by Keith Bassham
As far as I can tell, the first time we encounter the word love in the Bible is in the story we call The Sacrifice of Isaac, and it describes Abraham’s affection for his son Isaac. Isaac, whose name meant “laughter,” was a miracle child for the aged Abraham and Sarah, their hope for a family that would live and grow to be a great nation.
The story is well known, even among people with little or no Bible knowledge. The great themes of trust, faith, obedience, justice, and compassion are presented, not in a point-by-point theoretical explanation, but in a narrative — a story — a drama. The narrative is known among the Jews as the Akedah, or the binding, a reference to the act of Abraham binding his son to an altar that, for all we know when we first read the story, is to be the place where Isaac will die.
The text says the episode was a test, the final test of ten according to Jewish tradition. The other tests involved leaving his home, dealing with famine, dealing with his nephew Lot, and other events, but this last test is said to be the most difficult of all.
And why not? On the face of it, it seems ridiculous, almost barbaric and cruel. “Take your son, whom you love, to Moriah and offer him for a burnt offering.” Abraham, who had argued enthusiastically on behalf of the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, offered no objection, and he made plans to obey. However, we do have a couple of clues explaining his action, or inaction. As he and his entourage came near the place of the sacrifice, he explained to the others that he and his son were going off a ways to worship, and then they would return. The second clue comes when Isaac, a model of patience and trust himself, asks his father about the “lamb for a burnt offering,” Abraham replies, “God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.”
These clues, along with some explanation in the New Testament, tell us that Abraham believed God’s promise, given to him years before, that Isaac would participate in a covenant with God, along with his descendants. For this to happen, Isaac must live, and not die childless:
By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac: and he that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son,
Of whom it was said, That in Isaac shall thy seed be called:
Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead;
Hebrews 11:16-19
And so, just before Abraham was to inflict the wound that would kill his son, he was stopped, and directed to take a ram caught in a thicket and sacrifice it in the stead of Isaac (believers in Jesus Christ will see the substitution connection immediately), making Abraham call the name of the place Jehovah Jireh, or “the Lord provides.” And as the smoke of sacrifice went heavenward, Abraham heard these words:
… By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son:
That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies;
And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice.
Genesis 22:16-18
The ideas contained in this speech appear several times in the Old Testament.
Stars. Sand. Seed.
Let’s take the last one, the seed, first. One of the first references to seed takes place just after Adam’s sin when God tells the serpent that he would “put enmity” between the serpent’s seed and the seed of the woman. This is usually seen to be a reference to the battle between Satan and the Son of God, a battle that ends with the Savior’s death and resurrection in which we are delivered and Satan is defeated. Here, the “seed of the woman,” is Jesus Christ.
Each of the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), as well as Judah and David are spoken of in “the seed of ___” phrasing.
Seed is also used in an ordinary way, a euphemism for offspring and descendants among humanity. It takes on a more important idea when it is applied to Abraham and his family. We know as we move into the New Testament that the seed takes in more than just physical descendants, and in fact, it comes to refer to Jesus as Messiah, but the Old Testament people don’t really see that clearly, and it becomes apparent only when the New Testament events occur, and the early preachers declare it explicitly.
We see the sand and stars imagery in Genesis 15:5 when God says to Abraham “Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be.” And in Genesis 26:4, God says to Isaac, “And I will make thy seed to multiply as the stars of heaven, and will give unto thy seed all these countries; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” Isaac’s son Jacob, in a prayer to God, recounts the promise made to him, “And thou saidst, I will surely do thee good, and make thy seed as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude” (Genesis 32:12).
Other passages use similar language applied to the entire nation of Israel: Deuternomy 1:10, 10:22, 26:5, 28:62; Numbers 23:10; 1 Kings 3:8, 4:20; 2 Chronicles 1:9; and Nehemiah 9:23. The imagery moves to the New Testament, and here is where we begin to learn that something more than biology and physiology is at work where the sand, stars, and seed are concerned.
Paul lets us in on some inside information when he writes in his letter to the Galatian churches, “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ” (Galatians 3:16). In other words, the focus of the promise given to Abraham and his heirs was not confined to mere physical multiplication, but there is a spiritual lineage in mind as well. Just as God had said to Abraham at the first, before he changed his name, before he left the Chaldees, before he possessed children, and before he began to exercise real faith and trust, “In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” All families. And the God of Genesis is the God of the Revelation where we read that John saw in his heavenly vision “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues,” those who had washed their robes and “made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9, 14). Thus, “… if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29).
I was thinking about this sand and star imagery recently as I recalled reading once that until the invention of the telescope, humans could only see a couple of thousand or so stars. Even a pair of ordinary binoculars on a clear night will easily multiply that number. The large observatory telescopes took us into the millions of visible stars, and now the Hubble telescope is allowing us to see parts of the universe and objects in the heavens we never dreamed of. Literally billions of stars are out there. Or at least I thought so.
I don’t ordinarily speculate on such things, but apparently some people have occupied themselves with the question, what is there more of — grains of sand or stars in the sky? Seriously.
And more surprising, someone has given us an answer. Science writer David Blatner, in his book Spectrums: Our Mind-Boggling Universe, from Infinitesmal to Infinity, describes a group of University of Hawaii researchers who decided to figure out how much sand there is. You have to take a few things for granted, like an average size of a grain, and then you take a small quantity, perhaps a teaspoonful. And then you multiply that number by what you think is the area of sand covering the earth (I don’t know if ocean bottoms were included), but according to the research, a rough estimate is about 7.5 times 10 to the 18th power grains of sand — seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion, give or take a few gazillion (that last part I included just in case a correction was needed).
But get this. According to Blatner, in 2003 we knew about 70 thousand, million, million, million observable stars. And that gives us an idea of the vastness of God’s promise, the sheer audacity of God for making such a promise to a 100-year-old man.
But there is more. Blatner goes on to tell us that even though that number of stars seems to be an “unbelievably large number,” he says, there are the same number of molecules in just ten drops of water. Fascinating, no?
I guess I can understand why God would use sand and stars rather than water drops when he made those promises. How could anyone, let along people of the Old Testament era, possibly understand such a comparison?
And yet, God does something like that when he talks about a seed. A mere seed. Something small becoming something so large and unfathomable. I wonder if the magi had something like that come to mind when they were crossed over an ocean of sand, followed a star, and came upon a seed in Bethlehem something a little more than 2,000 years ago. And the whole event was surrounded by vastness.
May you come to appreciate the vastness of God, His promise, and His salvation during this Christmas season.