Three times in this chapter Abraham says the same two words, "Here I am," once to God, once to the son he is about to lose, and once to the messenger who stays his hand. Whatever else is happening on that mountain, Abraham is a man who can be found.
The command that opens the chapter is one of the hardest sentences in the Old Testament. 2"Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love." Every phrase closes a door Abraham might have used to escape. It is the same voice that once told him to leave his country and his father's house (Genesis 12:1). That call cost him his past. This one asks for his future.
He obeys without argument. 3"Abraham rose early in the morning." Hebrews tells us what was happening underneath the calm. Abraham considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead (Hebrews 11:19), and that is why he could tell his servants, 5"I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you."
Isaac's question should stop us. He sees the fire and the wood, and asks where the lamb is. It is the most honest question in the story, and Abraham's answer is the truest sentence in the chapter, though he could not have known how true. He says, 8"God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." Abraham meant faith reaching past what he could see, and he did not know he was speaking a promise that would be kept two thousand years later.
The verb underneath "provide" is, in Hebrew, simply "see," the same verb used when Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar, and again when he saw a ram. God's seeing, all through this account, is a seeing that acts. When Abraham names the place 14"The LORD will provide," the words are literally "the LORD sees."
The angel's word settles what kind of test this had been. 12"now I know that you fear God." The test was the shape of Abraham's heart, and the raised knife had already shown it. Then behind him was a ram caught in a thicket, and Abraham offered it 13"instead of his son." Instead of. That is the gospel in two words, centuries before Sinai and before a single lamb was slaughtered at Passover. Something else dies so that the beloved son does not have to.
Paul takes Abraham's language and hands it to us. God gave up his own Son for us all (Romans 8:32). Abraham was spared what the Father was not. There was no ram in the thicket for Jesus and no voice from heaven to stay the hand. Isaac carried the wood of his own altar up the mountain, and centuries later another Son carried the wood of his own cross, and this time there was no substitute, because he came to be the substitute. When John the Baptist called Jesus the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), he was answering Isaac's question. Where is the lamb? Here he is.
What are you holding that God has asked you to lay down? The one who provided the lamb has not stopped seeing.
Prayer
Father, we do not know most of what you will ask of us. Teach us Abraham's readiness, the "here I am" that answers before it understands. We could never walk up that mountain as he did, and thank you that we have not had to. You did not spare your own Son, so that what you withheld from Abraham you gave for us. In the name of the Lamb you provided, Jesus Christ, amen.