God tests Abraham on Mount Moriah: take your only son Isaac, whom you love, and offer him. Abraham goes, Isaac carries the wood, a ram is provided in his place, and the place is named “the Lord will provide.” That mountain runs through the rest of Scripture and history—David’s threshing floor, Solomon’s temple, exile, the second temple, Herod, the destruction in 70 AD, and the Dome of the Rock that still stands there. Yet Jesus was not crucified on Moriah. Golgotha, the place of the skull, is not the temple mount. It lies to the east, on the Mount of Olives: the direction of exile and curse, the place associated with Goliath’s head, where the centurion could see the temple veil torn in two. Isaac’s story points to Christ—the beloved only Son, three days, the wood on His back, the substitute, the thorns, blessing for the nations—but the cross had to be east of Moriah. There Jesus became a curse for us so that worship would no longer be tied to one mountain, but offered in spirit and in truth throughout the world. Forgiveness is not another trip to Moriah with another sacrifice of guilt, pity, or performance. It is union with the one perfect offering of Christ. God does not give us the wrath we deserve; He gives us what His Son deserves. That does not license sin. It calls us to stop trusting repeated self-offerings, to confess that we cannot defeat sin on our own, to seek and extend real forgiveness, and to walk as those already washed clean in Jesus.
