God of Promise & Possibility
The God of Abraham - Part 2
Sunday, September 10, 2023
Genesis 17:1-20
When Abram was 99 years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am El Shaddai. Walk with me and be trustworthy. I will make a covenant between us and I will give you many, many descendants.”
Genesis 17:1-2
Listen to this Week’s Sermon here:
_______________
God had promised to make Abram into a great nation, that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars, and that through him all nations of the world would be blessed. There was only one problem… Abram and his wife were far too old to have children.
In the ancient near eastern culture, having a male heir was crucial, so Sarai, Abram’s wife, gave her maidservant Hagar to Abram so that she could bear for them the son that she could not have. By the time we get to chapter 17, Abram’s son Ismael is coming of age as a 13 year old young man. We’ll come back to Ishmael & Hagar next week, but for now, it is important to remember that according to their culture, Abram did nothing wrong by having a child with Hagar to be his heir. Though our modern sensibilities consider this immoral, even God does not condemn the morality of Abram and Sarai’s action.
The problem for God, as we see in chapter 17, is not that Abram had a child with his maidservant, but that Ishmael, despite being Abram’s firstborn, is not the child God had promised. For the Biblical writer, it is not a question of morality or even marital faithfulness. It is rather a question of Abram taking God’s promises into his own hands and doing things his own way.
13 years have passed. Abram is 99 years old and preparing his son to one day take responsibility of his great inheritance. Then God shows up and reminds Abram that the promise has not yet been fulfilled.
“What do you mean, God? I have Ishmael. All is well. Why can’t he inherit your promise?”
Next week we’ll see that God does not forsake Ishmael. At the same time, God is working toward a new creation through the faithfulness of Abram’s lineage. Just as God created all things from a formless void and shaped Adam out of the dust of the ground, so God wants to bring forth his people out of the barrenness of Sarai’s womb. This is God’s promise to fulfill, not Abram’s.
The trouble is that while Abram believes God’s promise, he feels he alone is responsible for making it happen. He is not able to comprehend God’s power to bring new life out of barrenness. Abram clings to the rational solutions of the flesh over the seemingly impossible work of the Spirit. He is not trying to be disobedient. Rather, he is trying to obey in the best way he knows how. If God says he must have descendants, Abram made sure that would happen in the only logical way available to him. By verse 17 we find Abram laughing at God. In chapter 18, we’ll see Sarai do the same.
I wonder what might be behind this laugh. Maybe the laugh was simply at the absurdity that he and Sarai should bear children so old, especially given her inability to conceive throughout her life. Maybe the laugh was to keep from crying over his own desperate frustration that all he invested in Ishmael seemed like it was for nothing. Maybe it was just a laugh of “You’ve got to be kidding… Now What?!”
More importantly, I wonder in what ways we are still laughing today as we consider the absurd and impossible promises and possibilities of God for our own life?