摩利亚山上的三天路程

My name was Abram. Later, God changed it to Abraham , father of a multitude.

I want to tell you about one day , the darkest day and the brightest day of my life.

That day has a name: Moriah.

The son I waited twenty-five years for

If you are to understand that day, you must first understand what Isaac meant to me.

When God first called me, I was seventy-five. He promised I would become a great nation, with descendants as numerous as the stars and the dust. But Sarah had no children. We waited one year, then five, then ten. Sarah grew old and so did I; our bodies had long since lost the power to conceive , yet God's promise had not been fulfilled.

At one point I trusted my own wisdom. I had my servant Hagar bear me a son, Ishmael, thinking this was the fulfillment of the promise. But God said: no.

Twenty-five years later, I was a hundred years old. Sarah was ninety. Her ability to bear children had long been impossible. And then God did something utterly impossible in human terms: Sarah became pregnant and gave birth to Isaac.

Isaac means "laughter." Because when God announced this news, both of us laughed , not with joy but with that disbelieving, half-bitter laughter of "how could this possibly be?" We did not believe it, until Isaac was truly born.

From that day, Isaac was my entire joy. He was the living evidence of God's faithfulness, the embodiment of the promise. Every time I looked at him, I saw that God was real.

That morning

When Isaac was perhaps in his early teens, God spoke to me in the night.

"Abraham!"

"Here I am."

"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."

I do not know how long I lay there through that night.

People imagine that faith is an easy feeling , a voice in your heart saying "don't worry, God will protect you," and then everything becomes simple. It is not like that. Faith is not the absence of struggle. Faith is choosing obedience in the depths of the most agonizing struggle.

The first thing I recognized: this was God's voice. I had followed God for twenty-five years; I knew His voice. This was not a temptation, not a dream. It was God.

The second thing I could not silence: but Isaac is the promised offspring. If Isaac dies, how can the promise be fulfilled?

This question turned over and over in my mind through the whole night. The letter to the Hebrews says later that I found an answer: I believed that God was able even to raise him from the dead (Hebrews 11:19). God had promised that Isaac was the heir; God had commanded that Isaac be offered. If Isaac died, God would raise him back to life , because God does not contradict Himself.

I do not know how much of that was faith and how much was fear when I believed it. But I rose. Early the very next morning, I rose.

Three days on the road

I split the wood, took two servants and Isaac, and set out for Moriah.

Three days on the road.

Three days. Imagine those three days. Isaac walked beside me the whole way, completely unaware of what was coming. He must have been talking with me, asking questions, running ahead and laughing. And every moment I knew: I am going to kill him.

How I walked through those three days, I cannot fully explain. I only know that every step was held by one conviction: God will provide.

On the third day, I lifted up my eyes and saw the place in the distance.

I said to my servants: "Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you."

"Come again to you" , I said we, not I. I said we would return, Isaac and I together. Whatever was going to happen, Isaac would come back. I believed it.

Father, where is the lamb?

Isaac carried the wood on his back. I carried the fire and the knife. The two of us walked together.

Isaac said: "Father!"

I said: "Here I am, my son."

"Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?"

Brothers and sisters, I cannot tell you what I felt in that moment. My son , the son I waited twenty-five years for , looking up at me with those innocent eyes and asking: where is the lamb?

I said: "God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son."

When I said those words, I did not know whether they would prove true. I simply compressed everything I had into that one sentence.

"And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son." (Genesis 22:9-10)

The knife did not fall.

The angel of the LORD called to him from heaven: "Abraham, Abraham!"

And I said: "Here I am."

"Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me."

I lifted my eyes and looked, and behold, behind me was a ram caught in a thicket by his horns. I went and took the ram and offered it as a burnt offering instead of my son.

The name of that place

I called the name of that place, "The LORD will provide." As it is said to this day, "On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided."

Brothers and sisters, on that day I understood two things.

The first: God did not want Isaac. God wanted my heart.

God already knew I would obey , He stopped me before the knife fell. The whole thing was not about Isaac dying. It was about asking me: what do you love most? Isaac, or the One who gave you Isaac?

Do you love God, or do you love God's gifts?

I discovered, on Mount Moriah, that the knife did not pierce Isaac. It pierced the idol in my heart , the place where I had set Isaac above God.

The second: God provided a substitute lamb.

That ram was caught in the thicket before I found it. God had put it there already. He provided it , not to reassure me that everything would go smoothly from then on, but to show me a foreshadowing. One day, God's own Son would be bound like that ram, offered up, to take the place of humanity's death.

Isaac carried the wood up the mountain; that wood was later laid on another man's shoulders , the Son of God, carrying the cross up to Golgotha.

My hand raised the knife but was stopped; the Father's Son was nailed to the wood, and no one stopped it.

"He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?" (Romans 8:32)

That day, on Mount Moriah, I raised the knife , and only then did I see the heart of God: a Father willing, out of love, to give even His own Son without holding back.

That is the gospel.

Your brother in faith, Abraham