salvation, and so in his place God provided a ram, representing the ultimate
sacrifice of Jesus our substitute on the cross.
Abraham in this story was the agonizing father who had to give up his own son
of promise through sacrifice. Agony that he experienced in a very real way in the
long, laborious journey to Mt. Moriah, the place of sacrifice. Agony that he
experienced to the point of a broken heart when he tied his son to the altar, with
the wood for the fire, agony that pierced his soul when he raised the knife to drive
the death blow into his son....
It should be noted that this was a sacrifice we all mankind rightfully deserved,
having all sinned and gone astray from the Father and His holy commandments.
We had already all been condemned to death in the Garden of Eden through our
first parents because of sin. Yet even in that Garden God provided a sacrifice when
he made garments of skin for Adam and Eve, not wanting them to be naked now
that His glory that earlier clothed them, had been withdrawn. This sacrificial
substitute through shedding of blood also represented Christ, who would die in
our place so He can clothe us with His righteousness. ‘ The Lord God made garments
of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them’ (Genesis 3:21).
Years later, Mt. Moriah became the site of the altar and the Temple of God where
the priests offered sacrifices to God on behalf of the people. And so this occurrence
in Genesis was deeply symbolic to the story of salvation.
It is not for nothing that Abraham was called the Friend of God (Isaiah 41:8), and
the Father of Faith (Romans 4). He had the chance to experience first-hand the
agony of sacrificing his own son, and so tasted for all humans a bit of the agony
God our Father would experience in sacrificing His own Son on the cross. God
trusted Abraham with this experience because he had proved to be a faithful and
trustworthy servant, who now also became a friend of God through that shared
sense of tragedy and loss, regrettable yet deeply necessary.
God chose Abraham to be the father of his physical and spiritual offspring. This
would be done through Isaac and ultimately through Christ, the Seed, as we have
seen. This deeply spiritual experience was therefore necessary for the Father of
Faith and his Seed (both Isaac and Christ).