I just want to take a brief respite from our study in Jude and share with you something I came across recently in my Bible study. If you have your Bible, turn to Genesis 22. This is a fairly familiar account in the Old Testament that is often used as a picture of Christ's sacrifice. Long story short, God comes to Abraham and tells him to go atop a mountain and sacrifice his only son Isaac. Abraham obeys and sets off the next morning for the mountain. Abraham and Isaac go on alone, they build the altar, and Isaac is laid upon it with the wood. Abraham readies his knife and prepares to sacrifice his only son, the son that God had so long promised him. Just before Abraham kills his son, a voice speaks out from heaven, staying his hand. Paraphrasing, God commends Abraham's faith, and that He had seen that Abraham was unwilling to hold anything back from Him.
Again, it is a fairly familiar story and has great implications as a picture of Christ; however, I think that this account can reveal more about the heart of God than we often see. Look at who commands Abraham to sacrifice his Son. It's God. No surprise there. The person of the Trinity that is also termed God that Father makes this command, but look at verses 11-13, when the voice calls out from Heaven. In verse 12, the voice says that Abraham had not witheld his son from "me," so we see that this is God speaking, but look at the proper noun in verse 11. It says that the angel of the LORD is speaking. A while back, I wrote a post entitled "The Way" looking at something in the Old Testament called a theophany. I would recommend your going back to that post to get a little more detail on this particular truth, but, simply put, the angel of the LORD is the preincarnate Christ. Do you see the symbolism. God the Father demands the sacrifice, and the Son saves the victim, and in verse 13, provides a substitutionary ram. Thousands of years later, God the Father still demands that His holiness and wrath be appeased, but in His love, God sends another Ram to be offered up in the stead of the transgressors, and once again, it is the Son who provides this substitute.
