The promised son had been given, but to the father’s heart there came the demand from God to give that son back to Him, and to do it in such a way as to prefigure the sacrifice of God’s own Son upon the cross, and in a manner that transcended every other Old Testament type.

The scene in Genesis 22 is one that moves every regenerated soul to worship and praise as he reads it, presenting as it does the father and the son going to the place of sacrifice. Twice in that chapter we get the tender and meaningful words, “the two of them went together” (Gen. 22:6, 8). How strikingly this sets forth that mystic journey of the Father and the Son from the throne of glory to the cross of Calvary. Of these divine Persons it may also be said, “the two of them went together.” It tells us something of what it meant to God to give His Son to die on behalf of sinful man, as well as reminding us of what it meant to Jesus to take our place in judgment and die in our stead.

In Abraham’s case, God “spared that father’s heart a pang which He would not spare His own,” as F. W. Grant has well said. So Abraham offered up his son in figure only, and in figure received him again from the dead. Faith triumphed over an apparently insurmountable difficulty so far as nature was concerned, and Abraham bound his son upon the altar and actually took the knife to slay him, “concluding that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead” (Heb. 11:19). It was faith at its highest, triumphing over every question that the human mind could raise, and depending upon the living God, who is the God of resurrection, to work out His own wondrous purpose of grace.