“There He has proved beyond any doubt that He will provide” by Sinclair Ferguson
“When I think about the big themes in the Bible, there seems to be no end to them. This week, we’ve been like theological gemologists holding up a precious stone to the light and admiring some of its facets.
In this case, we’ve been mining in Exodus 3, examining the precious jewel buried deep in that chapter: the great name Yahweh, the Lord, I Am, what used to be translated as “Jehovah.”
If your first Bible was a King James Version, you remember that in Genesis there is one place where this name is expanded. It’s expanded into “Jehovah-jireh” in Genesis 22:14:
“And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh [the LORD will provide]”
This took place on Mount Moriah, where Abraham went to offer his son Isaac, the son of the promise, as a sacrifice to God.
The angel of the Lord intervened, and as Abraham turned around, there was a ram caught in the bushes, a divinely provided substitute for his son.
And so he called the place “The LORD will provide.” He must have hardly been able to believe that his own words had been fulfilled.
As they had climbed the mountain, Isaac had said to Abraham, “Father, we have everything we need here for the sacrifice except the sacrifice.”
Abraham had responded, “God Himself will provide a lamb for the sacrifice.” Haunting words.
But if Abraham reflected on this dramatic experience of the angel of the Lord, I wonder if he ever thought, “I told Isaac that the Lord would Himself provide a lamb for the sacrifice, but it was a ram, not a lamb, that He provided.”
Is there something significant in this detail?
Later on, hidden away in 2 Chronicles 3:1, we discover that Mount Moriah was the area where Solomon began to build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem.
It was therefore the area where Jesus spent the last week of His ministry.
It’s where He went through His agony in Gethsemane.
It’s where He was arrested, condemned, crucified, buried, and then wonderfully raised from the dead. Truly, on the mountain of the Lord it came to pass: God did provide for Himself the Lamb.
There on Mount Moriah, on the edge of King David’s city, took place the event that all history had awaited since Abraham had spoken to his son as they climbed the barren wastes of that elevated ground.
There, the words of the greatest of the prophets of the old covenant era, John the Baptist, were fulfilled: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).
Jehovah-jireh, the Lord, will provide the Lamb for the sacrifice.
We began this week by asking what God is like, and we should end it by saying that this is what He is like: He is the God we can trust to provide us with everything we need, because, as Paul says:
“If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Rom. 8:31-32).
May these two words be fixed into our hearts: Jehovah-jireh, the Lord will provide.
And if we want to be sure that He will, we must look nowhere else than to the cross of Jesus Christ, for there He has proved beyond any doubt that He will provide.”
–Sinclair B. Ferguson, Things Unseen: One Year of Reflections on the Christian Life (Sanford, FL: Ligonier, 2024), 87-88.
