These words are twice repeated in this narrative; they mean something more than that Abraham and Isaac climbed the mountain track side by side: they were together in heart as well as in bodily presence; in submission of will as well as in direction of steps. Isaac was at this time in the vigour of his youth; his father was a very old man. Unless he had been a willing victim there could have been no question at all of his being sacrificed.
I. Abraham and Isaac are an example of the unhesitating obedience of faith. Abraham knew that his own son had been named as the appointed victim; yet even so he could feel that God would provide that victim, and therefore he could submit. Isaac acquiesced in his father's submission, content that God should provide the victim, even though it were himself.
II. We have here an example which finds its perfect antitype in the compact of sacrifice between God the Father and God the Son. The sacrifice of Calvary was as much the eternal design of the Son as of the Father: the Father laid nothing on the Son but what the Son freely took on Himself.
III. The conduct of Isaac has not only a prophetic significance, but a Christian beauty also; it embodies the doctrine of sacrifice not only in Christ the Head but in us the members.
R. Winterbotham, Sermons and Expositions,p. 19.
Abraham was not picked out as a model of excellence. He was apt to fear, apt to lie. What he was apart from his Teacher we see in his journey to Egypt: a very poor, paltry earthworm indeed, one not to be despised by us, because we are earthworms also, but assuredly worthy of no reverence which was his by birth or which became his merely in virtue of his call. What he was when he was walking in the light, when that transfigured him from an earthworm into a man, his after history will help us to understand.
I. The thought may have struck our minds that the circumstances of Abraham were eminently favourable to the cultivation in him of a pure, simple, monotheistic faith. A man living under the eye of Nature on open plains, amidst flocks and herds was likely, it may be said, to preserve his devotion unsullied and to give it a healthy direction. But we must remember that there was nothing in the perpetual beholding of natural objects which could preserve him from the worship of those objects. You cannot, by considerations of this kind, escape from the acknowledgment of a distinct call from an actual, personal, unseen Being, addressed to the man himself and confessed by him in his inmost heart and conscience. But if you begin from the belief of such a call, the more you reflect upon Abraham's outward position the better. His work was the image of a Divine work; his government over the sheepfold, and still more in the tent, was the image of the Divine government of the world.
II. This we shall find is quite as important a reflection with a view to Abraham's personal character as it is with a view to his position and office as a patriarch. His faith carried him out of himself; it made him partaker of the righteousness of Him in whom he believed. He became righteous in proportion as he looked forward to that which was beyond himself, and as his own life was identified with the life of his family.
III. Abraham's intercession. Abraham believed God to be a righteous Being, not a mere sovereign who does what he likes. On that foundation his intercession is built. It is man beseeching that right may prevail, that it may prevail among men, by destruction if that must be, by the infusion of a new life if it is possible. It is man asking that the gracious order of God may be victorious over the disorder which His rebellious creatures have striven to establish in His universe.
IV. As the life of the family is inseparably involved with the life of the individual, the most awful experience in the personal being of the patriarch relates to the child of promise the child of laughter and joy. If we take the story as it stands, we shall believe that God did tempt Abraham as He had been all his life tempting him in order to call into life that which would else have been dead, in order to teach him truths which he would else have been ignorant of. God did not intend that a man should be called upon to make a sacrifice without feeling that in that act he was in the truest sense the image of his Maker. A filial sacrifice was the only foundation on which the hearts of men, the societies of earth, the kingdom of heaven, could rest.
F. D. Maurice, Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament,p. 83.
References: Genesis 22:8. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. vi., p. 98. Genesis 22:9. Bishop Armstrong, Parochial Sermons,p. 172.Genesis 22:9; Genesis 22:10. Ed. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Congregation,2nd series, p. 163.