The Sacrifice of Isaac, Genesis 22:1-19
- The sacrifice of Isaac is a difficult passage and a great example of the importance of reading the Bible as a story and not isolated parts.
- If we read the sacrifice of Isaac without considering its context in the bigger story of Genesis we will miss its significance and we will likely develop a highly negative view of God - after all God is asking Abraham to kill his son, how does that make sense?
- God comes across like a cruel prankster demanding the death of Isaac and then at the last minute going “psyche!”
- The passage actually asks us to look at in context by adding the phrase “after these things” to the usual transition “and it came to pass” These things is referring to the whole scope of Abraham’s story rather than just what happened in the previous pericope.
Q. So let’s try to understand the context - what are the key themes we have been discussing in Genesis? Don’t worry about connecting them with Genesis 22, let’s just look at the big picture:
1. God created a kingdom with humans made in His image as His representatives given the task of being fruitful and multiplying and tending and keeping the earth.
2. The fall resulted in a disruption in this plan, however, God promised to preserve a people for Himself who would carry out this task.
3. A descendant of this people would defeat Satan.
4. Genesis 3-11 details this war between the seed of the serpent and seed of the woman. The seed of the serpent is characterized by violence, murder, autonomy, and power characterized by people like Cain, Lamech, and the sons of god.
5. This cycle of violence leads to the flood, but God concludes that this will not ultimately change the hearts of man and so promises that the flood will not be repeated.
6. Instead God covenants with Abram and promises that through him and his seed God’s plan for the earth will be fulfilled.
7. Genesis 18:18-19.
“Seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? For I have chosen him that hey may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of YHWH by doing righteousness and justice, so that YHWH may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.”
In contrast to the violence, sexual, and economic exploitation described in Genesis 3-11, Abraham’s descendants will bring righteousness and justice.
8. This fulfillment will occur through the seed who God will bless and who will ultimately bless the whole earth.
Q. Isaac is obviously significant to Abraham and Sara. They want a child and descendants. However, what is Isaac’s significance to this story?
- Isaac is the way God will fulfill the promises to Abram.
- Isaac is the means by which the world will be blessed.
- Isaac is the solution to the cycle of violence, power, and murder we see in Genesis 3-11.
- It is through Isaac that God will reverse the curse.
- Ultimately, Isaac will provide the seed of the woman who will crush the seed of the serpent.
- Isaac is Abraham’s son and and according to verse 2 “his only son, who he loves.” Isaac clearly means a lot to Abraham.
Q. What does Isaac mean to God?
- However, Isaac is also the means by which God will bring about His kingdom on earth, defeat the serpent, and restore humanity and creation. God’s entire program for creation rests in the life of Isaac.
- Genesis makes it clear that God’s plan comes to fruition through Isaac alone.
1. Genesis 12:7 - It is Abraham’s offspring who will inherit the blessing of the land. God is not going to select some other person.
2. Genesis 12:17-19 - When Abraham’s line is threatened by Pharaoh, God afflicts Egypt with plagues. Even though this threat was through Abraham’s duplicity.
3. Genesis 15:2-4 - God makes it clear this it will be Abraham’s very own son and not some legal arrangement who will inherit the promise.
4. Genesis 16:1-4 - Sarai and Abraham arrange to have a son through Hagar. Yet even though Ishmael is a legitimate offspring of Abraham, Ishmael will not be the child to inherit the promise.
5. Genesis 17:18-21 - Isaac is the one one with whom God will establish His covenant.
6: Genesis 21:12 - When Ishmael’s actions threaten Isaac, Hagar and Ishmael are exiled from Abraham’s camp and God makes clear that blessing will only come through Isaac.
- All of this makes it clear that only a child through Abraham and Sarah named Isaac can function as part of God’s plan. There is no ambiguity. God killing Isaac can be equated with God killing His own plan for creation or else exposing God as a liar.
- God’s own glory and word is also at stake in the testing of Abraham.
Q. What else has God done to prepare Abraham for this moment?
- God has demonstrated His veracity by granting Abraham victory against the 5 kings who raided Canaan and kidnapped Lot.
- God had cared for Abraham’s other son Ishmael despite the fact that he was not the child of promise and had to be exiled.
- God has sworn an oath in a solemn ceremony that he would take the curse of death on Himself if He did not bring about the promises to Abraham.
- Abraham believed God was righteous and just. When God tells Abraham that He is planning on destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham argues with God based on the fact that God is just “far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that righteous fare as the wicked! Far be it from you! Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just?”
- When Abraham sees the justice of God exacted on Sodom and Gomorrah and sees the smoldering ruins he thinks his family has also been killed, but the text says that God remembered Abraham and saved Lot and his family. Abraham has seen that even in the midst of God’s justice, God’s mercy finds a way.
- God causes Isaac to be born in impossible circumstances. Now God is asking again that Abraham would trust that Isaac would live and fulfill God’s mission in impossible circumstances.
- God also uses similar language to the original call God gave to Abraham in Genesis
12. For example God tells Abraham to “take 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.” In Genesis 12, God says “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Notice the similarity in language.
Both Genesis 15 and Genesis 22 begin with the phrase “after these things.”
Q. What point would God be making by using similar language in Genesis 22 to Genesis 12?
- God is reassuring Abraham that just as God has been faithful until this point in Abraham’s life, God will continue to be faithful.
- God is not asking Abraham to be faithful in a vacuum. God is asking Abraham not just to have faith, but to faith in something. Abraham is to have faith in God’s promises and goodness, something that God has repeatedly demonstrated through Abraham’s whole life.
- Abraham shows his faith by his statement in Genesis 22:5. Abraham tells his servants that he and the boy will worship and come back again to you. When Isaac asks where is the lamb, Abraham responds in verse 8 by saying “YHWH will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”
- Its possibly these are statements not of faith, but of Abraham trying to placate his servants and Isaac. However, in verse 2 God told Abraham to go to Moriah. That is not merely a place name. Moriah literally means “the place where YHWH will provide.”
- God’s solution to this seeming paradox of the death of Isaac and God’s determination to restore creation, defeat the serpent, and bring His kingdom on earth is to provide a substitute.
- The original audience of this story would have been Israel. As Isaac is the progenitor of the Israelites, the Israelites would see themselves on the altar. God is preparing to sacrifice them.
- To this day, the Jews read this story called the Akedah, the Hebrew word for “the binding,” on Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish new year.
- Rabbinic Judaism developed the doctrine of patriarchal merit. The patriarchs were to have accumulated a surplus of righteousness based on their deeds that is then imputed to later Jews. The doctrine is very similar to Paul’s ideas of Christ’s imputed righteousness.
- The Talmud says the following:
"Why do we blow a ram’s horn? The Holy One, Blessed Be He, said: ‘Sound before Me a ram’s horn so that I may remember on your behalf the binding of Isaac the son of Avraham, and account it to you as if you had bound yourselves before Me."
- The interesting thing is that they miss the symbolism of the ram. By providing the substitute for Isaac, the blessings God promised to Abraham would be fulfilled. Abraham’s seed would become numerous and defeat all their enemies. Ultimately all the nations of the earth would be blessed by Abraham’s seed.
- The ancient near east was governed by the concept of primogeniture. All the hopes, dreams, and future of the family depended on the first born.
- Exodus 13 says that all the first born of Israelites belong to him and were intended to become priests. However, because only the tribe of Levi was obedient to God during the golden calf incident the priesthood became limited to the tribe of Levi. Since the Levites were now taking the place of the first born, the parents of all first borns had to redeem their sons, in a ceremony called the pidyon haben, by paying a redemption price of 5 shekels of silver to the priests.
- Luke 2:22-24 tells the story of Jesus being brought to Jerusalem where as the first born of Mary and Joseph, Jesus is redeemed when Joseph and Mary offer a pair of turtledoves to the priests.
- Genesis tells us this event takes place on Mt. Moriah which is in Jerusalem. This will be the place that David will buy from Ornan the Jebusite a field where he will build an altar and eventually Solomon will build a temple. At this temple the priests, who stand in the place all the first born of Israel, will administer the sacrifices that stand as a substitute for the Israelites themselves. Eventually these sacrifices will come to end but because next to Mt. Moriah God will do the very thing that he prevented Abraham from doing. God will sacrifice His Son, the Davidic king who represents all of Israel, the ultimate high priest, the first born of God, the person that the ram and all the sacrifices at the temple pointed to. Because Christ is the promised seed, this act will result in the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham that all the nations of the earth would be blessed.
- God gives us these stories so we can understand the significance of Christ’s death and redemption. If all we knew about Christ is that he was executed by the Romans and then rose again we would not understand what it meant unless we had the context.
