Summary:
God asked Abraham, the father of Israel, to be willing to do the same thing that God, our spiritual father, would do with His own son Jesus.
Background:
In Genesis 17, God tells Abraham that he will be the father of the Israelites. They would become a great nation and out of them would come a savior. When Abraham was 100 years old, God gave him a son named Isaac, but several years later God told him to sacrifice Isaac on an altar.
God never again asks anyone else to do this, and detests the idea of people doing it later (Deuteronomy 12:31). Why would He ask Abraham to do that?
To understand this, we need to remember who God called Abraham to be. God said that Abraham was going to be the father of God’s people on earth. While God never again asked anyone else to kill their children, God himself sacrificed His son Jesus a few thousand years later.
Explanation:
God wanted to make sure that the person who He called “the father of God’s people” was willing to do the same thing that He would have to do. The parallels are beautifully described in Genesis 22.
Abraham’s son rode a donkey to a hill, then carried wood upon his back up the hill to be the sacrifice. The other servants stayed at the bottom of the hill while Isaac walked up the mountain with his father.
God replaced Isaac as a sacrifice with a ram that was caught in a thicket by the horns. God also replaced our sacrifice with His own son, the lamb of God, who rode a donkey into Jerusalem, and whose disciples scattered just before the crucifixion. Like the ram with his horns caught in a thicket, Jesus wore a crown of thorns on His head and carried His wooden cross up the hill.
Deeper Understanding:
Knowing why God told Abraham to kill his son, not only gives us peace in a hard question, but it also reveals God’s mind. When Isaac walked up that mountain to be sacrificed, his father was next to him. His father knew what needed to be done, and stayed with him up the mountain. With all the parallels of Isaac and Jesus, we can see that Jesus was not alone when He walked up the hill to be crucified.
God, the Father, was next to Jesus during his crucifixion.
Jesus referenced this in John 16:32 when He said, “…you will be scattered, each to his own home, and will leave me alone. Yet, I am not alone, for the Father is with me.” We can imagine what Abraham must have been feeling walking with Isaac. Now we get a glimpse of what God was feeling too.
