For Abraham it all started with obedience in Genesis 12:1 when “The Lord said to him. ‘Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.’” “So,” verse 4, “Abram left, as the Lord had told him.”
It was Abraham’s obedience, then, that got God’s great plan to “bless all peoples on earth” started. This is how and when the plan of salvation and rescuing us humans from the mess Adam and Eve made began – in Abraham doing what he was told by God.
But it took another test of Abraham’s obedience for him to picture the level of obedience that God required. And that test came in Genesis 22:2 when God told Abraham to kill his son. Because for Abraham to properly represent and picture Jesus, the ultimate source of salvation, nothing less than being “obedient to death” would suffice.
What God required of his own son – to “humble himself and become obedient to death” in Philippians 2:8 – meant, therefore, that Abraham needed to humble himself and become obedient to death too. That’s why God required Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. It was a test of obedience, at the level Jesus would willingly go through later.
And the parallel with Jesus on this score is made even more apparent in the response that Abraham and Jesus both had to what God wanted them to do.
Because when God planned to test Abraham in Genesis 22, Abraham’s immediate response in verse 1 was: “Here I am.” And what was Jesus’ response to God wanting him to die in a human body for our salvation? “Here I am,” Hebrews 10:7, “I have come to do your will, O God.”
So – in both attitude and action – Abraham and Jesus did what God required for the blessing and salvation of the human race. And it was because both Abraham and Jesus “reverently submitted” to God’s will, and never questioned it, that God, in response to their obedience, “exalted Jesus to the highest place” (Philippians 2:9), and swore to Abraham he would bless “all nations on earth, because you have obeyed me” (Genesis 22:18).
It was their obedience, therefore, that reversed the devastation that Adam and Eve’s disobedience had caused. Which is why the salvation of us messed up humans started with obedience.
But next blog: “What made Abraham obey God so willingly?”
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