Genesis 22:3-10 KJV
3 And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.
4 Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off.
5 And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.
6 And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together.
7 And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?
8 And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.
9 And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.
10 And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.
Welcome to KJV Cafe. Thanks for taking time out of your day to listen. Each episode of the Cafe is dedicated to studying the Bible verse by verse from Genesis through Revelation. Your host here at the Cafe is Bible teacher, Clark Covington. Looks like the coffee is hot and ready, so let's get started. Amen, glory to God. Welcome to the program. Welcome to the Cafe, Pastor Clark Covington here with another episode of KJV Cafe. So glad that you are joining us here today. It is a beautiful day outside. Birds are chirping. Coffee is black coffee in my cup. I can't complain. Very good coffee today. What can be better? You know, we're in the Cafe. We're ready to study God's word. Amen. If you're new to the program, we are a first by verse Bible study podcast from Genesis to Revelation. Taking our time with it, because there's so many lessons in God's word that we can apply today. And one of the lessons, I think, in understanding so many lessons are there, is that we should take our time with it. Right? We went through the whole Bible in a month. Well, no, you didn't. You might have gone through visually, right, like looking over the words, but God's word is inexhaustible. You know, and I've been studying God's word, faithful, I say well over a decade now, and it's inexhaustible. And every time it seems that I read it, no matter where I'm reading it, just all of these things pop out to me. And by nature of the Old Testament being much kind of more meaty than the New Testament in terms of the volume and the scripture and stuff, I end up spending a lot of time in the old, I'm trying to rectify this, and I'm trying to like do the New Testament the same day as the Old Testament. So I'm not just, you know, if you read your Bible through, you're going to spend more time in the Old Testament. So you look at that, and there's so many lessons in any of them, any of the 66 books, you know, there's so many lessons. Right? And so, you know, it's unbelievable. You think we have 39 books in the Old Testament, something like that, you know, incredible. And whether it's the Old Testament, whether it's the New Testament, again, we're New Testament Christians here, amen. We believe in grace alone, we believe being saved by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ. We believe that you're saved by faith, amen, and that like your baptism is just a public profession of your faith. So don't believe we're under the law by any means. So again, people then can take that and say, well, why should we look at this or why should we look at that? But there's just so many lessons because God is the same. The Bible says yesterday, today and forever, okay, he doesn't change. And so the same God in the Old Testament has a lot to tell us about the New Testament. And oftentimes in the New Testament, the Old Testament is quoted. So anyway, it's not to get confused things. Genesis 22. Let's pick up here because it's a bigger block of Scripture. So let's pick up here. Let's see, maybe verse 5, okay. And verse 5 reads, "And Abraham said unto his young man, Abadi, here with the ass, and I in the lad will go yonder and worship and come again to you." Okay. So verse 5, it's getting down to business time. Abraham is telling the young men to stay there, and he is going to do what? He is going to go and worship. So think of the time that they are in. The time that they are in, part of their worship was sacrifice, right? Now, we're in Genesis. And so if you look at the order of the Bible, right, the order of the books of the Bible, we're not yet at Leviticus. We're not at Deuteronomy. We're not at the point of biblical commands to sacrifice. So we see here that this is a pattern set by God before all of the orders of sacrifice, right? And so we see like, for example, Abraham gave 10th of all he had to Mount Kizadek when he came back and he'd rescued a lot of sodomites from those kings. Okay. So he's tithing, but we don't get to the command to tithe in detail until you get to Leviticus, numbers, Deuteronomy. We get to these books and we're getting a lot of details as to what we're supposed to do, what the Israelites were supposed to do, right? And when they were supposed to do it. And then, of course, a lot of that leads up to, if you think about it this way, if you look at the Bible starts with Genesis, right, where we are now, then Exodus, right, the leaving of Egypt, leaving of bondage. So Genesis, the formation of God's people, Exodus, the leaving of Egypt is a mighty group, right? And then they're where? They're in the wilderness. And so Leviticus, numbers, Deuteronomy, up to Joshua there, you're dealing with God through Moses commanding the Israelites to do thus, thus and thus as they're about to inherit the Promised Land. They're about to inherit the blessing. And so there is a reason why we are seeing this sacrifice and not yet calling it a order of God in terms of what we have been told, right? And it gets, if you get into some of these books, you realize that these sacrifices, there's a lot to it. Like, they were supposed to be a certain cut of the meat, right? And then that was supposed to be eaten by the Levites because those were the priests. And so that was like part of their blessing, their pay, if you will. I mean, it's kind of like if they're serving God and they don't have the inheritance that the rest of the Israelites have, because God is their inheritance, then what's given to God is then given to them because he's a spirit. He doesn't need to eat the meat, right? All right, so what we'll do is we'll get, we're going to start moving along in the scripture, we get back, so stay tuned. You're listening to KJV Cafe. We encourage you to look us up on your favorite podcast app and subscribe to our channel on YouTube. Now let's get back to some more in-depth Bible study. All right, so we see here that Abraham says we're going to worship, which is a form of worship being sacrificed, which later is instituted by God through Moses to the Israelites as a command. But at this point, it was, I mean, I guess in a way, you could say it's heritage in the sense that as they're committed to do it, they could go back to Genesis, to the scrolls, to the text, if you will, and they can see, oh, wow, this was done at this time, right? And you want to get to like, big time sacrifice, I was at like Solomon, the dedication of Solomon's Temple Temple, Temple. There might have been a table there, but it was a temple, Solomon's Temple and all of the sacrifice there, all of the great, you know, procession and all of the volume of animal sacrifices and so forth. I don't know if that was the height of sacrifice, but that's one great example of it. And we see it here. Now, it's not the first time we've seen it in the Bible, by the way, because in Genesis, they're much earlier, what do we have Cain and Abel, right? And Cain and Abel are called to sacrifice. I think it's Genesis 4. And so we see that there is a call there to bring something before God, and Cain kills Abel because Abel was sacrificed, was accepted, and Cain's wasn't. So anyways, a lot there that you could kind of go upon, and that's an example of how we can learn so much through studying the Scriptures, is just parking it, you know, when he says here in verse 5, the latter part, and I in the lad will go yonder and worship. You know, and you just say worship, he is being called to kill his son, the chosen son, and he calls it worship. It's just like, just go ahead and park it there and say, well, what does that mean? Oh, he's sacrificing. What does the sacrifice look like? Oh, what was the sacrifice instituted by God? And you can just follow that path down and learn so much from that one verse. Verse 6, "And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid upon Isaac his son, and he took fire in his hand and a knife, and they went both of them together." All right, now it's getting very, very real. So Isaac is carrying the wood. He's got fire in his hand and a knife, as the instrument used for this sacrifice was to be a knife. And verse 7, "Isaac spoke unto Abraham his father and said, 'My father,' and he said, 'Here am I, my son,' and he said, 'Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for burnt offering?' You know, if I'm in this situation and my son asks me that, that's probably when I would just lose it, you know? But Abraham says, "And Abraham said, 'My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.'" So they went both of them together. And so what we see here is that Abraham believed that God was going to provide for them. And he was telling his son, he provided a lamb. Hebrews 11, 17 through 19, tells us that Abraham, the writer of Hebrews, I believe to be Paul, says this, "By faith Abraham, when he was afraid, offered up Isaac, and he that had received the promises, offered up his only begotten son of whom it was said that in Isaac shall I see be called, accounting that God was able to raise him up even from the dead." From whence also he received him in a figure. And so what the writer of Hebrews is asserting or assuming or thinking is that Abraham thought that God would resurrect Isaac. And so Abraham is comforting Isaac in this very trying time when Isaac is starting to put the pieces together, that he is the sacrifice. And that Abraham is able to cope with this because he believes God is going to raise him from the dead, which goes to that deeper idea that Abraham trusted God. That Abraham believed God. That it was accounted to Abraham for righteousness that he had faith. And when it comes to us in this world today, we simply have to have faith. There are a lot of things in my simple life God has called me to do. That I have struggled with thinking about why he would have me do it or why this wouldn't be that way. And I've just trusted him. And in hindsight, it's always made a lot of sense. But at the time, it hasn't. Again, imagine Abraham now. Imagine in one day, Lord willing, we can sit with Abraham in heaven and he can tell us face to face. I look forward to that day, man. I cannot imagine that day. But imagine him now in hindsight, where he says, yes, that was terrifying. And yes, I wasn't sure. And yes, those three days were the longest three days of my long life. And yes, I couldn't understand. I was confounded by how God had called me to be the father of Isaac and yet he was calling Isaac to be sacrificed. But I went on believing that God would provide a lamb, believing that God would resurrect him if need be, believing that God had a plan greater than I could fathom. And there, the ram was. And there God provided. And then Isaac lived. And then Isaac did all that he was called to do. Excuse me. And then God showed up. And now here I am recognized in his word as one that had great faith. And all I did was simply believe God at his word. I believed God at his word. I remembered what he had done in the past. And I believed him. And I was faithful. That is, I believe something to the extent of what Abraham would say if we had a chance to talk to him. That he was justified by his faith. And that his faith was proven through his fears and through temptation and trials and through certainly someone may have been telling him don't do this. Certainly he may not have exactly given Sarah all the details to this plan. You see, he, look, he was battling the things of this world and living for God by simply trusting God. Now here it is the application for you today as you experience the trials in life. Will you trust God to see you through it? Trust God that his word is perfect like Romans 828 that all things happen for good to those that love the Lord to those that are called according to his purpose. Will you trust God in that regard? Will you trust him when you feel like you know better when you feel like how could he be calling you to do something like this? Will you trust him simply having faith. And that faith, the Bible says faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. And so faith grows as we spend time with God. And so if we lack the faith, if we just cannot get to the point that we could do something like Abraham did, whether it's leaving his father, whether it's having Isaac, whether it's bringing him to the altar to sacrifice and so forth. Whatever it may be, if you just say, I just can't get to that place, commit to spending more time with God. Commit to reflecting more on what God has done in your life and the lives of others. Commit to studying the Bible objectively, not with some kind of agenda, but just simply studying it objectively. What does this mean? Asking that question. And I believe that God will work a faith in your heart like you've never seen and give you strength to carry on in the hardest of times. As he grows your faith and blesses you again, maybe in hindsight, maybe it's after you've gone to be with the Lord, but he will bless you for your great faith as you live for him, even in great trials. And those two things go together. You can't have great faith tested without a trial to be there to test it, right? And so praise God for whatever situation you're in today, cling to him and understand like Abraham, we can have great faith by simply being obedient and believing God at his word. Thank you for listening. Take care. God bless. Amen. Thanks for spending time with us today at the Cafe. We would love to hear from you. You can email Brother Clark directly at Clark@EnduringPromise.org. See you again tomorrow. Same time. Same place. [BLANK_AUDIO]
