22:12
‘Do not lay a hand on the boy,’ he said. ‘Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.’ So God intervened to stop Abraham from actually sacrificing Isaac. We will see in the next verse that God provided the sacrifice, and, of course, He always intended to do this, and we see the obvious parallels with Jesus. However, this still leaves questions unanswered. “Why did God tell Abraham to sacrifice his son”, “what would have been the consequences of Abraham not being prepared to sacrifice his son?” It may be that these are the wrong questions. At the beginning of the chapter it says that “God tested Abraham”. It may be that we read this wrong. Our natural reading of this is that God was seeing what was in Abraham, what was the true state of his heart. Perhaps we should be reading it as God showing what was in Abraham’s heart. So the whole incident demonstrates the changes that have taken place in Abraham. Without God our hearts are far from Him, but it is possible for God to transform us and to enable us to trust in Him and to obey Him. God was also enabling Abraham to appreciate something of what the cross is all about.
22:13,14
“Abraham looked up and there in the thicket he saw a ram”. So Abraham sacrificed the ram. He named the place “The Lord will provide”, or “Jehovah Jireh”. In Jesus the Lord has provided the sacrifice for our sins. We need to appreciate the forgiveness we receive in Christ, but it is interesting that in this incident Abraham is appreciating things from the Father’s side. There is a fundamental fact that we need to learn, and that is that God will provide, whatever the need.
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