This is another installment in a series that has been adapted from my 11-part CD teaching series on A. W. Tozer’s spiritual classic, The Pursuit of God.

The Agony of the Altar

As is often the case, New Testament truths are brought to life in Old Testament history. There is no more poignant illustration of the surrendered life than the story of Abraham and Isaac. As you recall, Abraham was very old when Isaac was born; old enough to have been his great-grandfather. Isaac was the delight, but also a potential idol in his father’s heart. From the moment when he stooped to take the tiny form in his arms, he was a love slave to his long-promised son. In fact, God himself commented on the intensity of the father’s affection for the boy.

Isaac represented everything sacred to Abraham’s heart: all the promises of God, the sign of the covenant, the longing of his years, and the hope of the messianic dream. So as he watches him grow from infancy into early manhood, the heart of the old man is knit closer to the life of his son, until at last his love bordered on idolatry. And that’s when God, with his loyal love, stepped in to save both of them from the damage of an unhealthy love.

So God says to Abraham in Genesis 22, “Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you truly love, and go to the land of Moriah; and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you of.” The writer of Genesis spares us the details of how Abraham must have inwardly wrestled with God during that long dark night under the stars near Beersheba. With great insight, Tozer suggests that, “Possibly not again until One greater than Abraham wrestled in the Garden of Gethsemane did such mortal pain visit a human soul. If only the man himself might have been allowed to die. That would have been a thousand times easier, for he was old now, and to die would have been no great ordeal for one who walked so long with God.” How glorious if his last vision in life could have been to but gaze upon his only son, the promised seed, the one through whom all the world would be blessed. But no, God was not finished with this old man. He had much to teach him, even now. And somewhere in the struggle of the night, Abraham finally came to a decision. As the writer of Hebrews reveals to us, he decided to offer up his son just as God had directed him to do, and then trust God to raise him from the dead.

• As you consider the life of Abraham, why did God continue to increase the level of risk in his commands to the patriarch?