He Carried the Wood and Asked the Question

The detail that undoes me is the wood.

Genesis 22 says Abraham cut it before he left. Not on the mountain, not when he got there. At home, in the yard, the night before, with his own hands and his own axe, knowing exactly what it was for. Then he loaded it on the donkey and walked for three days. Three days is not a scene. Three days is meals, and sleeping under the sky, and getting up in the dark to walk again, and a boy asking ordinary questions the whole way.

Read verse four. Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off. He saw it from a distance first. He had a whole final morning of walking toward it with it in view.

Then he tells the young men to wait with the donkey. And here is the second detail, and it is worse than the first: he takes the wood off the animal and he puts it on the boy. Isaac carries it up. The son carries the thing he is going to be laid on, up a hill, on his own back.

And somewhere on that path, in the quiet, Isaac speaks.

My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. You can feel the boy find his courage in the shape of that. He says the safe part first, the word father, testing whether the conversation is allowed. And Abraham, who is carrying the fire and the knife and a secret that would break most men, answers him instantly and completely. Here am I. Not later. Not not now, son. Here.

Then the boy finishes it. Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?

He is not stupid. He has been to sacrifices. He knows the list and he can count, and there is an item missing, and he has been walking beside the missing item for three days working out how to say it.

The answer that was not an answer, and was

And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.Genesis 22:8, King James Version

Look at what he does not say. He does not explain. He does not soften it, and he does not lie to the boy either. He hands him a Person instead of an answer, and then the text says the most extraordinary thing in the chapter: so they went both of them together. Together. The question did not separate them. It was asked, and it was answered the only honest way it could be, and the two of them kept walking up the same hill side by side.

You are carrying wood you did not cut. Genesis 22:6 has the wood laid on the boy by somebody else and the fire and the knife carried by the father, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that division of the load visible.

That is what I actually want to say to you tonight. Somebody handed this over. The diagnosis, the debt somebody else ran up, the child who came home in a state you did not cause, the job that closed, the care of a parent that fell to you because you were the one who answered the phone. You did not choose the hill and you did not choose the load, and you have been walking up it for what feels like three days that will not end, and the worst part is not the weight. The worst part is that you have a question you have not been able to finish asking.

Ask it. He is not fragile and He does not flinch. The boy asked the hardest question on that mountain out loud, to the one person who could have been offended by it, and the walking did not stop and the closeness did not break. You have a question that was never the thing standing between you and God. Genesis 22:7-8 has the hardest question on that mountain asked out loud and answered in the same breath, and the same Spirit who kept both verses is the reason silence has never been the safer option. Carrying it alone for three days is nearer to a distance than saying it ever was.

You are not walking this alone, and you never were. The whole of Genesis 22 has two people on that path and the writer will not let anybody forget it: they went both of them together, and he says it twice, and the Holy Spirit is the reason that sentence is not merely about two men in the Bronze Age.

Now hear the turn, and it comes in a place nobody looks. Verse thirteen. Abraham lifts up his eyes and there is a ram caught in a thicket by his horns.

Caught. Which means it was already there.

And caught by the horns, which the account specifies. A ram tangled by its horns in a thicket is not going anywhere. It could not have wandered off in the time it took two people to finish climbing. The detail is doing work: it is not only that the provision was present, it is that it was held in place.

That ram did not appear at the last second like a trick. It had walked into that thicket at some point earlier, on its own legs, while two people were still coming up the far side of the hill with fire and wood and a question. The provision arrived before the crisis peaked. It was in position while Abraham was still walking, still silent, still absolutely certain that the worst thing was going to happen.

You have a supply that was not being decided while you dreaded it. That is not a slogan, it is what Genesis 22:13 says about a ram already caught by its horns, and His Spirit is not hurrying to catch up with anybody's calendar.

And then Abraham names the place, and the name is a tense: Jehovahjireh: as it is said to this day, In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen. In the mount. Not before the mount, and not instead of the mount. He did not find out on day one. He found out on the hill. You may not get to see it from the bottom either, and that is not God withholding. That is where seeing happens.