Good evening and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #22 of Genesis, chapter 22, and we are reading Genesis 22:8-14:

And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.  And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. And the angel of JEHOVAH called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I. And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovahjireh: as it is said to this day, In the mount of JEHOVAH it shall be seen.

I will stop reading there.  Again, we are going through this historical passage, and we are looking to understand why God is telling us these things.  What is the deeper spiritual meaning?  The deeper spiritual meaning is, ultimately, the most important meaning; it is the (spiritual) truth God wants to get across.  It is the mystery of His Word that we are interested in.  You know, we can understand the whole Bible in a historical way, but the deeper spiritual meaning is the more important meaning.

Just consider one of Christ’s parables.  He spoke many parables.  I do not want to point to one specific parable, but just think of any parable.  This is what church theologians, pastors and, at this time, the entire church world does, as they tell us to just accept the written Word as it is proclaimed – just receive it, whether it be the man seeking the one lost sheep out of 100 that was lost or the woman seeking the one lost coin out of 10.  Just imagine if we approached that parable and we say, “Well, this man had a lot of sheep, and he lost one and, yet, is it not wonderful that he found it?  And this woman had 10 coins and she lost one, and is it not great that she swept the house and found it?  You can glean a principal of “cleanliness” from  that, and it means we are exercising ourselves in cleanliness, and that is profitable.  You see, if you stay within the boundaries of the wording of the parable, what have you really learned?  What was the point of Christ speaking the parable?  Was it so we could learn about a man and his 100 sheep and what to do if one gets lost?  Or, was it so we could learn that it is a good idea to sweep your house every now and then, so you can find some lost change?  Of course, it is not.  Christ spoke the parables for a very definite reason and that was to teach a spiritual meaning.  You have to find out what the number “100” represents.  What does it mean that one is lost?  Who is the “man” that has 100 sheep?  Who is the woman that swept the house?  Then we can begin to understand the real significance of that parable, and why Christ spoke it.

That is exactly what it is like for the entire Bible.  I am sorry to say that if we followed what so many natural-minded theologians and natural-minded professed Christians tell us to do, it would empty the Bible of its deeper meaning, its mysteries and the very reason God spoke it.  And we would be left with a “shell” of a story, just the historical events that are in Genesis, Exodus and everywhere in the Bible.  Yes – we would have the history.  We would have the grammar.  We would have some literal statements.  We would have some nice moral teachings, but no Gospel, and no “meat” or spiritual food for the people of God.  When God gives us a new heart and a new spirit, we become spiritual and we crave spiritual nourishment.  We desire the manna that comes down from above that can only be found through comparing Scripture with Scripture.  What does the Bible say?  It does not say Scripture with Scripture in 1Corinthians 2, but it says, “spiritual with spiritual.”  Romans 7:13 tells us the Law is spiritual.  The Law is the whole Bible, so we can take that statement in Romans 7 and apply it to Deuteronomy, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.  And that is exactly what we see, is it not?  When God draws from the book of Genesis in Galatians regarding Hagar and Sarah and their respective sons, He said, “which things are an allegory.”  He is letting us know the Law is spiritual.  Compare spiritual with spiritual.  It is not wooden, dull, plain and literal statements, which are lifeless.  I guess that is what I am trying to say.  We will not always find it (the spiritual meaning), but we are called upon to search for it, and when we do find the spiritual meaning, it brings “life” to the verse, the passage, the chapter and the book.  And we begin to delight within as we see the spiritual teaching in the things that God has revealed to us, such as in the book of Ruth and in the book of Esther.  What are those books without spiritual meaning?  Without spiritual meaning, they just become quaint, little historical tidbits of information.  When we find spiritual meaning, there is a beauty and a wholeness and such wonder to these things.

Here in Genesis 22, we saw that Abraham said in Genesis 22:8:

And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.

The word “provide” is the word “see” or “behold.”  It is the word “yir-eh” in verse 14, where it said Jehovahjireh was the name of the place where Abraham did “behold” the ram caught in the thicket by his horns.  We discussed earlier that in this account this is the second time that Isaac is a picture of the Lord Jesus in the atonement.  The first time was at his birth when he was born of Sarah’s “dead womb.”  We went into detail about that, where in Hebrews 11:11 God used the word “foundation,” which the King James translators translated as “conceive.”  Sarah

conceived seed or “foundation seed,” and that word is the same word found in Revelation 17:8 where it refers to the “foundation of the world.”  Actually, it is translated as “foundation” everywhere else.  That helped us to see that Isaac’s birth from Sarah’s dead womb was a picture of Christ emerging and rising from the dead at the foundation of the world to be declared the Son of God.  There, the atonement was in view early on in Isaac’s life and now several years into his life (I would not be surprised if he was 11 years old) God called upon Abraham to offer up his son for a burnt offering.  Then God stopped him right before Abraham brought the knife down. 

If you were God, and you wanted to paint a picture of the Lord Jesus entering into history and going to the cross in 33 A. D. to demonstrate the atonement (because that was the second time He was smitten by the Law), then you would cause Abraham to act it out – the father taking his only son and going to mount Moriah with the wood and laying the wood upon Isaac, with Abraham carrying the knife and the fire and going through the all the motions, and then stopping him before he actually sacrificed him.  You see, it was all a figure, was it not?  It was all a figure, so God is showing us that this is what will happen the second time when the Lord Jesus Christ would enter into this world and make manifest the thing He had done from the foundation of the world.

I think we have covered this pretty well, so let us go on to Genesis 22:10-12:

And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. And the angel of JEHOVAH called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I. And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.

We have discussed this for several studies, so I do not think there is any need to go into the particular words used in the verses because it is all painting the same picture we have been talking about.

Then it says in Genesis 22:13:

And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.

The word “looked” is the same word as “provide” used in verse 8: “My son, God will provide himself a lamb.”  Abraham was stopped by God from following through, and I just explained what I believe was going on and the spiritual meaning that was pointing to the demonstration that would occur some 2,000+ years later when Jesus would go to the cross.  God told Abraham not to do it, and then God illustrates, again, the very same thing.  He paints another picture of the atonement by having Abraham “behold” the lamb.  We know that John the Baptist said of Jesus, “Behold, the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world.”  And John was drawing upon this historical event with Abraham at this place called Jehovahjireh, which means “JEHOVAH beheld” or “JEHOVAH seen.” 

Again it said, “And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns.”   The word “caught” is Strong’s #270 in the Hebrew, and it is also found in Deuteronomy 32:41:

If I whet my glittering sword, and mine hand take hold on judgment; I will render vengeance to mine enemies, and will reward them that hate me.

The words “take hold” are a translation of this same Hebrew word translated as “caught.”

It is also found in Isaiah 13:8:

And they shall be afraid: pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them; they shall be in pain as a woman that travaileth…

Isaiah 13 is a chapter describing the judgment of God upon the world.  So to “take hold” in these couple of verses, plus the spiritual picture in Genesis 22 has to do with the judgment of God.  Every sacrifice pictures the judgment of God upon the sacrificial animal and, of course, the sacrifices were pointing to the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ as the sin bearer for the sins of His elect people.

So, again, “And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns.”    The thicket would be like an overgrown bush and the ram’s horns were entangled in this thicket and he could not escape.  It was caught in the thicket, which led to Abraham being able to go and take the ram and offer it up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. 

We can see in this how God controls circumstances and events.  Of course, God just directed that ram on that day to that area of mount Moriah, just as Abraham was laying his son on the wood upon the altar and beginning to bring down the knife.  God was controlling both events.  He was controlling what Abraham was doing and He was controlling the rambling of the ram.  And however it happened, the ram wandered into that thicket and he got caught.  He was shaking his head around, trying to get loose and making a little noise.  And Abraham looked up and, behold, there was the ram caught.  In other words, God prepared the ram for that very purpose, and whatever happened in the ram’s life before that time, it had always been God’s plan and intention for that particular ram to be caught in the thicket at that exact time, so Abraham could go and take him and slay him and place the ram upon the altar he had built and offer him up for a burnt offering.

Is that not amazing?  The way God has control of all events and circumstances probably impresses me more than most things.  In other words, it is fascinating to me (and I am sure it is to you, too) when we read in the New Testament of those that asked Peter if his Master paid tribute.  Let us read that, because it really is fascinating.  After they asked him if his Master paid tribute, it says in Matthew 17:25:

He saith, Yes. And when he was come into the house, Jesus prevented him, saying, What thinkest thou, Simon? of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or tribute? of their own children, or of strangers? Peter saith unto him, Of strangers. Jesus saith unto him, Then are the children free. Notwithstanding, lest we should offend them, go thou to the sea, and cast an hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up; and when thou hast opened his mouth, thou shalt find a piece of money: that take, and give unto them for me and thee.

It is incredible, is it not?  Peter came to Him because they had asked him if his Master paid tribute.  Christ pointed out at another time when the scribes and Pharisees were asking Him if it was lawful to give tribute to Caesar, “ Shew me a penny. Whose image and superscription hath it?”  They answered, “Caesar’s.”  Then the Lord wisely answered, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar's.”  So, yes, the Lord indicated we are to pay taxes to the government that is over us, so we will pay our tax. 

But it is the way He paid it.  He did not pull money out His pocket.  He did not go to Judas who had the bag.  But He told Peter to go to the sea and cast a hook, and take up the fish that first comes up.  How many fish in the sea would have a piece of money inside them?  I think the number would be very, very small and the sea was very, very big.  Christ did not give specific directions to a location, as if He could have planted a fish that swam in that area of the sea.  Peter could select any part of the sea and he could get there at whatever time he wanted to get there.  He could have cast a hook near the shore or he could have taken a little boat out to the middle of the sea, or whatever he wanted to do.  Christ had not given direction concerning any of the details, but only that he was to go to the sea and cast a hook.  So no matter where Peter went to the sea and no matter how far out in the sea he went and no matter what time he got there, he would cast a hook and the fish that first came up would be the fish (with the coin).  Now how could that be?  How could that be!  Did Jesus know the exact speed that Peter would walk to the sea and how long it would take him?  How could Jesus (who is God) control the movements of the fish in the sea with the movements of Peter on the land, so as to bring them together at a specific point in time?  Peter could have done anything he wanted to do.  He could have delayed.  He could have walked slowly or quickly.  The fish could have done anything it wanted to do, according to its whims.  It could have decided to swim far away from where Peter would be, but God so orchestrated the events.  Do you see how the hand of God is in such complete control?  And God would have to be in complete control of all things and all events right down the line; it is not as though God just decided, “Well, I am going to put on a show and take control during this short period of time to impress Peter and impress the ones receiving tribute.”  No – in order for Him to exercise such control, it means He has always had control of all circumstances  and events.

It is just like today in the world, with the way everything is “sped up” and happening so fast, whether we travel by train, plane or boat.  Everything goes so fast, like our cars, and so many people have cars.  Just look at the highways and at times there are cars zooming by in one direction and zooming by in another direction, and the people in these cars are all going about their business, taking care of the things they have to take care of.  Yet God is in control of each and every vehicle and person and animal and all the circumstances that could possibly occur.  He is in control of the weather that sometimes will intervene with travel.  There could be people traveling along safely with no problems, and then a storm comes and there is an accident.  God is in control of all these events, not only in one town, state or country, but in every town, every state and every country in all the world.  He is in control of all the universe and billions upon billions of happenings.  That is why it is so fascinating. 

It is similar to the book of Jonah when the storm arose, and the mariners were frightened and did not know what to do.  Then Jonah told them to cast him overboard.  Remember what we read in Jonah 1:17:

Now JEHOVAH had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

Here, there were (seemingly) random circumstances: a fleeing prophet, a raging storm and the mariners that desperately did not want to throw him overboard, but they were forced.  It was all part of God’s determinate fore counsel and knowledge that this would happen to Jonah – he must be thrown overboard at the precise time.  God had “prepared” a great fish.  That fish was to swim by and see that man descending into the depths and to swallow him up at the exact time God wanted him to be swallowed up.