There is a particular quality to the Lenten road. It is not like ordinary time. We know where it ends. The cross is not a surprise for those who walk toward Holy Week with open eyes — it is the destination, announced long before we arrive.
And so it is perhaps inevitable that, in this season, the mind wanders toward Genesis 22.
The three-day journey to Moriah. The only son, carried on his own back the wood for the offering. The altar built in silence. The knife raised. And then, at the last moment, a ram — caught in a thicket, its head enshrouded in thorns — given in the place of the son who was bound.
Even the geography speaks. Moriah would become Jerusalem. It would be outside those very gates, centuries later, that the Only Son of God would be offered — his head not merely brushed by thorns, but crowned with them. The author of Scripture is not subtle about this. He is orchestrating. He is drawing a line across the centuries with the precision of one who knows exactly where it ends.
Genesis 22 is arguably the most Christological chapter of the Old Testament. The parallels are not incidental. They are intentional, woven by the God who inhabits all of time and determined, before the foundation of the world, to give His Son for us.
But the shadow begins even earlier than we tend to look.
To find it, we need to go back to Genesis 12.
The opening chapters of Genesis trace a widening catastrophe. Creation. The fall. Cain and Abel. The flood. And then Babel — the definitive fracturing of humanity, scattered across the earth with divided languages and broken communion. The world that God made for fellowship has become a world of fragments.
And then, without ceremony or elaborate introduction, the narrative zooms in.
“Now the LORD said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.'” — Genesis 12:1 (ESV)
Out of the silence of a shattered world, God speaks to one man. Not a king, not a priest, not a figure of obvious consequence. An old man in Ur of the Chaldeans, with a barren wife and no heir. The call is abrupt, precise, and costly.
Leave your country. Leave your kindred. Leave your father’s house.
These are not incidental losses. They represent the three concentric rings of ancient security: the nation, the clan, and the household. To leave all three simultaneously was not merely relocation. It was the surrender of every structure that protected and identified a person in the ancient world. No social standing. No tribal network. No family safety net. God was not asking Abram to adjust his life. He was asking him to give it up entirely and walk toward something he could not yet see.
Abram is given no map. He is given no named destination — only the promise of a land that I will show you. And then the text does something quietly staggering:
“So Abram went.” — Genesis 12:4 (ESV)
Three words. No recorded deliberation. No negotiation. No request for clarification. The writer of Hebrews, looking back across the centuries, names what this moment truly was:
“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.” — Hebrews 11:8 (ESV)
Not knowing where he was going. This is the nature of the obedience on display in Genesis 12. It is not the obedience of a man who has calculated the odds and found them favorable. It is not the obedience of certainty. It is the obedience of one who trusts the voice more than he requires the destination.
When Abram arrives in Canaan, the land God has called him toward, the text offers a detail that is easy to read past:
“Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land.” — Genesis 12:6 (ESV)
At that time the Canaanites were in the land.
God has not led Abram to an empty country, cleared and prepared and waiting. He has led him into contested ground. The promise and the obstacle arrive together. The land that would belong to his descendants is currently occupied by someone else entirely. Abram plants his tent not in safety, but in the middle of enemy territory — a sojourner with a promise that looks, from the outside, like nothing at all.
And yet he builds an altar there. He worships in the middle of the contested land. This is the shape of obedient faith: to receive the promise and the difficulty in the same moment, and to build an altar anyway.
As we walk the Lenten road, this is where I find myself arrested.
Because Abram’s obedience is not the point. It is the pattern — the silhouette that the light of the gospel is projected through to show us something greater.
Jesus was called by the Father before the foundation of the world. He was there at the beginning, present at creation, the one through whom all things were made (John 1:3, ESV). And He knew — fully, completely, without the mercy of uncertainty — the nature of what the Father’s call would require.
He too left the security of the Father’s house. He too came as a stranger to foreign ground. He too entered enemy-occupied territory — the domain of Satan, the one He himself would name “the ruler of this world” (John 12:31; John 14:30, ESV). The earth remained His — it had never ceased to be His — but it had been yielded to the enemy for a season, groaning under a borrowed dominion it was never designed to bear. The Cross would be the moment that dominion broke. The crescendo, where death itself was swallowed in victory.
Here is the weight of the comparison: Abram went out not knowing where he was going. Jesus went out knowing exactly what lay ahead. Every detail of the road was visible to Him. The garden. The betrayal. The trial. The thorns. The wood He would carry on His own back to the place of the offering.
He went anyway.
If Abram’s obedience is remarkable — and it is — then what word is adequate for this?
This is the road we are on in Lent.
We walk it knowing the destination: the cross outside Jerusalem, on the hill that looms over the valley of Moriah. We walk toward the place where the only Son was offered — not a ram caught in a thicket, but the Son Himself, delivered into the hands He had formed from dust. His head not caught in thorns but crowned with them. The three-day journey not toward a mountain altar, but through death, into the silence of Holy Saturday, and out the other side of an empty tomb.
Abram planted his tent in Canaan and built an altar in contested ground because the one who called him was trustworthy. Christ walked the road to Jerusalem and did not turn back because the Father’s plan was good, and because the joy set before Him — the restoration of all that had been broken, the return of the communion shattered in Eden — was worth the cost of the road.
We follow the one who modeled obedience in its most perfect form. Not the obedience of one who did not know the cost, but the obedience of one who knew it fully — and said yes.
From one man He made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us. Acts 17:26-27