Genesis 22

Galatians 3:8 tells us the Gospel was preached to Abraham—though he lived centuries before Christ was born on earth.

Isaac and Jesus

Isaac was a picture of Jesus Christ in the Old Testament, and here is how:

Now Abraham and Sarah were old, well advanced in age; and Sarah had passed the age of childbearing. And the LORD said to Abraham, “….Is anything too hard for the LORD? At the appointed time I will return to you, according to the time of life, and Sarah shall have a son” (Genesis 18:11,13-14).

 This was a prophesied miracle birth—just like Jesus’ birth. (See Isaiah 7:14, Matthew 1:22-23.)

God said Isaac would be born “at the appointed time.” (See Genesis 18:14.) And, “When the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman” (Galatians 4:4a).

In Genesis 17, God had said to Abraham, “Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac’” (Genesis 17:19b). Jesus, too, was named before He was born. (Matthew 1:21).

Mount Moriah and Calvary

“Now it came to pass after these things that God tested Abraham, and said to him….‘Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you’” (Genesis 22:1-2).

What does that remind you of? (Read John 3:16.)

Moriah means, “foreseen of the LORD.” Out of this vast Universe, God took a little land on the edge of the Mediterranean and called it, “My land.” God chose one city, Jerusalem, the holy city of the king. He took one mountain in that city—“My holy hill.” (See Psalm 2:6.) This is Mount Moriah, where the Temple was built. Mount Moriah is also Calvary, where Jesus died.

Sacrifice

Abraham and Isaac started up Mount Moriah. “So Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife, and the two of them went together” (Genesis 22:6). Isaac went up Mount Moriah carrying his cross, as it were.

“Then they came to the place of which God had told him. And Abraham built an altar there and placed the wood in order; and he bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, upon the wood” (Genesis 22:9). Isaac was a strapping teenage boy. Abraham was now over a hundred years old. Isaac could have outrun him.

But he did not refuse to be a sacrifice—just as Christ said in Gethsemane, “Not as I will, but as You will” (Matthew 26:39b).

Substitution

Abraham was about to plunge that knife into the beating breast of his son.

But the Angel of the LORD called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!....Do not lay your hand on the lad, or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God…” Then Abraham lifted his eyes and looked, and there behind him was a ram caught in a thicket by its horns. So Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up for a burnt offering instead of his son (Genesis 22:11-13).

The scene shifts, and Isaac is now a picture of us. He is destined to receive the knife, but God says, “Here is a substitute—sacrifice Him instead.”

“And Abraham called the name of the place, The-LORD-Will-Provide; as it is said to this day, ‘In the Mount of the LORD it shall be provided’” (Genesis 22:14; emphasis added). On this same Mount, God would provide Himself a Lamb. 

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