The story of Abraham trusting God to the point of being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac is one that shows the great faith of Abraham, it is perhaps the greatest show of faith and trust in God in the entire Old Testament. But it goes much deeper than that, this might be the most profound and extended prefiguring of Christ in the entire Old Testament. The typology is amazing, and I think sometimes it slips by us, so let’s take a closer look at this.

The Birth Announcements of Isaac and Jesus

For starters, both Isaac’s and Jesus’ births were miraculous, Sarah was well beyond childbearing age and Mary was a virgin, and they were both announced in advance by either God or by an Angel of God.

First we look at Sarah:

¹⁶ I will bless her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall become nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.” ¹⁷ Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself, “Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?”¹

¹⁹ God said, “No, but Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac. ²

And now we look at Mary:

³¹ And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. ³² He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, ³³ and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

³⁴ And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?³

In addition God told Abraham what to name his son, and the angel told Mary what to name her son. Both sets of parents obeyed and gave their sons their divinely ordained names. The one obvious difference in the two stories is the reaction of the people involved. While both questioned how this could be, which is an understandable reaction, Abraham and Sarah laughed, while Mary and Joseph did not.

Isaac and Jesus as Sacrifices

The obvious typology is in the overall story of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son when God asked him to, and God not withholding his son as a sacrifice on the Cross, but there are several other parallels.

Let’s start with this:

⁶ And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son.⁴

Isaac was made to carry the wood for his sacrifice to the place where he would be sacrificed, while Jesus was made to carry the wooden cross to Calvary where he would be sacrificed.

¹⁷ and he went out, bearing his own cross⁵

Isaac is often thought of as a young boy, however based on the fact that he was strong enough to carry the bundle of wood, it is likely he was a teenager or a young man at the time of the sacrifice. Isaac could have fought back when he was bound, but nothing in the Bible hints that Isaac resisted at all, and that is where we find the next parallel:

⁹ When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built the altar there and laid the wood in order and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood.⁶

Jesus also did not resist his arrest and did not defend himself at his trial, like Isaac he was a willing sacrifice at the hands of his father.

When Isaac questioned where the sacrifice was coming from, Abraham said God himself will provide the sacrifice.

“God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” ⁷

And God did provide the lamb, both in this story and the sacrificial lamb on Calvary.

Symbolically Isaac was dead to Abraham because he had all intentions of sacrificing him, however he received him back from the dead in a figurative way.⁸

And there is one last parallel. The ram that God provided for Abraham was caught in the thickets, and Jesus, the lamb of God, was given a crown of thorns.

The Bible tells us God was testing Abraham, and he was, but as I wrote above, it was more than that. God was foreshadowing his plan to sacrifice his son as a ransom for many. While people at the time had no knowledge of this, God was showing those of us who look back on this story now that this was his plan for salvation from the beginning.

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1. Genesis 17:17 ESV ↩︎
2. Genesis 17:19 ESV ↩︎
3. Luke 1:31-34 ESV ↩︎
4. Genesis 22:6 ESV ↩︎
5. John 19:17 ESV ↩︎
6. Genesis 22:9 ESV ↩︎
7. Genesis 22:8 ESV ↩︎
8. Hebrews 11:19 ↩︎