By Gillian Bethel
“Abraham!”
“Here I am, Lord.”
“Take your son, your only son Isaac whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. Offer him there for a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you of.”
Do what? It was an incredible command, but Abraham knew God’s voice. Actually, God had no intention of letting him go through with killing his son. The command was to be a very stiff test of his trust in God. Abraham’s experience would also provide the world with a glimpse of God’s agony in sacrificing His Son.
God had asked Abraham to emigrate from his native country to Canaan. He had no children, but God promised to make him a great nation and a blessing to all Earth’s families. Abraham obeyed, but it wasn’t until 25 years later, when Abraham was 100 and his wife 90, that they finally had a miracle child—Isaac. The apparent impossibility of conceiving was a huge test of enduring faith in God’s promise.
But sacrificing this much-loved, long-awaited son was beyond huge. Yet Abraham resolutely chose to fully trust and obey this time. Years ago, he had tried to “help” God fulfill His promise by marrying and having a son with his wife’s maid. It didn’t help, though. God told Abraham that Ishmael wasn’t the promised child. Abraham learned that God would do the impossible in His own timing!
Now trusting God to come through somehow, Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac. But as he tremblingly raised the knife to kill his son, God stopped him. He told Abraham to sacrifice a substitute—a ram caught in a bush nearby.
“I have sworn by Myself,” God promised, “that on account of this thing you have done, and have not withheld your son, your only son, that blessing I will bless you, and multiplying I will multiply your seed as the stars of the heavens, and as the sand which is on the shore of the sea. And your Seed shall possess the gate of His enemies. And in your Seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed because you have obeyed My voice.” Gen. 22:16-18, LITV.
The promises to Abraham were God’s commitment to an “everlasting covenant” between them. The covenant promises and relationship were to continue with Abraham’s descendants. God would be their God, too, and give them a land to inhabit forever. Gen. 17:7, 8. That promise pointed not only to Canaan, but also to eternal life in a recreated earth.
These promises were conditional. God said He would be able to fulfill them if Abraham and his descendants would “keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice, that the Lord may bring to Abraham what He has spoken to him.” Gen. 18:19, NKJV. Abraham’s descendants would need to demonstrate their trust in God by loyal obedience in impossible circumstances, as Abraham had done.
Abraham and Isaac remained faithful to their everlasting covenant with God. Isaac had two sons, and it was Jacob, the younger, and his descendants, the Israelites, who inherited the promises.
Many centuries later, God formalized His covenant to be their God and King with the nation of Israel. He reminded them of His eternal moral law by writing the Ten Commandments in stone with His own finger. He established civil laws, health laws, and ceremonial laws to govern their religious life. The system of worship which God gave Israel prefigured Christ, the Seed. It showed how He would save them and the world from sin and death.
This national covenant was an interim, teaching covenant, designed to help Israel realize their need of the Deliverer promised in the everlasting covenant. Gal. 3:16-25. The people vowed to be obedient to it, and everything seemed fine.
But loyalty problems arose with the Israelites almost immediately and continued to arise down to Christ’s time. Sometimes they maintained only an outward form of worshiping God. Other times, they worshiped pagan gods and ignored God altogether. They often disobeyed Him.
What went wrong for Israel? Some individuals revealed an amazing faith in God. But more often, true respect, trust, and love towards God were sorely lacking. God asked Israel for “heart religion” (see Deut. 10:12-16) in response to all He was doing for them, but often their hearts weren’t in the covenant relationship. They relied on outward practices. God’s messages to them showed how this caused Him pain because He loved them.
Most painful of all was Israel’s misunderstanding of God’s work to save them from sin through His Son. God designed this covenant to teach them what righteousness is and point out how to achieve it. The law would reveal their many sins, while the temple and its services would teach them to depend on God for cleansing from their sins. If they had understood God’s undeserved love and mercy, they would have loved Him. Instead, they tried to earn His favor by law-keeping (an impossibility).
The temple services and many prophecies also pointed to a spiritual Deliverer to come, but most Israelites misunderstood that, too. They mistakenly looked for God to send a liberator to free them from their enemies rather than their sins.
When Jesus, the Deliverer, came, His life, death, and resurrection formed the basis for God’s fulfillment of the everlasting covenant with Abraham. Through this “New Covenant,” God offered all humanity the blessing of becoming “spiritual Israelites” and inheriting an eternal home with Him.
The New Covenant has wonderful provisions only symbolized in the Old Covenant with national Israel. Because Israel’s temple rituals and animal sacrifices were merely symbols pointing to Jesus, they were no longer needed after He became our heavenly high priest. He brought in the full reality of God’s plan of salvation. What is it?
The New Covenant offers us a fresh start individually, whatever our past. This is part of Jesus’ work as our high priest in heaven. We will be given spiritual eyesight so we realize our great need of help and God’s great love in providing it.
Israel’s temple rituals and sacrifices were merely symbols pointing to Jesus and were no longer needed after He became our heavenly high priest.
Our past sins will be forgiven because Jesus took their consequences when He died on the cross. This forgiveness lifts a tremendous burden off us that we didn’t know we were carrying.
But this is just the beginning. Our self-centered hearts will be recreated to love God and others unselfishly. This gives us the ability to live life differently with Jesus’ help. Serving God and others provides the happiness and satisfaction we can’t find by serving ourselves.
Best of all, we will know Jesus and have Him as our counselor and dearest friend. The Holy Spirit connects us with Him personally. We will develop a trust relationship with Him and His Father, like Abraham’s. We’ll be given the power to choose to obey God, even in seemingly impossible circumstances.
All this is for anyone who wants it. We’re invited to come to God day by day, confess our sins, and give our lives to Him.
If we treasure all God does for us and avoid Israel’s mistake of just going through the motions, we’ll always have our heart in this covenant relationship. We’ll realize that Jesus and His Father deserve all the trust, obedience, and love we can give Them—forever!
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Gillian Bethel is the associate editor of Last Generation magazine.