Where is Isaac? After the ram appeared, Isaac was nowhere to be found, and what happened to him and his family is one of the greatest mysteries of the Bible–one that led the ancient Rabbis to ask questions about the coming Messiah.
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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.
Okay, we got done what I wanted done with teaching about Jesus and His love and the way He acted and didn’t act because now, oh boy, we are going back to Abraham’s family and we will learn how different they are from Jesus—just like us! I wanted to teach you about Jesus because sometimes we think that we have to be okay with everything the people in the Bible (and especially Abraham’s family) are doing but the Bible tells their stories as they were, with them doing awful stuff, and not usually what they should have been doing. They need Jesus, right? Actually, it’s nice to know that they didn’t have it all together and that they were normal people living in a different sort of world, thinking different thoughts, and doing different things. That’s because their context was pretty much totally different than ours—what was normal to them isn’t normal to us and what is normal to us would just be absolutely crazy to them. Actually, compared to how it was when I was born back in the late 60’s, it’s already crazy and strange. Computers! Phones you carry around in your hand when you are far from home! YouTube! Podcasts! Blogs! Digital books! Reading and writing being normal instead of rare! Okay, I am not that old! We just can’t hardly imagine living in a world without air conditioning, cars, toilets and a million choices about what we want to eat today. In those days, it was like, lentils and bread with a bit of vinegar to dip it in and water from the well and raisins if you got lucky. Apart from all of those differences, remember that people need to be more like Jesus because only He is perfect. If Jesus wouldn’t do it—lying, cheating, stealing, tricking, killing, etc. then we shouldn’t do it either, even if Abraham or his kids did it. Our example is Jesus. The Bible isn’t about Abraham or Moses or David or anyone else for that matter. They were born, they lived, and they died so long ago that the only things we can guess about them is that they were very short, with brown skin and brown eyes. The Bible is 100% about God and how He deals with humans because we are a super big problem. So the Bible telling us about how messed up His chosen people are tells us how loving and patient He is and how He does and doesn’t usually respond to our nonsense.
Like today, there weren’t any perfect politicians or kings or priests or prophets. For that matter, there were no perfect nations or countries either. If there were then there wouldn’t have been any prophets—and there were a LOT of prophets telling Israel to turn around and stop behaving badly and that they were being as bad as or worse than all the pagan nations most of the time—except probably the Hittites because those guys even had laws telling them not to bite other people’s noses off. Not just bite their noses, but biting them off! Who needs to be told that’s wrong? The Bible shows us that we can only 100% trust God to be right and good all of the time. Because we can trust God like that, we can also trust Jesus like that as well. In fact, when the apostle Paul was telling people to do what they saw him doing, he made sure that they knew they should only do that when he was acting like Jesus. Same with me for sure, only do what I am doing if I am acting like Jesus. I sure don’t want you acting like me when I am being a gooberhead, that’s for sure. It’s okay to say, “Dang, Miss Tyler isn’t acting very much like Jesus today. I had better go back and read what Jesus said and did because He never behaves badly just because He has a bad day. Heck, on the very worst day of His life, He was still perfectly good.” Maybe the one thing we can say about the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation is, “God is good and the rest of us are pretty messed up but He wants us to keep trying our hardest to be more like Him.” When Jesus came, it was like God was saying, “Okay, this is my Son and He behaves exactly the way I want, all of the time, no matter what. You can read all of the Hebrew Bible and read all of the commandments and you can still get it really wrong, just like the Bible experts in Jesus’s time. But if you follow and imitate Jesus, you will get it right.”
So, now we are going backward to Genesis 22 again, back to Jesus’s Bible, and we are going to talk about what happened after the angel stopped Abraham from killing his son, Isaac. And this is one of the strangest and most mysterious things in the Bible. Before this chapter of the Bible, Sarah and Isaac live together as a family with Abraham. After this chapter, we never see Isaac or Sarah with Abraham again while they are all alive. Abraham is going to have to travel to where Sarah is when she dies, and when he gets a wife for Isaac, they are living in two entirely different places and only Abraham’s servant talks with them both. Isaac will go see his father to bury him when he dies, along with Ishmael, but we don’t know exactly what happened between all of them. Many Bible experts for thousands of years have asked the question, “what’s going on here?” but the Bible doesn’t give us any real answers, again. All we can do is look at the clues and come up with ideas. I suppose we don’t need to know for sure, otherwise, the Bible would be clearer. What am I even talking about? Let’s look at the end of chapter 22 of Genesis and we will go back a bit to review what had just happened after the angel stopped Abraham from killing his son Isaac:
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 what I told you.” Abraham went back to the young men who were waiting with the donkey, and they got up and went together to Beer-sheba. And Abraham settled (meaning, he made a new home for himself) in Beer-sheba.
So, God asked Abraham to give Isaac to Him as an olah, a whole burnt offering. And Abraham didn’t argue even though he argued with God a lot and even tried to talk Him out of destroying the five wicked cities—remember that? And then there was the time that God said, “Hey, I am going to give you everything you see around you.” And Abraham was like, “Big deal! It means nothing because you haven’t given me any kids at all!” Abraham was pretty honest with God and good thing too, since being dishonest with God is pretty pointless. Like, somehow He doesn’t know when we are lying, right? When Abraham was angry or when he was disappointed or sad or whatever, he let God know. I am not saying he was always complaining, but when God talked, Abraham talked right back to God. But when God asked him if he would do the worst thing in the whole world, Abraham zipped his lip and didn’t say a thing. And it seemed like he didn’t say anything for three whole days until they got to the mountain where God was sending them. Isaac figured out the problem pretty quick once they arrived—they were going with wood, fire, and a knife, but there was no lamb. Anywhere. And nowhere close to buy one, I imagine. When Isaac asked, Abraham simply replied that God was providing the lamb. If my dad had been quiet for three days and put wood on my back and had a knife and fire in his hands, I would be super nervous.
For some reason, strong, young Isaac cooperated with his old, weaker father. No way could Abraham have tied him up and put him on the altar if Isaac fought back. The movies show Isaac as just a kid but a small boy couldn’t have that much firewood on his back. Isaac was at least an older teenager and maybe as old as thirty-seven.We talked a lot about what some people think might have happened but no one knows for sure. It’s a big mystery. Fortunately, before Abraham could kill Isaac, the angel of the Lord—you know, the angel who speaks as though he is God but also seems like just an angel too—he stops Abraham and says that because Abraham listened to God and tried to do what God asked, God made all of His promises since chapter twelve a for sure thing (but he didn’t mention the chapter twelve part of course). Abraham would have more children and grandchildren all the way to today, than there were stars in the sky and that was back when you could see millions of them in the sky because there weren’t lights on to block out the view, and they would be able to take over the cities of their enemies, and every nation in the world would be blessed by Abraham’s child. Not children, but child—which child? Was it Isaac? Isaac doesn’t show up much in the Bible and doesn’t really do much either. This is one of the places where ancient Bible experts looked and said, “Hmmmm…this looks like it is talking about one special child of Abraham. I suppose we ought to look for more clues as to who this is because he definitely hasn’t been born yet or we would know.” It is from many hints like this all over the Bible that they began to look for someone they called the Messiah, Maschiach in Hebrew and he would be called Christos in Greek. They both mean “the anointed one” because kings and priests all over the world were anointed—meaning they had special oil put on them to make them special. But this one would be THE anointed one. He is also called The Branch, David’s Lord, the Servant, the Arm of the Lord, the Savior, Emmanuel (which means God with us), Prince of Peace, and many other things. Who do you think that would be? If you guessed Jesus then you would be right. Jesus is the child of Abraham who would bless the whole world by making a way for everyone to be able to join God’s family. Pretty cool, eh?
There are things about Jesus that are pretty mysterious and even confusing because our brains are too small, and that’s okay. If we were smart enough to know everything, we wouldn’t need Jesus at all, right? Because, then we could be the ones who were right about everything and could make all the right decisions. But we aren’t, so we can’t, and so we need Jesus really bad to help us out of our nonsense behavior. After Jesus came to life again after He was killed by the Romans, He went to be with God. And when Isaac didn’t get sacrificed by his dad, he disappears too. The Bible says that Abraham went back to the young men who were watching the donkey, but there is nothing about Isaac going with them. In fact, we don’t actually see Isaac again until the end of chapter 24 when he gets married! Did he run away because he was scared and angry over almost being killed? I have trouble believing that because, after all, he could have run away instead of allowing Abraham to tie him up. One theory that I like, and a theory is something that hasn’t been proven yet but is a possibility—is that Isaac stayed with God instead of going home with his father. But then later, when Isaac’s son Jacob is talking about God, he calls Him the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac. And that’s not the kind of fear that just means Isaac respects God—it’s the kind of fear where you are actually afraid of someone. It’s what God promised would happen to the Canaanites, that they would be terrified of the children of Israel. And I mean, could we blame Isaac for being terrified of God after what happened to him? His dad almost killed him after all, because God asked Abraham if he would. I would be totally scared of Abraham and of God if that had happened to me because the gods of the world around them were also pretty scary and they didn’t stop you from killing your kids and, in fact, some of them seemed to like it or no one would ever do it, right? This is actually why I think God wanted Abraham to argue with God with something like, “Far be it from you to ask me such a thing! You are a holy and just God and why would you ask me to kill an innocent person?” I mean, that’s pretty much what Abraham said to try and save Sodom. Even if Isaac did cooperate and let himself be tied up, he’d have to be in shock about what could have happened and scared that it might happen again but the next time he might die.
But maybe the Bible just didn’t mention that Isaac went with Abraham. Still, why wasn’t Abraham living in Hebron with Sarah when she died? If my husband was willing to kill my only kid after being unable to have any kids for ninety years, and I am way younger than that thank you very much, I wouldn’t let him anywhere near me. I would want him to move far away. And I wouldn’t much care for what his excuse was. Some people think that Sarah was so disappointed that Isaac wasn’t sacrificed that she just died on the spot; but she was in Hebron in the north and Abraham was all the way down in Beersheva to the south. That’s thirty-two miles. Not only that, but he had to pass by where Sarah was on his way there so we have to wonder if he was scared to admit to her what he had done because she might think he was out of his mind or was dreading what would happen if Isaac got to her first or if he did stop in Hebron and she was so angry that he went down to Beersheba to live. We just don’t know. My husband would have to move way more than thirty miles away from me, I bet, if I was Sarah. Here’s how I think the conversation might have gone if these were our parents, “Excuse me, you did what? Did you try to talk God out of it, like you did when He said He was going to destroy Sodom? No? RU serious? I woke up a week ago to find you both gone, with no way to find out where you were, and now you come back and I find out that you were actually willing to sacrifice my only child, my sweet baby boy, who I carried in my ninety-year-old body for nine whole months, without air conditioning or indoor plumbing, and that I nursed and cared for and protected from that other boy and his mother, and you sneak out first thing in the morning to actually do this without talking to me? Did it ever occur to you to run this by me? Or to ask God for clarification, like, I dunno, maybe you had misunderstood? Do you get where I am going here? You had a lot of options, and you just kept quiet and took my baby off to kill him and even if you thought God would resurrect Isaac afterwards, don’t you think he is going to be, oh, I don’t know, a bit traumatized? And psychiatrists haven’t been invented yet and as far as I know, there are no emotional support groups available for Adult Children of Human Sacrificers.” And if that happened, then probably Abraham was smart to just keep on going. No matter what happened, there was no way for this situation to be anything but really awkward. God told Abraham to listen to Sarah back in chapter 21, maybe God wanted Abraham to listen to her again but he never gave her a chance to talk. We’ll just never know for sure. What do you think happened? I have taught you a lot about that world, maybe you can think of another story that might be a lot better than mine. Some of you guys are definitely going to learn things about the ancient world that I don’t know. When I am too old to teach, maybe you will be teaching me!
I honestly think that when Abraham didn’t argue with God, that he created a very bad situation. God expected him to talk God’s decisions over with him, but this one time he stayed absolutely quiet when it was most important to say something. It would have made a big difference to Isaac, right? And to Sarah, right? And back then, Isaac and Sarah would have been upset but they understood that the gods of the Canaanites and Babylonians (where they lived then and where they came from) were scary jerks who had better be obeyed, or else, no matter what. I think it would have been very hard for everyone to have no choice in the matter. Yes, fathers in those days had the legal right to kill anyone in the family they wanted to if the family was being shamed by their behavior, but this wasn’t like that. Sarah hadn’t shamed the family and neither had Isaac, as far as we know.
Sarah had been patient for many years. She followed her husband all over Canaan for like fifty years at this point, as he did everything he was claiming God told him to do. She had waited for the baby God had promised until she decided that God had only promised Abraham a son, but not her. Then she waited while Abraham had a son with her slave, Hagar, and dealt with a lot of bad emotions for like seventeen years because of that—pretty much mostly her fault because she tried to force God’s promises to happen way too early, and then she became a mom when she was ninety years old, and watched her son grow up and protected him, and then one day her husband disappears with him and comes back with the most crazy story she could imagine. God had only spoken to her once that we know of, to tell her to expect a baby boy. To her, God was someone who brought good news and not bad news. How could the God who promised her a baby have asked her husband to kill him?
And what about Isaac? When he was three years old, his teenage brother Ishmael was forced to leave the family with his mother Hagar. He grew up knowing that he was special, and a miracle, because his mom was very old and all of the mothers of the other kids were way younger. Instead of being born when their mothers were ninety, their mothers had been teenagers or in their twenties. Isaac would have known about his older brother who was sent away and probably knew how much his father loved Ishmael. It seems from the language used in the stories as though Ishmael was still Abraham’s favorite son, and that would have been difficult for Isaac. I wonder if sometimes he was worried that his brother might come back to kill him or that Abraham wished he had never been born. After all, Abraham’s reaction when God told him about Sarah having a baby wasn’t exactly positive. He asked if Ishmael could be God’s choice instead. And so, years and years went by and at some point, his father’s God asks if Abraham would kill him and instead of begging for Isaac’s life or saying no because that’s just messed up and not what God promised, Abraham just went along with it. Why didn’t his father at least try to reason with his God who had always been so good and generous with them?
It’s good to look at where people have been when we are asking ourselves why they are making the decisions they make later. Not to make excuses but to understand. Isaac has a complicated relationship with his father and also with his brother. When he gets married, he’s going to have a complicated relationship with his wife and with his twin sons Esau and Jacob, and he’s going to commit some of the same sins as his father Abraham did, especially when it comes to lying to protect himself when he is scared. If we are wanting to look back into the Bible for perfect families, we sure won’t find any. Even Jesus’s brothers didn’t believe what He was saying about Himself. They thought he was crazy. None of them tried to stop the people of Nazareth from trying to toss Him off the hill His town was built on. No one in his family except for his mother was there when he died either. They didn’t bury Him either, even though it was their job. I guess we can say that this family has been messed up since the beginning and especially since Cain killed his own brother Abel. Noah’s family was messed up too. All of these stories are given to us to show how sad a place the world is compared to how it was in the Garden in Eden when God walked with the man and the woman. We are supposed to read these stories and say, “Can’t anyone please stop this and put things right again? Who can fix the problem of all this sin and these messed up families and death and false gods and cruel leaders? Please God, save us!”
Like I said before, the Bible is full of clues about the answer to their prayers. The Messiah has been promised. He will come from Abraham and He will also come from Isaac, but it will take almost another two thousand years to happen. God has to get the whole world good and ready before the Son of God comes to show us who God is and what He is really like, and what He wants His Kingdom to be like—and it won’t be until the leaders of God’s Temple in Jerusalem and the leaders of the Roman Empire work together to kill Him, even though He did nothing wrong. Just imagine that—a world so sinful that they murder God’s own Son even though He was innocent. But because they made the most important judgment in the entire world in the worst possible way, and because Satan was behind them pushing and prodding them to do what was wrong, they were all judged as absolutely guilty and Satan lost all of His power to Jesus. Right now, Satan just wishes he could be the boss over the whole world but now the world belongs to Jesus and more and more people every year hear about Him and call Him their King. Satan is losing people and Jesus is getting more and more people to follow Him.
I love you. I am praying for you. I hope you will spend time thinking this week about Bible people not as characters in a book but real people who lived out their real lives while dealing with God. Sometimes they did really well and other times they really messed up bad, but God stayed the same and they learned how to see Him differently as they learned more about Him.