After Abraham Moved to the land of promise, the Lord God used three different incidents to teach him about resurrection. These teachings progressively elevated Abraham’s faith and understanding in this critical area, although it seems probable that, even back in Ur, he already had a belief in resurrection from the dead.
As shown in the first article, scripture leads us to believe Abraham was a prophet in Ur. In his preaching of the one true God he must have dealt with the subject of eternal life. What would he have preached to the Chaldeans but the resurrection? At that time in Abraham’s life resurrection may have been an academic topic, one for debate with immortalsoulist Chaldeans. However, the Lord God would soon show him the inter-working between what he believed and how he believed.
As we shall see in this article, the Almighty developed Abraham’s functional belief in resurrection — his ability to act upon what he believed. This would be a real-life training that would push Abraham to the very limits of his faith. God taught Abraham about the resurrection not in words or promises, but in dramatic enactments of life out of death.
The three occasions that the Lord God used to instruct Abraham concerning resurrection were the deep sleep, the birth of Isaac, and the offering of Isaac. As with the other teachings, these also show a progressive development of Abraham’s faith.
The deep sleep
This incident, recorded in Genesis 15, followed the great promise in which God likened his seed to the stars of heaven. The sequence of events is instructive:
- Abraham returns from the rescue of Lot and pays a tithe to Melchizedek.
- Abraham laments that he has no biological heir, only his servant Eliezer.
- The Lord tells Abraham his own biological son will be his heir.
- God instructs Abraham to look up at the night sky and count the stars. “So shall your seed be,” declares God.
- Abraham believes God’s promise, and God reckons his belief as righteousness.
- God repeats the promise of the land; Abraham asks for a sign to know of the surety of this.
- God instructs Abraham to offer a heifer, goat, ram, dove, and a pigeon.
- Abraham arranges the offering, drives away birds of prey, and falls into a deep sleep as the sun sets. The Lord speaks to him in a dream, saying that his descendants would go into slavery for four hundred years, and Abraham would go to his fathers in peace and be buried.
- The thick darkness that came upon Abraham gives way to a flaming furnace, which consumes the sacrificial animals.
- The Lord specifies the land of promise which his seed will inherit as that currently occupied by ten Canaanite peoples.
The meaning
What would all this mean to Abraham? Obviously, God is creating a scene that will impact Abraham’s understanding beyond what the words alone would convey. The main points reinforce the promises concerning the land and the seed, and in this brief space of time the word “seed” has three connotations. First it refers to Isaac (v.4), then to Messiah (v.5), and finally to national Israel (v.13); v. 18 could include all three meanings. The acceptance of Abraham’s faith as righteousness (to be treated in depth in a future article, Lord willing), the sacrificial animals, and the deep sleep all represent new items in God’s dealing with Abraham. For the moment, we limit our comments to the “deep sleep.”
Yes, it is the same as that which befell Adam (Gen. 2:21). We have no doubt it symbolizes Abraham’s death, because the Lord also told him this directly — he would go to his fathers in peace (first occurrence in Scripture of shalom; context is resurrection!) and be buried in a good old age. If he died, and the land later would become his inheritance through his seed, God must raise him to fulfill His promise. Abraham, who had just accepted God’s promise of Messiah-seed being exalted to eternal life (v.5), now must accept that his own inheritance would come by means of resurrection to eternal life. Having only heard “positive” things thus far in the promises, Abraham might have received this news with conflicting emotions.
The Lord spoke to him immediately after the deep sleep came upon him, so apparently this message came to Abraham in a dream. This would be the only promise God would make to Abraham in the medium of dream, or vision of night. Appropriately, recovering from this “deep sleep” would reinforce the teaching about resurrection.
The birth of Isaac
While the birth of Isaac contains many lessons, we will look at the event from a physiological perspective to see that God used this as another medium to instruct Abraham concerning resurrection. We need to carefully note the details to get the full impact of how God used the birth of Isaac to teach Abraham that He could bring life out of death. We are on firm footing in this interpretation, as Paul twice connects Abraham’s faith in God’s ability to give him seed with resurrection from the dead (Rom. 4:17, 25). We also find in this chapter a key hint to help us understand how God taught Abraham.
Abraham becomes impotent
The birth of Isaac represented far more than the result of a miraculous pregnancy of an old woman by an old man. Abraham and Sarah each had a fatal reproductive impediment in addition to their advanced years. First consider Sarah. She had always been barren, so having a child at any age would have been quite a miracle. Then she became barren and old. However, the additional mention in Gen. 18:11 “it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women,” puts the matter of child-bearing beyond all (from a human perspective) possibility. Sarah had reached menopause. The implication of the text is that this was a fairly recent happening, an additional factor to her age and lifelong infertility. With this development, any iota of hope she may have retained would certainly have died in her heart.
As for Abraham, his course was slightly different. Although he was ten years Sarah’s senior, he was still able to lie with Hagar and father Ishmael at the age of 86. Thus “being old, advanced in years” by itself wasn’t the whole story. However, over the next thirteen years his virility turned to impotency— and he knew it. Paul tells us this also in Romans when he wrote, “He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead because he was about a hundred years old” (Rom. 4:19 NRSV). His body was not as good as dead when he was 86; it was reproductively functional!
Isaac is life from the dead
We can piece the facts together in a likely chronology. Shortly after the birth of Ishmael, when Abraham and Sarah learned that he was not the seed of promise, they both lost their last thin hopes of pregnancy. Sarah reached menopause and Abraham became impotent.
Then nothing happened for thirteen years, except they got even older! They were very old, and they had self-evident proofs of reproductive cessation. A child was absolutely impossible. They were as good as dead.
They were also right where God wanted them.
It had to be thus if He was to teach them that He alone could bring life out of death. Entirely stripped of human resources, the child to be born would not only represent the fulfillment of God’s promise, but the teaching of life out of death. This is where Paul cites Abraham’s faith in the resurrection as a model for those who believe. It was in the miraculous birth of Isaac that Abraham learned death must precede life, and with God nothing is impossible. It is therefore not surprising we find in the third and last episode Abraham responds in faith to God’s arduous demand.
The offering of Isaac
Many years later, God one more time moved in Abraham’s life to prove his faith and teach him the full meaning of resurrection. God had used the miraculous birth of Isaac to demonstrate He could bring life out of death in the figurative sense. Now the Lord would test Abraham literally — would he believe that God could actually restore a dead human to life? And not just dead, but one whose corpse had been completely destroyed by fire?
That was exactly what the Lord asked of Abraham’s faith when he said “take your only son Isaac, and offer him as a burnt offering” (Gen. 22:2). The child that God miraculously gave Abraham he now asked in sacrifice! As unbelievable as this must have been to the patriarch, he rose up early in the morning to do as he was told.
A crisis of faith
There were really only two options, as Abraham would calculate: either God would raise Isaac to life, or God would again rejuvenate Abraham and Sarah so that they could have another child. However, the promise already stated “I will establish my covenant in Isaac” (Gen. 17:21) and “in Isaac shall your seed be named” (Gen. 21:12). The only option was clear: God would resurrect Isaac, and he would live to have children of his own. and so carry on the promise.
Did Abraham think that God was only testing his faith, and that He would change His mind at the last moment, thus sparing Isaac’s life? We can surmise Abraham’s prayer would foreshadow the Lord Jesus’ in Gethsemane: “If there is any other way, please Lord let it be so, nonetheless, not my will, but yours be done.”
However, we know from the text that he certainly intended to execute the gruesome task. This was the test of his faith — did he absolutely believe in the resurrection, even to the sacrifice of his only son through whom the promises, including Abraham’s own eternal inheritance, would come?
He believed in bodily resurrection
Carrying out the command would mean suicide for Isaac, who was in every way informed and willing, and a return to “as good as dead” status for Abraham — unless God would indeed raise Isaac again. We know from Hebrews 11:19 that Abraham’s faith extended to the bodily resurrection of the dead, for the writer states, “he considered that God could raise men from the dead, hence, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back” (RSV).
There is also a plain declaration of this belief in Genesis, which only the NIV (as far as this author has seen) accurately brings out. Abraham and Isaac had gone part of the way to Moriah with two of his servants. When they parted from the servants near the mountain, he told them, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and we will come back to you” (22:5). The “we will come back” is exactly what the Hebrew text says. In other English translations, however, we read (as in RSV) “I and the lad will go yonder and worship and come again to you,” leaving the statement somewhat ambiguous.
It is not ambiguous at all; Abraham fully expected to both sacrifice Isaac and then see his son raised again out of the ashes of the burnt offering before they came down from the mountain. This is incredible faith!
When the angel of the Lord God saw the obedience of Abraham and Isaac, he put an end to the test. The point was proved, Abraham was faithful and obedient unto death. He believed so strongly in the resurrection of the dead that he acted decisively and without question or delay to show his belief.
The how of Abraham’s faith
This greatest of Abraham’s expressions of his faith provides for us the perfect example of what we meant in the introduction to this series when we said we look not only at what Abraham believed, but “how” he believed. He believed in the resurrection, and he believed it to the point of putting everything on the line that God had promised him for 50 years. This was not a Sunday school quiz or a baptismal “interview” where one states “I believe in the bodily resurrection of the dead to eternal life,” this was the living reality, the test of life. God asked Abraham not for a verbal answer to “Do you believe me?” but for a living demonstration of the utmost measure of his conviction. Not even asking for Abraham’s own life would test his faith as strongly.
It was fitting that the Lord God should proclaim the greatest of His promises after the greatest victory of Abraham’s faith. It is here that the angel spoke to Abraham saying, “your seed shall possess the gate of his enemies and in your seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 22:18). The singular seed of Abraham, the Lord Jesus Christ, would possess the gates of the last enemy, death (I Cor. 15:26) and overcome death in the resurrection to which his forefather’s faith had just so dramatically testified.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One