The Sacrifice of Issac



The Sacrifice of Issac

Literary Context

Abraham pictures God, and Isaac prefigures Jesus. However, we must be careful about certain parts of the account. For example, the following debate took place. One brother felt that at times, God is not omniscient in the sense normally thought, that He does not know everything long in advance, the end from the beginning. But, the brother continued, God is able to confront the situation and to give a solution immediately. He used Abraham and Isaac as an illustration, but this reasoning is wrong! Being omniscient, God is never confronted with anything suddenly. God sees things in advance—before they occur—and never has to make a quick decision(1).

Abraham loved Isaac, his dearly begotten son. The Logos in heaven was submissive to the Father, and thus endeared to Him, long before coming down here to earth, as Jesus, to give his life as a ransom. God had a plan in which beings here on earth, as well as future beings yet unborn, should know about evil through the exercise of free moral agency so that they would not be tempted inordinately if certain things happened. For instance, Adam had no knowledge of sin or death when he was created, but he made an unwise decision. He did not see that one cannot trifle with the Father in any sense of the word. His lack of experience enabled Satan to succeed in tempting him to the point of disobeying the specific injunction of the Father not to eat certain fruit. The permission of evil on the earth will benefit not only those who have lived here but also those not yet born on other planets, who will see earth's experience via movies, photography, etc. Thus all will know that God is just, and evil will not have to arise elsewhere to teach this lesson. So strict is God's justice that Jesus had to die to cancel it. In seeing movies, populations on other planets will vicariously experience what earth's inhabitants went through(2).

God loved His Son before the Logos came down here, and this relationship compares with the account of Abraham's love for Isaac. However, one point we cannot compare in the antitype is the fact that Abraham was tested, for nobody tested God. The Father devised the plan of the ages even before the Logos was created. And when the planets and the stars were created, He gave them all names, showing that they were designed for a purpose. In the vast universe, with all of the named stars, is the earth, an insignificant planet of a particular sun. “Earth” was designed in advance as the place where Jesus would come and die. Before the Logos was created, God purposed or planned his creation, and He planned that the Logos would have companions (the Church) and what their functions would be and that evil must be experienced here on earth as an object lesson for all of God's future creations(3). The point is that we cannot ...