Chapter 3: World's Only Innocent Man (Who are the "Israel of God?")

By Hazel Holland

The fact that Isaac continued to believe and trust God as his father did is revealed in Isaac’s demonstration of faith when he found out that God had asked Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice. Isaac knew that God had told Abraham that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through him. Ishmael, Abraham’s first born son, had been sent away because he was not the child through whom the promised Seed would come. So all God’s promises to Abraham depended on Isaac, didn’t they?

Even though Isaac didn’t understand God’s request, he didn’t try to resist his father Abraham by trying to figure out some alternate plan to save himself. Instead, he trusted himself to God. He placed his faith in his father’s God, and obeyed. Isaac must have “reasoned” like his father did that since Abraham and Sarah were “dead” with respect to child-bearing, then God gave life from death in his conception and birth. If God could bring him into existence from the “dead”, then surely God could raise him back to life again after he was offered up to God as a sacrifice. The following verses reveal Abraham’s reasoning faith.

“By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had received the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death” Hebrews 1:17-19 (NASB).

We all know the rest of the story. God stopped Abraham from offering his son because God didn’t want Abraham’s son, He wanted Abraham’s heart. God wanted to give Abraham His heart for the nations. He wanted Abraham to enter into the most precious things that were on God’s heart. In the same way that God wanted Abraham’s heart, He wants your heart and my heart.

Let’s remember that Abraham didn’t have the benefit of God's revelation to Moses and the Old Testament prophets when God asked him to sacrifice Isaac. All he knew was that child sacrifice was practiced by some of the Canaanites, and so he had no option but to believe that God required that he sacrifice his son. So why did God put Abraham through this severest of tests when God condemned child sacrifice in the first place? (Deuteronomy 12:31)

I believe God gave Abraham this test because this “acted out prophecy” would announce to the world in type and shadow the unimaginable thing that God had planned to do from the creation of the world! God would offer up His Son (the promised Seed), whom He loves on the cross, “as a Lamb that only He can provide, to accomplish what only He can accomplish”—to take away the sin of the world (http://www.jesuswalk.com/abraham/10_sacrifice.htm).

Innocent Blood

The New Testament further clarifies for us the lessons that the Old Testament sacrificial system was supposed to teach us in types and shadows. The main lesson was that the shedding of innocent blood was required for the remission of sin. However, although the animals sacrificed as sin offerings were innocent, their blood wasn’t sufficient for the remission of our sins. The blood of those innocent animals only allowed man’s sin to be set aside until the world’s Only Innocent Man would die for the sins of the world.

An animal couldn’t die in the place of a human being—it had to be like for like, a Man for mankind. That’s why an angel couldn’t die for the human race because angels are a different order of being. Man was created in God’s likeness, angels were not. So God chose to come in the likeness of human flesh and be born of a woman. What humility! What unimaginable love! Remember the Scripture we read earlier in chapter one of this study? “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive” 1 Corinthians 15:22 (NASB).

The reason that Christ’s suffering and death was sufficient for the remission of our sins is because He didn’t have any sins of His own to pay for. He was innocent. For that very reason, no amount of good works on our part can ever redeem us because we are not innocent. We lost our innocence when Adam and Eve sinned. As a result of the Fall their sinful human nature got passed down to us. That’s why Jesus had to die in our place, because Jesus is God’s only remedy for sin.

The truth of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ now becomes crystal clear. Not one of us will go to hell because of our sins, but because we rejected Jesus Christ, God’s sole remedy for sin. What becomes even more apparent to me now is that the “conditional” view of hell that I grew up with in Adventism is actually the mirror image of works-based salvation! Why? For the reason that this false teaching supposes that the fewer the bad works we have on our record here, the lighter will be our punishment there!

I must hasten to add that this false doctrine presumes to further teach us that after we have suffered for an unspecified period of time in hell (depending on the amount and degree of our sins), we will then be annihilated. That might sound comforting to those who prefer to believe that when their lives end here they are going to be just as if they had never been. But that isn’t what the Scriptures teach. Every man is given a choice. The final destiny of each one of us is either heaven or hell.

By rejecting God’s only remedy for sin we have only our own works to offer as a remedy for sin. However, even our most honorable and good works are considered by God as filthy rags! Why? Because they are tainted by sin! Nothing in us or anything that comes from us is free from the curse of sin. Furthermore, not even eternal punishment can redeem us from sin that is why the punishment for not believing in the One He has sent, is eternal.

But the Scriptures teach us plainly that the only work God requires of us to be saved is to believe in the one He sent (John 6:28-29). If that’s all God requires of us, then that’s all He can judge us on! Since there are no degrees of belief (either we do believe God or we don’t), our choice of eternal life or eternal punishment is based on who we will believe.1 Will you believe God’s remedy for your sin right now and choose to believe in the one He sent?

We know that the Scriptures tell us that Abraham believed God. Abraham believed in the promised Seed to come. He knew that no amount of good works on his part could ever redeem him from his sins because he was not innocent. Through this awful experience of being asked by God to give up his son, God put into Abraham the heart of a Father who had lost His Son! For the Scriptures tell us that Jesus Christ was the “Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world” (Revelation 13:8).

In view of the fact that Abraham was called to be the father of many nations, God wanted to give him the “Father’s heart”. Unless God had put him through this severest of tests I believe that Abraham could never have understood God’s heart of love for the nations—Abraham’s spiritual sons and daughters. Perhaps Abraham's anguish and resolve to be obedient to God’s request in spite of the cost can help us understand in some small way God’s love for us all and his determination to save us, no matter the cost.

1 http://gracethrufaith.com/ask-a-bible-teacher/more-on-conditional-hell/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Gracethrufaith+%28GraceThruFaith%29

(Next: Chapter 4: Go here.