When it comes to God’s ways, some questions aren’t answered for a really long time.
As Abraham and Isaac approached Mount Moriah from the south, the old man turned to the young men traveling with them and said, “Stay here with the donkey; the lad and I will go yonder and worship, and we will come back to you” (Gen 22:5). We? “We will come back to you”? But I thought Abraham knew it was just a one-way trip for Isaac. Hadn’t God told him to “offer him there as a burnt offering” (v 2)? No, the man of faith wasn’t thinking of returning with a container of ashes. If there was really going to be a death on Moriah, he was also expecting a resurrection! After all, Isaac had come into the world in the first place by way of a miracle—a kind of resurrection out of the dead womb of Sarah. Abraham knew that God had obligated Himself to fulfill His promise through Isaac, in the same way that believers can know resurrection awaits us on the other side of death. The wood was laid on Isaac (not a little boy but a young man) just as the cross would be laid on the Father’s Son for His journey up the same mountain. Then taking the fire and the knife, we read, “the two of them went together” (v 6). But then Isaac’s question: Fire? Yes. Wood? Yes. But the lamb—where is the lamb? The father’s reply was in reality a deferment, a call to trust the Lord for it: “My son, God will provide for Himself the lamb” (v 8). But in a deeper sense, that question hung there unanswered for two millennia, until one day John the Baptizer “saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, ‘Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!’” (Jn 1:29). Another two thousand years have rolled, and soon we will join John the apostle and say, “And I beheld…a Lamb as it had been slain” (Rev 5:6), the Lamb we will follow wherever He goes.