Seeing with Abraham
Judica Sunday (Lent 5)| Genesis 22:1-14| Pastor James Preus| Trinity Lutheran Church| March 22, 2026
Jesus said to the Jews, “Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.” The Jews scoffed at this statement, because Jesus was only about thirty-years-old and the patriarch Abraham had died about 1,800 years before Jesus was born. How could Abraham possibly have seen Jesus? Our Old Testament lesson from Genesis 22 gives us a good example of Abraham rejoicing to see the day of Christ, seeing it, and being glad.
God spoke to Abraham, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” Here God tested Abraham. Now, an obvious lesson in this test is the First Commandment, which commands us to fear, love, and trust in God above all things. Jesus teaches an identical lesson when He says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.” (Matthew 10:37) Being willing to sacrifice his own son at God’s command showed that Abraham loved God more than his son. Yet, even more, it showed that he feared and trusted in Him, that is, that he had faith in God’s promises.
The only way Abraham can pass this test is by holding fast to God’s Word. You see, Isaac wasn’t always Abraham’s only son. He had another son born of the slave woman Hagar, whom his wife Sarah told Abraham to cast out, and God told Abraham to do as Sarah said, because Isaac was the child of promise through whom all families of the earth would be blessed. Because of God’s Word, Abraham now only had one son, and now God was commanding Abraham to sacrifice that only son. Yet Abraham held so firmly to God’s promise that through Isaac his offspring would be named (Genesis 21:19), that He believed that God could even raise Isaac from the dead (Hebrews 11:19).
Many Christians immediately notices the connection between what God commands of Abraham and what God Himself did for us. “Take your son, your only son, whom you love and sacrifice him,” God says to Abraham. This is the same God who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all (Romans 8:32), as Jesus says in John 3, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” What God commands Abraham to do, but ultimately stops him from doing, is exactly what God did for us. He offered His only begotten Son, whom He loves, as a sacrifice of atonement for our sins.
And so, as Abraham carries on to do the unthinkable, while trusting in God to fulfill His promise, we see a remarkable parallel to when God did the incomprehensible in sending His own Son to die for our sins. Isaac is Abraham’s only son of promise, whom he loves. Jesus is the only begotten Son of God, beloved from eternity. Although his father’s will seems to be to bring him harm, Isaac walks together with his father toward the mountain of sacrifice. And so, Christ Jesus prays, “Not my will, by yours be done,” and walks willingly into danger, as the hymn paraphrases the prophet Isaiah, “A Lamb goes uncomplaining forth, the guilt of all men bearing.” Abraham places the wood upon which he intends to burn Isaac’s body upon Isaac for him to carry up the mountain. Likewise, Christ Jesus carries His wooden cross upon which He will be nailed and suffer the fires of hell. Isaac is a strapping young lad, strong enough to carry the load of wood up the mountain, and so, he clearly is strong enough to resist his elderly father and save his life. Yet he permits his father to bind him and lay him upon the wood of the altar. Likewise, Christ can send all His enemies to the ground with a word (John 18:6), yet He permits Himself to be bound and led to trial and crucifixion.
For three days Abraham walked toward the mountain of sacrifice where he would kill his son, mourning his son’s death the whole way. And for three days Christ, the Son of God, lay dead in the tomb. Yet as Abraham received his son back alive, so the Father in heaven received His Son back alive and well after His resurrection. Yet Abraham did not sacrifice Isaac. The angel of the Lord, who is Christ, prevented him. Rather God provided a ram, stuck by its horns in a thicket. That ram wearing a crown of thorns reminds us of the Lamb of God, Christ Jesus, wearing a crown of thorns when He was crucified. And the fact that the ram was caught by its horns also indicates something. A ram’s horns are its most prized asset. In fact, the Hebrews used the word horn to symbolize power. King David calls the Lord the “horn of my salvation,” (2 Samuel 22:3; Psalm 18:2). And so, as the ram is trapped by His power, so our Lord is trapped by His power. The Lord’s power is His love. As the Lenten hymn states, “O wondrous Love, what have You done! The Father offers up His Son, Desiring our salvation. O Love, how strong You are to save! You lay the one into the grave Who built the earth’s foundation.” (LSB 438:3) The horn of our salvation, that is, the power of our salvation is God’s love for us. Christ’s love for us trapped Him, so that He died to set us free.
Now, we who know the Gospel of Christ and confess it regularly in the Creed, can look back at the account of Abraham and Isaac and see the clear parallels to Christ’s crucifixion and use this account to preach the Gospel. Yet, how much of this event could Abraham connect to Christ, who would be born eighteen centuries later? Did even Moses understand what he was writing, as St. Peter writes that the prophets searched their own prophecies, “inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when He predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories” (1 Peter 1:11)?
I don’t know how many details of this event Abraham could connect to Jesus. Yet we do know that He did connect this even to Jesus. As they were walking together, Isaac said to his father, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering.” And Abraham responded, “God will provide for Himself the Lamb for a burnt offering.” Later, when Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the ram stuck in the thicket, and he sacrificed that ram, Abraham named the place, “The LORD will provide,” as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided.”
Abraham rejoiced to see that the Lord would provide. He saw that the Lord provided, and He was glad. That is how Abraham saw Jesus so many years before Jesus was born. He had faith in God’s promise to provide a Lamb. God told Abraham that all families of the earth would be blessed through His seed. Had Abraham sacrificed Isaac, that would not have been a blessing for all people. He could not take away their sins. The ram sacrificed in Isaac’s stead saved Isaac’s life that day but certainly could not save the lives of all peoples. Although there is no forgiveness of sins without the shedding of blood, not all the blood of goats and calves could take away sin. Yet Abraham believed that the Lord would provide as He promised, so he named the place, the Lord will provide.” He believed that the Lord will yet provide a Savior to bless all people, because the Lord had provided and He promised that He would provide. And we know that God did provide, when Christ Jesus, true God and true man, suffered and died on that same mountain so many years later.
Abraham saw Christ through faith in God’s promise to provide. Although He did not always see God’s providence, He knew that God would fulfill His word. Abraham had already made a fool of himself by doubting God’s promise when he married his wife’s slave so that he could get a son, because his wife Sarah was baren. Yet, that son of flesh was not the promised child. In His good time, God gave Abraham a son of promise through his wife Sarah. And so, Abraham knew that in His good time, God would provide for Himself a Lamb. So, when God provided that ram for a burnt offering, Abraham rejoiced to know that all of God’s promises would come true, including the promise that through his seed all families of the earth will be blessed.
Abraham saw Christ the same way we see Christ today: through faith in God’s promises. Abraham believed God’s promise to fulfill what He had not yet done. We believe what God has already done and what He promises He will do. There is not a religion of the Old Testament and a religion of the New Testament, just as there is not a God of the Old Testament and a God of the New Testament. There is one and the same God who saves all people through faith in His promises, which rest on Christ.
Abraham saw Jesus through faith in God’s promises. You see Jesus through faith in God’s promises. Yet how does God see Jesus? When Abraham told Isaac, “God will provide for Himself the lamb for a burnt offering,” And he named the place, “The LORD will provide,” and Moses wrote, “On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided,” they used a Hebrew idiom. What he literally said was, “God will see for Himself the lamb.” And he named the place, “the LORD will see.” And Moses writes, “On the mount of the LORD it or He shall be seen.” The Hebrews used the word see to mean provide. And we can understand why. God will see to it. Yet it is even stronger than that. While Isaac did not see a lamb for a burnt offering, and neither did Abraham, Abraham confessed that God did see the lamb. And so, we learn that it does not matter what we can see with our own eyes, but what God sees.
God sees Christ according to His promises found in His Word. God told Abraham that all families of the earth would be blessed through his seed, and so Christ is the Savior for all people. That is how God sees it. The prophet Isaiah says that God laid on Christ the iniquities of us all (Isaiah 53:6), and so God sees all your sins on Jesus as He goes to the cross to die for them. And God raised Christ Jesus from the dead, just as He promised, because Christ had fully paid for all our sins. That is why Christ sits at the Father’s right hand, just as God promised in His Word, “Sit at My right hand until I place all your enemies under Your feet.” (Psalm 110:1)
This means that God sees you as He promises to see you. Isaiah prophesies, “I will greatly rejoice in the LORD; my soul shall exult in my God, for He has clothed me with the garments of salvation; He has covered me with the robe of righteousness,” (Isaiah 61:10) and St. Paul states, “As many of you as were been baptized into Christ have put on Christ,” (Galatians 3:27). St. John records that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:7). And so, when God looks at us, He sees us washed clean in Jesus’ blood, clothed in Christ’s robe of righteousness.
What God sees is what He promises. He provides for what He says He will provide. If God says He will do it, in His eyes, it is already done. That is why we should believe Him when He says He will do something. Jesus told His disciple Philip, “Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father.” This is because God promised us Jesus. When we see Jesus through faith, we see what God sees, and so we see God, because He is revealed in His promises.
Before Abraham was, Christ already is, because He is true God. And that means that before Abraham was, God had already seen what He would do for Abraham and for us through Christ. He already saw all our sins paid for by the blood of Christ. We do not see that but blessed are we if we believe it. We do not see Christ’s body and blood in the Sacrament. We don’t see the Holy Spirit come to us in Baptism or in the preaching of the Gospel. We have not yet seen what we will become. We have not yet seen Christ return in a cloud of glory. We have not seen heaven yet. Yet, we have heard God’s promises concerning these things. Which means that He does see them. This means that they are true. As our father in the faith has promised us, “The LORD will provide.” He already sees what He will provide. And the day will come when we will see it too.