Abraham just found out on the Mountain of the Lord that God will provide. God was getting ready to make His final promise to Abraham and He swears by Himself that absolutely everything He ever promised to Abraham is a done deal and will happen through Isaac and his descendants.
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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 week, we saw that God saved Isaac from being sacrificed by his father, Abraham. But we didn’t see Isaac’s reaction or anything at all about him. And we won’t. It’s like Isaac isn’t even important anymore. Isaac is weird because his father, Abraham, and his son Jacob are both really important in the Bible, and we have these long, long stories about them, but we don’t really see Isaac that much at all. Actually, we see his wife Rebekkah way more than we see him. He will mostly disappear for the next three chapters while we wrap up the lives of Sarah, Abraham, and then Ishmael. But that’s also why what happens in today’s reading is so important because God is going to formally pass the torch to Isaac—which isn’t a real torch, that’s just what we say when one person replaces another person in a race or at a job. Pretty sure we say that because that’s what happens at the Olympics, when people take the Olympic torch fire all the way from Greece to wherever the Olympics are happening and that takes a whole lot of people. Abraham’s story is ending, but Isaac’s story (at least for us) is just beginning. Right now, he’s just gone because nothing is written about him. And he will mostly be gone until chapter 26! By the beginning of chapter 28, his story is pretty much done but the story of his son Jacob will go to the very end of the book of Genesis. For now, the story is still about God and about Abraham. Let’s start this week’s reading, near the end of Genesis 22, going back a bit for context:
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 instead of his son, Isaac. And Abraham named that place The Lord Will Provide, so today it is said, “It will be provided on the Lord’s mountain.” Then the angel of the Lord called out to Abraham a second time from heaven and said, “I have sworn an oath by my own self,” this is the Lord’s declaration: “Because you have done this thing and have not withheld your only son, I will absolutely bless you and give you as many descendants (your children and grandchildren, etc.) as there are stars of the sky and sand on the seashore (way too many to count!). Your descendants will take the city gates of their enemies (which means they will have control of enemy cities). And all the nations of the earth will be blessed by your descendant because you have listened to and obeyed what I told you.”
So, there Abraham was, taking the knife to sacrifice his son Isaac, and the Angel of the Lord stopped him. Thank goodness, eh? It’s good to know that God wouldn’t allow something like that to happen. Abraham looked and saw the ram and took him and sacrificed it instead. And we talked a lot last week about how the ram is like Jesus because of its head stuck in the thorns and how the Romans put a crown of thorns on Jesus’s head, and how the ram died instead of Isaac and Jesus died instead of us. We’ll talk about Jesus this week too, because he is the biggest and best part of God’s promise to Abraham and Isaac. For right now, we can just be glad that Isaac is alive and that Abraham isn’t a murderer even if we still are confused and unhappy about why this even happened in the first place. Even though we can come up with reasons that make us feel better about it, we just don’t really know for sure. What we can know, which is good, is that God didn’t really want Isaac sacrificed and wasn’t ever going to let it happen. Isaac was God’s plan and that hadn’t changed but even if Isaac wasn’t God’s plan, God isn’t okay with human sacrifice. At all. What a relief!
That’s why Abraham gave that place a special name—Yahweh Yireh—which literally means “Yahweh (the Lord) will see” (because that’s what the actual words mean) but the actual meaning reads more like “the Lord will provide.” If you think about it, that makes sense because the Lord saw what was happening and stopped Abraham and gave him a ram instead. God didn’t stop the offering, but He replaced Isaac with the ram. God isn’t ever okay with human sacrifice—I want you to know that. In fact, I want to tell you some of the Bible verses about that. This is what Moses told the children of Israel right before he died and they went back into the Promised Land that Jacob and his kids had left hundreds of years before:
“When you go into the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not do the horrible things that the Canaanites and other nations in the land are doing. Not even one of you is allowed to sacrifice their son or daughter in the fire, try to find out the future, tell fortunes, interpret omens, practice sorcery, cast spells, ask a medium or spiritist questions so they can get answers from demons, or try to talk to dead people. The Lord just can’t stand the people who do that stuff, and so the Lord your God is kicking out everyone who lives in the Land because of all this horrible stuff they are doing.” (Deut 18:9-12)
Wow, God hates human sacrifice so much that He actually drove people out of the promised land so that it could be clean again, with none of that Canaanite and Amorite nonsense. God tested Abraham but it is good to know it was nothing but a test and although God finds out that Abraham will do anything for God, the Bible story focuses not on Abraham but on God and what He does and doesn’t want from us and how He always provides another way. Unlike all the other gods of the nations, sacrificing people never makes Him happy. That’s why Jesus wasn’t a sacrifice—the chief priests gave Him to the Romans but Jesus chose to die so that He could go to war with sin and death and kick them both to the curb. He ambushed them and they never saw it coming, otherwise they would have let Him die of old age instead. That would have worked so much better for them!
Now, the other thing this verse says is that later on, it was said, “It will be provided on the Lord’s Mountain.” What does that mean? It means that someone added that later—it wasn’t Moses who wrote that just like Moses didn’t write about his own death at the end of Deuteronomy. A lot of times in the Bible, we will see someone adding a little note in the future to make something clearer or they will use a name for a city or a region that didn’t exist when the story happened. They did that because they wanted the people reading and hearing it to know where they were talking about. I don’t know that the native Americans used to call the place where I live but I know they didn’t call it Idaho Falls. It had another name, but if someone was telling a story, they would probably say “it was where Idaho Falls is now.” The Bible does that same thing a lot and that is good because otherwise we would be clueless as to where a lot of the stuff in Genesis and Joshua ever happened. It’s always important to be understood when we are telling a story or teaching history—unless that story is fiction and about people in some sort of fantasy land like Narnia. Then you can call stuff whatever you want and draw a pretend map of the pretend place. Anyway, when someone helps us by giving us a place name later or makes a comment to help us understand, it is called an editorial comment. But you don’t have to remember that.
And there are a lot of people who believe that this was Mt Moriah, where David’s son Solomon built the Temple. But we don’t really know for sure. That being said, it would make the comment about the Lord’s mountain make a lot more sense. But, the Lord can also provide on a lot of mountains and as He tells us in the Psalms, all of the animals on the mountains are His—which makes sense. If those animals are His, then so are the mountains. No wonder God doesn’t need anything from us! He made everything and so everything is His. We will all die someday and then we won’t have anything here until we come alive again but God will still be here with all the stuff we had. Now, He probably doesn’t want most of it but it doesn’t change the fact that He will be here and our stuff will be here but we won’t be here. And we won’t actually care.
After this, the Angel of the Lord calls to Abraham again, from the heavens—which we talked about last week so if you missed it, you can check it out on my websites—and as always, talks like He is God and not an angel, which is always very confusing but that’s the way it is so we can either accept it or just be confused forever with no way to know anything for sure. I like just moving on to other things that I actually can maybe figure out. And something I can figure out is what God tells Abraham through the Angel of the Lord because it is just awesome! This is God’s final promise to Abraham, that He says He swears by Himself. But what does that mean? It means that God is tying this promise to His own reputation and so if it doesn’t happen, then He isn’t who He says He is—the supreme, highest, holiest Creator God who made the whole universe and everything in it who can absolutely be trusted. That’s how important this promise is and why Abraham could trust it. God is like, “Hey, if I really exist then this absolutely will happen. It’s a done deal. There is no chance that this isn’t going to happen because I am real and I have sworn an oath to make it happen.” Wow, what would it be like to have God say something like that to you? God hasn’t ever done that for me, I can tell you that, even though I have had dreams about what He wants to do with me before it ever happens—things that I didn’t have to make happen myself. But He didn’t like lay it all out and promise me so I had some kind of roadmap. He just showed me things that mostly confused me but make perfect sense now. Prophecy in scripture is almost always like that—impossible to figure out beforehand and God actually told Isaiah the prophet that prophecy was just around so that people would see that God really had told them something that would happen before it happened. And definitely not so that we could figure it out ourselves beforehand. Remember that that’s how Ishmael was born and a lot of problems started, because Abraham decided to make God’s predictions happen in his own way instead of waiting.
So, what did God promise Abraham that He couldn’t ever take back? I am going to rephrase it a bit to make it easier to understand—we aren’t talking about the words or all of that but the meaning of what God said to Abraham. “I swear by myself (really, God was “swearing to God”) that because you were willing to do what I said and give me your only son, I will absolutely bless you and make all your kids until the end of time more than could ever be counted—more than the stars in the sky or the bits and pieces of sand on the seashore. And your descendants will take over the cities of their enemies. And not only that, but all of the people groups who make up the nations of the earth will be blessed by your seed because you obeyed my voice when I spoke to you.”
We’ve seen versions of this promise before—all the way back in Genesis 12 when God said He would do these things if Abraham left his home and family and traveled to the Land of Canaan. Abraham was promised a great name, which means he would be famous and respected and powerful, and that his family would become a mighty nation (and that was a strange promise to make to someone who didn’t have any kids until he was 87 years old!), that he would be under God’s special protection, and that God would someday bless the world through him. When Lot took the best of the Land for himself and left Abraham with the rocky terrain, God promised Abraham that He would eventually give him all of the Land and that he would have more descendants that anyone could count. In Genesis 15, God promised Abraham a very great reward for all of his obedience and promised him a child and more descendants than anyone could count. In Genesis 17, in exchange for Abraham obeying the command to become circumcised and to circumcise all the men and boys in his household, God set up a covenant that Abraham would be the father of many people groups and that his children would be given the Land of Canaan. And now that Abraham has shown that he will listen to God no matter what, that he will have a descendant who will be a blessing to the entire world. And also, that his descendants would become powerful enough to one day take over the cities of their enemies. We see that happen in the book of Joshua and through the time of King David. But because of disobedience, his descendants later lost their power and God took the land away from them for a long time. And they never really got it back again because when God is not the King—like He was Abraham’s King—no one owns the Land except Him. The Land of Canaan, that later became Israel, has always been God’s. Sometimes He would give it to them, but it couldn’t ever be bought or sold because it’s God’s property and He only ever loaned it out to people. That’s also why He drove out the people who were doing such horrible things on God’s property, like a landlord would get rid of people who were messing up the home they were renting. God kept His promises to Abraham but when Abraham’s children didn’t treat God like their king, they lost the Land in some pretty awful ways.
And the Land is important but it isn’t even remotely as important as God’s promise that one day, one of Abraham’s children would bless the entire world. And we know who that is—Jesus. Unlike the Land that has been taken away from the children of Israel many times when they have done things their own way, Jesus never gets taken away. Not from the children of Abraham or the people of the nations of the world. Jesus is way better and way more of a blessing than the Land God gave His people. God called it a land flowing with milk and honey—sounds yummy to me but Jesus reminded us that after we eat regular bread and drink regular water, we are all going to be hungry and thirsty again. If all of the nations were going to be blessed through Abraham, it isn’t like they were all going to be moved to the Promised Land. If they did that it would be so crowded that there wouldn’t be any room for cows, sheep, goats, bees, fruit trees, or anything else. It would just be a land packed with way too many people! No, if God was going to bless the world through the seed of Abraham, one particular descendant, then God was going to have to use that man to give the people of the world real water, what Jesus called living water, and real bread, which is what Jesus said that He was. What Jesus gives us will last forever and fills us up on the inside, which is much different than the regular food that we eat today and is gone tomorrow and we need more to eat and drink. But Jesus is always enough—enough for the Jewish children of Abraham and also all the other children of Abraham that come from the other nations. And, of course, Jesus totally took the gates of God’s enemies! He totally owned them.
Now that God knows Abraham is absolutely loyal and obedient and will give God anything He asks for or do anything God asks him to—no matter what it is—God is making a declaration, an announcement to the universe even if only Abraham and the angels can hear it. Everything that God has promised will happen, period. The only way it wouldn’t happen is if God stopped being God and it isn’t like that’s going to happen. And what God is promising, even though Abraham doesn’t know the details, is Jesus. Jesus the King of kings and the Lord of lords—the only one ever born who can smack down sin and death and give the people who believe Him living water and the bread from heaven. That’s you and me. That’s what He told the people at the Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles) celebration in Jerusalem and the Samaritan woman at the well. “On the last and most important day of the festival of Sukkot, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone is thirsty, let them come to me and drink.Anyone who believes in me will have streams of living water flow from deep within them, just like the Scriptures say.” Jesus said this about the Holy Spirit. Everyone who believed in Jesus was going to get the Spirit from Him later; the Holy Spirit hadn’t been given out yet because Jesus hadn’t been raised from the dead and hadn’t gone to sit in the throne room of God yet as King of the world.” (John 7:37-39) And what about the woman who was at the well in Samaria when it was so hot in the middle of the day?
A woman of Samaria came to draw water from the well outside her town. “Give me a drink,” Jesus said to her, because his disciples had gone into town to buy food. The woman replied, “How can you, a Jew, ask me for a drink when I am a Samaritan woman?” She asked that because Jews do not have anything to do with Samaritans (in fact, they hated each other so much that the Jews destroyed the Samaritan Temple and the Samaritans put dead people’s bones in the Jerusalem Temple). Jesus answered, “If you knew the gift of God, and who is talking to you and saying, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would ask him for a drink instead, and he would give you living water.” “Sir,” said the woman, “you don’t even have a bucket, and the well is really deep. So where do you get this ‘living water’? You aren’t greater than our father (make that great great great great about a hundred times grandfather) Jacob, are you? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, and so did his sons and all his critters.” Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks this water will get thirsty again. But whoever drinks from the water that I am going give them will never get thirsty again. In fact, the water I will give them will become a whole well of water springing up inside them so they will live forever.” “Sir,” the woman said to him, “give me that water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to come here to draw water anymore.” (John 4:7-15)
Jesus said that the water He gives is the Holy Spirit and it will fill us up and we will live forever with Him. Although our bodies will still need water to drink, we will go on forever with Jesus when He makes us come alive again when He comes back as King over the whole world. That’s some powerful water for sure, which is why it is called living water. Living water was what they called water that kept flowing and flowing. Think of a river—I live by a huge river, the Snake River in Idaho. But I also lived pretty close to the Mississippi River when I lived in Minnesota. Close enough to visit, anyway, and it is much bigger than the Snake River. We can’t see where those rivers really come from or why they just keep flowing and flowing but we know that’s what they do. God’s Spirit is like that too—it never stops flowing unless we do something to block it out, like if we decide to hate Jesus after knowing how good He is. I know people that has happened to. When people have the Holy Spirit flowing through them like a huge river, they change a lot and become more and more like Jesus, but when they decide to hate Him, it’s like the water gets dammed up and they go back to how they used to be before they knew Him, or worse. The Holy Spirit doesn’t just flow through us but out of us to bless other people because that’s what rivers—living waters—do. They flow and flow and flow unless they get dried up and I can tell you that God’s living water can’t ever dry up. Even if it isn’t flowing through one person, it’s flowing in other people.
When God made His last promises to Abraham, I think that was when Abraham knew that Jesus was coming to save the world. Jesus even said that Abraham knew He was coming. When He was in the Temple, some time after telling the Jewish festival pilgrims about the living water He can give them, the Judeans who lived in the south (and didn’t know him and follow Him like the Jews from Galilee) were picking on Him and saying terrible things about him. But Jesus told them that Abraham, their most famous ancestor had actually seen that He was coming, and that Abraham was just thrilled about it. Well, this is when I think that happened, and especially when God provided a ram and saved Isaac’s life. I think that Abraham understood exactly what had happened and what was going to happen in the future, but I am betting it is one of those things that people know deep inside but can’t explain to anyone. Have you ever had that happen? Oh man, it just makes me so frustrated. There are things I can’t explain about God, even though I know them on the inside, because I don’t even know what words to use. I think that’s how Abraham was with knowing about Jesus. After all, if he could have explained it then Moses would have known about it and would have written about it. But that’s just my opinion!
But the promises to Abraham have all been made now, and Abraham sees Jesus coming in the future, through the children of Isaac. He understands that all of the nations of the earth will be blessed—every single one of them. That means we are supposed to be living in peace and love with God and each other, no matter where we are from or what languages we speak or what we look like or how much money we have. Nothing else matters except for having the same King, Jesus, and the same living water—the Holy Spirit—inside us.
I love you. I am praying for you. God adopts as children everyone whose King is Jesus, and unlike Abraham, Isaac and Jacob with their kids, He doesn’t play favorites. He doesn’t love me more than you or you more than anyone else. God is love and so all of His love is the only thing He can give us.