Gênesis 22

Gênesis 22

Maclaren - Genesis 22:14 JEHOVAH JIREH And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah Jireh (that is, The Lord will provide) (Ge 22:14). As these two, Abraham and Isaac, were traveling up the hill, the son bearing the wood and the father with the sad burden of the fire and the knife, the boy said: “Where is the lamb?” and Abraham, thrusting down his emotion and steadying his voice, said: “My son, God will provide Himself a lamb.” When the wonderful issue of the trial was plain before him and he looked back upon it, the one thought that rose to his mind was of how, beyond his meaning, his words had been true. So he named that place by a name that spoke nothing of his trial but everything of God's provision—“The Lord will see,” or “The Lord will provide.” What the Words Mean The words have become proverbial and threadbare as a commonplace of Christian feeling. But it may be worth our while to ask for a moment what it was exactly that Abraham expected the Lord to provide. We generally use the expression in reference to outward things and see in it the assurance that we shall not be left without the supply of the necessities for which, because God has made us to feel them, He has bound Himself to make provision. And most blessedly true is that application of them, and many a Christian heart in days of famine has been satisfied with the promise when the bread that was given has been scant. But there is a meaning deeper than that in the words. It is true, thank God! that we may cast all our anxiety about all outward things upon Him in the assurance that He who feeds the ravens will feed US, and that if lilies can blossom into beauty without care, we shall be held by our Father of more value than these. But there is a deeper meaning in the provision spoken of here. What was it that God provided for Abraham? What is it that God provides for us? A way to discharge the arduous duties which, when they are commanded, seem all but impossible for us and which, the nearer we come to them, look the more dreadful and seem the more impossible. And yet, when the heart has yielded itself in obedience and we are ready to do the thing that is enjoined, there opens up before us a possibility provided by God, and strength comes to us equal to our day, and some unexpected gift is put into our hand which enables us to do the thing of which Nature said: “My heart will break before I can do it”; and in regard to which even Grace doubted whether it was possible for us to carry it through. If our hearts are set in obedience to the command, the farther we go on the path of obedience, the easier the command will appear, and to try to do it is to ensure that God will help us to do it. This is the main provision that God makes, and it is the highest provision that He can make for there is nothing in this life that we need so much as to do the will of our Father in heaven. All outward wants are poor compared with that. The one thing worth living for, the one thing which in being secured we are blessed and being missed we are miserable, is compliance in heart with the commandment of our Father, and the compliance wrought out in life. So, of all gifts that He bestows upon us and of all the abundant provision out of His rich storehouses is not this the best, that we are made ready for any required service? When we get to the place we shall find some lamb “caught in the thicket by its horns”; and heaven itself will supply what is needful for our burnt offering. And then there is another thought here which, though we cannot certainly say it was in the speaker's mind, is distinctly in the historian's intention, “The Lord will provide.” Provide what? The lamb for the burnt offering which He has commanded. It seems probable that that bare mountaintop which Abraham saw from afar and named Jehovah Jireh, was the mountain-top on which afterward the Temple was built. And perhaps the wood was piled for the altar on that very piece of primitive rock which still stands visible, though Temple and altar have long since gone, and which for many a day was the place of the altar on which the sacrifices of Israel were offered. It is no mere forcing of Christian meanings on to old stories but the discerning of that prophetic and spiritual element which God has impressed upon these histories of the past, especially in all their climaxes and crises, when we see in the fact that God provided the ram which became the appointed sacrifice, through which Isaac's life was preserved, a dim adumbration of the great truth that the only Sacrifice which God accepts for the world's sin is the Sacrifice which He Himself has provided. This is the deepest meaning of all the sacrificial worship, as of Israel so of heathen nations—God Himself will provide a Lamb. The world had built altars, and Israel, by divine appointment, had its altar too. All these express the want which none of them can satisfy. They show that man needed a Sacrifice and that Sacrifice God has provided. He asked from Abraham less than He gives to us. Abraham's devotion was sealed and certified because he did not withhold his son, his only son, from God. And God's love is sealed because He has not withheld His only-begotten Son from us. So this name that came from Abraham's grateful and wondering lips contains a truth which holds true in all regions of our wants. On the lowest level, the outward supply of outward needs; on a higher, the means of discharging hard duties and a path through sharp trials; and, on the highest of all, the spotless sacrifice which alone avails for the world's sins—these are the things which God provides. The Conditions in the Case So, note again on what conditions He provides them. The incident and the name became the occasion of a proverb, as the historian tells us, which survived down to the period of his writing, and probably long after, when men were accustomed to say, “In the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.” The provision of all sorts that we need has certain conditions as to the when and the where of the persons to whom it shall be granted. “In the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.” If we wish to have our outward needs supplied, our outward weaknesses strengthened, power and energy sufficient for duty, wisdom for perplexity, a share in the Sacrifice which takes away the sins of the world, we receive them all on the condition that we are found in the place where all God's provision is treasured. If a man chooses to sit outside the baker's shop, he may starve on its threshold. If a man will not go into the bank, his pockets will be empty though there may be bursting coffers there to which he has a right. And if we will not ascend to the hill of the Lord, and stand in His holy place by simple faith, and by true communion of heart and life, God's amplest provision is nought to us; and we are empty in the midst of affluence. Get near to God if you would partake of what He has prepared. Live in fellowship with Him by simple love and often meditate on Him if you would drink in of His fullness. And be sure of this, that howsoever within His house the stores are heaped and the treasury full, you will have neither part nor lot in the matter unless you are children of the house. “In the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.” And round it there is a waste wilderness of famine and of death. When the Provision Comes Further, note when the provision is realized. When the man is standing with the knife in his hand and the next minute it will be red with the son's blood—then the call comes: “Abraham!” and then he sees the ram caught in the thicket. There had been a long weary journey from their home away down in the dry, sunny south, a long tramp over the rough hills, a toilsome climb with a breaking heart in the father's bosom, and a dim foreboding gradually stealing on the child's spirit. But there was no sign of respite or of deliverance. Slowly he piles together the wood, and yet no sign. Slowly he binds his boy and lays him on it, and still no sign. Slowly, reluctantly, and yet resolvedly, he unsheathes the knife, and yet no sign. He lifts his hand, and then it comes. That is God's way always. Up to the very edge we are driven before His hand is put out to help us. Such is the law, not only because the next moment is always necessarily dark nor because God will deal with us in any arbitrary fashion and play with our fears, but because it is best for us that we should be forced to desperation and out of desperation should “pluck the flower, safety.” It is best for us that we should be brought to say, “My foot slippeth!” and then, just as our toes are sliding upon the glacier, the help comes and “Thy mercy held me up.” “The Lord is our helper, and that right early.” When He delays, it is not to trifle with us but to do us good by the sense of need as well as by the experience of deliverance. At the last moment, never before it, never until we have found out how much we need it, and never too late, comes the Helper. So “it is provided” for the people that quietly and persistently tread the path of duty and go wherever His hand leads them without asking anything about where it does lead. The condition of the provision is our obedience of heart and will. To Abraham doing what he was commanded, though his heart was breaking as he did it, the help was granted—as it always will be. What to Do with the Provision And so, lastly, note what we are to do with the provision when we get it. Abraham christened the anonymous mountaintop, not by a name that reminded him or others of his trial, but by a name that proclaimed God's deliverance. He did not say anything about his agony or about his obedience. God spoke about that, not Abraham. He did not want these to be remembered, but what he desired to hand on to later generations was what God had done for him. Oh! dear friends, is that the way in which we look back upon life? Many a bare, bald mountaintop in your career and mine we have names for. Are they names that commemorate our sufferings or God's blessings? When we look back on the past, what do we see? Times of trial or time of deliverance? Which side of the wave do we choose to look at, the one that is smitten by the sunshine or the one that is all black and purple in the shadow? The sea looked at from the one side will be all a sunny path, and from the other, dark as chaos. Let us name the heights that lie behind us, visible to memory, by names that commemorate, not the troubles that we had on them, but the deliverances that on them we received from God. This name enshrines the duty of commemoration—yes! and the duty of expectation. “The Lord will provide.” How do you know that, Abraham? And his answer is, “Because the Lord did provide.” That is a shaky kind of argument if we use it about one another. Our resources may give out, our patience may weary. If it is a storehouse that we have to go to, all the com that is treasured in it will be eaten up some day; but if it is to some boundless plain that grows it that we go, then we can be sure that there will be a harvest next year as there has been a harvest last. And so we have to think of God not as a storehouse but as the soil from which there comes forth, year by year and generation after generation, the same crop of rich blessings for the needs and the hungers of every soul. If we have to draw from reservoirs we cannot say, “I have gone with my pitcher to the well six times, and I shall get it filled at the seventh.” It is more probable that we shall have to say, “I have gone so often that I durst not go any more”; but if we have to go not to a well but to a fountain, then the oftener we go, the surer we become that its crystal cool waters will always be ready for us. “Thou hast been with me in six troubles; and in seven thou wilt not forsake me,” is a bad conclusion to draw about one another; but it is the right conclusion to draw about God. And so, as we look back upon our past lives and see many a peak gleaming in the magic light of memory, let us name them all by names that will throw a radiance of hope on the unknown and unclimbed difficulties before us and say, as the patriarch did when he went down from the mount of his trial and deliverance, “The Lord will provide.” JEHOVAH JIREH John MacDuff "This is the resting place, let the weary rest; and this is the place of repose"— "The Lord will provide." Genesis 22:14 The Elim-palms only environed Israel's temporary resting-place—marked one of the many wilderness camping-grounds on the way to Canaan. In the very next words after the recorded tent-pitching by the twelve wells, we read, "Then they left Elim" (Ex. 16:1). If "Get up, go away! For this is not your resting place," be the watchword for all God's pilgrims still, what, it may be asked, of the untrodden journey? What of tomorrow's march? What of the unknown future? "The Lord will provide!" That future is in the keeping of the God of the pillar-cloud, and we may well leave it there. These refreshing palm-groves at one encampment may well be taken as pledges of His faithfulness and loving care, until the last stage of the wilderness journey be reached, and 'the fields of living green' appear in view. How beautiful the impress of the Divine hand in the works of outer nature. Every blade of grass, every forest leaf, how perfect, in symmetry of form, and in tenderness of color! With what exquisite elegance He has pencilled every flower, delicately poised it on its stalk, or spread a pillow for its head on the tender sod! The God who has "so clothed the grass of the field," will not be forgetful of the lowliest of His covenant family. It is for us to say, as we lie passive in His hands, "O Lord, come to my aid!" He, portioning out for us as He sees fit, and having His own infinite reasons for what may appear perplexing to us—we, with an unquestioning and unreasoning faith, fully trusting His power, tenderness, vigilance, love. He does not consult our short-sighted wisdom in what He does. The clouds do not consult the earth as to when they shall visit its fruits and flowers—its cornfields and forests, with their watery treasures. The pining plant does not dictate to the cloud-reservoirs as to when they shall unseal their hidden stores. These give a kindly and needful supply "in due season," and the earth has never yet (for six thousand years) had to complain of them as miserly distributors of their Creator's bounty. So it is with the soul. He who makes the clouds His chariot—who opens and shuts at will the windows of heaven—locking and unlocking the springs of the great deep—says to all His people, 'Trust Me; I will give you all needed present blessings; I will come to you like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth. I do not pledge myself as to how or when the rain shall fall—but I will send down showers in season; there will be showers of blessing.' Happy for us, if we are able to respond with a declaration of entire confidence in a present, personal God, in whom we live, and move, and have our being! Behold the sun of the natural heavens, the great central luminary—a dumb unfeeling mass of matter—holding its dependent planets in their orbits, controlling their unerring movements; they, in calm, silent submission, yielding obedience to the will of this sovereign lord! How much more may we hold on our way in the orbit of undeviating obedience, exulting in Jehovah's ever-present power and love; so that in the most remote solitude, as well as the most dense crowd, we can say, 'Alone, yet not alone, for my Father is with me!' And if we thus confide in God, He will confide in us. Beautiful are the words of the prophet, "You meet him who rejoices and works righteousness; those that remember You in Your ways." Those that remember You and confide in You, "You meet them!" The Lord comes out halfway to meet the confiding heart. Let us listen to the words of Him who spoke as never man spoke, "Take no thought" (that is to say, Do not be over-anxious or over-careful) "for tomorrow." That 'tomorrow' is in the hands of One boundless in His resources, infinite in His compassion. He not only distributes the destiny of His people, but He molds and adapts them for their lots and positions in life. Just as in outer nature He adapts the varied classes in the vegetable world for different climates. As the palm was the tree of the desert, the olive that of Palestine, the cedar, of Lebanon—so is it with every tree of righteousness. They too are "the planting of the Lord;" and wherever planted, there, in their varied ways, they may 'glorify' Him. Do not charge God with insincerity, when He declares, through His inspired Apostle, that all things work together for good to those who love Him. "No good thing will He withhold from those who walk uprightly." If He leads you along a rough and thorny road, hear His loving voice thus reassuring your faith and lulling your misgivings, 'Your heavenly Father knows that you have need of all these things.' He foresees and anticipates every emergency that can overtake you. He can ward off every danger, and disarm every foe. As you may be now surveying the yet-untrodden road, leading 'uphill and downhill, to the city of habitation,' remember the words of Him who has said, "I will never leave you, nor forsake you." "Leave, oh leave your fond aspirings, Bid your restless heart be still; Cease, oh cease your vain desirings, Only seek your Father's will. Leave behind your faithless sorrow, And your every anxious care; He who only knows the morrow Can for you its burden bear. Leave the darkness gathering o'er thee, Leave the shadow land behind; Realms of glory lie before thee, Enter in, and welcome find." "Commit your way to the Lord; trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass." JEHOVAH-JIREH: A TREATISE ON PROVIDENCE William S. Plumer, 1865 Abraham named the place "Jehovah-jireh." (The Lord Will Provide) This name has now become a proverb: "On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided." Genesis 22:14 I would assert eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men. "Our God is in heaven and does whatever He pleases!" Psalm 115:3 "For I know that the Lord is great; our Lord is greater than all gods. The Lord does whatever He pleases in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all the depths!" Psalm 135:5-6 "Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns!" Revelation 19:6 Providence Asserted Providence Defined God's Providence Results from His Nature. It is Holy, Just, Benevolent, Wise, Supreme and Sovereign, Sure and Stable, Powerful and Irresistible God's Providence is Universal Practical Remarks on the Nature of Providence God's Providence is Retributive Some Explanation of the Delays of Providence in Punishing the Wicked How Divine Forbearance Should Be Regarded—and How it May Be Abused Several Principles of the Doctrine of Providence over Wicked Men Illustrated in the Life and End of Judas Iscariot The Mysteries of God's Providence Practical Remarks on the Mysteries of God's Providence The Special Kindness of Providence Towards Godly Men Practical Remarks on the Special Kindness of Providence Towards Godly Men Alternate Light and Darkness in Providence,, Illustrated in the Case of Job God's Providence Towards His Church Renders Unnecessary All Tormenting Fears Respecting Her Safety and Final Triumph God's Providence over Nations Providence Punishes Nations for Their Sins Providences are long chains with many links in them. If one link were missing, the event would fail. But it is God's chain and God's plan. The thing is fixed. The outcome is not doubtful. "I know that You can do all things; no plan of Yours can be thwarted." Job 42:2 "My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please. What I have said, that will I bring about; what I have planned, that will I do." Isaiah 46:10-11 "The plan of Him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will." Ephesians 1:11 "This is the plan determined for the whole world." Isaiah 14:26 MORE RELATED RESOURCES GE 22:1-18 GOD DID TEMPT ABRAHAM The trial of Abraham I. THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF ABRAHAM WHEN THIS TRIAL CAME. His hope was set on Isaac as the medium through which God’s promise could be fulfilled, and he had been encouraged by observing him rising year after year to the age and stature of manhood. II. GOD’S CONNECTION WITH THE TRIAL. He subjected Abraham to a testing trial in order to prove his faith. 1. There was no attempt in the action of God, bearing upon Abraham, in the least to diminish the patriarch’s affection for his son. 2. In the command binding Abraham to offer up his son there was an assertion of Jehovah’s right to be regarded as the supreme object of His creatures’ love. III. ABRAHAM UNDER AND AFTER THE TRIAL. 1. His fear of God was tested by this trial. 2. His faith in God was tested by the trial. But the result was blessed to him in these four ways: (1) He obtained an attestation from heaven of his fear and of his faith. (2) He obtained a new revelation of Messiah as the atoning Surety. (3) He brought back with him alive his only son, whom he loved. (4) He held “Jehovah-jireh” in the grasp of his faith, and had Him pledged to care for him always. Application: 1. Learn that true faith is sure to be tested faith. 2. Learn that all love must be subordinated to love for God. 3. Learn that the only way to be truly strong is to have faith in God. 4. Learn that God will never fail under the leanings of faith. 5. Learn from this text that no one need expect an attestation of his fear and faith except when these are revived and exercised. (J. Kennedy, D. D.) Abraham’s trial It is by trial that the character of a Christian is formed. Each part of his character, like every part of his armour, is put to the proof; and it is the proof that tests, after all, the strength both of resistance and defence and attack. I. The voice of God to Abraham was NOT HEARD IN AUDIBLE WORDS; it was a voice in the soul constantly directing him to duty and self-sacrifice. The voice told him, as he thought--I do not for a moment say as God meant--that his duty was to sacrifice his son. The memories of olden days may have clung and hovered about him. He remembered the human sacrifices he had seen in his childhood; the notion of making the gods merciful by some action of man may still have lingered in his bosom. We have here the first instance of that false and perverse interpretation which made the letter instead of the spirit to rule the human heart. II. As Abraham increases in faith HE GROWS IN KNOWLEDGE, until at last more and more he can hear “Lay not thy hand upon thy son.” “God will provide Himself a sacrifice” bursts from his lips before the full light bursts upon his soul. In this conflict Abraham’s will was to do all that God revealed for him to do. In every age and in every station faith is expressed in simple dutifulness, and this faith of Abraham is, indeed, of the mind of Christ. We may be perplexed, but we need not be in despair. When we arrive on Mount Moriah, then the meaning of the duty God requires of us will be made clear. And as we approach the unseen, and our souls are more schooled and disciplined to God, we shall find that to offer ourselves and lose ourselves is to find ourselves in God more perfect. (Canon Rowsell.) Abraham’s sacrifice The birth of Isaac brought Abraham nearer to God; though he had believed in Him so long, it was as if he now believed in Him for the first time--so much is he carried out of himself, such a vision has he of One who orders ages past and to come, and yet is interested for the feeblest of those whom He has made. Out of such feelings comes the craving for the power to make some sacrifice, to find a sacrifice which shall not be nominal but real. I. The Book of Genesis says, “God did tempt Abraham.” The seed did not drop by accident into the patriarch’s mind; it was not self-sown; it was not put into him by the suggestion of some of his fellows. It was his Divine Teacher who led him on to his terrible conclusion, “The sacrifice that I must offer is that very gift that has caused me all my joy.” II. Abraham must know what God’s meaning is: he is certain that in some way it will be proved that He has not designed His creature to do a wicked and monstrous thing, and yet that there is a purpose in the revelation that has been made to him; that a submission and sacrifice, such as he has never made yet, are called for now. He takes his son; he goes three days’ journey to Mount Moriah; he prepares the altar and the wood and the knife; his son is with him, but he has already offered up himself. And now he is taught that this is the offering that God was seeking for; that when the real victim has been slain, the ram caught in the thicket is all that is needed for the symbolical expression of that inward oblation. III. When this secret has been learnt, every blessing became an actual vital blessing; every gift was changed into a spiritual treasure. Abraham had found that sacrifice lies at the very root of our being; that our lives depend upon it; that all power to be right and to do right begins with the offering up of ourselves, because it is thus that the righteous Lord makes us like Himself. (F. D. Maurice, M. A.) Abraham’s temptation A temptation had come upon Abraham; he thought that it was the right thing to do, and that he was called to do it; so after brooding over it intently for several days, he was irresistibly drawn to take the knife for the purpose of slaying his son. I. Since the child of promise had been born to him, his natural tendency had been to repose on Isaac rather than on God. After a while he would awake to the troubled consciousness that it was not with him as in other days; that he had sunk from the serene summit on which he once stood. Brooding thus from day to day he came to feel as if a voice were calling him to prove himself by voluntarily renouncing the son that had been given him. He was driven wild, fevered into madness, through the fervour of his desire to maintain trust in the great Father, even as now men sometimes are by the lurid burning of distrust. II. But did not God tempt him? you say. Is it not so recorded? Yes, undoubtedly; in the patriarch’s mind it was God tempting him. The narrative is a narrative of what took place in his mind; the whole is a subjective scene, portrayed objectively. The old Canaanite practice of offering human sacrifices suggested to Abraham the cultivation and manifestation of trust by immolating his son. III. Although God did not suggest the crime, yet He was in the trial--the trial of maintaining and fostering trust without allowing it to lead him by perversion into crime. IV. We see God penetrating and disengaging the grace in Abraham which lay behind the wrongness. He divided between the true motive of the heart and the false conclusion of the weak brain. He notes and treasures every bit of good that blushes amidst our badness. (S. A. Tipple.) The crucial test I. THERE COME TIMES IN HUMAN LIFE WHEN MEN MUST UNDERGO A CRUCIAL TEST. A man can have but one trial in his lifetime; one great sorrow, beside which all other griefs dwindle into insignificance. II. THE CRUCIAL TEST CAN ONLY TAKE PLACE IN REFERENCE TO THAT WHICH WE LOVE AND VALUE MOST. DO we so hold that which is dearest to us upon earth, that we could surrender it at the Divine bidding? III. Abraham’s answer, “My son, God will provide Himself a lamb,” IS THE SUM OF ALL MEDIATORIAL HISTORY; it is the main discovery of love. After all, what has the world done but to find an altar? It found the Cross; it never could have found the Saviour. IV. The narrative shows WHAT GOD INTENDS BY HIS DISCIPLINE OF MAN. He did not require Isaac’s life; He only required the entire subordination of Abraham’s will. (J. Parker, D. D.) Lessons from the trial of Abraham 1. We learn from this passage the lesson that God taught Abraham that all souls and all beings are His, and that our greatest and dearest possessions are beneath His control and within His grasp. 2. We learn also a lesson of obedience. Abraham was called upon to make the greatest possible sacrifice, a sacrifice that seemed to clash with the instinct of reason, affection, and religion alike, and yet without a murmur he obeyed the command of God. We learn, too, that for wise reasons God sometimes permits the trial of His people’s faith--not to weaken, but to strengthen it, for He knows that if it be genuine, trial will have the same effect which the storm produces on the kingly oak, only rooting it more firmly in the soil. 4. We learn that God’s provisions are ever equal to His people’s wants. Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity. He giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not. (J. W. Atkinson.) Abraham offering Isaac All the elements of piety were in this act. The voice of the Lord heard and obeyed is essential to religion. The unshaken conviction that all He requires is best, though one lose thereby all but Himself, is the substance of religion. Abraham heard and did and trusted. Thus he became our worthy example. I. His TRIAL. What could it mean? Abraham had the traditions and prejudices of his time. No man can be much above them. With all the manifestations of Jehovah to him, there yet lingered in his mind the common ideas of God and of His requirements which the common people had. He was in conflict between the two. The sense of sin and guilt was universal; the hope of propitiation as well. Human sacrifice was common. It represented the most stern exaction by the offended deity and the greatest gift which the transgressor could make. Popular custom helped the conceit in the patriarch. While heathen were so ready to show their faith in the false god, much more must he exhibit as great for the true. Could he withhold the choicest thing while imagining the Almighty asked for it, then his was a partial, not a single and complete, fealty. Isaac must not rival Jehovah in his affection. More and more plain the issue became, till his intense impressions seemed the solemn accents of his Maker, bidding him take the precious life. So far, at least, must he be willing to blot out every means by which his darling desire might be gained. Was not this an early illustration of the crucial test: “He that loveth son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me”? II. HIS OBEDIENCE. “Doubtless,” one says, “while Abraham lifted up the knife to slay his son, the sun was turned to darkness to him, the stars left their places, and earth and heaven vanished from his sight. To the eye of sense, all was gone that life had built up, and the promise had come actually to an end for evermore; but to the friend of God all was still as certain as ever--all absolutely sure and fixed. The end, the promise, nay even the son of the promise--even he, in the fire of the burnt-offering--was not gone, because that was near and close at hand which could restore: the great Power which could reverse everything. The heir was safe in the strong hope of him who accounted that God was able to raise him up even from the dead.” The offering, so far as the offerer was concerned, had been made. His obedience to the word he thought to hear was perfect. God’s will and his were one. III. His ACCEPTANCE. From that lofty summit in the land of Moriah there went up to heaven the sweet savour of acceptable sacrifice before any fire was kindled on the altar. So in the grossest darkness it may be still, where they who know not of the true God bring as perfect a gift. But piety and humaneness alike impel all who have heard the protest from the lips of Jehovah to speed with it to them whose sacrificial knives are about to be bathed in the blood of their firstborn. Thus again Christ arrests the devout and teaches them His righteousness. IV. HIS DELIVERANCE. The place was “Jehovah-jireh “ indeed, for the Lord bad provided Himself the lamb for the burnt-offering. The sacrifice in its outward form should not fail. Here was the Divine sanction of the method of substitution. Here was foreshadowed the ritual of Tabernacle and Temple, and, most dimly, “the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” Isaac need not die, but the animal must. We need not perish, but the Christ must give His flesh and blood for the life of the world. The victim was God’s choice in the first instance: He was in the last. In the smoke and flames of this first sacrifice ascended not only the tribute of a penitent and adoring soul, but also the unutterable gratitude for a life given back as from the dead. (DeWitt S. Clark.) Abraham’s trial, obedience, and reward I. ABRAHAM’S TRIAL. 1. Purpose of this trial. Not to discover something unknown; but to test the strength of a recognized faith. To illustrate the gift of Christ; whose day Abraham saw afar off. 2. The nature of this trial. (1) The sacrifice of a son. An only son. A well-beloved son. (2) By the father’s own hands. (3) A son of promise. Through whom was expected the fulfilment of the covenant. In whom this great believer’s hopes centred. What is the trial of our faith as compared with this? How little does our faith in God call us to surrender. Yet the “trial of our faith is more precious than of gold which perisheth.” II. ABRAHAM’S OBEDIENCE. 1. He did not wait for the repetition of the command, nor demand additional evidence concerning it. Did not imagine he might have mistaken its nature. Did not question the love or wisdom of God. Did not wait till he perfectly understood its purpose. 2. It was prompt. To hear was to obey. Rose early. Prepared at once. 3. It was ruled by precedence. Told no one his purpose. What might Sarah and Isaac have done or said to hinder the execution of the plan? Conceals it from his young men. The wood was cleft at home and taken with him. There might be none on the spot. That might be a hindrance. 4. It was marked by great self-control. Does not by manner express a mental burden. The affecting conversation with Isaac by the way. 5. It was distinguished by an heroic confidence in God. The Lord will provide. He fully believed he should return to the young men with Isaac. Expected he would be raised from the dead (Rom 4:16-22). III. ABRAHAM’S REWARD. Having built an altar, he bound his son. Non-resistance of Isaac (“Jesus, the Son of God, became obedient unto death.” “No man taketh My life from Me,” &c. Isaac, at twenty-five years of age, might have resisted, but did not). Learn-- 1. Receive with submission the trial of our faith. 2. Cheerfully and promptly obey God. 3. The Lord has provided. Jesus died willingly. (J. C. Gray.) Temptation a trial When a person took the first Napoleon a shot-proof coat of mail, the emperor fired many shots at it, whilst the inventor had it on. Finding it answered, the emperor gave the maker a reward. Storms of trial, sacrifices to be made, obedience required, or loving services demanded, will test us. Constantine thus tested the Christians in his household, when he required them to give up their religion under a heavy penalty. Those, however, who were faithful he took into his particular favour and service. Trials reveal God to us It is the mission of trouble to make earth worth most and heaven worth more. I suppose sometimes you have gone to see a panorama, and the room has been darkened where you were sitting--this light put out, and that light put out, until the room was entirely darkened where you sat. Then the panorama passed before you, and you saw the towns and villages, the cities and the palaces. And just so God in this world comes to us and puts out this light of joy, this light of worldly prosperity, and this light of satisfaction; and when He has made it all dark around us, then He makes to pass before our souls the palaces of heaven and the glories that never die. (Dr. Talmage.) Abraham’s faith tried and triumphant The significance of the transaction is rooted in the fact that Abraham was not a mere private individual, but in a very special sense a representative man. God’s communications to him were made, not for his own sake alone, but also for that of those who should come after him. There was a revelation through Abraham as well as to him; and in this transaction God was seeking not only to develop Abraham’s faith to its highest exercise, but at the same time to instruct him and all his spiritual children in their duty to their covenant Lord. It was literal fact, but it was also acted parable. I would say that the whole story was meant to reveal the universal law to this effect, that what is born of God must be consecrated to God; that the children of promise are at the same time the children of consecration, and so there is no more difficulty in the command to sacrifice Isaac than there is in the injunction to cast out Ishmael. Both alike arose out of the representative character of Abraham and his seed, and through both alike a revelation has been made for all time. The one says to unbelievers, “Ye must be born again”; the other says to believers, “I beseech you by the mercies of God that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable, unto God, which is your reasonable service.” The whole transaction, therefore, literal fact as it was, was at the same time the acted hieroglyphic of a spiritual revelation foreshadowing the self-sacrifice of the Christian to his Lord. But now leaving the merely expository for the time, let us take with us one or two practical lessons suggested by the whole subject. 1. And in the first place we may learn that the people of God should expect trial on the earth’. Here is one of the greatest saints subjected to the severest of tests, and that not as an isolated experience but as the last of a series which began when he was called to leave his country and his kindred in the land of the Chaldees. So when we are required to pass through ordeals that seem to us inexplicable let us not imagine that some strange thing has happened to us. And Tholuck is right when he says: “I find in all Christians who have passed through much tribulation, a certain quality of ripeness which I am of opinion can be acquired in no other school. Just as a certain degree of solar heat is necessary to bring the finest sorts of fruit to perfection, so is fiery trial indispensable for ripening the inner man.” Nor is this all: trial may come upon the believer for the sake of others rather than for his own. The chemist darkens the room when he would show some of his finest experiments; and when God designs to let others see what His grace can enable His people to endure, He darkens their history by trial. So God, by our trials, may be seeking to show through us what His grace can do; may be making manifest the reality of His presence with His people in the fire, in such a way as to bring others in penitence to His feet. Thus we too may vicariously endure, and so enter into what Paul has called “the fellowship” of the Saviour’s sufferings. What a sting does that take out of many of our trials! 2. But we may learn in the second place, that if we would stand trial thoroughly we must meet it in faith. Tribulation by itself will not improve our characters. The patriarch did not know the way God was taking with him; but he knew God. He had received such proof of His tenderness, His faithfulness, and His wisdom in the past that he could trust Him now; and so putting his hand in the Divine grasp, he was once more upheld by God’s strength. Andrew Fuller has well said that a man has only as much faith as he can command in the day of trial. 3. Finally, we may learn that faith triumphant is always rewarded. At the end of this dreadful ordeal the Lord renewed the covenant with Abraham; and in the belief of many writers, it was on this occasion that he was permitted to see Christ’s day and to rejoice in the assurance thereby given him that his hope should never be belied. (W. M. Taylor, D. D.) Abraham’s trial I. ITS LEGALITY. Would God command to kill who saith, Thou shalt not kill? (1) The supreme Lawgiver, who made that law, can out of His uncontrollable sovereignty, dispense with His own law. (2) God did not command Abraham to do this, as it was an act of rebellion against His own moral law (which was not now promulgated, as after by Moses) nor against the law of nature, which is writ in every man’s heart, and so in Abraham’s (Rom 2:14-15), but as it was an act of obedience to the great Lawgiver; and therefore it was necessary that Abraham should well know it was God, and not the devil, who tempted him to this act, which in itself seemed so unnatural for a father to kill his own son, and wherein God seemed so contrary to Himself, and to His own positive precepts and promises; this Abraham knew well, (a) from special illumination; (b) from familiar experience of God’s speaking to him, whose voice he knew as well as the voice of his wife Sarah’s. (c) This voice came not to him in a dream (which would have been more uncertain, and less distinguishable from the devil’s deceit), but while Abraham was awake; for it is not said that he stayed till he was awaked out of sleep, but immediately he rose up and addressed himself to his business, which intimates he understood his author from the plainest manner of speaking to him, without any ambiguity in so arduous an affair. II. What were the DIFFICULTIES of Abraham’s duty under this command of God? 1. God saith not to him, Take thy servants, but thy son. Oh then what a cutting, killing command was this to Abraham, Take (not thy servant, but) thy son! 2. Thy only son. Had he had many sons, the trial had been more bearable. Here was another aggravation; for a tree to have but one branch and to have that lopped off; for a body to have but one member, and to have that dismembered. 3. Yet higher, Whom thou lovest (Gen 22:2). Isaac was a gracious and dutiful son, obedient both to his earthly and to his heavenly Father, and therefore Abraham did love him the more; had he been some graceless son, his grief had been the less. 4. Higher than that, Isaac was the son of God’s promise--In him shall thy seed be called. So he was the son of all his father’s hope of posterity, yet his expectation hereof, and of the accomplishment of God’s promise (given to relieve him, when his mouth was out of taste with all His other mercies), as victory (Gen 14:1-24.), protection and provision (Gen 15:1): he could take no joy in his former conquest or present promise, because childless (Gen 5:2)--must by this means be cut off in the offering up of Isaac. 5. But the greatest conflict of all was, that the Messiah was promised to come of Isaac, and so the salvation of the world did seem to perish with Isaac’s perishing. Notwithstanding all these difficulties, Abraham acts his part of obedience-- 1. With all alacrity and readiness to obey, he rose up early (Gen 22:3), making no dilatory work about it. Thus David did, saying, I made haste, and delayed not (Psa 119:60). 2. The constancy and continuance of this his ready obedience it is a wonder how his heart was kept in such an obedient frame for three days together, all the time of his travelling from Beersheba to Mount Moriah. 3. Abraham’s prudence in leaving his servants and the ass at the foot of the hill (Gen 22:5). 4. Abraham’s confidence herein. (1) Speaking prophetically, we will both of us come again to God Gen 22:5), and (2) God will provide Himself a lamb (Gen 22:8). Abraham believed to receive his son again from the dead (Heb 11:19). Yet this cannot be the genuine sense. As Abraham did, so every child of Abraham ought to evidence their fear and love to God (Gen 22:12). (C. Ness.) Trial of Abraham This is the most extraordinary command which we find in Scripture. In order to set it in the most intelligible and instructive light, I shall make the following inquiries. I. LET US INQUIRE, WHETHER GOD HAD A RIGHT TO GIVE THIS COMMAND TO ABRAHAM. 1. In the first place, God did not command Abraham to murder Isaac, or to take away his life from malice prepense. He required him only to offer him a burnt sacrifice; and though this implied the taking away of life, yet it did not imply anything of the nature of murder. 2. In the next place, it must be allowed that God Himself had an original and independent right to take away that life from Isaac, which He had of His mere sovereignty given him. It is a Divine and self-evident truth, that He has a right to do what He will with His own creatures. And this right God not only claims, but constantly exercises, in respect to the lives of men. He taketh away, and who can hinder Him? And He takes away when, and where, and by whom He pleases. 3. Farthermore, God has a right to require men to do that at one time which He has forbidden them to do at another. Though He had forbidden men to offer human sacrifices in general, yet He had a right to require Abraham, in particular, to offer up Isaac as a burnt sacrifice. And after He had required him to sacrifice Isaac, He had a right to forbid him to do it, as He actually did. II. WHETHER ABRAHAM COULD KNOW THAT THIS COMMAND CAME FROM GOD. Now it must be granted by all, that if Abraham did sacrifice Isaac, or offer him upon the altar, he really thought God did require him to do it; and, if he did really think so, it must have been owing either to his own heated imagination, or to the delusion of some evil spirit, or else to some real evidence of God’s requiring him to sacrifice his son. But it is evident that it could not be owing to his own heated imagination; because there was nothing in nature to lead him to form such an imagination. The command was contrary to everything that God had before required of him; it was contrary to what God had revealed in respect to human sacrifices; and it was contrary to all the natural instincts, inclinations, and feelings of the human heart. Nor is there any better reason to think that he was under the delusion of some evil spirit. We can by no means suppose that God would suffer such an excellent man as Abraham to be deluded in such an extraordinary case, by the great deceiver; nor that Satan would be disposed to tempt Abraham to do what he really thought would be for the glory of God. Nor can we suppose, if Satan viewed it as a criminal action, that he would have restrained him from committing the crime. But if Abraham was not led to think that God required him to sacrifice his son, by a wild imagination, nor by the delusion of an evil spirit, then we are constrained to conclude that he had clear and conclusive evidence of the command’s coming from God. III. WHY GOD COMMANDED ABRAHAM TO SACRIFICE HIS SON. 1. It is evident that Abraham’s offering Isaac upon the altar was a lively type or representation of God’s offering Christ as a sacrifice for the sins of the world. 2. God meant, by the command in the text, to try or prove whether Abraham loved Him sincerely and supremely. IV. WHETHER THIS COMMAND TO ABRAHAM ANSWERED THE END WHICH GOD PROPOSED IN GIVING IT. And we find that Abraham did actually and punctually obey both the letter and spirit of the command; by which he gave an infallible evidence that he loved God sincerely and supremely. 1. He obeyed, in contrariety to all the natural feelings and affections of the human heart. 2. The cheerfulness and promptitude with which he obeyed the Divine command increase the evidence of the sincerity and supremacy of his love to God. 3. His obedience to the command to sacrifice his son was obedience to the mere will of God; which renders it, in the highest possible degree, evidential of his real and supreme love to Him. Improvement-- 1. It appears from Abraham’s ready obedience to the command in the text, that those who are willing to obey God, can very easily understand the real meaning of his commands. 2. Did Abraham exhibit the highest evidence of his sincere and supreme love to God, by obedience to His command? Then we learn that this is the only way for all good men to exhibit the highest evidence of their sincere and supreme love to God. 3. It appears from the obedience of Abraham to the Divine command, that all true obedience to God flows from pure disinterested love to Him. 4. It appears from God’s design in giving the command in the text, and from the effects of it, that Christians have no reason to think it strange concerning the fiery trials which they are called to endure. God has a good design in all their trials. (N. Emmons, D. D.) Abraham’s trial 1. This trial is wholly unexpected. For several years the patriarch has been the recipient of great and uninterrupted prosperity. Instead of going through the bleak and barren desert he has been walking in the garden, which is smiling with the flowers of richness, fertility, and hope. How speedily may the heart be bereft of all joy and filled with poignant sorrow! 2. This trial is wholly unprecedented. Abraham is not a foreigner to suffering. He had been separated from his country and friends at the age of seventy-five. He had been driven by famine from the land of promise into a distant country. The companion of his youth and the affectionate partner of all his fortunes had been forced from him again and again. You may say, “I am the man that hath seen and felt affliction;” yet sterner calamities may be coming upon you than any you have ever experienced. 3. This trial is an assault upon the object which the patriarch loves and values most. He loves and values his son Ishmael. He loves and values his wife Sarah. He loves and values his own life. Isaac, however, is the son of promise, the root from which the final blossom is to be the Messiah, and on this account he must love and value him most of all. To slay him with his own hand, this is the climax of trial to Abraham--it cannot ascend higher. A man can only have one such trial in his lifetime. But if no such surrender has been demanded from us; then our trials have been only secondary. They have scattered a few blossoms, and swept away a little fruit, but they have not touched the root; the tree remains as healthy and vigorous as ever. Let us not heave one rebellious sigh, lest, instead of the wind, the whirlwind should come to us in all its terrific fury. (A. McAuslane, D. D.) The temptation of Abraham 1. Trials increase with time. 2. There is a gradation in service, and the trial is in proportion to the rank. 3. God’s servants are tested most severely at their strongest point. 4. In proportion to the uses to be made of a thing, so is it tested. 5. In the Bible history individual virtues are tried in turn. I. GOD TESTED ABRAHAM’S POWER OF SIMPLE OBEDIENCE. II. GOD TESTS THE POWER OF PERFECT SURRENDER. III. IN ALL GOD’S DEALINGS WITH MEN THERE IS A REVELATION, AND THE GREAT TRUTH UNFOLDED AT THE CROSS IS HERE IN GERM AND SEED. (Anon.) Abraham’s great trial 1. No narrative in Scripture more solemn and affecting, more graphic in its delineation, than this. 2. Profound instruction here as to the power and reward of faith. I. THE TIME AT WHICH THE TRIAL CAME. “After these things”--after all his rich and ripe experience, after all that be had done and suffered, after all that he had gained and lost, in his repeated trials, after all Divine promises and Divine manifestations. There is no guarantee that our worst trials are over, till we have sighed out our spirits upon the bosom of our great Father. II. THE NATURE OF THE TRIAL ITSELF. What could be a greater contradiction than this, that the child in whose seed mankind was to be blessed, was now to be slain? Only let us yield implicit obedience to Divine commands, and contradictions will explain themselves; the mysteries of providence, of life and death, shall all be unfolded; for “the secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him.” III. THE PURPOSE FOR WHICH THE TRIAL OCCURRED. It was the final and grand development of the patriarch’s faith; that was the end sought and attained. Not the sacrifice of Isaac, but of Abraham himself. When this was complete, it was enough (Homilist.) Abraham’s victory I. THE TRIAL. 1. An unexpected trial. 2. A trial between the present and the future. 3. A trial without any precedent. 4. A trial between man and God. II. THE VICTORY. 1. A victory after a long struggle. 2. A complete victory over self. 3. A victory revealing the trust God had placed in him. 4. A victory which obtained fresh tokens of the Divine love. Lessons: 1. That a religion without sacrifice is worthless to us. 2. The shadow directs our attention to the reality--the Saviour’s Cross. (Homilist.) Perfect faith I. THE TESTING OF FAITH. II. GOD’S MANIFEST APPROVAL OF PERFECT FAITH. 1. God manifests His approval by abstracting the pain consequent on obedience to the command. 2. God manifests His approval by providing a sacrifice which shall be at once vicarious and a thank-offering. 3. God repeats His promise of blessing, and confirms it by a solemn covenant. (F. Hastings.) Abraham’s sacrifice I. HE SACRIFICED HIS OWN REASON. No argument. Simply faith. II. HE SACRIFICED HIS OWN AMBITIOUS DESIRES. His only son was to be slain. III. HE SACRIFICED NATURAL AFFECTION. TO murder an only child in cold blood required a strong nerve and a wondrous fixedness of purpose. IV. HE SACRIFICED HIS OWN GOOD REPORT. Was willing to be branded as a murderer, for the sake of winning the approval of God. (Homilist.) Faith’s trial; or, Abraham’s example practically applied I. THE FATHER OF THE FAITHFUL. Example is an invariable element in every man’s education. More or less he is sure to be shaped by it. II. ABRAHAM’S EXAMPLE ATTAINABLE. Abraham is a favourite subject for the artist’s pencil. But in most of the paintings we behold a figure erect and commanding, his countenance ploughed with stern lines of determination, an eye which makes resistance quail and tremble, and features which display a natural decision of character capable of pursuing its object at any cost. You would think love an easy sacrifice for such a being; you would say at the very first glance, “I could tell beforehand that man would give up his all to accomplish his purpose; I can understand his offer of Isaac.” I recollect seeing a painting the very opposite of all this. Before me stood the Patriarch, a decrepid and weak old man; he had lost his stature, for years had bent him down; there was a shrinking back from the deed, a rebellion in every joint; his face harrowed with grief, wearing an expression of intense agony, and evidently appalled by the act it was contemplating; his arm half lifted up, and apparently questioning whether he should do the deed or not. My first impression was, “It is wrong, utterly wrong.” And yet there was something on that canvas which kept me gazing, and at last altered my opinion entirely. There was a certain speech about the uplifted eye which you could not mistake; there was a peculiar and inexplicable expression overshadowing the agony of feature; there was a heavenly something about the countenance which told you that, after all, the deed would be done, and that the struggles you saw were but the weakness of man contending in unequal and unavailing effort with the might of the Spirit. The man would evidently draw back, but the God would as evidently triumph. Human power was all directed to avoid the sacrifice; but heavenly power--God working in that refractory heart to will and to do of His good pleasure--would certainly consummate the offering. That painting was a faithful likeness. I recognized Abraham. The Patriarch was not by nature a firm man; much less was he a stern man of cold heart. There are facts of his previous life which prove him to have been originally of a somewhat shrinking and cowardly disposition. We look in vain for moral firmness in the case of Sarah’s sojourn in Egypt. He resorted to a falsehood as a safeguard against his fears lest strangers should slay him to obtain his wife; and notwithstanding he saw the evil and mischief resulting from this deception, he again practised it on Abimelech with the same purpose. His domestic life altogether indicates a pliant and yielding disposition. The short narration of Sarah’s imperious and overbearing conduct in Ishmael’s case (Gen 13:8-10) is very significant. The division of land with Lot goes to prove the same point; there is no stern demand of strict justice; he does not insist upon his due; he does not even award the nephew his portion of territory; but he gives up his right of adjudication, which he possessed by seniority and patriarchal title, and meekly does he allow his younger relative to select his own land and pasturage. Even in his prayer for Sodom, there evidently is seen the pitying and earnest, yet fearful and undecided suppliant: he does not sternly leave the city to its doom; he does not put forth one general supplication for mercy; but the ground of his petition is moved and shifted in a way, which, to say the least, is not the act of a firm unyielding nature. Yet if these proofs do not establish the contrary of constitutional boldness, there is at least no proof of its existence; there is nothing to indicate that the parent’s sacrifice had any sort of origin or support in natural disposition. We know that one who was weak in bodily presence, and in speech contemptible, was chosen out of the rest as the very chiefest of the apostles; and the probability is that one of the most infirm and naturally unlikely of all the Patriarchs was made strong out of weakness, and distinguished above many physical and mental Samsons, as a Father in grace. We are apt to consider such examples far above, out of our reach. We reckon them as giants from the womb, instead of giants by grace. We attribute to them natural powers which we have not. In fact we treat them as superhuman beings of a different race, and moving in a different sphere, But though the power provided is amply sufficient to enable us to emulate the faith of Abraham, yet you object, that you will not have the same scope for the exercise of that power; your circumstances are different; you are never likely to be commanded to take a son of special promise and slay him as a sacrifice to God. True, the deed is great, and probably, as a single act, it stands and will stand alone and unequalled; but there is often, as it were, a congeries of trials, which may even surpass, in its sum total, the amount of suffering which Abraham endured. A long succession of lesser sacrifices, following one on the heels of another, and keeping you in a state of constant depression for years, may call for more than the strength of faith required for Isaac’s sacrifice. Sustained labour--sorrow scattered over a large surface--is far more difficult to bear than any crushing but momentary load. A strong man may easily walk twenty-four miles a day for a fortnight together; but break up this distance, and distribute it over the entire day and night; compel him to walk half a mile in each half hour. The distance is the same, but the effect is altogether different. The harassed traveller cannot bear this unceasing drain on his strength; he has no unbroken rest, no time for nature to recruit before her energies are again taxed; and often has such an attempt ended in almost fatal exhaustion. There is an analogy between body and soul; a number of little trials are more than equal to a great one; like the half mile to each half hour, they keep the moral bow continually strained and bent, and thus tend to destroy its elasticity. You may kill a man with drops of water as well as by immersing him in a flood. III. THE NATURE OF FAITH’S TRIAL. God tries men; Satan tempts them. God sits as a refiner of silver, to purify it; Satan as a base coiner, to alloy it. Both often use fire; but the fire of heaven burns out the dross, whilst the fire of hell amalgamates more and more base metal with the lump. The two operations are diametrically opposed, though the means are often the same. God sits as a refiner of His people; His object is to purify and not to punish; and hence our surest escape from sorrow is not to struggle against the sorrow itself, but against the sin which demanded it. But since God alone gives trial efficacy, why cannot He give the efficacy without the trial? of what use is trial? how does God employ it? Some speak of the believer’s trial as though it were a means employed by God, for His own information, to find out the qualities of our heart and the strength of our faith. But the Lord knows such facts without trial. Our Creator is not a mere spiritual experimentalist, who needs a long course of practical tests before He can arrive at the truth. His science is not inductive, but intuitive. A mere volition on His part is more searching than the most careful analysis of the chemist, or all the combination, separation, and comparison of the philosopher. A look of God can resolve the intricate mesh-work of the human heart into single strands, and make every spiritual pulse as apparent as though it were the heaving of a volcano. The Lord “knoweth our flame “--every part as well as all--every weakness as well as every faculty; andeven the unconceived thought--the “thought afar off “--is understood by Him. It is not necessary, then, that we should be put to the proof, in order that God may estimate our amount of faith and love; neither is it needful for our Maker to try our strength by actually piling burdens upon our shoulders, for He can tell to the very grain what we can bear, and what will crush us. The promise that He “will not suffer us to be tempted above that we are able to bear,” clearly implies a previous knowledge of the extent of our ability, Yes! God can weigh in the delicate balances of His Omniscience every power, bodily, mentally, or spiritual; a mere glance reveals to Him every weakness of our soul; and therefore trial is not intended to usurp the province of Omniscience, or to teach that which the Lord knows without teaching. Why, then, does God try His people? How does He employ trial? He aims, not at a knowledge of their condition, but at development of it. His object is to open out to your own eye the book of your heart, to display before you the letters which He Himself has already seen, and to pour such a light upon them that their true meaning and character may be understood by you. The frequent aim of sorrow is to “show My people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.” At other times trial is sent, not so much to point out actual sin, as to expose some internal weakness--some latent tendency to evil. There is a flaw in the metal, and since it has escaped your notice, God puts the lump in the proof-house, and that flaw is soon made visible--David’s impure affections, and Peter’s “fear of man,” were thus brought to the light. Or, perhaps, there is some muscle of the soul shrunken for the want of use--some talent buried and wrapt in a napkin--and temptation is to us as a gymnasium, strengthening that which was weak by athletic exercise, and gradually developing that “which was attenuated even to deformity, until the might of the Spirit has by trial so completely matured our strength that the babe in Christ stands forth in all the gnarled muscle and staining sinew of spiritual manhood. IV. THE REALITY OF TRIAL. Abraham’s offer of Isaac was not “a solemn farce,” as a scoffer has said; but it was a real sacrifice--real, as God who searches the heart counts reality. The father’s entire plan bears the impress of a fixed conviction that Isaac must die, and die by his parent’s hands. There are many who can behave most heroically with trial in the far and uncertain distance. So long as self-denials and sacrifices are indefinitely shadowed in the dim future, so long as they are problematical, who so ready as these pseudo-Abrahams to meet them! There have been sad instances of this spiritual dealing in promissory notes, given under the impression that no call for the money would ever be made, and that men may live, and satisfy both their neighbours and themselves, on the credit of this mere paper sacrifice. God does not require from us loud assertions of what we would do under circumstances which we never expect to occur; He does not desire us to tell the world how unflinchingly we would bear the tortures of persecution, and die in the flames for the sake of Christ; but He requires some practical and real proof of our obedience. Conditional faith is very easy; gifts ungiven do not cost much; zeal, without a field for work, is readily kindled; but the true proof that you possess the spirit of Abraham is this--are you ready in act or deed to give up this or that jewel as he gave up Isaac? Are you willing to surrender any possession, or endure any suffering, in the full belief that God will ask and receive it from you? V. FAITH TRIED BY DUBIOUS OR CONFLICTING COMMANDS. VI. FAITH TRIED BY A CONFLICTING PROMISE AND COMMAND. he command to slay Isaac seemed to be given in the very face of previous promise. On Isaac was the covenanted future of Abraham built. “But My covenant will I establish with Isaac.” What a strange and mysterious contradiction! Here is the forefather of the Redeemer--the boy from whom Christ is hereafter to be born; and he is to die as a sacrificial lamb--a burnt-offering--a type of Christ. As though God with one fell blow would destroy the hope of Israel, and in the very act of destruction mock His servant with the sign He had established as a guarantee that the hope would be fulfilled. It was like using the earnest of our inheritance to sweep away and devastate our inheritance itself. It was like employing the seal of the covenant as an instrument wherewith to cancel the covenant itself. This alone was a fearful trial of faith. And can our circumstances ever resemble these? We believe they can, and often do. God may have placed you in a position of great spiritual peril. Your soul seems to be endangered. He has promised to save you, and yet has surrounded you with such a complication of snares and dangers, that salvation appears impossible. Cares “like a wild deluge “ sweep over you; your business is all-engrossing; it demands your closest attention; it calls you early from your bed, and only allows you to retire when it has thoroughly drained the energies of mind and body; your family is increasing around you; you dare not slacken your labours; starvation or this drudgery lies before you. Now such a case appears to be utterly incompatible with the growth of piety; it seems a fiat contradiction of the promise, “Peace I leave with you.” Yet it is clear that God has put a necessity upon you to remain in this employment; He has so contrived circumstances that you cannot escape without violating duties on all hands. If you abandon your calling, then a much worse condition threatens. You dare not lay down and die; this were suicide, and if you have lives depending on you, it were murder too. If your employment were in itself wrong and immoral, then it would be different; in such a case God calls you out, and at all risks, even though you had a thousand Isaacs to leave, you must go. But as it is, your occupation is right in itself, yet owing to your own weakness and infirmities, it has an influence, as all business has, to draw your soul from Christ, and plunge it in a sea of anxieties. Your companions also may be among those spiritual fools who say in their hearts there is no God, and laugh at your scruples. You cannot rid yourself of them; they may be employed by your master; or they may be a part of your necessary stock-in-trade; at all events, for some reason or other, escape from their society may be as impossible as giving up your calling altogether. Or perhaps your very family may be profane; the father who begat you may look coldly on you as a saint; your piety may wean you even from a mother’s heart; for Christ’s sake you must remain like a leper in your family--alone, and when not alone, still worse--a butt for mockery, or a thing to be loathed. And all these grievous spiritual stumbling-blocks, or some of them, or other which we have not named, may stand in your way to heaven, and there is no possible turning by which you may rightly avoid them. In fact, to stay or to go seems fraught with your soul’s peril. How then can you be saved? Now such a position may appear hostile to your soul’s welfare; it may seem like handing you over to the wiles and power of Satan; it may wear the aspect of imminent peril; but if only you go on your way as Abraham journeyed with the doomed Isaac to Moriah, trusting in God’s love and faithfulness, you will eventually find that this road right through the enemy’s camp was really your safest road after all; your mind and your habits may be so formed, that nothing but constant “fightings without” keep up the necessary fightings within; like many a soldier after the flesh, you may not be fit for peace service; the luxuries of repose may prove more fatal to you than the enemy’s whole park of artillery; so that war is actually your safest occupation; resisting strong temptations may be the securest employment for you. Or perhaps God has some work for you to perform in the world’s heart--some poor half-wrecked bark to draw out of the whirling sucking vortex--some soul to be converted from the error of his ways, and to shine at last as your joy and crown of rejoicing before the presence of Christ. At all events, you may be quite sure that though every possible spiritual danger were accumulated round you, yet is that position nought but a master-piece of strategy, planned by the Captain of your salvation for your safety. Only trust in the Lord’s wisdom, and lean upon His strength, and the very spear of the foe shall be your defence, warding off some more dangerous and unseen weapon; the sharp bosses of the world’s buckler shall be the steel on which you sharpen your own sword; the number of your enemies shall be but an index of your imparted graces; the fierceness of the fight shall only predicate the splendour of your triumph and the brightness of your everlasting crown. VII. FAITH SACRIFICING AFFECTION. The heart of the Patriarch was the primary point of assault in his trial of faith. The flocks of the Patriarch were not asked. It had been a great sacrifice to give up those large possessions of which we are told, some years previously to Isaac’s offer, that “Abram was very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold.” But though the command left them untouched, what would they be when the heir was gone? And Isaac was now Abraham’s only son. Ishmael was gone--gone at God’s command (Gen 21:13). And how painfully must the dear boy’s name have struck on the father’s ear, when he was told to take “thine only ISAAC”--“thy Laughter!” Oh! God touched more than one sensitive cord of Abraham’s heart when He said, “Take Isaac.” It told the father of that ungrateful mockery with which he heard the promise of a son pronounced; it told him how a forgiving God had pardoned the offence, and turned the laughter of mockery into the laughter of joy; it told him of the many years he had spent with this Isaac--this “Laughter”--to wipe away his tears and wreath sorrow itself into smiles. And now he is to take this Isaac--and God, when He dooms the son to death, and the father to kill him, calls him “Thine only Laughter.” And then to complete this array of the son’s claims on his father’s heart, the Lord terms him thy son, “whom thou lovest “--as though there were any occasion to tell Abraham that. The reason of all this is obvious; it was to make manifest the Divine purpose; it was to say in plain language, “Lovest thou Me more than these?” God is not contented if you only give Him what you can easily spare; He will not be satisfied with a mere secondary treasure; but often He demands your chief delight, and bids you surrender the most precious thing you have. There is to be no reserve--no treasure kept back--no bidding God to take anything except that. There are many ways in which your faith is thus tried, and your love is called to give up its treasures. True, you are not told to offer up an Isaac on the altar; but there are other things which are “Isaacs” to you, and which God requires you to surrender; the” great possessions” were the young ruler’s Isaac, pharisaism was that of Paul, and expected worldly greatness was that of all the apostles who followed Christ in the days of His flesh. Everything dear to us, whether within or without, may be our Isaac; and oftentimes we find that the most hidden of our idols is our dearest. What can be dearer to you than your own will--that inbred desire to walk where you list, do as you like, and live for yourself? it is your nature; it is like the instinctive love of life; it is that for which the carnal man craves. And God invariably says with respect to this Isaac; “Take him, dear though he be, and offer him up in a place that I will show thee”--that place is Calvary. But frequently this cherished will assumes some more special form; it appears as some particular disposition or tendency of nature; there is some pleasure in which your tastes lead you to indulge, some unholy employment which mere avarice induces you to continue, some bad companion whose image has crept into your heart. Or it may be that some object, good in itself, stands between you and your God--between your love and your duty. And this trial is often heightened by God’s selecting a particular mode of giving, as well as by His choosing a gift we prize. God not only demanded Isaac, but He also fixed upon the most trying process of surrender. “Give Me thy son, and offer him up.” Abraham knew what that meant. If Isaac had been sent, like Ishmael, into the wilderness, and there left to perish of thirst, still had it been a gift of the child to God. But a mere gift was not all which God demanded; the means of bestowment were as essential as the gift itself. Abraham must sacrifice Isaac like a mere sheep on the altar. How many pangs did that act require l Even the mere preparations demanded more than a martyr’s fortitude. Knife and fire! Just the two things from which affection most abhorrently recoils. So fearful in their operation! So violent in their work! So terrible for memory to dwell upon. It is related of an ancient painter that he once chose for his subject the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father, and over Agamemnon’s face he painted a veil, thus rendering the features invisible. The artist’s friends remonstrated on this singular omission. “You have obscured,” said they, “the chief personage in your group; you have concealed the father.” “Ah,” said the painter,” “I could not describe his features”; and so he thought the veil more significant than any impotent attempt to depict agony, which no canvas nor words can convey. We must adopt the same wise plan; silence is the best comment upon the anguish of Abraham; the heart alone can paint it. But, however painful the operation which God selects, we must adopt it; for to change the mode of sacrifice, or to murmur at it, is just as much a proof of deficient faith, as to withhold the object. Alas! This impatience of the Lord’s mode of trial is all but universal. We seem contented with submitting to the bare loss of some treasure, and appear to think this meagre submission entitles us to find fault with the way in which that loss befel us. The merchant does not pine under his ruin, but impatience overmasters him when he thinks of the fact that a son’s extravagance, or a friend’s treachery was the agency which God permitted; if only he had miscalculated his expenses, overrated his profits, or been defrauded by strangers, and thus being ruined, he could have submitted; at least he thinks he could. The parent loses his child; perhaps the stroke fell upon him with appalling suddenness, or the visitation was attended with severe pain, and long continued struggles with death; he fancied that he could have given up his boy in any other way without a murmur; if only time to say farewell had been granted, or if he had seen his darling sink into death as into a calm and painless sleep, he could have said, “Thy will be done”; but oh! that violent wrenching apart of soul and body, that pillow unwatched and unsoothed, that far distant grave unwatered by a tear, untold by an epitaph, or unadorned by a flower; these are the food on which a murmuring spirit feeds; these are the excuses to which want of submission clings. Or perhaps the sacrificed Isaac may be of quite a different kind; some privilege is taken away, some means of usefulness removed, and it is possible that all this may have been brought about by the authority of those dear to you; they care not for religion, they are taken up with business, they compel you, as far as possible, to relinquish what they call your weakness and absurdity, and since you will not go with them to the same excess of riot and worldliness, they throw every obstacle they can in the way of your progress; the taunt, the sneer, the profane jest, and the positive prohibition are all tried in turn; your heart is almost broken as it views such barriers reared by such hands. Oh l if the sword were to be the instrument which cut you and your privileges asunder; if a dungeon were to shut you out from your means of grace, instead of that parlour and that circle of loved hearts which like a chain surround you; if the edicts of some bloodthirsty ruler or some savage council were to utter your sentence of banishment from your means of grace, and not those words spoken by lips which have kissed you, and by tongues which have soothed you even as a babe, then you could bear your sad lot. All this is wrong; our faith is seriously defective; we have not learnt to say, “Thy will be done,” until we can give not only what the Lord wills, but as the Lord wills. VIII. FAITH OPPOSITE AFFECTION. One half of the Patriarch’s sacrifice is frequently forgotten--men see the father surrendering the son, but they overlook the husband giving up the wife; they do not remember that the same weapon which slew the child would inevitably divide asunder the parents. Abraham was called to pierce one heart and break another; and the same blow would certainly do both. How could Sarah survive Isaac’s death stroke? The probability is that the command was purposely kept from her, lest she, who had imperiously sent Ishmael away against her husband’s wish, should now step in like a robbed lioness, snatching Isaac from his father’s hands, and thus preventing obedience. Besides, the account tells us that God’s purpose was to try Abraham--not Sarah--and therefore to him alone was the afflicting command given, and from him alone was this sacrifice of faith required. With Sarah in this state of unconsciousness, what a terrible awakening was before her! And supposing Isaac were at length given back, would Sarah’s love for Abraham recover from such a shock? Could she ever bear to be supported or fondled with that hand which had once been spotted with her Isaac’s blood? But in any case what a trial of the heart was here! We speak truth when we say that a large share of the Patriarch’s sacrifice consisted in opposing, as well as surrendering, his affections--in wounding Sarah as well as killing Isaac. God calls you frequently to thwart your heart, and to oppose things and persons you love. He does not always require you to give up the object; but He leaves it in your possession and bids you contend against it. It is not enough to resist love’s influence against God, nor will it suffice that it should lie passive and submissive beneath the Saviour’s power; but we must even strive to make it an active and influential agent in Christ’s work of winning souls. Love must not be drummed out of the regiment as a vagabond sin, but it must be disciplined into a “good soldier of Jesus Christ”--a recruiting sergeant for the Lord’s army. Love must turn preacher, and “persuade men.” IX. FAITH DARING THE WORLD’S REPUTE. What will the servants of Abraham say? How will the Canaanite mock? Even if Isaac be restored, yet what will they say, should the bare purpose of that journey to Moriah ever transpire? And if the Patriarch should return alone; what then? What a difference between the Patriarch and many of us I He had reproaches awaiting him of such a character as to make the firmest man stagger--reproaches founded on principles which were true in the general way, and only false in his special case; and here are we hesitating at every step, however slight, wondering and fearing what this friend, or that neighbour, may say. “How strange it will seem” is our excuse for omitting many a duty, and perpetrating many a sin. I have but to quote to you half-a-dozen opinions against your obedience to God; I have but to show you that this or that act of discipleship will incur a laugh, or a sneer, or a curse, from your acquaintance, and you draw back; I have but to prove that open profession of Christ will be followed by your being cast out from some privileged “Synagogue of Satan,” and you timidly hide your Saviour, you content yourself with a hole-and-corner piety, your discipleship is only an invisible dress, you come to Jesus by night, the fear of man is your snare. Abraham must have expected to draw down upon himself the reproaches even of those who loved God; Melchisedec the priest, and Sarah the wife, and Eliezer the servant, would probably all unite in upbraiding him. And the name, too, how hard to hear--“Murderer!” X. PROMPT FAITH. The difference between an excuse and a reason is, that the former is the offspring of desire, the latter is the result of judgment; one is forced into being by self-justification, the other is deliberately conceived by conviction; one is a mere invention, the other is a discovery. Now Abraham had no reason for delay; yet had he many possible excuses. Why not take some days or at least some hours to make his preparations for almost a week’s journey; food must be obtained, tents must be packed, wood must be hewn, and arrangements must be made for so long an absence. Affection might have lingered over a thousand so-called necessaries, and multiplied its preparations, in order to lengthen out the span of Isaac’s life. The youth himself must be allowed time to get ready; and, above all, Sarah’s mind must be prepared for his absence, or else what will she say to his sudden and mysterious journey? True, the servants may tell her, “He is gone to do sacrifice”; but will not her obvious answer be, “Why should he conceal such a deed from me? why should he so suddenly conceive such a purpose? why disappear like a thief in the night?” Surely the husband may spare her this woe I surely he may lull her suspicions by giving her a few days’ warning that he and Isaac are about to go and offer sacrifice in a place which God will show him, and thus reconcile her to the journey! The heart might easily have seized on any or all these excuses to prolong the son’s life, and defer the dreadful slaughter. And to facilitate this immediate obedience, we find the Patriarch using the most simple preparations, and actually sharing in the labour of making them. With servants in abundance, he yet saddles the ass with his own hands; he then takes Isaac and two young men, and the four cleave the wood--i.e., the dry fuel which it was necessary to carry with them in order to kindle the damp wood they might find near the place of sacrifice. A tardy and hesitating commencement of Christian duty is so utterly opposed to the spirit of the gospel that the bare existence of reluctance is a just cause for doubting the genuineness of our faith. One of the most hopeless forms which ungodliness takes is the pseudo-obedience of unbelief, and fear, and hesitation. Oh! there is a force in prompt obedience which completely baffles the enemy of souls; he has no time to manufacture snares; he has no opportunity of throwing down stumbling-blocks before you; but there you are in possession, so to speak, of the heights, and too firm and strongly entrenched for him to disturb your position. Promptitude is the very strategem Satan employs so successfully against us; he anticipates our obedience with his rebellious suggestions; he is throwing up barricades before us while we are questioning whether we will go forward or not. Alacrity is thus the very weapon specially adapted to foil him. History tells us that promptness and rapidity of movement were the keys to Napoleon’s most splendid victories; he no sooner conceived a plan of campaign than his whole army was in swift march to execute it; his adversary’s outposts, driven in by what appeared to them a mysterious and omnipresent antagonist--his artillery, flashing and booming from heights which the foe thought it useless and absurd to occupy--these were the couriers who made the first announcement of his approach to the enemy. At times this prompt appearance in the field served of itself to force the opposing army into a hasty and full retreat; and if this effect did not follow, then did the conqueror’s columns move with the same swiftness to the attack as they had shown on their march, and they fell upon the surprised and panic-struck foe as though they had been transformed into a literal “thunderbolt of war,” hurled by a second Mars. And why may not we use the same tactics in spiritual warfare with the same success? XI. DELIBERATE FAITH. True diligence begins her work by earnest inquiry; she first looks, and then runs; she first prepares, and then sets out; neither is her course, when commenced, like an arrow from a bow--slower and slower, as she goes on, but it is like iron attracted towards a loadstone--faster and faster as she approaches it. She does not move like some showy ensign on a flagstaff--flapping and waving in all directions, yet always confined to one point--but like the sails of some gallant ship, she catches and keeps the wind, her canvas filled with the heavenly breeze, and pressing onwards towards port. She has an eagle’s eye and an eagle’s wing--looking and soaring to the sun--and not a swallow’s uncertain flight,now skimming the water, now gliding along the ground, now circling in the air, and yet never flying towards a given point. The desire of true diligence is, not motion, but motion towards an object; she runs, looking to Jesus; she presses to the mark. First of all, deliberation is needed to ascertain the fact and the genuineness of the Divine command; for until that is known, true faith can do nothing. Abraham was sure of this fact at once, but, as we have seen, it is different with us, and often much doubt surrounds the question. Diligence, therefore, begins by seeking Divine illumination; for no time is gained which is gained at the expense of God’s teaching--no time is wasted which is spent in supplication of the Spirit. Yet there must be no manufacture of doubts for the sake of waiting to have them removed; there must be no halting of unbelief after the Lord has uttered a reply quite clear and definite enough for a ready faith to hear, In fine, your questions must be like those of the child who has lost its way, and pants for home--not like those of the sluggard, who, when he is called, still lies rubbing his eyes, and asking a score of inquiries as to the time, and weather, and temperature, just to delay the act of rising, and, if possible, to discover an excuse for further sleep. And then, while this earnest and sincere inquiry of the Lord is going on, and we are learning what we knew not, a second purpose will be attained; we shall be strengthened as well as taught; the answer to our prayer for teaching will include might as well as instruction; the Lord will add power to knowledge; the Spirit will at the same time mark out our road, and prepare us for it. True obedience does the Lord’s will at the Lord’s time; it is neither before nor after; it is neither rash nor slow. But what has all this to do with Abraham’s example? he did not tarry, but set out almost immediately; two or three hours after the vision he was on his way. Yet, notwithstanding this early start, the deliberate character of the Patriarch’s faith was most thoroughly tested by the three days’ journey to Moriah . . . It had been comparatively., easy for him to leave his couch under the immediate influence of the vision, rouse Isaac from his bed, take him to some neighbouring hill, and there sacrifice him before the morning had dawned. But God required him to be a burning and shining light, and not a mere flashing meteor; He resolved to expose the flame to rough winds, and to sustain combustion, in order to give us an example of that holy fire kindled by the Spirit, which no wind can blow out, and no time can burn out. At first the full extent of Isaac’s loss might not present itself to Abraham’s mind. He was probably carried beyond himself by the abundance of the revelation given unto him. The first excitement of the Lord’s sudden appearance to him was cooled down; his obedience was clearly not the result of entrancement; he could stand, as it were, calmly in God’s presence for three long days, holding Isaac in his extended and untired arms for the Lord to take him when He chose. And then this period of suspense served not only to try the real and enduring character of Abraham’s faith, but it also gave time for that necessary and painful work of counting the cost. In fact, he had time to estimate what the Lord’s will really was in all its extent and consequences, and thus to obey God with his eyes open. The Saviour is not contented that He should know the value of what He asks; we must know it too. Christ will have an intelligent surrender of all you have. You must reckon what you give to Him, not with a purse-proud spirit, but with the steady purpose of a man who makes over all his property to another, and numbers up pounds, and fields, and houses, to see that nothing is wanting. Thus prepared by earnest inquiry, imparted grace, patience, and a foresight of sorrows, our obedience will not be that hybrid monster of a day, begotten from the adulterous union of so-called religion with excitement or fear; but it will be the calm, holy, long-lived offspring of the Spirit--obedience which can rise with the lark, and like a bird of passage on its migration, continue on the wing till the distant clime is reached--obedience so unchangeable, that even were it three years instead of three days, or three centuries instead of three years, still would God’s true servant bend his willing steps to the distant Moriah, and at last take the knife to consummate the act with as much holy strength of purpose as if he had rushed from the scene of the night vision to the place of sacrifice. XII. FAITH CLEARING, THE WAY OF EXPECTED OBSTACLES. It is not enough to foresee a difficulty or to blunder onwards, encountering hindrances as they come, but, so far as we can, we must previously remove out of our path everything which may impede or stop us. Many obstacles are insurmountable and fatal when discovered after they are reached, and yet are mere trifles if seen and provided against at a distance. How easy for a general to dislodge the mere handful of enemies which lie in yonder wood in ambush; yet let him march his whole force past the ambuscade, and only take measures against it when his army is attacked, then are his troops thrown into most serious confusion, and perhaps driven back panic-stricken. The traveller across the desert may easily guard against the drought of his journey beforehand; he has nothing to do but to fill his water-skin, and sling it across his shoulders; but if he delays preparation till the moment of thirst, what agonies--perhaps agonies even to death--does it entail i It is self-confidence, and not faith, which despises precaution, and expects no obstacle till it comes; it is presumption, and not filial confidence, which will not anticipate the obstacles God has revealed, or use the means to overcome them which He has given. A foresight of difficulty, and precaution against future obstacles, are as much the Spirit’s work as is strength for the actual battle. What, if Abraham had not hewn the wood, or had left the fire or the knife at home, depending on the moment of sacrifice to provide him with these necessaries! Would that have been genuine faith? Would you not have questioned his sincerity if the Bible had told us that he took Isaac to Moriah, and lo! the wet wood of the mountain would not kindle? Would you not have suspected an obedience which was arrested by the want of a knife or fire? If Abraham had returned with an unslain Isaac on such grounds as these, you would have refused to own him as an example of faith. Another remarkable instance of this same careful forethought is seen when, at some distance from Moriah, Abraham stopped the servants who attended his journey, and bade them “Abide here with the ass, and I and the lad will go yonder and worship.” It is clear that Abraham’s purpose was to secure himself against the certain interference of these servants. Without having received a direct command from God to submit, there is not a single right-minded man on earth who would, or could, or ought to, have quietly permitted such a deed to be done. They would certainly have interfered. “Well! if they did, was not Abraham’s purpose of obedience perfect? Could he not have said, “I was quite willing, but they prevented me”? Now, the faith of excitement would have gone carelessly on, without any forethought or precaution against this obstacle. Oh! what a contrary spirit often prevails among so-called disciples of Christ, and professors of Abrahamic faith. Instead of the Patriarch’s foresight and energy of purpose, they welcome difficulties as saviours from self-denial. They snatch at any obstruction, magnify it a thousand-fold, esteem it an impassable barrier, and call it an interposition of Providence. XIII. ACTIVE FAITH The son must be given--and something more--the father must be the immediate giver. Behold a priest is even at hand! Why not send Melchisedec to me? he is Thy priest; the office is peculiarly his; let the work be his; let him slay my Isaac. No! Abraham, the Lord requires thy active faith, therefore “Take the knife.” How desirable such a plan must have appeared for many reasons! Melchisedec would share in the act; the priestly sacrificer would at once be a guarantee for the character of Isaac’s slaughter, and would in some measure silence the reproaches which such a deed would bring on the Patriarch. It would be evident to all that the deed was done from religious motives. But no! All this alleviation must Abraham forego; his faith must be active--not passive--he must take the knife. Faith must be active. She must not wait till houses, and lands, and friends are wrenched out of her possession, but when the Saviour’s cause requires it, she must forsake them; she must become the agent in her worldly loss; she must, so far as earth is concerned, be both ruiner and ruined. Are we to wait till accident robs us of them, or till God takes them from us by some signal calamity? No! The deprivation is to be our own act; we are to cut off the hand; we are to pluck out the eye; we are to amputate the foot. She is not like an unwilling child who requires the mother to rise up out of her place and force the toy from his hand; but she resembles the sweet and ready child, who, at a word, catches up the forbidden plaything, and runs with outstretched arms to put it in the mother’s lap. Thus, the believer must often be the executioner of his own joys--the slayer of his own Isaac. But there must be no mere self-torture, for torture’s sake; none of those lashings, and horse-hair shirts, or hot iron floor, or beds of thorns, or starving, which are often prescribed as trials of faith. If you act on your own judgment and responsibility, you are a presumptuous tormentor; your sacrifice has no relationship to that of Abraham, for if he had done as you do, he would have taken Isaac without any Divine command to Moriah, he would have slain him upon the altar, he would have been a murderer. Faith, then, must not walk alone: she must not mark out her own course; her activity must be that of obedience, and not of independent and self-prescribed action. Her first inquiry must be, “Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?” and immediately she must set about doing it. XIV. PASSIVE FAITH. There stands a weak and aged man, his form bent, and his hand trembling. And there, on the wood, lies a youth in all the bloom and power of bursting manhood, his age about twenty-five, his muscle developed, his form displaying all that wiry strength which ultimately endured the shocks of one hundred and eighty years. Why, Abraham would have shaken and staggered in such a grasp as Isaac’s hand could give. A blow from the son’s arm, and the father had rolled helplessly down the sides of Moriah. Doing often includes suffering; but suffering does not in itself always include doing; there is a suffering which is strictly passive; we have solely to endure. Yet when we speak of any part of Christian character or conduct as passive, it must be a very contrast to apathy. XV. FAITH REWARDED. The reward of faith is so named because it is given to faith, and not because it is given for faith. The relation therefore of faith to blessing is not the relation of a price to a purchase, but that which the excavation of a channel bears to the water which is afterwards to flow into it. And what of the reward itself? What was it in Abraham’s case? One part of that reward was the restoration of Isaac. Yet what was this more than the father would have enjoyed if the son had never been taken to Moriah? Was not Isaac returned, the same Isaac as Isaac given? No! he was not; Isaac after being offered and restored, could not be the same to Abraham as if he had been unoffered and unrestored; he was a different son--a more precious son--a thousand-fold more precious. Could Isaac be the same boy to him? Supposing by some fearful accident I had almost destroyed the child of my love; for days I watched him as life seemed rapidly ebbing; but suddenly a change appeared, and the physician told me he was out of danger; what would be my future feelings to that child? Why! under such circumstances even hatred has been known to warm into affection; and how much more will a father’s ready heart be kindled into an intensity of fondness! Our Saviour Himself founds some of His most beautiful parables on the principle that a thing lost, but restored, is dearer far to the finder than a thing never lost at all. Isaac restored was literally a reward--a thing given to faith--a thing which Abraham never possessed before. And then what a hallowed and sacred association would ever after cling to that boy! he had actually been solemnly offered to God. Isaac was an ever-present image of God’s favour--a living memorial of the Lord’s faithfulness--he was grace incarnated--grace “manifest in the flesh.” A trial sanctified is always a trial rewarded; it always sweetens the true believer’s blessings; and though he may have no more outward causes of happiness than before--yea, though he may have even fewer--yet has the soul’s palate been so freshened and improved that his actual perception of joy is tenfold greater; the change is not in the food, but in the quickened appetite of the eater. But the consummation of faith’s reward in Abraham’s case was when, for the first time, he gazed on that incarnate Saviour born of his Isaac’s seed. Great must have been his joy when he saw the Eternal Son in all the glory of His Godhead; but when he beheld his Lord becoming in very deed a child of Isaac and a Redeemer of the whole world, oh then he could understand in all their fulness and their depth those promises which were confirmed and enlarged on that mount where his faith was so tried--then could he estimate in all its unmerited richness the infinite value of faith’s reward. And doubtlessly Abraham’s constant and eager eye was fixed on that great consummation of faith. And if faith thus keeps her constant eye fixed on this bright, holy, and Christ-pervaded consummation of her reward, the result is certain--our efforts will all take the direction of our heart, our steps will follow our eye, our thoughts and actions will tend upwards, and we shall gradually be “changed into the same glory” we contemplate, “from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord.” (D. F.Jarman, M. A.) The trial of Abraham I. THE PATRIARCH’S PAINFUL TRIAL. 1. The subject of requisition. 2. The prescribed manner of compliance. II. THE PATRIARCH’S EXEMPLARY CONDUCT. 1. The promptness of his obedience. 2. The prudence of his measures. 3. His inflexible perseverance, III. THE BLESSINGS OF WHICH IT WAS PRODUCTIVE. 1. Isaac was spared. 2. A testimony of Divine approbation was experienced. 3. A gracious repetition of promise was received. IV. THE INSTRUCTIVE TENDENCY OF THE WHOLE. 1. The will of God revealed to man is a sufficient reason for prompt obedience. 2. Our greatest earthly blessings may be productive of very painful exercises. 3. Severe trials are strictly consistent with the enjoyment of Divine favour. 4. A lively faith in God manifests itself by a regular course of cheerful obedience. (Sketches of Sermons.) The tried of Abraham’s faith I. THE PERSONAL TEST AND DISCIPLINE. II. THE GREAT MORAL AND RELIGIOUS LESSON HERE TAUGHT. God was loved better than Son--loved even though He slew. III. THE FACT BECOMES A TYPICAL PROMISE. God has provided (W. H.Davison.) Abraham’s temptation I. HIS TRIAL. II. HIS OBEDIENCE. 1. Prompt. 2. Protracted. 3. Perfect. III. HIS REWARD. 1. A numerous seed, instead of one Son. 2. To be the progenitor of the Messiah, because willing to give up Isaac. 3. He also received the most express and gratifying assurance of Jehovah’s approval and friendship. Application: 1. God tries the faith of all His people. The principle is, that we are not fit to possess any treasure unless we are ready to give up that treasure at God’s command at any moment. You say you love God; but you also love your child, friend, property, life. Which do you love most? 2. Let our obedience be like Abraham’s. As soon as you know God’s will, submit to it. 3. God will reward the patience of faith. (The Congregational Pulpit.) Trial of Abraham’s faith I. THE SEVERITY OF THIS TRIAL. 1. It was a trial that put the severest possible strain upon him in the tenderest relations of his natural life. Isaac was his son, his only son. 2. It was a trial that put the severest possible strain upon him in the tenderest relations of his spiritual life. (1) In respect to the promise of God (Gen 17:19). (2) In respect to the covenant of God. 3. The severity of this trial is unparalleled, save in the experience of Abraham’s God (Rom 8:32; Joh 3:16). II. ABRAHAM’S CONDUCT. 1. In obedience he was prompt, believing, perfect. 2. His obedience was inspired by faith. 3. His obedience was perfect (Gen 22:9-10). III. GOD’S INTERPOSITION. 1. God did interpose. 2. God’s interposition was timely. Lessons: 1. It is God’s plan to test the faith of His children (1Pe 1:7). 2. God’s children should rejoice when their faith is tested. 3. The more cheerfully we bear the tests of faith, the more we honour God. 4. No one will be tried beyond what he is able to bear. (D. C. Hughes, M. A.) Abraham’s temptation and obedience I. WHAT THIS TRIAL WAS. 1. It came from God Himself. 2. It comprehended the loss of a child, and of a peculiarly dear and precious child. He was his Isaac too; and how much does that word comprehend! the son of his old age; his beloved Sarah’s child; one who had been promised him and whom he had looked for with eager expectation, not months but years, before he came; a child of miracle, born out of due time, to be regarded as an almost immediate gift from heaven! 3. And he is to lose him, not as we generally lose our children, by sickness, but by a violent death, and that death to be inflicted by his own hand--Abraham is to slay him. And, moreover, he is to be a burnt-offering. This includes more than the slaying of him--a dismembering of him when slain and the consuming of his mangled body in the flames. 4. And the time, too, when this trial fell on Abraham must have made it worse. “After these things”--i.e., just after losing Ishmael, he is called upon to give up Isaac. II. His CONDUCT UNDER IT. 1. Prompt obedience. 2. Determined, unflinching obedience. 3. His obedience was also calm. III. Let us now see what lay at the bottom of all this; WHAT THAT MIGHTY PRINCIPLE WAS WHICH ACTUATED ABRAHAM IN IT. And we are not left in doubt of this point. It was faith. “By faith,” says St. Paul, “Abraham when he was tried, offered up Isaac.” And by faith, as we apply the term here to Abraham, we mean, not a belief in this or that great gospel-truth only, but a belief in the Divine character and word generally, a faith embracing all the glorious perfections of Jehovah and all the glorious promises and declarations of his lips. This led Abraham to sacrifice his son. There are three things which commonly actuate mankind in their conduct-reason, feeling, and interest. All these we find in this case put aside. Abraham did not act from either of them, but from a principle which was in opposition to them all. (C. Bradley, M. A.) The appointed sacrifice; or, Abraham’s faith I. THE TRIAL OF FAITH. Very heavy must have been Abraham’s heart when he heard God’s strange message. But he would not refuse to trust God. Job 23:8-12; comp. 1Pe 1:5-7.) II. THE OBEDIENCE OF FAITH. Not a base profession. He obeyed promptly, and without murmuring. III. THE REWARD OF FAITH. 1. He won God’s approval. 2. He received God’s explanation of what had seemed so strange. 3. He gained God’s solemn assurance to comfort and gladden him. IV. THE SACRIFICE OF ISAAC AS TYPICAL OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 1. It was an appointed sacrifice. 2. It was a willing (self-) sacrifice. 3. It was a mystery of salvation. (W. S. Smith, B. D.) Abraham tempted to offer up his son I. THE TRIAL ITSELF. 1. The time of it. The same things may be more or less trying as they are connected with other things. If the treatment of Job’s friends had not been preceded by the loss of his substance, the untimely death of his children, the cruel counsel of his wife, and the heavy hand of God, it had been much more tolerable; and if Abraham’s faith and patience had not been exercised in the manner they were anterior to this temptation, it might have been somewhat different from what it was. It is also a much greater trial to be deprived of an object when our hopes have been raised, and in a manner accomplished respecting it, than to have it altogether withheld from us. It was “after these things that God did tempt Abraham”--that is, after five-and-twenty years waiting; after the promise had been frequently repeated; after hope had been raised to the highest pitch; yea, after it had been actually turned into enjoyment; and when the child had lived long enough to discover an amiable and godly disposition. 2. The shock which it was adapted to produce upon his natural affections is also worthy of notice. The command is worded in a manner as if it were designed to harrow up all his feelings as a father: “Take now thy son, thine only son (of promise), Isaac, whom thou lovest”--or, as some read it, “Take now that son . . . that only one of thine . . . whom thou lovest . . . that ISAAC!” And what! Deliver him to some other hand to sacrifice him! No; be thou thyself the priest; go “offer him up for a burnt-offering!” But the shock which it would be to natural affection is not represented as the principal part of the trial; but rather what it must have been to his faith. It was not so much his being his son, as his only son of promise; his Isaac, in whom all the great things spoken of his seed were to be fulfilled. II. THE CONDUCT OF ABRAHAM UNDER THIS SHARP TRIAL. We have here a surprising instance of the efficacy of Divine grace, in rendering every power, passion, and thought of the mind subordinate to the will of God. There is a wide difference between this and the extinction of the passions. This were to be deprived of feeling; but the other is to have the mind assimilated to the mind of Christ, who, though He felt most sensibly, yet said, “If this cup may not pass from Me, except I drink it, Thy will be done!” III. THE REWARD CONFERRED UPON HIM. A repetition of the promised blessing. IV. THE GENERAL DESIGN OF THE WHOLE. 1. Though it was not the intention of God to permit Abraham actually to offer a human sacrifice, yet He might mean to assert His own right as Lord of all to require it, as well as to manifest the implicit obedience of faith in the conduct of His servant. Such an assertion of His right would manifest His goodness in refusing to exercise it. 2. But in this transaction there seems to be a still higher design; namely, to predict in a figure the great substitute which God in due time should see and provide. The very place of it, called “the mount of the Lord” (verse 14.), seems to have been marked out as the scene of great events; and of that kind, too, in which a substitutional sacrifice was offered and accepted. 3. One reason of the high approbation which God expressed of Abraham’s conduct might be its affording some faint likeness of what would shortly be His own. (A. Fuller.) Temptation a test Temptation is that which puts to the test. Trials sent by God do this. A test is never employed for the purpose of injury. A weight is attached to a rope, not to break but to prove it. Pressure is applied to a boiler, not to burst it but to certify its power of resistance. The testing process here confers no strength. But when a sailor has to navigate his ship under a heavy gale and in a difficult channel; or when a general has to fight against a superior force and on disadvantageous ground, skill and courage are not only tested but improved. The test has brought experience, and by practice is every faculty perfected. So, faith grows stronger by exercise, and patience by the enduring of sorrow. Thus alone it was that “God did tempt Abraham.” (Newman Hall, LL. B.) Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest Sacrificial obedience I. THE SACRIFICE DEMANDED BY GOD. 1. That which was prized the most. 2. That which tested faith the most. 3. That which God gave Himself. II. THE WAY IN WHICH THIS SACRIFICE WAS RENDERED BY ABRAHAM. 1. It was rendered promptly. “And Abraham rose up early in the morning.” 2. It was rendered prayerfully. “Abide ye here, and I and the lad will go yonder and worship.” Prayer prepares for sacrifice. 3. It was rendered heroically (Gen 22:8-9). 4. It was rendered observantly. “The place which God had told him of.” “Laid the weed in order.” III. THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE ACCEPTED BY GOD. 1. It was substitutionary. 2. It was sufficient. (The Congregational Pulpit.) The offering of Isaac I. THAT WE ARE OFTEN EXPOSED TO GREAT TRIALS WITHOUT ANY REASON BEING ASSIGNED FOR THEIR INFLICTION. II. THAT EVEN IN OUR SEVEREST TRIALS, IN THE VERY CRISIS AND AGONY OF OUR CHASTISEMENT, WE HAVE HOPE IN THE DELIVERING MERCY OF GOD (Gen 22:5; Gen 22:8). It is often so in human life; the inward contradicts the outward. Faith substitutes a greater fact for a small one. “You will get better,” we say to the patient, when perhaps we mean that he will be healed with immortality; and when we meet him in heaven, he will tell us that we were right when we said he would live. III. THAT WE ARE OFTEN MADE TO FEEL THE UTTERMOST BITTERNESS OF A TRIAL IN ITS FORETELLING AND ANTICIPATION. Sudden calamities are nothing compared with the lingering death which some men have to die. IV. THAT FILIAL OBEDIENCE ON OUR PART HAS EVER BEEN FOLLOWED BY SPECIAL TOKENS OF GOD’S APPROVAL (Gen 22:16). More than mere Hebrew redundancy of language in the promise. It reads like a river full to overflow. “Because thou hast done this thing,” &c. I call upon you to witness whether you yourselves have not, in appropriate degrees, realized this same overflowing, and all-comforting blessing of God, in return for your filial obedience. V. OTHER POINTS OF COINCIDENCE as between the old experience and the new will occur on reading the text, such as-- 1. The unconscious aggravations of our suffering made by inquiries such as Isaac’s (Gen 22:7). 2. The wonderfulness of the escapes which are often made for us by Divine Providence (Gen 22:13). 3. The sanctification of special places by sweet and holy memories of deliverance and unexpected joy (Gen 22:14). (J. Parker, D. D.) An educational command Abraham must have been conscious that the way that led to the perfecting of his faith was the way of renunciation and self-denial. The sight of the Canaanite sacrifices of children must have led Abraham to self-examination, whether he would be strong enough in renunciation and self-denial to do what these heathen did, if his God desired it of him. But if this question was once made the subject of discussion in Abraham’s heart, it had also to be brought to a definite and real decision. That was the substratum for the Divine demand in Abraham’s soul. Objectively, the following are the deduction from this point of view. The culminating point of worship in the religions of nature was human sacrifice. The covenant religion had to separate itself in this respect from heathenism; the truth in it had to be acknowledged, and the falsehood denied. In the command to offer up Isaac, the truth of the conviction that human life must be sacrificed as an unholy thing, is acknowledged, and by the arresting intervention of God, the hideous distortion of this truth which had arisen in heathenism is condemned and rejected. (Kurtz.) Human sacrifices among the heathen No reader of the Old Testament needs to be informed that this hateful kind of offering defiled the religious rites of the Canaanites several centuries later. But there are probably few readers who have sufficiently realized how ancient or how widespread among primitive religions was a custom which has come to be associated only with the lowest type of barbarism. Yet traces of it, reliable enough, though dimmed now through lapse of ages, meet the inquirer among the primitive population of far-sundered localities, and in stages of civilization which even we should call advanced. Its prevalence among all men of Hamitic race who observed the same type of religion as the tribes of Canaan is a fact well known. This of itself fastens the dark stigma on some of the most polished and powerful states of antiquity; on Tyre, for example, and on all the great Punic colonies, such as Cyprus, Rhodes, and Carthage. Egypt itself was not exempt. But what is less generally noticed is, that among Aryan peoples a similar custom widely obtained in the earliest periods, and sprang out of a similar nature-worship. It has left its mark on several of the most familiar legends of Greek literature. It was practised in the Mithras cult of Persia, which lingered to the age of Hadrian. It is found among the ancient Pelasgians, as at Eleuis in the worship of Demeter; in Attica and Arcadia, in that of Artemis; in Tenedos and Chios, in that of Bacchus. It is probable, indeed, that the immolation of a human victim to divinities like Bacchus or Demeter was reserved for great occasions. Among the milder Pelasgians, it did not become so regular a part of worship as those sacrifices, for example, which annually appeased the tutelary sun-god of Carthage, or the massacre of infants by passing them through the fire to the Chemosh of Moab or the Molech of Phoenicia. The general results of research on this painful subject, however, goes to show that even the milder faiths of early Greece sprang out of, or were grafted on, the same original idolatry of the generative and productive forces in nature which found favour among older races in Babylon, Phoenicia, and Canaan. Wherever the influence of that dark religion stretched, it bore of necessity two ghastly fruits--cruelty and lust: the orgies of the grove and the sacrifice of human blood. (J. O. Dykes, D. D.) Mature faith--illustrated by Abraham’s offering up Isaac I. THE TRIAL ITSELF. Every syllable of the text is significant. If George Herbert were speaking of it, he would say the words are all a case of knives cutting at Abraham’s soul. There is scarce a single syllable of God’s address to him, in the opening of this trial, but seems intended to pierce the patriarch to the quick. Look. “Take now thy son.” What! a father slay his son! Was there nothing in Abraham’s tent that God would have but his son? II. THE PATRIARCH UNDER THE TRIAL. In Abraham’s bearing during this test everything is delightful. His obedience is a picture of all the virtues in one, blended in marvellous harmony. It is not so much in one point that the great patriarch excels as in the whole of his sacred deed. 1. First notice the submission of Abraham under this temptation. 2. Abraham’s prudence. Prudence may be a great virtue, but often becomes one of the meanest and most beggarly of vices. Prudence rightly considered is a notable handmaid to faith; and the prudence of Abraham was seen in this, that he did not consult Sarah as to what he was about to do. 3. Abraham’s alacrity. He rose up early in the morning. 4. Abraham’s forethought. He did not desire to break down in his deeds. Having cleft the wood, he took with him the fire, and everything else necessary to consummate the work. Some people take no forethought about serving God, and then, if a little hitch occurs, they cry out that it is a providential circumstance, and make an excuse of it for escaping the unpleasant task. Oh, how easy it is when you do not want to involve yourselves in trouble, to think that you see some reason for not doing so! 5. Abraham’s perseverance. He continues three days in his journey, journeying towards the place where he was as much to sacrifice himself as to sacrifice his child. III. THE BLESSING WHICH CAME TO ABRAHAM THROUGH THE TRIAL OF HIS FAITH. The blessing was sevenfold. 1. The trial was withdrawn; Isaac was unharmed. 2. Abraham had the expressed approval of God. “Now I know that thou fearest God.” 3. Abraham next had a clearer view of Christ than ever he had before--no small reward. “Abraham saw My day,” said Christ. “He saw it and was glad.” 4. More than that, to Abraham God’s name was more fully revealed that day. He called Him Jehovah-jireh, a step in advance of anything that he had known before. “If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine.” 5. To Abraham that day the covenant was confirmed by oath. The Lord swore by Himself. 6. Then it was that Abraham had also a fuller promise with regard to the seed. 7. God pronounced over Abraham’s head a blessing, the like of which had never been given to man before; and what if I say that to no single individual in the whole lapse of time has there ever been given, distinctly and personally, such a blessing as was given to Abraham that day! First in trial, he is also first in blessing; first in faithfulness to his God, he becomes first in the sweet rewards which faithfulness is sure to obtain. (C. H.Spurgeon.) The gospel of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac If the Messiah be anywhere symbolised in the Old Testament, He is certainly to be seen upon Mount Moriah, where the beloved Isaac, willingly bound and laid upon the altar, is a lively foreshadowing of the Well-beloved of heaven yielding His life as a ransom I. First, THE PARALLEL. YOU know the story before you; we need not repeat it, except as we weave it into our meditation. As Abraham offered up Isaac, and so it might be said of him that he “ spared not his own son,” so the ever blessed God offered up His Son Jesus Christ, and spared Him not. 1. There is a likeness in the person offered. Isaac was Abraham’s son, and in that emphatic sense, his only son; hence the anguish of resigning him to sacrifice. Herein is love! Behold it and admire! Consider it and wonder! The beloved Son is made a sacrifice! (1) Remember that in Abraham’s case Isaac was the child of his heart. I need not enlarge on that, you can readily imagine how Abraham loved him; but in the case of our Lord what mind can conceive how near and dear our Redeemer was to the Father? (2) Remember, too, that Isaac was a most lovely and obedient son. We have proof of that in the fact that he was willing to be sacrificed, for being a vigorous young man, he might have resisted his aged father, but he willingly surrendered himself to be bound, and submitted to be laid on the altar. How few there are of such sons! “Though He were a Son yet learned He obedience.” It was His meat and His drink to do the will of Him that sent Him. (3) It must not be forgotten, too, that around Isaac there clustered mysterious prophecies. Isaac was to be the promised seed through which Abraham should live down to posterity and evermore be a blessing to all nations. But what prophecies gathered about the head of Christ I What glorious things were spoken of Him before His coming! He was the conquering seed destined to break the dragon’s head. He was the messenger of the covenant, yea, the covenant itself. 2. The parallel is very clear in the preface of the sacrifice. Let us show you in a few words. Abraham had three days in which to think upon and consider the death of his son; three days in which to look into that beloved face and to anticipate the hour in which it would wear the icy pallor of death. But the Eternal Father foreknew and foreordained the sacrifice of His only begotten Son, not three days nor three years, nor three thousand years, but or ever the earth was Jesus was to His Father “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” Remember, that Abraham prepared with sacred forethought everything for the sacrifice. But what shall I say of the great God who, through the ages, was constantly preparing this world for the grandest event in its history, the death of the Incarnate God? All history converged to this point. 3. We will not tarry, however, on the preface of the sacrifice, but advance in lowly worship to behold the act itself. (1) When Abraham came at last to Mount Moriah, he bade his servants remain at the foot of the hill. Now, gather up your thoughts, and come with me to Calvary, to the true Moriah. At the foot of that hill God bade all men stop. The twelve have been with Christ in his life-journey, but they must not be with Him in His death throes. Eleven go with him to Gethsemane; only three may draw near to Him in His passion; but when it comes to the climax of all, they forsake Him and flee; He fights the battle singly. (2) Do you observe that Isaac carried the wood!--a true picture of Jesus carrying His cross. (3) A point worthy of notice is, that it is said, “that they went both of them together.” He who was to smite with the knife, and the other who was to be the victim, walked in peaceful converse to the altar. “They went both together,” agreeing in heart. It is to me delightful to reflect that Christ Jesus and His Father went both together in the work of redeeming love. In that great work which we are saved, the Father gave us Christ, but Christ equally gave us Himself. (4) They proceeded together, and at last, Isaac was bound, bound by his father. So Christ was bound, and He saith, “Ye could have no power against Me unless it was given to you of My Father.” (5) The parallel goes still further, for while the father binds the victim, the victim is willing to be bound. Isaac might have resisted, but he did not; there are no traces of struggling; no signs of so much as a murmur. (6) Yet the parallel runs a little further, after having been suspended for a moment--Isaac was restored again. He was bound and laid upon the altar, the knife was drawn, and he was in spirit given up to death, but he was delivered. Leaving that gap, wherein Christ is not typified fully by Isaac, but the ram, yet was Jesus also delivered. He came again, the living and triumphant Son, after He had been dead. Isaac was for three days looked upon by Abraham as dead; on the third day the father rejoiced to descend the mountain with his son. Jesus was dead, but on the third day He rose again. (7) What followed the deliverance of Isaac? From that moment the covenant was ratified. (8) Isaac, also, had that day been the means of showing to Abraham the great provision of God. That name, Jehovah-jireh, was new to the world; it was given forth to men that day from Mount Moriah; and in the death of Christ men see what they never could have seen else, and in His resurrection they beheld the deepest of mysteries solved. God has provided what men wanted. II. I have to HINT AT SOME POINTS IN WHICH THE PARALLEL FALLS SHORT. 1. Isaac would have died in the course of nature. When offered up by his father, it was only a little in anticipation of the death which eventually must have occurred. But Jesus is He “who only hath immortality,” and who never needed to die. His death was purely voluntary, and herein stands by itself, not to be numbered with the deaths of other men. 2. Moreover, there was a constraint upon Abraham to give Isaac. I admit the cheerfulness of the gift, but still the highest law to which His spiritual nature was subject, rendered it incumbent upon believing Abraham to do as God commanded. But no stress could be laid upon the Most High. If He delivered up His Son, it must be with the greatest freeness. Oh! unconstrained love--a fountain welling up from the depth of the Divine nature, unasked for and undeserved! What shall I say of this? O God, be Thou ever blessed! Even the songs of heaven cannot express the obligations of our guilty race to Thy free love in the gift of Thy Son! 3. Isaac did not die after all, but Jesus did. 4. Isaac, if he had died, could not have died for us. (C. H. Spurgeon.) A difficulty removed How could God command Abraham to sacrifice his son? We reply: God never intended the death of Isaac. He saw the end from the beginning, and knew that the life of Isaac would not be taken. The command was only a severe test of the absolute faith and unswerving obedience of His servant Abraham. A story may illustrate this. In the Napoleon wars, it is said that once the emperors of Austria and Russia and the king of Prussia were discussing the relative absolute, unquestioning obedience of their soldiers. Each claimed the pre-eminence, in this regard, for his own soldiers. They were sitting in a room in the second story. To test the matter, they agreed that each in turn should call up the sentinel at the door, and command him to leap out of the window. First the Prussian monarch called his man. “Leap out of the window,” was the order. “Your Majesty,” said the soldier, “it would kill me.” He was then dismissed, and the Austrian soldier was called. “Leap out of that window,” commanded the emperor. “I will,” said the man, “if you really mean what you say.” He was in turn dismissed, and the Czar called his man. “Leap out of that window,” cried the Czar. Without a word in reply, the man crossed himself, and started to obey, but of course was stopped before he had reached the window. Were the sovereigns guilty of murder? Surely not, because their purpose was not to sacrifice their soldiers, but only to test their obedience. This anecdote may throw more light on the first difficulty than perhaps many a logical argument could do. God’s purpose must be judged, not by His command alone, but by the story in its completeness. Then only will our judgment be a correct one. Trial of Abraham’s faith We notice-- I. The AUTHOR of the trial (Gen 22:1). What has God to do with my trials? is the first question which wisdom always asks. When that is settled, we know where we are and what to do. II. The NATURE of the trial (Gen 22:2). It was no ordinary requirement. Any father’s heart would sink within him at such a command. The history of the future of which hope had dreamed was a fable. The book of life was to be closed when nothing but the title-page had been written. III. The PROGRESS of the trial (Gen 22:3-10). It was not one downright blow of trouble, but protracted trial. Days came and went, and found it unconcluded. Good men never graduate from trouble. Christian life itself, in one view, is trial--an escaping from old conditions, a breaking of fetters, a climbing to higher levels--all accomplished with pain and cost. Life is a race for life. Life is a battle for life. And so likewise its incidental troubles have a self-perpetuating power. Long after the gale has gone down the ocean keeps its restlessness, and under the serenest sky the after-surge of the storm moans upon the beach. It is so in human life. The shock of sorrow comes and passes, but the soul is not at rest. The old grief comes back in thought and dreams, and life can never again be what it was. IV. The ENDING of the trial (Gen 22:11-14). The long agony was over, and the issue was all the sweeter for the bitterness which had preceded it. Accepting this story of Abraham’s trial as a type of human life, we find certain practical truths emphasized. 1. Men make mistakes in their judgment of experience. What they think the best, may be the worst possible for them; what they think the worst, may be the best. Humanly judging, the command to sacrifice Isaac was the end of Abraham’s hopes; in fact, it was the beginning of his prosperity. It is so always. God plans behind and works through a cloud, but always for the best. 2. Clearly, also, in the practical conduct of life, faith is superior to reason. We can trust, and are wise in trusting for some things which can never be argued. 3. In our dealings with God, obedience is safety. Men are not to stop to calculate chances, nor wait until they think they see their way clear. Whatever God appoints is to be undertaken at once and without question. Men ruin themselves sometimes with what they call their prudence. There is no prudence in anything that limits exact obedience to the Divine requirements. (E. S. Atwood.) The trial of Abraham’s faith I. IT WAS A TRIAL FOR WHICH ABRAHAM HAD BEEN CAREFULLY PREPARED. 1. By his spiritual history. 2. By a life of trial. II. IT WAS A TRIAL OF REMARKABLE SEVERITY. 1. The violence done to his natural feelings. 2. The violence done to his feelings as a religious man. III. THIS TRIAL WAS ENDURED IN THE SPIRIT OF AN EXTRAORDINARY FAITH. His obedience was-- 1. Unquestioning. 2. Complete. 3. Marked by humility. 4. Inspired by trust in a personal God. IV. GOD REWARDED HIS FAITHFUL ENDURANCE OF THE TRIAL. 1. By taking the will for the deed. 2. By renewing His promises. 3. By turning the occasion of the trial into a revelation of the day of Christ. (1) He sees represented the sacrifice of the only-begotten and well-beloved Son of God. (2) There is suggested to him the idea of substitution. (3) The resurrection of Christ and His return to glory are also represented. Learn: 1. That the most distinguished of God’s servants are often subjected to the greatest trials. 2. That trials test the strength and spirituality of our faith. 3. That trials well endured set spiritual truths in a clearer and more affecting light. (T. H. Leale.) Abraham offering Isaac The crowning test of Abraham’s life, in which all preceding trials culminated. The greatness of the test appears in the exceptional character of the demand. It appeared as a direct contradiction of God’s promise. Abraham’s obedience was-- 1. Prompt. The command came in the night. Early next morning, Abraham “rose up . . . and took . . . Isaac,” &c. 2. Persistent. He had the sustaining force which enabled him to maintain his purpose unwaveringly during the period of suspense between the command and the full obedience to it. 3. Perfect. He accepted the command as meaning the unreserved and unconditional offering up of Isaac, with the faith that God would say “enough” when the obedience came up to the measure of the demand. When that would be, it was for God, not Abraham, to decide. It was for him to obey; and he did obey. When he lifted up the knife, the sacrifice was complete. Isaac bad already been sacrificed upon the altar of a father’s heart. All the agony of giving up had been endured. Only the tragedy, and not the real sacrifice was prevented. (D. Davies.) Abraham’s trial I. THE DIFFICULTY AND ITS EXPLANATION. God seems to have required of Abraham what was wrong. He seems to have sanctioned human sacrifice. My reply is-- 1. God did not require it. You must take the history as a whole, the conclusion as well as the commencement. The sacrifice of Isaac was commanded at first, and forbidden at the end. Had it ended in Abraham’s accomplishing the sacrifice, I know not what could have been said; it would have left on the page of Scripture a dark and painful blot. My reply to God’s seeming to require human sacrifice is the conclusion of the chapter. God says, “Lay not thine hand upon the lad.” This is the final decree. Thus human sacrifices were distinctly forbidden. He really required the surrender of the father’s will. He seemed to demand the sacrifice of life. 2. But further still. God did not demand what was wrong. It did not seem wrong to Abraham. It is not enough defence to say God did not command wrong. Had God seemed to command wrong, the difficulty would be as great. Abraham’s faith would then have consisted in doing wrong for the sake of God. Now it did not. Abraham lived in a country where human sacrifices are common; he lived in a day when a father’s power over a son’s life was absolute. He was familiar with the idea; and just as familiarity with slavery makes it seem less horrible, so familiarity with this as an established and conscientious mode of worshipping God removed from Abraham much of the horror we should feel. II. THE NATURE OF THE TRIAL. 1. We remark, first, this trial was made under aggravated circumstances. The words in which God’s command was couched were those of accumulated keenness. To subdue the father in the heart, that a Roman has done, and calmly signed his son’s death-warrant; but to subdue it, not with Roman hardness, but with deep trust in God and faith in His providence, saying, It is not hate but love that requires this--this was the nobleness, this the fierce difficulty of Abraham’s sacrifice; this it was which raised him above the Roman hero. 2. We remark, secondly, Abraham was to do this; his son was to die by his own hand, not by a delegate. He was to preclude escape. We do our sacrifices in a cowardly way; we leave loopholes for escape. We do not with our own hand, at His call, cut asunder the dearest ties. We do not immediately take the path of duty, but wait till we are forced into it; always delaying in the hope that some accident may occur which will make it impossible. Them conscience says, with a terrible voice: “You must do it and with your own hand. The knife must be sharp and the blow true. Your own heart must be the sacrifice, and your own hand the priest. It must not be a sacrifice made for you by circumstances.” III. HOW THE TRIAL WAS MET. 1. Without ostentation. 2. Abraham was in earnest. If you make a sacrifice, expecting that God will return you your Isaac, that is a sham sacrifice, not a real one. Therefore, if you make sacrifices, let them be real. You will have an infinite gain: yes; but it must be done with an earnest heart, expecting nothing in return. There are times, too, when what you give to God will never be repaid in kind. Isaac is not always restored; but it will be repaid by love, truth, and kindness. God will take you at your word. He says, “Do good and lend, hoping for nothing in return.” Lessons: 1. The Christian sacrifice is the surrender of will. 2. For a true sacrifice, there must be real love. 3. We must not seek for sacrifices. You need make no wild, romantic efforts to find occasions. Plenty will occur by God’s appointment, and better than if devised by you. Every hour and moment our will may yield as Abraham’s did, quietly, manfully, unseen by all but God. These are the sacrifices which God approves. This is what Abraham meant when he said “My son, God will provide Himself a lamb for a burnt-offering.” (F. W. Robertson, M. A.) The greatest trial of all Satan tempts us that he may bring out the evil that is in our hearts; God tries or tests us that He may bring out all the good. The common incidents of daily life, as well as the rare and exceptional crises, are so contrived as to give us incessant opportunities of exercising, and so strengthening, the graces of Christian living. I. GOD SENDS US NO TRIAL, WHETHER GREAT OR SMALL, WITHOUT FIRST PREPARING US. II. GOD OFTEN PREPARED US FOR COMING TRIAL BY GIVING US SON, IN NEW AND BLISSFUL REVELATION OF HIMSELF. III. THE TRIAL CAME VERY SUDDENLY. IV. THE TRIAL TOUCHED ABRAHAM IN HIS TENDEREST POINT. V. IT WAS ALSO A GREAT TEST OF HIS FAITH. VI. IT WAS A TEST OF HIS OBEDIENCE. VII. THIS TEST DID NOT OUTRAGE ANY OF THE NATURAL INSTINCTS OF HIS SOUL. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.) JEHOVAH JIREH by Nathan Stone - excerpt from The Names of God THE NAME Jehovah-jireh is one a number of names compounded with Jehovah. Natur lly these names owe something of their significance t the name Jehovah itself which as we have learned, reveals God as the eternal self-existent One, the God of revelation, the God of moral and spiritual attributes—of righteousness, holiness, love, and therefore of redemption, the God who stands in special covenant relation to Israel in contrast to Elohim, the general name of God in relation to all the nations. Most of these compound names of God arise out of some historic incident, and portray Jehovah in some aspect of His character as meeting human need. HISTORICAL SETTING The historic incident out of which the name Jehovah jireh rises is one of the most moving and significant in the Word of God. The story is found in Genesis 22 . It is the story of the last and greatest crisis in the life of Abraham. Every event in his life has led up to this supreme hour from the time of his call to a high destiny, through every vicissitude, through every joy, through every trial or failure, through every measure of success and blessing, through every hope and promise and assurance. All had been in preparation for this event. The great promise had been fulfilled, the supreme hope of his life realized. He had settled down to live the rest of his life in peace and in joyous anticipation of the larger fulfillment of the promise through the centuries, and its final spiritual fulfillment. The rationalistic critics have long been silenced who denied or doubted the reality of the Patriarchs as actual persons, but interpreted them merely as ideal and imaginary figures around which ancient Hebrew tradition cast its national origins and early history. For apart from our faith in the Bible as the inspired revelation of God, and its Old and New Testament testimony, to the reality of Abraham as a historic person, abundant evidence has been brought to light in recent years and decades as to the historicity of the persons and the veracity of the events to dispel all doubts and invalidate all objections. In this incident Elohim appears to Abraham with the astounding command to offer up as a sacrifice, a burnt offering, his only and well-beloved son Isaac. Abraham, apparently, is not aware that this is a testing. His feelings can scarcely be imagined. His tremendous faith, in view of all the circumstances, is, perhaps, not sufficiently appreciated. The record reveals not a word of objection or remonstrance on his part. But if he laughed in his heart with joyful hope, even though perhaps mingled with a little doubt, when this son was promised to him, how deep his anguish and perplexity must have been at this amazing request from the God who had been so good to him. Yet the faith which enabled him to believe such a staggering promise in the first place is now sufficient for an even more staggering demand. This incident, then, reveals Abraham's obedience and faith, Isaac's willing submission, and Jehovah's gracious pro-vision of a substitute in his place. THE MEANING OF THE NAME Before we discuss the derivation and meaning of this name, it will be well to briefly recall the happenings which occasioned its use. On the way to the place of sacrifice Isaac cannot contain his curiosity about the lamb for the burnt offering. "Behold the fire and wood"; he said, "but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" (Gen. 22:7). Abraham's answer to this question is that God will provide Himself a lamb. It is not necessary to suppose that Abraham thought of an ordinary lamb in this answer, although he may have had some such dim hope in his mind. At any rate, in his instructions to his young men to wait for him he says: "I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you" (v. 5). It is only at the last moment, when Isaac lies bound up-on the altar, and any such hope he may have entertained is gone, and the knife in his upraised hand is about to descend, that the voice of the angel of Jehovah arrests and stays his hand, and Abraham looks about and sees a ram caught in a thicket by its horns, which he offers up instead of his son. Then in verse 14 we read in the Authorized Version of our Bible: "And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh: as it is said to this day, In the mount of the Lord [Jehovah] it shall be seen." In the American Standard Version of our Bible, however, instead of "it shall be seen," it reads "it shall be provided." Still another rendering of this important word is "he shall be seen." Thus, "in the mount of Jehovah, he shall be seen or provided." First of all it must be understood that in this name Jehovah-jireh, the word jireh is simply a transliteration of a Hebrew word which appears many times throughout the Scriptures and is translated for what it means. Only its unusual significance here, its connection with this remarkable event, and its union with the title Jehovah has brought it down to us as a compound name of God. It is simply a form of the verb to see. What connection can there be then between the word see and provide, for both of these English words are used to translate the one Hebrew word, and they certainly seem to be quite distinct in their meaning? It must be admitted, too, that in the great majority of cases where this word occurs in the Hebrew Bible, it is translated "see" or "appear." Why then should we translate it "provide" here? One reason for this, no doubt, as one writer declares,' is, that with God, to see is also to foresee. As the One who possesses eternal wisdom and knowledge, He knows the end from the beginning. As Elohim He is all-knowing, all-wise, and all-powerful. From eternity to eternity He foresees everything. But another word for seeing is vision, from the Latin word video—to see. Thus with God foreseeing is prevision. As the Jehovah of righteousness and holiness, and of love and redemption, having prevision of man's sin, and fall, and need, He makes provision for that need. For provision, after all, is merely a compound of two Latin words meaning "to see beforehand." And we may learn from a dictionary that provide is simply the verb and prevision the noun of seeing beforehand. Thus to God prevision is necessarily followed by provision, for He certainly will provide for that need which His foreseeing shows Him to exist. With Him prevision and provision are one and the same thing. All this is certainly expressed in the term Jehovah-jireh; and it is quite correct and in its proper significance to translate this name of God Jehovah jireh, "God will provide." Another form of the word from which jireh is derived is also used of men in the sense of foresee. It is translated "seer" or "prophet." Several references are made in the Scriptures to Samuel the Seer and the Book of Samuel the Seer (I Chr 9:22; 26:28; II Sam. 15:27; II Chron. 16:7). The word is ro'eh which, as can easily be seen, is much like jireh. In I Samuel 9:9 it is stated that the prophet formerly was called a seer. Even as late as the time of Isaiah (30:10) this was the word sometimes used for a prophet. Here the prophet Isaiah speaks of a people who say to the seers: "See not; and to the prophets, Prophesy not unto us right things." A prophet is, of course, one who foresees, and since seer, or ro'eh, is the same as prophet, it consequently means one who foresees. Besides this the word jireh is translated in Genesis 22:8, even in our Authorized Version of the Bible, as provide. Abraham here said to Isaac: "My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering." Even if we were to translate here, "God will see to it," or "God will see for Himself a lamb for a burnt offering," the meaning would be exactly the same as provide. The importance of the words used here can hardly be overestimated, and afford striking evidence and confirmation of the hand of God in revelation. "Abraham called the name of the place Jehovah-jireh: as it is said to this day, In the mount of the.Lord it or he shall be seen." "It shall be seen"—jeroeh—the same word as jireh. That is, God's provision shall be seen. In the mount of the Lord! What was this mount of the Lord? In Genesis 22:2 the command comes to Abraham: "Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of." The significant word here is the word Moriah, of which more will be said later. This word, many He-brew scholars agree, is a kindred word to jireh, derived from the same root. Its ending is an abbreviated form of the name Jehovah. Thus it may be rendered "seen" or "provided of Jehovah." All of this confirms and justifies our translation of the word jireh as "seeing" or "appearing and providing," and invests this name of Jehovah with a wealth of meaning and significance. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS NAME This name is significant, first of all, because it is a commemoration—a commemoration of a great deliverance. This was the primary reason for naming the scene of this event Jehovah-jireh. It was a constant reminder of the wonderful grace of the Jehovah who had wrought this deliverance. Now that it was all over, and Abraham had learned the lesson God was teaching him and could see something of God's glorious purpose in it all, he sought only to magnify the grace of Jehovah. His magnifying of this grace was in proportion to the deep and dark perplexity that had filled his soul on the way to the mount. Had God really spoken to him and called him? Did the Elohim mean what He had said? Could He really mean what He said now? Such may have been Abraham's thoughts. But his joy and gratitude were in proportion to his sorrow and despair at the terrible prospect before him—the overwhelming horror that must have flooded his soul at the thought, yes, the very act of plunging the knife of sacrifice into the body of his own son, his only son, the son so longed for, hoped for, prayed for, the child of their old age. What a great and glorious deliverance it was that Jehovah's grace had provided, and how unexpected and dramatic! Man's extremity is ever God's opportunity, not only for deliverance but to teach also wonderful lessons of His purpose as well as providence. Surely out of this experience of Jehovah's delivering grace there must have come a purer, more spiritual relationship of love between this father and son. This must have been one lesson the experience was intended to convey. As one great commentator has declared, it was that he should no more love his beloved son as his flesh and blood, but solely and only as the gracious gift and possession of God, as a good entrusted to him by God; which he was to be ready to render back to Him at any moment (Delitzsch) . According to the words of the angel of Jehovah it is fullest proof of Abraham's faith and obedience, "seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me." And He might have added, "Even as I will not withhold my only and well-beloved Son as the great provision for man's redemption." For this, after all, is the chief lesson of the story, the deliverance of Isaac through the provision of a substitute. For just as Abraham is about to slay him, the voice of the angel of Jehovah arrests him: "Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do anything unto him." And there in the thicket is the substitute provided by Jehovah. A further significance of this name of God lies in the expectation of something yet to come. Even if we were to translate Jehovah-jireh as "the Lord doth provide" rather than "will provide," it would be Abraham's testimony to the fact that Jehovah is a God who always provides; that as He provided then He would also pro-vide in the future—deliverance from death, the oil of joy for the ashes of sorrow and mourning, blessings for obedience, even though obedience be made perfect through sufferings. The naming of the place Jehovah-jireh was meant to be proverbial of this very thing—"as it is said to this day." But this naming of the place was more than proverbial with Abraham. He can hardly have emerged from such a remarkable and solemn experience without feeling or realizing that it had far deeper significance than the test of his own faith only. The profound import of the occasion is strikingly attested by the most solemn language of Jehovah Himself calling from heaven a second time after the lamb of His provision had been offered, and saying, "By myself have I sworn, saith Jehovah." The word translated "saith" is the particular word used of Jehovah when making the most solemn prophetic utterances. Some translate it "utterance," others, "oracle." Then follows an emphatic confirmation of the promises to make Abraham a multitude, and a blessing to the world "because thou hast done this thing," and "because thou hast obeyed my voice." There are various allusions in the New Testament to this great transaction that indicate that Abraham saw far more than the immediate provision and deliverance in it. It was more than proverbial. He saw in it a prediction. He called the name of the place Jehovah-jireh; not merely Jehovah doth provide but Jehovah will provide. And then, "as it is said to this day, In the mount of Jehovah it shall be seen" or "it shall be provided." One of the most noted of medieval Jewish commentators also understood this expression to mean, "God will manifest Himself to His people." THE REALIZATION What then was that provision which Abraham saw, dimly perhaps, with the eye of faith? What was the reality of which Isaac, and the lamb, were but types? Certainly Abraham understood the reality of sin, and realized the need for atonement. The numerous altars he built and the offerings he sacrificed attest that fact. Why then the demand for Isaac as an offering? Was it not to impress upon Abraham more deeply the temporary character of these sacrifices; that it was impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins (Heb. 10:4); that they were only shadows of which some-thing infinitely worthier should be the substance and reality? Thus Isaac was exhibited as the pattern of one under the judgment of God for sin. Animals cannot take away the sins of men. Animals cannot be consecrated to God instead of men. "Lebanon is not sufficient to burn, nor the beasts thereof sufficient for a burnt offering" (Isa. 40:16). Only one of like nature, if one worthy enough can be found, can make such atonement and consecration. Here again in the deliverance of Isaac as he was about to be offered Abraham received more than an inkling of the fact that not even Isaac, that none born of flesh alone, is sufficient for that. For Isaac was offered and received back only in a figure (Heb. 11:19), and the lamb became his substitute also. Surely 'God was teaching Abraham that the only sacrifice acceptable to Him is the one chosen and appointed by Himself. "Wherewithal shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come be-fore him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams .. . shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" says Micah 6:6-7. In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen or provided, and that mount is Moriah which, as already stated, means appearance or provision of God. It was this Mount Moriah which later became the site of the Temple and the center of Israel's worship, its sacrificial system. In II Chronicles 3:1 it is written: "Then Solomon began to build the house of the Lord [Jehovah] at Jerusalem in mount Moriah, where Jehovah appeared unto David his father, in the place that David had prepared in the threshing floor of Ornan, the Jebusite." It was here, in David's time, that God in His mercy staved the hand of avenging justice when David offered the sacrifices of substitution. The very heart of Israel's religion, centered in the Temple on Mount Moriah, was its substitutionary sacrifices. A Jewish interpretation of Genesis 22:14 is: "God will see and choose that very place to cause His Shekinah to rest thereon and to offer the offerings." But, like Abraham, the true and faithful Israelite must have realized that the sacrifice of animals was only a shadow of something to come. Jehovah's gracious promise to Solomon in II Chronicles 7 to set His heart and eyes and His glory on that place indicate something in-finitely nobler than animal sacrifice. Isaiah and Micah make sublime predictions concerning the mountain of the house of the Lord. Zechariah speaks of the glory of that holy mountain, the mountain of Jehovah of hosts. What was the glory of that mountain? Surely it was no temple made with hands! Surely it was not all the beasts on Jewish altars slain. The Abraham who looked not for an earthly city but for one "which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God," also looked for a better and more enduring sacrifice; for the Mount Moriah of which he spoke saying: "In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen." be-came the site of Calvary and the scene of that grand and awful sacrifice of God's only begotten and well-beloved Son, who was put under judgment for sin, and became our Substitute. Perhaps Abraham understood better than we realize the wonder of Jehovah's provision for man's redemption when he said: "In the Mount of Jehovah, he will appear. " Was it not this to which the Lord Jesus Christ Himself referred in John 8:56, when He said: "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad." Abraham and Isaac, as father and only begotten son. are both types of Jehovah's full and glorious provision for man's sin and need. "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son ..." (John 3:16). And Paul speaks of God as "he that spared not his own Son. but delivered him up for us all . . ." (Rom. 8:32). "Who was delivered up for our trespasses . . ." (Rom. 4:25). And John says again: "ln this was manifested the love of God toward us, in that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him" (1 John 4:9). On Mount Moriah Jehovah was teaching Abraham what He Himself was prepared to provide. He was teaching the awful cost to Himself of the provision of the sacrifice for sin. Does it break your heart, Abraham, to give up, to slay, yes, by your own hand, as an innocent sacrifice, your well-beloved and only son? Then think of the awful and infinite cost to Me of what I am prepared to do for man. The thing that Abraham fore-shadowed on Mount Moriah was realized, accomplished, when God's Son upon the cross cried, "It is finished." Isaac asks, "Where is the lamb?" Abraham answers, "God will provide himself a lamb." John the Baptist announces, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). This was the Lamb provided and slain from the foundation of the world but manifested on Mount Moriah for us; through whose precious blood, even the blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, we are redeemed (1 Peter 1:18, 19). This Lamb is the center of heaven's glory and the object of its adoration. Ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands say with a loud voice: "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and might, and honor, and glory and blessing." Yes, and every creature will join in saying: "Blessing and honor, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb forever and ever" (Rev. 5:11-13). God will provide Himself a lamb. In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen, it shall be provided. In the mount of the Lord He was seen, He was provided, even Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, our Saviour, our Lord, to whom be glory forever, and who is over all God blessed forever. Amen. (The Names of God) Herbert Lockyer - JEHOVAH-JIREH—The Lord Will Provide (Genesis 22:14) Mohammed declared that he received from Gabriel 99 divine names, sufficient for him to present the whole Being of God, which he utterly failed to do. Here is a further compound name, and one of the most precious among all of God's scriptural titles. Although Abraham knew God as his Friend, he continued to make fresh discoveries of Him, and as memorials coined new names so Jehovah-Jireh stands as a monument of a great discovery and of a remarkable deliverance, the full story of which is found in Genesis 22. The margin of our Bible tells us that this name means "The Lord will see" or "The Lord will provide." That there is a good deal of difference between these two meanings as far as man is concerned, is seen in the fact that to foresee is one thing, but to provide is another. But when we come to deal with God the two are found to be one and the same. Are not our hearts comforted as we remember that His pre-vision means His pro-vision, which is what is meant by His combined name that Abraham gave to the place where he found the ram provided as a substitute for Isaac. What an expression of wondrous fullness and meaning is Jehovah-Jireh! Because of His omniscience and perfection of character, He is able to provide for, or supply, the need whatever it may be. We may foresee a need that may arise, yet be incapable of making any provision at all for the need. What He foresees, He can furnish. A comparison of renderings is profitable. For instance in the KJV, we read, "In the mount of the LORD, it shall be seen," the margin of the RSV reads, "He will be seen." The KJV has "In the mount of the LORD, It shall be provided"—the RV "He shall be provided." Further, these alternative readings become more emphatic as we connect them with Moriah, which, in the Hebrew, is a kindred word to Jireh, taken from "Jehovah seeing," and can be translated, "seen of JAH" or, "the vision of Jehovah." Thus, there is a far deeper and more solemn application of Moriah than we realize! "In the mount of the LORD, or in Moriah (that is, where Jehovah shall see) It or He (Jehovah) shall be seen." Immediately we ask, who is the infinite power and love of Jehovah that shall be seen upon Mount Moriah making provision, by substitutionary sacrifice, for all the demands of Almighty GOD-Elohim? "Jehovah shall provide"—"Jehovah shall be seen"? As Elohim God demanded the sacrifice of Isaac, but as Jehovah He made complete provision of a substitute for the son Abraham willingly offered. What God commanded, He supplied. Augustine expressed it, "Command what Thou wilt, then give what Thou commandest" Paul puts it, "Faithful is He that calleth you, who also will do it" (1 Thessalonians 5:24). Abraham's faith endured many trials, but that of Moriah was the summit of them all. But out of the severe test the patriarch emerged with a new name and seal, The Lord Will See to It. Abraham evinced a growing faith in God, which He himself cultivated, and now he came to learn in a new way the truth of God's all-sufficiency. Hence his reply to Isaac's question as to the animal for sacrifice, "The Lord will see to it that there is a lamb for the burnt offering." Even if he had to plunge his knife into Isaac, Abraham believed that God was able to raise his son from the dead. His faith was willing to go to the limit, for he knew that, "The Lord will see to it" (Hebrews 11:19). The three interpretations of the name Abraham gave to the place God brought him to, are worthy of comparison— • The Lord shall appear, an allusion to the divine interposition by which Isaac was saved from death. • The Lord shall see, in the sense of looking out and selecting the offerings that should afterwards be presented in the Temple. • The Lord shall provide. Here we have a backward glance to Abraham's answer, "God will provide Himself the lamb for the burnt-offering" (Genesis 22:8). The latter interpretation, as given in the ASV, suggests at least three aspects of spiritual import, namely: 1. A Memorial of Divine Intervention. 2. A Mirror of the Lamb of Glory. 3. A Message of God's Goodness to Mankind in General, and to the Saints in Particular. First of all, then, we think of Moriah the place as being commemorative of Abraham's deliverance. The interesting thing is that this is the first recorded instance in Scripture of the naming of a place after a divine interposition or manifestation; a practice afterwards frequently observed as by Jacob at Bethel and Peniel, and Moses at Rephidim. Surely, if ever a spot was worthy of remembrance by a special designation it was Mount Moriah, not so much, however, as Dr. Thomas Whitelaw, in his Jehovah-Jesus published in 1913, points out— "In order to consecrate the spot or invest it with peculiar sanctity, as if discerning with the eye of faith the sacred uses to which in the distant future it should be put, not merely to assist Abraham's own remembrance of the awful experiences through which he had passed on his journey to the mount and in his transactions there with his son and his God—these things, one can imagine would never pass from the patriarch's recollection, rather would be engraven on his memory with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever—but to magnify the grace of God which had wrought out for him so marvellous a deliverance." We cannot enter into the agony of Abraham's heart staggering under the heavy load of sorrow at having to slay his own son, the son of promise for whom he had waited for 25 years. This fine lad was dearer to the aged patriarch than life, and when asked the innocent question, "Father, where is the Iamb for a burnt-offering?" his soul must have been lacerated to the very quick. What grief and overwhelming horror of soul darkness must have descended upon Abraham when the mount was reached, the altar prepared and Isaac bound upon it, and the knife uplifted to plunge into the lad's heart! But God's obedient friend was to prove that in a paradoxical way, what had been divinely commanded was never intended; that the call to such a supreme sacrifice was only intended to test the reality of faith, which God vindicated. Abraham went through the dread transaction most obediently up to the last act, when suddenly his uplifted hand was' stayed, and a substitute provided in "the ram caught in the thicket." So strong faith prevailed—Isaac was spared, and Abraham prevented from slaying his son. And it was to commemorate such a divine intervention that he named the place Jehovah-Jireh—THE LORD WILL PROVIDE. While Abraham believed that God would not suffer His promise to be defeated, and would thus raise Isaac from the dead, the deliverance from death in the nick of time was unexpected, as most of God's deliverances are. In such an hour as they are not looked for they appear. "Man's extremity is God's opportunity." Surely that intervention is one of the most dramatic in Scripture! How startled Abraham must have been as he heard the divine voice say, "Abraham! lay not thine hand upon the lad," especially after hearing the same voice command, "Take thine only son, whom thou lovest, and offer him for a burnt-offering." Dr. Whitelaw remarks, "Ah! there is no actor like God. When He steps upon the stage, all human actors are put into the shade." In the second place, there is the typical value of that grim scene on Mount Moriah. Isaac asked the question, "Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb?" Two thousand years later John the Baptist answered this question, "Behold the Lamb of God!" We read of Abraham and Isaac that they went together to "the place of which God had told him," and once again we behold the two going forward together to Mount Calvary in holy consent and unison. "God so loved the World that He gave His only begotten Son" (John 3:16). But what a difference between Moriah and Calvary! Isaac was about to be offered but spared at the last moment and a ram sacrificed in his stead. The knife, however, was not stayed at Calvary, but was plunged deep into the heart of God's only begotten Son. The Father did not produce a substitute for His Son at the final moment. "He gave His only begotten Son," because He, as the Holy Ram, was to be the Substitute for sinners who deserved to die. "He gave Himself for—on behalf of—our sins." Calvary was not a tragedy that could be avoided as the one at Moriah was. "The place called Calvary" was seen afar off even from the foundation of the world. When, in a past eternity, Love drew salvation's plan, the Father and the Son went forward deliberately until the "green hill far away without a city wall" was reached, where the Father gave—gave to the uttermost for our redemption. Perhaps the Crucifixion Day was the day our Lord spoke of to the Jews, "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad" (John 8:56), which He had in mind as He thought of Moriah, The Son, typified by Isaac, acquiesced in the sacrifice. The aged patriarch could never have captured and bound his agile, strong son without his consent At Calvary, Christ's life was not taken by force, it was willingly given. The answer of Abraham to Isaac's question as to where the lamb was coming from for the sacrifice gathers added significance as we think of the provision God has made for the deepest need of sinners. "God will provide Himself a lamb." God Himself in the Person of His Son provided "the Lamb without blemish and without spot," for our deliverance from sin's curse and dominion. At the Cross, He became the universal Provider of redemption, providing life for our death, atonement for our guilt, strength for our weakness, Heaven for our Hell. Because God spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for all, in virtue of the Lamb of Calvary, He stands ready to "freely give us all things" (Romans 8:32). Now, the sinner can do nothing whatever for his salvation. The Lord has seen to it, both for time and eternity. Thirdly, we have the promise and assurance of God's goodness in Jehovah-Jireh. In the matter of temporal provision for mankind in general, God daily proves Himself to be the unfailing Provider. "The eyes of all—man and beast—wait upon Him, for He giveth (them their meat in due season." He daily spreads a glorious feast, And at His table dine, The whole creation—man and beast, And He's a friend of mine. For those of us redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, we have the promise, "My God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus" (Philippians 4:19). These words of Paul are the New Testament version of Jehovah-Jireh, and the all means ALL, whether our needs are spiritual, physical or material. Food, clothing, and the sustenance of life, are nothing to Him to provide who never forgets to feed the sparrows (Matthew 6:25-34). When Jesus sent forth the Seventy He knew all about the need that would face them, and when they returned it was with the confession that they lacked nothing (Luke 22:35). The heart of the Lord is as large as His power is infinite, and as we cast all our care upon Him, we experience how deeply He cares for us, and is at hand to provide when need arises. Say not, my soul, "From whence can God relieve my care? Remember that Omnipotence hath servants everywhere. His methods are sublime; His heart profoundly kind; God never is before His time, and never is behind. When faced with a legitimate, pressing need, faith can say, The Lord will see to it. The seeing implied here is a kindly, friendly, interested seeing, a seeing that cares and sympathizes and provides for the need it sees, and God's vision issues in provision. Trials, sorrows, and disappointments may be ours, but in all situations we can prove that it is true that God will provide. Tho' troubles assail and dangers affright Tho' friends should all fail and foes all unite; Yet one thing secures us, whatever betide, The Scripture assures us, "The Lord will provide." Abraham Offers Isaac or Finds Jehovah-Jireh - Robert Neighbour The Supreme Test (Gen. 22:1,2). The Three Days' Journey (Gen. 22:3,4). Where Is the Lamb? (Gen. 22:7). Isaac Bound (Gen. 22:9). In the Stead of His Son (Gen. 22:13). Jehovah-jireh (Gen. 22:14). Because Thou Hast Done This Thing (Gen. 22:16,17). Abraham offering up Isaac has always stood with the orthodox as a striking and beautiful type of God offering up His Son. To be sure the critic would rob us of this meaningful message, and tell us that Abraham, of his own volition, was only following out the heathen custom of his day — a most hideous and barbaric rite, — the sacrifice of his son to appease the wrath of an avengeful God. In spite of the critic we come believing; and we sit at the feet of our Lord to-day and ask Him to teach us the deeper meanings of this trying test with which God, Himself, did test Abraham. The Supreme Test "And it came to pass after these things, that God did prove Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham; and he said, Here am I. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of" (Gen. 22:1,2, A. S. V.). 1. The testing of Abraham was, in no sense, a temptation to sin. James 1:13: "Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth He any man." A man may be tempted to evil by the drawings out of his own flesh; or else by the enticings of the devil; but he is never tempted of God to do evil. God does often test saints. God led the children of Israel forty years in the wilderness to prove them, to know what was in them and to see whether they would keep His commandments (see Deut 8:2). God tried out His servant Job; He permitted satan to divest him of his possessions and even to put his hand upon his body. Yet, in all of Job's trials, while satan was seeking to pull him down and to wreck his faith, God was only testing him that He might lift him up, and lead him to better things. It is good to see the latter days of Job and to observe the "end of the Lord, that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy" (James 5:11). Thus can we say, James 1:12: "Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love Him." 2. The testing of Abraham was a supreme test. The command was, "Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest * * and offer him." (1) Isaac was a son of promise. In him Abraham's all was staked. There was no other son to take his place, none other who could stand in his stead. With Isaac slain every promise of God to Abraham would be done away. The type is plain. Jesus Christ, too, was a Son of promise. There was no other son to take His place. He was God's only begotten. In Him and in Him alone could God save the lost. There was no other name under Heaven and among men whereby we must be saved. (2) Isaac was the son of his father's love. This was made doubly true, because Abraham had waited so many years for the birth of Isaac. He had sometimes almost despaired that Isaac would' be born. When at last, Isaac came as a babe to bless his home, Abraham was overwhelmed with joy. His whole heart was centered in his son. Jesus Christ was the Son of the Father's love. "This is My beloved Son." These were the words that came from the blue, as Christ was baptized. Christ was God's beloved Son, for He had been one with the Father from all eternity. He and the Father were one. (3) Isaac was the son of Abraham's Old age. Christ was the Son of Eternity. He was from everlasting unto everlasting. Again the type is manifested. (4) Abraham's offering up of Isaac was a supreme MARK OF HIS UNSWERVING LOVE AND FIDELITY TO God. Jesus Christ offered up on the Cross is God's greatest proof of His love to us. "God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8). The Three Days' Journey "And Abraham rose early in the morning, and saddled his ass and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son; and he clave the wood for t e burnt-offering, and rose up, and went onto the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off" (Gen. 22:3, 4, A. S. V.). 1. Abraham obeyed promptly. When the word came to offer up Isaac, Abraham rose up early in the morning and started out to obey God's command. Prompt obedience is the only obedience that merits praise. The commandments of the Lord require haste. Hesitancy spells disaster. During all the ages there never was a moment that God, the Father held back from man the gift of His Son. Neither did Christ tarry by the way. Even the Garden of Gethsemane scene suggests no desire on Christ's part to loiter on the way to His Cross. 2. Abraham and Isaac went a three days' journey. Three days in the Bible speaks of death, burial and resurrection. The objective of that memorable trip had to do with the Cross of Christ. Far back in eternity Jesus Christ began His journey toward the Cross of Calvary. He was a Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world. He was foreordained to die by the determinate council and foreknowledge of God. Long before God said, "Let Us make man," Jesus Christ was the crucified, in the will of God. When Christ was born of Mary, He only continued the pathway toward the Cross which He had been treading for many ages. 3. Abraham placed the wood of the burnt-offering on Isaac. Even so did Christ carry His Cross. "And He bearing His Cross went forth into a place called the place of a skull" (John 19:17). There are many to-day given to the wearing of tiny gold crosses. These crosses are fastened on shining chains. The Cross of Christ was rugged. He first bore the Cross and afterward the Cross bore Him. "In the Cross of Christ I glory, Towering o'er the wrecks of time, All the light of Sacred Story, Gathers round its head sublime." 4. Two young men went part of the way and then tarried behind. Christ had twelve Apostles, but as the mob came to His arrest, they all forsook Him and fled (see Matt. 26:56). To be sure, as He hung on the Cross, "all His acquaintances, and the women that followed Him from Galilee, stood afar off, beholding these things" (Luke 23:49); and John and Mary and some others stood near by at the foot of the Cross (see John 19:25, 26) however, none could travel with Him around the cycle of His suffering. He went alone. 5. From Isaac there is no recorded word of reproach, only a question — Where is the sacrifice? Jesus Christ went unresistingly toward His Cross. He went as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep dumb before its shearers (see Isa. 53:7). Only once did Christ question the Father, when He said "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" 6. Abraham and Isaac went both. Jesus Christ could well say: "The Father is with Me" (John 16:31). All of the weary way from the upper room to Gethsemane; from Gethsemane to Pilate's judgment hall, by way of the home f Annas and of Caiaphas; from the hall of Pilate to the whipping post, and from the whipping post to the Cross, did the Father walk with Jesus. Yes, God was with Him. It was only when God laid iniquity upon Him, when God made Him to be sin for us (see II Cor, 5:21), that the Father hid His face. Where Is the Lamb? "And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My Father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold, the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering" (Gen. 22:7, A. S. V.). 1. The question that troubled Isaac was the question of many an Old Testament saint. They saw many lambs led forth to the slaughter, they knew that those lambs looked forward to a sacrifice yet to come, — and they often asked where is the Lamb? When will Christ be born? When will the Messiah come? 2. Abraham responded: "God will PROVIDE HIMSELF a LAMB for the burnt offering." Surely this was true. All the lambs sacrificed in the days of Israel made necessary the sacrifice of the Lamb of God, God's Lamb. Those lambs were pledges of God's coming Lamb. Those lambs had no power to take away sin. Hebrews 10:11-14: "And every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins: but this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God; from henceforth expecting till His enemies be made His footstool. For by one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." 3. God did provide HIMSELF a Lamb. We needed the Lamb that we might be saved. We could not get to God apart from the Lamb of God, for Christ said: "No man cometh unto the Father but by Me." However, God needed a Lamb also. God loved us, but God could not come nigh unto us, unless Christ died. Our God was a Holy and a Just God. He could not receive the unholy nor justify the guilty: therefore God needed a Lamb. Every blessing God has bestowed upon us is ours in Christ Jesus. Every manifestation of God's grace is possible alone in Christ Jesus. God provided HIMSELF a Lamb, as His only channel of blessing toward man. 4. John the Baptist gave us the answer to Isaac's question. As Christ approached the waters of the Jordan, John cried: "Behold the Lamb." Oh, that the children of Israel would to-day discern the meaning of the words of John! Oh, that they might see in Christ the fulfillment of all their sacrificial lambs! Since the day that the Temple was destroyed by Titus there has been no more sacrifice. Sacrifice is not needed, for those types were all fulfilled in Christ — He is the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world. Isaac Bound "And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built the altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar, upon the wood" (Gen. 22:9, A. S. V.). 1. Abraham took the wood and laid it upon Isaac. Even so did God "lay on Him the iniquity of us all." God placed our sins upon our Isaac. He put Him to grief. Sometimes the question is asked, Who crucified the Saviour? Peter said: "Ye have taken, and with wicked hands have crucified and slain." But Peter prefaced his words with: "Him being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God." Thus while man crucified Christ God let man have his way, that thereby He might fulfill His will. 2. Abraham bound Isaac. From the foot of the Cross the mockers cried, "Let Him now come down from the Cross, and we will believe Him" (Matt. 27:42). They also cried: "He saved others, Himself He cannot save" (Matt. 27:42). Both of these accusations were true, but they were true from a different view point than that in which they were spoken by those blasphemous Jews. Jesus Christ did not hang on the Cross because He was helpless to resist the onslaught of His enemies. They were no more to Him than the chaff on a summer threshing floor before the wind. One breath from His mouth would have swept them all away. Neither men, demons nor devil could have nailed Christ to the Cross against His will. They prevailed only because Christ opened not His mouth. They overcome Him because He yielded Himself to their cruelties. The reason Christ died was because His Father bound Him and laid Him upon the Cross. He could not break the Father's will, for He Himself was wholly one with the Father. Therefore Christ could say, "I lay down My life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. * * This commandment have I received of My Father" (John 10:17,18). 3. Abraham took the knife to slay his son. This is just what God did. "He hath put Him (Christ) to grief." "Thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin" (Isa. 53:10). Some may wish to charge God with cruelty. To such we would say, "Be not rash with thy mouth." God certainly sent His Son to be the Saviour of the world (see John 4:14). God certainly delivered Christ to die on the Cross (see Acts 2:23). God sent forth His Son to redeem them that were under the Law (see Gal. 4:4,5). The wickedness of the men who crucified the Lord is not at all lessened by the fact that the Cross was predestined of God. The men who crucified the Lord were free moral agents; they took Christ of their own stubborn will, and with wicked hands they crucified Him. In no sense were they forced to carry out God's will and plan. God did not enter into their hellish conspiracy; God did not sit in their conclaves, as they went about to slay the Lord. However, if God had no part in the death of Christ, and if therefore our Lord was overpowered and slain a martyr to a holy cause, then Jesus Christ is robbed of His Deity and left a weak and helpless man. In the Stead of His Son "And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son" (Gen. 22:13). When Abraham lifted his hand to slay his son, God cried: "Abraham, Abraham, * * Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him." Here the type breaks and it is transferred to the ram caught by its horns in the thicket. In the seventh sub-division we will take up this thread again. Just now let us look at the ram, which was to be taken in the stead of the son. 1. In that ram the doctrine of substitution is plainly set forth. We were under the curse, but Christ was made a curse for us. We were under eternal death, but He tasted the cup of death for us. In the little Book of Philemon, Paul is sending back a runaway slave who had been saved in the jail at Rome. Paul writes a letter urging Philemon to receive Onesimus back, no longer, however, as a slave, but as a brother beloved in the Lord. In fact Paul urges that he should be received as a partner, even as he, Paul, would have been received; thus Paul said: "If he owes thee ought, put that to my account." Thus does Jesus Christ send us back to God. Our sins are all gone, our record is made clean; our position is that of a son, not a servant. Christ carries us to the Father's heart, even as He Himself is in the Father's heart. He also presents His claim, "If he oweth Thee ought, put it to My account." And God did lay our sins on Jesus Christ. The whole account against us was settled on the Cross. "What! Lay my sins on Jesus, God's well beloved Son, Yes, 'tis a truth most precious, That God Himself hath done." 2. Not only was the ram a type of Christ dying for us, but Abraham so understood it. It was a trying moment to the aged patriarch as he raised his own hand to slay his son. It was a blessed moment when Abraham heard God's voice saying, "Lay not thine hand upon the lad;" and as Abraham turned and saw the ram, he also was exceeding glad. The Lord doubtless referred to this very scene when He said: "Abraham saw My day and was glad" (John 8:56). And should not we rejoice. Is it nothing to us that we are taken out from the sentence of death, that our sins are gone? How can the sinner refuse so great salvation? Would' Abraham slay his son with the substitute close at hand, held by his horns in the thicket? Will the sinner rush on to death and hell when the Substitute is crouching at the door? Why not believe Christ this very hour and live?