There’s no getting around the strangeness of that Old Testament story of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac just because God told him to. But the story is also making points that were valuable in the ancient setting. And in the sweep of biblical history, the story points forward to Jesus Christ himself. 

There are historical and textual observations that many scholars make about this account in Genesis chapter 22. For example, we know that Abraham’s original hometown of Ur was a centre in the ancient world of child sacrifice to the pagan gods. The disturbing archaeology is clear on that. So this biblical story seems designed to nod to that pagan background only in the end to deliberately overturn any idea that this God, the true God, would ever demand what Abraham’s former hometown religion demanded. 

There’s also the textual observation that the passage deliberately repeats the word provide, “jireh,” as a reminder that God will provide the sacrifice, not Abraham or Isaac. So in the story Abraham says to Isaac, “God himself will provide (jireh) a lamb for the burnt offering my son.” That’s exactly what ends up happening in the story, and the scene concludes with the words, “so Abraham called the place the Lord will provide. And to this day it is said on the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.” (Genesis 22:14)

So the point of this entire chapter seems to be that God takes an assumed part of Abraham’s pagan background and flips it, subverts it. And there’s reason to think that within the story, Abraham himself knows that that’s what’s going on. For one thing he says, “the Lord will provide.” So unless he’s flat out lying to Isaac, Abraham is pretty sure that despite what God commanded, it’s not going to come to sacrificing Issac. The other thing is at one point Abraham says to his servants, “you stay here while I and the boy go over there, we will worship and then we will come back to you.” The plural “we” is key and it’s there in the original Hebrew, not just the English. So it looks like Abraham knows that whatever is about to happen up there on Mount Moriah, they’re both coming back somehow. 

And what’s driving all this confidence must be that in the previous chapter, Genesis chapter 21, God had told Abraham that the boy Isaac is the heir through whom God would create many nations. So Abraham is clinging to that. God has made a promise, he’s thinking, and that means there’s no way this can be the end for Isaac. 

Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide. (Genesis 22:13-14a)

The story forever branded in the minds of God’s ancient Israelite people two things. One, God will never demand they offer up themselves or their children in sacrifice. And two, God will himself provide the sacrifice, a sacrifice of his own making. Richard Dawkins complained, “we cannot help but wonder how a child could ever recover from such a psychological trauma.” But I reckon Isaac himself would reply, “don’t fret for me, I’ve learnt better than anyone in history that, unlike our pagan forebears, we will never have to sacrifice ourselves to God. God himself provides the sacrifice.”

This, of course, is why the story points forward to Jesus Christ. It’s impossible to read Genesis 22 without thinking of the ultimate divine provision of a sacrifice. And this too happened where Jewish tradition places Mount Moriah, that’s Jerusalem. Jesus Christ lived the perfect life none of us could live. He offered up that life for us, for our forgiveness. 

The punchline of the Abraham Isaac story is the Lord will provide the sacrifice. The punchline of the entire biblical narrative is God gave himself in sacrifice. That God is worthy of the dancer’s leap.

By John Dickson

Want to hear the rest of the episode?
Check out episode 103: “Blind Faith”