Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Genesis 22:1-14, NASB
- Series: Jesus in the Old Testament (2024), no. 1
- Date: Sunday, October 13, 2024 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
Listen Online
Watch Online
Text
Seeing Christ Before He Came
A lot of you 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 it 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 parent-teacher conferences 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 did not 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 have ever enjoyed was back when we were homeschooling, and I took Charla out on a date and we called it a parent-teacher conference. She is 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.
Part of the reason I do not enjoy parent-teacher conferences on either side of the equation is because, like I said, you do not know what is going to come out of that meeting. Did my child cause problems that I am now going to have to clean up? As a teacher, am I going to tell parents what their child is doing in class and have them blow up at me? I think, basically, I walk into the conference wondering whether something is going to blow up, and whether it is going to blow up on me.
I love the kind of conference like we had this week. We have five kids, so instead of doing five straight conferences, we just split them up. Charla did some, and I did some. She asked me, “How did this conference go?” I said, “Exactly like you’d expect.” As they reviewed classwork in each subject, as they reviewed learning and habits and behavior, you and I could have filled out the good and the bad. It went exactly like we would have expected.
I loved walking into that. I mean, I was still apprehensive going in. But I loved going through that whole parent-teacher conference and finding no surprises. There are things in life that are a little easier to deal with when you have some idea what you are getting.
I know I take this to an extreme, because if I am watching a show or a movie, I will go online and read how it ends before we get to it. I do not like surprises. I like to know what is coming. God has done that a little bit for us in the Old Testament by providing 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 start looking for Jesus there, he is all over the place. Several weeks ago, the older kids and I were in the truck, listening to a program about the resurrection. If you have been here more than about five minutes, you know that sometimes I get a little wound up on that topic. It is my favorite thing to talk about.
They dealt with a question I have had for many years. If you were here around Easter, we talked about the Corinthian Creed, this little snippet in 1 Corinthians 15:5. That is not where we will be today, but in 1 Corinthians 15:5 we can trace this statement back to within a couple months of the crucifixion. It is evidence that the earliest Christians believed Jesus rose from the dead. It is evidence that this was not a story made up hundreds of years later.
It is right there, and you can trace the history of it back to within a couple months of Jesus’ crucifixion. People believed Jesus rose from the dead. That is how Christianity got started. People believed he died and rose from the dead.
Promises, Prophecies, and Pictures
That passage says Paul is reminding the Corinthians of what he taught them, what they had learned from him, and what he had learned from others who had already taught this: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. Then it goes on to list some of his appearances.
The question I have always had is this: Where does it say in the Scriptures that Jesus would die for our sins? Because at that time, they only had access to the Old Testament. 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, how Jesus would die, and 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 the Psalms. We can get close to it in Hosea. But it is not there as clearly as the idea of the crucifixion.
I have always wondered, what exactly is Paul referring to? We heard this program where a man was talking about the idea of Jesus rising the third day, and he said, “I can’t point you to one particular Old Testament Scripture, because it is in all of it.” He began to work, just in this brief interview, story by story through some of the passages of the Old Testament.
Even though those passages do not say in that day, “We are 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. 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 am 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.
We will look at 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 die for us. He was going to pay for our sins according to the Scriptures. He was going to be buried and rise again the third day according to the Scriptures.
These things really show up in three ways. They show up in promises, prophecies, and pictures. When I say promises, that overlaps with prophecy somewhat. But I am thinking of the times when God said, “I am going to send a Messiah.”
These things go back to the earliest pages of Genesis. You go to Genesis 3, where God hands down the punishments in the garden when Adam and Eve sinned. He says that he is 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 God says, “I am sending a Messiah. I am sending someone who is going to deal with the sin problem.”
What I call prophecies are when he says how this is going to happen. For example, Micah says the Messiah is going to be born in Bethlehem. Isaiah says, in effect, “Here is how the crucifixion is going to happen.” He does not use those exact words, but when you read Isaiah 53, it is a very clear picture. Psalm 22 gives a very clear picture of the crucifixion hundreds of years before it happened and hundreds of years before that was even a common way of executing someone.
Then there are the pictures, the way God used the stories. Please understand, and I will probably remind you of this as we go through this series, when I use the word “story,” I am not talking about a story like Hansel and Gretel. We think, “Oh, it is a story, so it did not really happen.” I in no way mean to imply that these things did not 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 they were always pointing people to Jesus Christ and what he was going to do.
Back in Genesis 3, we see a picture that would point to Jesus Christ. When Adam and Eve sinned, God said, in effect, “You are naked, and you need to be covered.” So God made them a covering out of 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.
There, for the first time in all of redemptive history, we see the innocent dying to cover the sins of the guilty. It is a picture of Jesus.
The Test of Abraham’s Faith
I want us to skip ahead this morning to Genesis 22. In this passage, we need to understand, first of all, that this is about a test God put Abraham through. We might look at it and say, “That is kind of a harsh test. That is kind of a cruel test to put someone through.”
But as we talked about last week with the end of Joel, God is just. That means everything God does is right, even if it does not look that way from our perspective. 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. I have often wondered about that, and I think it came from misremembering parts of the story. God is testing Abraham and then says, “Wait, wait, now I know you fear God.” I have always wondered, why did God just then know? God knows everything. God knew Abraham’s faith before Abraham was even born.
Then you reread the story and realize it is 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 would turn out. God knew the end from the beginning. So this test was not for God’s benefit. It was for Abraham’s benefit.
Abraham needed to understand the depth of his own faith, the depth of God’s faithfulness, and all these things, so that Abraham could show himself useful to God. The test was not for God. It was for Abraham.
This test demonstrated God’s faithfulness to Abraham. The book of Hebrews seems to indicate that Abraham thought, “I am 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. I do not believe there is any one of us in here who would sacrifice our own child. That is a tall request.
I do not 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 do not 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 is trusting that God is going to do something to fix it.
Abraham is trusting in the goodness and justice of God, that God is always going to do what is 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. When we step out in faith and trust God, God will always come through.
Just like with Abraham, that coming through does not 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 did not just hang Abraham out to dry.
This test also showed Abraham the depth of his own faith. If you had asked Abraham a few years before this, or 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?”
“Yes, but…”
How many times have we had those conversations in our own minds? When you are in the midst of a difficult situation and God asks you to do something you do not think you can do—and by the way, I am not encouraging anybody to go out and sacrifice their children. Just to be very clear for anybody watching online, this was a specific request God made to Abraham.
But when God calls us to step out and do something that requires faith, we do not know exactly how much we trust God until we actually step out and trust God. It is one thing to sit back and say, “Oh yeah, I trust God,” when things are great and he is not asking anything of us. This was proof to Abraham of exactly how much he trusted God.
A Picture of God’s Redemptive Plan
I think the most incredible part of this 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 study 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 are reading a mystery story, for example, and one character seems just a little too fixated on knives, you read a little further and realize that became important later. That was an important detail to the story. Or some of you will watch a murder mystery show. Maybe you are like my wife, who is always playing detective. I do not want to figure it out. I just want to know. She likes figuring it out. We will be watching a mystery show, and ten minutes in she will say, “That guy is the killer.” Some little detail has been foreshadowed that points to who it is.
Here, God is foreshadowing his plans for the salvation of mankind. He is giving 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. We can look back as well and say Jesus was not just some random guy who had a good story about dying for us and then went to the cross. This was not 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. I did not just pull this out at random. The Bible even says that this whole thing took place to point us to Jesus Christ. Hebrews 11 calls Isaac a type of Christ. That does not mean he is some kind of Christ. It means he is a picture that points to Jesus Christ.
Hebrews 11 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, from which he also received him back as a type.”
That is where I get the idea that Abraham was expecting, “I am going to sacrifice my son, and then God is going to raise him back from the dead.” But Hebrews says he received Isaac back as a type, meaning he was a picture. Hebrews 11 is talking about how the Old Testament points to Jesus. It is right there in God’s Word that Isaac is pointing us to Jesus Christ.
So we have read the story. Most of you are probably familiar with it already. God calls Abraham to get up and go sacrifice his son, and Abraham gets up and does it. There is no back talk recorded, no logistical planning. He just gets up and goes like it is another Wednesday. I do not know that it was Wednesday, but he gets up and goes like it is another normal day.
They head off, and it is a multi-day journey. They are approaching where they need to be on the third day. Abraham tells the servants, “Stay behind. We are going to go over here, and we are going to worship. We are going to take the wood and the fire with us.”
They start up the mountain, and Isaac says, “Father, where is the lamb for the sacrifice? We have the wood. We have the fire. Where is the lamb?” Abraham says, “God will provide the sacrifice.”
I think in Abraham’s mind, God had provided Isaac as the sacrifice, and God was going to raise him back up. They get there. Abraham ties Isaac down. He is about to sacrifice him, and the angel of the Lord stops him and says, in effect, “You have passed the test.” At that moment, Abraham looks up and sees a ram caught in a thicket to be sacrificed.
The Son of Promise
There are a few ways 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.
God promised to send a Son in the New Testament, and Jesus was conceived miraculously. They were both sons of promise, uniquely beloved by their fathers. In verse 2, God says, “Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac.”
Our translation says “your only son,” which might leave you scratching your head thinking, “What about Ishmael?” We know that Abraham had another son. This is not a Bible contradiction, because the original Hebrew means one of a kind, kind of like when Hebrews refers to Isaac as 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. 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 is the only one who shares the same nature as the Father.
Isaac was not Abraham’s only son, but he was, 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, uniquely beloved by their fathers, sons of promise.
We also see in verse 2 that Abraham is 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 he was taking Isaac to Jerusalem. It does not necessarily mean, unless I have missed something in the Old Testament, that Isaac was specifically offered on Mount Moriah. But he was taken to the land of Moriah. He was taken to what would become Jerusalem.
Anybody else we know of who went to die in Jerusalem? Jesus. That is a random detail to include unless it parallels the story of Jesus.
Then we see that Abraham and the Father both offered their sons as a sin offering. In verse 2 God says to go and offer Isaac as a burnt offering. That is a sacrifice to cover sin. The offerings in the Old Testament could not pay for sin in full. That is why they had to keep doing it. But it was at least a temporary covering for past sins.
God says, in effect, “Go and offer your son for that.” This points to the fact that he was going to offer his Son as the perfect sacrifice for sin, who would cover all sin for all time for those who believed.
The Willing Son and the Provided Lamb
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 hear skeptics call God a cosmic child abuser, or they talk about child sacrifice because he sent his Son to die on the cross.
It is a little different when you are God the Son. Jesus has the power to decide what he wants to do. His will was always in line with the Father’s. He was an equal participant in this. Even in his humanity, by the time he went to the cross, he was over 30. He was an adult. 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 told Pilate that he laid his own life down.
If you are like me, you have read this story and heard this story since you were in Sunday school as a little kid, and you have always pictured a little boy. That is 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 is a little boy. That Hebrew word is the same one Abraham uses for the young men, the servants who are carrying the wood for him.
It does not mean Isaac is a little boy. It means he is a young man. He is old enough and strong enough that when Abraham cannot carry the wood up the mountain because he is well over 100, Isaac is strong enough to carry the wood up. In ancient cultures, many details were passed down by oral tradition. There is a tradition recorded by the Jewish historian Josephus that says Isaac was about 25 when this happened.
Are you going to tell me that an over-100-year-old man overpowered a 25-year-old and tied him down against his will? I do not buy that, not even on double coupon day. Isaac was a willing participant. I do not know what the conversation was. I do not know exactly what was said. But in some way, Isaac was told what the deal was, and he trusted his father. He trusted his father enough to willingly lay down his life, just like Jesus did.
Finally, 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 the angel stopped Abraham and God provided the ram. If you are a little more skeptically minded, you might look at that and say, “Well, three days is not that unusual a time period. It could be a coincidence.”
It could be a coincidence if there were not 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, or God doing something on the third day. You see a couple of things line up, and it might be coincidence. Three, okay, maybe. But eventually, you start to see a pattern.
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. There are differences between the story of Isaac and the story of Jesus. Isaac did not have to die. Isaac would not have been a perfect sacrifice if he had died. Isaac is not God in human flesh. We are not looking to Isaac for our salvation.
But God uses this story. He used this story to teach the Jewish people, and he uses it to teach us today to trust him and the sacrifice he provides. Just as Abraham said in verse 8, the Lord himself will send a sacrifice.
God Provided the Sacrifice
The major difference between the two stories is that while Isaac was willing to be offered, Jesus followed through. Jesus actually was offered. 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. That is why Romans 8:32 says, “He did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also 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 grow deeper in his walk with God. But there was also 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.
We are going to see not only in this story but in several others over the course of this series that God was pointing to this all along. He was pointing to this so that we would see 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.
God did that so he could fulfill his promises and so 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. He went to the cross with no sin of his own, but bearing responsibility for all of mine and all of yours.
When he was nailed to that cross and shed his blood, it was payment for those sins. It was so those sins could be paid for, so that we could be forgiven, so that we could go free. Then three days later, the Father pulled him back from death, proving that everything he said about coming and forgiving our sins was true.
All that is 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 your trust in that sacrifice God sent. Believe that Jesus paid the price for your sins and rose again to prove it, and ask for that forgiveness, and you will have it.