“Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.” Genesis 22:2
Abraham was obviously a man of great faith! Can you imagine his reaction when God instructed him to sacrifice his only son as a burnt offering? And THEN, imagine Isaac’s reaction when he found out that he himself was to be that burnt offering! YIKES!
Abraham trusted God because he knew Him. He knew that whatever God instructed him to do would work out for the good because He is GOD. Wow! To have that kind of faith! It’s obvious that Isaac also had faith and fully trusted Abraham and God. Most sons his age would have ran for their lives! But not Isaac.
In Genesis 17:19 God tells Abraham “…. your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will call him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him. Abraham trusted God, obeyed God, and believed God was a God of His word when He told Abraham of the covenant He would establish with Isaac. According to that covenant, Isaac would HAVE to be alive in order to have ‘descendants after him.’ After all, he hadn’t had children yet. And he knew God did not lie.
Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death. Hebrews 11:19
Although not knowing what God had planned, according to Hebrews 11:19 Abraham had faith that He would raise Isaac from the dead because he knew He could.
This story of Abraham and Isaac prefigures God’s ‘Ultimate Sacrifice’, Jesus Christ in many ways. Like Jesus, Isaac was the only son, whom was loved by his father. Both Jesus and Isaac are to be sacrificed on a hill (the same hill) and each offered by their father. Both carried the wood that they were to be sacrificed on (Isaac the firewood and Jesus the Cross). Both were voluntarily willing to be sacrificed.
On that hill, in place of Isaac, God provided the ‘substitutionary sacrificial lamb’, a ram (Genesis 22:13). Because of sin, you and I should be on that Cross but God provided us with the ‘substitutionary sacrificial lamb’, Jesus.
It’s hard to trust God when we don’t understand the whole plan.
When is a time when you didn’t fully have faith and trust God, but realized later that He had it all under control?
