CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES
Hebrews 11:19. Received him in a figure.—Lit. “in a parable.” Stuart thinks the reference is to Abraham’s having originally received Isaac as one born of parents who were virtually dead. But the reference is clearly to the scene on Mount Moriah; and it must mean that when, in full purpose, Abraham had laid his son on the altar, he was potentially sacrificed, and Abraham received him again as one brought back from the death to which he had devoted him.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Hebrews 11:17-20
Faith under Divine Discipline.—A special reference is made to Abraham, because in his case Divine discipline took an unusual and extraordinary form. Reference has already been made to the general features of his life, as a sojourner in a strange land, which was indeed the land of promise, though of it he only had a present possession by faith. It was his, because he was quite sure that it would be his. He had the “substance” of what he “hoped for.” But there was one most singular and striking incident in Abraham’s later life, which provided too important an illustration of one sphere of faith for it to be passed over. He who had been called to forsake his early home, and go forth, responsive to Divine leadings, not knowing whither he went, was now called to give up, and even himself to sacrifice, that very child in whom all the promises of God and all the hopes of Abraham seemed to centre. He gave up his father’s home in faith. Could he break up his own home in faith, and with his own hand destroy all hope of a race in whose history God’s promises could be fulfilled? Perhaps a man’s faith has never been put to a severer test than was Abraham’s in that hour of strain. No wonder that early legends represent Sarah as never recovering from the shock of Isaac’s being taken away to be sacrificed, and from that time pining away to her death. Two forms of Divine discipline are indicated in this paragraph.
I. The relation of faith—which makes real the spiritual—to times of trial.—Trials come into every man’s life; but we have to consider the trials which come into the good man’s life—the renewed, spiritual man’s life. And they cannot be explained in any ready, offhand way. Two cases—three, if we class our Lord with men—are given in Holy Scripture, in order to check our satisfaction in general, and hastily made, and surface explanations. We must think about this strange trial of Abraham. We must wonder why Job, “the perfect man and upright,” was so severely afflicted. We stand in awe before the mystery of the agony of the cross, and say, “Why did the innocent One suffer?”
1. This is clear—the punishment of transgressions will not explain all the trials through which good men are called to pass. Job’s friends may persist in it that suffering is always penalty. It is not. The trial to which Abraham was now subjected was not penalty or punishment in any sense whatever. No hint is given of any moral or spiritual failure on the part of Abraham which Divine justice was bound to recognise. The sufferings which came to Job were not penalty or punishment in any sense whatever. When they came upon Job, he was a man standing fully in the Divine acceptance. It is a small, poor, and unworthy view that persists in seeing penalty everywhere. God reproves, in every age, the Job-friends who do that sort of thing.
2. The idea of Divine discipline will not sufficiently explain all the cases of trial which come before us. We may take a comprehensive view of Divine discipline, and say that it includes:
(1) the correction of evils which are ever ready to develop into sin; and also
(2) the culture of moral virtues and graces into strength and completeness; and also
(3) the mastery of life-conditions and relations in the power of moral principle; but we have only got a little way then toward the understanding of Abraham’s trial. On the face of the narrative there is no special call for a discipline of correction or of culture. In the case of Job it is not God who finds it necessary to discipline Job. It is God permitting Job to be tempted and tried, when He knows that he does not need it. Exactly this brings in the perplexity and difficulty of the poem. There was no need for subjecting the ever-acceptable Son to the discipline of the cross. That must be explained from some other point of view. Christian men and women, in their times of trial, would be greatly comforted and strengthened, if we would assure them that trial need not be punishment, and it need not be discipline. Faith in God, in the unseen, in the spiritual, brings round to us another and a better explanation.
3. Much of the trial that comes to good men is vicarious. It does not strictly belong to them; it belongs to others. It has no more necessity than the necessity which God finds for witnessing to some truth, and using them as witnesses. The trial may simply be the service which God asks us to render to our sphere, our age, or the world. This comes out clearly enough in the three cases already called to mind. The trial of Abraham has taught the generations. “Ye have heard of the patience of Job.” Christ, “lifted up, draws all men unto Him.” But what a faith of unseen and eternal things is involved in an obedience like Abraham’s, unquestioning, prompt, entire, almost cheerful—an obedience which involved so severe a trial and loss! It was a triumph indeed of faith that Abraham could see God wanting a witness, and not therefore finally intending to take away his son. Faith in man—the obedience of faith—has never surpassed this: “Accounting that God is able to raise up, even from the dead; from whence he did also in a parable receive him back.” We shall never explain all the cases of trial to which spiritual men are subjected, nor understand the sublime heights to which the faith of spiritual men may reach, until we fully recognise that much of human suffering is vicarious, as was that of our Divine Lord.
II. The relation of faith to the hope of the future.—It is stranger than it seems, that God should have ever held out a prospect before men and generations, and fulfilled His promise, but seldom, if ever, to the man or to the generation. Spiritual men live by faith. Their future is always the “good time coming.” Even to-day men’s faith is exercised concerning the coming of the Son of man, which is hardly yet on the eastern horizon-line. How faith can stand related to the hope and promise of the future is seen in Isaac, who “blessed Jacob and Esau even concerning things to come.” He lived under promise of the possession of Canaan. He died almost as much a stranger as his father had been. He never had the promise fulfilled. But faith held it firm, and made it real. He confidently passed the promise on to his sons. He blessed them in assuring them of God’s blessing. And so still we sing concerning our “good time coming.”
SUGGESTIVE NOTES AND SERMON SKETCHES
Hebrews 11:17. The Offering of Isaac.—Abraham’s offering of his son is one of the perplexing things of God’s word, because it seems to commend the immoral thing, murder, in connection with God’s worship. But we too readily judge the Divine requirements in patriarchal days by our modern sentiments concerning human sacrifice, forgetting that these should not be projected back into the earlier ages of the world, when men, being in the child-stages, had to be taught by action and ceremonial and symbol, rather than by words. Ancient Easterns had thoughts about God’s absolute proprietary rights in man which we seem to have lost; and we now know that the Accadians, or early inhabitants of Chaldea, sacrificed their firstborn sons in times of special trouble, and their practice the Semitic race had, to some extent at least, copied.
I. Abraham’s sacrifice was a burnt-offering.—This kind of offering was the foundation of the sacrificial system. All the other offerings—peace-offerings, meat-offerings, trespass-offerings, sin-offerings, thank-offerings—were but the detailed adaptation of the burnt-offering to the varieties of human conditions and experiences. The burnt-offering was presented ages before the Mosaic system was established. Can we get to understand this original, simplest, and yet most significant and spiritually suggestive form of sacrifice? It was called a “burnt-offering” because the victim was wholly consumed by fire, and so, as it were, sent up to God on the wings of fire. The victim must be selected with extreme care. It must be pure, unblemished, and as nearly perfect an animal as possible. It was regarded as a whole, an entire and complete offering, only when the life of the creature had been taken. Then, as a complete body, and a whole, completed life, it was ready for offering to God. Then it was laid on the altar, and entirely consumed. What was the idea of such a sacrifice, as it came to the mind of a devout and spiritual worshipper? Can we at all enter into the thought of a serious-minded patriarch or Jew? It must have been this: he passed to God an entire life, a pure, clean beast—gave it to God wholly, body and life; and by so doing he, in a representative way, passed to God himself—himself wholly, body, will, life. He gave to God a representative of what he himself wished to be, what he thus solemnly pledged himself that he would strive to become. Or, to put the same thing in more formal language, the burning of this whole creature by fire “marked it as an expression of perpetual obligation to complete, sanctified self-surrender to Jehovah.” And, therefore, in the Mosaic system, every morning and evening a lamb was sacrificed as a burnt-offering on behalf of the whole covenant people; and the evening victim was to be so slowly consumed that it might last till the morning—an expressive symbol of that continual self-dedication to God which is the duty of man. In the light of this spiritual idea of a “burnt-offering,” we can see something of the Divine purpose in this strange command given to Abraham, that he should offer as a sacrifice his only and beloved son. Evidently God asked for an expression, through that singular burnt-offering, of Abraham’s entire devotion to Himself. He desired to read the patriarch’s very heart through an act of obedience and devotion. He purposed to show the perfect trust and loyalty of His servant, to all the ages, by means of an unusual burnt-offering.
II. Abraham’s sacrifice anticipated the Great Burnt-offering.—It was the sonship of Isaac made him an acceptable offering. His submission and obedience were so different from the yielding of a mere animal, because it had a will in it; and so the sacrifice of Isaac, the son, alone fittingly suggested the obedient sanctified will of Jesus, the Son of God. “Every burnt-offering was a type of the perfect offering made by Christ, on behalf of the race of man, of His human nature and will to the will of the Father.” And this burnt-offering, Christ—the only begotten and well-beloved Son—is our burnt-offering, yours and mine. We could not make Him ours if we were not sure that God was well pleased with Him. But God has provided Him for us; so we stand beside the strange Calvary altar, shaped for human seeing like a cross, and see our sacrifice go up to God, with the confidence that God will “smell a sweet savour,” and accept us as we give ourselves to Him in that burnt-offering.
Faith inspiring Self-sacrifice.—Observe that it was faith in God’s word, in what Abraham intelligently apprehended to be God’s word to him. The demand it made was a personal one, the full surrender of a personal possession. To a father it was the supreme, the extreme demand. To Abraham, because of peculiar circumstances associated with Isaac, it was truly a sublime demand, and response to it a model of self-sacrifice. By showing and illustrating what a height of self-sacrifice Abraham reached, it may be shown what an inspiring, elevating, ennobling power faith was to him.
Hebrews 11:17-18. The Strain that Feeling may put on Faith.—In the record of this incident given in Genesis 22 there is a very tender bit of conversation. The aged patriarch is journeying on an errand which he can explain to nobody, and the darling of his life is the companion of his journey. We know the great things that were in his heart—he was taking his only son, the heir of all he had, the heir of all he hoped for, to his death by his own fatherly hand. The youth wondered much over the object of this sudden and mysterious journey, until at last he could keep back his questionings no longer. There were evident signs of his father’s intention to offer sacrifice; he himself was carrying the wood needed for a fire; and his father had in his hands the bowl with fire and the sacrificial knife. But Isaac knew well that on such occasions his father also took the necessary victim with him; but this time they had brought no lamb from the flock. So he said, “My father.” And Abraham said, “Here am I, my son.” And Isaac said, “Behold the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?” And Abraham said, “My son, God will provide Himself a lamb for a burnt-offering.” Surely a wonderful answer! But it must have cut that father to the quick to speak those silencing, those trustful words. In him faith triumphed over feeling.
Hebrews 11:19. A Figurative Resurrection.—“Whence he did also in a parable receive him back.” Abraham received Isaac back, figuratively, from the dead, because so far as Abraham’s purpose and intention were concerned he was dead, “potentially sacrificed.” In one Jewish writer it is said that Isaac was actually killed and raised to life again.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 11
Hebrews 11:17. Abraham’s Faith.—The trial by faith is by finding what we will do for God. To trust Him when we have the securities in our own iron chest is easy, and not thankworthy; but to depend on Him for what we cannot see, as it is most hard for man to do so, so it is most acceptable to God when done, for in that act we make confession of His Deity. Faith without works of this kind is like a fish without water: it wants the element it should live in. A building without a basis cannot stand; faith is the foundation, and every good action, especially where we trust God without seeing Him, is a stone laid.—Feltham.