Last time we were with Abraham, he had a terrible decision to make. Was he going to sacrifice Isaac in the Land of Moriah or was he going to refuse, or at least argue with God about it? Abraham’s response is even more confusing than God’s request–absolutely nothing for three whole days. We are starting to see hints about Jesus in this story, and so we will talk about the “type” of Isaac and the “antitype” of Jesus both carrying wood on their backs.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
Last time we saw Abraham, we ended on a cliffhanger! A cliffhanger is a story that leaves you wondering what has happened but makes you wait a long time to find out. Like when I had to wait three years to find out if Han Solo would survive being frozen in carbonite, George Lucas! I only made you wait three weeks. So, God asked Abraham to do something just horrible as part of a test, but we still don’t know what kind of test this is and what it would even mean to pass or fail the test. Was it a test to see if Abraham will do anything God asks without an argument? Or is it a test to see if Abraham will argue with God like he did for the survival of the people of Sodom? Is the test to see what Abraham thinks God is and isn’t okay with? Maybe to see if Abraham does or doesn’t know that our God is different from the gods he grew up knowing? Or is this test not about passing or failing but just to see what kind of a man and a father Abraham actually is? We just don’t know and we won’t ever really know what God was looking for or if He was even looking for anything specific. What is going to be important in this whole chapter is finding out what Abraham and God will both end up doing. A lot of times, God’s tests are about showing us what kind of people we are because He already knows. But we won’t ever know what either of them are actually thinking going into this or along the way to the land of Moriah, which is super frustrating. Because of that, there are a lot of “what if” stories out there where people try to make sense of it. But they are all just stories and no one knows for sure. We will talk about them as they come up though, just for fun. But for now, how is Abraham going to respond to what God said? Let’s go back to the beginning of the chapter for anyone who missed it last week and for context.
After these things, God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” “Here I am,” Abraham answered. And God said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.” So Abraham got up early in the morning, put a saddle on his donkey, and took two of the young men who worked for him and his son Isaac with him. He chopped wood for a burnt offering and set out to go toward the place God had told him about. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. Then Abraham said to the young men, “Stay here with the donkey. The boy and I will go over there to worship; then we’ll come back to you.” Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and had his son Isaac carry it on his back. Abraham took the fire and the knife, and the two of them walked on together.
After God tells him or asks him about the sacrifice (it could be read either way), the next thing we see is Abraham getting up early in the morning. I suppose it is probably the next morning but it doesn’t really say. But it kinda implies that whatever happened, had probably happened during the night. We know that Abraham has had visions and dreams about God at night before. It doesn’t say anything more about what happened than just hearing a voice and so he might even be awake with God just talking out loud to him. I suppose the message is so important that we maybe aren’t even supposed to wonder about all of that but I do try to notice so I can help you learn to see what it does and doesn’t say. No matter what, I wouldn’t be surprised if Abraham got up early because he just couldn’t sleep after what God said to him. Could you sleep? I sure couldn’t. This is the exact same thing that happened when God told Abraham to listen to Sarah about sending Ishmael and Hagar away in the last chapter. Abraham got up first thing in the morning and sent them off. It seems like Abraham doesn’t like to put things off even when he doesn’t want to do something. Have you ever heard of “eating the frog?”
Eating the frog is a trick to help us get things done that we just don’t want to do. Say you have ten things to do today and one of them is eating a frog. Nothing in your day is going to be worse than eating that frog. Homework, dishes, laundry, yardwork—all of it is fun and games compared to eating a raw frog and you know that you are going to be thinking about eating that frog all day and dreading it and just being so upset about it, right? So, what do you do? Well, you have to eat the frog no matter what—maybe the world will explode if you don’t. And I know that is really silly but then no one is ever going to give you a list of things to do that includes eating a raw frog either. So, this is all silly, okay? But if you are going to have to eat the frog no matter what, it’s the best idea to eat that frog first thing in the morning so you don’t have to think about it all day. And you can brush your teeth a thousand times. Blech. It’s going to be gross and nasty but at least it will be all over and everything else will be a lot easier after that. You will be relieved when it is all over. Or maybe you will get sick and won’t have to do the laundry and all of that. Sending Ishmael away from home and taking Isaac to the Land of Moriah are way worse than having to eat a whole raw frog, believe me. Abraham probably would have eaten frogs every day for the rest of his life if he didn’t have to do those things. I know I would if it was my kids.
But Abraham saying nothing isn’t what I expected, I can sure tell you. Abraham doesn’t say anything. Not one word. He doesn’t say, “okay” or yell or cry or anything or even say, “yay, I can get rid of Isaac and have Ishmael back again.” Of course, that would have been super messed up. And not only that but he doesn’t seem to say anything for three whole days. Is he sad? Is he angry? Is he so confused that he just can’t say anything at all, good or bad? Does he know he will start crying if he says anything? Are there any hints in the verses? I think there are. Take a look at what Abraham does the next morning—it’s quite a mess. First, he puts the saddle on his donkey, even though his younger servants would usually do that. And it isn’t until the donkey has a saddle on that Abraham goes to get two of the young men in the camp to go with him. And then he gets Isaac, too. But this is where it really gets weird. While everyone is just standing around and the donkey has to stand there in a saddle for no good reason, Abraham chops the wood. Not his servants, he does it himself. Abraham is way over a hundred years old and chopping wood by hand isn’t going to be quick no matter how old you are. They must have been looking at him like he was crazy. I wonder if the young men offered to do it for him, because that was the type of job they were responsible for. Maybe Abraham said no but maybe he didn’t say anything at all. Maybe he was too distracted with thinking about why God was asking him to do this and trying not to cry. I bet he was thinking about all of God’s promises and how this didn’t make any sense at all. But gods didn’t have to make sense because, you know, they’re gods. In any event, if Abraham was quiet for three whole days, by the time they got there they all would have been pretty danged freaked out. Unless, of course, Abraham wasn’t usually very chatty and maybe it was normal. And he was really old and so maybe they weren’t too freaked out that he was doing things in the wrong order and by himself. I suspect Abraham not talking would have been super strange because in Abraham’s culture, instead of radios and televisions and computers and all of that, they told stories. And if no one was telling any stories for three days, that would have been really creepy.
The author of Hebrews had an interesting idea of what Abraham was thinking about. We don’t know if the person who wrote that book of the Bible was a man or a woman or who they were but they were very smart and they said Abraham knew that even if God made him or let him go through with it, and he actually killed Isaac, that God could raise him from the dead. That’s an interesting thought and it would sure explain why he stayed quiet. But still, actually taking a knife and killing Isaac would have to happen and who could even do such a thing even if they believed with their whole heart that things would work out in the end? I don’t think that most people are capable of killing other people unless there is no other choice. Even strangers and even people who are dangerous. I don’t think I could. I can’t even kill people in my bad dreams and not even when I have a gun in my hand. If I heard a voice telling me to kill one of my kids on an altar on a far off mountain, I hope I would check myself into a hospital. But I live in a world where we know our God doesn’t want us to commit murder. Abraham didn’t know that yet. I think he was just barely holding himself together and probably wanted to turn around every second.
But let’s come up with a “what if” story. What if Abraham still loved Ishmael and wanted Ishmael back. What if Abraham never loved Isaac? Things like that aren’t normal but they do happen sometimes. Maybe Abraham was angry at Sarah and never got close to Isaac? After all, he only calls him “the boy” when talking about him. When he talked about Ishmael, he always used his name or called him his son. Emotions can be very complicated and in the Bible we will see a lot of stories where families have favorite kids and it always ends badly. The kids often hate each other too, because of jealousy. Isaac and Rebekah played favorites with Esau and Jacob and Jacob had to leave his family for about twenty years to escape his brother. Jacob didn’t learn his lesson and played favorites with Joseph—and Joseph was mean to some of his lower ranking brothers (because their moms were slaves) and they all threw him into a pit and sold him into slavery in Egypt for decades. David was worst of all, and his kids even murdered each other because one did something incredibly evil and another brother got even and killed him for it. So, in the Bible we have a long list of people who should have loved all of their kids the same but didn’t. Maybe Abraham was the first. Maybe he loved them both the same. We can’t ever know for sure. We know that God calls Isaac Abraham’s only and beloved son but all that means is that Isaac is God’s choice for Abraham to be loyal to and that is what “beloved” means. It isn’t about emotions, necessarily. As soon as Isaac was born, God made sure Abraham knew that he had to switch gears and see Isaac and not Ishmael, as the future of his household. That would have been very hard for Abraham, or anyone, to deal with. So, maybe Abraham knew it wouldn’t be a pleasant thing to do but was willing because no matter how it turned out, he still had a son and remember, that people did sacrifice their kids sometimes when they really believed their gods wanted them to.
But Abraham is absolutely quiet and so we just have no idea. Until the third day of traveling, that is. That’s when Abraham looked up and must have known he was looking at the right mountain. And I don’t want you to think that this was a huge mountain like the Rockies or Alps or Everest or the Andes or Kilimanjaro. No, compared to those, the mountains in Israel are hills that an old man can actually walk up if he has to, and is in decent shape. And again, Abraham does something weird. He could have ridden the donkey and gone faster but he left it with the young men he brought with them. But before that, we have to talk about the idiom, “on the third day” because that is when the Bible says they arrived. And the walk from Beersheva to Jerusalem would have taken about two days so if they started like on a Monday late in the morning and traveled all day Tuesday, they would have arrived sometime early on Wednesday. So, Monday is the first day of travel, Tuesday is the second and Wednesday is the third. So, it really could have taken three actual days but “on the third day” shows up a lot in the Bible and has another meaning—it means that something suspenseful is happening. Time is a funny thing to talk about, like when we say “at the last minute” when it isn’t really anything near the last minute.
Suspense is what happens when we are expecting something scary or important to happen, and it can happen “any minute.” Have you ever played with a Jack in the Box? Oh man, those things are kinda freaky. A box with a pop-up clown in it and a handle on the side and as you turn the handle round and round the music plays and at some point, that clown is gonna pop up like a demented elf on the shelf and make you flinch. We could say that the clown pops up on the third day—we know it is gonna happen but we are just bracing ourselves and trying not to jump or shriek when it does. Lots of things happen on the third day in the Bible—Pharaoh’s Baker and Cup Bearer get set loose from jail, Jonah gets spit up on land, the Ark of the Covenant trashes the idol of Dagon, and Jesus comes out of His tomb. On the third day, shocking things happen. And so, when Abraham sees the mountain on the third day, we know something is up and this isn’t going to be a normal day. But what is going to happen? Abraham is going to finally open his mouth, and what does he say? “Stay here with the donkey. The boy and I will go over there to worship; then we’ll come back to you.”
First, he tells the young men to stay here. Which makes sense. I mean, adding more people to what is about to happen is risky. Will they be loyal to Abraham as their patriarch or to Isaac who is younger and stronger and the one who should someday be taking over the family? All their lives, since they were probably born into the camp of Abraham, they have been taught to honor Abraham, to respect and obey him, even more than their own fathers. But they have also grown up knowing that if Isaac tells them to do something, it’s the same as Abraham saying it. This is different from the way you have probably grown up where you are taught to obey your parents and even the President or Prime Minister aren’t supposed to be able to get in the way of that. I mean, unless your parents tell you to rob a bank or something then listen to the police and please don’t do that, okay? But I imagine if your parents were going to do that, you wouldn’t be listening to this in the first place. However, in the ancient world and in a lot of places today even, you listened to and obeyed whoever was top dog. You, your parents, your grandparents, whoever—didn’t matter. The people on top did what they wanted and everyone else had to either cooperate or sit back and watch if they didn’t want a whole lot of trouble. So, if these young men had gone all the way to the mountain with Abraham and Isaac, it would have been hard for them to know what to do and especially if Isaac fought back. Sometimes it is easy to know what choice people would have made but not this time.
So, maybe Abraham had simply brought them along for protection and help on the road because of bandits and wild animals, but taking them all the way would have been too complicated and risky and it would have been cruel as well. But Abraham told them something unexpected—he said that he and “the boy” would go to the mountain and worship and then they would both come back. That can mean three different things (1) Abraham believed that if he went through with it, then God could and would raise Isaac from the dead and they would return home together, (2) Abraham believed that God would change His mind at some point, or (3) Abraham was lying because he was scared about what the young men would do and he wanted to wait until after it was all over, one way or the other, to deal with it. We’ve seen this with Abraham in the past because he does lie when he isn’t feeling safe.
But one more thing. The way he talks about Isaac is really weird. He isn’t being affectionate, the word he uses means something like “the boy” and not “my boy” or “my son.” It’s really cold. I haven’t ever talked about my kids like that and if I didn’t talk to them for three days and then left everyone else behind and said I was going to take “the boy” with me along with a knife and fire and wood, my kids wouldn’t just shrug and do it. They’d be asking some serious questions. Like, “hey, what’s going on here…?” But in the ancient world, you didn’t ask anyone you respected a question in front of other people. You will see that a lot in the Gospels where people wait until they are alone with Jesus to ask Him about what He was teaching. The disciples wouldn’t ever ask Jesus a question in public because if Jesus gave a bad answer, it would embarrass and humiliate Him and make Him look like a bad teacher. That’s why Nicodemus came to Jesus at night and alone to ask Him big questions—because Nicodemus respected Jesus. The disciples would wait until they were alone to say, “What did you mean when you said such and such?” If people loved and respected you, they waited to ask their questions until it was safe to do it.
Abraham took the firewood, which was probably quite a bit because it takes quite a lot of wood to totally burn up this sort of whole offering, and put it on Isaac’s back while Abraham grabbed the knife and the fire. I want to talk about all three of these things but I will start with the knife. Sacrificial knives were razor sharp. They were made to kill an animal so quickly that it felt nothing. It was really hard to kill an animal after it was wounded because it would fight and kick and be just terrified and when you have a knife in your hand it can kill you if you are trying to hold down an animal that is freaking out or you can cut off a finger or put out your eye quicker than with a Red Ryder BB Gun. Have you ever tried to clip the claws of an uncooperative cat or dog? It isn’t fun, and that’s nothing compared to an animal that has just been cut the wrong way. Not that they had an animal with them but we’ll get to that next week. Did you know that when Peter cut the ear off of the High Priest’s servant the night that Jesus was arrested, Peter didn’t have a sword but one of these knives because when a man came to Jerusalem for the Passover, he had to bring a knife so that he could sacrifice the lamb. It was the one thing that many men did on the Passover. The priests had to catch the blood of the lamb in a special bowl, but people would often kill their own lamb themselves right there in the Temple. The priests had way too much work to do themselves and it made their jobs a lot easier. They had to wait until the lambs were calm and that could take a bit because of all the people and animals and excitement. They weren’t offering a bunch of freaked out animals because that would have been cruel.
Also, Abraham was carrying fire—how do you think he did that? We live in a world where we can just bring those lighters and start a quick fire but in Abraham’s day, fire was a difficult thing to make. It was sometimes easier to carry it with you as you traveled than to make it new wherever you went, taking the coals from the morning fire with you—maybe in a clay pot. No one knows for sure.
Now, for the most interesting part of this story so far—Isaac is carrying the wood for the sacrifice on his back and it was put there by his father, Abraham. It was the wood that Abraham thought Isaac was going to be burned on as an offering for God. And of course, something very much like this happened with Jesus. The Roman soldiers made Him carry wood on His back too—a big wooden beam that they were going to nail Him to when they got to Golgotha. Of course, unlike Isaac, Jesus knew exactly what was about to happen because this was the plan He and His Father had come up with in the beginning to rescue us from sin and death and all of the consequences of what happened in the Garden. This is how Isaac is a type of Jesus but not exactly the same. We talked a long time ago about what John said—that Jesus was how God created the universe and everything and everyone in it—and who better to fix what was broken than Jesus who created it? When you want something fixed that is terribly broken, it’s better to get the person who made it than just some random person who hasn’t ever seen one before. Humans are too complicated for anyone other than Jesus to fix. And there was only one way to do it. God was willing to have His own Son die so that He could deal with sin and death on their own turf. It was a clever plan and they caught the powers of evil totally by surprise. Isaac isn’t going to die because God hasn’t ever expected any of us to sacrifice a child. Jesus wasn’t a sacrifice because He chose to die but the High Priest told his friends that it would be a good thing to sacrifice Jesus to the Romans instead of letting things get out of control. Of course, they weren’t talking about sacrificing Jesus to the Romans but to give Jesus to them to kill. They were afraid of losing the Temple, and their jobs as priests, and their power and money. They said it was better for one person to die than for them to lose everything they had. In their way of thinking, it was better for Jesus to die than for them to lose all of their stuff. So, they weren’t sacrificing Him to God but in exchange for keeping their lives the way they liked it. Jesus stayed quiet as they did this to Him, but what will Isaac do?
I love you. I am praying for you. Remember that even though this chapter of the Bible can be scary and make us angry, that in the end, God didn’t let anything terrible happen to Isaac. God made another way. God always makes another way and we can know that He won’t ask us to do anything like this.