I have had the privilege of visiting Israel three times. On the first occasion, in 2007, I spent several hours at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, including a tour of the Dome of the Rock, where the Jewish Temple stood during Jesus’ life, until its destruction by Rome in AD 70.
Beneath the great gilt dome on the Temple Mount today is a quiet place for Islamic worship, and beneath the blue-tiled floor is a stairway leading to an underground chamber with a distinctive rocky outcrop at its centre.
“This is the place where Abraham sacrificed his son,” my Muslim guide said. “This is Mount Moriah.”
It’s a contested but plausible claim. The famous story is told in Genesis 22, where God tells Abraham to take a three-day journey from his home at Beersheba.
“Take your son,” God says, “your only son Isaac, whom you love, go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about” (Gen 22:2). And Abraham obeys.
Then come the haunting words of verses 7-8: “Isaac said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering.”
Verses 9-14 tell the rest of the story:
9 When they arrived at the place that God had told him about, Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood. He bound his son Isaac and placed him on the altar on top of the wood. 10 Then Abraham reached out and took the knife to slaughter his son.
11 But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!”
He replied, “Here I am.”
12 Then he said, “Do not lay a hand on the boy or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your only son from me.” 13 Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught in the thicket by its horns. So Abraham went and took the ram and offered it as a burnt offering in place of his son. 14 And Abraham named that place The Lord Will Provide.
The site has no further historical significance for several centuries until the time of King David, and an event recorded in 2 Samuel 24. A plague from God has killed 70,000 Israelites, and David is persuaded to build an altar and offer sacrifices to turn away God’s wrath. The Lord is receptive to David’s prayer for the land, and the plague ends (v. 25).
The place where David made his intercession was the rural threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. David bought the land from Araunah, and we know it today as Jerusalem.
A few years later, David’s son Solomon is king of Israel, and he begins the mammoth task of building a permanent temple for the worship of God. In 2 Chronicles 3:1, we read, “Then Solomon began to build the Lord’s temple in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah where the Lord had appeared to his father David, at the site David had prepared on the threshing floor of Ornan[Araunah] the Jebusite.”
This temple was later destroyed, and after the return from exile a smaller temple was rebuilt under the guidance of Ezra (Ezra 5:15f; 9:9). Later still, King Herod the Great renovated and extended this temple, and this is the temple that Jesus occasionally visited.
On one occasion, Jesus said, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days” (John 2:19), but he was not speaking of the Jewish Temple but his own body.
How extraordinary that these words were spoken close to where Abraham sacrificed Isaac, and that both events involve situations of costly sacrifice, and both involve extraordinary faith in God.
How extraordinary, too, that there appears to be a strong historical link between Abraham’s Mount Moriah, David’s threshing floor experience, Solomon’s great construction project, and the Temple in which Jesus worshipped.
Faith in God binds these four stories together. Faith always involves belief (mental assent to certain convictions). It involves personal, relational trust. It involves obedience (actions in response to belief and trust).
Faith also involves hope: referring to Abraham’s faith, Paul says “he believed, hoping against hope” (Rom 4:17). Faith involves loyalty or fidelity toward another – toward God, a spouse, a friend. It involves perseverance, despite setbacks and opposition.[1]
The author of the Letter to the Hebrews mentions Noah, Abraham and others in his chapter on faith. He writes,
“Without faith it is impossible to please God … By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac. He received the promises and yet he was offering his one and only son, 18 the one to whom it had been said, Your offspring will be traced through Isaac. 19 He considered God to be able even to raise someone from the dead” (Heb 11:6, 17-19a).
Sometimes faith is a struggle. Sometimes the barriers feel too high, or the demand too mysterious. If that is you today, let me encourage you to press on, to persevere, to live in hope. With the words of the anonymous man in Mark 9, we pray, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief” (v. 24).
Dr Rod Benson is Research Support Officer at Moore Theological College, Sydney. He previously pastored four Baptist churches in Queensland and NSW, and served for 12 years as an ethicist with the Tinsley Institute at Morling College. The previous column in this series is available here.
Reference:
[1] Luke Timothy Johnson, Faith’s Freedom: A Classic Spirituality for Contemporary Christians (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1990), 78-83.
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