Remember when God first called Abraham it was to a land God
would show him. Now, he is to take the child
of that same promise to "one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” The Lord had a very specific place in mind
both times and we believe that mountain to be the same place where the
crucifixion occurred on Good Friday. This
was a foreshadowing of those events. The
promise of the entire enterprise, the covenant, depended on this child being
the hope of the future. Abraham, without
hesitation in action, goes forward. We don't
know anything about what Sarah knew or thought, but there is an interesting
midrash on that you can read here. Abraham was a faithful man and this test
shows his faith in the Lord more profoundly than anything in scripture. He trusted the Lord that God would provide
the lamb for sacrifice. Abraham was
willing to do whatever the Lord required because he knew that the Lord had
promised that Isaac was the child of the promise and that no matter what
happened here that would not change, so we see him reach out his hand and take
the knife and then the angel of the Lord calls out to him to stop. What a remarkable man of faith!
Jesus tells the disciples they cannot follow now where He
goes. Peter, God bless him, wants to be
the kind of man who will be faithful to the end but Jesus knows better, this
will be a lonely time for Him, made more so by Peter's betrayal. Jesus' prophetic words concerning the rooster
crowing must have seemed like a knife stab in Peter's heart at the time and
even worse when he heard that sound and knew that he had betrayed Jesus as
surely as Judas had done. In the movie
Braveheart, Robert the Bruce reveals his admiration for William Wallace to his
father and how deeply his betrayal of Wallace affected him. The father replies, "All men betray. All
lose heart." Robert responds, "I don't want to lose heart. I want to
believe as he does." Peter's faith
lacked something that would be provided by two things to come, the resurrection
and the giving of the Holy Spirit. In the
end, that other prophecy of Jesus', "you will follow afterward" will
reveal that faith as Peter goes to his own death.
That same Peter who betrayed Jesus now has the faith to
persevere, faith in the very blood spilled on Good Friday when the flow of
blood and water gushed from His side, flowed from His head when the crown of
thorns was pressed into His skull, flowed from his feet and hands as the nails
were driven into them. He knows that
that blood was precious, that it paid his ransom and that his eternity is
secure. Peter, however, has learned that
it isn't about him and that this sacrifice is for all who will believe and they
are to be changed by this as he has been changed into the man he so desperately
wanted to be, a man of faith and action, a man who won't lose heart.
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