“15 God also said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her Sarai; her name will be Sarah. 16 I will bless her and will surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.”
17 Abraham fell facedown; he laughed and said to himself, “Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?” 18 And Abraham said to God, “If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!”
19 Then God said, “Yes, but your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will call him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him. 20 And as for Ishmael, I have heard you: I will surely bless him; I will make him fruitful and will greatly increase his numbers. He will be the father of twelve rulers, and I will make him into a great nation. 21 But my covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah will bear to you by this time next year.” 22 When he had finished speaking with Abraham, God went up from him. ”
“I’ll pick up supper on the way home from Sioux Falls.” My guess is that a good number of us have said those words at some point, “I’ll pick up supper on the way home from Sioux Falls.” When you said those words, you generated some excitement. It’s fun to get take-out.
But what happened when you got home? When you got home, you disappointed somebody. You picked up Jimmy John’s; someone expected pizza. You picked up Chinese; someone expected Culver’s.
You did what you promised, but your keeping of that promise did not meet someone’s expectations. Was it your responsibility to meet that person’s expectations? Of course not. It was your responsibility to do what you promised.
The same goes with our expectations and the promises of God. God makes promises, but He is under no obligation to keep them the way that we expect. He has His own plan. We must live by the promises as God plans to keep them, not the promises as we expect God should keep them. We might expect that the promise of all things working to our good means this job, or that healing, or a certain future for our children, but He promised that all things will work for the good of those who love Him, and He might have other plans to work that good. The people of faith live by the promises as God plans to keep them, not the promises as we expect God should keep them. Don’t put faith in the promises as you expect they will go. Put your faith in the promises as God has planned they will go. That is the claim of this sermon: Don’t put faith in the promises as you expect they will go. Put your faith in the promises as God has planned they will go.
We see this in two points. First: the promises and Sarai. Second: the promises and Ishmael. Abraham has expectations about the promises and Sarai, and he has expectations about the promises and Ishmael. His expectations do not match God’s plan to keep the promises. In verses 15-17, we study the promises and Sarai. In verses 18-22, we study the promises and Ishmael.
First: the promises and Sarai. As we’ve seen over the past two weeks, this conversation recorded in Genesis 17 takes place thirteen years after Sarai told Abraham, “The Lord has kept me from having children.” Nothing that has happened in those intervening years would lead either Abraham or Sarai to question that conclusion. Abraham believed God’s promise about descendants, but he thought that promise had nothing to do with Sarai. Hagar had already given him Ishmael. He already had descendants. That is what makes God’s words in verse 15 so unexpected, ‘God also said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her Sarai; her name will be Sarah. I will bless her and will surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.”’
These are many of the same promises given to Abraham. God promised to bless Abram. God promised to bless Sarai. God promised that Abram would have a son. God promised that Sarai would have a son. God promised to make Abram the father of many nations. God promised to make Sarai the mother of many nations. God promised that kings would come from Abram. God promised that kings would come from Sarai. God renamed Abram “Abraham” to confirm these promises. God renamed Sarai “Sarah” to confirm these promises. God would keep the promises through Sraah, not according to Abraham’s expectations.
Now when you come with Jimmy John’s when your child expected pizza, you might hear, “ewwww.” When God told Abraham that the promises had everything to do with Sarah, He heard laughter; verse 17, ‘Abraham fell facedown; he laughed and said to himself, “Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?”
The idea of a ninety-year-old woman having a baby is funny. When we were in Worthington, I preached through Hebrews 11. After the sermon on the faith of Sarah and her having a child at the age of ninety, a ninety-year-old woman in the congregation grabbed one of the elders after our worship and said, “that won’t be happening with me any time soon” That’s funny. It’s funny because ninety-year-old women don’t have children, but, of course, there is more going on in this laughter of Abraham than mere humor. There is disbelief. As Abraham himself put it, “Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?”
This is a laugh of disbelief. God’s word gives us an honest picture of humanity. Abraham laughed at God’s plan to keep His promises. Abraham wasn’t perfect; neither are any of us, and yet God worked powerfully through this man who laughed at some of His promises, and we can trust that He can work through people like us.
The Bible is honest about its people. Be honest about yourself. There is so much pretending in church. We pretend we are what we think we should be. Jesus never had much patience for that, and you don’t see any of that in Scripture’s presentation of Abraham.
Abraham laughed because God’s promise seemed impossible, but what seemed impossible to Abraham was not impossible to God. You see a hint of that in the way in which God introduced Himself at the beginning of these promises back in verse 1 of chapter 17. He said, “I am God Almighty,” or, “I am El-Shaddai.” The name “El-Shaddai” is commonly thought to mean, “He who is sufficient.” God promises the impossible, but He is sufficient to do the impossible.
Now we need to be careful here because God is not in the business of doing the impossible for its own sake. He is in the sake of doing the impossible for the sake of keeping His promises.
We want God to do the impossible to prove Himself. I remember standing on the shore of Lake Michigan thinking to myself, “God, if you are real, let me levitate. Levitating is impossible, but, after all, with You all things are possible, and if I do the impossible, I will always trust you.” I didn’t levitate. God didn’t do the impossible in that moment. Why should He? He didn’t promise to do that.
There are too many people who have walked away from God because He hasn’t done the impossible on their terms. They say, ‘my dad needed a miracle; where was this God who can do the impossible then?’ Beware of this god who does the impossible simply because it’s impossible. He isn’t the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is all about keeping promises. That imaginary god is all about wish fulfillment.
God’s promise to Abraham involved Him doing the impossible and Abraham laughed. God gently, but firmly, corrected him; the adversative in verse 19 is rather strong in the Hebrew. God was clearly correcting Abraham; “yes, but your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will call him Isaac.”
The tone of that sentence corrected Abraham’s laughter as did the name of this unborn son. The name Isaac means, “laughter.” Every time Abraham called that boy in for dinner, he would remember that God was indeed sufficient to do what he thought was laughable. God didn’t do that to shame Abraham. He did that to remind Abraham that He was sufficient. He was El-Shaddai. Abraham would need such reminders.
You need such reminders. My guess is that many of you have them. You have Bible verses stenciled on the walls of your homes to remind you that God keeps His promises just as Isaac’s name reminded Abraham that God kept promises. You have friends who aren’t merely Christian but who remind you with words that God keeps promises. You are in Bible studies because you know that you need such reminders that God is sufficient to keep His promises. That really is the question of life isn’t it—is God sufficient to keep His promises?
God proved His sufficiency to keep promises by opening Sarah’s womb. Opening impossible wombs is something of an obsession in Scripture. You’ve got Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, Elizabeth, and others. Why? Why this regular focus on God opening wombs? Well, childbearing is an emotional and deeply personal matter, and so it stands to reason that a book as relevant as the Bible would deal with it, but that doesn’t fully explain this continued preoccupation with God opening closed wombs. Mary does. When the angel told Mary that she would have a child, she asked, “how will this be since I am a virgin?” ‘The angel responded, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you… for nothing is impossible with God.”’ God is sufficient to do all that He has promised even if it sounds impossible.
It wasn’t God meeting Abraham’s expectations about the promises that proved God was sufficient to keep promises; it was the birth of Isaac. It wasn’t God meeting the world’s expectations about the promises that proved God was sufficient to keep the promises; it was the birth of Jesus. The world didn’t expect God to make everything right that way. It still doesn’t. Praise God that He kept His promises according to His plan not according to expectations.
Sarah would bear a child according to God’s promise not according to Abraham’s expectations. That had implications for the boy that Abraham expected to be the heir. That had implications for Ishmael. That’s our second point: the promises and Ishmael.
Thirteen years before this conversation in Genesis 17, Sarah had told Abraham, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her.” When Hagar gave birth to Ishmael, Abraham and Sarah expected that he was the child that God had promised. As John Walton put it, “Abraham has not been anxiously awaiting the arrival of another son. He would not have seen a need for another. That’s what lies behind verse 18, ‘Abraham said to God, “If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!”’
“We are now able to see the function of Ishmael as a threat to the promise,” writes Walter Brueggemann, “Abraham is no longer pressed to believe in an heir to be given, for he already has one, albeit in a devious way.”
To Abraham, Ishmael was a certainty, and God’s promise of another son was only a promise. Abraham had been living on hope in promises for years until he had Ishmael. He didn’t want to go back to that, and so He said, “If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!”’ Think of it this way. Imagine a young lady who wants to get married. For whatever reason, young men rarely take an interest in her; well, there this one young man, but she knows that he is wrong for her. All her friends say that he is wrong for her. He is needy. He could never be the leader in their home. He is something of a doormat. She runs in the same circles as him for a few years while she waits for a suitable young man, but no suitable young man expresses interest, and waiting is hard. Living by hope is hard. She begins to date this needy young man. She can easily manipulate him. She doesn’t always like that, but she does find that safe because she knows that he won’t break up with her and that she will never be alone. Her parents see any number of yellow flags and even some red flags in this relationship. They really do think it would be in her best interest for them to break up, but ask yourself, how hard is it going to be to convince this young lady to break up with this guy? It will prove quite difficult. She will most likely prefer the certainty of having this boyfriend, problematic as he is, to living by hope yet again.
Now that isn’t a perfect analogy because that girl didn’t have any promise from God of a God-honoring husband, but you get the point. That girl lived by hope for years and only by hope and eventually entered a problematic relationship that she wasn’t ready to give up. Abraham had lived by hope in the promises for decades and only by hope and eventually took part in a problematic plan that he wasn’t ready to give up. He was scared to leave what he saw as certainty for hope.
Abraham preferred what he had. God didn’t. ‘Abraham said to God, “If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!” Then God said, “Yes, but your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will call him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him.”’ It wasn’t Abraham’s expectations or desires that determined how God would keep the promises; it was God’s plan that determined how God would keep the promises. So it goes with us.
Abraham had understandable reasons for his expectations as we all have understandable reasons for our expectations. “For the last thirteen years,” writes John Walton, “Abraham has lived in the belief that Ishmael, the son of his old age, is the promised son and that God’s covenant will be carried out through him. All of his love, all of his hopes, and all of his dreams have been poured into this boy, and it is not unlikely that they have already discussed Ishmael’s covenant destiny.” Abraham had reasons for his expectations, but God had reasons for His plan. He wanted to show that the promises were enough and that He didn’t need the human ingenuity seen in the birth of Ishmael and He doesn’t need your ingenuity. He didn’t need Abraham and Sarah’s plan for a child. The promise is enough. That is Isaac. That’s just one of the reasons God chose Isaac rather than Ishmael. The birth of the child according to the flesh required no divine intervention. The child according to the promise did.
The apostle John picked up on this divine intervention to describe we who are born again. He said that we are, “children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” John would say that your rebirth was just as much of a miracle as Isaac’s birth and that you are just as much of a child who was born only by promise.
I would imagine that Isaac had quite a unique self-understanding. He was, after all, born to an old man and a woman well beyond her child-bearing years. He was a child whose birth was promised a quarter of a century before; based upon this promise his family had pulled up stakes and moved to an entirely new country. That would form an identity. Being a child of promise forms an identity. It should for you. Your rebirth should give you a unique self-understanding. It was and is no easy matter to come to Jesus. If you have truly come, it is only because of an act as remarkable as what we see here with Isaac. That birth couldn’t happen without God’s power; your rebirth didn’t happen without God’s power. That’s what Jesus meant by talking about being born again.
God chose Isaac to show the necessity of His intervention. He also chose Isaac as an act of correction. Thirteen years before, Sarah and Abraham had decided that God could not keep His promises; Sarah said, “The Lord has kept me from having children,” and Abraham went along with her plan involving Hagar. Sarah and Abraham acted out their disbelief in the promise because the promise seemed impossible. Now God was giving Abraham another chance to trust this same promise even though it seemed impossible. This was another opportunity to trust the same promise.
There might be something from thirteen years ago that God is correcting within you today or that He will tomorrow. Grace has an incredibly long arc to it, and neither sin nor doubt have a statute of limitations with God.
God had chosen Isaac. He still blessed Ishmael in tremendous ways as this passage makes clear; we will see that Ishmael was circumcised, but he was not the child of promise. This child of promise would be born by the power of God and the power of God alone.
Abraham was likely rather cast down at the thought of yet more years spent waiting for the promises. It had been twenty-five years since he left Ur. It had been thirteen years since he tried to keep God’s promises for Him by making a child. Now God was giving him another chance to trust that He could do the impossible. It seemed that he was back to square one. How many more years of trust would be necessary? That’s how we tend to think. That’s not how God works; verse 21, “my covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah will bear to you by this time next year.” It isn’t our trust that keeps God’s promises. It is God’s choice that keeps God’s promises.
This was all in God’s hands. It always had been. It was when they left Ur. It was when they went down to Egypt. It was before Ishmael was born. It was after Ishmael was born. It was never Abraham and Sarah’s expectations about the proimses that determined the keeping of the promises. It was never the perfection of their faith that determined the keeping of their promises. It was God’s choice that determined the keeping of the promises. That is grace.
God decides how His promises will be kept. He decides when His promises will be kept. That is the end of the matter. You see that in verse 22, “When He had finished speaking with Abraham, God went up from him.”
God always gets the last word. God explained how He would keep the promise. That was the end of it. God will do as He will do. Don’t expect otherwise. Don’t desire otherwise. Abraham’s expectations wouldn’t have led to Isaac. Abraham’s expectations wouldn’t have led to Jesus. Neither would your expectations. If you knew nothing about the New Testament, but believed every word of the Old, would your expectations of how God would keep those promises be better or worse than what you see in Jesus? If what you see in Jesus is worse than what you would expect, I really don’t know what I can say to you other than you don’t know Jesus. If what you see in Jesus is better than what you would have expected, then stop putting your expectation of how He should act above His plan for how He will act. His plan is obviously better. Trust it. Trust Him. Amen.