What Does Genesis 22:7 Mean?

Abraham 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 instruction to the servants, "we will worship and then we will come back to you", uses the plural "we will come back." He is not deceiving the servants about what he intends; he is speaking faith as present reality. The patriarch commissioned to offer his son as a burnt offering tells the servants that both of them will return. The statement is not made with certainty about how it will be accomplished; it is made with certainty that the God who gave the son will not permanently take him.

Hebrews 11:17-19 is the New Testament's commentary on this verse: "Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had embraced 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 even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death." The "we will come back" is not a deception; it is Abraham's expectation of resurrection, the first recorded resurrection faith in the biblical canon.

The plural statement, "we will come back", anticipates every subsequent biblical declaration of resurrection confidence. Jesus's "I will rise on the third day" is the ultimate form of the same faith: the declaration of return from a death-pointing situation before the mechanism of that return is visible to anyone. Abraham did not know about the Ram in the thicket; Jesus knew about the resurrection, but the disciples did not. In both cases, the declaration of return is made in faith before the means of it is visible to the observers who hear it.