Genesis · Chapter 22

V. 1. Here is the trial of Abraham’s faith, whether it continued so strong, so vigorous, so victorious, after a long settlement in communion with God, as it was at first, when by it he left his country: then it appeared that he loved God better than his father; now, that he loved him better than his son.

After these things-After all the other exercises he had had, all the difficulties he had gone through: now perhaps he was beginning to think the storms were blown over but after all, this encounter comes, which is stranger than any yet.

God did tempt Abraham-Not to draw him to sin, so Satan tempts; but to discover his graces, how strong they were, that they might be found to praise and honour and glory. The trial itself: God appeared to him as he had formerly done, called him by name Abraham, that name which had been given him in ratification of the promise: Abraham, like a good servant, readily answered,

Here am I; what saith my Lord unto his servant? Probably he expected some renewed promise, like those, Genesis 15:1 17:1, but to his great amazement that which God hath to say to him is in short, Abraham, go kill thy son: and this command is given him in such aggravating language as makes the temptation abundantly more grievous. When God speaks, Abraham, no doubt, takes notice of every word, and listens attentively to it: and every word here is a sword in his bones; the trial is steel’d with trying phrases. Is it any pleasure to the Almighty that he should afflict? No, it is not; yet when Abraham’s faith is to be tried, God seems to take pleasure in the aggravation of the trial.

Verse 1. God did tempt Abraham] The original here is very emphatic: hsn והאלהים אברהם ha vehaelohim nissah eth Abraham, “And the Elohim he tried this Abraham;” God brought him into such circumstances as exercised and discovered his faith, love, and obedience. Though the word tempt, from tento, signifies no more than to prove or try, yet as it is now generally used to imply a solicitation to evil, in which way God never tempts any man, it would be well to avoid it here. The Septuagint used the word epeirase, which signifies tried, pierced through; and Symmachus translates the Hebrew hsn nissah by edoxazev, God glorified Abraham, or rendered him illustrious, supposing the word to be the same with sn nas, which signifies to glister with light, whence sn nes, an ensign or banner displayed. Thus then, according to him, the words should be understood: “God put great honour on Abraham by giving him this opportunity of showing to all successive ages the nature and efficacy of an unshaken faith in the power, goodness, and truth of God.” The Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel paraphrases the place thus: “And it happened that Isaac and Ishmael contended, and Ishmael said, I ought to be my father’s heir, because I am his first-born; but Isaac said, It is more proper that I should be my father’s heir, because I am the son of Sarah his wife, and thou art only the son of Hagar, my mother’s slave. Then Ishmael answered, I am more righteous than thou, because I was circumcised when I was thirteen years of age, and if I had chosen, I could have prevented my circumcision; but thou wert circumcised when thou wert but eight days old, and if thou hadst had knowledge, thou wouldst probably not have suffered thyself to be circumcised. Then Isaac answered and said, Behold, I am now thirty-six years old, and if the holy and blessed God should require all my members, I would freely surrender them. These words were immediately heard before the Lord of the universe, and yyd armym meimera daiya, the WORD of the LORD, did try Abraham.” I wish once for all to remark, though the subject has been referred to before, that the Chaldee term armym meimera, which we translate word, is taken personally in some hundreds of places in the Targums. When the author, Jonathan, speaks of the Divine Being as doing or saying any thing, he generally represents him as performing the whole by his meimera, which he appears to consider, not as a speech or word spoken, but as a person quite distinct from the Most High. St. John uses the word logov in precisely the same sense with the Targumists, John 1:1; see the notes there, and see before on Genesis 21:22, and Genesis 15:1.

Verse 1. Here is the trial of Abraham’s grace, and especially of his faith, whether it continued so strong, so vigorous, so victorious, after a long settlement in communion with God, as it was at first, when by it he left his country: then it appeared that he loved God better than his father; now, that he loved him better than his son. After these things — After all the other exercises he had had, all the difficulties he had gone through: now perhaps he was beginning to think the storms were blown over; but, after all, this encounter comes, which was sharper than any yet. God did tempt Abraham — Not to draw him to sin, so Satan tempts; but did try him, as the word here used signifies, to discover his graces, how strong they were, that they might be “found to praise, and honour, and glory.” Behold, here am I — What saith my Lord unto his servant? Probably he expected some renewed promise, like those, Genesis 15:1, and 17:1; but to his great amazement that which God hath to say to him is in short, Abraham, go, sacrifice thy son — And this command is given him in such aggravating language as makes the temptation abundantly more grievous, every word being as “a sword in his bones.” Is it any pleasure to the Almighty that he should afflict? No, it is not; yet when Abraham’s faith is to be tried, God seems to take pleasure in the aggravation of the trial.

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

THE OFFERING OF ISAAC, 1-19.

We now come to the seventh and great test of Abraham’s faith. See note on Genesis 18:1. Here the spiritual life of the honoured patriarch attains its climax. Native land and kindred have long ago been left behind; revelation after revelation has lifted him into a lofty friendship with God; he has sacrificed his natural yearning for Ishmael, who for years had seemed to him the heir of promise, and has submitted to send him and his mother away into the wilderness. Now all his hope for the after time hung on his only son, his Isaac, whom he loved, (verse 2,) and, as the utmost trial and test of his confidence in God’s word, he is commanded to go forth and sacrifice even that child of miracle. So must the will of the flesh be subjected to the word of God. And so must all Abraham’s spiritual seed, the true children of faith, attain to that lofty elevation. So also Abraham’s greater Son, who in the fulness of time gave his life a ransom for many, declares: “He that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;… and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” Matthew 10:37, 39. Herein is shown the faith of Abraham. A peculiar interpretation has been put upon this chapter by Hengstenberg and Lange, who maintain that Abraham misunderstood the divine command. They deem it absurd to suppose that God should forbid in one part of the transaction what he commands in another, or that he should at all command a human sacrifice, a thing declared so abominable in the law. They understand the command of verse 2 to mean that Abraham should offer his son in spiritual consecration to God; not slay him for a literal burnt offering. Thus God would teach his friend both the distinction and the connexion between sacrificing and killing. The principle and methods of this interpretation are like those by which it is attempted to show that Jephthah did not offer his daughter as a burnt offering, but devoted her to perpetual virginity. It explains away the natural meaning of the language, and foists in a spiritualizing process of thought, transcendental in nature and tendency, and calculated to confuse and mislead rather than help the student of the Scripture. “The Hebrew cultus,” says Lange, “distinguishes between the spiritual consecration of man as a sacrifice, and the visible slaughter of an animal. Thus, for example, according to 1 Samuel 1:24, 25, the boy Samuel was brought by his parents to Eli the priest, and consecrated at the tabernacle, since the three bullocks were slain there as burnt offerings.” — Com. on Genesis, p. 79. But will Lange maintain that the three bullocks were slain as a substitute for Samuel’s life? or that Samuel’s consecration at the tabernacle was equivalent to the act of Abraham in not withholding Isaac? or that Samuel’s parents, in that consecration, offered up their son in any proper sense as a burnt offering to the Lord? The cases are not parallel at all, and to put them thus together is to confound things that are different. Those passages in which the spiritual significance of offerings is presented (Psalms 40:6Psalm 40:6-9; 51:17; 119:108; Hosea 14:2) have no essential relevancy to this narrative of Abraham, and in the passage most frequently cited, (Psalms 51:16Psalm 51:16, 17,) a contrite heart and a burnt offering so far from being synonymous, are put in direct opposition to one another. God’s command to Abraham was plain and positive. The patriarch’s mind was not confused with the metaphysical subtleties of German critics, and when God said: “Take Isaac and go to Moriah and offer him there for a burnt offering;” it was impossible for him to understand any thing else than to go and do exactly what God commanded. He probably knew of no law against human sacrifice, and to him, God’s word, spoken at sundry times and in divers manners, was the supreme law.

We must particularly observe, that this whole procedure was a testing, a temptation, (hsn,) of Abraham. For the purpose of such trial it was perfectly proper for God to command the offering up in sacrifice of the life which he had himself given, and had the right and the power to take again. It was equally proper for him to countermand the order when he saw its purpose was accomplished. Verse 12. In all this there was no conflict, as some writers have supposed, between the revealed and the secret will of God, as if the Holy One had two wills acting in opposite directions at the same time. When God commanded Abraham to go and offer up Isaac, he meant exactly what he said; and when Abraham had shown implicit faith and obedience, God spoke again and commanded him to offer the ram for a burnt offering instead of his son. Verse 13. Here is no conflict between a revealed and a secret will of God. It is simply and solely his revealed will countermanding, for stated reasons, what his revealed will had before commanded. And thus we are told, with a beauty and tenderness unsurpassed in literature, the process and the outcome of the trial of Abraham’s faith.

1. After these things — After all that has been narrated of Abraham before. God did tempt Abraham — The Hebrew for God is here µyhlah, the God; emphatic, the same “everlasting God,” who is called Jehovah in verse 33 of the previous chapter. The tempting is a key-word to the whole chapter. The Hebrew word hsn means to try, to test, to prove. Thus Gesenius (Lex. under hsn) observes: “God is said to try or prove men, that is, their virtue, Psalms 26:2Psalm 26:2; piety, Deuteronomy 8:2, 16; their faith and obedience, Exodus 15:25; 20:20; 2 Chronicles 32:31. This is done by wonderful works, Exodus 20:20; by commands difficult to be executed, Genesis 22:1; Exodus 16:4; and by the infliction of calamities, Deuteronomy 33:8; Judges 2:22; 3:1, 4.” Lange remarks that the word “denotes not simply to prove, or to put to the test, but to prove under circumstances which have originated from sin, and which increase the severity of the proof and make it a temptation.” And this is an important point to note. Man’s life of probation is in a world of trial; and while the world lies in wickedness, many trials come from evil sources; the god of this world solicits to evil, and seeks whom he may devour. 1 Peter 5:8. All such solicitations to evil are among the offences which Jesus deplored, (Matthew 18:7; Luke 17:1,) and when thus viewed it is manifest that God tempts no man. James 1:13. But even such temptations, when resisted and overcome, will issue in good, and the godly discipline they thus subserve is to be recognised as God’s chastising. Hence the apostle says, in the same chapter, (James 1:2,) “Count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations,” etc. God’s tempting Abraham was not a malicious solicitation to evil, but a testing commandment to prove the depth and strength of the patriarch’s faith. If now Abraham will, without questioning, obey a commandment that seems to subvert all the promises of the past, and even the words of prophecy touching Isaac, then will the evidence of his faith be perfected. And so it was, that he who before “against hope believed in hope,” (Romans 4:18,) now staggered not at this strange word, “accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead.” Hebrews 11:19.

V. 2. And he said, take thy son-Not thy bullocks and thy lambs; how willingly would Abraham have parted with them by thousands to redeem Isaac! Not thy servant, no, not the steward of thine house. Thine only son-Thine only son by Sarah. Ishmael was lately cast out, to the grief of Abraham, and now Isaac only was left and must he go too? Yes: take Isaac, him by name, thy laughter, that son indeed. Yea, that son whom thou lovest-The trial was of Abraham’s love to God, and therefore it must be in a beloved son: in the Hebrew ‘tis expressed more emphatically, and I think might very well be read thus, Take now that son of thine, that only son of thine, whom thou lovest, that Isaac. And get thee into the land of Moriah-Three days journey off: so that he might have time to consider it, and if he do it, must do it deliberately.

And offer him for a burnt offering-He must not only kill his son, but kill him as a sacrifice, with all that sedateness and composedness of mind, with which he used to offer his burnt-offering.

Verse 2. Take now thy son] Bishop Warburton’s observations on this passage are weighty and important. “The order in which the words are placed in the original gradually increases the sense, and raises the passions higher and higher: Take now thy son, (rather, take I beseech thee an na,) thine only son whom thou lovest, even Isaac. Jarchi imagines this minuteness was to preclude any doubt in Abraham. Abraham desired earnestly to be let into the mystery of redemption; and God, to instruct him in the infinite extent of the Divine goodness to mankind, who spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, let Abraham feel by experience what it was to lose a beloved son, the son born miraculously when Sarah was past child-bearing, as Jesus was miraculously born of a virgin. The duration, too, of the action, Genesis 22:4, was the same as that between Christ’s death and resurrection, both which are designed to be represented in it; and still farther not only the final archetypical sacrifice of the Son of God was figured in the command to offer Isaac, but the intermediate typical sacrifice in the Mosaic economy was represented by the permitted sacrifice of the ram offered up, Genesis 22:13, instead of Isaac.” See Dodd.

Only son] All that he had by Sarah his legal wife.

The land of Moriah] This is supposed to mean all the mountains of Jerusalem, comprehending Mount Gihon or Calvary, the mount of Sion and of Acra. As Mount Calvary is the highest ground to the west, and the mount of the temple is the lowest of the mounts, Mr. Mann conjectures that it was upon this mount Abraham offered up Isaac, which is well known to be the same mount on which our blessed Lord was crucified. Beer-sheba, where Abraham dwelt, is about forty-two miles distant from Jerusalem, and it is not to be wondered at that Abraham, Isaac, the two servants, and the ass laden with wood for the burnt-offering, did not reach this place till the third day; see Genesis 22:4.

Verse 2. And he said, Take thy son — Not thy bullocks and thy lambs; how willingly would Abraham have parted with them by thousands to redeem Isaac! Not thy servant, no, not the steward of thy house. Thine only son — Thine only son by Sarah. Ishmael was lately cast out, to the grief of Abraham, and now Isaac only was left; and must he go too? Yes: take Isaac, him by name, thy laughter, that son indeed. Yea, that son whom thou lovest — The trial was of Abraham’s love to God, and therefore it must be in a beloved son: in the Hebrew it is expressed more emphatically, and might very well be rendered, Take now that son of thine, that only son of thine, whom thou lovest, that Isaac. And get thee into the land of Moriah — Distant three days’ journey, that he might have time to consider it, and if he do it, might do it deliberately. And offer him for a burnt- offering — He must not only slay his son, but slay him as a sacrifice, with all that sedateness and composedness of mind, with which he used to offer his burnt-offering.

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

2. He said — Doubtless in some open and positive way. There is no evidence that this word came by a vision of the night. Least of all should we give countenance to the strange fancy that Abraham was imposed upon by Satan, and tempted, by observing human sacrifices among the heathen, to suppose that the sacrifice of Isaac would be acceptable to God. If such were the fact, the sacred writer fell into a most unfortunate style of recording the truth. Take now thy son — This command is peculiarly touching. Hebrews, Take now thy son, thy only one, whom thou lovest, even Isaac. Various conjectures have been held as to Isaac’s age at this time. Josephus says twenty-five, and other numbers have been mentioned ranging from ten to thirty-seven. But all is conjecture. He was a young lad, but old and large enough to carry the wood for the burnt offering. Verse 6. Land of Moriah — On the origin of this name, see on verse 14. The Samaritans read land of Moreh, and so identify this Moriah with the Moreh of Genesis 12:6, and Stanley and others argue that the place of Abraham’s sacrifice was on the summit of Mount Gerizim, which, after a journey of two days from Beer-sheba by way of the Philistine plain, can be seen “afar off.” Verse 4. But the Jewish tradition identifies this Moriah with the mountain on which the Temple was afterwards builded, (2 Chronicles 3:1,) and there seems no sufficient reason to abandon this view. Thomson says, “It is almost absurd to maintain that Abraham could come on his loaded ass from Beer-sheba to Nablus in the time specified. On the third day he arrived early enough to leave the servants afar off, and walk with Isaac bearing the sacrificial wood to the mountain, which God had shown him; there build the altar, arrange the wood, bind his son, and stretch forth his hand to slay him; and there was time, too, to take and offer up the ram in Isaac’s place. That all this could have been done at Nablus on the third day of their journey is incredible. It has always appeared to me, since I first traveled over the country myself, that even Jerusalem was too far off from Beer-sheba for the tenor of the narrative, but Nablus is two days farther north.” — Land and Book, vol. ii, p. 212. Offer him there for a burnt offering — There is no possibility of mistaking the plain import of these words. It is not, consecrate or dedicate him there in connexion with a burnt offering, but offer him there. Though God’s command seems to be contrary to all hope and promise and prophecy, Abraham obeys. One of the mountains which I will tell — Was there not a divine plan and purpose, in selecting the spot for this most wonderful event, to make it identical with the place where afterwards Jehovah would record his name, and set forth his son to be a propitiation for the sins of the whole world?

V. 3. The several steps of this obedience, all help to magnify it, and to shew that he was guided by prudence, and governed by faith, in the whole transaction.

(1.) He rises early-Probably the command was given in the visions of the night, and early the next morning he sets himself about it, did not delay, did not demur. Those that do the will of God heartily will do it speedily.

(2.) He gets things ready for a sacrifice, and it should seem, with his own hands, cleaves the wood for the burnt-offering.

(3.) He left his servants at some distance off, left they should have created him some disturbance in his strange oblation. Thus when Christ was entering upon his agony in the garden, he took only three of his disciples with him.

Verse 3. Two of his young men] Eliezer and Ishmael, according to the Targum.

Clave the wood] Small wood, fig and palm, proper for a burnt-offering.-Targum.

Verse 3. The several steps of this obedience all help to magnify it, and to show that he was guided by prudence, and governed by faith, in the whole transaction. 1st, He rises early — Probably the command was given in the visions of the night, and early the next morning he sets himself about it, did not delay, did not demur. Those that do the will of God heartily, will do it speedily. 2d, He gets things ready for a sacrifice, and, it should seem, with his own hands “cleaves the wood for the burnt-offering.” 3d, He left his servants at some distance, lest they should have created him some disturbance in his strange oblation. Thus, when Christ was entering upon his agony in the garden, he took only three of his disciples with him.

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

3. Rose up early — An early start on a journey is all-important in the East. Thus would the traveller avoid the heat of the day in the open sun, by travelling before the sun was up, and resting in the heat of the day. Saddled his ass — The modern saddle was not then known, but pieces of cloth and garments (Mark 11:7) were bound (vbj) on the back of the animal. The saddling also implied the binding on of whatever baggage the traveller would take along. The Oriental ass is a nobler animal than that which we of the West associate with that name. (See the Bible Dictionaries on the word.) Took two of his young men — An incident which shows the naturalness and accuracy of the narrative. A chief like Abraham would not travel far unattended.

Verse 4. The third day] “As the number SEVEN,” says Mr. Ainsworth, “is of especial use in Scripture because of the Sabbath day, Genesis 2:2, so THREE is a mystical number because of Christ’s rising from the dead the third day, Matthew 17:23; 1 Corinthians 15:4; as he was crucified the third hour after noon, Mark 15:25: and Isaac, as he was a figure of Christ, in being the only son of his father, and not spared but offered for a sacrifice, Romans 8:32, so in sundry particulars he resembled our Lord: the third day Isaac was to be offered up, so it was the third day in which Christ also was to be perfected, Luke 13:32; Isaac carried the wood for the burnt-offering, Genesis 22:6, so Christ carried the tree whereon he died, John 19:17; the binding of Isaac, Genesis 21:9, was also typical, so Christ was bound, Matthew 27:2.

“In the following remarkable cases this number also occurs. Moses desired to go three days’ journey in the wilderness to sacrifice, Exodus 5:3; and they travelled three days in it before they found water, Exodus 15:22; and three days’ journey the ark of the covenant went before them, to search out a resting place, Numbers 10:33; by the third day the people were to be ready to receive God’s law, Exodus 19:11; and after three days to pass over Jordan into Canaan, Joshua 1:14; the third day Esther put on the apparel of the kingdom, Esther 5:1; on the third day Hezekiah, being recovered from his illness, went up to the house of the Lord, 2 Kings 20:5; on the third day, the prophet said, God will raise us up and we shall live before him, Hosea 6:2; and on the third day, as well as on the seventh, the unclean person was to purify himself, Numbers 19:12: with many other memorable things which the Scripture speaks concerning the third day, and not without mystery. See Genesis 40:12,13; 42:17,18; Jonah 1:17; Joshua 2:16; unto which we may add a Jew’s testimony in Bereshith Rabba, in a comment on this place: There are many THREE DAYS mentioned in the Holy Scripture, of which one is the resurrection of the

Messiah.”-Ainsworth.

Saw the place afar off.] He knew the place by seeing the cloud of glory smoking on the top of the mountain.-Targum.

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

4. Third day — Two days of journey and reflection did not cause the faith of Abraham to waver, but must have deeply intensified the trial going on within him. Afar off — These words do not necessarily imply a great distance. Moses’s sister stood afar off to watch the ark of bulrushes, (Exodus 2:4,) and Job’s three friends “lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not,” (Job 2:12,) but the distances in each case were obviously not great.

Verse 5. I and the lad will go and come again] How could Abraham consistently with truth say this, when he knew he was going to make his son a burnt-offering? The apostle answers for him: By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac-accounting that God was able to raise him up even from the dead, from whence also he received him in a figure, Hebrews 11:17,19. He knew that previously to the birth of Isaac both he and his wife were dead to all the purposes of procreation; that his birth was a kind of life from the dead; that the promise of God was most positive, In Isaac shall thy seed be called, Genesis 21:12; that this promise could not fail; that it was his duty to obey the command of his Maker; and that it was as easy for God to restore him to life after he had been a burnt-offering, as it was for him to give him life in the beginning. Therefore he went fully purposed to offer his son, and yet confidently expecting to have him restored to life again. We will go yonder and worship-perform a solemn act of devotion which God requires, and come again to you.

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

5. I and the lad will go yonder — Abraham doubtless took the ass and his servants to the foot of the mountain, so as to carry the wood and the fire no unnecessary distance. From the junction of the valleys Hinnon and Kedron the heights of Moriah would seem afar off, and be properly spoken of as yonder. And come again to you — These words may have been designed to conceal from his servants the purpose of his heart; but according to Hebrews 11:17, he had confidence that God would raise up his son from the dead. By faith he spoke, in this verse and verse 8, more wisely than he knew, and his words were a true prophecy.

V. 6. Isaac’s carrying the wood was a type of Christ, who carried his own cross, while Abraham, with a steady and undaunted resolution, carried the fatal knife and fire.

Verse 6. Took the wood-and laid it upon Isaac] Probably the mountain-top to which they were going was too difficult to be ascended by the ass; therefore either the father or the son must carry the wood, and it was most becoming in the latter.

Verse 6. Isaac’s carrying the wood was a type of Christ, who carried his own cross, while Abraham, with a steady and undaunted resolution, carried the fatal knife and fire.

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

6. The wood… upon Isaac — How does this suggest the only-begotten Son of God bearing his wooden cross to Calvary! John 19:17. Fire in his hand — Either a stick of wood that would long endure as a burning ember, or coals in a firepot.

V. 7. Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb?-This is,

1. A trying question to Abraham; how could he endure to think that Isaac is himself the lamb?

2. ‘Tis a teaching question to us all, that when we are going to worship God, we should seriously consider whether we have every thing ready, especially the lamb for a burnt-offering. Behold, the fire is ready; that is, the Spirit’s assistance, and God’s acceptance: the wood is ready, the instituted ordinances designed to kindle our affections, which indeed, without the Spirit, are but like wood without fire, but the Spirit works by them. All things are now ready, but where is the lamb? Where is the heart? Is that ready to be offered up to God, to ascend to him as a burnt-offering?

Verse 7. Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb] Nothing can be conceived more tender, affectionate, and affecting, than the question of the son and the reply of the father on this occasion. A paraphrase would spoil it; nothing can be added without injuring those expressions of affectionate submission on the one hand, and dignified tenderness and simplicity on the other.

Verse 7. Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb? — This is, 1st, A trying question to Abraham; how could he endure to think that Isaac is himself the lamb? 2d, It is a teaching question to us all, that when we are going to worship God, we should seriously consider whether we have every thing ready, especially the “lamb for a burnt-offering.” Behold, the fire is ready, the Spirit’s assistance, and God’s acceptance: the wood is ready, the instituted ordinances, designed to kindle our affections, which indeed, without the Spirit, are but like wood without fire. All things are now ready, but where is the lamb? — Where is the heart? Is that ready to be offered up to God, to ascend to him as a burnt-offering?

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

7. My father — The narrative, in its life-like simplicity, evidences its own genuineness. It was probably often repeated by Isaac to his sons, and by them handed down, till it took this written form. Where is the lamb — A most searching question, painful to Abraham’s heart, and prompting the prophetic utterance recorded in the next verse, where Abraham again speaks more wisely than he knew. Comp. verse 5.

V. 8. My son, God will provide himself a lamb-This was the language either,

1. Of his obedience; we must offer the lamb which God has appointed now to be offered; thus giving him this general rule of submission to the divine will to prepare him for the application of it to himself. Or,

2. Of his faith; whether he meant it so or no, this proved to be the meaning of it; a sacrifice was provided instead of Isaac. Thus,

1. Christ the great sacrifice of atonement was of God’s providing: when none in heaven or earth could have found a lamb for that burnt-offering, God himself found the ransom.

2. All our sacrifices of acknowledgement are of God’s providing too; ‘tis he that prepares the heart. The broken and contrite spirit is a sacrifice of God, of his providing.

Verse 8. My son, God will provide himself a lamb] Here we find the same obedient unshaken faith for which this pattern of practical piety was ever remarkable. But we must not suppose that this was the language merely of faith and obedience; the patriarch spoke prophetically, and referred to that Lamb of God which HE had provided for himself, who in the fulness of time should take away the sin of the world, and of whom Isaac was a most expressive type. All the other lambs which had been offered from the foundation of the world had been such as MEN chose and MEN offered; but THIS was the Lamb which GOD had

provided-emphatically, THE LAMB OF GOD.

Verse 8. My son, God will provide himself a lamb — This was the language either, 1st, Of his obedience; we must offer the lamb which God has appointed now to be offered; thus giving Isaac this general rule of submission to the divine will, to prepare him for the application of it to himself: or, 2d, Of his faith; whether he intended them so or not, the meaning of his words proved to be that a sacrifice was provided instead of Isaac. Thus, 1st, Christ, the great sacrifice of atonement, was of God’s providing: when none in heaven or earth could have found a lamb for that burnt-offering, God himself found the ransom. 2d, All our “sacrifices of acknowledgment” are of God’s providing too; it is he that “prepares the heart.” The broken and contrite spirit is a sacrifice of God, of his providing.

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

8. God will provide — Hebrews, Elohim-jireh, God will see. See on verse 14.

V. 9. With the same resolution and composedness of mind, he applies himself to the compleating of this sacrifice. After many a weary step, and with a heavy heart, he arrives at length at the fatal place; builds the altar, an altar of earth, we may suppose, the saddest that ever be built; lays the wood in order for Isaac’s funeral pile; and now tells him the amazing news. Isaac, for ought appears, is as willing as Abraham; we do not find that he made any objection against it. God commands it to be done, and Isaac has learned to submit. Yet it is necessary that a sacrifice be bound; the great Sacrifice, which, in the fulness of time, was to be offered up, must be bound, and therefore so must Isaac. Having bound him he lays him upon the altar, and his hand upon the head of the sacrifice. Be astonished, O heavens, at this, and wonder, O earth! here is an act of faith and obedience which deserves to be a spectacle to God, angels and men; Abraham’s darling, the church’s hope, the heir of promise, lies ready to bleed and die by his own father’s hands! Now this obedience of Abraham in offering up Isaac is a lively representation,

1. Of the love of God to us, in delivering up his only begotten Son to suffer and die for us, as a sacrifice. Abraham was obliged both in duty and gratitude to part with Isaac and parted with him to a friend, but God was under no obligations to us, for we were enemies.

2. Of our duty to God in return of that love we must tread in the steps of this faith of Abraham. God, by his word, calls us to part with all for Christ, all our sins, tho’ they have been as a right hand, or a right eye, or an Isaac; all those things that are rivals with Christ for the sovereignity of our heart; and we must chearfully let them all go. God, by his providence, which is truly the voice of God, calls us to part with an Isaac sometimes, and we must do it by a chearful resignation and submission to his holy will.

Verse 9. And bound Isaac his son] If the patriarch had not been upheld by the conviction that he was doing the will of God, and had he not felt the most perfect confidence that his son should be restored even from the dead, what agony must his heart have felt at every step of the journey, and through all the circumstances of this extraordinary business? What must his affectionate heart have felt at the questions asked by his innocent and amiable son? What must he have suffered while building the altar, laying on the wood, binding his lovely son, placing him on the wood, taking the knife, and stretching out his hand to slay the child of his hopes? Every view we take of the subject interests the heart, and exalts the character of this father of the faithful. But has the character of Isaac been duly considered? Is not the consideration of his excellence lost in the supposition that he was too young to enter particularly into a sense of his danger, and too feeble to have made any resistance, had he been unwilling to submit? Josephus supposes that Isaac was now twenty-five, (see the chronology on Genesis 22:1;) some rabbins that he was thirty-six; but it is more probable that he was now about thirty-three, the age at which his great Antitype was offered up; and on this medium I have ventured to construct the chronology, of which I think it necessary to give this notice to the reader. Allowing him to be only twenty-five, he might have easily resisted; for can it be supposed that an old man of at least one hundred and twenty-five years of age could have bound, without his consent, a young man in the very prime and vigour of life? In this case we cannot say that the superior strength of the father prevailed, but the piety, filial affection, and obedience of the son yielded. All this was most illustriously typical of Christ. In both cases the father himself offers up his only-begotten son, and the father himself binds him on the wood or to the cross; in neither case is the son forced to yield, but yields of his own accord; in neither case is the life taken away by the hand of violence; Isaac yields himself to the knife, Jesus lays down his life for the sheep.

Verse 9. After many a weary step, and with a heavy heart, he arrives at length at the fatal place; builds the altar, an altar of earth, we may suppose, the saddest that ever he built; lays the wood in order for Isaac’s funeral pile; and now tells him the amazing news. Isaac, for aught that appears, is as willing as Abraham; we do not find that he made any objection against it. God commands it to be done, and Isaac has learned to submit. Yet it was necessary that a sacrifice should be bound; the great Sacrifice, which, in the fulness of time, was to be offered up, must be bound, and therefore so must Isaac. Having bound him, he lays him upon the altar, and his hand upon the head of the sacrifice. Be astonished, O heavens, at this, and wonder, O earth! here is an act of faith and obedience which deserves to be a spectacle to God, angels, and men; Abraham’s darling, the church’s hope, the heir of promise, lies ready to bleed and die by his own father’s hands! Now this obedience of Abraham in offering up Isaac is a lively representation, 1st, Of the love of God to us, in delivering up his only begotten Son to suffer and die for us, as a sacrifice. Abraham was obliged, both in duty and gratitude, to part with Isaac, and parted with him to a friend, but God was under no obligations to us, for we were enemies. 2d, Of our duty to God in return for that love; we must tread in the steps of this faith of Abraham. God, by his word, calls us to part with all for Christ, all our sins, though they have been as a right hand, or a right eye, or an Isaac; all those things that are rivals with Christ for the sovereignty of our hearts; and we must cheerfully let them all go. God, by his providence, which is truly the voice of God, calls us to part with an Isaac sometimes, and we must do it by a cheerful resignation and submission to his holy will.

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

9. The place which God had told — How, when, and where God revealed to him the exact spot for his offering, we are nowhere informed. The rabbins have a tradition that on this same spot Adam, Abel, and Noah had offered sacrifice. Built… laid… bound… laid — The four different Hebrew words graphically describe the successive acts in the work of preparation. These are followed in the next verse by three words which paint the final tableau — stretched forth… took… to slay. All the efforts of sculptors and painters to present this scene have never equalled this word-picture.

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

THE OFFERING OF ISAAC, 1-19.

We now come to the seventh and great test of Abraham’s faith. See note on Genesis 18:1. Here the spiritual life of the honoured patriarch attains its climax. Native land and kindred have long ago been left behind; revelation after revelation has lifted him into a lofty friendship with God; he has sacrificed his natural yearning for Ishmael, who for years had seemed to him the heir of promise, and has submitted to send him and his mother away into the wilderness. Now all his hope for the after time hung on his only son, his Isaac, whom he loved, (verse 2,) and, as the utmost trial and test of his confidence in God’s word, he is commanded to go forth and sacrifice even that child of miracle. So must the will of the flesh be subjected to the word of God. And so must all Abraham’s spiritual seed, the true children of faith, attain to that lofty elevation. So also Abraham’s greater Son, who in the fulness of time gave his life a ransom for many, declares: “He that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;… and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” Matthew 10:37, 39. Herein is shown the faith of Abraham. A peculiar interpretation has been put upon this chapter by Hengstenberg and Lange, who maintain that Abraham misunderstood the divine command. They deem it absurd to suppose that God should forbid in one part of the transaction what he commands in another, or that he should at all command a human sacrifice, a thing declared so abominable in the law. They understand the command of verse 2 to mean that Abraham should offer his son in spiritual consecration to God; not slay him for a literal burnt offering. Thus God would teach his friend both the distinction and the connexion between sacrificing and killing. The principle and methods of this interpretation are like those by which it is attempted to show that Jephthah did not offer his daughter as a burnt offering, but devoted her to perpetual virginity. It explains away the natural meaning of the language, and foists in a spiritualizing process of thought, transcendental in nature and tendency, and calculated to confuse and mislead rather than help the student of the Scripture. “The Hebrew cultus,” says Lange, “distinguishes between the spiritual consecration of man as a sacrifice, and the visible slaughter of an animal. Thus, for example, according to 1 Samuel 1:24, 25, the boy Samuel was brought by his parents to Eli the priest, and consecrated at the tabernacle, since the three bullocks were slain there as burnt offerings.” — Com. on Genesis, p. 79. But will Lange maintain that the three bullocks were slain as a substitute for Samuel’s life? or that Samuel’s consecration at the tabernacle was equivalent to the act of Abraham in not withholding Isaac? or that Samuel’s parents, in that consecration, offered up their son in any proper sense as a burnt offering to the Lord? The cases are not parallel at all, and to put them thus together is to confound things that are different. Those passages in which the spiritual significance of offerings is presented (Psalms 40:6Psalm 40:6-9; 51:17; 119:108; Hosea 14:2) have no essential relevancy to this narrative of Abraham, and in the passage most frequently cited, (Psalms 51:16Psalm 51:16, 17,) a contrite heart and a burnt offering so far from being synonymous, are put in direct opposition to one another. God’s command to Abraham was plain and positive. The patriarch’s mind was not confused with the metaphysical subtleties of German critics, and when God said: “Take Isaac and go to Moriah and offer him there for a burnt offering;” it was impossible for him to understand any thing else than to go and do exactly what God commanded. He probably knew of no law against human sacrifice, and to him, God’s word, spoken at sundry times and in divers manners, was the supreme law.

We must particularly observe, that this whole procedure was a testing, a temptation, (hsn,) of Abraham. For the purpose of such trial it was perfectly proper for God to command the offering up in sacrifice of the life which he had himself given, and had the right and the power to take again. It was equally proper for him to countermand the order when he saw its purpose was accomplished. Verse 12. In all this there was no conflict, as some writers have supposed, between the revealed and the secret will of God, as if the Holy One had two wills acting in opposite directions at the same time. When God commanded Abraham to go and offer up Isaac, he meant exactly what he said; and when Abraham had shown implicit faith and obedience, God spoke again and commanded him to offer the ram for a burnt offering instead of his son. Verse 13. Here is no conflict between a revealed and a secret will of God. It is simply and solely his revealed will countermanding, for stated reasons, what his revealed will had before commanded. And thus we are told, with a beauty and tenderness unsurpassed in literature, the process and the outcome of the trial of Abraham’s faith.

1. After these things — After all that has been narrated of Abraham before. God did tempt Abraham — The Hebrew for God is here µyhlah, the God; emphatic, the same “everlasting God,” who is called Jehovah in verse 33 of the previous chapter. The tempting is a key-word to the whole chapter. The Hebrew word hsn means to try, to test, to prove. Thus Gesenius (Lex. under hsn) observes: “God is said to try or prove men, that is, their virtue, Psalms 26:2Psalm 26:2; piety, Deuteronomy 8:2, 16; their faith and obedience, Exodus 15:25; 20:20; 2 Chronicles 32:31. This is done by wonderful works, Exodus 20:20; by commands difficult to be executed, Genesis 22:1; Exodus 16:4; and by the infliction of calamities, Deuteronomy 33:8; Judges 2:22; 3:1, 4.” Lange remarks that the word “denotes not simply to prove, or to put to the test, but to prove under circumstances which have originated from sin, and which increase the severity of the proof and make it a temptation.” And this is an important point to note. Man’s life of probation is in a world of trial; and while the world lies in wickedness, many trials come from evil sources; the god of this world solicits to evil, and seeks whom he may devour. 1 Peter 5:8. All such solicitations to evil are among the offences which Jesus deplored, (Matthew 18:7; Luke 17:1,) and when thus viewed it is manifest that God tempts no man. James 1:13. But even such temptations, when resisted and overcome, will issue in good, and the godly discipline they thus subserve is to be recognised as God’s chastising. Hence the apostle says, in the same chapter, (James 1:2,) “Count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations,” etc. God’s tempting Abraham was not a malicious solicitation to evil, but a testing commandment to prove the depth and strength of the patriarch’s faith. If now Abraham will, without questioning, obey a commandment that seems to subvert all the promises of the past, and even the words of prophecy touching Isaac, then will the evidence of his faith be perfected. And so it was, that he who before “against hope believed in hope,” (Romans 4:18,) now staggered not at this strange word, “accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead.” Hebrews 11:19.

V. 11. The Angel of the Lord-That is, God himself, the eternal Word, the Angel of the covenant, who was to be the great Redeemer and Comforter.

Verse 11. The angel of the Lord] The very person who was represented by this offering; the Lord Jesus, who calls himself Jehovah, Genesis 22:16, and on his own authority renews the promises of the covenant. HE was ever the great Mediator between God and man. See this point proved, Genesis 15:7.

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

11. The Angel of the Lord called — This climax of the faith of Abraham is worthy of the coming of the angel of Jehovah. On this name see note, chap. 16:7. It is appropriate that the interruption and the countermand of the words of the Elohim of verse 1 (note) come from the angel of the covenant, who in the fulness of times will, on this same mountain, lay down his life a ransom for many. Abraham, Abraham — This repetition of Abraham’s name gives an intense liveliness to the scene, and shows the urgency of the new commandment now to be given.

V. 12. Lay not thine hand upon the lad-God’s time to help his people is, when they are brought to the greatest extremity: the more eminent the danger is, and the nearer to be put in execution, the more wonderful and the more welcome is the deliverance.

Now know I that thou fearest God-God knew it before, but now Abraham had given a memorable evidence of it. He need do no more, what he had done was sufficient to prove the religious regard he had to God and his authority. The best evidence of our fearing God is our being willing to honour him with that which is dearest to us, and to part with all to him, or for him.

Verse 12. Lay not thine hand upon the lad] As Isaac was to be the representative of Jesus Christ’s real sacrifice, it was sufficient for this purpose that in his own will, and the will of his father, the purpose of the immolation was complete. Isaac was now fully offered both by his father and by himself. The father yields up the son, the son gives up his life; on both sides, as far as will and purpose could go, the sacrifice was complete. God simply spares the father the torture of putting the knife to his son’s throat. Now was the time when it might properly be said, “Sacrifice, and offering, and burnt-offering, and sacrifice for sin thou wouldest not, neither hadst pleasure in them: then said the Angel of the Covenant, Lo! I come to do thy will, O God.” Lay not thy hand upon the lad; an irrational creature will serve for the purpose of a representative sacrifice, from this till the fulness of time. But without this most expressive representation of the father offering his beloved, only-begotten son, what reference can such sacrifices be considered to have to the great event of the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ? Abraham, the most dignified, the most immaculate of all the patriarchs; Isaac, the true pattern of piety to God and filial obedience, may well represent God the Father so loving the world as to give his only-begotten Son, JESUS CHRIST, to die for the sin of man. But the grand circumstances necessary to prefigure these important points could not be exhibited through the means of any or of the whole brute creation. The whole sacrificial system of the Mosaic economy had a retrospective and prospective view, referring FROM the sacrifice of Isaac TO the sacrifice of Christ; in the first the dawning of the Sun of righteousness was seen; in the latter, his meridian splendour and glory. Taken in this light (and this is the only light in which it should be viewed) Abraham offering his son Isaac is one of the most important facts and most instructive histories in the whole Old Testament. See farther on this subject, Genesis 23:2.

Verse 12. Lay not thy hand upon the lad — God’s time to help his people is, when they are brought to the greatest extremity: the more imminent the danger is, and the “nearer to be put in execution,” the more wonderful and the more welcome is the deliverance. Now I know that thou fearest God — God knew it before, but now Abraham had given a memorable evidence of it. He need do no more; what he had done was sufficient to prove the religious regard he had to God and his authority. The best evidence of our fearing God is our being willing to honour him with that which is dearest to us, and to part with all to him, or for him.

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

12. Lay not thine hand upon the lad — That is, for the purpose of slaying him. “God did not seek the slaying of Isaac in fact, but only the implicit surrender of the lad, in mind and heart. But if all mental reservation, every refuge of flesh and blood, all mere appearance and self-delusion were to be avoided, this surrender could only be accomplished in the shape in which it was actually required. If it was to be wholly an act of faith left to its own energies, without any other point of support, God could not merely ask a mental surrender, but must have demanded an actual sacrifice. On the part of any other than God such a quid pro quo would have been a dangerous game. Not so on the part of God, who held the issue entirely in his own hand. When Abraham had, in heart and mind, completely and without any reserve, offered up his son, God interposed and prevented the sacrifice in facto, which was no longer required for the purpose of trial” — Kurtz. Now I know — The Covenant Angel speaks here after the manner of man, as when, in Genesis 18:21, he said: “I will go down now and see,” etc. The word, says Murphy, “denotes an eventual knowing, a discovering by actual experiment; and this observable probation of Abraham was necessary for the judicial eye of God, who is to govern the world, and for the conscience of man, who is to be instructed by practice as well as principle.” Thou hast not withheld thy son — This passage seems to have suggested to Paul the language of Romans 8:32: “He that spared not his own son, but delivered him up for us all.” But it is misleading to speak unqualifiedly of Isaac as a type of Christ. Isaac did not lay down his life at all, nor do we know that he was a willing victim. Not Isaac, but Abraham, is the great figure in this scene. See below, on the typical lessons of this chapter.

V. 13. Behold a ram-Tho’ that blessed Seed was now typified by Isaac, yet the offering of him up was suspended ‘till the latter end of the world, and in the mean time the sacrifice of beasts was accepted, as a pledge of that expiation which should be made by that great sacrifice. And it is observable, that the temple, the place of sacrifice, was afterward built upon this mount Moriah, 2 Chronicles 3:1, and mount Calvary, where Christ was crucified, was not far off.

Verse 13. Behold a ram — Though that blessed Seed was now typified by Isaac, yet the offering of him up was suspended till the latter end of the world, and in the mean time the sacrifice of beasts was accepted, as a pledge of that expiation which should be made by that great Sacrifice. And it is observable, that the temple, the place of sacrifice, was afterward built upon this mount Moriah, 2 Chronicles 3:1; and mount Calvary, where Christ was crucified, was not far off.

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

13. Lifted… looked… behold — These verbs afford another vivid word-picture. The startled patriarch hears, stops short, looks up and all around to see and know all that Jehovah wills. A ram — The Samaritan, Sept., Syriac, and many MSS. read one ram, which would result from the mere changing of r into d in the word rja, translated behind. Such a reading would emphasize the ram as being single and separate from the flock, thus typifying, as some think, the Lamb of God as being “separate from sinners.” Hebrews 7:26. The same thought, however, may be held with the common reading. God had truly provided a lamb for a burnt offering. Comp. verse 8. Caught in a thicket by his horns — “What, then, did he represent,” asks Augustine, “but Jesus. who before he was offered up, was crowned with thorns by the Jews?” Offered him up… in the stead of his son — Here comes out prominently the idea of substitution in sacrifice; the animal for the human life. But it is scarcely proper to hold up this incident as designed to teach or enhance the doctrine of vicarious atonement. That doctrine is, indeed, implied; but the prominent thought is not that either Isaac’s or Abraham’s life was now demanded in order to atone for sin. The typical lessons of the whole procedure are rather incidental, and to be presented as by accommodation and analogy, (see below,) not as the great thought, which is to show the perfection of Abraham’s faith in God.

V. 14. And Abraham called the place Jehovah-jireh-The Lord will provide. Probably alluding to what he had said, Genesis 22:8. God will provide himself a lamb-This was purely the Lord’s doing: let it be recorded for the generations to come; that the Lord will see; he will always have his eyes upon his people in their straits, that he may come in with seasonable succour in the critical juncture. And that he will be seen, be seen in the mount, in the greatest perplexities of his people; he will not only manifest but magnify his wisdom, power and goodness in their deliverance. Where God sees and provides, he should be seen and praised. And perhaps it may refer to God manifest in the flesh.

Verse 14. Jehovah-jireh] hary hwhy Yehovah-yireh, literally interpreted in the margin, The Lord will see; that is, God will take care that every thing shall be done that is necessary for the comfort and support of them who trust in him: hence the words are usually translated, The Lord will provide; so our translators, Genesis 22:8, hary אלהים Elohim yireh, God will provide; because his eye ever affects his heart, and the wants he sees his hand is ever ready to supply. But all this seems to have been done under a Divine Impulse, and the words to have been spoken prophetically; hence Houbigant and some others render the words thus: Dominus videbitur, the Lord shall be seen; and this translation the following clause seems to require, As it is said to this day, hary hwhy rhb behar Yehovah yeraeh, ON THIS MOUNT THE LORD SHALL BE SEEN. From this it appears that the sacrifice offered by Abraham was understood to be a representative one, and a tradition was kept up that Jehovah should be seen in a sacrificial way on this mount. And this renders the opinion stated on Genesis 22:1 more than probable, viz., that Abraham offered Isaac on that very mountain on which, in the fulness of time, Jesus suffered. See Bishop Warburton.

Verse 14. Abraham called the place Jehovah-jireh — That is, The Lord will provide, alluding, it seems, to what he had said, verse 8, God will provide himself a lamb. This was purely the Lord’s doing: let it be recorded for the generations to come, that the Lord will see and provide; will always have his eyes upon his people in their straits, that he may come in with seasonable succour in the critical juncture: as it is said to this day — The time when Moses wrote this account; or is become a proverb in frequent use; In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen — The words thus rendered, namely, the words of the proverb, should certainly be translated either, In the mount the Lord well appear, or rather, In the mount the Lord will provide. That is, in his people’s greatest perplexities and extremities, and when matters are come to a crisis, the Lord will appear to provide for them. Or, according to the proverb used with us, “Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.”

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

14. Jehovah-jireh — This name appears to have been given because of the marvellous fulfilling of the words of Abraham in verse 8 — Elohim-jireh, “God will provide,” or God will see to it. Abraham had uttered an unconscious prophecy, and now in adoring confidence he gives that sacred spot a name which will forever endure as a memorial of Jehovah’s providence. In giving this name he prophecies again, and utters a proverb, which was common in the days of this writer, and has been immortalized in Christian hope and song. In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen — Or, in the mount Jehovah shall be seen. Thus the Sept. The Vulgate disregards the Masoretic pointing, and reads, in the mount, the Lord will see; on which Jerome thus comments: “This became a proverb among the Hebrews, that if any should be in trouble and should desire the help of the Lord, they should say in the mount the Lord will see; that is, as he had mercy on Abraham, so will he have mercy on us.” It is quite probable that the name of this mountain, Moriah, originated with this event, and is used proleptically in verse 2. It is compounded of the root har, to see, (the jireh of this verse,) in its Hophal participal form harm, and the initial letters of the divine name Jehovah, hy, which in a contracted form may be read and pronounced hyrm, Moriah, seen of Jehovah. The language of 2 Chronicles 3:1, where only the name Moriah elsewhere occurs, seems to hint at this same etymology: “Mount Moriah, in which Jehovah was seen (harn) by David.” In this holy mountain Jehovah was seen long after, in the symbolism of the temple and its offerings, and finally in the sacrifice of Him in whom God was seen reconciling the world to himself. 2 Corinthians 5:19.

V. 15. And the Angel-Christ. Called unto Abraham-Probably while the ram was yet burning. Very high expressions are here of God’s favour to Abraham, above any he had yet been blessed with.

Verses 15-18. And the angel — Christ, called unto Abraham — Probably while the ram was yet burning. Very high expressions are here used of God’s favour to Abraham, above any he had yet been blessed with. Multiplying I will multiply thee — Those that part with any thing for God, shall have it made up to them with unspeakable advantage. Abraham has but one son, and is willing to part with that one in obedience to God; Well, saith God, thou shalt be recompensed with thousands and millions. In blessing I will bless thee — 1st, The promise of the Spirit is here included, which is that blessing of Abraham which was to “come upon the Gentiles through Jesus Christ,” Galatians 3:14. 2d, The increase of the church; that believers, his spiritual seed, should be many as the stars of heaven. 3d, Spiritual victories; Thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies — Believers by their faith overcome the world, and triumph over all the powers of darkness. Probably Zacharias refers to this part of the oath, Luke 1:74, “That we, being delivered out of the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear.” But the crown of all is the last promise, 4th, The incarnation of Christ; In thy seed (one particular person that shall descend from thee, for he speaks not of many, but of one, as the apostle observes, Galatians 3:16) shall all the nations of the earth be blessed — Christ is the great blessing of the world. Abraham was ready to give up his son for a sacrifice to the honour of God, and on that occasion God promised to give his Son a sacrifice for the salvation of man.

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

15. The Angel… called… second time — Once more will Jehovah speak to Abraham before he leaves this memorable spot, and by an oath confirm unto him all his previous promises.

V. 16. Because thou hast done this thing, and hast not with-held thy son, thine only son-He lays a mighty emphasis upon that, and Genesis 22:18, praises it as an act of obedience, in it thou hast obeyed my voice. By myself have I sworn-For he could swear by no greater.

Verse 16. By myself have I sworn] So we find that the person who was called the angel of the Lord is here called Jehovah; See Clarke’s note on “Genesis 22:2”. An oath or an appeal to God is, among men, an end to strife; as God could swear by no greater, he sware by himself: being willing more abundantly, says the apostle, to show unto the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, he confirmed it by an oath, that two immutable things, (his PROMISE and his OATH,) in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold on the hope set before us. See Hebrews 6:13-18.

Verses 15-18. And the angel — Christ, called unto Abraham — Probably while the ram was yet burning. Very high expressions are here used of God’s favour to Abraham, above any he had yet been blessed with. Multiplying I will multiply thee — Those that part with any thing for God, shall have it made up to them with unspeakable advantage. Abraham has but one son, and is willing to part with that one in obedience to God; Well, saith God, thou shalt be recompensed with thousands and millions. In blessing I will bless thee — 1st, The promise of the Spirit is here included, which is that blessing of Abraham which was to “come upon the Gentiles through Jesus Christ,” Galatians 3:14. 2d, The increase of the church; that believers, his spiritual seed, should be many as the stars of heaven. 3d, Spiritual victories; Thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies — Believers by their faith overcome the world, and triumph over all the powers of darkness. Probably Zacharias refers to this part of the oath, Luke 1:74, “That we, being delivered out of the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear.” But the crown of all is the last promise, 4th, The incarnation of Christ; In thy seed (one particular person that shall descend from thee, for he speaks not of many, but of one, as the apostle observes, Galatians 3:16) shall all the nations of the earth be blessed — Christ is the great blessing of the world. Abraham was ready to give up his son for a sacrifice to the honour of God, and on that occasion God promised to give his Son a sacrifice for the salvation of man.

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

16. By myself have I sworn — “When God made promise to Abraham, because he could swear by no greater, he sware by himself.” Hebrews 6:13. Hanna observes, that this oath “was the last utterance that fell from the lips of God upon the ear of Abraham. He lived for fifty years and more thereafter, but that voice was never heard again. These late years rolled over him in peaceful, undisturbed repose.” Because thou hast done this thing — This last act of faith was the crowning point in Abraham’s spiritual life, and in view of this especially — as summing up and representing in itself all other evidences of his faith — Jehovah repeats his promise.

V. 17. Multiplying I will multiply thee-Those that part with any thing for God, shall have it made up to them with unspeakable advantage. Abraham has but one son, and is willing to part with that one in obedience to God; well, saith God, thou shalt be recompensed with thousands and millions. Here is a promise,

1. Of the Spirit, In blessing I will bless thee-The Gift of the Holy Ghost; the promise of the Spirit was that blessing of Abraham which was to come upon the Gentiles through Jesus Christ, Galatians 3:14.

2. Of the increase of the church; that believers, his spiritual seed, should be many as the stars of heaven.

3. Of spiritual victories; Thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies-Believers by their faith overcome the world, and triumph over all the powers of darkness. Probably Zacharias refers to this part of the oath, Luke 1:74. That we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear. But the crown of all is the last promise, 4. Of the incarnation of Christ;

In thy seed (one particular person that shall descend from thee, for he speaks not of many but of one, as the apostle observes, Galatians 3:16.) shall all the nations of the earth be blessed-Christ is the great blessing of the world. Abraham was ready to give up his son for a sacrifice to the honour of God, and on that occasion God promised to give his son a sacrifice for the salvation of man.

Verse 17. Shall possess the gate of his enemies] Instead of gate the Septuagint have poleiv, cities; but as there is a very near resemblance between poleis, cities, and pulas, gates, the latter might have been the original reading in the Septuagint, though none of the MSS. now acknowledge it. By the gates may be meant all the strength, whether troops, counsels, or fortified cities of their enemies. So Matthew 16:18: On this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it-the counsels, stratagems, and powers of darkness shall not be able to prevail against or overthrow the true Church of Christ; and possibly our Lord had this promise to Abraham and his spiritual posterity in view, when he spoke these words.

Verses 15-18. And the angel — Christ, called unto Abraham — Probably while the ram was yet burning. Very high expressions are here used of God’s favour to Abraham, above any he had yet been blessed with. Multiplying I will multiply thee — Those that part with any thing for God, shall have it made up to them with unspeakable advantage. Abraham has but one son, and is willing to part with that one in obedience to God; Well, saith God, thou shalt be recompensed with thousands and millions. In blessing I will bless thee — 1st, The promise of the Spirit is here included, which is that blessing of Abraham which was to “come upon the Gentiles through Jesus Christ,” Galatians 3:14. 2d, The increase of the church; that believers, his spiritual seed, should be many as the stars of heaven. 3d, Spiritual victories; Thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies — Believers by their faith overcome the world, and triumph over all the powers of darkness. Probably Zacharias refers to this part of the oath, Luke 1:74, “That we, being delivered out of the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear.” But the crown of all is the last promise, 4th, The incarnation of Christ; In thy seed (one particular person that shall descend from thee, for he speaks not of many, but of one, as the apostle observes, Galatians 3:16) shall all the nations of the earth be blessed — Christ is the great blessing of the world. Abraham was ready to give up his son for a sacrifice to the honour of God, and on that occasion God promised to give his Son a sacrifice for the salvation of man.

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

17. Bless… multiply — Compare the promises that had gone before. Genesis 12:2, 8; 13:14-17; 15:5, 7, 18; 17:1-8; and 18:18. Thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies — Fulfilled primarily in the conquest of Canaan, (comp. Genesis 15:18-21,) but pointing even now to Christ’s ultimate triumph over the gates of hell. Matthew 16:18. In the rapturous hour of this revelation and promise, Abraham, doubtless, saw Messiah’s day, and was glad. John 8:5, 6.

With this account of the attempted offering of Isaac it has been common to compare the Grecian legends of Phrixus, Idomeneus, and Iphigenia; and also the Phoenician tradition of Chronos, who in a time of war and impending perils took his only son Jehoud, clothed him in royal apparel, and offered him in sacrifice upon an altar which he had built. But these tales have no more connexion with Abraham and Isaac than have the narratives of Jephthah’s vow (Judges 11) or the sacrifice of the king of Moab’s son. 2 Kings 3:12 Kings 3:27.

The bearing of this act of Abraham on human sacrifices is worthy of notice. We need not go to the extent of Kurtz, who imagines that Abraham might have descried, on all the heights around him, altars smoking with human sacrifices; but we may believe that the idea of human sacrifice sprung from deep religious promptings; the consciousness of guilt, and the felt necessity of offering up the dearest and most precious gift as an atonement. Abraham’s act, adapted to be monumental in the history of the chosen race, recognised at once the necessity of sacrifice, and that our life is not our own; but it also revealed the authority from heaven to substitute animal life instead. In this revelation human sacrifices stand condemned, and animal sacrifices sanctioned and established as meeting the divine requirement.

The typical significance of the offering of Isaac has been recognised by nearly all Christian divines, but the pressing of all analogies and correspondencies as types may well be condemned. We have noted above (on verse 12) how Isaac is no proper type of Christ; but as the apostle speaks of Abraham’s receiving his son from the dead “in a figure,” (Hebrews 11:19,) we may, by a legitimate accommodation, speak of the points in the narrative which in any way prefigure or suggest great Gospel facts. Thus 1) Abraham’s not withholding his only son suggests that greater act of Him “who spared not his own Son, but freely gave him up for us all.” Romans 8:32. 2) Isaac bearing the wood for the sacrifice suggests Christ bearing his own cross. 3) The ram caught in the thicket of thorns reminds us of Jesus with the thorn-wreath on his brow. 4) Isaac and the ram together have been taken as a double type, Isaac representing the divinity of our Lord, and the ram the humanity which Christ assumed (“a body hast thou prepared me,” Hebrews 10:5,) that he might taste death for man. 5) The three days from the command to sacrifice his son to the time of the deliverance of Isaac, his son was as one already dead to Abraham; and so, “in a figure,” his release was a resurrection from the dead. Hebrews 11:19. All these analogies may be truthfully presented as parabolic, (en parabolh,) but not as proper types.

Other lessons of this chapter are abundant. 1) Here is the notable instance in which to see how faith wrought with works and was thus made perfect. James 2:22. 2) The moral sublimity of ready obedience and submission when God demands our beloved. 3) The moral value of temptation and stern discipline. 4) The word of God the highest law. 5) Two immutable things, the oath and promise of God, a permanent source of consolation to the Christian believer. Hebrews 6:17, 18.

Verse 18. And in thy seed, &c.] We have the authority of St. Paul, Galatians 3:8,16,18, to restrain this to our blessed Lord, who was THE SEED through whom alone all God’s blessings of providence, mercy, grace, and glory, should be conveyed to the nations of the earth.

Verses 15-18. And the angel — Christ, called unto Abraham — Probably while the ram was yet burning. Very high expressions are here used of God’s favour to Abraham, above any he had yet been blessed with. Multiplying I will multiply thee — Those that part with any thing for God, shall have it made up to them with unspeakable advantage. Abraham has but one son, and is willing to part with that one in obedience to God; Well, saith God, thou shalt be recompensed with thousands and millions. In blessing I will bless thee — 1st, The promise of the Spirit is here included, which is that blessing of Abraham which was to “come upon the Gentiles through Jesus Christ,” Galatians 3:14. 2d, The increase of the church; that believers, his spiritual seed, should be many as the stars of heaven. 3d, Spiritual victories; Thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies — Believers by their faith overcome the world, and triumph over all the powers of darkness. Probably Zacharias refers to this part of the oath, Luke 1:74, “That we, being delivered out of the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear.” But the crown of all is the last promise, 4th, The incarnation of Christ; In thy seed (one particular person that shall descend from thee, for he speaks not of many, but of one, as the apostle observes, Galatians 3:16) shall all the nations of the earth be blessed — Christ is the great blessing of the world. Abraham was ready to give up his son for a sacrifice to the honour of God, and on that occasion God promised to give his Son a sacrifice for the salvation of man.

Verse 1-18. God did tempt Abraham, who had now attained the height of all his earthly joys; and seen in Isaac the long-suspended promises fulfilled. He saw nature aided by divine power in his birth, and in his conduct daily proofs of genius, of piety, and filial obedience. The lad everywhere accompanied his aged father, and gained on his affections, not less by his love of virtue than by his other engaging qualities, and hopeful indications of future greatness. In such circumstances it were no wonder, if the patriarch loved his son a little too well; and that the Lord God, desirous of giving an early type of the promised Saviour, should also at the same time resolve to purify his beloved and faithful friend from inordinate affections. With these views, everyway becoming the wise and holy One, he said, Take now thy son. And what could Abraham now expect, accustomed as he had been to hear the promises concerning Isaac enlarged, but that they should now be larger still! Take now thy son, the only son now in thy house, even Isaac, whom thou lovest, whose birth occasioned thee so much joy, 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. Every word in this command was as a two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow. The divine injunction was clear and distinct; and the patriarch, long accustomed to the visions of God, well knew the voice which spake. A doubt, or shadow of a doubt, which often proves painful to others, would have afforded him the greatest relief.

It being probably after the evening devotion when this command was received, let us cast our eye on the astonished patriarch, and trace the workings of a wounded mind. See him extended this night on his sleepless couch, labouring with thought, embarrassed with darkness, and groaning with grief. He had no friend to whom he could disclose his burdened heart; for no friend had ever known the griefs which now assailed him; and a friend destitute of experience would have proved his greatest foe, by tempting him to disobedience; or by advising, as the priests of Crete advised Idomeneus, to substitute a hundred bulls for the life of his son. In the morning, unrelieved by thought, he rises early with a trembling but obedient heart. He saddles his ass, cleaves the wood, and taking two young men and Isaac his son, sets his face, like the Saviour, stedfastly to go up to Salem. Oh what a day of pensive grief and labouring thought! As a bird caught in the net of the fowler, runs round a thousand and a thousand times, and seeks in vain some avenue of escape, and then sits down to breathe; so this weary traveller, having revolved in fruitless toil all his stores of ancient knowledge for comfort, lays down at night to enjoy his grief.

The second day arrives, and after a long and labouring night which seemed too short; the patriarch rises to travel a new road indeed, but his mind still revolved the same train of thought. Whether he reviewed a vast pilgrimage of chequered life, or whether he considered the traditions of his long-lived Sires, nothing was pertinent to his case, nothing afforded him comfort, or even a vestige of hope. Whether he considered the awful effects which Isaac’s tragic death would produce on Sarah, on his household, and on his pagan neighbours; or whether he considered the forlorn and languishing remains of his own old age, destitute of a son, and a dejected wife; all presented some new gloom, some fresh cup of bitterness, some additional woe. Big with these thoughts, and thoughts which inexperience cannot trace, he lays down the third night, but not to sleep. A dark and gloomy tempest still assailed his soul; waves of trouble still rolled over his head, and merciless as the roaring ocean, menaced his feeble age with never- ceasing fury.

The third day at length began to obtrude an unwelcome lustre on his wakeful eyes. But when calamities come to a crisis they often take a favourable turn; so even now, a ray of hope sprung up in the patriarch’s mind, but hope of the saddest kind. He knew, he well knew that God was true, and that he had promised to multiply Isaac’s seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sands on the seashore which are innumerable. His fainting soul therefore catched at the only vestige of presumptive comfort admissible in his case: he assuredly gathered, that God would raise his Isaac from the ashes of the altar, and so fulfil his faithful word. Oh what a tragic faith! Faith in a God unseen, faith in a God surrounded with clouds of thickest darkness. Somewhat cheered with this sad hope, he rises this morning also; and after adoring his Maker, throws his weary limbs across the beast, and stedfastly pursues his way.

He had not travelled far, before he saw the place afar off, the place already seen in vision. The word being in the plural, we cannot say whether it were mount Calvary or mount Zion; but Josephus thinks the mount was the scite on which the temple was afterwards built. Here all his wounds bleed afresh, and all his soul he yields a willing prey to grief. Here nature made her last recoil. But shrinking more at disobedience to his God, than at the oblation of his son, he delivers his beast to the young men, promising that both would soon return. He laid the wood on Isaac, and taking the knife in one hand and the censer in the other, proceeds with the lad to devotion. But ere they reach the awful place, ere the father slays his son, it was the lot of Isaac to pierce the Sire with the deepest wound. Isaac, trained to devotion, Isaac, accustomed to attend the altar, observed a defect in his father’s preparations. My father, said the unsuspecting youth, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The father, unable as yet to afflict his unoffending son, answers, the Lord will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering. So they walk on, both of them together, and arrive at the awful spot. Abraham with a slow and trembling hand prepares the rude but mystic altar; he lays the wood in order, and then is compelled to disclose the strange revelation to his beloved son.

See the astonished youth turn pale with awe. See him rapidly revolve a train of thoughts in his astonished mind concerning God, providence, his mother, and a future state. See reflection soften his soul into tears; and the heroic faith of the father gradually inspire the heart of his obedient son. Isaac was now approaching 25 years of age, and Abraham 125, so that it is doubtful whether he could have bound him, unless Isaac had been willing. See Isaac now all irradiated in countenance by this faith, offer himself a willing victim to the divine command, and even exhort his shrinking father to persevere in obedience. So it is, that heaven gives to faithful martyrs a courage more than human, and arrays the soul with a lustre all divine. The courage of the son, now animates the trembling Sire to perfect his obedience. But what can language say. It has lost all its force. The aged patriarch raised his arm, to slay his only son!

The act of obedience being now completed, immediately the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and stayed his hand. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from ME. In that happy moment heaven poured its full tide of joy and glory on the patriarch’s soul, chased before it all his griefs, and left eternal serenity behind. In that happy moment God the Messiah renewed his covenant once for all with the venerable prophet; and to banish all doubt for ever from his mind, he confirmed the promise with an oath, that his seed should possess the gates of their enemies, and bring the promised blessing on all the nations of the earth.

This most extraordinary transaction, of Abraham’s offering up his son, was afterwards incorporated into the mythology of the heathen, who preserved the memory of it in the fables of their gods. What else is meant by Saturn, the Chronos or time of the Greeks, devouring the male children; and what by the scythe or sickle put into his hand to reap the earth. Eusebius reports, out of Sanchoniotho, that Ham, in time of surrounding war and grievous danger, offered up Jeoud, the only son of a certain poor woman, called Anobret. Præp. lib. 1. c. 10. This is the first human victim of which we have any trace in history. Since then the numbers offered by the progeny of Shem, and of Ham, and of Japhet is countless. They did it in Otaheite, as Captain Wilson reports, prior to his carrying missionaries there. In the nations of India, once in about three years, they still catch a young man about twenty five years of age, and offer him up in one of the larger temples to appease the gods; the king is always made acquainted with such sacrifices. These awful results of paganism have mostly been connected with the terrors of impending danger, and with the largest promises to voluntary victims. And whence could they originate, but in the gross and mistaken notions that the woman’s Seed was to die by the serpent’s biting his heel? All those sacrifices are regarded by Eusebius as having been effected by the influence of demons. How strange then must it appear to Abraham, that God should have required of him such a sacrifice!

THE OFFERING OF ISAAC, 1-19.

We now come to the seventh and great test of Abraham’s faith. See note on Genesis 18:1. Here the spiritual life of the honoured patriarch attains its climax. Native land and kindred have long ago been left behind; revelation after revelation has lifted him into a lofty friendship with God; he has sacrificed his natural yearning for Ishmael, who for years had seemed to him the heir of promise, and has submitted to send him and his mother away into the wilderness. Now all his hope for the after time hung on his only son, his Isaac, whom he loved, (verse 2,) and, as the utmost trial and test of his confidence in God’s word, he is commanded to go forth and sacrifice even that child of miracle. So must the will of the flesh be subjected to the word of God. And so must all Abraham’s spiritual seed, the true children of faith, attain to that lofty elevation. So also Abraham’s greater Son, who in the fulness of time gave his life a ransom for many, declares: “He that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;… and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” Matthew 10:37, 39. Herein is shown the faith of Abraham. A peculiar interpretation has been put upon this chapter by Hengstenberg and Lange, who maintain that Abraham misunderstood the divine command. They deem it absurd to suppose that God should forbid in one part of the transaction what he commands in another, or that he should at all command a human sacrifice, a thing declared so abominable in the law. They understand the command of verse 2 to mean that Abraham should offer his son in spiritual consecration to God; not slay him for a literal burnt offering. Thus God would teach his friend both the distinction and the connexion between sacrificing and killing. The principle and methods of this interpretation are like those by which it is attempted to show that Jephthah did not offer his daughter as a burnt offering, but devoted her to perpetual virginity. It explains away the natural meaning of the language, and foists in a spiritualizing process of thought, transcendental in nature and tendency, and calculated to confuse and mislead rather than help the student of the Scripture. “The Hebrew cultus,” says Lange, “distinguishes between the spiritual consecration of man as a sacrifice, and the visible slaughter of an animal. Thus, for example, according to 1 Samuel 1:24, 25, the boy Samuel was brought by his parents to Eli the priest, and consecrated at the tabernacle, since the three bullocks were slain there as burnt offerings.” — Com. on Genesis, p. 79. But will Lange maintain that the three bullocks were slain as a substitute for Samuel’s life? or that Samuel’s consecration at the tabernacle was equivalent to the act of Abraham in not withholding Isaac? or that Samuel’s parents, in that consecration, offered up their son in any proper sense as a burnt offering to the Lord? The cases are not parallel at all, and to put them thus together is to confound things that are different. Those passages in which the spiritual significance of offerings is presented (Psalms 40:6Psalm 40:6-9; 51:17; 119:108; Hosea 14:2) have no essential relevancy to this narrative of Abraham, and in the passage most frequently cited, (Psalms 51:16Psalm 51:16, 17,) a contrite heart and a burnt offering so far from being synonymous, are put in direct opposition to one another. God’s command to Abraham was plain and positive. The patriarch’s mind was not confused with the metaphysical subtleties of German critics, and when God said: “Take Isaac and go to Moriah and offer him there for a burnt offering;” it was impossible for him to understand any thing else than to go and do exactly what God commanded. He probably knew of no law against human sacrifice, and to him, God’s word, spoken at sundry times and in divers manners, was the supreme law.

We must particularly observe, that this whole procedure was a testing, a temptation, (hsn,) of Abraham. For the purpose of such trial it was perfectly proper for God to command the offering up in sacrifice of the life which he had himself given, and had the right and the power to take again. It was equally proper for him to countermand the order when he saw its purpose was accomplished. Verse 12. In all this there was no conflict, as some writers have supposed, between the revealed and the secret will of God, as if the Holy One had two wills acting in opposite directions at the same time. When God commanded Abraham to go and offer up Isaac, he meant exactly what he said; and when Abraham had shown implicit faith and obedience, God spoke again and commanded him to offer the ram for a burnt offering instead of his son. Verse 13. Here is no conflict between a revealed and a secret will of God. It is simply and solely his revealed will countermanding, for stated reasons, what his revealed will had before commanded. And thus we are told, with a beauty and tenderness unsurpassed in literature, the process and the outcome of the trial of Abraham’s faith.

1. After these things — After all that has been narrated of Abraham before. God did tempt Abraham — The Hebrew for God is here µyhlah, the God; emphatic, the same “everlasting God,” who is called Jehovah in verse 33 of the previous chapter. The tempting is a key-word to the whole chapter. The Hebrew word hsn means to try, to test, to prove. Thus Gesenius (Lex. under hsn) observes: “God is said to try or prove men, that is, their virtue, Psalms 26:2Psalm 26:2; piety, Deuteronomy 8:2, 16; their faith and obedience, Exodus 15:25; 20:20; 2 Chronicles 32:31. This is done by wonderful works, Exodus 20:20; by commands difficult to be executed, Genesis 22:1; Exodus 16:4; and by the infliction of calamities, Deuteronomy 33:8; Judges 2:22; 3:1, 4.” Lange remarks that the word “denotes not simply to prove, or to put to the test, but to prove under circumstances which have originated from sin, and which increase the severity of the proof and make it a temptation.” And this is an important point to note. Man’s life of probation is in a world of trial; and while the world lies in wickedness, many trials come from evil sources; the god of this world solicits to evil, and seeks whom he may devour. 1 Peter 5:8. All such solicitations to evil are among the offences which Jesus deplored, (Matthew 18:7; Luke 17:1,) and when thus viewed it is manifest that God tempts no man. James 1:13. But even such temptations, when resisted and overcome, will issue in good, and the godly discipline they thus subserve is to be recognised as God’s chastising. Hence the apostle says, in the same chapter, (James 1:2,) “Count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations,” etc. God’s tempting Abraham was not a malicious solicitation to evil, but a testing commandment to prove the depth and strength of the patriarch’s faith. If now Abraham will, without questioning, obey a commandment that seems to subvert all the promises of the past, and even the words of prophecy touching Isaac, then will the evidence of his faith be perfected. And so it was, that he who before “against hope believed in hope,” (Romans 4:18,) now staggered not at this strange word, “accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead.” Hebrews 11:19.

THE OFFERING OF ISAAC, 1-19.

We now come to the seventh and great test of Abraham’s faith. See note on Genesis 18:1. Here the spiritual life of the honoured patriarch attains its climax. Native land and kindred have long ago been left behind; revelation after revelation has lifted him into a lofty friendship with God; he has sacrificed his natural yearning for Ishmael, who for years had seemed to him the heir of promise, and has submitted to send him and his mother away into the wilderness. Now all his hope for the after time hung on his only son, his Isaac, whom he loved, (verse 2,) and, as the utmost trial and test of his confidence in God’s word, he is commanded to go forth and sacrifice even that child of miracle. So must the will of the flesh be subjected to the word of God. And so must all Abraham’s spiritual seed, the true children of faith, attain to that lofty elevation. So also Abraham’s greater Son, who in the fulness of time gave his life a ransom for many, declares: “He that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;… and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” Matthew 10:37, 39. Herein is shown the faith of Abraham. A peculiar interpretation has been put upon this chapter by Hengstenberg and Lange, who maintain that Abraham misunderstood the divine command. They deem it absurd to suppose that God should forbid in one part of the transaction what he commands in another, or that he should at all command a human sacrifice, a thing declared so abominable in the law. They understand the command of verse 2 to mean that Abraham should offer his son in spiritual consecration to God; not slay him for a literal burnt offering. Thus God would teach his friend both the distinction and the connexion between sacrificing and killing. The principle and methods of this interpretation are like those by which it is attempted to show that Jephthah did not offer his daughter as a burnt offering, but devoted her to perpetual virginity. It explains away the natural meaning of the language, and foists in a spiritualizing process of thought, transcendental in nature and tendency, and calculated to confuse and mislead rather than help the student of the Scripture. “The Hebrew cultus,” says Lange, “distinguishes between the spiritual consecration of man as a sacrifice, and the visible slaughter of an animal. Thus, for example, according to 1 Samuel 1:24, 25, the boy Samuel was brought by his parents to Eli the priest, and consecrated at the tabernacle, since the three bullocks were slain there as burnt offerings.” — Com. on Genesis, p. 79. But will Lange maintain that the three bullocks were slain as a substitute for Samuel’s life? or that Samuel’s consecration at the tabernacle was equivalent to the act of Abraham in not withholding Isaac? or that Samuel’s parents, in that consecration, offered up their son in any proper sense as a burnt offering to the Lord? The cases are not parallel at all, and to put them thus together is to confound things that are different. Those passages in which the spiritual significance of offerings is presented (Psalms 40:6Psalm 40:6-9; 51:17; 119:108; Hosea 14:2) have no essential relevancy to this narrative of Abraham, and in the passage most frequently cited, (Psalms 51:16Psalm 51:16, 17,) a contrite heart and a burnt offering so far from being synonymous, are put in direct opposition to one another. God’s command to Abraham was plain and positive. The patriarch’s mind was not confused with the metaphysical subtleties of German critics, and when God said: “Take Isaac and go to Moriah and offer him there for a burnt offering;” it was impossible for him to understand any thing else than to go and do exactly what God commanded. He probably knew of no law against human sacrifice, and to him, God’s word, spoken at sundry times and in divers manners, was the supreme law.

We must particularly observe, that this whole procedure was a testing, a temptation, (hsn,) of Abraham. For the purpose of such trial it was perfectly proper for God to command the offering up in sacrifice of the life which he had himself given, and had the right and the power to take again. It was equally proper for him to countermand the order when he saw its purpose was accomplished. Verse 12. In all this there was no conflict, as some writers have supposed, between the revealed and the secret will of God, as if the Holy One had two wills acting in opposite directions at the same time. When God commanded Abraham to go and offer up Isaac, he meant exactly what he said; and when Abraham had shown implicit faith and obedience, God spoke again and commanded him to offer the ram for a burnt offering instead of his son. Verse 13. Here is no conflict between a revealed and a secret will of God. It is simply and solely his revealed will countermanding, for stated reasons, what his revealed will had before commanded. And thus we are told, with a beauty and tenderness unsurpassed in literature, the process and the outcome of the trial of Abraham’s faith.

1. After these things — After all that has been narrated of Abraham before. God did tempt Abraham — The Hebrew for God is here µyhlah, the God; emphatic, the same “everlasting God,” who is called Jehovah in verse 33 of the previous chapter. The tempting is a key-word to the whole chapter. The Hebrew word hsn means to try, to test, to prove. Thus Gesenius (Lex. under hsn) observes: “God is said to try or prove men, that is, their virtue, Psalms 26:2Psalm 26:2; piety, Deuteronomy 8:2, 16; their faith and obedience, Exodus 15:25; 20:20; 2 Chronicles 32:31. This is done by wonderful works, Exodus 20:20; by commands difficult to be executed, Genesis 22:1; Exodus 16:4; and by the infliction of calamities, Deuteronomy 33:8; Judges 2:22; 3:1, 4.” Lange remarks that the word “denotes not simply to prove, or to put to the test, but to prove under circumstances which have originated from sin, and which increase the severity of the proof and make it a temptation.” And this is an important point to note. Man’s life of probation is in a world of trial; and while the world lies in wickedness, many trials come from evil sources; the god of this world solicits to evil, and seeks whom he may devour. 1 Peter 5:8. All such solicitations to evil are among the offences which Jesus deplored, (Matthew 18:7; Luke 17:1,) and when thus viewed it is manifest that God tempts no man. James 1:13. But even such temptations, when resisted and overcome, will issue in good, and the godly discipline they thus subserve is to be recognised as God’s chastising. Hence the apostle says, in the same chapter, (James 1:2,) “Count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations,” etc. God’s tempting Abraham was not a malicious solicitation to evil, but a testing commandment to prove the depth and strength of the patriarch’s faith. If now Abraham will, without questioning, obey a commandment that seems to subvert all the promises of the past, and even the words of prophecy touching Isaac, then will the evidence of his faith be perfected. And so it was, that he who before “against hope believed in hope,” (Romans 4:18,) now staggered not at this strange word, “accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead.” Hebrews 11:19.

V. 20. This is recorded here, 1. To show that tho’ Abraham saw his own family highly dignified with peculiar privileges, yet he did not look with contempt upon his relations, but was glad to hear of the increase and prosperity of their families.

2. To make way for the following story of the marriage of Isaac to Rebekah, a daughter of this family.

Verse 20. Behold, Milcah, she hath also borne children unto thy brother] This short history seems introduced solely for the purpose of preparing the reader for the transactions related Genesis 24:1-67, and to show that the providence of God was preparing, in one of the branches of the family of Abraham, a suitable spouse for his son Isaac.

Verse 20. This is recorded here, 1st, To show that though Abraham saw his own family highly dignified with peculiar privileges, yet he did not look with contempt upon his relations, but was glad to hear of the increase and prosperity of their families. 2d, To make way for the following story of the marriage of Isaac to Rebekah, a daughter of this family.

NAHOR’S CHILDREN, 20-24.

20. It was told Abraham — How few and far between the visits and messages of those days! Fifty or more years had passed since Abraham left his kindred in Haran, and now he hears from them. The news may have come by a passing traveller from Haran, or a company of merchants, passing down into Egypt; or possibly some special messenger from Nahor sent to inquire after Abraham.

Verse 21. Huz] He is supposed to have peopled the land of Uz or Ausitis, in Arabia Deserta, the country of Job.

Buz his brother] From this person Elihu the Buzite, one of the friends of Job, is thought to have descended.

Kemuel the father of Aram] Kamouel patera surwv, the father of the Syrians, according to the Septuagint. Probably the Kamiletes, a Syrian tribe to the westward of the Euphrates are meant; they are mentioned by Strabo.

Ver. 21. Uz, after whom a district was called, and from whom Job descended. Buz, his brother, was ancestor of Elihu, one of Job’s three friends. Kemuel, Father of Aram. The LXX read here, father of the Syrians, who were no doubt Aram’s posterity.

21. Huz… Buz… Aram — Uz, a son of Aram, is mentioned Genesis 10:23, among the descendants of Shem, and the names Uz and Aran occur also among the Edomites, Genesis 36:28. Buz is also mentioned in Jeremiah 25:23. And it is noticeable that Job was of the land of Uz, (Job 1:1,) and Elihu was a Buzite of the kindred of Ram. Job 32:2. Nothing certain, however, can now be made out of these

correspondencies, and it is well-known that names were often repeated in different lines of the same original family.

22. Chesed — Supposed by some to have been the father of one branch of the Chasdim, or Chaldeans. But the Chaldees of chap. 11:28, appear to have been older than Abraham.

Verse 23. Bethuel begat Rebekah] Who afterward became the wife of Isaac.

23. Bethuel begat Rebekah — Compare Genesis 24:15. The purpose of inserting this genealogy here seems to have been to prepare the way for the narrative of Isaac’s marriage to Rebekah. The only other name in the list of which we have any other trace, is Maachah, (verse 24,) who was, perhaps, the father of the Maachathites mentioned Deuteronomy 3:14, and Joshua 12:5. Observe that Nahor has twelve sons, like Ishmael (Genesis 25:16) and Jacob.

Verse 24. His concubine] We borrow this word from the Latin compound concubina, from con, together, and cubo, to lie, and apply it solely to a woman cohabiting with a man without being legally married. The Hebrew word is vglyp pilegesh, which is also a compound term, contracted, according to Parkhurst, from glp palag, to divide or share, and vgn nagash, to approach; because the husband, in the delicate phrase of the Hebrew tongue, approaches the concubine, and shares the bed, &c., of the real wife with her. The pilegesh or concubine, (from which comes the Greek pallakh pallake, and also the Latin pellex,) in Scripture, is a kind of secondary wife, not unlawful in the patriarchal times; though the progeny of such could not inherit. The word is not used in the Scriptures in that disagreeable sense in which we commonly understand it. Hagar was properly the concubine or pilegesh of Abraham, and this annuente Deo, and with his wife’s consent. Keturah, his second wife, is called a concubine, Genesis 26:15; 1 Chronicles 1:32; and Pilhah and Zilhah were concubines to Jacob, Genesis 35:22. After the patriarchal times many eminent men had concubines, viz., Caleb, 1 Chronicles 2:46,48; Manasses, 1 Chronicles 7:14; Gideon, Judges 8:31; Saul, 2 Samuel 3:7; David, 2 Samuel 5:13; Solomon,2 Kings 11:3; and Rehoboam, 2 Chronicles 11:21. The pilegesh, therefore, differed widely from a prostitute; and however unlawful under the New Testament, was not so under the Old.

FROM this chapter a pious mind may collect much useful instruction. From the trial of Abraham we again see, 1. That God may bring his followers into severe straits and difficulties, that they may have the better opportunity of both knowing and showing their own faith and obedience; and that he may seize on those occasions to show them the abundance of his mercy, and thus confirm them in righteousness all their days. There is a foolish saying among some religious people, which cannot be too severely reprobated: Untried grace is no grace. On the contrary, there may be much grace, though God, for good reasons, does not think proper for a time to put it to any severe trial or proof. But grace is certainly not fully known but in being called to trials of severe and painful obedience. But as all the gifts of God should be used, (and they are increased and strengthened by exercise,) it would be unjust to deny trials and exercises to grace, as this would be to preclude it from the opportunities of being strengthened and increased. 2. The offering up of Isaac is used by several religious people in a sort of metaphorical way, to signify their easily-besetting sins, beloved idols, &c. But this is a most reprehensible abuse of the Scripture. It is both insolent and wicked to compare some abominable lust or unholy affection to the amiable and pious youth who, for his purity and excellence, was deemed worthy to prefigure the sacrifice of the Son of God. To call our vile passions and unlawful attachments by the name of our Isaac is unpardonable; and to talk of sacrificing such to God is downright blasphemy. Such sayings as these appear to be legitimated by long use; but we should be deeply and scrupulously careful not to use any of the words of God in any sense in which he has not spoken them. If, in the course of God’s providence, a parent is called to give up to death an amiable, only son, then there is a parallel in the case; and it may be justly said, if pious resignation fill the parent’s mind, such a person, like Abraham, has been called to give his Isaac back to God.

Independently of the typical reference to this transaction, there are two points which seem to be recommended particularly to our notice. 1. The astonishing faith and prompt obedience of the father. 2. The innocence, filial respect, and passive submission of the son. Such a father and such a son were alone worthy of each other.

GENESIS

Ver. 24. Concubine, the partner of his bed. Our Saviour decides against polygamy in these words: “from the beginning it was not so.” Custom then sanctioned it in princes and great men, often to the bitterness of their own minds, and the destruction of their children. Instead of building their regal houses, it often pulled them down. The average of births is 24 females and 25 males, God foreseeing that men would perish in various ways, provided that one male and one female should be one flesh, and as one soul in two bodies. Such was the marriage in paradise, the purest model of posterity. The Hebrew vglyp pilgesh, is certainly a low word, and cannot be derived from the root Peleg, he divided; for concubines were servants, and their children were not heirs. Whatever honour or respect they might sometimes acquire, it was on the law of custom, not of right.

NAHOR’S CHILDREN, 20-24.

20. It was told Abraham — How few and far between the visits and messages of those days! Fifty or more years had passed since Abraham left his kindred in Haran, and now he hears from them. The news may have come by a passing traveller from Haran, or a company of merchants, passing down into Egypt; or possibly some special messenger from Nahor sent to inquire after Abraham.