In verse 2 God said to Abraham, "Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of." God told Abraham to offer Isaac, his only son whom he loved. How hard it must have been for Abraham to do this! If we had been he, we would have said, "Lord, I am more than a hundred twenty years of age, and Sarah is about to die. How can You ask me to offer back to You what You have given me?" If you have not had this experience, you will have it some day. We can testify that quite a number of times in the past God asked us to give back to Him what He had given us. The gifts, power, work, and success which He gives us must be offered back to Him. This is a real test. It would have been easy for Abraham to give up Lot or Eliezer. Even casting out Ishmael was not that difficult. But for him to offer his only son whom he loved was a very difficult thing. One day, after our having a good enjoyment of the Lord, He will ask us to give back to Him the gift, work, or success He has given us. He may say, "Now is the time for Me to ask you for something. I don't ask you to work for Me or to go to the mission field. I ask you to offer back what I have given you." This is the way we all must take today.
God did not tell Abraham to offer up a baby or even a little boy, but a full-grown man. Isaac's life was a life grown up by the well of the oath with the calling on the name of the Eternal God (21:33-34). Genesis 21:34, the last verse of chapter twenty-one, says, "Abraham sojourned in the Philistines' land many days." This means that Abraham remained there for a good number of years. During that time, Isaac grew up by the well of Beer-sheba, growing up by a life of planting and calling on the name of the Lord, the Eternal God. The one whom Abraham was told to offer up was a grown-up son, one who had lived with him in a life of planting and calling. The life in Beer-sheba built Isaac up to be a burnt offering, not an archer.
When God told Abraham to offer Isaac, He told him to go to the land of Moriah and to offer him upon one of the mountains there (v. 2). The land of Moriah was a two-day journey from Beer-sheba. The mountain on which Isaac was offered was later called Mount Moriah, eventually becoming Mount Zion, the place where the temple was built (2 Chron. 3:1).
When I read 22:2 as a youth, I was bothered. I wondered why God was so troublesome, saying, "Lord, You gave Abraham a son and asked him to offer his son back to You. That was all right, but it was not reasonable for him to go to such a far-off place. Aren't You omnipresent? Were You not there in Beer-sheba? Why did You ask Abraham to journey to a mountain so far away?" At first, God did not even tell Abraham on which mountain he was to offer Isaac, saying only that it would be "one of the mountains which I will tell thee of." In asking Abraham to journey far away for the offering of Isaac, God was not being troublesome. He is never troublesome; He is always meaningful. Eventually Mount Moriah became the center of the good land, and Abraham's descendants had to go to that mountain three times a year to offer the burnt offering to God (Deut. 16:16; Psa. 132:13). Thus, we see that chapter twenty-two of Genesis is a seed.
We cannot and should not offer to God the burnt offering which He desires in the place of our choosing. We must leave our place and go to the place of God's choice. Ishmael, the archer, the bowman, went southward toward Egypt and married an Egyptian woman. But Isaac, the burnt offering, was a different kind of person. He did not go downward to Egypt; he went upward to Moriah. If you consult a map, you will see that Moriah is north from Beer-sheba. Here we have a picture of two types of persons—an archer and a burnt offering. Which will you be?