Blessing at the Enemy's Gates

Abraham has passed the test. Summoned by God to a far mountain, he'd been ordered to devote his beloved son to the Lord by blade and flame, in a human sacrifice. Of course, God never meant to allow him to go through with it; to do so would've been to contradict himself. But Abraham displayed the devotion to go to any lengths for God, and the faith to believe that God would stoop to any miracle necessary to fulfill his promises despite the contradiction. With an angelic call from the skies, God intervened at the last moment to stop the shedding of Isaac's blood; Abraham rejoiced to see a ram provided as a substitute to be offered on the altar in worship.

It's in the glow of that smoldering flame burning up the mutton, as the sweet smoke of gratitude ascends to the skies, that “the Angel of the LORD called to Abraham a second time from the heavens” (Genesis 22:15). What more is there to be said? A fair bit, as it turns out. The prophetic voice relays an oracle of ongoing blessing for Abraham and his seed. Abraham's heard this sort of sentiment before, to the point that you could almost think this anticlimactic, so similar does it sound to past assurances. But heaven forbid we should let good news decay to background noise! This, in fact, is “the fullest version of the divine promise” Abraham will get.¹ And there are a few key differences added here to keep things interesting for us.

The first difference is that, whereas formerly it seemed like Abraham received these promises as pure decrees of grace to be held passively by faith, now we can clearly see two additional pillars on which they'll rest for the ages. One of those pillars is Abraham's accomplished obedience, his radical devotion, the perfect fruit of his journey of faith. “Because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only one” (Genesis 22:16), “because you have hearkened to my voice” (Genesis 22:18) – that's a new degree of maturity. Abraham's own virtue, his works, become “the basis for a renewal of the covenant promises of nation, land..., and blessing,”² so that these expectations of faith are now “grounded on Abraham's obedience” alongside the grace of God.³

But the other pillar is even more profound. What we're about to hear are beyond promises, beyond even facts; they are solemn oaths. Earlier, before this adventure to the land of the moriah, Abraham dealt with the king of Gerar, Abimelech, swearing by God at Abimelech's request but dealing with the king until “both of them swore an oath” to each other (Genesis 21:31). Now, not one to be left out, God will swear as Abraham has sworn: “By myself I have sworn, declares the LORD,” that all these blessings shall belong to Abraham's seed (Genesis 22:16). In “reaction to Abraham's unconditional loyalty” on display in his offering, we now get to see “God's unconditional commitment” to Abraham's family.⁴

The New Testament comments on this verse, observing that “an oath is final for confirmation” in all our human disputes, as there's no stronger form of promise out there (Hebrews 6:16). For that reason, “when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath” to Abraham (Hebrews 6:17). Now, as a rule, “people swear by something greater than themselves” (Hebrews 6:16), since the point is to submit themselves to a power capable of enforcing the oath over them. But here, “when God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself” (Hebrews 6:13), committing himself as his own enforcer against himself, as if to say again that his very existence is placed on the line. St. Augustine asks, “What is the sworn oath of the true and truthful God but the confirmation of his promise and a kind of rebuke to those who don't believe him?”⁵

So what's the content of what we're to believe? What are the specific things made certain by this holy oath of the Most High? First, “blessingly I will bless you” (Genesis 22:17). From the beginning, Abraham had been told, “I will bless you and magnify your name” (Genesis 12:2) – it's practically the first thing he heard out of God, after all. But never before has God said to anybody, 'blessingly I will bless you' – that's the Hebrew way of intensifying a verb, by doubling it up on itself. Now, as powerfully as Adam was told that for disobedience “dyingly you shall die” (Genesis 2:17), exactly twenty chapters later Abraham hears at last the good news with the same degree of emphatic force: God will give him blessing with no less abundance than the curse of Adam!

Second, “multiplyingly I will multiply your seed” (Genesis 22:17). We've heard this exact phrase said before to Hagar (Genesis 16:10), and it's here an answer to the LORD's word to Eve that “multiplyingly will I multiply your hardship” (Genesis 3:16); God will make Abraham's seed fruitful enough to outmatch the hardships of human history, to overcome decisively the pervasive barrenness post-Eden.⁶ Decades earlier, God had promised first to make Abraham's seed “as the dust of the earth” (Genesis 13:16), then compared Abraham's future seed even to the stars in the sky (Genesis 15:5). Now, God modifies both pledges into a single oath, to absolutely multiply Abraham's seed “as the stars of the heavens and as the sand that's on the lip of the sea” (Genesis 22:17). The imagery “combines... the lofty and the earthly,”⁷ and while the top picture is unchanged, the bottom one is a swap, mortal dust of death displaced by gleaming sand bordering the open blue mystery.

From here on out, the promises elevated into this oath are decisively passed off to the next generations to carry through history. We see it beginning to take place when, in a foreign land, Abraham's seed “multiplied and grew very numerous” (Exodus 1:20); and when they were in danger of being reduced to one alone after the calf of gold was made, Moses begged the LORD to “remember Abraham... to whom you swore by your own self” (Exodus 32:13). That was Israel's salvation in their primal sin.

God's next words are something new, a different way of putting the promise of giving Abraham's seed the land (Genesis 12:7). Now we hear that “your seed shall inherit the gate of his enemies” (Genesis 22:17). I had little idea, before this week, what the Bible means by a 'gate,' but it wasn't just a door or arch at the edge of town. A city's gate was a big building, the gatehouse, which had a paved floor, benches, side chambers for meetings, even a second floor.⁸ Built into the city wall, it had a pair of protective outer doors that could be locked by night or in emergencies.⁹ The connected plaza was the main civic forum, the place where the town elders met, where public announcements were made, where court cases were heard, even a site of commercial exchange and ritual worship.¹⁰ Naturally, the gate was “a defensive liability” requiring added watchfulness and reinforcement.¹¹ And when a town was conquered, the victorious king's representative might set up a throne in the gatehouse of the city, symbolizing the transfer of ownership of the whole city and its society, and his new authority to impose his brand of law and order there.¹² So one king threatened another, “I shall install myself at your city gate.”¹³ That's what God is promising Abraham's seed: that they'll enjoy “military ascendancy” and, when they find themselves resisted by enemies, Abraham's seed will conquer and occupy their cities.¹⁴

So when Moses stood at the edge of Canaan, he preached for Israel to “go in and take possession of the land that the LORD swore... to Abraham,” since God “is keeping the oath that he swore” (Deuteronomy 1:8; 7:8). As Moses died, God encouraged Joshua to “be strong and courageous, for you shall cause this people to inherit the land that I swore to their fathers to give them” (Joshua 1:6). They fought battle after battle, clearing out city after city, to “subdue Canaan by their arms and be envied by all men.”¹⁵ By the end of the work, “the LORD gave them rest on every side, just as he had sworn to their fathers; not one of all their enemies had withstood them, for the LORD had given all their enemies into their hands” (Joshua 21:44). This persisted into the days of the kings, when “the LORD gave victory to David wherever he went” (2 Samuel 8:6).

All God wants to add is a new twist on an oldie but goodie. Up to now, Abraham's heard the pledge that “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). But now, the LORD decrees, “in your seed shall all the nations of the earth bless themselves” (Genesis 22:18). The promise extends into the future, and it now sounds more geopolitical. That sounds incompatible with what we just heard: if Abraham's seed is seizing cities from their enemies, then it sounds like other nations will be hated adversaries, so how could this same seed be the way those very nations lay hold of the blessing? It's a mystery we start to see unfold in Solomon's “fame... in the surrounding nations,” how “people of all nations came to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and from all the kings of the earth, who had heard of his wisdom” (1 Kings 4:31-34). Solomon inherited already his father's conquests of the gate of his enemies; now Solomon can turn this prominence into a vehicle of blessing the neighbor nations with wisdom and light.¹⁶ In Old Testament terms, it's in Solomon's reign that God's oath reaches fruition – at least in its surface meaning. For what goes deeper, we have to wait for God to unveil.

In the wake of Abraham's devotion and obedience, he's now heard the God of all the universe swear an oath of undying loyalty to him. Everything is bright. But is it bliss? With the words “You heard my voice” (Genesis 22:18), Abraham will hear this voice no more. After the dreadful and majestic mountain-top experience, there are no more speeches or calls or visions or dreams. “The spiritual odyssey of Father Abraham is over,” as it were.¹⁷ He's become who he was meant to become; God can be with him in a quieter way.¹⁸

Earlier in this chapter, Abraham led his donkey, son, and two serving boys toward the mountain, then separated from his servants with the words, “Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there, and we will worship, and we will come back to you” (Genesis 22:5). Is that what happens? As the chapter ends, “Abraham returned to his boys, and they arose and went unitedly to Beersheba” (Genesis 22:19). It technically does not say that Abraham and Isaac returned. Maybe we're to just assume it, as many ancient readers figured,¹⁹ but it's possible they separated here in the wake of Isaac's new adulthood and the difficulty of seeing each other the same way after the knife entered the picture. And you already may have noticed that missing from chapter 22 altogether has been Sarah, who – you can imagine – would've had thoughts about her husband taking her one and only son to butcher and burn on some hill. As this chapter ends, “Abraham lived in Beersheba” (Genesis 22:19), and the next time we see Sarah, she's at Hebron (Genesis 23:2), thirty-five miles away, and it seems as though they're living separately. If this were a play, we'd never see any two of the three alive on stage together after this point.²⁰ The Bible doesn't come right out and say it, but Abraham's obedience, while securing the future of his family, also might have cost him his relationships with his family.

How long pass between chapters 22 and 23, we don't know – it could be days, it could be twenty years. But we hear now that “it came to be that Sarah lived a hundred years and twenty years and seven years – the years of the life of Sarah” (Genesis 23:1). She's the only woman in the Old Testament whose life span is tallied up; she is also the first member of the chosen family to die.²¹ Now, her lengthy work on earth being done, “Sarah died at Kiriath-arba, which is Hebron, in the land of Canaan” (Genesis 23:2). She died in the promised land, in the place to which God had called her. But God won't appear 'on-screen' at all in chapter 23, lending this text a sense of “the seeming absence of God in death,” when its darkness dims our sight.²²

Then “Abraham went in to lament for Sarah” – an outward practice of beating your chest and wailing with your voice, maybe even tearing at your hair, wearing sackcloth and ashes – and “to weep for her” (Genesis 23:2). If Abraham earlier laughed the Bible's first laughter, now he cries the Bible's first tears – a true emotional pioneer, this man.²³ This was a woman he not only had been married to for at least sixty-two years; he'd known her for over a century, they grew up together. It hasn't always been smooth, but he's always loved her. Now... goodbye.  (Some of you have experienced for yourselves the grief and pain of such a parting.  I'm sorry.)

We aren't told how long this official time of weeping and lamenting over the late Sarah lasted. The Bible allows Abraham to grieve privately; not everything has to be stripped bare for our readerly gaze. But in the depths of this sorrow, Abraham also understood there were practical things to be done, and also things at stake beyond his personal feelings. As if this were a final trial in his life, “he was found faithful, controlled in spirit.”²⁴ Abraham is “determined that death will not dictate the course of his life.”²⁵ He will not let himself be consumed or waylaid from his holy mission, but will turn even this toward God's purposes.

So now “Abraham rose up from the face of his dead one, and he spoke to the Sons of Heth” (Genesis 23:3), one of the ethnic groups in the area at the time. This looks back to the Table of Nations where “Canaan fathered Sidon his firstborn and Heth” (Genesis 10:15). The Bible often represents these people as 'Hittites,' and there was a great Hittite Empire far to the north at this time, but these Sons of Heth in the Canaanite hill country live much too far south and don't look or sound anything like them, so they're either unrelated or distantly related.²⁶ But the important thing to realize is that Abraham has known, for decades, that these Sons of Heth are among the future enemy peoples whom Abraham's seed will dispossess: “To your seed I have given this land... and the Hittite” (Genesis 15:18-20). But for now, they're the very people Abraham approaches. And he does so in the gate of Hebron, the natural place for “legal and commercial transactions such as the sale of land... in the presence of witnesses.”²⁷ Abraham has literally entered the gate of a future enemy city which his seed will seize, but has come to negotiate (Joshua 10:36-37). And that negotiation is a deeply Middle Eastern scenario, pitting two shrewd negotiators against each other to bargain for advantage while coming across as generous.

Abraham comes to them with a problem. He needs to “bury my dead one away from my face” (Genesis 23:4), to get the corpse out of sight before decomposition becomes too obvious. It's a need the Sons of Heth would understand, and Abraham's counting on them to not want an unburied corpse in the neighborhood any more than Abraham does.²⁸ By prevailing superstition of the time, they'd be risking her vengeful spirit haunting them and causing trouble. But you don't have to be superstitious to realize that “human beings cannot live with death staring them in the face.”²⁹ The dead have to be removed from the living somehow, and the culturally preferred way here was some kind of burial. The trouble is, Abraham is “a sojourner and settler among you” (Genesis 23:4). Being a semi-nomadic resident alien is fine for being a shepherd, but it's not handy if you need land to bury in. Now, Abraham knows that he's been divinely granted the entirety of Canaan for his seed, but he dare not appeal to that secret here to just take things prematurely.³⁰ So he appeals to the Sons of Heth for a favor: “Give me a possession for a burial place among you” (Genesis 23:4).

In their response, as he humbly approached them, the Sons of Heth lift him up. They remark on him as a chief of a clan, a respectable figure, a “mighty prince” in their midst. Both he and they are exercising their best diplomacy here. But what they say could just as well be read, “A prince of God are you among us” (Genesis 23:6), which would make this the chapter's only reference to God. Though he's hiding in the background, the Sons of Heth unwittingly acknowledge his grace in Abraham's greatness, unaware that this God is the one who has pledged the Sons of Heth into the hands of Abraham's seed – they don't realize what they're admitting.

Does that mean they give Abraham what he asks? It sure looks like it: “Bury your dead one in one of our choicest burial sites; none of us will withhold from you his burial site to hinder you from burying your dead one” (Genesis 23:6). Problem solved! Or is it? They're saying that they have multi-generational family tombs, like Abraham has asked about.³¹ They suggest that one of their number could open up his own family tomb and adopt Sarah's bones into it, to effectively treat Abraham's clan as an extension of their (native) family. That'd be a coveted honor for any of them, to be able to lay claim to such a mighty prince!³²

But notice what their offer doesn't do. People in these cultures were very reluctant to part with their ancestral land outside the clan, let alone to a total foreigner like Abraham.³³ So while they extend him a privilege to bury the body, they exclude the possibility of Abraham possessing the spot; the burial site will remain theirs, remain Hethite.³⁴ Their offer is effectively a gambit to block Abraham from becoming a landowner.³⁵ If Abraham takes their offer, he'll solve his short-term problem: the dead body will be buried. But it comes with long-term risks. Either they'll expect him to move her bones out when he inevitably ceases sojourning in what they call their land, or they'll exercise the right to refuse Abraham's bones when the less mighty Isaac has to ask for a similar favor, or they'll use this burial as a pretext for a postmortem assimilation of Abraham's family into their people, thus erasing the distinctive identity God has sworn on oath to give them. Twice in life Abraham allowed Sarah to fall into the hands of foreign men and put the promises at risk; he's resolved there not be a third in her death.

So Abraham rose again in the gate plaza of Hebron and “bowed to the people of the land, to the Sons of Heth,” showing them utmost respect (Genesis 23:7). Then he made a second petition, building on their concession of a desire that he “should bury my dead one away from my face.” Since they're willing to extend the privilege of a local burial, then “hear me and entreat for me Ephron son of Zohar, that he may give me the cave of the machpelah which he owns, which is at the end of his field” (Genesis 23:8-9). Abraham's done his homework. He mentions a specific property owner and a specific property. By mentioning an empty cave, Abraham subtly declines their offer of absorbing Sarah's bones into a used Hethite tomb; by clarifying that it's at the end of a field, Abraham assures them he won't need a right-of-way over Ephron's other property.³⁶

Abraham reasserts his request quite clearly: “For full silver, let him give it to me among you as a possession for a burial place” (Genesis 23:9). Abraham's not asking for a freebie; he's willing to pay fair market price – which he has to ask the community for here, because resident aliens didn't have the legal permission to buy land at all. But that's exactly what he wants: to have this land be his lasting family possession, something inheritable by his heirs, something where all sales are final.³⁷ Sarah should be buried in Abraham's earth, not a Hethite tomb.

Now, having asked the Sons of Heth to appeal to this Ephron for him, we learn that “Ephron was sitting among the Sons of Heth” in the gatehouse this whole time. Sneaky Abraham, making sure every Hethite eye turned to put Ephron on the spot! Now “Ephron answered Abraham in the hearing of the Sons of Heth, of all who went in the gate of his city” (Genesis 23:10), “as formal witnesses to the proceedings.”³⁸ “No, my lord, hear me,” Ephron declined. “I give you the field, and I give you the cave that is in it; in the eye of the sons of my people, I give it to you. Bury your dead!” (Genesis 23:11). What an incredible gift! How generous of Ephron!

Or not. This could be Ephron's way of saying Abraham can't have the cave unless he bargains for the entire field – which, if this is to be a purchase, is a much bigger one.³⁹ And if it's not offered as a purchase, then this hasty gift might come with unseen strings attached. Unlike documented sales, “donations are notoriously insecure in law,”⁴⁰ and Abraham's claim on this field and cave “would not have been incontestable.”⁴¹ Abraham can't be sure this isn't an offer of a temporary lease.⁴²

Negotiations in the Middle East tend to open with lavish offers not meant to be accepted immediately; Abraham can't honorably say yes to this, isn't expected to think Ephron's speaking literally,⁴³ and Ephron likely doesn't want to “yield Abraham legal possession” of the property.⁴⁴ If Abraham took Ephron literally and accepted this as a huge gift, he and Isaac and Isaac's heirs would be deeply indebted to Ephron's family for ages,⁴⁵ and in light of the future enmity between Israel and Heth, Abraham doesn't want to be thus unequally yoked.⁴⁶

So again “Abraham bowed down before the people of the land,” the community of stakeholders in this property deal (Genesis 23:12), and then “spoke to Ephron in the ears of the people of the land, saying, 'But if you will, hear me'” (Genesis 23:13). He's got a next move to play in this game of commercial chess. “I 'give' the silver of the field! Take it from me, that I may bury my dead one there” (Genesis 23:13). Abraham's playing hardball. If Ephron insists on 'giving' the field, then Abraham insists on return 'gift': the full market price of the place. And he won't bury the corpse of Sarah until Ephron agrees. Abraham won't let his grief push him into a bad deal, but will actually leverage the desperateness of his situation to press Ephron to hurry up and sell.⁴⁷

Playing it smoothly but sharply, “Ephron answered Abraham, saying to him, 'My lord, hear me: land worth four hundred shekels of silver, what is that between you and me? Bury your dead!'” (Genesis 23:14-15). He keeps up the conceit of an unconditional gift, implying his asking price without using the language of selling. Ephron prices his land at four hundred shekels, or around ten pounds, of silver.⁴⁸ Is that a fair price? This is a fifteenth of what Omri will buy the whole future site of Samaria for (1 Kings 16:24), and it's over twenty-three times the “seventeen shekels of silver” Jeremiah pays for his cousin's field (Jeremiah 32:9). There's a whiff of suspicion Ephron is price gouging, either to convince Abraham to back down or to exploit his vulnerable grief.⁴⁹

Both sides have been petitioning the other to 'hear me' this whole time; now “Abraham heard Ephron,” accepts his terms, even though it's Ephron who's been backed into giving Abraham “exactly what he wanted.”⁵⁰ “And Abraham weighed out for Ephron the silver that he had spoken in the ears of the Sons of Heth: four hundred shekels of silver by the standard of the merchants” (Genesis 23:16). Since a city's gatehouse was often a place for commercial transactions, yet coins hadn't been invented yet, there'd be a scale on hand with standardized weights.⁵¹ Abraham draws on the “thousand of silver” Abimelech gave him years earlier to cover Sarah from judgmental eyes (Genesis 20:16); now Abraham uses that Philistine silver to cover Sarah's body with a cave.

With payment, the deal is struck. Where before Abraham had been rising and bowing, now “there rose up the field of Ephron in the machpelah, which was before the face of Mamre..., to Abraham in the eye of the Sons of Heth, among all who entered the gate of his city” (Genesis 23:17-18). It's colorful language, as if the field and cave stood up and walked over to join Abraham, giving him an “impeccable legal claim” to this real estate.⁵²

So now “Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the field of the machpelah on the face of Mamre, that is, Hebron, in the land of Canaan” (Genesis 23:19). From the moment the funeral paused, the text has not said her name once; she's only been Abraham's 'dead one' – a corpse, a non-person. Only once her remains are laid to rest is her identity and relationship restored as “Sarah, his wife.” If in a sense the dead body was no longer her, in another sense it now was and would be again.⁵³ Her burial “legally completes the transaction” and “makes the sale absolute and incontestable” – no refunds, no reclamations.⁵⁴ And she's buried “in the land of Canaan,” so that the molecules of her flesh can be infused into the very earth there, filling the land of promise with her God-restored miracle of maternity. Now it's sown with what it needs to become the motherland of her children!

That's why this wasn't just about two individual men making a deal. “There rose the field and the cave that is in it to Abraham as a possession for a burial place from the Sons of Heth” as a community (Genesis 23:20). It's officially no longer Hethite property; this land is reborn as Abrahamic land.⁵⁵ This right here was “the patriarch's first instance of acquiring land,”⁵⁶ as if this field is “a downpayment on the divine promise of land.”⁵⁷ God previously pledged Abraham and his seed “all the land of Canaan as a possession everlasting” (Genesis 17:8); now, as the opening deposit, Abraham gets one field as “a possession for a burial” (Genesis 23:20), “a permanent stake in the Promised Land,” obtained not by coercion but by commerce, craft, and character.⁵⁸

In time, Abraham will be buried in this cave (Genesis 25:9), Isaac will join him (Genesis 35:27-29), and Jacob's very last words command his sons to “bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite, in the cave that is in the field at Machpelah, which is before the face of Mamre, in the land of Canaan, which Abraham bought with the field from Ephron the Hittite to possess for a burial place. There they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah – the field and the cave in it were bought from the Sons of Heth” (Genesis 49:29-32). Now we appreciate why Abraham couldn't take their sly and subtle diversions for an answer. This was how the generations would be rejoined as a family unit in the afterlife, with their bones side by side in the land of promise.⁵⁹ While their children spend centuries in a foreign land, this field and its cave and the bones therein stood as a placeholder of promise: the seed of Abraham will be back, they'll inherit all that God has sworn, and as they pluck fruit from the trees that came with Abraham's purchase, they'll savor the sweetness of the goodness of the LORD!⁶⁰

When the time came to make good on that claim, Hebron would be captured by Joshua, who awarded it to his buddy Caleb as a personal inheritance (Joshua 14:13-14); but then, while Caleb's family kept the surrounding villages, Hebron itself was turned over to the priests as a city of refuge for Israel (Joshua 21:10-13). Centuries passed, and God directed a non-priest to move to Hebron (2 Samuel 2:1-3). His name was David. And it was a stone's throw from the bones of Father Abraham and Mother Sarah that David was anointed king over Judah (2 Samuel 2:4). Hebron was David's capital city for the next seven and a half years (2 Samuel 2:11), and after the fall of Saul, “all the elders of Israel came to the king at Hebron, and King David made a covenant with them at Hebron before the LORD, and they anointed David king over Israel” (2 Samuel 5:3). Eventually, this king from Hebron took control of Mount Moriah also, and there, as God had sworn an oath to Abraham, so he swore an oath there to David also.⁶¹ Yes, “the LORD swore to David a sure oath from which he will not turn back: 'One of the fruit of your womb I will set on your throne'” (Psalm 132:11), and to that coming king, “the LORD has sworn and will not change his mind: 'You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek'” (Psalm 110:4), so “rule in the midst of your enemies!” (Psalm 110:2).

When the fullness of time had come, another angel spoke, not out of heaven above, but descending humbly to an earthly Nazareth. There the Lord's handmaiden, grace-saturated Mary, received the annunciation and sang back a hymn of praise, that the Lord God was now acting “just as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and his seed forever” (Luke 1:55). After she visited her kinswoman Elizabeth, who with her priestly husband might've lived not far from Sarah's tomb, Zechariah saw it all coming together – how now God “had raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David..., that we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us; to show the mercy promised to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our father Abraham, to grant that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days” (Luke 1:69-75).

Jesus, in his ministry, “was made a priest with an oath” by God his Father (Hebrews 7:20). In him, the oath to Abraham and the oath to David merge and reach their “definitive fulfillment” – hence why the Gospel starts by labeling Jesus both Son of David and Son of Abraham (Matthew 1:1).⁶² His fellow countrymen, by this point, had made it their mission to “build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous” (Matthew 23:29), as when King Herod raised a thick stone wall at Machpelah and inscriptions for the patriarch and matriarch.⁶³ Such actions weren't themselves bad, but Jesus pronounced a woe, for those who so honored the patriarchs failed to receive the Messiah in whom the oath of God was now being paid in full.

To honor the oath of God, Jesus ascended the mountain like Isaac – we heard all about that last Sunday – and he “suffered outside the gate, in order to sanctify the people through his own blood” (Hebrews 13:12), “so that, in Christ Jesus, the blessing of Abraham might come to the nations” as God had sworn (Galatians 3:14). Turning the vital key, Jesus laid down his life. A wealthy secret disciple came and claimed the divine corpse, and Joseph of Arimathea did what Ephron the Hittite couldn't. Joseph “laid [the body of Christ] in his own new tomb, which he had cut in the rock” (Matthew 27:59-60), “where no one had ever been laid” (Luke 23:53).

That's half the story – but barely half. For the oath of God was still in effect, which had decreed that Abraham's Seed must seize possession of the gate of his enemies. “And the last enemy... is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). Surrounding cultures had oft imagined “the seven gates of the netherworld,”⁶⁴ and the Old Testament similarly pictured the realms below as if a fortified citadel of the powers of darkness, a prison-city “whose bars closed upon [the dead] forever” (Jonah 2:7), where “Death shall be their shepherd” (Psalm 49:14). King Hezekiah, when terminally ill, lamented being “consigned to the gates of Sheol for the rest of my years” (Isaiah 38:10); God asked Job if he'd seen “the gates of death..., the gates of death's shadow” (Job 38:17); and the psalmist prayed to be lifted up, up, and away “from the gates of death” before being swallowed up therein (Psalm 9:13).

Now Jesus, like Sarah before, passed through those gates. But he did not come as one who could be imprisoned and enslaved – not by a long shot. He entered as a warrior, a Samson ready to grab the pillars and topple the house. “Who can deliver his soul from the power of Sheol?” (Psalm 89:48). This Messiah, that's who. After preaching the gospel of salvation to all the dead ones (1 Peter 4:6), he raised quite a ruckus in grave-land's gate plaza, disenchanting the doors, plundering the darkness. Just as conquering kings would enthrone themselves in the gatehouse of the broken city, so Jesus enthroned himself in the gate of death on Holy Saturday, seizing for himself “the keys of Death and Sheol” (Revelation 1:18). In victory, he imposed his eternal law there.

On the third day, God the Father “raised him from the dead, no more to return to corruption” (Acts 13:34). It's here that Matthew gives us a unique image, suggesting that, as Jesus died, “the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and, coming out of the tombs after his resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many” (Matthew 27:52-53). Bible-believing scholars debate what to make of that picture, but if Matthew means it literally, then surely one of the tombs opened at the earthquake must've been in Hebron; surely Abraham and Sarah “rose with Christ” and, in the light of Easter, would've made their way to preach from Mount Moriah the name of the Promised Seed who'd set them free!⁶⁵

It's in retrospect that we can look back on a moment late in Jesus' earthly ministry. There, at a grotto far to the north, he'd asked his disciples who they think he really is. Simon alone is enlightened by the revelation of God to proclaim the True Son of the Father. And in return, Jesus declares, “I tell you, you are Peter,” a strong rock (Matthew 16:18); as Abraham was the rock from which Israelites were chipped, so here's a fatherly rock for a people made new (Isaiah 51:1-2). “And on this rock, I will build my Church” (Matthew 16:18). This Church will be the new Temple, gleaming beautiful and sturdy atop the new mount, outshining the one Solomon of old compelled the surviving Sons of Heth to assemble (1 Kings 9:15-21). But the Church will also be a new Sarah, since Sarah had stood for the new covenant and the heavenly mother-city of the faithful (Galatians 4:24-27).

And here comes the kicker, the promise rooted in the prior oath of God: “And the gates of Sheol shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). Remember what God swore to Abraham: that to Abraham's seed would be given possession of the gate of the enemy, hence the gate of the enemy would not prevail against the seed of Abraham. Among the functions of ancient city gatehouses in the Middle East, one purpose they served in times of war was as “a command center during battle, used for mustering troops and sending dispatches.”⁶⁶ The gates of Sheol are where the armies of death muster, to spill forth and trouble the world of the living. It's where the revelations of hell arise from, the network of dark decrees to negate the power of life. It had seemed, in Genesis 23, as though the gates of Sheol had prevailed against Sarah. But they cannot prevail against the New Sarah. The forces of death mustered there may march out as they please to flood the world, but the Temple will stand on the rock. The orders of the devil may pass from courier to courier from there, but they will not at last deceive the Bride of Christ. The Church will prevail; the Church will gain possession. The Church must, since God's oath in Genesis 22 “foretold the Church quite openly” and gave this blessing to her!⁶⁷

And so neither can the gates of death stop Abraham's seed from being multiplied by the grace of God, as now “the preaching of the gospel” has “extended” from one end of the earth to the other,⁶⁸ making Father Abraham “the father of a countless multitude of nations in Christ.”⁶⁹ Jesus was “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep,” but it's pledged in the oath of God that “as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:20-21). The field of Ephron was a guarantee or a downpayment on the earthly inheritance of the seed of Abraham, but there's a Machpelah for our final future, too: “the promised Holy Spirit... is the downpayment on our inheritance until we acquire possession of it” (Ephesians 1:13-15), for “if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, then he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you” (Romans 8:11). Such a faith is why Christians dare, in the spirit of Abraham, to bury our dead in holy ground “consecrated to the power of life.”⁷⁰

We know the Seed of Abraham must possess fully the gate of his enemies, “destroying every rule and every authority and power” (1 Corinthians 15:24). For the prophet heard God declare that “by myself I have sworn...: 'To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear'” (Isaiah 45:23), and the apostle understands that “at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow – in heaven and on earth and under the earth – and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:10-11). Angels kneel and Abraham kneels, Sarah and the Sons of Heth and the Serpent shall at last all confess, that Jesus is the aim of the oath of God, the Lord who sits in glory in every gate. And when Death is destroyed, we who confess Christ early and are the seed of Abraham in Christ know that we “shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” forever (Romans 6:5). “O Death, where is your victory?... Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ! Therefore, my beloved brothers [and sisters], be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:55-58).  Hallelujah!  Amen.

Hidden in Every Offering

When we left off last Sunday, we reached what some might consider the climax of the Book of Genesis. Abraham was put to the test in the toughest of ways, with God asking him to give back his whole future and betray the one he loved. It was heart-wrenching, gut-twisting, head-pounding stuff, this summons for Abraham to lead his son Isaac up a strange mountain under the pretext of worship and to then bind, butcher, and burn the beloved boy until there was nothing left at all. We reflected on Abraham's wrestling; we questioned and then vindicated the test itself, and began to glimpse its fruit in revealing Abraham's devotion and desire, and how it made Isaac a man (Genesis 22:1-14). In the end, Abraham was “found faithful in trial, and it was credited to him as righteousness” (1 Maccabees 2:52). For “why was our father Abraham blessed? Was it not because he did what was righteous and true through faith?”¹

And blessed he was. The verses beyond the first fourteen give some specifics by angelic diction (Genesis 22:15-18), and the Jewish people always took this event as a firm basis for God's ongoing commitment to the seed of Abraham through Isaac, that God “would never fail to regard with the tenderest care both him and his race.”² What happens in this chapter has “become a foundational act, and its consequences extend to every generation.”³ For these things of which we've read have a “hidden, mysterious, sacramental meaning,” unfolded throughout the ages.⁴

To briefly retell the highlights, after a three-day journey to a mysterious mountain, Abraham displayed his final and supreme devotion in worship, raising up his own son Isaac upon the altar with the intention of making him an ascension offering (the literal meaning of what we usually read as 'burnt offering'). But Isaac was given back by God, redeemed, and in his place another sacrifice was offered, a ram “substituted at God's behest,”⁵ whose blood and ashes took the place where Isaac's otherwise would've been, but who stood in for Isaac to be received by God as if it were Isaac; “and so representative sacrifice was established by divine command: God gives the lamb, which Abraham then offers back to him.”⁶ Isaac lived through his hour of sacrifice, because it had been promised by God that through him would Abraham's seed be called (Genesis 21:12) – and so they were.

Now let's fast-forward a few centuries. Since then, Abraham's seed via Isaac have found themselves oppressed and afflicted in a foreign land, Egypt; and as they cry out to the God of Abraham and Isaac, their sighs and tears are heard by the very LORD who blessed their forefathers on the mysterious mountain. He adopts Israel, he claims Isaac writ large, as his very own “firstborn son” (Exodus 4:22). He raises up Moses and Aaron, sending them to Egypt's king, to bid that king to allow God's firstborn to “go a three-day journey into the wilderness,” like Abraham's three-day journey, “that we may sacrifice to the LORD our God” (Exodus 5:3). The LORD says through them, “Let my son go, that he may serve me; if you refuse to let him go, behold, I will kill your firstborn son” (Exodus 4:23).⁷ After nine preliminary afflictions find Pharaoh's heart harder than stone, Moses magnified that ultimate threat, that “every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on the throne even to the firstborn of the slave girl who is at the handmill and the firstborn of all the cattle,” but the firstborn of Israel shall not be touched (Exodus 11:5-7). How that difference was to be made, though Moses didn't share this with Pharaoh, was that each house in Israel should take a lamb, a healthy lamb a year old, and have it die in place of the firstborn in their house, and paint its blood around their doorways as a seal of protection from harm. This chosen lamb, this substitute lamb, would be the Passover lamb (Exodus 12:3-7). “The Israelite sons live because the lamb dies,” they're “saved from death by the substitute.”⁸

What we often miss is that, as they then head for the border, “the LORD said to Moses, 'Consecrate to me all the firstborn. Whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of Israel, both of man and of beast, is mine” (Exodus 13:1). The firstborn saved by the lamb have a consecrated existence; they are not their own. It applies in perpetuity, too: after reaching the land of promise, they “shall set apart to the LORD all that first opens the womb” (Exodus 13:11-12). As the firstborn in Egypt had been destroyed, so the firstborn in Israel are to be consecrated to God, given over to him in sacrifice. But, clarified the LORD, “every firstborn among your sons you shall redeem” – they were not to die, they were to be bought back somehow. “And when, in time to come, your son asks you, 'What does this mean?', you shall say to him: 'By a strong hand the LORD brought us out of Egypt, from the house of slavery; for when Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the LORD killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the firstborn of man and the firstborn of beasts; therefore I sacrifice to the LORD all the males that first open the womb, but all the firstborn of my sons I redeem'” (Exodus 13:13-15).

So, what does this have to do with anything? Well, look how much the logic of substitution and redemption, the theme of firstborn sons and lambs, has in common with what happened centuries before on the mountain. Both stories share this “conviction that the firstborn son belonged to God,” a belonging that could be ratified in death and sacrifice, and both stories then share a joy “that God might accept a sheep in the son's stead.”⁹ These are just one story. What did Abraham say to Isaac? “God will himself see to the lamb” (Genesis 22:8). There “he foretells the Passover substitution of the lamb for the firstborn in Israel” in Egypt and each year after that.¹⁰

In fact, one of the oldest Jewish retellings of Genesis rewrites it in such a way that the fateful moment when the father loomed over his son at the altar had to be the twilight of the fourteenth day of the first month.¹¹ What time of the year was that? Oh, just “the same as the date for the Passover,” the time when the lamb was to be slain.¹² In fact, this retelling adds that, after they went home, “he observed this festival every year for seven days with rejoicing, and he named it 'the Feast of the LORD' according to the seven days during which he went and returned in peace; and thus it is ordained and written in the heavenly tablets concerning Israel and his seed to observe the festival seven days with festal joy.”¹³

In this version, “Abraham becomes the originator of Passover,” laying the groundwork for Israel's future redemption, where now “it is the blood of Isaac that procures deliverance” during the final plague and which is celebrated each year.¹⁴ A first-century Jew imagined God explaining that “I gave [Isaac] back to his father, and... on account of his blood, I chose them,” Israel.¹⁵ The rabbis taught that, when God looked at the blood of the Passover lamb around Israel's doors, what he saw was “the blood of the sacrifice of Isaac.”¹⁶ What's more, in some old Jewish readings, God chopped the sea in half for Israel's passage through it out of appreciation for Abraham chopping the wood for the sacrifice,¹⁷ and the reason the devil couldn't get in the way then was, he'd been “bound at the time of the exodus on account of Abraham's and Isaac's deed” of binding and being bound.¹⁸

To the Jewish eye, then, when Abraham consecrated his son Isaac to God and devotedly brought him to sacrifice him, only for a ram to be offered as his redemptive representative, that was the first Passover, and Isaac was the model for the Passover lamb by which Israel's firstborn were shielded from destruction and redeemed unto life. So every year, as these Jews celebrated Passover with joy, they rejoiced in the echo of Abraham and Isaac for Moses and Israel and all generations, how God had accepted a substitute for the son who needed to live.

If that were everything this meant to them, it seems like that'd be enough. But that's the tip of the iceberg. We glossed over a part of the story last week. When the God lays out his request to Abraham, to offer to the God his one-of-a-kind son Isaac, the God tells him to “go to the land of the moriah” and to “raise up Isaac there as an ascension offering on one of the mountains which I shall tell you” (Genesis 22:2). There are two interesting things there, and the first in the region, 'the land of the moriah.' Ancient Bible translators were unsure what to make of that word. Some derived it from the verb for 'seeing' – either it'd be a land that's visible because it's a high country, or it'd be a land of visions and revelations. Others derived it from the phrase 'fear of the Lord,' suggesting a land consecrated to worship. Yet others derived it from the verb for 'teaching' – a land where some lesson would be given, a land from which teaching would spread out.¹⁹ It's good to balance all three.

The second thing is, within the land, God is clear he's going to choose the mountain. As we go along, Abraham “went to the place of which the God had told him” (Genesis 22:3). In the Bible, 'the place' can sometimes mean a sacred site set apart for worship, like when Moses teaches that “you shall seek the place that the LORD your God will choose... to put his name and make his habitation there” (Deuteronomy 12:5). Naturally, once on the third day of their journey Abraham “saw 'the place' from afar,” he distanced himself from non-participants and declared that “we will worship” (Genesis 22:4-5). As they ascended to the chosen mountain in the land of hammoriyyah, Abraham answered Isaac's question by assuring him that God would see to – yir'eh – the lamb for their worship (Genesis 22:8). At the height of the mountain, “they came to the place of which the God had told him,” again, a specific location designated and desired by God, and it's where Abraham built “the altar,” the definitive one beyond all the memorial altars he'd built earlier in his travels (Genesis 22:9). In both carrying the wood and then getting onto that altar, Isaac here “becomes both victim and priest.”²⁰

There, after their devotion was witnessed in heaven, Abraham “was prevented by an angel, who provided him with a ram for that offering; and Abraham took down his son from the pyre and offered the ram.”²¹ Some rabbis held that “the ram of Father Abraham” was created just before work shut down on the week of creation, and had been held in waiting in secret for this fateful moment ever since Eden, God ready in advance with provision.²² “And Abraham called the name of that place 'The LORD Will Provide,'” or 'the LORD Will See,' Yahweh-yir'eh or Jehovah-jireh. The narrator then comments that this explains a saying later current in Israel, which could be translated as “On the mount of the LORD, it shall be seen,” or as “On the mount of the LORD, it shall be provided,” or as “On the mount of the LORD, he shall be seen” (Genesis 22:14). See, “God not only provides for Abraham but, through this action, also makes himself visible to Abraham.”²³

So this chosen place that God handpicked to witness Abraham's willingness faith and devotion in offering him the son of his love, the chosen place where God provided another way for Abraham to worship, the chosen place where God made himself present and visible to Abraham, is a mountain peak in the land of seeing or providing or revealing, Moriah. Abraham called it Yahweh-yir'eh, but the narrator just calls it “the mount of the LORD,” a place where in later days the children of Abraham could themselves find what Abraham discovered of revelation and provision, of worship and instruction and encounter, and could be witnessed before the LORD.

Where in the world were they going to find somewhere like that, the place that was that? I bet you can guess. It isn't like there are many places in the Bible called “the mount of the LORD” (Genesis 22:14), but the prophets say we “go up to the mount of the LORD” when we approach the “House of God” (Micah 4:2; Isaiah 2:3). You know where that is. In case you don't, I wonder if you've ever caught this little line tucked away in Chronicles: “Solomon began to build the House of the LORD in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where he had appeared to David his father” (2 Chronicles 3:1). Did you catch it? “In Jerusalem on Mount Moriah” is where Solomon's Temple stood! That Jewish retelling of Genesis, just a couple centuries after Chronicles, clarifies that “it is said, 'In the mountain, the LORD has seen' – it is Mount Zion.”²⁴ A first-century Jewish writer emphasized that it was exactly “that mount whereon” Israel “afterwards erected the temple.”²⁵ Later rabbis punned that the very name 'Jerusalem' could be a fusion of Melchizedek's city, Salem, and Abraham's name for the mountain, Yahweh-yir'eh, to make Jireh-Salem.²⁶ But those kinds of puns on Jerusalem's name are actually rich in Scripture, too.²⁷

The Chronicler and the rabbis alike tie together a couple stories on this mountain. The Bible tells how David was tempted into taking a census, how “Satan stood against Israel and incited David” to it (1 Chronicles 21:1); and in the same way, Jewish minds imagined that the devil was the one who, as in the Book of Job, suggested testing Abraham with the slaying of his son.²⁸ Just as the angel watched over Abraham on the mount in Genesis, so in Chronicles “God sent the angel to Jerusalem to destroy it..., and the angel of the LORD was standing by the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite; and David lifted his eyes and saw the angel of the LORD standing between earth and heaven, and in his hand a drawn sword stretched out over Jerusalem” (1 Chronicles 21:15-16). The Chronicler tells us this this threshing floor is the same place Abraham hovered over Isaac with his drawn blade; now there's an angel there with a drawn blade, ready to sacrifice Jerusalem; this is a destroying angel, like the destroyer who went after the firstborn in Egypt but was held back by the blood of the lamb. But at the pivotal moment, “as he was about to destroy it, the LORD saw, and he relented from the calamity; and he said to the angel who was working destruction, 'It is enough; now stay your hand'” (1 Chronicles 21:15).²⁹

The rabbis were intrigued by that little phrase, “the LORD saw.” They asked, “What did he behold? He beheld the blood of the sacrifice of Isaac,” they answered.³⁰ As they pieced this all together, Jerusalem was spared on that spot, God relented from the destructive order, because he looked back through the ages to Isaac on an altar there – and therefore God now told the angel what the angel had then told Abraham, to refrain from letting his hand touch the beloved. “A line runs from Abraham's great act of obedience,” through the sparing of Israel at the Passover, “to the deliverance of Jerusalem” in the days of David.³¹ So “David built an altar there to the LORD, and presented ascension offerings,” as Abraham had (1 Chronicles 21:26). And “David said, 'Here shall be the House of the LORD God, and here the altar for ascension offering for Israel,” where Abraham's and now his stood (1 Chronicles 22:1). Later he “gave Solomon the plan” for it all (1 Chronicles 28:11-19), and Solomon fulfilled it on just that hallowed spot, building the temple and its altar right there (2 Chronicles 3:1).

So then, “for the first time, the temple was built in the place which Abraham, instructed by God, had chosen for the purpose of sacrifice,”³² the place God had picked as “the place of sacrificial worship par excellence,”³³ the selfsame spot Abraham had originally sanctified at God's direction as a site for complete consecration.³⁴ “The place where Abraham built an altar to sacrifice his son is none other than the future location of the temple..., the only place where God's people could come in order to make sacrifices to God.”³⁵

Okay, but why does any of that matter? Well, a major part of temple worship, as outlined before the temple was there, was that, on a continual daily basis, Israel would sacrifice on the altar two year-old male lambs, one in the morning and another in the evening, as “a continual ascension offering throughout your generations,” God had instructed Moses (Exodus 29:38-42). In the desert, this happened in front of the opening of the tent of meeting. But once the temple was built, it was put on “the place that the LORD your God” chose, that “there you shall bring your ascension offerings and your sacrifices” (Deuteronomy 12:5-6). In fact, Moses warned, “take care that you do not offer your ascension offerings at any place that you see, but at the place that the LORD will choose..., there you shall offer your ascension offerings” (Deuteronomy 12:13-14) – at the temple on the mount.

It was mainly for this twice-daily ascension offering that the altar was hallowed (Exodus 29:44). The lamb that was offered on it in the morning was the very first sacrifice of the day, so “all subsequent sacrifices offered during the day were placed upon it” as their foundation, while the lamb offered at twilight was the last sacrifice of the day, the one kept burning through the night so that the holy flames would never die (Leviticus 6:9).³⁶ All the aspects of Israel's worship each day were sandwiched between those two lambs, which kept the whole thing chugging along. So it was mainly for those daily ascension offerings that the priests were chosen (Exodus 29:44). They were chosen from one tribe, which had been selected in place of the brotherhood of the firstborn (Numbers 3:12-13), but ancient Jews came up with a story where the choice of the Levites didn't start with Moses; they imagined how Levi was instructed in “the law of the priesthood” by none other than his grandfather Isaac, who based those teachings on his personal experience as a sacrificial victim and the explanations he was given by Abraham throughout the ordeal.³⁷ At the very first priestly ordination in the Bible, they took “a ram for an ascension offering,” as Abraham did, and paid hands on it (Leviticus 8:18-21; 9:2), and once Aaron had “killed the ascension offering” (Leviticus 9:12), “the glory of the LORD appeared to all the people, and fire came out from before the LORD and consumed the ascension offering on the altar...; and when all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces” (Leviticus 9:23-24). This is actually the second time in the Bible after Genesis 22 where you get a ram, an ascension offering, and the LORD making himself seen.³⁸

So now, these ram-consecrated priests and their twice-a-day lamb offerings are moved to the temple, where their altar is effectively a rebuilding of Abraham's altar. With that, Abraham's sacrifice becomes “a precursor to the temple sacrifices” at that same spot.³⁹ The offering of Isaac becomes “the basis for the twice-daily offering” of the lamb at the temple,⁴⁰ and so “the sacrifice of Isaac was a foundational offering that paved the way for the ongoing liturgy in the temple,”⁴¹ all of Israel's life of worship being based on what Abraham did as his supreme display of faith, obedience, and awe.

Whenever the priests slew those lambs at either end of the day, or any other ascension offerings in between, the rules of God told them that “he shall bring a male without blemish, and he shall kill it on the north side of the altar before the LORD” – a very specific instruction (Leviticus 1:10-11). But the thing about the Hebrew word for 'north' is that the same word can be read as 'hidden.'⁴² So what, asked the rabbis, is hidden before the LORD at the altar on the mountain at every sacrifice? I bet you can guess their answer. “When Abraham our father bound Isaac his son, the Holy One instituted the sacrifice of two he-lambs, one in the morning and one in the evening. Why did he do this? When Israel offers up the daily sacrifices on the altar and read this verse” from Leviticus about it, God “remembers the binding of Isaac” on that altar,⁴³ which is “preserved in God's memory whenever the [daily lamb] sacrifices are carried out.”⁴⁴ As God had told Abraham and Isaac, according to a first-century Jewish reteller, “Your memory will be before me always..., from one generation to another.”⁴⁵ So, they said, “the lamb was chosen to recall the merit of a man, the unique one, who was bound... like a lamb for a burnt offering on the altar.”⁴⁶ Isaac on the altar is the origin story of the temple lambs and every sacrifice.

Remember what Genesis said: “On the mount of the LORD, it will be seen” (Genesis 22:14). At the temple each day, during the sacrificial service of God, what did God see as he looks down toward their worship? According to this line of thought, every morning and every evening, the priest offers the ascension-offering lamb for Israel, but when God looks down, he sees Abraham laying Isaac on the altar. Every lamb offered in the temple was “a kind of reenactment of the binding of Isaac.”⁴⁷ God brings it to mind, sees Abraham and Isaac hidden in each sacrificial act at the temple, and imputes to each sacrifice made there the original offering of the beloved son. So “the daily offering taps into the power of that foundational moment” and infuses Abraham's merit into everything offers Israel up, reckons to them sacrificial faith and love, his obedience and devotion.⁴⁸

Doesn't this revolutionize our vision of what Israel's worship could've meant? Isaac was made to ascend up the mount of the LORD to be slain as an ascension offering at the place (Genesis 22:2). And then the psalmist asks us, “Who may ascend the mount of the LORD, or who may stand in his holy place?” (Psalm 24:3). Of course, we know the answer: “He who has clean hands and a pure heart,” for starters (Psalm 24:4) – that's the one who will encounter, on the mount of the LORD, “blessing from... the God of his salvation” (Psalm 24:5). But when they come, they come and lay Isaac on the altar in each lamb, and everything else is built on that, all of Israel's worship is founded on a supreme sacrifice made present again and again in each animal immolated on the altar.

Of course, the trouble is how difficult it is to keep hands clean and heart pure, isn't it? Inevitably, dirt and filth would collect there, and even if the sacrifices could move it to the temple like a filter, you've got to change your filters every now and then. So Israel had a feast on their national calendar, the Feast of Trumpets, which later was picked as the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. On that day, “you shall observe a day of solemn rest, a memorial proclaimed with the blast of trumpets” (Leviticus 23:24). It sets in motion the Ten Days of Awe, an annual season symbolizing judgment for sin, where in Jewish lore the accounts of each one's deeds for the year are written down but open to revision by repentance.⁴⁹ The Ten Days of Awe climaxed with Yom Kippur, “the Day of Atonement; it shall be for you a time of holy convocation, and you shall afflict yourselves” by fasting (Leviticus 23:27). What we find out later is that, on days of public fasting in Israel, the trumpets they blew were made from the horns of a ram.⁵⁰

Remember how the story in Genesis ends when Abraham spies out and sacrifices a ram caught in the thicket by its horns (Genesis 22:13)? Well, what the Jewish assembly shouted at the temple, as the priests raised those ram-horn trumpets, was, “Blow, priests, blow! May he who answered Abraham on Mount Moriah answer you and listen to the voice of your outcry this day!”⁵¹ The rabbis went on to explain this prayer by saying that they blew rams' horns to point God back each year to Abraham, Isaac, and the ram, asking him to apply that power of redemption to Israel all over again.⁵² They imagined it as if Abraham had asked God, “When Isaac's children put their hands to transgressions and evil deeds, remember for their sake their father's being bound on the altar, and be filled with mercy for them,”⁵³ and as if God had replied to Israel that, when they blow the ram's horn while one year closes and another dawns, “I will remember for you the binding of Isaac, son of Abraham, and I will ascribe it to you as if you had bound yourselves before me.”⁵⁴ That is, God would impute to them the act of Isaac in offering himself totally to God, and would treat them as if they'd loved him with a whole heart. “Since Isaac was redeemed,” they said, “it is as if all of Israel was redeemed.”⁵⁵ Later rabbis went so far as to say that Isaac “bound on the altar... atones for the iniquities of Israel.”⁵⁶

That thought, of God identifying them with Isaac, exploded when the situations were ripe. In the days of Moses it had seemed so simple: obey God, enjoy the blessed life in the land. For all their woes with Canaanites and Philistines, for all their belittling by Assyrians and Babylonians and their tolerance by the Medes and Persians, there was seldom a danger that to obey God was to be cut off. But then came the Greeks, and a crisis in which the Jews, under oppression, found the laws of their pagan overlords directly forbidding obedience to the Law of the LORD, on pain of death. There emerged a choice: enjoy life, or obey God, but not both.

There were Jews who fought back; there were others who boldly gave their lives. Reflecting in hindsight from under Rome's thumb, Jews started to pioneer a new theology of what it means to offer your life unto death for the sake of God's name – what we call martyrdom; for them, “Isaac becomes the archetypal martyr, willingly dying for the faith” on the altar.⁵⁷ The retold the tale of the Jewish woman who'd been forced to watch her seven sons tortured to death, one by one, in front of her eyes. But as the story was retold, her resolute faith in the face of such grief made her “like-souled with Abraham” in Genesis 22, for she “remembered the endurance of the godly fear of Abraham.”⁵⁸ She's said to have reminded her sons that their late father “used to read to you about... Isaac being offered as a sacrifice,”⁵⁹ and she told them that, because of God's generous gifts to them, “you are obliged to endure every pain for the sake of God, on account of which even our father Abraham hastened to sacrifice his son Isaac, the father of the nation,” and Isaac “did not cower in regard to his father's sword-bearing hand bearing down on him.”⁶⁰ No, he “rushed to the altar,”⁶¹ he “stretches out his neck.”⁶²

So the seven sons gave their lives, as had others – “tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life” (Hebrews 11:35). The book clarified that it was because of this voluntary gift of martyrs that “the enemies did not conquer our nation” – that for their sake “the homeland was purified,” since they had given their lives to balance out its sin, “and through the blood of these pious ones and through the propitiatory offering of their death, Divine Providence rescued the previously mistreated Israel.”⁶³ In this Jewish theology, the martyrs, precisely by imitating Isaac and laying down their lives as if a sacrifice on an altar, “atone for sin, avert the divine wrath, defeat the tyrant, purify the land, and restore peace” to the people.⁶⁴

And so the cycle of regular sins and annual cleansing and seasons of emergency would continue, as – like a ram tangled in a thicket – Israel kept getting snared in first this sin, then that sin; snagged by first this empire, then that empire, throughout the ages. But the hope the rabbis kept burning was that their aspirations at the Feast of Trumpets and the Day of Atonement could be projected large on the screen of time itself, so that when all these generations had come and gone, and when the final tribulation at last reached its fever pitch, “at the end they will be redeemed by the horns of this ram,” conformed fully and finally to the freedom of their father Isaac.⁶⁵

That's the story as it played out in the rabbinic Jewish vision: that when Isaac was laid on that altar, and when Abraham was provided a ram to actually slay as if it were him, Isaac was the prototype of the Passover lamb; he was the foundation for the lambs offered daily, the one hidden in each act of sacrifice and seen on the mountain by God in all Israel's worship; he was their annual appeal for mercy, that God would count his merit as theirs and have mercy on them; he was their model in times of crisis, laying down their lives as martyrs in imitation of him on the altar and thus saving the people again; he was the shape of history itself, where in the end they would be redeemed from the chopping block by the horns of the ram, freed unto eternal life.

But it's not enough. You could see from the start where the story of Isaac was really going, couldn't you? That story “actually happened and is a prophecy.”⁶⁶ In Genesis, Isaac is described to Abraham as “your son, your only, whom you love” (Genesis 22:2), a line which the Greek Bible reads as “your son, the beloved one, the one whom you love.”⁶⁷ Fast-forward, and the New Testament begins with “the book of the genesis of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1), and when the voice calls down from heaven, “with a fatherly voice, as from Abraham to Isaac,”⁶⁸ what does it say? “You are my Son, the Beloved One; in you I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17), quoting precisely from Genesis 22.⁶⁹

At the other end of his ministry, Jesus “brought” three disciples “up a high mountain by themselves” (Matthew 17:1), as in Greek Genesis Abraham was called to “bring” his son up a mountain “in the high country,” and added two servants for a group of four.⁷⁰ In Jewish tradition, Abraham recognized the mountain because he “saw the cloud of glory enveloping the mountain,”⁷¹ and on the mountain Jesus “was transfigured before them..., and a bright cloud overshadowed them” (Matthew 17:2-5). Then, as a voice called from heaven before, so again it came: “This is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased; listen to him!” (Matthew 17:5). In Genesis, after the heavenly voice, Abraham “lifted up his eyes” and he “saw one ram” (Genesis 22:13); here, when the disciples “lifted up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only” (Matthew 17:8).⁷² Only then does Jesus warn them to “tell no one the vision” from the mountain until after the passion (Matthew 17:9-11).

Genesis 22, at heart, is a father asked to offer up his only-begotten son, whom he loves, as a sacrifice; so, when the time comes, the son leaves his friends behind and carries the wood for the sacrifice on his shoulder up the hill to the site where he's to give his life. What more familiar event does that sound like to you? In Genesis 22, Isaac was “prefigured in the likeness of the Lord.”⁷³ The Father summoned the Son to such a purpose. Like the servants staying behind, the disciples fled Jesus in the decisive hour.⁷⁴ Then “they took Jesus, and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called Place of the Skull” (John 19:16-17). Early Christians marveled that he “bore the wood on his shoulders, going up to slaughter like Isaac at the hand of his father,”⁷⁵ fulfilling the image “set forth in Isaac when he was offered on the altar.”⁷⁶ Everything that Isaac went through “happened as a type of the cross” of Christ.⁷⁷ In fact, in some Christian traditions, instead of identifying Mount Moriah with the Temple of Solomon, Abraham's mountain became “the very place where the cross of Christ was fastened; there also grew the tree which held the ram that saved Isaac. This place,” they said, “is the middle of the earth, Adam's tomb, the altar of Melchizedek, Golgotha... There Abraham made Isaac ascend upon the altar, and saw the cross, Christ, and our father Adam's salvation.”⁷⁸

Where “Abraham offered God a mortal son who wasn't put to death” in the end, “God delivered to death an immortal son for men.”⁷⁹ Didn't Abraham say, “God will himself see to the lamb” (Genesis 22:8)? Well, “behold the Lamb of God” (John 1:36)! Isaac was freed, for a thorn-crowned ram entangled in a tree took his place (Genesis 22:13). Abraham saw that ram “and recognized the mystery, that our salvation would be on a tree.”⁸⁰ Abraham “saw the Messiah in the sheep which was offered instead [of Isaac] as a sacrifice to God.”⁸¹ As Isaac had been a foreshadowing of Jesus, “we can even say that the ram was a symbol of Christ, for to be held fast by thorns is like a crucifixion. So all this obscurely prefigures Christ.”⁸²

The Isaac of Jewish tradition believed he'd “been born into the world to be a sacrifice to him who made me,”⁸³ and later sources even added that Isaac “wished to sacrifice himself for the sake of the world.”⁸⁴ Jesus called himself the One “whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world” (John 10:36), adding that “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17) – for “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15). For in fact, “the death of Isaac would not have liberated the inhabited world, but only that of our Savior, by whose wound we all have been healed.”⁸⁵ In Greek Genesis, the voice of God rejoices that Father Abraham “did not spare your beloved son because of me,”⁸⁶ and St. Paul tells us that now God is a Father “who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all” (Romans 8:32). “For the sake of the world, the Father offered his beloved Son.”⁸⁷

In fact, one early Christian draws the tightest possible connection between the two: Abraham “readily offered his only-begotten and beloved son as a sacrifice to God, so that God in turn might have the good pleasure of offering his beloved and only-begotten Son for his entire offspring as a sacrifice for our redemption.”⁸⁸ Did you catch that? Abraham offers his son to God so that God will offer his Son for humanity. On this reading, what we find in Genesis 22 is a cause of God sending his Son, God receiving his Son as a sacrifice at the cross, God sparing him not but giving him up for us all. Genesis 22 is so much more than an example of a man's most audacious faith; it's a foreshadowing of the greatest story ever told and the pretext for your salvation!

If some said that Isaac was the first Passover lamb, we know who the last and truest one was: “Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). It was from him that the Passover derived backwards its protecting power, because Isaac was a shadow of this “firstborn among many brothers” (Romans 8:29), and “in him we have redemption through his blood” (Ephesians 1:7). If some said that Isaac was the basis of their plea for mercy at the trumpet call, we know better still that we “are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24), for we are not simply bound with Isaac but “crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). Jesus is the model of martyrs, for he is the one “whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood” (Romans 3:25), whose death conquers the devilish tyrant to win us purity and peace, a power extended through “the blood of the martyrs of Jesus” (Revelation 17:6). It's him whom we await at “the sound of the trumpet of God” (1 Thessalonians 4:16).

And in the meantime, the power of the sacrifices in the temple wasn't truly based on looking back to Isaac, not ultimately. Because Isaac was a type of Christ. And it was Christ to whom they pointed ahead in implicit faith with those offerings, it was Christ whom they meant, “for by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:13). As the priests in the temple acted as Abraham on the mount day after day, presenting again the original sacrifice in each offering, so it was said, Christ's single offering is made present day after day in the Church – not in new offerings of blood, but on altars and in hearts, presenting Christ and pointing to Christ and celebrating the feast of the Lord Christ, the Son of God. Because he is the true foundation of all Christian worship, everything we do. His temple, his Church, is made the place of provision, where his grace is offered for us; the place where he sees us, as we gather unto him; the place where he is seen, when we behold the King in his beauty; the place of the vision of heaven, where we worship “a Lamb standing as though it had been slain” (Revelation 5:6). Worthy is he, worthy is the Beloved Son, worthy is the Passover and Temple and Martyr of Martyrs, worthy is the Mercy and Forgiveness made flesh, worthy is the True Isaac, to stand alive from the altar on the heavenly Mount Zion “to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing” (Revelation 12)! Hallelujah! Thanks be to God. Amen.