Three Day Death March

Articles

Larry Walker
02/16/16 - Faith

God’s Promise to Abraham: A Three-Day Death March?
Gen. 22

Abraham, having long awaited the promise of God, and having over many years reaffirmed his loyalty to God by believing in him and acting on it, now rejoices in Isaac, the promised son. Can you imagine how all of Abraham’s earthly hopes and dreams rested in that boy? Can you see how Abraham must have watched him, protected him, trained him, loved him with the greatest love a father could imagine? For Abraham, the friend of God, could also see in Isaac the unfolding of the spiritual heritage that God promised through him. “I will make of thee a great nation… and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” How Abraham must have rejoiced in Isaac, praising the great God who had kept his promise of a son. See him triumphantly looking by faith to that great nation that would come through Isaac, and ultimately the blessing of all nations of the earth.

But then his world crashes. It is the story that I shudder to think about, and maybe you also flinch as you tell it to your children. Jehovah instructs Abraham to take this son of promise and offer him as a burnt sacrifice. This unspeakable horror is the command of the great God of heaven? How can we justify it? How can we explain it? Some even say, “How can we trust a God who would ask such a thing?”

Abraham, unlike the men of his day [and ours], lived in another realm. He saw the reality of life with God, and he understood that it transcends this earthly life. He looked for a city, whose builder and maker is God. He was not tied to this world. To him, Isaac was as good as dead, but he was looking beyond this material realm, and he KNEW that God was able to raise him up, if he chose to. [See Hebrews 11.]

So Abraham arises “early in the morning” and starts his journey of death. Surely it was an agony of doubts, fears, anger, numbness, heartache, suffering like he had never known – yet he obeys his God.

Abraham’s faith was “made perfect” through his suffering. It was not just a professed faith, but a tried and demonstrated and proven faith. “Now I know that thou fearest God”, Gen. 22:12. Isaac was not the only sacrifice in that story. In a very real sense, Abraham sacrificed himself to the will of God. Isaac was “as good as dead”, but so was Abraham, from a worldly perspective. But he gave it all up, and by that he was completely fitted to be the “father of the faithful”. “Because you have done this thing”, v. 16, the covenant with Abraham was renewed and further revealed. All nations could be blessed through Abraham in a way that was now amplified by his great foreshadowing of the sacrifice of the Father in the sacrifice of the Son. Abraham’s sacrifice of his own son prefigures the Father’s sacrifice of HIS own Son.

There is no doubt that God blessed Abraham with many material gifts for only one reason: so that in God’s plan he could be a blessing to others! But it should send us to our knees when we think that God also asked Abraham to endure long years of waiting and trial, and then to suffer untold misery in that horrible journey of sacrifice – again, so that in God’s plan he could be a blessing to others. If God could do this through Abraham, might he also ask some small sacrifice of me?

Larry Walker, January 2009