‘And Abraham said, “God will provide himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.”
What a wealth of meaning is found in these words. ‘God will provide'. For Isaac they meant that his father believed that God would let him have a lamb from somewhere. But was he beginning to get a little uneasy? For Abraham it was a statement of belief that God would somehow make all things right. But for us it is far more significant. For we know that God did provide Himself as a Lamb for the offering, the Lamb of God Who would take away the sin of the world. And it makes us look at what this was costing Abraham, and realise how much it must have cost God. God did not ask Abraham to do something that He would not do Himself.
‘So they went both of them together.'
The repetition of the phrase (compare Genesis 22:6) brings out the length of the journey in the mind of Abraham. It must have seemed that they went on and on. Getting ever nearer to the fateful place.