God Will Provide (Genesis 22:8)

 


Friday, February 7, 2025


Psalm 90

Genesis 22

Luke 3:15-22


God Will Provide (Genesis 22:8)


This chapter is one of the most difficult passages of the entire Bible. Not only is the subject matter difficult, but the attitudes of everyone involved (God included) is difficult as well. It is one of those passages that has been done over so thoroughly by scholars, pastors and scoffers alike that finding anything approaching a consensus on how to understand it is impossible.


So let’s turn to something basic: where is the “melody line”? Take all the different strands of this passage and stick them in the middle of the music staff and call them “harmony” – that is, various themes we could run off and play with somewhere else – and look instead for the main theme. What is the loudest part? Where is the trumpet fanfare? Where is the big cymbal crash?


Surely it has to be the promise of God – and specifically, the promise we have been following since Genesis 3: that the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. Every step of the way through Genesis since that moment we have seen the history of humankind, with all its mess and tragedy, simultaneously shot through with the promise of the coming Messiah.


We don’t know yet what a “burnt offering” is. Moses, who wrote Genesis, goes into more detail on this in Leviticus. It is assumed that if you have a copy of Genesis, you also have a copy of Leviticus, and can go and find out more about it there. Effectively, when it comes to the one true God, we don’t offer sacrifices in order to get something from him, like the pagans do with their gods. We offer God a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. And so Isaac is to be offered as a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving to God, for fulfilling his promise. But the promise was that there would be a son who would make everything right, so why are we offering this son up as a burnt offering…?


“God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering”, utters Abraham, who must, at this point, be filled with the Holy Spirit, for this is the most explicit prophecy of the coming Messiah we have heard yet. God will provide – God has provided – God will always provide. Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. The promise was made, could never be broken, and was fulfilled in Jesus. And if we trust and obey the God of Abraham, then through the obedience of Jesus he will surely bless us, and multiply us, the adopted children of God, as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And us, the offspring of Abraham by faith, shall possess the gate of our enemy, the devil. In Christ and his church shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because he obeyed where we could not.


Where can you see proof of the promises of God in your life? If you can’t, or are finding it difficult, where can you see Jesus calling you to go in order to find them?


Lord of the eternal covenant: ignite in our hearts a blazing passion for the love you have shown us in the cross of Jesus. Teach us to see his life, death and resurrection everywhere we go. And may your will be done in bringing all your offspring by faith from across the world and in every age into your church.

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