Genesis 22

Genesis 22:1:
And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.

Many of the struggles we are soon to face "come to pass." Temptation is the act of tempting or the state of being tempted. In the OT the specific verb indicating the act of tempting is the Piel form nissa. In Gen. 22:1 nissa characterizes God's command to Abraham to offer Isaac as a burnt offering in the land of Moriah. The term nissa is rarely, if ever, applied in the OT to Satan's act of enticing men to sin. An understanding is established between the writer and the reader; we know more than Abraham could have known.

Warren Wiersbe

Living by faith means obeying God’s Word in spite of feelings, circumstances, or consequences. It means holding on to God’s truth no matter how heavy the burden or how dark the day, knowing that He is working out His perfect plan. It means living by promises and not by explanations. --Warren Wiersbe in his Genesis commentary, both in the preface and his comments on Genesis 22:3–5:

Genesis 22:7:
And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?

(1.) It was a very affecting question that Isaac asked him, as they were going together: My father, said Isaac; it was a melting word, which, one would think, would strike deeper into the breast of Abraham than his knife could into the breast of Isaac. He might have said, or thought, at least, “Call me not thy father who am now to be thy murderer; can a father be so barbarous, so perfectly lost to all the tenderness of a father?” Yet he keeps his temper, and keeps his countenance, to admiration; he calmly waits for his son’s question, and this is it: Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb? See how expert Isaac was in the law and custom of sacrifices. This it is to be well-catechised: this is,
[1.] A trying question to Abraham. How could he endure to think that Isaac was himself the lamb? So it is, but Abraham, as yet, dares not tell him so. Where God knows the faith to be armour of proof, he will laugh at the trial of the innocent, Job ix. 23.
[2.] It is a teaching question to us all, that, when we are going to worship God, we should seriously consider whether we have every thing ready, especially the lamb for a burnt-offering. Behold, the fire is ready, the Spirit’s assistance and God’s acceptance; the wood is ready, the instituted ordinances designed to kindle our affections (which indeed, without the Spirit, are but like wood without fire, but the Spirit works by them); all things are now ready, but where is the lamb? Where is the heart? Is that ready to be offered up to God, to ascend to him as a burnt-offering?

(2.) It was a very prudent answer which Abraham gave him: My son, God will provide himself a lamb. This was the language, either,
[1.] Of his obedience. “We must offer the lamb which God has appointed now to be offered;” thus giving him this general rule of submission to the divine will, to prepare him for the application of it to himself very quickly. Or,
[2.] Of his faith. Whether he meant it so or not, this proved to be the meaning of it; a sacrifice was provided instead of Isaac. Thus, First, Christ, the great sacrifice of atonement, was of God’s providing; when none in heaven or earth could have found a lamb for that burnt-offering, God himself found the ransom, Ps. lxxxix. 20. Secondly, All our sacrifices of acknowledgment are of God’s providing too. It is he that prepares the heart, Ps. x. 17. The broken and contrite spirit is a sacrifice of God (Ps. li. 17), of his providing.
- Matthew Henry (1662–1714), Commentary on Genesis 22:7

Genesis 22:9:
And Abraham built an altar....and bound Isaac his son"

It is of no value to God to give Him your life for death. He wants you to be a "living sacrifice" to let Him have all your powers that have been saved and sanctified through Jesus.

Genesis 22:10-16:
10 Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. 11 But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”
“Here I am,” he replied.
12 “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”
13 Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram[a] caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. 14 So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide. And to this day it is said, “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.”
15 The angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven a second time 16 and said, “I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son

It is impossible for us to understand God’s request to Abraham without fast-forwarding in our Bibles to the story of the Exodus from Egypt. In the book of Exodus, God unleashed 10 different plagues upon the Egyptians in response to the king’s rebellious refusal to let God’s people go. The 10th plague is vital to our discussion of Abraham’s test. In the Passover, God called Pharaoh to account for his sins by taking the life of every firstborn son in Egypt whose doorframe was not covered in lamb’s blood. This story in Exodus gives us a framework for understanding Genesis 22. When God instructed Abraham to sacrifice his own son Isaac, Abraham must have known what God was doing. God was calling Abraham to account for the sin in Abraham’s life. It would be Isaac’s life for Abraham’s sin. So instead of focusing on whether God is cruel and abusive, we must first approach Abraham’s test by acknowledging that God is holy and just and that the penalty for sin is death (Rom. 6:23).
Did God ask Abraham to sacrifice Isaac because God is cruel and abusive? No. God had a greater purpose. The further we go in Genesis 22 the more we discover that God’s request was designed to demonstrate not only his holiness and justice, but also his love and compassion. Jewish rabbis have a story they tell about the testing of Abraham’s faith. Tradition says that while Abraham and Isaac were traveling up one side of the mountain, the ram that would take Isaac’s place on the altar was climbing up the other side. God wasn’t asking Abraham to rationally understand God’s request, but instead to radically trust that God would provide, making a way where there was no way (Heb. 11:19).
The beauty of what happened on Mount Moriah is that it prepares us for the cross. The great ascent of Abraham, Isaac, and the ram up Mount Moriah prepares us for the great descent of Christ at Calvary. On the altar of the cross, God’s holiness and justice meet God’s love and compassion. Through the cross, the Bible teaches us, “the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23). Genesis 22 should not cause us to question God’s goodness; the paradox is designed to teach us how to walk by faith on our way to paradise. -Banner

Genesis 22:17:
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;

This prediction appears in the Lord's word of promise to Abraham in response to his faith and obedience in being willing to follow the Lord's command to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. In context, this prophecy is part of the comprehensive plan for the seed of Abraham: Abraham's seed shall multiply and be as the stars of heaven in number; Abraham's seed will be the means of blessing to all nations of the earth.
The Hebrew word for "possess" (yarash) means to take, to take possession of, to inherit, dispossess, or to occupy. The word was commonly used in reference to Israel's possession of the land of Canaan by conquering the inhabitants and occupying their land (Dt 31:3). The specific object to be possessed in this prediction is the gate of their enemies. The word "gate" is filled with significance in the Old Testament. The gate was important for war, commerce, and civil government. In war, if one could penetrate the gates of a city, his victory was virtually assured; control of the gates determined the outcome of the conflict. In commerce, those who controlled the gates determined who could and who could not enter the city to do business. In civil government, the gate was the place where the elders and rulers of the people would sit to hold court and carry out the other aspects of civil ruling. Therefore, to "possess" the gate" of your enemy is to conquer him and take control of his city, commerce, and civil government. In the New Testament perspective, it promises the church complete dominion over the heathen and possession of all the nations of the earth, i.e., all nations will be conquered by the gospel of Christ and be discipled in the Christian faith. Believers in Jesus Christ will dispossess the enemies of God and control the "gate" in all nations.