Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

The Lord Can Be Trusted

The Lord Tells Abraham To Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice

22 ^(A) Some years later God decided to test Abraham, so he spoke to him.

Abraham answered, “Here I am, Lord.”

^2 (B) The Lord said, “Go get Isaac, your only son, the one you dearly love! Take him to the land of Moriah, and I will show you a mountain where you must sacrifice him to me on the fires of an altar.” ³ So Abraham got up early the next morning and chopped wood for the fire. He put a saddle on his donkey and set out with Isaac and two servants for the place where God had told him to go.

⁴ Three days later Abraham looked off in the distance and saw the place. ⁵ He told his servants, “Stay here with the donkey, while my son and I go over there to worship. We will come back.”

⁶ Abraham put the wood on Isaac's shoulder, but he carried the hot coals and the knife. As the two of them walked along, ^7-8 Isaac said, “Father, we have the coals and the wood, but where is the lamb for the sacrifice?”

“My son,” Abraham answered, “God will provide the lamb.”

The two of them walked on, and ^9 (C) when they reached the place that God had told him about, Abraham built an altar and placed the wood on it. Next, he tied up his son and put him on the wood. ^10 (D) He then took the knife and got ready to kill his son. ¹¹ But the Lord's angel shouted from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”

“Here I am!” he answered.

¹² “Don't hurt the boy or harm him in any way!” the angel said. “Now I know that you truly obey God, because you were willing to offer him your only son.”

¹³ Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught by its horns in the bushes. So he took the ram and sacrificed it instead of his son.

¹⁴ Abraham named that place “The Lord Will Provide.” And even now people say, “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.”^[a]

¹⁵ The Lord's angel called out from heaven a second time:

^16 (E) You were willing to offer your only son to the Lord, and so he makes you this solemn promise, ^17 (F) “I will bless you and give you such a large family, that someday your descendants will be more numerous than the stars in the sky or the grains of sand along the seashore. They will defeat their enemies and take over the cities where their enemies live. ^18 (G) You have obeyed me, and so you and your descendants will be a blessing to all nations on earth.”

¹⁹ Abraham and Isaac went back to the servants who had come with him, and they returned to Abraham's home in Beersheba.

The Great Faith of God's People

11 Faith makes us sure of what we hope for and gives us proof of what we cannot see. ^2 (A) It was their faith that made our ancestors pleasing to God.

^3 (B) Because of our faith, we know that the world was made at God's command. We also know that what can be seen was made out of what cannot be seen.

^13 (A) Every one of those people died. But they still had faith, even though they had not received what they had been promised. They were glad just to see these things from far away, and they agreed that they were only strangers and foreigners on this earth. ¹⁴ When people talk this way, it is clear they are looking for a place to call their own. ¹⁵ If they had been talking about the land where they had once lived, they could have gone back at any time. ¹⁶ But they were looking forward to a better home in heaven. This is why God wasn't ashamed for them to call him their God. He even built a city for them.

^{17-18 (B)(C)} Abraham had been promised that Isaac, his only son,^[a] would continue his family. But when Abraham was tested, he had faith and was willing to sacrifice Isaac, ¹⁹ because he was sure that God could raise people to life. This was just like getting Isaac back from death.