Michaelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio, The Sacrifice of Issac, 1602. Oil on Canvas, The Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
This article is Part 6 of the FAI Publishing series Seeds and Generations, a Biblical survey of the theology of “Seed” and “Generation” throughout redemptive history to the end of the age.
a laughing birth
“Sarah laughed to herself, saying, ‘After I am worn out, and my lord is old, shall I have pleasure?’ The Lord said to Abraham, ‘Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too hard for the Lord? At the appointed time I will return to you, about this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son.’”[1]
Sarah’s whimsy turned to fear as she realized that the Man in the other room with her husband was within earshot of her snide comment. In a moment of panic, she lied, “I did not laugh!” The Man gently assured her, “No, but you did laugh.”[2]
The pain and shame of decades of barrenness, the weariness of an unfulfilled Divine covenant, and the lingering hope of a promised son all weighed together on Sarah’s mind and heart to produce incredulous laughter. But all of her disappointment would melt away in joyful laughter just one year later, as Sarah held the newborn son of promise in her arms and exclaimed, “God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh over me.”[3] Appropriately, the mother named her son “laughter,” or in Hebrew, Yizhak.
And so, after 25 years, the promised seed who would inherit the promised land was miraculously conceived and surrounded at birth by wonder and rejoicing. The Divine Visitor’s question, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” was answered by His angelic messenger 2,000 years later while standing before the mother-to-be of the final Promised Seed.
No, “Nothing is impossible with God.”[4]
a laughing spite
But as the boy Isaac grew, he encountered another kind of laughter.
“And the child grew and was weaned. And Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, laughing.”[5]
As the son miraculously “born through promise,” Isaac prefigured the Woman’s Seed. But his older half-brother Ishmael, the “son of the slave woman” Hagar, was born “according to the flesh,” or according to the default human condition, in bondage to the serpent.[6] As foretold in the Garden, so it would be in Abrham’s tents. The serpent’s seed would have enmity for the woman’s seed. Like Cain and Abel, the older brother became jealous of the younger brother’s favor with God, and laughed at him. The usage of the word “laughing” in Hebrew here implies mocking or scoffing. Later, under the Spirit’s sway, the Apostle Paul would describe Ishmael’s treatment of Isaac as “persecution.”[7]
And so, Yitzak prefigured the Woman’s Seed not only through the joy of a miraculous birth, but also by suffering as one who was “despised and rejected by men.”[8] Ishmael, on the other hand, prefigured the fate of the serpent’s seed when Sarah demanded to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not be heir with my son Isaac.”[9]
Like Cain who was “driven away from the ground” to be a “fugitive and a wanderer on the earth,”[10] so too was Ishmael and his mother “cast out” from Abraham’s tent and left to wander in the barren wilderness. In other words, the serpent’s seed will be given authority to bruise the heel of the woman’s seed for a time, but ultimately, he will be “cast into outer darkness” where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”[11]
Yet Isaac’s greatest test was yet to come.
A PROMISED SEED PLANTED
“After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘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.’”[12]
Abraham rose early and saddled his donkey. Leaving with Isaac and two servants, he headed north from Hebron. As when he struck out from Haran decades ago, Abrham did not know where he was going, or what would happen when he got there. Once again, the future of the promised seed seemed uncertain.
On the third day, as the travelers approached Moriah, Abraham “lifted up his eyes” to see a short mount in the distance. Having cut the wood for the sacrifice, he laid it on the back of his only son, whom he loved, and led him up the hill to be slaughtered.
Upon reaching the top of the mount, without resistance or even a recorded complaint, Isaac allowed his elderly father to bind him, and willingly laid down on the wood to become qorban, a burnt offering unto the Lord. In his greatest moment of righteous faith, Abraham lifted the knife to his son. He was “fully convinced that God was able to do what He had promised,”[13] despite the apparent hopelessness of his circumstance. And at the last moment, he heard the Voice of relief: “Abraham! Abraham! Do not lay your hand on the boy.”[14] Instead, the old man turned to see a ram waiting in the thicket. “In hope, he had believed against hope,”[15] and his faith was rewarded by the One who provided a substitute.
Abraham had been prepared to slaughter his son of promise because “he considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did.”[16] In his “death” that day on Moriah, Isaac revealed the bloody path of the Woman’s Seed; a beloved, only Son who would willingly climb the hill of offering at his Father’s behest with the wood of sacrifice on his back. Only there would be no substitute for the Woman’s Seed. Rather, He would be the Substitute. For a Seed cannot produce many seeds until it first dies and is buried in the ground.[17] And like his forefather Isaac, the Woman’s Seed would “see his offspring (i.e. seed), and his days would be prolonged.”[18]
But who is the “seed of the Seed”? What seeds are produced by his death?
A BRIDE FOR THE PROMISED SEED
Having withstood the test and “risen” from the altar of sacrifice, Isaac was rewarded by his father. Abraham turned to his most trusted servant and said,
“‘Go to my country and to my kindred, and take a wife for my son Isaac.’ The servant said to him, ‘Perhaps the woman may not be willing to follow me to this land. Must I then take your son back to the land from which you came?’ Abraham said to him, ‘See to it that you do not take my son back there.’”[19]
And so, the son waited while the father sent his trusted servant on a far journey to search out a bride. And when the servant found the woman Rebekah, he exhorted her to return with him immediately. But her family protested.
“Her brother and her mother said, ‘Let the young woman remain with us a while, at least ten days; after that she may go.’ But he said to them, ‘Do not delay me, since the Lord has prospered my way. Send me away that I may go to my master.’ [They said] ‘Let us call the young woman and ask her.’ And they called Rebekah and said to her, ‘Will you go with this man?’ She said, ‘I will go.’”[20]
And so, the young woman willingly left behind her land and family without delay. She put her hand to the plow and did not look back,[21] in order that she might be united with her husband. In doing so, she prefigures the Bride of the Woman’s Seed, to whom the Father sends his trusted servants on long journeys, and when called, she willingly leaves “house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands” for the sake of the Son who she is called to marry.[22]
Rebekah met Isaac at the place where his mother’s maidservant had met the Lord face-to-face decades before. Hagar had named the area Beer Lahai Roi, or “well of the One who sees me.” It was there that the bridegroom Isaac first saw his bride. And like the Seed who would come after him, Isaac saw her “and she became his wife, and he loved her.”[23]
Gabe Caligiuri is a regular contributor to THE WIRE publication and podcast, as well as an occasional contributor to other FAI digital content on the subjects of history and geopolitics as they relate to the Great Commission. Gabe and his family live in California.
[1] Genesis 18:12-14
[2] Genesis 18:15
[3] Genesis 21:6
[4] Luke 1:37
[5] Genesis 21:8-9
[6] Paraphrased from Galatians 4:21-23
[7] Galatians 4:28
[8] Isaiah 53:3
[9] Genesis 21:10
[10] Genesis 4:14
[11] Matthew 22:13
[12] Genesis 22:1-2
[13] Romans 4:21
[14] Genesis 22:11-12
[15] Romans 4:18
[16]Hebrews 11:19
[17] Paraphrased from John 12:24
[18] Isaiah 53:10
[19] Genesis 24:4-6
[20] Genesis 24:55-56
[21] Luke 9:62
[21] Mark 10:29
[22] Genesis 24:67