Genesis 22:17-19

"That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heavens, and as the sand which is upon the seashore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice. So Abraham returned unto his young men, and they rose up and went together to Beersheba: and Abraham dwelt at Beersheba."

"Stars of the heavens ... the sand which is upon the seashore ..." Morris did an extended calculation on this, concluding that: "An estimated number of the stars Isaiah 10^25 and likewise, the number of grains of sand on the earth, allowing 10,000,000 to a cubic foot, and 10^15 for the square feet of earth's surface makes the estimated number of grains of sand exactly the same, :10^25!"[23] Neither of such remarkable numbers was known to the ancients; and thus, "This is an excellent example of scientific truth found in the Bible long before scientists, by other means, learned that the two metaphors are essentially identical!

"Seed ..." as used first here therefore means an innumerable multitude; but "seed" as used in the last clause of Genesis 22:18 is the "Seed Singular." Note the singular pronoun. How futile are the devices by which critics apply this in the plural sense, meaning Abraham's fleshly descendants. Do they not know that the totality of Northern Israel was carried away forever by their enemies; and that again and again Southern Israel was defeated and carried to captivity, and finally completely obliterated by Titus and Vespasian in A.D. 70, and that even today, the Jews do not possess the cities of their enemies? Why make God prophesy a lie, by reading "seed" in this second recurrence of the term as plural also? Only "in Christ" did the seed of Abraham ever actually "possess the gate of his enemies." Most of the commentators miss this, but Unger discerned it accurately: "This expanded blessing centered in Christ, the coming seed (Galatians 3:16)."[24]

Isaac was one of the great O.T. types of Jesus Christ, and we shall discuss that aspect of this chapter after Genesis 22:24. As Leupold said, "The proper exposition of this chapter must point to the type that is involved. Such necessarily belongs to the exposition."[25]