When is a sacrifice not a sacrifice? That’s the big question this week as the Angel of the Lord interrupts the sacrifice of Isaac. And what does this have to do with Jesus? We will also be discussing the concept of the heavens in ancient Near Eastern context.
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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.
I hope you have been following along. We have two more teachings on Gen 22 after this and then we are going to talk about loving one another for a couple of months because it is more complicated than we think. If loving people was just falling in love with them and never being angry, then it would only take about five minutes but the Bible has a lot to say about love as an action and love as something that the Holy Spirit grows in us bit by bit when Jesus is our King of kings and Lord of lords. Last week, Isaac finally asked the huge question—one of the biggest questions anyone has ever asked in the history of the world. He asked his father, since they had everything they needed to sacrifice and worship God except for the most important thing—the animal!!—Isaac asked where the lamb was. It was a good question for sure and it was a question that Abraham wouldn’t have wanted to have to answer, not at all. Abraham told Isaac that God would provide the lamb Himself—but as we know that Isaac was a miracle and people did sacrifice their kids to the gods sometimes when they were very desperate, Abraham was definitely leaving his options open. The only question was whether God had already provided a lamb to take the place of Isaac or if Isaac was the lamb God had provided. And the Bible says that they walked on together to the mountain. That means Isaac agreed to go, even though he could have run away at any moment and Abraham couldn’t have caught up to Isaac in his wildest dreams. Abraham is probably somewhere between 120 and 137 years old. Isaac is somewhere between being a teenager strong enough to carry a lot of wood and 37 years old, which he will be in the next chapter. Let’s look at this week’s verses:
When they got to the place that God had told him about, Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood (which Isaac had carried there on his back). He tied up his son Isaacand placed him on the altar on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out and took the knife to slaughter (to kill like an animal) his son. But the angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” He replied, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Do not lay a hand on the boy or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear and respect and glorify God, since you have not withheld your only son from me.” Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught in the thicket by its horns. So Abraham went and took the ram and offered it as a burnt offering in place of his son.
So, Abraham and Isaac came to the mountain and Abraham built an altar. An altar in those days would be made of large stones found lying around. It wouldn’t be metal or made from cut stones. It wouldn’t be fancy. The job of the altar was to provide a sturdy and strong place to roast the meat of the sacrifice. You wouldn’t want the sacrifice to fall on the ground any more than you would want your dinner to fall on the ground. Now, our God doesn’t eat the sacrifices but we aren’t sure whether or not He had told Abraham that yet. That’s why these are called “meat offerings” in the Bible. God is still teaching Abraham all the things about Himself that we take for granted, like He doesn’t want us killing our kids. We are really blessed to know all this stuff that Abraham was clueless about. But Abraham, like everyone else in his world, knew how to build an altar of plain stones and how to place the wood on top and how to kill an animal. But this isn’t an animal—Isaac is his son. And that’s where this gets really confusing because we see that Abraham tied up Isaac and there was no way that he could do that without some sort of help. Abraham is older than your great grandparents! I know I couldn’t tie up either one of my twenty-three-year-old sons without help. Did God paralyze Isaac or make him fall into a deep sleep? Was Isaac just so super obedient that he let Abraham tie him up? Was Isaac so shocked and scared that he was frozen stiff (that happens to me)? Did Isaac want to be sacrificed to God or was he just willing because he didn’t want his dad to get into trouble? Did he believe that God would resurrect him and make him great? The person who wrote the book of Hebrews in the New Testament was convinced that Abraham must have believed that’s what would happen. But the Bible doesn’t tell us anything like that. I wish the Bible told us but it doesn’t. Why did Isaac let his father tie him up and put him on the wood? Why did he lay there while Abraham pulled out the knife? And if he was actually willing, why was there any need to tie him up? Everything seems to be pointing in different directions.
All we have are a bunch of ‘what if’ stories and Christians and Jews tell a lot of them. Some of them even claim that Abraham actually did kill Isaac or that Sarah died of disappointment when she found out that Isaac didn’t get sacrificed to God—which seems pretty messed up to me. Other stories say that when Abraham came back and Sarah found out what he had tried to do, that she dropped dead from a heart attack or something. I think people come up with “what if” stories because it is just so hard to teach about things when we don’t have all the answers but this chapter of Genesis has about a thousand questions and maybe ten answers. This isn’t like any other book ever written because there are things about God we can’t know or understand and unlike modern books, it leaves out a lot of details and we almost never know what people are thinking. The Bible is a book about God, but it isn’t a book with all questions answered. I sure wish it was, but I suppose that God would be pretty simple and weak if I could understand everything about Him with my puny brain. We can know God, but He is also very mysterious. Look at how much trouble we have not thinking about God as an actual man, as though He was a human being with a body when the Bible tells us He doesn’t have one.
I am going to tell you my opinion about this whole chapter from beginning (when God called Abraham) to the end (when God is going to renew His promises to Abraham). We aren’t supposed to like it or feel good about it. We are supposed to wrestle with it and wonder and ask questions and not be satisfied with easy answers because there aren’t any. The other day, someone was telling me the “easy way” to teach about this chapter and I had to tell them that they were saying a lot of stuff that just isn’t in the Bible at all and she got really mad at me. Genesis 22 is easy to teach if we make stuff up to fill in the blanks, or at least easier, but when we do that we are kinda lying. “What if “stories are really cool but we have to admit that’s all they are—made up stories about true events that we don’t know a lot of details about. Like Abraham’s knife in the air ready to kill Isaac. Let’s get to that.
You might notice something else strange. The way that Abraham is offering up Isaac is very different from how the priests in the Tabernacle and Temple do it. Isaac is on top of the wood, tied up, when Abraham tries to kill him but the priests would first kill the animals to the west of the altar, catch their blood in a special bowl, splash the blood on the sides of the altar, would skin, gut, cut up and wash the animal inside and out, and then would put it on top of the fire that was already burning. That was how they did a whole burnt offering, an olah. But Abraham built the altar, put the wood on it, tied up Isaac, put him onto the wood, and was about to kill him before there was a fire (thank God!). Maybe that was how they made offerings before God made special rules for His tabernacle. When we get to Exodus and Leviticus, we will see that different places had different levels of holiness and so the rules for what you did in one place were different from the rules for what you did in another. Maybe the easiest way to understand it is to think about how you would dress if you went to a soccer game or school or church or the White House or Buckingham Palace. If you ran into the President or the King downtown you could be dressed however you want and even all sweaty from playing sports but if you went to where they lived, then you would have to be fancier. As far as Abraham is concerned, this place is just like the other places God has led him to, and every time God led Abraham somewhere, he made an altar. We just never see anything about him sacrificing anything on them.
Now, in the movies, they always have Abraham with his knife in the air ready to kill Isaac when the angel of the Lord calls out to him but what the Bible says is that the angel called when Abraham reached out and took it. Of course, having his knife up in the air is super dramatic but as far as we know, God stopped Abraham as soon as he had the knife in his hand and didn’t wait until the last minute at all. It’s funny how, when we read the Bible, we see things that aren’t really there because of what we see in books and movies. All we really know is that Abraham has the knife in his hand. Because, think about it, if you had a knife in your hand and all of a sudden you heard a voice from heaven—what if you were so scared that you dropped the knife and oops—you killed Isaac by accident? I hope God didn’t wait. I don’t think He waited.
The angel of the Lord called from heaven, but what does that mean, from heaven? Well, this is kinda more complicated. Ancient people, because they believed that the word looked a lot like one of those snow globes, flat with a solid dome over it with windows for the rain to come through, believed there were different layers to what they called “heaven.” What we call the air around and above us (of course, they were clueless about oxygen and all the stuff we breathe) they would have called the heavens—at least the lower heavens or the first heavens. Then they believed there was a solid dome covering all of the earth with water on top of it. And God let them believe this just like He still allows us not to understand things today. We have a lot of wrong ideas now but we just don’t know what all those wrong ideas are. God doesn’t so much care about our scientific ideas because He is all about rescuing us from sin and death, right? And that is a full time job. He made us curious and intelligent so that we could try to understand how His creation works, even though we will never know everything and we will never ever understand it well enough to make worlds of our own. We’re just plain old people and not gods. We wouldn’t even qualify as powerful enough to be those pathetic gods of the Canaanites and Egyptians who needed to be fed all the time in order to survive and get their jobs done taking care of things they didn’t even make in the first place.
Above the dome was another heaven, called hashamayim and maybe you know the word for water in Hebrew is mayim. So ha is “the” sham means “there” as in “over there” and mayim means waters. So, hashamayim kinda means “the waters there.” It means that because the heavens were believed to be either in or on or above or in the waters. And sometimes it meant the dome (Bibles usually call this the firmament) they thought covered the earth. Some verses talk about chambers in heaven. So, when the Bible says that the angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven, it can mean a couple of things (1) it could mean something like “out of thin air” which is how we describe something that is gone one second and there the next, so a voice that could be heard but not seen from somewhere close in the air or (2) maybe it was describing something from above. All we really know from this is that Abraham heard a voice but saw no one. And that voice said, “Abraham! Abraham!”
But the Bible has a few tricks it uses to tell us how loudly something was said, or how seriously a word is used. There are no periods or exclamation points or question marks originally in the Bible. Instead of saying, “Abraham” with an exclamation point to let us know that the voice is loud, strong, and maybe even yelling, it says the word twice or even three times in a row. Do you remember back in Genesis 2 when God told the man not to eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil or else they would die die? It said die twice to let them know God was serious. When the Serpent was talking to Eve, he said it too, “You won’t die die.” Like, as if to say. “dude, come on, it isn’t that serious…” So, when we see Abraham, Abraham, maybe the word was said twice or maybe the word was just said super loud. I mean, God wanted to be heard, right? This isn’t any time for whispering and hoping for the best. God said Abraham’s name so hard that he probably felt like he had gotten hit with a 2×4. What we don’t know is if Isaac heard the voice too—because he doesn’t say or do anything the entire chapter except carry wood and ask that one question. I would think that Isaac would have a LOT to say. A lot of times in the Bible, one person hears the voice from Heaven, which is called the bat kol, and everyone else just hears thunder or something like it.
And for the third time, Abraham replies hineni, “here I am.” Just like he did when God called him the first time and when Isaac asked his question. Remember one of the things I like about Abraham is that he doesn’t ignore people when they talk to him and even when he doesn’t want to answer their questions or do what they say! God says, “Do not lay a hand on the boy or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear and respect and glorify God, since you have not withheld your only son from me.” What a relief, eh? Dang. It’s been a horrible three days for Abraham and today hasn’t been so hot for Isaac either—and just think of the two men a ways off watching the donkey and totally clueless as to what is going on with their master ready to kill his kid and the angel of the Lord and all of that. And God does something weird. He calls Isaac “the boy” just like Abraham has been doing. And He calls Isaac Abraham’s only son but He doesn’t say it the same way He did at first when He called Isaac “your son, your only son whom you love.” There is nothing there about Abraham loving his son Isaac, and maybe he doesn’t and God sees that now. After all, Abraham’s son and grandson have favorite children and even children they seem not to like very much. This is a pattern in the Bible, about the problems caused by parents loving one child and not the other or one a lot more than the others. In any event, God is only calling Isaac Abraham’s only son now, and not the beloved son. Maybe Abraham only ever loved Ishmael. Sarah certainly only loved Isaac. And Hagar only ever loved Ishmael, for sure. Ishmael was practically a grownup when he was forced to send him away forever. And you don’t stop loving someone just because God has chosen someone else to be part of His plans.
So, God says not to lay a hand on Isaac or to do anything to him—really that just means don’t hurt him. It doesn’t mean never to touch him again. And God says that He has the answer to the test, even though we still don’t know exactly what the test was for—only what God found out from it. Abraham is obedient. Period. Which shouldn’t surprise us because Abraham has been doing what God asked him to do since chapter 12. Abraham left home. He went to Canaan. He walked all over. He circumcised himself and all of the men and boys in his household. He sent away his oldest son Ishmael. Abraham has had to do really difficult things that we can’t even hardly begin to imagine. And although he is a liar when he gets scared, he never lies to God. Even though he tricks people, he is always honest with God. And when he does do the wrong thing, it isn’t because he is disobeying God but because he isn’t patient and figures he can do things his own way to make God’s promises happen sooner.
But the Bible says that God learned something important about Abraham. Abraham respects God. It actually says that Abraham fears God. But what does fear mean? Is it being scared? Yes but not exactly. I mean, Abraham knew that God could do some really powerful stuff like when He messed with the families of Pharaoh and Abimelech to get Sarah back. And when He destroyed the evil cities on the plain. Abraham had no reason to doubt that God could do anything He wanted to do, to anyone, good or bad. We could say that Abraham respected God’s power and knew God’s reputation because He always kept His promises. Maybe after they got impatient and Abraham had a baby with Hagar, Sarah’s slave girl, God wanted to make sure that Abraham trusted Him enough to just obey without asking questions. Maybe being quiet for those three long days was because he knew that when he did things his way, people just got hurt. Like Hagar and Ishmael, and Pharaoh and Abimelech and their families. God is saying, “now I know” these things because you didn’t say no to me and you tried to do what I said to you.
Now here’s a question—if God was just trying to get information, was He even looking for anything specific? Would He have been happier with another outcome? Or angrier? What if Abraham had behaved more like he did back when God shared with him that He was going to destroy Sodom if it was as wicked as everyone was claiming? What if Abraham had said, “how can you ask such a thing? To kill a boy like an animal, treating your image bearers like animals? You couldn’t possibly ask such a thing. Won’t the Judge of the whole earth do what is right and fair?” I mean, Abraham said stuff like that on behalf of Sodom and they were wicked beyond description; Isaac had to be better than that! Maybe God would have replied, “Abraham, now I know that you trust me and know my love, because you had faith in my goodness and care about my reputation.” God was going to find out something about Abraham by testing him—some tests aren’t a pass/fail but just to see where we are in what we know or what we can or can’t do. Has a teacher ever given you a test on the first day of school not for a grade but to find out kinda where you are and what you can do? God needs to know whether or not He can depend on us and whether or not we trust Him. Maybe Abraham would have been better off doing something else, but he at least showed God that he was absolutely obedient, no matter what.
Abraham looked up and saw a ram, which is an adult boy sheep, stuck in a thorn bush by its horns. Abraham went and got it and offered it instead of Isaac. Isaac, I would imagine, is untied and I don’t know where because we will see that when Abraham goes back to the two servants, Isaac isn’t with him. In fact, the Bible won’t ever show them together again. And we don’t know why.
Should we have another type lesson, like last week when we compared Isaac carrying the sacrifice wood on his back to Jesus carrying the wooden crossbeam on His back? Well, this week we saw Isaac about to be killed but God supplied something else to die instead of him—a ram with its head stuck in the thorns. Does that remind you of anything else about Jesus? Matthew, Mark, and John all talk about what the Roman soldiers did when they were making fun of Jesus right before they nailed Him to the cross. They put a purple robe on him and took some really nasty sharp thorns and made a crown of them and put it on his head. So, Jesus looked kinda like that ram, stuck in the thorns by its head. Abraham said that God would provide the lamb for the offering, but God sent an adult male instead—which is what a ram is. And like that ram who died instead of Isaac, Jesus died instead of us. The ram died so that Isaac would live and Jesus died so that we would live. Abraham was willing to let his son die but God didn’t let him do that. Instead, God and His Son Jesus came up with this plan to have Him die instead of us—because when He died, He was able to fight against sin and death and all the evil powers and win against them. None of us could ever do that because we are sinful. We do bad things. Jesus never did anything wrong and so when death tried to hold Him prisoner, it had nothing to hold Him with. It’s like trying to insult the kindest and most wonderful person in town—people will just shake their heads and won’t listen to you anymore because you are obviously a liar. That ram in the thorns was a type that pointed us to Jesus and what He would do for us. Isaac pointed to Jesus too with that wood on his back. Isaac was the sacrifice that wasn’t a sacrifice because God stopped Abraham. Jesus was the sacrifice that wasn’t a sacrifice because even though the chief priests wanted Him to die instead of losing their power, Jesus gave up His life instead of having it be taken from Him. He could have stopped it at any moment but He did it because He knew it was the only way to save us from the enemies that we can’t fight ourselves. Can you imagine fighting against death and winning? Where would we even begin? Only Jesus, the author of life—the creator of all things living—can stand against death and win.
I love you. I am praying for you. Jesus is all over this chapter of Genesis and I hope you are seeing Him more and more with the hints God has given us. But remember that before He came and died and rose from the dead, all of this was hidden—like Paul said, it was a mystery.