Summations Only

I explained all that already you dolt.And that will no doubt put "dolt" on the censor list.Doalt, doooollllt, dohlt, dillitydollitydohlt.

No, the utterance was prophetic no matter what Abraham consciously meant by it, as evidenced by the appearance of the ram in the thicket.Duh.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

So are you saying that Hebrews 11:19 is a lie? I didn't think you'd do that but I guess I've been getting you wrong.The comment about the lamb doesn't anticipate resurrection, I merely said I thought it could be fit into that expectation, which it can if we understand that Isaac's resurrection wouldn't accomplish anything anyway as Jesus' of course did, so another sacrifice could be expected, which I just suggested in a recent post.In any case the evidence that Abraham was expecting God to raise Isaac from the dead has not gone away.The lamb was an unconscious prophecy of the ram, and also a conscious prophecy of Christ.For you to deny that Abraham expected Isaac's resurrection makes absolutely no sense and you haven't said one thing to support your rejection of the idea, whereas my argument still stands.There is notrhing complicated about genesis 22, it's a straightforward narrative. If you think I've misread it then YOU quote what you think disputes me.Yes, you've been very disrespectful.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Hebrews 11 is the word of God just as Genesis 22 is. For you to argue this way at this point just makes the whole discussion worthless. Over eighty useless posts by the usual suspects against my perfectly reasonable Message 1502. What a waste of time.Oh you've been very disrespectful in many ways.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I do get sick of making perfectly reasonable orthodox Bible-based posts only to get them trashed by the ********** and ******* and ******** and ***********************s here. I despise this place. I've GOT to get out of here. I wish I could CENSOR EvC off the internet so I'd never have to see it again. Just go *poof* the lot of you.

Perhaps it's a lost cause but I would like to run the content of Message 1502 by you all again, because I do think it contains actual factual evidence for the claim that the Bible is inspired by God, and isn't just me preaching something. As I say there, the "coincidences" between the story of the intended sacrifice of Isaac and the actual sacrifice of Jesus Christ, actual events separated by nearly 2000 years, do strongly imply God's overseeing the entire history that is reported in the Bible, which makes good evidence that this whole history is God's doing and evidence that the Bible is His word.The answers I got to that post didn't deal with anything in it at all, so I would like to request now that at least some elements in the post itself be addressed in any answers to this. NoNukes did at least address the statement about the "lamb" but other elements in the story are far more clearly prophetic of the sacrifice of Christ than that one. Of course it does foreshadow the role of Christ as "The Lamb of God that Takes Away the Sins of the World" as John puts it, but the lamb figure shows up in many other OT passages with that same foreshadowing, while I'd like to stick to the specifics of the story of Isaac.Some things to note:It was said that these correspondences are just made-up and that it's not hard to make up such connections, but of course nobody offered an example to prove it. Except Golffly who kept trying to show that the story of Jephthah in Judges 11 was somehow similar, and that his story was prophetically fulfilled in the resurrection of Jairus' daughter by Jesus as reported in Mark 5:22 and Luke 8:41. But there is no similarity at all between these events. Abraham was called by God to sacrifice Isaac, Jepthah simply made a rash vow on his own that he'd sacrifice whatever came out of his house. The claim of any connection with the raising of Jairus' daughter is equally ridiculous, since the point is to find SIMILARITIES between the stories, and there was no raising to life in the story of Jephthah's daughter, nor anything else in the story that reflects the Jephthah event. We're looking for SIMILARITIES between events.So I'm going to repeat the most salient points in Message 1502 to see if it's possible to avoid the red herrings that were the main response to the first posting.The common objection that it is not hard to come up with such correspondences just from pure imagination failed miserably with Golffly's supposed example, so if anyone still thinks it's so easy, I invite further attempts to prove it. Remember, again, we're looking for SIMILARITIES between widely separated events. There are in fact many events and figures in the OT that look forward to Christ, but the challenge is that you aren't going to be able to invent any as you think you can.Again the point of this is to show that the facts in the story in Genesis 22 parallel elements of the story of Christ and His sacrifice, which is why the story is traditionally understood to be a "type" or emblem or prophetic picture of that event so far in the future, and that such a correspondence of events so widely separated in time suggests the work of God Himself in ordering history toward His own purposes.That said, here's a revised list of what I consider to be the evidence of God's hand in Biblical history and I'll include quotes since that was an issue for the first post. This time I'm dividing the list into five of the most clearly prophetic elements, above, and a lower list of four that are less clear.

• Isaac is called Abraham's only son:
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  Gen 22:2 writes:

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  : And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.
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  --> this is of course emblematic or prophetic of God's only Son who would appear almost 2000 years later. [Note: Arachnophilia brought up the red herring of Abraham having another son, Ishmael, and Jesus having brothers. This is a red herring because Genesis 22 clearly STATES that Isaac was Abraham's only son, which must reflect the fact that he was the son specifically promised to Abraham by God and miraculously brought to conception and life since Abraham and Sarah were too old for that; and we're talking about God's only begotten Son: Jesus' brothers were not God's begotten sons. I would hope we might avoid such clearly irrelevant objections].
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• Abraham's name means father --> emblematic or prophetic of God the Father's sacrifice of His only Son to come almost 2000 years later.
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• Abraham had every intention of sacrificing Isaac, there is no doubt about that, (as I recall NoNukes agreed with this), and he would have if God hadn't stopped him. He raises his arm to plunge the knife into Isaac without any hesitation as recounted in the passage:
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  Gen 22:9,10 writes:

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  And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.
  --> which is of course emblematic or prophetic of God's actually sacrificing His Son almost 2000 years later.
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• Abraham believed God would raise Isaac from the dead. This is the New Testament interpretation as stated in Hebrews 11,
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  Hebrews 11:17-19 writes:

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  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; from whence also he received him in a figure.
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  but it's clearly implicit in Genesis 22. [NoNukes challenged this but on the basis that God could easily have provided another child to Abraham, which is a pretty far-fetched idea. This is the only reason I remember him giving so if there was another I hope he will give it now. This one is extremely far-fetched because so much had been made of God's promises to Abraham to make a great nation through him who at that point was childless, and because God waited until Abraham and Sarah were aged 100 and 90 to bring about the promise of giving them a son, so well beyond the age of conception and childbirth Isaac's birth was really a miracle, which is another foreshadowing of Christ, His miraculous conception and birth]
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  The evidence I kept repeating that Abraham must have been expecting God to raise Isaac from the dead is
  1) that he was committed to going through with sacrificing Isaac, truly intended to kill him,
  2) and yet he believed God's promise to him that He would bring a great nation out of Isaac.
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  There is no other possible resolution of these two facts except that he must have expected God to resurrect him that I can see.
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  --> and of course the idea of resurrection from the dead is prophetic of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead almost 2000 years later.
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• Abraham was told to perform this sacrifice in the region of Moriah on a particular mountain which God would reveal to him. This is where the city of Jerusalem was built hundreds of years later, which is of course where Jesus was crucified.
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  There is another connection with this as well, another event between Genesis 22 and its fulfillment in Christ: It was a threshingfloor on Mt. Moriah in what was by then the city of Jerusalem that some nine hundred years after Abraham was bought by King David for a place to erect an altar for burnt offerings (2 Samuel 24). This threshingfloor is not identified as located on Mt. Moriah in that passage; its identity is revealed later, in 2 Chronicles 3:1:
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  Then Solomon began to build the house of the LORD at Jerusalem in mount Moriah, where the LORD appeared unto David his father, in the place that David had prepared in the threshingfloor of Ornan the Jebusite.
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  At the very least Jesus was crucified in the same general area of Moriah where Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac was to be enacted. [see note below in extended list.]

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Extended List:
Here I'm listing some other correspondences that aren't quite as clear as those above but which often figure in the traditional understanding of this passage as prophetic:

• Jewish commentators put Isaac's age in his thirties --> same age Jesus was when he preached and then died on the cross for us. I saw this when I was reading the commentaries but I'd have to track it down again to quote it. I think it was in David Guzik's commentary.
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• The cross is a vertical representation of the altars of sacrifice which were used throughout the Old Testament, by which the sacrificial animal was lashed to the four corners. This representation is also seen in the lashing of Isaac to the sacrificial altar. Jesus was nailed but it's the same concept of being affixed to the altar.
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• Mt. Moriah is considered by believers to be the exact same location of Abraham's intended sacrifice of Isaac, also the exact site of the threshingfloor King David bought for makijng a sacrifice and for building the temple, and also the same site where Jesus was crucified. It is only identified in scripture in general terms as a mountain in the region of Moriah, but believers of course, knowing how God works, believe it to be the identical site. I can't expect unbelievers to accept what believers accept, of course, so I'm putting this information at the end with the less clear indicators, but at the very least the general location of Mt. Moriah is where all three events occurred.
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  Here is a statement that the site is considered to be the same place where Jesus was crucified: for which some archaeological evidence is offered:
  There is some archaeological evidence to suppose that the place of the crucifixion of Jesus was at the summit of Mt. Moriah, probably near the present-day Damascus Gate and the Garden Tomb which would of course be a literal fulfillment of Abraham's offering of Isaac when God said, "On the mount of the Lord it [the final offering for sin] will be provided."
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• When God stops Abraham from killing Isaac, He shows him a ram caught in a thicket which he can use for the sacrifice instead. This appears to be the fulfillment of Abraham's own statement to Isaac earlier that God would provide the lamb for sacrifice:
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  Genesis 22:8 writes:

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  And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.
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  No Nukes had various objections to this but since it is clearly stated in the passage, at the very least it foreshadows the provision of the ram, and the ram of course foreshadows the later provision of the sacrifice of the Messiah.
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  --> This is emblematic or prophetic of the fact that God would Himself provide the Sacrifice that saves the world almost 2000 years later, by "The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world."
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  John 1:29 writes:

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  The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Oh yes, you brought this up before and I meant to include it in my discussion and forgot. The objection doesn't make sense: of course it's all "after the fact," what else could it possibly be? The events occurred, the participants themselves would have had no inkling of their future implications, they merely lived through them. The only thing in this story that could have been at least cloudily understood by Abraham and Isaac to have prophetic implications is the comment about the lamb because they had inherited the knowledge of the promise of the Messiah God had given first to Adam and Eve and then renewed in various ways throughout history, including to Noah in a way that would be a whole study in itself. But they would have had no way of knowing how God planned to work it all out, or when. This is something we could only know after the fact. And that's how all the events in the OT that are considered to be types of Christ and the promise of salvation are known.After the fact: People think about the story, rehearse it in their minds, put it together with the promise of the Messiah they've already been taught, or later, they hear Moses' account read in the temple and so on, and a less and less cloudy picture starts to emerge of what God plans to do, and as prophecy continues throughout the years the picture gets even clearer. All these types and prophecies throughout the OT finally resulted in the expectation of the soon appearance of the Messiah in Jesus' time. And it's after Jesus comes that we fully see the prophecies and types, which makes the whole picture such a good argument for God's overseeing all the events involved. But of course no type COULD be, could it? But Isaac comes as close as you'll get, having been promised by God and conceived miraculously by parents well beyond childbearing age. Ishmael is regarded by God, as stated in the NT, as "born of the will of man" or "born of the bondwoman" rather than the free woman, which signifies the difference between salvation by works and salvation by grace, while Isaac was the work of God, and that's the parallel with Christ. Good grief, man, the ram HAS to foreshadow Christ, a sacrifice provided by God rather than man, the "Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world." Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I can't very well think that what is actually there in scripture isn't really there just because you don't believe in inspiration. Abraham's remark is there and God provides a ram which fulfills it, that's also there, and the sacrifice of a lamb always points to Jesus, and the ram is simply an older lamb, which fits just fine with the fact that Jesus was in his thirties. But I don't consider this part of the passage to be as important as other parts. How about the Moriah location, or the fact that Isaac carried the wood for his sacrifice as Christ carried the crossbeam for his crucifixion, which I forgot to mention, or the fact that it's a father sacrificing his son, who IS called his ONLY son, like it or not.

Well, find another such case of a father sacrificing his son, in the region of Moriah where Jesus died on the cross, and the son carries on his back the instrument of his death as Jesus did, and God provides a ram, instead of a bull for instance, and all the rest of the elements in common between the events, and we'll see how far you can go with that claim. I repeated it of course, though a revised version please note, because it wasn't given a fair hearing. It may not this time either but it seemed worth another try, after which I might venture on to other examples. Oh I doubt that. Most of us learned these marvels well into our Christian lives, believing all along in Bible inerrancy without their help, but they are lovely confirmations. I don't know how anybody could suppose a person could make up such stuff. Well, but you can't. Go ahead, try it. But you don't even try to prove your general statement do you? As the others didn't either, which is why I revised and re-presented the story (and I'm glad some others have responded than did the first time). Perhaps you can do better and come up with actual proof that one can "reinterpret practically any passage in the bible to mean whatever you read it to mean at the time?" This is nonsense, I certainly do no such thing, but if you think it's possible that anyone thinks that way then please demonstrate that you can do this intentional interpreting to suit oneself. Golffly tried and failed miserably. Maybe you can do better.You can't and I'm sure you won't try either. But that's OK, I'm glad I repeated the story, I think it makes the point I wanted to make.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

First, please recall that I demoted that part of the story to the second list because it isn't as clear as those in the first list. However, this is what I said about it: The correspondence of widely separated events is what I'm arguing is the evidence of inspiration. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The correspondence of similar elements is "confirmation bias?" What an odd idea, a rather too-clever way of disposing of the prophetic elements.I challenge you to find other examples of this, then, since if it's truly confirmation bias that ought to be easy to do.

Ishmael was the child of Abraham's human plotting, Isaac was the miraculous son of God's own plan and promise. God has only one BEGOTTEN Son, His other sons come through the usual human means. It is these facts that make the Genesis 22 event prophetic of Christ.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I'm sure you know it has a special meaning when God begets a child, don't play coy. Jesus is God and Man by being God's only begotten Son, and He was clearly not begotten in the usual way.

Jephthah could not possibly have expected a human being to come out of his house or he would not have made such a vow, since he would know human sacrifice was a terrible sin. _Perhaps you aren't aware that houses often included animals in those days, I think on a lower floor while the family was upstairs but I'd have to look that up, some other time.Anyway, the way the vow is worded itself makes it clear that he was not talking about a human being. The word he uses is "WHATEVER" not "whoever.""Whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me"Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Not obvious to me so thanks for the explanation.You won't accept it as a type because it has "dissimilar elements?"
What on earth are you asking for, an absolute perfect duplicate of the sacrifice of Christ in 1900 BC?