When Abram asked God in Genesis 15 (v.8) how he would know that he could possess the land that the Lord Yahweh promised him, God gave the answer in the form of a covenant with Abram, in which he was making the customary covenantal statement that: so will it be done unto Me if I do not keep my word, I will be sundered apart like these animals I pass between and be destroyed. In other words He would cease to be God, which is, of course, impossible.
But, in a sense, this is what eventually happened when God went through with what Abraham was rescued from, sacrificing His own Son as He saw him “sundered apart’ on the cross. If it were ever even possible for Jesus to cease to be God, it would have been at the moment when he became sin for us at the cross, when he became our sin. Thank God Abraham was listening moment by moment for his Master’s voice and not blindly and mechanically carrying out instructions previously given. Isaac looked up into the eyes of his knife-wielding father on Mount Moriah and found mercy because of divine intervention, Jesus called upon his Father in the same physical location known as Calvary in his day and found none, (no mercy, only silence) wondering why he had been forsaken. So it seemed momentarily as if God did break His word and paid the covenantal consequence of doing so.
Additionally, Abraham in his lifetime possessed no land of his own except his personal grave plot in Machpelah (meaning “portion” or ‘double” or when they are joined “double portion”) He was still looking forward in faith to the time that plot would have grown into a land so vast by comparison. Are we not all merely living in a little grave-plot reality of all that was won at the cross by Jesus and made available to us? We too, no matter how advanced or developed, are still closed up in a cave compared to what horizons will soon open up to us in the generous grace of God. Even our double portions of anointing are meager alongside of what eye has not seen nor ear heard nor has human heart conceived what abundance God has lavishly prepared for us who love Him. (1 Corinthians 2, v.9)
Isaac was the son of promise, but not Abraham’s first son chronologically in the flesh. Think of all the misery that was released into the world from Abraham and Sarah’s choice to bear a child by Hagar. The violent resentment and jealous hatred has not ceased to this day between the descendants of these two forefathers, Isaac and Ishmael. The only decision that I see that had wider and more grave consequences was Adam and Eve’s decision to eat of the forbidden fruit. In choosing that path involving Hagar as mother, Abraham and Sarah succumbed to the pressure of the surrounding culture, since it was not uncommon in their time and location. Similarly, it was the cultural practice of the time to pass the father’s blessing to the elder son, and Isaac’s older son was Esau not Jacob, yet Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, was one among several examples in the Bible where the younger received the blessing despite the fact that it was not “the way things were done” in that society, and despite the glaring fact that he did not deserve it as a cheater and a liar.
In many ways the Holy Spirit moves upstream against the currents and conventions of contemporary culture and we have to be willing to move with Him, no matter how it looks. May God grant us the grace if need be to flow with Him in opposition to these politically correct times and today’s moral, or shall we say, amoral climate. And may God grant us His vision to allow the expanding of our Machpelahs into the expanse that He in his great love has destined for us, as we are led by His Holy Spirit out of death into life, and out of our myopic caves into the wide, open air.
Moriah
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