Focal Passage: Genesis 22:1-14
Substitute: someone standing in the place of someone else, such as a substitute teacher or perhaps a teammate coming in off the bench in a game.
Or, maybe changing the recipe with different ingredients when you don’t have a needed item in your kitchen. Or, perhaps getting a generic prescription filled. Substitute appears to mean second best, a fill in, or not as good. If we would have life and death issue, we want the very best and not the substitute. But not always.
Drew Bledsoe was a first round draft pick of the New England Patriots. He would lead his team to a Super Bowl, was named to the Pro Bowl several times and would sign a $100 million dollar contract.
Bledsoe, by every standard, was a very good quarterback in the NFL. In the 2001 NFL season, Bledsoe got hurt and a “substitute” had to come in. His name? Tom Brady who would become the most decorated QB in the history of the NFL. So, maybe, substitutes are not secondary.
The story of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah (Genesis 22) is a story about “standing in the place of” (v. 13) or being a substitute.
After Abraham passed the test of his willingness to offer his only son as a sacrifice to God and after God had commanded him to stop the sacrifice, a ram appeared.
Lloyd
Abraham and Isaac had traveled to offer a sacrifice and now that Isaac was no longer the needed sacrifice, would the sacrifice still happen? The need to acknowledge God, acknowledge sinfulness and acknowledge the need for repentance did not change. Immediately, the ram was spotted. The sacrifice to God was still offered. Instead of Isaac being sacrificed, the ram was sacrificed. It still happened.
When Isaac asked his father “Where is the sacrifice?” (v. 8), Abraham responded “the Lord will provide.” After the ram was sacrificed, Abraham named the place “the Lord will provide” because God did.
The message of this difficult passage was two-fold. First, the obedience of Abraham was found not in his willingness to murder his one and only son, the promised heir of a new nation but in his willingness to acknowledge God as Lord above all things. Second, that God provided a substitute in place of Isaac, not something less than, but something of value and importance.
Foreshadowing is a tool to give a glimpse of what is to come. Foreshadowing can be used to anticipate and to compare common events. The entirety of the Scripture was “foreshadowing” the moment upon which history would turn.
Jesus, much like Isaac would carry the wood to the sacrifice and silently without question, even willingly, would be laid, or nailed, to the sacrificial pier. There would be one difference. The reader would be hanging on to every word for once upon a time in this same scenario God has stayed the hand of Abraham. Would He do it again?
No, this time, Jesus would not be like Isaac and be spared but be like the ram and offered as an atoning sacrifice. Jesus became the substitute, no not one just filling in, but the perfect substitute.
This time God did not stop the hand of the executioner, and Jesus died in our place. A substitute. For our sinfulness. For us. B&R
