In Hebrews 11:17, it was “By faith that Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice.” Which in itself makes one wonder about God – but what thoughts were going through Abraham’s head? God had miraculously enabled Isaac to be born to him and Sarah in their old age, so that God’s promises could be passed on down through their son (18). Why on earth, then, would God want the boy killed?
Abraham was already familiar with God working in mysterious ways, but this time it looked like God was going against his promises. He’d never done that before. And how could he too? God was God, and he’d made a personal covenant with Abram back in Genesis 15, getting the point across in dramatic fashion (9-12, 17), that Canaan would belong to Abram’s descendants (18); no ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ – it was totally guaranteed.
And Abram got the point. He believed that God would stick to his promises. So, if God wanted Isaac killed, there was only one solution to God continuing both his promise and his covenant through Isaac, and that would be “raising the dead boy back to life again,” Hebrews 11:19.
It wasn’t an unreasonable thought either, because hadn’t Isaac already been brought miraculously to life from the dead, when born to two people whose bodies could no longer conceive a child? Abram already knew, then, that God could produce life from death.
When it came to Abram’s turn, then, to “live by faith in the things promised” in Hebrews 11:13, the thing Abraham saw promised was God’s ability to raise a human being from death to life. Which also ties in with the salvation theme running through Hebrews 11. In Abel, Enoch and Noah we see the process of salvation unfolding (redemption through sacrifice, walking with God, and resisting evil); in Abraham we see the end goal of salvation, raising humans to a deathless life.
And that’s what Abraham was commended for in Romans 4:17 too – for believing in “the God who gives life to the dead.” Because that’s the ultimate thing God promises, which we pick up from Abraham in our belief now in “God raising Jesus our Lord from the dead” (24) as his means of raising us from death to life too (Romans 6:4-5).
But what of Isaac? He went through all this too, so what effect did it have on him? According to Hebrews, it gave him “Total confidence in the future”….(next blog)
