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Hello again! Did the Spirit show you anything exciting in your review of the text this week? Here’s what I discovered.

Last Week’s Work

REPETITION

This time the Spirit called my attention to four items:

1. Offer/offering occurs seven times in six verses. Two things stood out to me as I reviewed this:
   (A) God commanded Isaac be offered, not sacrificed as a burnt offering. There’s a difference between offering something (as in making it available) and sacrificing it (as in permanently giving it up), but I didn’t really catch that until the Spirit showed me this repeated concept!
   (B) Abraham didn’t use either word to describe what he and Isaac would be doing while the young men accompanying them stayed with the donkey. Instead, he called it worship!
2. The statement Here I am, which was Abraham’s response to God, to Isaac, and to the angel on the mountain. Abraham answered everyone who called upon him the same way, making himself available to all of them.
3. Your only son, the statement by which God and the angel (here and here) described Isaac to Abraham.
   Technically, I know that Isaac was not Abraham’s only son when they traveled to Moriah in Genesis 20. In Genesis 16, Sarai (Abra[ha]m’s aged wife who’d clearly given up on God’s plan to produce a child through her womb) told him to procreate with her slave Hagar. He did, and she produced a son named Ishmael, Isaac’s older step-brother. While God honored Abraham’s request and indicated Ishmael would also father a nation, He made it clear that Isaac was the son through whom the covenant promises would be fulfilled.
4. The phrases will provide / shall be provided appear three times: once describing what Abraham expected God to do about a sacrificial lamb rather than requiring Abraham to murder his own child and twice designating the site on which this act of salvation occurred.

SPECIAL STATEMENTS

I noted:

• Five commands: three from God to Abraham (take Isaac, go to… Moriah, offer him… as a burnt offering); one from Abraham to the young men (stay here); and one from the angel to Abraham (do not lay your hand on the boy…); and
• Five promises of God: Abraham’s statement to Isaac that God will provide… the lamb for [their] offering; and the four statements the angel attributed to God making up the blessing detailed at the end of the Lists section, below.

LISTS

I noticed four elements of the burnt offering described in this study passage:

1. wood, brought from home, laid on Isaac, mentioned in Isaac’s question about the sacrifice, and formed the base on which Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac;
2. a fire,
3. a knife, and
4. the lamb.

The four-part blessing Abraham received for offering Isaac—God would

1. surely bless Abraham,
2. multiply Abraham’s offspring,
3. ensure Abraham’s offspring would possess the gate of his enemies, and
4. bless all nations in Abraham’s offspring.

Dig-In Challenges

This week, let’s wrap up Step 3 by:

1. PRAYING the prayer we wrote for Step 1.
2. MINING comparisons by reading through the passage again, looking for statements of difference or similarity in or related to your focus verses. These may be statements featuring key words such as [not] like, as, is, are, or of; qualitative comparisons indicating how one item is more or less than another; and/or contrasts that highlight or discuss how one concept differs from another.
3. MINING: Next, look for causes or motives by focusing on key words or phrases I call cause connectors. In the ESV translation of this study text, look for the connectors because, for (where it means because), and so (where it means therefore) in your focus verses, then check the text surrounding the connector for an action and the reason or explanation for that action. For example: in the sentence, I went to the store, for I was out of milk,
   the action = I went to the store
   for [because] 
   the reason = I was out of milk.
   NOTE: the words for and so don’t always connect actions and reasons. To determine if they do in your verses, read the sentences containing them while substituting the word because in place of for, and therefore in place of so. If the sentence(s) created from this exercise make(s) sense and mean(s) the same as the original, look for the action statement before the for and the stated reason after the for; but with so/therefore, the reason will appear first, and the action statement will come after: I was out of milk, so [therefore], I went to the store.
4. MINING: Finally, see if you can find any conditions for action in this narrative and/or descriptions of how action happens or should happen.
   – For example, does the text say if or when a certain condition exists, some action takes place?
   And/or
   – Does the author describe a method or process (for example, specific steps) taken to achieve something?
   Or
   – Does he indicate how action is accomplished more generally by or through attributes or actions? For example, … saved by grace, through faith (Ephesians 2:8).
   Finally,
   – Does the text include any adverbs (typically words ending in ly) that describe how action happens?

These exercises are a bit more involved, but I’m confident you can do this with the Holy Spirit! Don’t forget to check your How to Dig Into Scripture Ourselves guide, and you can always reach out to me at [email protected] if you have questions.