The Binding of Isaac and God's Provision | Advent Day 5

The word "love" appears for the first time in all of Scripture in Genesis 22:2. "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love." Mark it well. When love enters the biblical narrative, it enters bound to an altar, walking toward a mountain, carrying wood for its own sacrifice. The Story that will end on another hill, with another Father and another Son, casts its shadow backward across the centuries. God called to Abraham in the night. The command was precise and terrible: take your only son, the one you love, and offer him as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you. Abraham rose early in the morning. The text records no argument, no bargaining, no tears. The man who pleaded with God to spare Sodom speaks not a word when asked to sacrifice his own son. He simply rose, saddled his donkey, cut wood for the offering, and walked toward Moriah with Isaac beside him. Three days of silence. Three days of walking toward the unthinkable. Isaac was old enough to carry the wood up the mountain. Old enough to notice what was missing. As they climbed together, father and son, alone now, the servants left behind, the boy broke the silence. "Father, I see the fire and the wood. But where is the lamb?" The question hangs in the air across four thousand years. It echoes from this mountain to the Jordan River, where one day a wild prophet will see a man approaching and finally answer: "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world." But Abraham did not know that yet. He knew only that God had asked for everything, and he had said yes. His answer to Isaac was both comfort and prophecy, though he could not have known the full weight of his words: "God will see to it, my son. God will provide the lamb." In the ancient Hebrew, the word is "yireh," and it means both to see and to provide. What the Almighty beholds, He does not leave unanswered. The God who sees the need is the God who meets it. They reached the place. Abraham built the altar. He arranged the wood. Then he bound his son and laid him upon it. Caravaggio painted what happened next. He painted it with the brutal honesty the moment deserves. In his 1603 canvas, Abraham's hand presses Isaac's head down against the stone. The knife gleams, caught mid-descent. Isaac's face twists with terror, mouth open in a scream. There is no peaceful submission here, no serene acceptance. The painter understood what we too easily forget: this cost everything. This was horror. The knife began its fall. And the angel seized Abraham's wrist. "Do not lay your hand on the boy." Abraham lifted his eyes. There, behind him, a ram caught in the thicket by its horns. Not by its wool, where it might pull free, but by its horns, held fast, unable to escape. God had placed the substitute there before Abraham ever raised the knife. The provision preceded the crisis. The ram had been waiting all along. Abraham named that place "Yahweh Yireh," meaning the LORD will provide. A saying arose among the people: "On the mount of the LORD, it shall be provided." And where was this mountain? The land of Moriah, Scripture says. The name appears only once more in all the Bible: in Second Chronicles, where we learn that Solomon built the Temple on Mount Moriah. The place where Abraham bound his son became the place where Israel would offer sacrifice for a thousand years. The altar of the Temple rose on the same ridge where Isaac lay beneath his father's knife. Do you see it now? An only beloved son. Wood carried up a hill. Three days of journey. Hebrews tells us Abraham believed God could raise Isaac from the dead, receiving him back as a kind of resurrection. The pattern was always there, woven into the fabric of history, waiting to be recognized. Isaac asked where the lamb was. A ram appeared instead. The substitute died, and the beloved son walked down the mountain alive. But the question remained unanswered. The ram was not a lamb. Where is the lamb? On Moriah, a father prepared to sacrifice his son, and God stopped him. The angel stayed the knife. The boy lived. But at Calvary, no angel came. No ram emerged from the thicket. The Father did not stop. The knife fell. The beloved Son died. What God spared Abraham from doing, God did not spare Himself. The lamb was always coming. And when John the Baptist saw Jesus walking toward him, he finally gave the answer Isaac had waited four thousand years to hear: "Behold, the Lamb of God." Tomorrow we meet Jacob, the deceiver who flees his brother's rage and finds heaven open above a stone pillow. The promise continues through unlikely people. The seed moves ever toward Bethlehem.