Three Days Up the Mountain

Abraham and Isaac - When Your Greatest Fear Becomes Your Greatest Triumph

Adapted from Genesis 22:1-18

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“Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide. And to this day it is said, ‘On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.’” — Genesis 22:13-14

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I will never forget what the threshold of tragedy tasted like that day on the mountain as I lifted the blade high above my son’s bound body.

My mouth had gone desert-dry. A metallic, copper bitterness pooled under my tongue, the unmistakable flavor of a man at the edge of doing the unthinkable.

Adrenaline and Fear. Excruciating, bone-deep fear.

I was already an old man when it happened. I had lived a long and adventurous life. One where I had foolishly assumed that the season of impossible demands had passed, that the hardest roads were behind me. I had been through enough to believe that surely I had earned the right to enjoy what remained.

I happily obeyed when I left my homeland and walked away from everything familiar years ago. It’s not too difficult when you hear a Voice that you know to be the One True God. He told me to go. Seventy-five years is enough to learn how to discern the voice of God. I didn’t want to live the next seventy-five regretting a lack of obedience.

I had waited decades for a son. Decades. I watched Sarah’s face in the firelight every year, watching hope fight a slow losing battle against the natural seasons of life and fertility. Even after the voice, I left my homeland as an old man and waited another quarter of a century.

And then came that little baby. Hope against hope.

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Isaac.

Have you ever waited so long for something that you stopped believing it was possible? You give up, but you keep silently hoping, somewhere in the back of your mind. I waited that long and then watched it come out of nowhere. You must understand what that boy was to me. He was not just my son. He was the evidence that the Voice was real and the promises were not the delusions of a senile old man. Every time I heard that little baby cry, something in me exhaled that had been holding its breath for one hundred years.

But then something happened. One of those life events that splits time in half. Into before and after. The Voice, the same one I had heard before the baby came, whispered in the night. It always seemed to come when the darkness was deepest, and the silence made every word land like a stone dropped into still water.

Ripples. Extending into the most uncomfortable places.

“Abraham.”

“Here I am.”

There would never again be a me that did not know what it felt like to wrestle with the next words.

“Take your son. Your only son, Isaac, whom you love. Go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering.”

I want to give you the dignified version of what I felt next. The patriarch, steady as stone, rising in the night with calm resolve. The version that makes a good story and requires nothing uncomfortable from the listener. I want to ensure that the Maker would never whisper something so scandalous in the ear of one who loves Him so.

But you deserve the truth.

I lay on my mat, shaking like a leaf, for a long time in the dark.

Sarah was breathing softly beside me. I listened to the inhale and exhale like a man who knows he is about to walk off the edge of something. Isaac was asleep nearby, and I could hear him too. That boy could sleep through anything. I had watched him sleep a hundred times and thought, this is it. This is what it was all for. THIS is what gives purpose to the pain of decades of confusion, waiting, and fights with Sarah to help her hold on to some form of faith.

How long I lay there, I cannot say. I know that I made every argument a man can make. Every negotiation. Every reframing. Every attempt to soften the words into something less dangerous and excruciating. Surely He meant something else. Surely this was a metaphor. Surely there was a way to interpret it that didn’t require me to saddle a donkey and walk my son to his death.

The words wouldn’t bend. The assignment was sure. There was an earthquake in my soul that ripped me wide open like a great canyon.

I got up because I couldn’t sleep for a second. I split the wood. I saddled the donkey as night turned to morning and anticipation turned to action.

I want you to hear this clearly, because it is the truest thing I know about what happened in those three days of walking: I was wrestling with incredible double-mindedness. The two paths followed up that mountain, side by side, the whole way. Denial or obedience? My way or His? Life or death for my precious Isaac? Since the wretched day, I have heard people describe what I did as if it were easy for a man of such faith. Heresy, I say! It was not easy. It was torture. Excruciating torture every step up the mountain.

Isaac was not a child anymore. He was strong. Curious. The kind of young man who asks not to be difficult, but because he genuinely wants to understand the world. He never hesitates to ask me the hard questions. We love each other so.

Halfway up.

“Father?”

“Yes, my son?”

“The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”

I have replayed that moment so many times that the memory has worn grooves in my heart. His face turned toward mine. The earnest, believing, utterly unsuspecting look of a son who has no reason to doubt that his father knows what he is doing. The assured trust of an intimate relationship and confidence that one of my greatest lots in life was to keep him safe.

I told him the only true thing I knew to say.

“God Himself will provide the lamb, my son.”

I believed it when I said it, although I couldn’t imagine how it would be given. At the same time, I did not believe the words as they rolled off my tongue. Both of those are true, and anyone who has ever stood at the precipice of something so unseen and spoken faith out loud into the dark knows exactly what I mean.

We kept walking.

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I will not linger long on what happened at the top. Some things are too sacred for many words. I built the altar. I arranged the wood. I bound my son, my laughing, trusting, beloved boy, and I placed him on the wood. He looked at me the entire time. He didn’t fight; I knew he wouldn’t. I think that is the detail that wrecks me most, even now. He did not fight.

I reached for the knife. How could I possibly raise a hand against my boy, my precious long-awaited gift? I had to fracture in that moment. I had to split in two and ignore the part that raised the blade. It was the only way. I had to make it feel like it was someone else. So I coped as the passive half of me screamed. It was the only way.

I heard something whisper. I thought it might be an echo of my outcry, but I stopped to listen anyway. And the Voice came again. It wasn’t mine. It was so familiar. I’d heard that voice many times before, including the night just before the blade was drawn.

“Abraham! Abraham!”

“Here I am.”

“Do not lay a hand on the boy. Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from Me your son, your only son.”

My hand came down shaking so violently that I nearly dropped the knife. My legs buckled. I fell down on the edge of that altar and tried to remember how to breathe. Isaac was huffing, the kind that happens to children when they are so upset they can’t control it. Even though he was a young man.

Through the sound of my heavy breathing and Isaac’s sobbing, I heard something behind me. The sound of an animal struggling in the underbrush. I turned to find a ram, caught by its horns in a thicket. Not wandering nearby. Not passing through by coincidence. Caught. Held captive by an unseen hand. Waiting for a savior to rescue him from the trap. Already there. Already provided. Already present in that place before I had even taken my first step up the mountain, an hour before.

Imagine what it must be like to untie your son with hands that are still trembling and watch his feet hit the ground alive. I cannot describe what it was to look at that ram caught in that thicket and understand, not just in my mind, but in the deepest part of my soul, that the God who made the stars and the seas had placed that animal in that thicket at that exact moment for no other reason than for me to prove that He can TRUST ME.

I sacrificed the ram. I named the place. Jehovah Jireh. The Lord will provide. The Lord who sees in advance. The Lord who places provision in the thickets of our lives before the moment of need is even known.

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I have had years now to sit with what happened on that mountain. Years to turn it over and look at it from every angle that only an old man can see through the eyes of a multi-layered life. Through the pain of the memory and the understanding of hindsight, I have come to one conclusion.

He was never asking for Isaac.

He was asking for my tight-fisted grip on my long-awaited son. He was asking whether the gift had slowly and quietly become larger to me than the Giver. Whether the miracle had imperceptibly edged out the God who performed it. Whether I could hold the most precious thing in my life with an open hand, or whether my fingers had curled so tightly around it that I couldn’t tell anymore where Isaac ended and my faith began.

That is the question that the climb up the mountain asks of every man. Every woman. Every person who has ever received something so precious that life before it seems impossible to remember.

It is not a comfortable question. I know.

But the ram was already in the thicket.

Whatever it is you have been white-knuckling at the top of your mountain, whatever it is you love so fiercely that even God asking for it feels like an unreasonable request, the provision is already placed. The ram is already caught. He has already seen your terror and made arrangements you cannot foresee.

The only question is whether you trust Him enough to open your hand before He shows you.

What mountain are you climbing? What are you clinging too tightly to with both fists? What would it mean for your faith, and for your freedom, if you finally let it go?

Let me tell you, from a man farther along and looking back on provision from a God who never fails,

It is WORTH IT.

Let go.

Breathe.

Be set free to discover the freedom of knowing that your provision is waiting.