By the time God told Abraham to sacrifice his son as a burnt offering in Genesis 22, Abraham had known God for at least fifty years. Twenty five of those years were between the time God first spoke to Abraham in Genesis 12:1, to the time Isaac was born. Then another twenty-five years (or more) to the day Isaac was to be sacrificed, just before the death of Sarah, Abraham’s wife, in Genesis 23:1. She was 127 years old when she died, so Isaac was 37, or close to it, when Abraham was told to sacrifice him in the previous chapter.
For at least fifty years, then, Abraham had known God. And during that time God had made himself known to Abraham, and well enough for Abraham to know it was God too. Which is extraordinary, because Abraham had been brought up in a family led by a hierarchical outrightly pagan father who “worshipped other gods,” Joshua 24:2.
It was only because “The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia (Iraq),” Acts 7:2 – when Abraham was already at least seventy years old – that any knowledge or relationship with God began for him. It was totally by God’s doing and calling, therefore, that Abraham came to know God at all (Isaiah 51:2) – and even then it took another five years for Abraham to be released from his pagan father and finally get to Canaan by age 75 (Genesis 12:4-5).
And in Canaan that’s when God told him, “I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldees to give you this land to take possession of it,” Genesis 15:7. “I am the Lord” was the first and major point God had called Abraham to know about him. And Abraham got it, because in verse 8 he replies, “O Sovereign Lord,” in clear recognition and understanding that God was the supreme power, majesty and ruler in his life now.
Which was good, but at this point in his life Abraham didn’t know God that well, because he asks in verse 8, “how can I know that I will gain possession of it (the land of Canaan)?” To which God replies in verse 13, “You’ll know for certain.” And in an amazing combination of visual and vision in verses 9-17, God then helps Abraham know for certain. So again, it’s by God’s doing that Abraham came to know him so well.
Which is encouraging, because we’re now “children of Abraham” (Galatians 3:7), and equally called by God to know him (John 17:3) – so we can expect God to do the same for us that he did for Abraham.
To the next blog, then: “How does God help us to know him?”
Buck To Basics 