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NOTE: Those of you who have subscribed to this blog for more than a year know that it is my annual practice to post a weekly story for the season of Advent about the incarnational birth of Jesus. My hope is that the stories become a part of your Advent tradition as you remember and celebrate the Good News of the advent of our Lord and Savior.
This year i have chosen to share the eyewitness accounts of four adolescents, beginning with Isaac, the son of Abraham. i have included his story so that we might be reminded of the promise of a Savior even dating back to the days of Genesis. The remaining three accounts are from fictional characters who represent the nameless individuals who experienced the circumstances surrounding the advent of Jesus. Though some of the characters and details contained in each story are fictional, you will find that the truth they reveal is very REAL!
To that end, let’s look at each part of this story through the eyes of these four very different eyewitnesses:
Part 1 as told by Isaac, the son of Abraham (This week – November 29th)
Part 2 as told by Salome, the friend of Mary (December 6th)
Part 3 as told by Yanzu, the servant of Balthazar (December 13th)
Part 4 as told by Ashriel, the great-grandson of Simeon (December 20th)
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My name is Isaac and I am the fourteen-year-old son of Abraham. A long time ago, God gave my father a promise. He told him, “I will make you the father of a great nation. I will bless you and make your name famous, and you will be a blessing to many others. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you; and the entire world will be blessed because of you.”(1)
When God gave my father that promise, my parents were already old and didn’t have any children. My dad believed God would be true to His word, but he wondered how he could become the father of a great nation if he didn’t have any kids.
My parents still did not have any children when my dad was eighty-six years old. My mom decided they couldn’t wait any longer for God to give them a child. She told my father, “Sleep with my servant, and if she has a baby, it will be mine.”(2) About nine months later, my mom’s servant Hagar gave birth to a baby boy named Ishmael.
Instead of being happy about Ishmael’s birth, my mother became jealous of Hagar. And my parents felt guilty because they had disobeyed God. Instead of trusting Him to provide the son He had promised, they had taken matters into their own hands. As precious as the life of little Ishmael was, he was not the son God had promised them.
Thirteen years later, God again came to my father and said, “By this time next year, your son Isaac will be born – and he will be the son of My promise.”(3)
I was born when my father was one hundred years old. My parents were extremely happy. They praised God for keeping His promise. My father now understood he could trust God to always keep His promises. And that was a lesson my father taught me from an early age.
When I was a teenager, my love for God – and my father’s – was put to the test. God told my father, “Go get Isaac, your son, the one you dearly love! Take him to the land of Moriah, and I will show you a mountain where you must sacrifice him to Me on the fires of an altar.”(4)
So my dad and I, along with our two servants, got up early the next morning and headed to the mountains. We had been traveling for three days when my father told the servants to wait. He and I would go on alone for the rest of our trip. He laid the wood for the burnt offering on my shoulders, and he carried the knife and the flint to make the fire. As we climbed the mountain, I asked him, “We have the wood and the flint to make the fire, but where is the lamb for the sacrifice?”(5)
I had never before seen the look on my dad’s face as he tried to find the right words to say to me. He was trusting God for whatever happened next. So he said, “God Himself will provide one, my son.”(6) I trusted him – and I trusted God – so I didn’t ask any more questions.
The first thing we did when we arrived at the top of the mountain was build an altar. The altar was much like a table. We would use it to offer our sacrifice to God. The sacrifice would be our gift to God. My dad and I made the altar by setting a flat boulder on top of a pile of rocks we gathered. We laid out the wood for the fire on top of the boulder.
When it came time to put the sacrifice on the altar, my dad turned to me. I had watched him tie up the legs of lambs and goats many times when we were preparing a sacrifice. But this time, he began tying up my hands and feet. I didn’t understand why, but I trusted him. I never struggled, even though I could have easily stopped him. After he finished tying me up, he laid me on top of the wood.
Tears were streaming down my father’s cheeks as I looked up into his eyes. He raised a knife over his head like he was going to stab me. Suddenly, an angel of the Lord called out to him saying, “Abraham, Abraham! Don't hurt the boy or do anything to him! Now I know that you honor and obey God, because you have not kept back your only son."(7) Immediately, we saw a male sheep caught by the horns in some bushes nearby. I know the sheep hadn’t been there a moment before!
After my father removed the ropes from my hands and feet, we just stood there holding onto each other. We were so happy! After a while, we offered the sheep as a gift to God. An angel called out for a second time saying, “Because you were willing to offer the Lord your only son, I will bless you and give you more descendants than stars in the sky or grains of sand along the beach. And through them you will be a blessing to all the nations on earth.”(8)
My father had promised that God would provide a lamb – and He had! And one day in the future, God would provide a Lamb as a sacrifice for the world’s sins. But when that day came, the Lamb would be His Son.
My father and I had obeyed God that morning by climbing the mountain. Now as we walked back down, I knew that one day there would be another Father and Son who would climb that hill to offer a sacrifice. And I knew that Son would come as a baby in a very unusual way, just as I had, and He would somehow be a future member of my family.
I will tell my children one day how God kept His promise to my dad and they will tell their children who will pass it on to their children and grandchildren. And the promise of a coming Son will be told from family to family – until the day He arrives.
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More about Isaac
Isaac is often referred to as one of the “patriarchs” of the Israelites. A patriarch is one of the first fathers of a family that becomes a large group of people like the Israelites. When Isaac was an adult, he had two sons – Esau and Jacob. It was through Jacob that the promise of God continued. As a matter of fact, God changed his name from Jacob to Israel. It was through the future generations of Israel that Jesus came to be born as a baby.
You can read about the day Abraham and Isaac climbed to the top of the mountain in Genesis 22:1-19 in the Bible.
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This story is taken from Not Too Little To Know, a collection of ten illustrated short stories written for ages 8 and up for the Advent season. The book is available through Amazon in hard cover, paperback, and for Kindle or Kindle app. It is also available as an audiobook. Click HERE for more information on how you can obtain a copy.
(1) Genesis 12:2-3 (TLB)
(2) Genesis 16:2 (CEV)
(3) Genesis 17:21 (paraphrase)
(4) Genesis 22:2 (CEV)
(5) Genesis 22:7 (TLB)
(6) Genesis 22:8 (GNT)
(7) Genesis 22:11-12 (GNT)
(8) Genesis 22:16-18 (CEV)
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