Postscript: Moriah Revisited

About a thousand years after Abraham offered Isaac on Moriah, David bought the entire mountain from Arauvnah, the Canaanite (1 Chronicles 21:25). In David’s day Moriah was little more than a scrub-covered, windswept hill. Today Jerusalem straddles the mountain.

Moriah is not a single peak but an elongated ridge that begins at the junction of the Kidron and Hinnom Valleys in the south and rises to its peak just northwest of the present Damascus Gate. Jesus was crucified there—on the summit of Mount Moriah.

No one reading about old Abraham, leading his dear son up the mountain, can fail to miss the parallel with God, His own heart breaking, leading His “one and only Son” up Calvary’s mountain to the place of the Skull (John 19:17).

Nothing is said about Isaac’s inner struggle, but it must have been intense—a picture for us of Jesus’ awful turmoil in the garden of Gethsemane when He faced this very dilemma. God was requiring something that He surely could not be asking. Jesus agonized over that will, sweating, as it were, great drops of blood.

Jesus, like Isaac, was led by His Father to the top of Mount Moriah, bearing the wood of the sacrifice, stumbling under its weight. Jesus, like Isaac, did not open his mouth, but voluntarily was bound to the wood. “He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7). Jesus, unlike Isaac, paid the price instead of Isaac and the rest of us. “For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for [instead of] many” (Mark 10:45).

This is the answer to Isaac’s question: “Where is the lamb?”—a question asked repeatedly for two thousand years until Jesus came. He is “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).

This is the answer to Micah’s question,

With what shall I come before the Lord
and bow down before the exalted God? . . .
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” (Micah 6:6–7).

No, God does not require our firstborn because He offered up His Son, His only Son, the Son whom He loved (John 3:16).

Remember the angel’s word to Abraham? “Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son” (Genesis 22:12). Using the same Greek word from the Septuagint (the earliest Greek version of the Old Testament) and clearly thinking of this verse, Paul wrote: “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).

God spared Abraham’s son; He did not spare His own. Because that is true, will He not give us all things?

Taken from Seeing God, © 2006 by David Roper. Used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566, Grand Rapids MI 49501. All rights reserved.