MORNING MESSAGE: John Cline
Genesis 21 and Galatians 4
Have you stumbled across that horrible American reality tv programme ‘The Maury Povich Show’? On it, women who have slept with a variety of men but have no certainty about who the father of their child is, come on, dragging with them the most likely candidate for father and having him take a paternity test, the result of which is made known at show’s end when Maury holds up the results of the paternity test and declares to the man, addressing him by name, “You are – or “You are not” – the father!” Absolutely painful! Please, never waste another minute of your life watching that show! Well, today, we are going to look at two lads, Ishmael and Isaac, who had the same father – Abraham – but different mothers, Hagar for Ishmael, and Sarah for Isaac. The question the Biblical New Testament writers picking up in this Old Testament story, pose to us is “Which of those is your mother? Hagar or Sarah?” I will explain that in a few minutes but first I have to set the scene for that question.
A great suspense has been building ever since December 15th when we read from the end of Genesis 11 that Abraham and his family left their home in Ur of the Chaldeans to move to Canaan, but Genesis 11 didn’t tell us why Abraham and family had moved. In the next chapter, Genesis 12, though, the reason for the move was revealed to us:
The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”(Genesis 12:1-3)
In the following chapters – 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 – more details about this covenantal promise of God are revealed, leading to the final reveal in chapter 18, that being that Abraham would be the father and Sarah the mother of the “child of promise” through whom blessings would flow to the entire world. That process took almost 25 years to be realized, an excruciatingly long time to wait, a delay that led Sarah to come up with a plan which Abraham agreed to, presenting her Egyptian handmaiden, Hagar, who was Sarah’s bond servant, essentially an economic slave, Hagar, to Abraham to be the surrogate whom Abraham could maybe impregnate and through whom the “child of promise” would thus be born. The birth of Ishmael was the result.
But God was not supportive of this “fleshly” planning, as His covenantal plan did not involve a son born of desperation, of impatience, “of the flesh” (as Ishmael was called), but another boy who would be born “of the promise”. His name would be Isaac.
Following that big reveal in chapter 18 – “Sarah, you are the mother!” – were some painful events we have preached through in recent weeks, specifically, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and then Abraham lying to a foreign king to protect his life (which turned out to be the second time Abraham had done such a thing). But today, finally, we have reached the point in our successive preaching through of the chapters of Genesis wherein the birth of the promised child happens. It took 25 years in the lives of Abraham and Sarah to come about (a very long period of time that many of you, no doubt) have similarly felt you have been experiencing as I have laboriously droned on, preaching through chapter after chapter) but I trust you would agree that, if we are going to preach through the Bible as we have been doing for 16 years so far, well, we would have been cheating if we had skipped over any of those intervening chapters. In any case, our suspense and waiting has come to an end! So, we read,
Now the Lord was gracious to Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised. (Genesis 21:1)
God fulfilled His promise to Abraham and Sarah with the birth of Isaac, just as this verse states, “as he had said”. Those powerful four words we can take as an assurance. Though it took 25 years, God was faithful to His promise. Now, some promises of God are conditional, dependent upon human actions. But other promises of God are unconditional, meaning God will fulfill them not because of what humans do, but because of who He is. This promise was unconditional. It was all on God and dependent on God being faithful to His promise.
Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the very time God had promised him. (Genesis 21:2)
“As he had said” – a remarkable four words in verse 1 were then followed in verse 2 by four more remarkable words: “at the very time” that God had promised. That is when Isaac’s birth occurred. That phraseology, “at the very time” referred to the time the three angels had one year earlier visited Abraham and Sarah and informed them that, one year hence, Isaac would be born to them. The conclusion we can come to through that event is that God’s timing – we are all loath to admit whenever we are having to wait for Him to act – is “perfect”.
Abraham gave the name Isaacto the son Sarah bore him. When his son Isaac was eight days old, Abraham circumcised him, as God commanded him. Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. Sarah said, “God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.” And she added, “Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.” (Gen. 21:3-7)
The child was named Isaac, a name that meant “laughter”. Originally, the name “Isaac” was meant as something of a rebuke of the laughter of Abraham and Sarah, but God turned a gentle rebuke into an occasion for joy. What happened next, though, was no laughing matter.
The child grew and was weaned, and on the day Isaac was weaned Abraham held a great feast. But Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham was mocking, and she said to Abraham, “Get rid of that bond woman and her son, for that woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.” The matter distressed Abraham greatly because it concerned his son. (Genesis 21:8-11)
For fourteen years since the birth of Ishmael there had been some manner of peace in the household of Abraham, mainly because Abraham loved his son Ishmael. But with the birth of Isaac, tensions were now high. You can understand why. Ishmael now was a surly teenager, old enough to know, in the minds of his mother Hagar and probably some others, that, though he had been slated to be the heir of Abraham, with the birth of Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah, he/Ishmael had been displaced as the heir of God’s covenantal blessings. Proud and hurting, Ishmael does not conceal his chagrin, engaging in mockery and insults of Isaac. But Sarah sees this, and she immediately demands that Abraham drive out Hagar and Ishmael. But because he loves his first-born son Ishmael, Abraham finds it hard to agree to Sarah’s demand. However, Sarah declares, “That woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.” Abraham knows that those words were first said by God, thus he reluctantly agrees. The issue of the motherhoods for Isaac and Ishmael was thus laid out.
In his letter to the church in Galatia, an area in today’s Turkiye, the Apostle Paul extrapolated on this issue and used it to address the legalism that had entered into the Galatian church when a group of Pharisaical Jews (who had converted to Christianity) had gone to the Galatian church and stated that the Gentile Christians of that church needed to be circumcised, a position Paul and every other Christian leader disagreed with (see the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15). Paul said that those pushing for mandatory circumcision were “born of the flesh” as Ishmael had been, while those who had been accepted by the Lord simply on the basis of putting their trust in Jesus Christ were “born of the promise” just as Isaac had been. Paul writes,
For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman. His son by the slave woman was born according to the flesh, but his son by the free woman was born as the result of a divine promise…Now you, brothers and sisters, like Isaac, are children of promise. At that time the son born according to the flesh persecuted the son born by the power of the Spirit. It is the same now. But what does Scripture say? “Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman’s son.” Therefore, brothers and sisters, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. (Galatians 4:22,23,28-31,5:1)
Paul, while asserting that all believers were “children of Abraham”, a relationship established in a shared faith in God and the righteousness imputed to every believer through that faith, a faith that Abraham had, claimed that the question was not, “Who is your father?” but “Who is your mother?” Sarah or Hagar?” As Christians, do we live according to “the flesh”, trying to figure things out on our own or through our own plans and devices, just as had been the case when Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar cooked up a plan to force God’s hand in providing a son for the covenant, or do we live “according to the promise”, simply believing in God and putting our trust fully in Him as Abraham and Sarah later did?
Life lived “through the promise”, as a child of Sarah, brings freedom to us. Life lived according “to the flesh” brings about enslavement, not to another person but enslavement to sin and its effects. Jesus declared that if he brought freedom to a person, they would “be free, indeed”, meaning that Jesus has put us in the position where, through faith in him, we can choose to live in his freedom, or choose to live according to “the flesh”, but doing that would result in misery and, ironically enough, enslavement. We can now choose whether or not to sin. The apostle Paul says, “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” (Galatians 5:24) God wants us to be ruthless with “the flesh”. We must strive to live in full trust of Jesus, not trusting in our own ways and schemes. Therefore, Sarah’s demand to Abraham to “cast out this bondwoman and her son” was a prefiguring of the future decision every human being would be faced with. We must cast out living according to “the flesh” and embrace living according to “the promise. Returning now to Genesis 21, Abraham reluctantly agrees to Sarah’s demands as God speaks to him.
But God said to him, “Do not be so distressed about the boy and your slave woman. Listen to whatever Sarah tells you, because it is through Isaac that your offspringwill be reckoned. I will make the son of the slave into a nation also, because he is your offspring.” Early the next morning Abraham took some food and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar. He set them on her shoulders and then sent her off with the boy. She went on her way and wandered in the Desert of Beersheba. (Gen. 21:12-14)
“Listen to whatever Sarah tells you.” Sarah knew that it would be through Isaac that the covenantal blessings of God would go to the world. Sarah’s words sounded harsh – heck, they were harsh – but God reminded Abraham that Sarah was echoing God’s own proclamation. God had set His heart and His covenant on Isaac and not on Ishmael. There’s no question that bidding farewell to Ishmael had been incredibly painful for Abraham. But, again, it was something he had brought on himself through his sinful deviation from God’s will, by acting not according to “the promise” but according to “the flesh” when he agreed to Sarah’s plan. Although people sometimes purpose to do a thing but then lose interest or change their minds or not follow through for whatever reason, God is always faithful to accomplish His purposes—just as we will see as we see in just a moment as we read about how God interacted with Hagar and Ishmael.
We moderns have trouble believing that God would choose one and not the other, never stopping to think about God’s ability to foresee the future or to consider the foreknowledge He had that led him to choose only one certain family line and people who would preserve His Word, survive the centuries, detailing the family line, descendent by descendent, and would do so all the way down to the birth of the Messiah, His Son, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. But God deciding all that did not mean that He abandoned Hagar or Ishmael. Not at all. God’s love for them was so great that, in the short-term, He provided for Hagar and Ishmael in their desert wanderings, while in the long-term, He would make Ishmael into a great nation, which he did when Ishmael became the father of all Arabic peoples, a great “nation” as it were. Friends, just as God promised to take care of Hagar and Ishmael, He has also promised so many times in the Bible to take care of us, of me, of you.
When the water in the skin was gone, she put the boy under one of the bushes. Then she went off and sat down about a bowshot away, for she thought, “I cannot watch the boy die.” And as she sat there, shebegan to sob. God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid; God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation.” Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. So, she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink. God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer. While he was living in the Desert of Paran, his mother got a wife for him from Egypt. (Genesis 21:15-21)
God will take care of you! God preserved Ishmael and Hagar in the desert. This incident reminds me of Psalm 34:18, which says that “The Lord is near to the broken-hearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” The water in the skin that Abraham had supplied was used up: As Hagar and Ishmael traveled away from Abraham, their supplies eventually ran out, but God provided something better for them, a well flowing with plentiful water. Listening to their cries of distress, God not only responded but He also made clear that He was for them, showing special favor to Ishmael because he was a descendant of Abraham, promising to bless Ishmael and make him into a great nation, even though all that was all done separately from how God interacted with Isaac. God’s love and care for Ishmael and Hagar didn’t change the fact that He was determined to accomplish his purpose through Isaac. In closing, what we have seen today is:
1. That God is faithful to His promises.
2. That He loves people even when they stray.
3. That He takes care of people who are mistreated and forced out in our society.
4. That He calls us to live as people of “the promise” and not as people of “the flesh”.
Abraham may be our father in faith, due to our placing of our trust in Jesus Christ, but the real issue is, “Who is our mother? Hagar or Sarah?” May we choose Sarah! Amen.
