Offering the Promised Son

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A lot of you here in this room have experienced the joy that is a parent-teacher conference, I’m sure. Maybe some of you have experienced those recently. I cannot honestly say that that is the worst thing in the world, but if I had a list of my least favorite things, it would be on it.

I did not enjoy them as a teacher because I never knew how the parents were going to react. I have not enjoyed them as a parent because I never know what the teachers are going to say to me about what my child has done. I didn’t enjoy them as a kid because my parents had the two-for-one deal set up where if I got in trouble at school, I got in trouble at home too.

The only parent-teacher conference I’ve ever enjoyed is back when we were homeschooling and I took Charla out on a date and we called it a parent-teacher conference. She’s a lot of fun. As a matter of fact, I think we did that once and called it a school board meeting too.

It was great. But part of the reason I don’t enjoy parent-teacher conferences on either side of the equation is because, like I said, you don’t know what’s going to come out of that meeting. You know, did my child, is my child causing problems that I’m now going to have to clean up?

As a teacher, am I going to tell them what their child is doing in class and they’re going to blow up at me? I think basically I walk into the conference wondering, is something going to blow up that is going to blow up on me? I love the kind of conferences like we had one of this week.

That, you know, we have five kids, so instead of doing five straight conferences, we just split them up. And she did some and I did some. And she asked me, how did this conference go?

I said, exactly like you’d expect. You know, as they reviewed their classwork in each subject, as they reviewed their learning and their habits and their behavior, you and I could have filled out that, you know, the good and the bad. We could have filled that out.

It went exactly like you would have expected. I loved that walking in. I mean, I’m still apprehensive going in.

But I loved that that I went through that whole parent-teacher conference and there were no surprises. there are things in life that are a little easier to deal with when you have some idea what you’re getting. I know I take this to an extreme because if I’m watching a show or a movie, I’ll go online and read how it ends before we get to it.

Because I just don’t, I like to know, I don’t like surprises. God has done that a little bit for us in the Old Testament. In providing us hints, or providing for those before Jesus, hints of what was going to come.

As a matter of fact, if you read through the Old Testament and you start looking for Jesus there, He is all over the place. Several weeks ago, the kids and I were in the truck, the older kids and I, we were listening to a program about the resurrection. If you’ve been here more than about five minutes, you know that sometimes I get a little wound up on that topic.

It’s my favorite thing to talk about. But they dealt with this question I’ve had for many years. If you were here around Easter time, we talked about the Corinthian Creed, this little snippet in 1 Corinthians 15.

5, which is not where we’ll be today, but in 1 Corinthians 15. 5 that we can trace back to within a couple months of the crucifixion that is evidence that the earliest Christians believed Jesus rose from the dead. It’s evidence that it wasn’t a story that was made up hundreds of years later.

It’s right there, and you can trace the history of it back to within a couple months of Jesus’ crucifixion, that people believed Jesus rose from the dead. That’s how Christianity got started. People believed He died and rose from the dead.

But that passage says that Paul is reminding the Corinthians of what they’ve taught, what he had taught them, what they had learned from him, what he had learned from others who had already taught this, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures. He was buried and he rose again the third day according to the scriptures, and then it goes on to list some of his appearances. Now the question I’ve always had, if you ask me, where does it say that Jesus would die for our sins in the scriptures?

Because they only had access to the Old Testament at that time. I can take you to Isaiah 53. I can take you to Psalm 22.

I can take you to some other places that clearly illustrate when Jesus would die or how Jesus would die, that he would die. But there is not a clear verse that says he would rise again on the third day. There are some things that hint at it.

We can get close to it in Psalms. We can get close to it in Hosea, but it’s just not there as clearly as the idea of the crucifixion. And I’ve always wondered, what exactly is he referring to? And we heard this program where this man was talking about, if you’re looking for the idea of Jesus rising the third day, he said, I can’t point you to one particular Old Testament scripture because he said it’s in all of it.

And he began to work in just this brief interview just began to work story by story through some of the passages of the Old Testament that even though they don’t tell them in that day, we’re talking about the Messiah, this is a prophecy here, they begin to present the idea of God bringing someone back to life, of God showing up and doing something miraculous on the third day. And once you realize that pattern is there, you start to see it all over the place. We could spend years going through the Old Testament piece by piece and finding those hints, those foreshadowings, those coming attractions that God put in the Old Testament, pointing to the coming of Jesus.

We could spend years doing that. I’m not going to spend years doing this with you, but I do want us to spend several weeks looking at the idea of Jesus being found in the Old Testament, and some of the places where we can find Him, some of the places where God began to show these patterns throughout the Old Testament, pointing to the fact that Jesus Christ was going to come and was going to die for us, was going to pay for our sins according to the Scriptures, was going to be buried and was going to rise again the third day according to the Scriptures.

and these things really show up in three ways they show up in promises prophecies and pictures now when I say promises that overlaps with prophecy somewhat but the times when god said I’m going to send a messiah you these things go back to the earliest pages of genesis you go to Genesis chapter 3, where God hands down the punishments in the garden when Adam and Eve sinned. And He says that He’s going to send the seed of the woman to crush the serpent’s head. We could call that a prophecy.

It is prophetic. I call it a promise because He says, I’m sending a Messiah. I’m sending someone who’s going to deal with the sin problem.

What I call prophecies are when He says how this is going to happen. Like when Micah says the Messiah is going to be born in Bethlehem. When Isaiah says, here’s how the crucifixion is going to happen, he doesn’t say those exact words.

But you read Isaiah 53, it’s a very clear picture. In Psalm 22, very clear pictures of the crucifixion hundreds of years before they happened and hundreds of years before that was even a common way of executing somebody. And then there are the pictures.

The way God used the stories. And please understand, and I’ll probably remind you of this as we go through this series, when I use the word story, I’m not talking about a story like Hansel and Gretel. You know, we think, oh, it’s a story.

It didn’t really happen. I in no way mean to imply that these things didn’t happen. I believe these are historical events that the Bible records.

They are stories, true stories of things that happened to people, but God also worked through those true stories and orchestrated events in such a way that it was always pointing people to Jesus Christ and what He was going to do. And there again, back at Genesis chapter 3, we see a picture that would point to Jesus Christ, because when they sinned, God said, you’re naked and you need to be covered. And so God made them a covering out of what?

Animal skins. Who lived in those animal skins before? An animal. What had to happen for that animal to give up its skin?

The animal had to die. We see for the first time in all of redemptive history, the innocent dying to cover the sins of the guilty. It’s a picture of Jesus.

I want us to skip ahead this morning to Genesis 22. And already, just with this introduction, I’ve gone longer than I intended to. I apologize for that.

I’m going to try to give you the parallels here as quickly as I can. Genesis 22. And once you find it, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, and if you can’t find Genesis 22 or don’t have your Bible, it’s on the screen for you, but we’re going to look at the first 14 verses of this chapter this morning.

And here’s what it says about what happened this day. Now, it came about after these things that God tested Abraham and said to him, Abraham, and he said, Here I am. He said, Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you.

So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey and took two of his young men with him and Isaac his son, and he split wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. On the third day, Abraham raised his eyes and saw the place from a distance. Do you notice that there, the third day?

Okay, that’s going to become important in a little bit. Abraham, verse 5, Abraham said to his young men, stay here with the donkey, and I and the lad will go over there, and we will worship and return to you. Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac, his son, and he took in his hand the fire and the knife.

So the two of them walked on together. And Isaac spoke to Abraham, his father, and said, My father. And he said, Here I am, my son.

And he said, Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering? And Abraham said, God will provide for himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son. So the two of them walked on together.

Then they came to the place of which God had told him, and Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood and bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Abraham stretched out his hand and took out the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, Abraham, Abraham.

And he said, here I am. And he said, do not stretch out your hand against the lad and do nothing to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.

Then Abraham raised his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him a ram caught in the thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the place of his son. Abraham called the name of that place the Lord will provide, as it is said to this day in the mount of the Lord, it will be provided.

And you may be seated. So we need to understand from this, first of all, this is about a test that God put Abraham through. And we might look at it and say, that’s kind of a harsh test. That’s kind of a cruel test to put somebody through.

But as we talked about last week with the end of Joel, God is just. That means everything God is going to do is right, even if it doesn’t look that way from our perspective. Because our understanding of God’s justice or our understanding of justice is not the same as God’s understanding of justice. So God used this experience to test Abraham’s faith.

He says that in verse 1. This was a testing. When this story is retold in Hebrews, it says the same thing, that Abraham was tested.

Every time this story is referred to in Scripture, it says this was a test. But we need to be very clear in our understanding that this was not a test for God. It was for Abraham. Because I’ve often wondered that, and I think it was from misremembering parts of the story.

God’s testing Abraham and then says, wait, wait, wait, now I know you fear God. And I’ve always wondered, why did God just then know? God knows everything.

God knew Abraham’s faith before Abraham was even born. And then you reread the story and you realize it’s the angel of the Lord who says, now I know. God was never in doubt.

God was not on the edge of his seat waiting to see how this was going to turn out. God knew the end from the beginning. So this test was not for God’s benefit.

It was for Abraham’s benefit. For Abraham to understand, as we’ll see in just a second, the depth of his own faith, the depth of God’s faithfulness, all these things, so that Abraham could show himself useful to God. The test was not for God, it was for Abraham.

The test demonstrated God’s faithfulness to Abraham. The book of Hebrews seems to indicate that Abraham thought, okay, I’m going to go and offer my son to God, and God is just going to raise him up. Abraham is about to go out and do something that requires an enormous amount of faith.

Because I don’t believe there’s any one of us in here who would sacrifice our own child. That is a tall request. I see some of you grinning. It depends on the day.

I get it. Depends on the day. whether, no. But we’re just, I don’t think I have that kind of faith.

I would like to have that kind of faith without having to go through the test of that kind of faith, because I just don’t think I could do it. But it demonstrated God’s faithfulness to Abraham, because Abraham goes out believing God is going to make this situation right. This situation is crazy.

This is not what we do, but he’s trusting that God is going to do something to fix it. He’s trusting in the goodness and the justice of God that God is always going to do what’s right. And sure enough, God did what was expected.

God did what God would do. Abraham needed to see that. You and I need to see that.

That when we step out in faith and trust God, God will always come through. And just like with Abraham, that coming through doesn’t always meet our expectations. Again, the Bible seems to indicate that Abraham was expecting a resurrection.

God came through in a different way, but God was faithful. He didn’t just hang Abraham out to dry. This test showed Abraham the depth of his own faith.

if you’d asked Abraham a few years before this maybe even a few days before this if God asked you to sacrifice your son would you do it Abraham might have thought I don’t think I could do that well come on you trust God don’t you yeah but I mean how many times have we had those conversations in our own minds but when you’re in the midst of a difficult situation and God asks you to do something that you don’t think you can do and by the way I’m not encouraging anybody to go out and sacrifice their children just to be very clear anybody watching online this was a specific request that God made to Abraham but when God calls us to step out and do something that requires faith we don’t know we don’t know exactly how much we trust God until we actually step out and trust God because it’s one thing to sit back and say oh yeah I trust God when things are great and he’s not asking anything of me but this was proof to Abraham of exactly how much he trusted God and I think this is the most incredible part of it is that the test foreshadowed God’s redemptive plans.

Foreshadowing is a term that a lot of us may have forgotten from English class. You’re studying literature, which was not most of our favorite thing. It was not my favorite thing.

But there was this idea they taught us about foreshadowing. When you’re reading a mystery story, for example, And one character seems just a little too fixated on knives. And you read a little further and you realize, oh, that became important later.

That’s an important detail to the story. Or some of you will watch a murder mystery show. Maybe you’re like my wife who’s always playing detective.

I don’t want to figure it out. I just want to know. Okay, she likes figuring it out.

But we’ll be watching a mystery show, and 10 minutes in, she’s like, oh, that guy’s the killer. How do you know that? And some little detail was foreshadowed that points to who it is.

Okay? Here, God is foreshadowing His plans for the salvation of mankind. He’s given us a hint, and not just to tickle our curiosity, but because He wants us to understand.

He wanted Israel to understand what their salvation was going to look like when it came. and so we can look back as well and say Jesus wasn’t just some random guy who had a good story about dying for us and then he went to the cross this wasn’t just random this was the culmination of thousands of years of God being at work and telling us what he was doing God used this experience to provide us a picture of Jesus Christ And I didn’t just pull this out at random.

The Bible even says that this whole thing took place to point us to Jesus Christ. Hebrews chapter 11 calls Isaac a type of Christ. That doesn’t mean he’s some kind of Christ. That means he is a picture that points to Jesus Christ. It says, by faith, Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was offering up his only begotten son, it was he to whom it was said, in Isaac your descendants shall be called. He considered that God is able to raise people even from the dead. That’s where I get the idea that Abraham was expecting I’m going to stab my son and then God’s going to raise him back from the dead.

But he says here, he considered that God is able to raise people even from the dead from which he also received him back as a type, meaning he was a picture. And Hebrews 11 is talking about how the Old Testament points to Jesus. That’s telling us, it’s right there in God’s Word that Isaac is pointing us to Jesus Christ. And I want to share with you a few ways this morning how that happens in the story.

So we’ve read the story. Most of you are probably familiar with it already. That God calls Abraham, get up and go sacrifice your son.

And Abraham, he just gets up and does it. There’s no back talk as far as what’s recorded, no logistical planning. He just gets up and goes like it’s another Wednesday.

I don’t know that it was Wednesday, but just gets up and goes like it’s another normal day. And this is what we do, and goes off to sacrifice his son because God called him to. They head off, and it’s a multi-day journey, and they’re approaching where they need to be on the third day.

And he tells the servants, stay behind. We’re going to go over here, and we’re going to worship. We’re going to take the the wood and the fire with us.

And they start up the mountain and Isaac says, Father, where’s the lamb for the sacrifice? We’ve got the wood, we’ve got the fire, where’s the lamb? And Abraham says, God will provide the sacrifice.

Now, I think in Abraham’s mind, God has provided you as the sacrifice and God’s going to raise you back up. They get there, Abraham ties Isaac down, he’s about to sacrifice him, and the angel of the Lord stops him and says, hey, you’ve passed the test. And at that moment, Abraham looks up and sees a ram caught in a thicket to be sacrificed. A few ways that this story points us to Jesus Christ. First of all, Isaac and Jesus were both sons of promise.

God promised Abraham a son in his old age. The conception of Isaac was miraculous. If memory serves, Abraham was 100 and Sarah was 90.

when Isaac was conceived. That is miraculous. Jesus promised to send a son in the New Testament, and Jesus was conceived miraculously.

But they were both sons of promise uniquely beloved by their fathers. Now, He says here, it says in our translation here, your only son. Take your only son, which might leave you scratching your head thinking, what about Ishmael?

We know that Abraham had another son. Folks, it’s not a Bible contradiction because the original Hebrew means one of a kind, kind of like when it says in Hebrews about Isaac, his only begotten son. When the Bible refers to Jesus as the Father’s only begotten Son, it means one of a kind.

As believers, we are adopted into the family of God. We become His sons and daughters. And not only that, the Scriptures teach that we are His sons and daughters in equal standing with Jesus Christ. But Jesus Christ is still one of a kind, the only begotten, because He’s the only one that shares the same nature as the Father.

And so Isaac was not Abraham’s only son, but he is, as the Hebrew tells us, the only son of that kind. He was the unique son, meaning He was the son of promise. So you have both of these men going to be sacrificed who were uniquely beloved by their fathers, sons of promise.

We see that there in verse 2. Also in verse 2, it says that he’s supposed to take Isaac to the land of Moriah. Mount Moriah today is what we call the Temple Mount.

he was going to Jerusalem there was not a Jerusalem yet but take Isaac to Jerusalem it doesn’t necessarily mean he was unless I’ve missed something in the Old Testament it doesn’t mean that he was specifically killed on Mount Moriah but he was killed in the land of Moriah he was killed in what would become Jerusalem anybody else that we know of that was went to die in Jerusalem Jesus That’s just a random detail to include in there, if not for the fact that it parallels the story of Jesus. Then we see that Abraham and the father both offered their sons as a sin offering. When he says in verse 2, go and offer your son as a burnt offering.

That’s an offering, that’s a sacrifice to cover sin. And the offerings they offered in the Old Testament could not pay for sin in full. That’s why they had to keep doing it.

But it was at least a temporary covering for past sins. He says, go and offer your son for that. Pointing to the fact that he was going to offer his son as the perfect sacrifice for sin that would cover all sin for all time for those who believed.

And I think this is important for us to understand. Because this helps ease a little of the tension we feel about this story. Isaac and Jesus both willingly laid down their lives.

I will hear skeptics call God a cosmic child abuser, or they talk about child sacrifice. Well, he sent his son to die on the cross. Okay, it’s a little different when you’re God the son.

You have the power to decide what you want to do. He was never, his will was always in line with the Father’s. He was an equal participant in this.

And even in His humanity, by the time He went to the cross, He was over 30. He was an adult. And the Gospels, written by those who walked with Him, say He was determined to go and do that.

He was determined to come here and die for us. He laid His own life down, is what He told Pilate. And if you’re like me, you’ve read this story, you’ve heard this story since you were in Sunday school as a little kid, and I’ve always pictured a little boy.

And that’s just hard to deal with. But when Abraham refers to Isaac as the lad, I think that may be where we get the idea that he’s a little boy. That Hebrew word is the same one that he uses for the young men’s servants who are carrying the wood for him.

It doesn’t mean he’s a little boy, it means he’s a young man. And he’s old enough and strong enough that when Abraham can’t carry the wood up the mountain because he’s well over a hundred, Isaac is strong enough to carry the wood up. In ancient cultures, lots of details were passed down by oral tradition.

And there’s a tradition recorded by the Jewish historian Josephus who says that Isaac was about 25 when this happened. You’re going to tell me an over 100-year-old man overpowered a 25-year-old? and tied him down against his will?

I don’t buy that, not even on double coupon day, all right? Isaac was a willing participant. I don’t know what the conversation was.

I don’t know exactly what was said, but in some way, Isaac was told what the deal was. And he trusted his father, and he trusted the father enough to willingly lay down his life just like Jesus did. And then we see, finally, that God pulled both sons back from death on the third day.

It was the third day of this story. When Isaac was about to be dead there on that altar, and God gave him new life as that angel stopped Abraham. And God provided the ram.

Now, if you’re a little more skeptically minded, you might look at that and say, well, that’s, I mean, three days is not that unusual a time period. It could be a coincidence. It could be a coincidence.

If there wasn’t a repeating pattern all throughout the Old Testament of God showing up on the third day or the third period of time or God bringing life on the third day, God doing something on the third day. You know, you see a couple of things line up. It’s a coincidence.

Three, okay, maybe. But eventually you start to see a pattern here. And three days after they set out, God pulled Isaac back from death.

Just like Jesus was sacrificed for our sins. And on the third day, the father pulled him back from death. Now, there are some differences between the story of Isaac and the story of Jesus.

Isaac didn’t have to die. Isaac wouldn’t have been a perfect sacrifice if he had died. Isaac is not God in human flesh.

We’re not looking to Isaac for our salvation. But God uses this story. He used the story to the Jewish people and he uses it to us today to teach us to trust him and the sacrifice that he provides.

Just like it says, Abraham himself said in verse 8, the Lord himself will send a sacrifice. The major difference between the two stories is that while Isaac was willing to be offered, Jesus followed through. Jesus actually was offered.

And this is the most important connection between the two stories. When Abraham said in verse 8 that God would provide a sacrifice, when Jesus came, He did. Jesus is the fulfillment of the promise in verse 8.

And that’s why Romans 8. 32 says, He did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us. And how will he also not with him freely give us all things?

There was an immediate purpose for this event to happen, which was to strengthen Abraham’s faith and help him to grow deeper in his walk with God. But there’s a more long-sighted purpose, a more long-term purpose in this story, which was to point to the fact that God would send a sacrifice. And we’re going to see not only in this story, but in several others that we’re going to look at over the course of this series.

God was pointing to this all along so that we would see that Jesus was not just some random guy. When Jesus came, he was the fulfillment of thousands of years of prophecy. He was the result of thousands of years of God being at work, that God orchestrated events and moved kingdoms around like pawns on a chessboard so that in due time, at just the right time, Christ could die for the ungodly.

So that God could fulfill His promises so that you and I could be forgiven. God did send that sacrifice. Jesus Christ came to earth at just the right time.

He came as God in human flesh. He became a man without giving up being God. And He went to the cross with no sin of His own, but bearing responsibility for all of mine and all of yours.

So that when He was nailed to that cross and He shed His blood, it was payment for those sins. So that those sins could be paid for. So that we could be forgiven.

so that we could go free. And then three days later, the Father pulled him back from death, proving that everything he said about coming and forgiving our sins was true. And all that’s necessary for you and me is that we do like Abraham and believe.

Not just believe in God, not just believe that Jesus exists, but believe, put our trust in that sacrifice that God sent. Believe that Jesus paid the price for your sins and rose again to prove it and ask for that forgiveness and you’ll have it.