Insight into Genesis 22: Abraham's Test of Faith (by Jewel)

This morning my husband, Kent, and I read and discussed Abraham's Faith being tested in God's personal request to Abraham to sacrifice his (Abraham's) "one and only son" Isaac. I hope to inspire you with some of the insights the Lord shared with our hearts. (Read Genesis 22, for fully measure.)

In verse 2 of Genesis 22, God says, "Take your son, your only son,- yes, Isaac, whom you love so much-…" 

In Hebrew, with Holy Spirit insight:

Take your son, God uttered (spiritually to Abraham), your only beloved (sole one, united in spirit, your true offspring of your life) son, Isaac (means “he laughs”) whom you love (deeply), and go (come, walk) to (near to Me, with Me, among My Spirit’s presence) the land of Moriah (mountainous area where Isaac would be sacrificed). Offer him (ascend in faith, actively in faithful obedience) there as a (whole) burnt offering on one of the mountains I will (spiritually utter to you in your heart) show you.

We discussed how Abraham had two sons: Ishmael and Isaac. Yet Isaac was the one from whom the promised Seed of the coming Messiah was to descend, through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob's line. 

God used to say often in the Old Testament, "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," He did not mention Ishmael. Through Isaac’s family line, Jacob would be born as the father of the 12 tribes of Israel. One of the tribes was the tribe of Judah, where God chose to create the descendant line to include the eventual birth of the Messiah, His one and only begotten Son, Jesus Christ.

Exodus 3:13-18 NLT

13 Then Moses asked God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is His name?’ What should I tell them?”

14 God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ ”

15 God also told Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.’ This is My name forever, and this is how I am to be remembered in every generation.

16 Go, assemble the elders of Israel and say to them, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—has appeared to me and said: I have surely attended to you and have seen what has been done to you in Egypt. 17 And I have promised to bring you up out of your affliction in Egypt, into the land of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites—a land flowing with milk and honey.’

18 The elders of Israel will listen to what you say, and you must go with them to the king of Egypt and tell him, ‘The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us. Now please let us take a three-day journey into the wilderness, so that we may sacrifice to the LORD our God.’

(Interesting that their journey is 3 days into the wilderness before they make a sacrifice to God...just like Abraham and Isaac did.)

Here is an example of this reference to "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" in the New Testament below.

Acts 3:13-15 NLT (Peter speaking to the Jews)

"The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified His servant Jesus. You handed Him over and rejected Him before Pilate, even though he had decided to release Him. You rejected the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you (Barabbas). You killed the Author of Life (Jesus), but God raised Him (Jesus) from the dead, and we are witnesses of the fact."

Kent and I reminisced on some of the previous chapters in Genesis, of how Abraham and Sarah grew impatient with the seemingly delayed timing of the Lord’s promise being fulfilled for them to have a son of promise. They then took matters into their own hands to create a child through using their maidservant Hagar. Ishmael was born from that human decision to try to help God in fulfilling His plan. It led to a lot of jealousy, anger and mockery from Hagar towards Sarah (and from Hagar’s son Ishmael towards Sarah’s son Isaac) on many different occasions. 

Can’t you see the devil at work trying to thwart God’s plan of salvation, thereby causing rotten fruits of hatred and division, jealousy and strife? The spiritual warfare fireworks are booming loudly in my mind... 

What you can gather from reading about this cruel behavior is that Ishmael did not share the same heart and character of his father Abraham. Ishmael was not the one that was to be a key descendant in the family line of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. The Lord in His mercy and compassion, blessed Hagar and Ishmael in a different way in their life, as they were banished from Abraham and Sarah's home. Ishmael was sent away as an illegitimate son, without an inheritance. Isaac was the only one considered by God as Abraham’s one and only begotten son.

When I looked up the word begot, the etymology said “to be or get”. I thought that didn't provide me with a lot of insight but then a tiny note said there was an option to look up "be-" separately. When I did so, I noticed that one of the meanings really helped to explain things clearer. 

Be- can mean "having the state, quality, identity, nature, role, etc., specified."

That's when the Holy Spirit was revealing in my heart for the first time that Abraham probably was realizing all along before this, time and time again, that Ishmael's heart was not right in God’s sight and that he did not represent the heart of his father Abraham. They could not share the love of God together. Nor could they share the walk of faith as father and son. 

Isaac had the "state, quality, identity, and nature, to fulfill the role that was specified". 

Abraham was left with one truly recognized son, Isaac, who had a heart similar to Abraham's heart, in regards to both placing their faith in God, a necessary requirement for passing on this faith down to Jacob and further down through the line of Judah to eventually reach the birth of the Messiah. I believe through the Holy Spirit’s revelation that Abraham raised Isaac (with Isaac’s willing heart of faith and obedience) to know about God, and how to live to please Him, from hearing his father talk about the Lord God from his own personal experiences. 

I feel it’s possible that Isaac did not personally feel and hear the Spirit of God in a truly personal way until he went through this experience of having his faith and obedience tested, like his father did. In Isaac's willingness to lay down his life we see his heart of faith was similar to his father Abraham's heart before the Lord and they were both accepted as "righteous" before God. Otherwise, it would seem very odd that Isaac would be so willing to cooperate with Abraham's decision to tie him up and sacrifice him. Isaac must have felt the Spirit of the Living God reassuring him to trust Him and obey. It was necessary for a Divine purpose, one they did not understand at the time. Jesus, the Author of Life, was writing a parable through their life story, one that is most often misunderstood, as spiritual warfare from Satan tries to hide the beautiful “sacrificial love" meaning of what happened that day.

The fact that Isaac asked his father, Abraham, in verse 7: "We have the fire and the wood but where is the Lamb for the burnt offering?", Makes me think that this might have been a turning point in Isaac's life of possibly the first time his faith walk with the Lord God was personalized internally. It is like he was previously used to obeying his father Abraham and went up on the mountain to pray with him and to carry the wood for the sacrifice but did not seem to know the whole plan yet. Then as he's asking his father and Abraham says "God will provide a lamb for the burnt offering", in verse 8, he rests in confident faith in his father having faith in God that a lamb would be provided. Then right afterwards in verse 9 "They arrived at the place where God had told him to go". God is talking to Abraham right now in his heart and he is going on instinct of following the Holy Spirit's promptings. In the same verse it says "Abraham built an altar and arranged wood on it and then tied his son Isaac and laid him on top of the wood." This was not a wrestling match! 

Something major happened in this verse where I believe the Holy Spirit moved upon Isaac and gave Abraham and Isaac glimpses into the need for a Messiah to be sacrificed someday. I see Isaac's total willingness to trust in God personally with his own life, just as he witnessed his father Abraham trusting in God, and to obey his father in this test of his own faithfulness as a son, to willingly give up his life, trusting and obeying the promptings of the Holy Spirit that moved within him in a powerful, living way. 

John 8:56-58 NLT (with other versions inserted in brackets) Jesus speaking:

“Your father Abraham rejoiced as he looked forward to My coming. He saw it and was glad.” The people said, “You aren’t even fifty years old. How can you say you have seen Abraham?” Jesus answered, “I tell you the truth, before Abraham was even born, I Am!”

Keep in mind, Abraham also knew that God was very upset with pagans who threw their children into the fire and said it was an abomination (horrendous, disgusting). We have been made in the image of God. We are not to murder. (Exodus 20:13 / Deuteronomy 5:17) Our lives are precious in His sight.

Deuteronomy 12:31 NLT

You must not worship the LORD your God the way the other nations worship their gods, for they perform for their gods every detestable (cursed, abhorrent) act that the LORD hates. They even burn their sons and daughters as sacrifices to their gods.

This was a test to see if Abraham and Isaac knew the true heart of God the Father. Would they believe their one true God was like minded with the expectations of the false gods unbelieving people worshipped by throwing their children into the fire as a sacrifice to appease their anger towards them? Or would Abraham and Isaac know assuredly in deep faith, that if God asked them to do this “out of character” detestable thing, that it was only a test, knowing confidently that God would never go through with it. Abraham must have known God would intervene!

Hebrews 11:17-19 NLT (with other versions and notes inserted in brackets)

It was by faith that Abraham offered Isaac as a sacrifice when God was testing him. Abraham, who had received God’s promises, was ready to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, even though God had told him, “Isaac is the son through whom your descendants (your seed, Christ's lineage) will be counted.” Abraham reasoned that if Isaac died, God was able to bring him back to life again. (resurrect / raise up, even from the dead because Christ's lineage would need to still come from Isaac in the future. *Everything God says always comes true!) And in a sense, Abraham did receive his son back from the dead. (Isaac's life was spared. Abraham also received him figuratively, in a parable sense.)

God used Abraham's and Isaac's lives to be a forever living true story parable of God the Father and His only begotten son, Jesus Christ, both being willing to give up what they cherished, for Christ to be our willing sacrificial lamb and redeem us from our sins. Through His resurrection He conquers our fear of death, returns Himself to life again, unharmed, and reunites us with the deep familial love of our Father God in a deeper way than possible before. Now we can experience the breaking of the curse of death over us and receive the blessing of His Holy Spirit living within us, within those who also trust and obey the promptings of the Lord’s voice within our hearts, as Abraham and Isaac did!

Another cool fact we discovered was this: Kent and I discussed comments found online, using the date of Sarah's age of 90 when she gave birth to Isaac and the next chapter (23) stating her death at age 127. By using these dates we discovered that it's possible Isaac could have been older than a young teenager in Genesis 22 when he was called upon to sacrifice his life. He may have possibly been in his late 20s up to the age of 37. 

Wouldn't it be interesting if he was 33.5 years old when this happened, which would mirror the age of Christ at the time of His great sacrifice for mankind’s redemption? The heavy load of wood, needed for the sacrifice, was placed on Isaac’s back so he would have to be old and strong enough to carry the weight of it all, up the mountain. This is similar to how the wooden cross was placed upon the back of Christ to carry up the hill at Golgotha, for His life's sacrifice, as our sacrificial lamb.

After Christ was born, died and was resurrected back to life again, the New Order or the New Way was opened, the Day of Grace! The doors of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ's salvation, for our personal acknowledgment of sin, were opened to all Gentiles all over the world. Because of the Jews' eventual rejection of Christ as their provided Messiah, God caused a blindness to come over them, to make them jealous, in the hopes that someday they would open their hearts up again in faith acceptance, to receive the true Messiah Jesus Christ's blood atonement for their very own since, as their very own Passover Lamb. We believe, according to Scripture, that in the very end times they will receive Him in faith. Their blindness will be restored to sight!

Romans 11:8, 11-16 NLT (Feel free to read all of Romans 11. It was pretty insightful!)

8 As the Scriptures say, “God has put them (the Jewish chosen nation) into a deep sleep. To this day He has shut their eyes so they do not see, and closed their ears so they do not hear.”

11 Did God’s people stumble and fall beyond recovery? Of course not! They were disobedient, so God made salvation available to the Gentiles (the rest of the inhabitants of the world). But He wanted His own people to become jealous and claim it for themselves. 12 Now if the Gentiles were enriched because the people of Israel turned down God’s offer of salvation, think how much greater a blessing the world will share when they finally accept it.

13 I am saying all this especially for you Gentiles. God has appointed me (Paul) as the apostle to the Gentiles. I stress this, 14 for I want somehow to make the people of Israel jealous of what you Gentiles have, so I might save some of them. 15 For since their rejection meant that God offered salvation to the rest of the world, their acceptance will be even more wonderful. It will be life for those who were dead! 16 And since Abraham and the other patriarchs were holy, their descendants will also be holy—just as the entire batch of dough is holy because the portion given as an offering is holy. For if the roots of the tree are holy, the branches will be, too.

What would you have done in Abraham's position? In Isaac’s? Is your faith and friendship with God, the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit and your knowledge of Them so deep that you know His presence and what it feels like? If he asked you to do something that was out of character, would you be able to feel in your spirit, and know in your collected truth knowledge of who He is, that it was just a test and be able to go through with what was asked of you, knowing that the Lord is able to alter all the laws of the universe and will not do the things that are against His character?

I leave you to ponder this verse. Apply it to your heart from the Lord above. This is true for all believers, both Jewish ones and Gentile ones. We are now all one in Christ, all who put their faith in His sacrifice for our sin atonement. Let’s proclaim and testify of all the marvelous works He has done in our lives.

1 Peter 2:9

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.

By: Jewel

In Christian Love

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