What Does Genesis 22:5 Mean?

He said to his servants, "Stay here with the Donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you." Abraham's statement to the servants, "we will come back to you", uses the first-person plural: both he and Isaac will return. Hebrews 11:19 interprets this statement as the expression of Abraham's faith: he reasoned that God could raise Isaac from the dead if necessary in order to keep the covenant promise. The factual content of "we will come back" is the patriarch's faith that the God who demanded this is the God who can resolve it without permanent loss of the covenant heir.

The leaving of the servants at the foot of the mountain is the separation of the path into its stages: the donkey path from home to the mountain base, the foot path from the mountain base to the summit with only father and son. The servants see the preparation, the wood, the fire, and then Abraham and Isaac go up together to the place where the decisive event will occur away from all witnesses. What happens on the mountain is between Abraham, Isaac, and God.

The phrase "we will worship and then we will come back" identifies the intended sacrifice as an act of worship, not execution. The entire event is framed as a worship act from the patriarch's side. Jesus described His coming death using the same framing: "No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord" (John 10:18). Both Abraham's offering of Isaac and Christ's offering of Himself are acts of worship, voluntary, costly, directed wholly at the Father, rather than impositions from outside. The worship frame determines the nature of the event.