Genesis 22:8,14

[dwight92070]

My wife and I went to see the movie "His Only Son" in the theater this week. I highly recommend it. It was a powerful movie with a powerful message about Abraham offering his son to God as a burnt offering. When I read these verses later, I found some interesting information.

The NASB has verse 8 saying: "Abraham said, 'God will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." The wording here always seemed a bit awkward to me. Obviously Abraham was not quite ready to tell Isaac that he would be the burnt offering. So they walked on. But it would sound more natural for Abraham to say, "God will provide the lamb (for us) for the burnt offering, my son." Why did he say, "for Himself"?

So I looked up that verse in the Hebrew, from the Masoretic Text. Here's how it reads: "God will provide Himself the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son."
Wow! Does that change the meaning or what? So I went further and looked up the word "provide" in the Strong's Concordance- #7200 - "raah" The first meaning is "to see", but there are 83 other possible meanings! The meaning that raah is translated into the most is "see" - 410 times.

If we put "see" into the verse, it reads: "God will see Himself the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son." Another possible meaning is "appear", which would make it: "God will appear Himself the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son." The meaning "provide" is only used 3 times out of over 1000 times that the word "raah" is used.

It's obvious that Abraham offering "his only son" as a sacrifice is a type of the Father offering His Son for the sins of the world. Could it be that Abraham was prophesying here that God Himself "became flesh" (John 1:14) in the form of the Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world?

[dwight92070]

Almost forgot verse 14. In my Hebrew translation it reads: " ... In the mount where the Lord is seen."

[darinhouston]

My wife just saw that with some of her small group ladies and it sounds like it was, indeed, quite a wonderful movie and I'm looking forward to seeing it. My hebrew understanding is more limited even than my greek, but I don't think there's any basis to see your grammatical points as suggesting God would himself "be" the sacrifice. But, I do think it's fairly well understood to be a prophetic allusion to God providing another (ultimate) sacrifice in Christ as he would do with the lamb in place of Issac. This is why he's called the Lamb of God.