Freedom is Good News Part 40

A few thousand years ago, an elderly father and his teenage son were walking up the side of a mountain, carrying only some wood, an ember to start a fire and a knife.  The father told his servants that he and his son were going on ahead in order to worship God and would return soon.  This worship would involve a sacrifice.

As they traveled up the path the boy turned to his father and said, “Father?”  “Yes, my son?” the father replied.  “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”  Father Abraham must have had a hard time controlling his emotions at this point for he knew what God had told him to do.  “And God said, ‘Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah.  Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.’”

With measured words and breath, (for this trek up the mountain was not easy for a man over a hundred years old) Abraham answered his son, “God will provide Himself a lamb for the burnt offering my son.”

This section of scripture, Genesis 22:1-14, is indeed a very difficult section to read.  As a father myself, I cannot imagine what must have been going through Abraham’s mind.  Abraham was later called the “father of the faithful” and I guess we can see why.  His faith was manifested in his obedience to God’s commands. (See James 2:20-24)

Let us fast forward some 2080 years and come to the banks of the Jordan River.  We see a rough hewn, rugged man waist deep in the water and he is baptizing those who are coming to him from the surrounding area.  All of a sudden he looks up and motioning to a couple of his disciples says, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”  Is there a connection here?  Jesus had already been baptized by John when this event took place and at His baptism there came a voice from Heaven, “This is my Son, whom I love; with Him I am well pleased”.  May I add that this was God’s Son, His only begotten Son?  The parallels here are quite unmistakable. 

The question I must ask at this time is, why a Lamb?

Let us take a look at another unmistakable parallel.  Some several hundred years after the episode with Abraham and Isaac, God told another man, Moses, to have the Israelites, who were in bondage to Pharaoh in Egypt, take a lamb and sacrifice it.  This time they were to use the blood of the lamb and apply it to the door posts and lintels of the houses as a protection for the first born children.  The Israelites were to take a lamb that was without defect, cook it over a fire and eat it, “Eat it in haste it is the LORD’s Passover” (see Exodus 12 for this story).

The use of a “lamb” is one of the greatest themes in the scripture and we’ll take a closer look at this in our next article.

Freedom is Good News Part 10

In my last article we saw that there are “types” in the scriptures. Abraham was told by God to sacrifice his son “his only son whom he loves”. God uses the same words for Isaac that He would later use in describing Jesus – God’s only Son. Some people think that this was a terrible thing for God to do to His servant Abraham. But the reality is that God, who is love itself, was having Abraham set up a type; a symbol of the reality of what was to come some 2080 years in the future. God knew that when Abraham raised the knife to sacrifice Isaac, He would send an angel to stop the action.

I mentioned that this is played out in Genesis 22 and if you have read the chapter this past week (because I piqued your curiosity in the last article) then you know how Isaac asked his father as they walked up the mount “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Abraham’s response is very telling, “God will Himself provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” This answer from a father to his son is “the gospel”, for God our Father did indeed provide the lamb for a sacrifice. It is in the book of John wherein John the Baptist says to his disciples, “behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29 & 36) as he pointed to Jesus.

Now if you’ve been following along you can see how both Matthew and John work hand in hand to reveal information. Matthew said that his book concerned, “A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham”. We’ve looked at the son of Abraham and correlated the account in Genesis with John calling Jesus “the Lamb of God”. (I told you this was getting good!!) And if you are paying close attention, you’ve noticed that the opening statement in Matthew says that Jesus was the Son of David.

David’s son was Solomon and he became the king when David died. The name Solomon is derived from the Hebrew word for peace, “shalom”. And we know from Isaiah 9:6 that Jesus is called “Prince of Peace”. This is one of His titles! But more than that, Solomon was to be the one who would build God’s house – God’s temple. This is also a type for us to learn from in the Old Testament because in the book of Hebrews Jesus is referred to as the builder of God’s house (see Heb. 3:1-6).

If we consider these two “types” from the Old Testament, we can see that God wishes to teach us that Jesus, as the Son of Abraham, was sacrificed for us as the Lamb of God and, as the Son of David, He would become the King of kings and reign as king over the house of God. This is pretty special, isn’t it?

Why are these types used in the Old Testament? Because God wants mankind to understand that all of His works have been known from the beginning. When God told Abraham that “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you”, He was proclaiming the Gospel to His servant Abraham.

Until next time….