Isaac: Child of Promise

Today we consider the eighth of ten books in Genesis, the record of the Generations of Isaac.

Isaac, the younger son of Abraham, his first Son by Sara, is the child of promise. He is the son that comes from the Lord, despite all human striving or ability. We meet Isaac before he is born, in chapter 17. Abraham had pinned his hopes on Ishmael, the child of the slave woman, the child born according to the flesh. But as the Lord confirms his covenant with Abraham through the sacrament of circumcision — through the cutting off of the foreskin, the cutting off of the human means of generation — so too he cuts off all hope that Abraham’s promise would pass down to his “natural” child Ishmael. But the Lord insists that aged, barren Sara will bear a son, and he will be named Isaac, and it is with Isaac, the child of promise, that the everlasting covenant will be established, a covenant for him and for his descendants after him.

And when Isaac is born, in chapter 21, Abraham still desires that Ishmael might share the inheritance somehow with Isaac. As we read last week, Sara sees Ishmael as a threat to Isaac’s inheritance, and seeks to drive Hagar and Ishmael out of the household. And the Lord upholds Sara’s judgment. The Lord tells Abraham yet again that it is through Isaac alone that his descendants shall be named. And this is how Isaac is memorialized in the pages of the New Testament, as the Son of Abraham through whom the descendants, the seed of promise, will be named. Both in Romans 9, and in Hebrews 11, this promise is reiterated: “Through Isaac your descendants shall be named.” Isaac is the child of the promise… both in the sense that he was promised to Abraham and Sara, and in the sense that he received the promise, the everlasting covenant, the oath of the Lord, and all its blessings.

And so it is that of the three patriarchs — Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — Isaac is perhaps the most passive, the least active. He is the heir of the promise, and he represents the initial fulfillment of the promises to Abraham. He lives in the land as the heir of the promise. He is predicted in chapter 17, born in chapter 21, sacrificed in chapter 22, married to Rebekah in chapter 24 — a bride secured by the faithful labors of Abraham’s nameless servant, not by Isaac himself, becomes a father in chapter 25, receives the oath and walks in his fathers footsteps in chapter 26, is manipulated into assigning his birthright to his younger, less-favored son, Jacob in chapter 27, and dies in chapter 35.

This career of Isaac is far more simplified than either Abraham, or Jacob. At the most crucial moments of his life, he is the unknowing recipient of the action. His wife Rebekah appears far more clever and cunning and energetic than he, and in the crucial scene of the birthright in chapter 27, he is a doddering old fool. Only in chapter 26 is he really his own man, and here more than anything else he is the recipient of what was promised to his father, prosperity in the land, the oaths and covenant and blessings of the Lord. He even re-enacts the covenant with Abimilech. Indeed, it is his competitor Abimelech who articulates the judgment of Genesis on Isaac:

“We see plainly that the Lord has been with you… You are now the blessed of the Lord.”

Isaac, the child of the promise, in his adulthood is presented to us as being in full possession of the promise, and in his old age he is the bestower of that promise on Jacob — on Israel — rather than on Esau, on Edom. That is his role in Genesis, the crucial, central link in the patriarchal chain. That’s the first and primary thing you need to know about Isaac, and that is the faithfulness of the Lord in Isaac’s life.

The Binding of Isaac

So the first focus of the New Testament regarding Isaac is on the fact that he is the child of promise, that “Through Isaac your descendants shall be named.” The second major interest New Testament writers have around Isaac is his role in the events of Genesis 22, our old testament reading today — what the Jews call the Akedah, or “Binding of Isaac.”

The Context of the Binding

And though it is Abraham who is the primary actor in this story of the sacrifice of Isaac, the significance of the story, and its dramatic power, lies in the fact that the object of sacrifice is Isaac, his only son, whom he loves. The context of this story is significant. Just last week, we read from the immediately preceding chapter, chapter 21, of the casting out of Ishmael. Isaac had just been born, and was being weaned, and Sara recognized that Ishmael would seek to usurp the inheritance which was rightly Isaac’s, by the Lord’s command and by the law of the land. Abraham was distressed at the thought of dispossessing his oldest son, and casting him out, but God assured him that Sara was correct, reiterating his promise that “through Isaac your descendants shall be named.” In short, in Genesis 21, Abraham was commanded to sacrifice Ishmael, his oldest son of fourteen years, to put him out and cut himself off. And we read there that “Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave them to hagar, putting them on her shoulder, and gave her the boy and sent her away.” And as Hagar and Ishmael lay themselves down to die in the wilderness, they were delivered by the Angel of the Lord.

And it is in the very next chapter that God tests Abraham with a seemingly impossible command: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I shall tell you.” And just as he did with Ishmael, we read that Abraham rose early in the morning, and set about making preparations to obey the command of the Lord.

The Symbolism of the Binding

This command has been debated through the ages, for it raises a troubling question. Is something right just because God commands it? Many biblical scholars have sought to argue it away, saying Abraham misunderstood God, or never intended to actually sacrifice Isaac, or indeed, was being punished for his treatment of Ishmael. The Danish Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard saw in this test of Abraham something profound… a demonstration that true faith is not following the rules or codes of an inherited religion, but the willingness to embrace and believe that which flies in the face of reason, even that which is utterly absurd.

But neither the text before us, nor the apostolic witnesses who read it, suggest to us any of those options. Remember, Paul said these two sons of Abraham could be understood as an allegory of bondage and freedom, works and faith. Abraham is a believer, even the father of all believers, but he is no ordinary believer, and his son Isaac is no ordinary child of the promise. All history lies open as a book before the Lord, and and the Lord is the author. Sacred history, the redemptive history of the covenant people of God, not only occurred, but was preserved and recorded for our instruction, that God’s dealing with men, his way of salvation, might be made all the more plain.

So the testing of Abraham with this dread command to sacrifice his son Isaac is not an philosophical puzzle or a moral quandary to be unfolded. Nor should we always view the particular actions of Abraham as a model of how we should act. They are history, but they are also a lesson. This is what allegory means. The Lord had already given Abraham the command of circumcision, as a sign and seal of the covenant. Circumcision today is hotly debated, it is viewed by many as an act of mutilation, that should never be practiced. But we know from Scripture that it sealed the covenant with the shedding of blood, and it signified that this covenant involved the seed, the offspring. So while circumcision marked the members of the covenant as belonging to the Lord, it also signified the curse of the covenant — the idea that outside of the covenant, one was “cut off,” from the Lord.

The sacrifice of Isaac was a similarly bloody command, and it required Abraham to go beyond the symbolic act of circumcision, to literally “cutting off” his inheritance, the child of promise whom he had been told would receive his blessings. This was a dire test indeed, far more painful than the command Abraham received earlier to be circumcised in his adulthood. Here he was asked to cut off with his own hand the life from his heir. But recall that Isaac is the child who was not born “according to the flesh,” he is the child who came to life from the dead womb of his mother Sara. And Hebrews tells us that Abraham considered that God would be able to raise him from the dead… and there seems to be some basis for this in the text, when Abraham tells his servents that “I and the boy will go over there and worship, and we will come again to you.” And again, when Isaac asks “where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”, Abraham answers “God will provide the lamb, my son.”

And without this mysterious command, we would have never had this powerful image of a Father knowingly sacrificing his own beloved son, an Old Testament image that is only matched in power by the New Testament truth of our heavenly Father sacrificing his own beloved son for our salvation. The story moves along briskly, but one can imagine the horror Abraham persevered through, as he cut the wood for the offering, marched for three days, gave the wood to Isaac to bear, endured his questions, built the altar and arranged the wood, and finally bound his son like a sacrificial animal and raised the knife to slaughter him. The painting of this scene by Rembrandt shows Abraham with his arm raised, holding the bound Isaac down with a single large hand that completely covers his face, as though Abraham couldn’t bear to look at the beloved Son whom he had been asked to sacrifice.

Why did this command come? That we might see the curse of the covenant, that we might see the price paid. Such a sacrifice, hundreds of years in the future, was the foundation of all the promises, all the blessings that Abraham and his seed would receive.

New Life as the Reward of Faith

And this testing of Abraham not only provides a picture of the cost of salvation, and a picture of the resurrection, according to Hebrews, but also a picture of Abraham’s faith, for the Angel of the Lord says “now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not hithheld your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham’s faith, according to James, is faith in action, it is faith completed in this act of obedience.

That faith should be active in works should not surprise us, and it is unfortunate that the diverse use of language in Paul and James has led many Reformation Christians to squirm, as though we had to explain away James. It is clear in Genesis 22 that the Lord blesses Abraham because he had done this thing. Abraham receives additional confirmation of the promises he had received, because of this act of obedience. But these blessings are not new — they are the same that were sealed to Abraham in the covenant of Genesis 15, and James himself quotes this earlier scripture referring to Abraham’s justification by faith.

The command to sacrifice Isaac was not a test of Abraham’s skill with the knife… it is a test of his faith. And Abraham’s performance showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that his trust in the Lord was beyond our comprehension. He was willing to sacrifice the greatest of blessings he had received from the Lord, in recognition that he had brought life forth from death, and could do so again.

And the supreme blessing of faith, of the Gospel, is the friendship we enjoy with God that can only come from a new heart, and the knowledge of God and his good that comes from intimate friendship with him, and walking with him. And knowing that he is our God, and we are his people. And that our iniquities have been forgiven, and our sins are remembered no longer by our good god in heaven. These are the blessings of the covenant that were bestowed upon Abraham in Genesis 15, and these blessings could not but bear the fruit of his obedience as he walked that three day journey to the mountain of Moriah. He trusted in the resurrection, for he had the life of the resurrection within himself. He knew what it was for all things to be made new again.

And so, Isaac, the victim, is a picture of the true descendant of Abraham, the true seed of Abraham. The Angel of the Lord — the preincarnate Lord — stayed that knife, because he knew that it was meant for his neck alone. Isaac, heir of the covenant, though he died. Isaac, who received all these blessings, that he might bestow them on Israel, the younger, weaker, undeserving Son. Isaac, in whom all of Abraham’s descendants were named, in whom all of us are named, passed under the knife, went down to the grave, and rose up again.

Sermon text as prepared for delivery; minor errors may remain. Please do not reprint or publish without the written permission of the author.