Wait a minute—Isaac notices a red flag. They have the sacrificial knife, the coals for a new fire, and the wood, but there is no animal for the slaughter. As Han Solo would say, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” and Isaac is finally alone with his father and able to ask the question his father doesn’t want to answer.
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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.
We’re now at the part of Genesis 22 where Abraham has already received the news about sacrificing Isaac, even though we can’t be entirely sure if it was an order or a question. Then, he, Isaac and two young male servants made the trip to the Land of Moriah where Abraham finally looks up and sees the mountain God was leading him to. Abraham and Isaac take fire, a sacrificial knife, and some firewood and head off alone to the mountain. Abraham hasn’t been talking all this time, except briefly to the young men, telling them to stay there with the donkey. What has he been thinking? We don’t know. Why hasn’t he said a single thing to God or to Isaac? We don’t know that either. We talked about some possibilities last time but we don’t know anything for sure. This week, though, we are going to get a big clue as to what is going on in Isaac’s mind. Let’s look at this week’s verses with a bit of overlap from last time:
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. Then Isaac talked to his father Abraham and said, “My father.” And Abraham replied, “Here I am, my son.” Isaac said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering? Abraham answered, “God will personally provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” Then the two of them walked on together.
Isaac has been watching and making offerings to God probably all his life. And how old is he? Well, at the youngest, Isaac is a teenager big enough to carry a load of firewood on his back and at the oldest, he might be in his late thirties because that’s how old he is in the next chapter when his mom Sarah dies. Isaac isn’t a little boy, that’s for sure. It takes a lot of wood to completely burn up a sacrifice and so they didn’t just bring a few sticks. The offerings wouldn’t just be killed and thrown whole on the fire but were drained of all their blood, cut into pieces, and placed carefully on top of the wood. An offering couldn’t have poop inside it or anything like that because in those days, people believed that the gods were actually eating the sacrifices, which they needed to live on. That’s how Abraham was raised, back in Ur near Babylon. That’s how he and his family thought and we have no reason to believe that God had clued him in yet that He doesn’t need to eat because He doesn’t have a body like ours. Sometimes we are taught to see gods and even our God as bloodthirsty, meaning they enjoy death and killing, but it was usually about eating. If you go to the store and pick up meat for dinner, it’s actually about the same thing—sacrificing animals was just what priests did to feed their gods. Ranchers and butchers do all of that for you, to feed you, and no one is calling you bloodthirsty or anything mean like that. Now, the ancient world had other reasons to call their gods bloodthirsty and cruel, but it wasn’t because of sacrificing animals. Folks believed their gods had to eat, just like everyone else. Of course, that wasn’t why people would be sacrificed. That wasn’t about feeding gods who looked like human beings. Sacrificing people was more complicated and horrible than that.
Appeasement is a word that means making an angry person happy by giving them something they want. If you have ever seen a screaming child in the store given candy to keep them quiet, you know what I am talking about and you also know why they will scream the next time too. Feeding a god wasn’t about making them happy when they were angry but about keeping them alive so that they could keep doing their jobs. Ain’t nobody wanting Ra to lose his battle with Apophis at night because he was too weak to win—then the sun isn’t ever coming up again. Or so they thought. That’s why they made oblelisks and sacrificed animals for him. The obelisks were for him to rest on in the middle of the day so that he would be well rested when he met up with Apophis again. By the way, do you know what obelisk means? It means “meat skewer”—you know, like you use for shish-kebabs? The Greeks saw them and called them obeliskoi because that’s what they roasted their own meat on. Funny, eh? The next time you see a professional meat skewer, notice that they are long, squared, and pointy on the end. And then look at an obelisk and you will notice the same thing. But none of that was appeasement—that was just taking care of the gods so that they would keep making the world work the way they needed it to. That’s right, there were many different reasons for sacrifices and it wasn’t just about sin.
Appeasement is more like a bribe. Suppose your god is really angry and so bad things are happening. Maybe you are losing a battle against your enemy, or it hasn’t rained all year, or there was an eclipse or a meteor shower. We understand that everyone loses fights from time to time and some of us are so teeny tiny that we lose all the fights, and we know that there is science explaining why it stops raining sometimes, and we know why there are regular eclipses and meteor showers and we even know when they are going to happen. But ancient people didn’t know, not for thousands of years. They thought a god was angry or that the gods were at war with each other or maybe one of their gods even died. Oh, the horror! Can you imagine how scary that would be if you believed that the rain god was dead and it might never rain ever again? Well, they were so scared that they were often willing to do anything to make the gods happy again. As we have talked about in the past, sometimes they figured an animal was enough to make them happy, or some art or a new temple or songs or whatever but when the situation was really desperate, sometimes they would give the gods their most valuable possessions—their kids. We even see it in the Bible! Abraham had to be wondering about the why behind what God had said. Had Abraham sinned a terrible and unforgivable sin—and if so then why not tell him what the problem was so Abraham could fix it? Was this a test to see how far Abraham would go to please God? There was no way of knowing for sure. If this was about Abraham sinning in a way that made God furious, then sacrificing Isaac would be appeasement—like a present to make God happy. Fortunately, we know that wouldn’t ever make God happy, right? God isn’t a big fan of murder and although He says that the smell of an animal roasting is really nice, He never says the same thing about a roasting person. Yuck.
But did Isaac know that God hates human sacrifice? Abraham had a long history of knowing and obeying God but Isaac was much younger and we don’t have any record in the Bible of God ever talking to Isaac until he was like eighty years old, but God did talk to Isaac’s wife Rebekah a long time before that. Anyway, all that aside, it was on the walk to the mountain in Moriah when Isaac finally asked the big question that no one had wanted to ask for the last three days. Let’s put it in modern English: Isaac finally spoke up and said, “Um, Dad?” Abraham replied, “Yeah, my son?” “Well, I can’t help but notice that I have the wood for an offering on my back and you have the fire for the offering and you told the guys we left back there that we would be worshiping and coming back but, well…there is actually no animal for the offering. So what’s up with that?” “God’s taking care of the offering, my son.” And I can hear Isaac thinking, “Okay, that’s not really an answer.”
What Isaac doesn’t know is why Abraham is calling him “my son” all of a sudden instead of calling him “boy.” Remember that’s what God called Isaac—“your son, your only son, the son whom you love.” It’s like Abraham is just repeating what God said to him “my son, my son Isaac, whom I love” except he isn’t saying anything about loving Isaac. Around the young men with the donkey, Isaac was just called, “the boy” but now at least he is being called “my son.” But that isn’t the only strange thing Abraham is saying, because he said hineni when Isaac called out to him. Hineni is an interesting Hebrew word that is translated into English as “Here I am.” Abraham says hineni three times in this chapter and this is the second time. The first time Abraham said it was in the very first verse when God called to him and he said, “Here I am.” And he said it again when Isaac called to him. The next time he says it, it will be because the Angel of the Lord called out to him. When a human being says hineni, it means I am here or I am listening or maybe best of all, I am available for whatever you want to do or say. When God called out to Adam and Eve after they sinned, they didn’t say hineni; they hid! When God called out to the young prophet Samuel at night, Samuel said “hineni—here I am!” and Samuel became a great prophet. Hineni is how we should always answer when God calls us. And it’s a lot easier to say it now when we know that God isn’t asking us to kill anyone! When I was a kid this story really scared the bejeebies out of me because I thought it meant that God might do something like this to me but I didn’t understand that this story is about letting us know that God isn’t like all those other gods they worshiped back then. Abraham is a rich and powerful man but when God calls to him, he answers, and when Isaac calls to him, he answers exactly the same way. Abraham was the kind of guy whom other people paid a lot of attention to but one of my favorite things about Abraham is that he pays attention when people talk to him too. He isn’t ignoring God or people. Even though Abraham has other stuff he is a mess with, I do like that about him.
Did you know that we don’t have to love everything about a person to love them or like everything about a person to like them? One of the hardest things God teaches us is how to see truth but love anyway, and to always be fair. If we find ourselves hating someone, we have to be very careful and prayerful because hate turns to lying really easy. It’s easy to call the good things that they do evil just because we don’t want to admit they aren’t totally bad. We’re going to talk a lot about that sort of thing next month when we start a series on one of my favorite grown-up books. But for right now, it is enough to remember and understand and accept that Abraham isn’t totally good or totally bad—and neither are we. That’s why it is okay to notice and talk about everything the Bible says about people like Abraham and Joseph and David and Peter and even horrible people like Ahab and Manasseh. But back to the point I was making, when people talk and when God talks, Abraham listens and answers. Ignoring people and ignoring God isn’t cool—but it is really easy to do when we are unhappy, angry, sad, scared, and confused. It seems as though Abraham has been ignoring everyone for three days and who can blame him? Was he talking to God in his thoughts? Or was he ignoring God ever since he got the news?
Oh hey, did you know that we don’t have to talk out loud for God to hear us? You might have someone tell you someday that God can’t hear you if you aren’t talking but that can’t be because how would He ever hear the prayers of someone who can’t talk??? God takes special care to listen to the people who are suffering and so I would expect Him to care very deeply about the people who can’t talk. Can you imagine God saying, “Sorry dude, but you don’t have a tongue or vocal cords or whatever and so I can’t hear you.” That would be as pathetic as the false gods who would die if they weren’t fed by humans. But also, if you share a room, it’s nice to be able to talk to God without waking anyone else up. God hears and loves the sound of our voices but He also hears everything we think too. Satan and his demons can only hear our words, and not what we are thinking. They aren’t gods. They are created just like we were.
I don’t think Abraham was ignoring God and, in fact, I think he was hoping to hear something because even if Abraham hated Isaac (which I doubt), this was a gruesome and horrible thing to even think about doing to your worst enemy. He might not want to talk to God but he was sure listening just in case God changed His mind! But now there was someone else to listen to—Isaac. And Isaac was asking the one question that Abraham didn’t want to have to answer or even think about. Think about this from the point of view of Abraham, who was probably just hoping all this time that Isaac wouldn’t notice that they hadn’t brought an animal. It isn’t like they were going to be able to buy one from anyone local and they had probably passed a few settlements without buying one. Now that they had left the young servants behind, and were heading out “to worship,” there wasn’t going to be any shopping. So, without the servants around, Isaac was finally able to ask and Abraham didn’t really have a good answer. Because Abraham didn’t know for sure. Abraham said that God would provide the sacrifice—and that could mean just about anything. Isaac knew he was a miracle baby. Everyone knew, I mean like, duh—right? His mother was ancient and she’d never had a baby until she was ninety. God had made a miracle and provided them with Isaac. Isaac was the promised child whose descendants would inherit the promised land. Isaac had an older brother, Ishmael, who he didn’t really know, but God had chosen Isaac specifically to inherit all of the promises He had made to Abraham. Isaac knew that everything was going to be his but he also had this uncertain situation. There was no animal. There was himself, a knife, firewood, and fire. We’d be confused and scared too.
Abraham couldn’t really give Isaac any different answer at this point. If he told Isaac the truth, there are a couple of things that might happen: (1) Isaac might drop the wood and run away. This is totally what I would have done. No question. Although I might have yelled, “What the heck is wrong with you?” as I ran. (2) Isaac might back off and ask more questions. (3) Isaac might kill his dad. No matter what, I am pretty sure he would have immediately dropped the wood. And you need to understand that Isaac could have done any of these things all the way to the mountain, but he didn’t. Isaac just keeps going. Maybe because he was a miracle, he doesn’t see anything strange with a lamb suddenly appearing for them in the desert. After all, sheep do wander off from their herds but then that would be stealing and they would be sacrificing someone else’s lamb and that doesn’t really work. Or maybe God would just make a lamb like “poof” there it is waiting to be sacrificed. Abraham and Isaac just kept walking toward the mountain. And we are left with a mystery.
How many times has this happened so far in the Bible? We seem to always be running into mysteries as long as we remember that these are the stories of real people that didn’t happen in the five minutes it would take us to read the chapter. When Adam and Eve got booted from the Garden, it was a mystery as they waited to find out what those consequences really meant. But when Eve’s son Cain killed his brother Abel, we found out what it means for having children to hurt. When Noah escaped the flood in the Ark, it was a mystery for a very long time wondering how long they would be in there and what they would find when they got out. When God told Abraham to leave his family, it was like another twenty-five years before Isaac was finally born and all of the promises God made to Abraham started to make sense. When Pharaoh took Sarah and when Abimelech took Sarah, she didn’t have to wait a few verses to find out what would happen. It was real time and real life. Now, since they began their journey, it had been three days of walking and wondering and waiting and what exactly would happen was a mystery to all of them.
The Bible is like this all the way through. How will Joseph escape slavery and jail? That took a lot of years. How will the children of Israel escape slavery in Egypt and return to the Land of Canaan? That took hundreds of years. How will Moses lead them to the Land? Well, they messed up really bad and that took forty years. How long will it take before David became king after the prophet Samuel poured oil on his head? That took decades. How long would it be before the Jews came back from Babylon after they were taken away? Seventy years! And how long until the Messiah came to save them from the first time He is mentioned in the Garden? Thousands of years. And what kind of Messiah and who will He be and what will He do? That was one, huge, unsolvable mystery. Before Jesus came, you could read the Bible from Genesis to Malachi a thousand times but you would still have more questions than answers. But God was telling them to wait and trust Him. The Messiah would come. Their people would be saved. And God had it all figured out so we didn’t have to make it happen ourselves, thank goodness because we just mess everything up!
The Bible gets us into the mystery mode where we get hints but we have no idea what they mean and how they will work together until BAM! It all happens and then we read and say, “Wow, that was obvious, why didn’t we see that before?” But no one could see it. No one could see Jesus carrying His crossbeam when Isaac was carrying the firewood, but we can all see it now. Do you remember when we learned about types and antitypes? This is one of the most important chapters in the Bible for learning about that. Jesus is our antitype—the one that everything in the Bible points to. Isaac carrying the wood on his back is a type that points to Jesus carrying the crossbeam on his back. If it could be figured out beforehand from the Bible—that God was planning all of this with Jesus from the very beginning—then Satan would figure it out long before humans did. Satan is smarter and he doesn’t die after a hundred years so he gets to keep all of his information. Everytime a prophet would say something, he would just put it into his own file cabinet and he would have thousands of years to figure it out and get the jump on God so he could spoil all of God’s plans. God knew this and so He hid all of the information so that it couldn’t be understood until it was all too late. That’s what Paul wrote to the Corinthians and in fact, lets read I Cor 2:
When I came to you, my brothers and my sisters, and I announced to you all the mystery that God had been hiding from the beginning of time, I did not come to you as the best speaker in the world or the wisest man on earth. I decided to share nothing with you except for Jesus and His crucifixion. When I came, it was as a weakling and scared to death. I didn’t impress you with fancy talk and I didn’t try to trick you into believing me, but I let God impress you through the power of His Spirit because I wanted you to believe Him and not me. But on the other hand, once God has convinced people of the truth about Jesus, then I can get fancy with what I am saying because you can handle it—not like the ones who are in charge but don’t understand anything important and are going to be nothing when it all comes down to it. When we talk to you, we speak about God’s hidden wisdom in a mystery, a wisdom God came up with in the beginning that would be for our benefit. None of the powermongers knew the secret because if they had, they never would have killed Jesus, the Lord of glory. But as it is written by the prophet Isaiah: God has prepared things for the people who love Him that no one else has ever before seen, heard, or even imagined.
See? No one could have ever figured it out beforehand. Like no one could find breadcrumbs on the floor and put them back together as a loaf of bread! Not even if they had every single crumb! And believe me, God’s puzzles are way more complicated than that. Isaac is a clue. The wood on Isaac’s back is a clue. The lamb is a clue. Joseph is a clue. Moses is a clue. David is a clue. The prophets gave loads of clues. But they were like a bunch of breadcrumbs and no one could see Jesus as He was when He came to us in all of them. They just didn’t totally make sense because no one could have put them all entirely together. However, if someone showed you a picture of the loaf of bread those crumbs came from, you’d be able to see the color of the crumbs, and the type of bread, and so many other things. And you could taste the crumbs too and see how good they were. Jesus is the glue that holds the Bible together. He’s the antitype that makes us understand all of the types in the Bible. Understanding Jesus makes it so we can understand everyone and everything else.
I love you. I am praying for you. I am so excited to be teaching you all of the types in the Bible—all the things that point to Jesus that no one could make sense of before He actually rose from the dead.