When we checked in at the airport for our flight to Israel several years ago, we had to show our passports. They wanted a solid photo ID to prove we were who we said we were. The airlines won’t take us at our word. They want to see some proof. When we landed in Israel, they wanted to see them again. It was the photo ID that would validate who we were. The religious leaders in Jesus’ day understood His claims and they asked for proof. They clearly understood Jesus’ claim to be God and they wanted a photo ID of sort. They asked him for signs and wonders. They wanted something they could see. But even when they got them, they didn’t believe Him. But Jesus’ best answer to them to prove who He was came in John 5:46. He told them that His portrait, photo ID, was on every page of the Old Testament and especially in the books of Moses. He said, “if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote about me.” He was pointing out to the religious scholars that the book they swore by was all about Him. It was his “photo ID.”
If you study Genesis with this in mind you will find Jesus on every page! The Old Testament truly is Jesus “photo ID.” You find Jesus in creation, in the fall, in the flood, even at Babel, and in Abraham’s call. But one of the clearest photos of Jesus is seen in the life of Isaac, the promised seed of Abraham. Isaac is a prototype of Jesus in too many ways to cover in this short devotional thought. Nearly everything about Isaac is really pointing to Jesus Christ. Isaac was the promised seed of the woman as was Jesus. A miracle birth to a 90 year old woman sets the stage for the miracle birth of a virgin according to Old Testament prophecies.
But the most beautiful observation about the two is that both Isaac and Jesus had fathers who were willing to sacrifice their sons “on a hill far away.” The hill was named in Genesis 22:14. It’s Mount Moriah. That verse says that Abraham named that mountain a more meaningful name. It says, “So Abraham called the name of that place, ‘The LORD will provide’; as it is said to this day, ‘On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided.’” According to 2 Chronicles 3:1, Mount Moriah is in Jerusalem. The range of mountains where Abraham built his altar would later become the very spot where Christ would die for the sins of the world. That’s why Genesis 22 keeps emphasizing the particular site of the mountain chosen by God (vv. 2, 3, 9, 14). “In the Mount of the LORD it shall be provided.” Two millennia later and two millennia ago, God became a man, went to the cross, and there, shedding His blood, bridged the gulf between His own holiness on the one hand, and you and I on the other. On the mountain of the Lord, it was provided. What was provided? The only photo ID that will admit us into the Kingdom of God – Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.