Who Will Be Sacrificed?
Samuel Prime · Tidal Church Moncton · August 2, 2026 · Heroes of the Faith series
Samuel Prime walks through Genesis 22 and Hebrews 11, the binding of Isaac, showing how God tests faith and provides the sacrifice. The story points to Jesus, the Lamb given for us, and invites everyone to trust Him fully.
More from Samuel Prime · The Heroes of the Faith series
Topics: Faith, Discipleship, Easter
Transcript
[0:00] This morning we're in the Book of Hebrews, continuing our series, "Heroes of the Faith." And so, in Hebrews 11:17-22, it's a snapshot of most of the chapter of Genesis 22, with the binding of Isaac. And so instead of spending all of our time this morning in a really condensed part of Genesis 22 in the binding of Isaac, which truly there's so much theological depth that we can't even begin to unpack all of the nuances and the depth of the scriptures. But we're going to attempt to kind of unpack Genesis 22 this morning. And so if you have your Bible, you can start turning there now just before I preface something. And so one thing when we approach the scriptures, especially the Old Testament, we have knowledge. We know what happens in the New Testament.
[0:53] We know that Jesus came, that He walked this earth, that He died on a cross, that He rose three days later and ascended to be seated at the right hand of God, the Father. We know that Jesus came, that all the prophecies in the Old Testament came to pass when Jesus was the ultimate Passover sacrifice. And so one thing that's important to note in Genesis 22 with Abraham is Abraham didn't know all of that. He didn't know all of that. And so this morning, my ask is, as we jump into the text, is however much you know, whether you think you know a little, I'd say you probably know more than what you think, or whether you think you know a lot, maybe you don't know as much as you think you do. It's all good. We're going to forget everything that we know. No Jesus, no church, no coffee and Timbits, and nice people.
[1:39] We're going to forget all of it. No commandments, no heroes of the faith to look back on, nothing. Just Abraham and a God that he's really only beginning to understand. He's seen glimpses of how God has moved. He's starting to begin to understand the depths of God's heart. And so I want us to put ourselves in Abraham's shoes. And so the hardest and most amazing moment in Abraham's life is, in my opinion, Genesis 22 and the binding of Isaac. And He was about to reveal Himself more than He ever had to Abraham. And so first He was going to show Abraham who He was not, and then He was going to show Abraham who He was. And so as we turn to the scriptures in Genesis 22, starting in verse 1, it says, "Sometime later God tested Abraham's faith." And we'll just stop there for just a brief moment. I just want to make note of this.
[2:36] A faith that is not tested is not faith. And so when we make promises to the Lord, when we say, "God, I will worship You with every breath," we must take note that the Lord takes those promises seriously. And I'd also like to make note that the testing isn't for His benefit. The testing isn't so that He knows the desires of your heart, because He already does. The testing is actually for our benefit. And so as the Lord leads us, He says, "I'm going to test you." And as we see, "Sometime later, God tested Abraham and He said to him, 'Abraham.'" Another thing that you might not know is the name Abraham means father of many. And so all throughout scriptures, names have significant meaning.
[3:31] Maybe today, names don't have as much meaning as they once did, but names are incredibly intentional in the scriptures. And so when we see Abraham, we see that he was the father of many. Father Abraham. I think of the old children's song, "Father Abraham had many sons." So the desire of Abraham's heart was to be a father, and we'll continue on. "'Here I am,' he replied." This is the Hebrew word that means Your servant. Here I am. I submit fully to You. "Then God said, 'Take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac.'" Isaac simply means laughter. It means joy. And so I love how specific the scriptures are here. He says, "Take your son, your only son," and He takes it a step farther because Abraham wanted to be a father, and his son, Isaac, meant laughter or joy, and it goes really specific, and it says, "whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain, which I will show you." And so one thing that we need to understand about these scriptures is Abraham lived in a time and a place where child sacrifice was a regular practice.
[4:42] So it was a regular practice, and it truthfully is one of the most detestable practice, and it was one of the reasons that God would drive the original inhabitants of the Promised Land out and give it to Abraham's descendants. And so we see this in Deuteronomy 18:9-12. "When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not learn to imitate the detestable ways of the nations there. Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or a spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord because of these same detestable practices, and the Lord your God will drive out the nations before you." I'd like to make note, 21 times in the Old Testament, child sacrifice is mentioned, and every time it is detestable in the sight of the Lord.
[5:42] But none of that had happened yet. No nation of Israel, no kings. Abraham did not know that Yahweh hates child sacrifice and that it's detestable before the Lord. And so he was at the beginning, just to give you some more context, he was at the beginning of a journey with God. God was progressively revealing who He was to Abraham. And so the whole Old Testament, truthfully, is a progressive revelation of who God is, of His ways, of His plans to provide a Messiah to save us from our sins. It starts with the basics and increasingly adds more heart and soul to who God is and brushes away sinful practices and second-best practices until His people are ready for God to come in the flesh, and that person, that God that we talk about, is Jesus Christ.
[6:34] This is also how God works in each and every one of us. And so my ask this morning as we begin to process these scriptures, as we begin to break them down and talk about and wrestle them this morning, would be for you to, just in your own prayer to the Lord as you seek Him, would be, "God, I want Your progressive revelation in my life." Another way to put it would be, "God, I want to see where Your hand is moving in my life, where I've witnessed Your prevenient grace, Your grace that has gone before." And so far, Abraham had experienced a God who made promises and came through. And so when Yahweh says, "Go and sacrifice your son," Abraham thinks this is the kind of God He is.
[7:20] "Go sacrifice your laughter to me, your joy to me, the one whom you love, the one who you delight in." And this is surprising to Abraham and perplexing, but this is something that other gods around him would do as an act of worship. And so a god to whom you have to sacrifice your children in order to be provided for or to be happy. In Psalm 106 they say, "They sacrifice their sons or daughters to false gods." And so the only thing Abraham knows is he knows that God had promised him Isaac, that God gave Abraham and Sarah Isaac as a promise when Sarah was past childbearing years, and that God said that many descendants would come from Isaac. It's Genesis 21:12 that says, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned." And so there's this conflict that begins to happen in Abraham's mind between what he knows of God to be true so far and what God is commanding him to now do.
[8:26] And so Abraham is expecting something to happen to resolve this conflict, but he doesn't fully know what. And so in Genesis 22:3, we continue on, "Early the next morning, Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two servants and his son, Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place that God had told him about. On the third day, Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance, and he said to his servants, 'Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.'" This is the first time that the Hebrew word is translated into our English as worship. And the Bible calls worship the giving of our entire selves to God.
[9:12] It's not just the songs and the declarations that we sing, that we've sung here this morning. It is actually the giving of our entire selves to God. As it says in the New Testament, that "It is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me." And so that's what Abraham is walking up the mountain to do. He's going up the mountain to sacrifice his laughter and His joy to the Lord. And I had a thought. Why is it that the two young guys actually stayed behind with the donkeys? And there's a few reasons for this that we definitively know. One of which being that the servants would've taken care of the donkeys to make sure they didn't run off, to take care of things when Isaac and Abraham went up the mountain. But I think one of the, and this is just a thought that I had, that one of the reasons why, in my opinion, the two young men and the donkey were left behind is because you don't get to climb the mountain if you don't have something to sacrifice.
[10:10] If you don't have anything to give, then you don't get to climb the mountain. And verse 6, it says, "Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. And the two of them went on together. Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, 'Father?' 'Yes, my son?' Abraham replied." I just want to make note of this, that the same response, depending on the translation you read, but especially in the Hebrew, the same response that Abraham has to Isaac is the same response that Abraham had to God earlier in this passage where he says, "Here I am, Lord." He said, "Your servant is here. Here I am." And I think that's beautiful and powerful.
[10:56] And he says, "'Yes, my son?' Abraham replied. 'The fire and wood are here,' Isaac said, 'but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?'" I think Isaac's quite clever. He mentions the wood, and he doesn't mention the knife, and so he's starting to, I think, figure it out. He's like, "I'm not giving Abraham any ideas." And verse 8, "Abraham answered, 'God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.' And the two of them went on together." And so when Isaac asks, "Where is the sacrificial lamb?" Abraham is believing that in some way, God will provide it. Abraham also knows, and he's believing, that if he has to actually go through with the killing of his laughter, of his son Isaac, that even then he's believing that Isaac will live somehow and have descendants. As Hebrews chapter 11, verse 19 puts it, "Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead."
[11:55] Abraham reasoned that even somehow God could raise the dead. And so Abraham knows Yahweh's power. He's witnessed it in his life, but he doesn't yet know Yahweh's character, God's character, at the deepest level. He doesn't know whether Yahweh is like the child-devouring gods of many of the nations around him or something altogether different. He can think that maybe there is a God who calls you to do horrible things so that good things can result. And I would like to put forth this morning that if you ever find yourself tempted to do something bad so that a good thing or a good outcome results, I just want to say this morning, that is not from the Lord. That truthfully, that is a demonic thought.
[12:41] We think we need to do wrong sometimes to make a way through a situation, but God is abundantly clear that He is our way maker. We sung it this morning, "Way Maker." We declared it. And so if we truly believe that, that will shift how we view situations and trials and tests of our faith. He never asks us to do something bad to make a way. He asks us to trust Him and He will make a way. And I think sometimes it's really easy to take phrases and to kind of latch onto things like God will never give us more than we can handle. I just would like to put forth this morning and say that that's not scriptural, that's not true. God, sometimes there are situations in which there is more than we can handle, but it is not more than He can handle.
[13:30] And so in verse 9, "When they reached the place that God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. And he bound his son Isaac, and he laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son." And so to paint this picture just a little farther, Abraham has his son, his feet bound on the altar. Abraham, who longed to be a father, who had his laughter and his joy in front of him, with his knife raised in the air, ready in an act of obedience to kill his joy. And what does the Lord do? God's voice rings out and it says, "Abraham, Abraham, here I am." There's that phrase again, Your servant.
[14:16] He replied, "Do not lay a hand on the boy," He said. "Do not do anything to him. Now that I know you fear God." I think of the scriptures that say the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. "Because you have not withheld from Me your only son. Abraham looked up and there was a thicket, and he saw a ram caught by his horns. And he went over and he took the ram and he sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place the Lord Will Provide, and to this day it is said, on the mountain of the Lord, it will be provided." I'd also just an aside here, a burnt offering is one of the offerings that you don't come back from. You're charred. It's pretty gnarly.
[15:02] And there are no other examples in scripture of God commanding someone to do something wrong to test them. And so God wasn't going to let him go through with the sacrifice. And Abraham did not actually know for sure that it was wrong. It was okay by his culture. There were other people that were worshiping gods through child sacrifice. And there's two kind of reasons for this. The first reason is that Yahweh shows Abraham that He is the exact opposite of gods of his culture. He says, "Abraham, Abraham, stop. This is not who I am. I am the exact opposite." It's almost as if He's saying, "I am not the God who demands your child sacrifice. I am the God who provides the sacrifice."
[15:50] The second reason was to test Abraham. In verse 15, it says, "The angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven a second time and said, "I swear by Myself," declares the Lord, "that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sands on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities and of their enemies, and through your offspring all the nations of the earth will be blessed because you have obeyed Me." So what we learn is, we learn that God tests us so that He can reveal more of who He is to us. Sometimes what we get wrong about a test is we think that a test is a punishment. A test is not a punishment.
[16:36] It is not just a normal difficulty. It's a difficult situation that God allows to happen or a specific situation that He sets up that is going to push us to our limit and then put us past that limit. And in the process, as we continue to be faithful to what we know of God, He will show up. He will reveal more of who He is, and the testing will be a pathway to blessing with Him. And I'm not talking about financial blessing or look under your chair, there's a car. I'm talking about a blessing. What did we learn from last week of what your reward is for seeking the Lord? Your reward is, the blessing is the Lord. It is God, that you will receive Him. In this case, for Abraham, God was testing him to see if Abraham would be as devoted to Him as his neighbors were to their false god and evil gods. And let's just think about this in our context here today.
[17:35] People who are devoted to financial success will sacrifice everything to get it. They will obsess over it day and night, and to the point where it'll ruin their marriages and their families and their health as they work day and night. They obsess over it. People who are devoted to finding love will give up everything else and sometimes even make foolish decisions that will wreck their lives just at the smallest chance of finding what we often call the one. And so God may be testing you to say, "Will you be devoted to Me as you were to these false gods of success or of relationship or of health or of wealth or of something else?" And the truth is, Yahweh, our Lord, our God, Jesus Christ, deserves that kind of devotion because unlike these false gods who take all that is precious to us away, when we give our full devotion to God, to the one true triune God, He provides, He shows up. For His ways are pathways to everything good, and we get to see so much more of who God is as we walk with Him through times of testing.
[18:49] Okay, great job, everybody. We're through the hardest part. We're through the absolute hardest part of the message. We put ourselves in Abraham's shoes. We forgot everything that we know about God, and we experienced the story like Abraham did. We can just take a moment and we can breathe. It's all good. We passed the test. And so the revelation focused primarily on who God was not, and it started to tell him about the character of who God is, as the God who provides the sacrifice. But to really understand who God is from this story, we have to look at it again and do the opposite of what we just did, where we forgot everything. Now, I want you to go ahead and just remember everything in the context that we have when we approach the Scriptures.
[19:36] And so let's read it as a people who know the story kept going forward from Abraham's time until the great nation of Israel that God was revealing more and more of Himself to, and the peak of that story was Jesus Christ. And let's look at it all with what we know about God through Jesus Christ, as people who know the end of the story of what happened. And so when we do, we actually see much more of who God is as He revealed Himself to Abraham. And so God showed Abraham that He is the God who provides the sacrifice. But check out the similarities between the story of the sacrifice that almost happened of Abraham's son, Isaac, and the sacrifice that did happen with God's Son. Listen to the wording when God said to Abraham, "Take your son, your only son, whom you love, who you delight in, and sacrifice him," in Genesis 22:2. This is the wording from the baptism of Jesus as He dedicated Himself to the mission to die for our sins, and the Father spoke from heaven in Matthew 3:17, "This is My Son, whom I love. With Him I am well pleased."
[20:44] It's also the wording from the Mount of the Transfiguration as Jesus prepared to sacrifice Himself for our sins on the cross, and the Father again spoke to Him from heaven, "This is My Son, whom I love. With Him I am well pleased. Listen to Him." In the same way Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac, God booms from heaven, "You have not withheld from Me your son, your only son," in Genesis 22:12. And God is saying, "I am not the God who demands your child in sacrifice. I am the God who provides the sacrifice." He's saying, "I am the God who sacrifices Himself for you as I give you My own Son." A God who sacrifices Himself for us.
[21:30] Today, He is offering Himself as the sacrifice for your sins and your transgressions. Will you personally receive Jesus as the sacrifice for your sins? Will you personally put your faith, your demonstrated trust, in Him today? The second similarity that we see from the Scripture is Abraham's obedience was tested and Jesus's obedience was tested. Both in Hebrews 11:17 and Genesis 22:1 introduce the same testing for God. Directly after the baptism, then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted or tested by the devil in Matthew 4:1. And the transfiguration was to prepare Jesus for His testing in Hebrews 4:15. "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weakness, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are, yet He did not sin." God is not just a God who tests you.
[22:34] He is the one who has been tested and can help you through the test. The third similarity that we see between what happens in Genesis 22 and what we see in the New Testament and in Hebrews is that a lamb is provided. In Genesis 22:8, "God Himself will provide a lamb for the burnt offering, my son." And if we look at John 1:29, it says, "Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world." The fourth one that's really easy to miss is wood is carried to the sacrifice. Abraham places the wood on Isaac's back, just as the Father places the sin of the world upon Jesus' back. Isaac bears the wood on his back, just as Christ Jesus bore the cross on His back.
[23:21] So you might be like, "What do these similarities mean? Why did you just take me on a journey through a whole bunch of Scriptures that may or may not seem connected?" Has anybody ever had a flashback? It's all good. You can raise your hand. Anybody ever have a flashback? There's a few. Well, Abraham was having a flash forward. What he was going through with almost sacrificing his son was a flash forward to the ultimate sacrifice of Christ Jesus that would happen of God's own Son. It's like he just got a glimmer of who God is that provides the ultimate sacrifice. In Hebrews 11:13, it says, "They did not fully receive the things promised. They only saw them from a distance and greeted them," or welcomed them, "from afar." The almost sacrifice of Isaac shows us that Jesus is the fulfillment of not just the prophecies in the Old Testament, but the whole storyline, the progressive revelation that was being pointed to when we get to the New Testament. Christ fully reveals the character and the depth of the character of God, which is the same all along.
[24:29] And as we begin to close this morning, I just want to point out how this is relevant for us today. Because the truth is, God promises everything, He asks for everything, and He provides everything. Satan promises everything, he asks for everything, and he takes everything. The result depends on who is being sacrificed. The question is, do you want everything provided, or do you want everything taken? Because the truth is, Satan will have you sacrifice not just your morals, but who you are to be happy. And I just want to point out that there's a difference between happiness and joy.
[25:17] Happiness is fleeting, where the joy of the Lord is present in all things. It's present in all circumstances. And so Satan will have you sacrifice who you are to be happy. He will have you sacrifice your ministry to pursue a lesser goal. He will have you sacrifice your eternal life to get some pleasures that maybe feel good in the moment in this life. And in the end, your pleasures turn to pain, your lesser goals displace what really matters in life, and your immorality takes your joy. Satan takes everything, my friend. And it becomes the sacrifice made on Satan's altar. And so in the end, it's not what you sacrifice, but who is sacrificed.
[26:06] Is it you who is sacrificed, or is it Jesus who is sacrificed for you? Jesus will call you to sacrifice some of your happiness to get new life, to get eternal life. And the truth is, sometimes we go through tests and hard things so He can prove Himself true to you, so that you can trust Him in all things. Jesus will call you to sacrifice some of your lesser ambitions to make His kingdom your number one mission in this life. He will provide the parts that actually matters of those lesser things in His way. Jesus will call you to sacrifice some pleasures in this life so that you may have eternal life with Him, and He will provide you with good pleasures, with no hangover, not with broken relationships, no lost wallets from binges or history that you have to delete from your phone, or conversations you try and hide and cover up. Instead, He offers the pleasures of the sun on your back, the fresh air in your lungs, the ability to keep your eyes fixed upon Jesus and His beauty and His glory and His majesty.
[27:25] More than that, He will provide your life with spiritual joy. The joy of knowing not just that God loves you, but knowing the one in whom loves you. The joy of sharing and sitting with somebody else in their grief and their pain, and helping them to trust the Lord. The joy of seeing your life used to build something bigger than yourself that matters more than any one of us in this room before the Creator. Jesus, in His sacrifice, did for us what we cannot do. He is our forgiveness. Jesus, in His sacrifice, showed us what it is like to lay down our lives so that God can provide it all back again. He is your pattern. Jesus is your sacrifice, your invitation. It says in John 3:16, "For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life."
[28:22] And there's a decision at the end of the day that we have to make. We either choose the Lord, and we choose to trust Him and have faith in Him and give Him the entirety of ourselves, the entirety of our lives, or there's the decision where we don't. And the unfortunate reality is there is no middle ground. There is no neutral when it comes to the condition of the human heart. There is no neutral. There's no Switzerland when it comes to the human heart. I think of in John 6, towards the end, after Jesus did some miracles and He fed the 5,000. Jesus, He had a crowd that began to follow Him. And the Scripture, for one of the first times, actually makes the distinction between His disciples and the 12, the apostles.
[29:08] And so the disciples, after Jesus was having some teachings that were really hard, He basically said that, "To have eternal life, you have to eat My flesh and drink My blood." He wasn't talking about communion, but He was rather saying that, "To have eternal life, to partake in the kingdom of God, you need to find all of your sustenance in Me. You need to have all your trust in Me. I need to be Lord of your life." And at the end, it actually says that many of them turned away. And so Jesus, not in His insecurity, not in any other way, He turns to His apostles, the 12, and He says, "Do you want to go, too?" And the Apostle Peter, I love the words of the Apostle Peter in this moment.
[29:56] He looks at Jesus and says, "To whom shall we go? To whom shall we go? Lord, You have the words of eternal life." That He has the words of eternal life, the gentle Shepherd has the words of eternal life. That we can know Him, not just know about Him, that we can talk with Him and speak with Him and have conversation and relationship with Him. And there's a serious decision that we have to make when it comes to following Him and trusting in Him, is actually listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit. To know that our God is good, that He is gentle, that His yoke is easy and His burden is light. But we do have to make a decision to follow Him and live for Him or to not.
[30:44] And my hope this morning is that if you don't know Him, or maybe you've strayed from Him and you need to come back home like the prodigal son, we'll rejoice with you. Heaven will rejoice. But I think there's some people in here today that need to make a decision for Christ. To say, "Jesus, I want You to be the sacrifice for my sins instead of sacrificing myself to chase the pleasures of the world." That, "God, I want to know what it means when the Scriptures say You have the words of eternal life." That His Word is like streams of water that flow. And we have access to that very God, but He asks us to give Him everything.
[31:38] It's an idea that Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls the idea of cheap grace, a grace that doesn't cost us anything, a grace that doesn't actually ask us to give stuff up. And so the question, just as we enter into a moment of prayer, would be, what is it this morning that you need to give up? That you need to say, "Jesus, You have the words of eternal life. Holy Spirit, You are like streams of water, that when I open up the Scripture, it revitalizes the depths of my soul." Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank You. God, we thank You that You are holy. We thank You that You are loving. We thank You that You are gracious. We thank You that You are good. God, and just in this moment, just ask the person of the Holy Spirit that You would speak to us, Lord.
[32:30] That You would remind us that You have the words of eternal life. That You would remind us that there's actually nothing else in this world that matters other than Jesus. Lord, I pray that we would lay down whatever we hold near and dear to us, Lord, down at the altar. That we would make the decision to follow You, that we would be covered in the blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Lord, I pray that we would not stand on the edge or sit on the fence, Lord, that we would make a decision for You where we say, "God, I'm done with everything else. I just want You, Jesus."
[33:16] That Your Holy Spirit would begin to just stir something up in us, Lord. And for those maybe that are making the decision the first time to say, "Jesus, I want You. I need You," God, I pray that they would bring forth, that they would confess that they are a sinner that has fallen short of the glory and the grace of our Lord. That they believe not only that You walk this earth and that You are a real person, but You are fully God. That You died on that cross for the forgiveness of our sins, Lord. I pray maybe for the first time, that there's somebody that would say, "God, I believe that You are real and that this is true, and I want to follow You for the rest of my life." God, I lay down these things that I hold onto at Your feet, Lord.
[34:03] Lord, we love You. We worship You, and we praise You. All in the powerful name of Christ Jesus. And I would just ask, as we continue in worship, for you to just ask the Lord, "Lord, You have the words of eternal life. Would You point out into me?" As the psalmist says, Lord, point out anything in me that offends You, and lay it down before the Lord here this morning.