“8 The child grew and was weaned, and on the day Isaac was weaned Abraham held a great feast. 9 But Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham was mocking, 10 and she said to Abraham, “Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.”
11 The matter distressed Abraham greatly because it concerned his son. 12 But God said to him, “Do not be so distressed about the boy and your maidservant. Listen to whatever Sarah tells you, because it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned. 13 I will make the son of the maidservant into a nation also, because he is your offspring.”
14 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. 15 When the water in the skin was gone, she put the boy under one of the bushes. 16 Then she went off and sat down nearby, about bowshot away, for she thought, “I cannot watch the boy die.” And as she sat there nearby, she began to sob.
17 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. 18 Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation.”
19 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. 20 God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer. 21 While he was living in the Desert of Paran, his mother got a wife for him from Egypt.”
In November of 2005, Kalamazoo, Michigan made national headlines with what is called The Kalamazoo Promise. The Kalamazoo Promise is a pledge to pay up to full tuition for any graduate of Kalamazoo schools to attend any state college or university within the state of Michigan. If you graduate from Kalamazoo schools and choose to attend a state college or university in Michigan, this promise is for you.
I want you to imagine a high school senior in Kalamazoo who gets accepted to Harvard. She knows that Harvard is in Massachusetts and that the Kalamazoo Promise is for universities in Michigan. She knows that Harvard is a private university and the Kalamazoo promise is for public universities.
She know this, but she still thinks that she should be included in the promise. She grew up in Kalamazoo too. She has tuition costs too. She thinks that Harvard is a better school than any of the options in Michigan. She writes a letter to the board of the Kalamazoo Promise explaining why she feels entitled to full tuition at Harvard. She explains why she is more entitled than a student attending what she calls “the deficient public universities of Michigan.” This young lady is rejecting the way of the Kalamazoo Promise but still expecting the promise. She is rejecting the way of the Kalamazoo Promise but still expecting to be included in the membership of the Kalamazoo Promise. It should come as no real surprise to her or her parents or to any of us that this is not how it works.
That’s not how it works with the promises of God either. Rejecting the way of the promise will exclude you from the promise. Rejecting the way of the promise will exclude you from membership in the people of the promise. We see that with Ishmael. God was quite kind to Ishmael, but those kindnesses didn’t change the fact that Ishmael had excluded himself from the promise and from membership in the people of the promise. The story of Ishmael is a warning for us, and for our children and their children. and it is the claim of this sermon: rejecting the way of the promise will exclude you from the promise and from membership in the people of the promise despite God’s continued kindnesses.
We will see that in two points. First: promises and heartstrings. Second: moving forward in a mess. First, in verses 8-13, we study God’s promises and Abraham’s heartstrings. Second, in verses 14-21, we study moving forward in this mess.
First: heartstrings and promises. Last week we studied the glad laughter that comes with God keeping His promises. We studied the birth of Isaac. This section begins by continuing that celebration; verse 1, “The child grew and was weaned, and on the day Isaac was weaned Abraham held a great feast.”
The message here is that Isaac had survived. Not all babies of that day survived until they were weaned, which was usually about the age of three. About half of them didn’t survive to that point. Isaac did. He was now “out of the woods” so to speak. This was good news for Isaac and for Sarah and for Abraham but not for Ishmael. Now that Isaac would survive, it was unmistakably clear now that Isaac and not Ishmael was the son of promise. That’s what’s behind verse 2, “Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham was mocking.”
Put yourself in Ishmael’s place. For most of your life, your father has told you that you are the child God promised and that you will be blessed; you will become a great nation; whoever blesses you will be blessed and whoever curses you will be cursed and that you were the conduit of blessing to the world. You thought that you were the promised one, and now it’s clear that you are not. That’s hard. Ishmael, the seventeen-year-old needed to honor the three-year-old through who the promises came. He, the oldest son, needed to honor the second born. Ishmael could have humbled himself. He could have trusted the promise and acknowledged what God had done in Isaac and would do through Isaac. He could have put his faith in the promises, but he didn’t. He behaved like that young lady who wanted the Kalamazoo promise.
Our translation of verse 9 says that he “mocked.” This is the same Hebrew word that we’ve seen translated as “laughed.” This is the same root that lies behind the name Isaac. You aren’t meant to imagine that Ishmael was simply giggling or telling a joke. He was acting as if he were the son of promise. He was “Isaac-ing,” to translate the word a bit differently. He was claiming to have more right to the promise than Isaac. He was behaving like that young lady who wanted the Kalamazoo Promise. “I’m the first born and I’m not going to accept what dad’s God says about this little brat.”
Ishmael had it out for Isaac. That’s how the apostle Paul read this. Ishmael didn’t just think that he deserved what Isaac had, he despised and mistreated Isaac for enjoying what he wanted. He persecuted that boy. Paul read this story of Ishmael and Isaac and told both the Romans and the Galatians that this persecution is what happens when there is a promise from God. Some accept the way of the promise and receive; others reject the way of the promise but still feel entitled to the promise and wind up persecuting the people of the promise. About Ishmael and Isaac, he wrote, “the son born according to the flesh persecuted the son born by the power of the Spirit. It is the same now.”
By rejecting Jesus, the Jews of Paul’s day had rejected the way of the promise. They, like Ishmael, could have submitted to the way of the promise and enjoyed it, but they didn’t. They wound up persecuting those who accepted Jesus. They thought they were entitled to God’s promise without submitting to the way of the promise. That wasn’t how it works. That isn’t how it works.
The line between the children born only of the flesh and the children born by the power of the Spirit runs throughout the history of the people of God. You see it in Cain and Abel. You see it Ishmael and Isaac. You see it in Esau and Jacob. It exists today. There are some, like Isaac, who are children of the promise. There are some, like Ishmael, who reject the way of the promise but still think they are entitled to the promises of God. Calvin saw that; he wrote, “hypocrites not only mingle with the sons of God in the church, but despise them, and proudly appropriate to themselves all the rights and honors of the church.” That is Ishmael.
Now Calvin calls them hypocrites because they think they are Christians without any marks of faith. There are plenty of people who have no inclination to keep the commands of Jesus who still assume that the blood of Jesus has cleansed them of their sin. There are plenty of people who are bearing no fruit who assume they are part of the vine. They want the promise without submitting to the way of the promise. They won’t receive. Unless they are born of the Spirit, they won’t receive
They don’t see that. After all, they were baptized; that’s what they will say. They went to Sunday School. They will be rather angry if you dare to question their faith. They will tell you that they might not be perfect, but they are better than all those hypocritical Christians and rule following sheep in the church—there’s the bubbling up of persecution. They might not be submitting to the way of the promise—trust and obedience—but they will tell you that they are just as much of a Christian as anyone else. They are behaving like Ishmael. They are rejecting the way of the promise and thereby excluding themselves from the promise and from any real membership in the people of the promise unless they repent and believe.
That’s Ishmael. Now I think it’s pretty safe to assume that this wasn’t the first sign of Ishmael’s jealousy of or hostility toward Isaac. I doubt that this teenager spent three years boiling with jealousy and never blew up before. This probably wasn’t the first such incident. What Sarah was doing was making sure that it was the last. That doesn’t excuse her pettiness in refusing to name Hagar and Ishmael but instead calling them, “that slave woman and her son.” That doesn’t deny that Sarah probably had it out for Hagar ever since Hagar had a child with her husband years before. Sarah might have had any number of dishonorable motivations rumbling around in her heart, but that doesn’t change the fact that she was right about what was going on with Ishmael. She was right about what was at stake even if her tone was all wrong. That’s often the way it goes with us.
Abraham didn’t like what Sarah had to say. Our translation says that it distressed him. Some say that it upset him or displeased him. It’s possible to understand this to say that it greatly angered him. Whatever he felt, he felt because, as verse 11 puts it, “it concerned his son.”
Abraham couldn’t see that Ishmael was persecuting Isaac because Ishmael was his son. Abraham couldn’t see that Ishmael was rejecting the way of God’s promise because Ishmael was his son. Sarah could see it. She could see it because her heartstrings weren’t attached to Ishmael.
That’s often the case for us parents. It’s hard for us to acknowledge that our children might not have any marks of being be born of the Spirit because our heart strings are attached to these kids. It’s also hard because we feel such guilt and shame if we fear that they might not be born again, and if that’s where you are, please note that no guilt or shame is heaped on Abraham for Ishmael’s choices in this passage. God knew that all of this was hard for Abraham to acknowledge and so He intervened; verse 12, “do not be so distressed about the boy,” God said. “Listen to whatever Sarah tells you, because it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.”
We see the greatness of Abraham in the fact that he accepted God’s word about Ishmael. Perhaps this morning you are being called to that same greatness of accepting God’s word regarding the current state of your own children or grandchildren or spouse or parents. Perhaps you need to acknowledge that these people are not submitting to the way of the promises. Perhaps you need to acknowledge that they are currently excluding themselves from the promises and from the people of the promises. That is hard to accept. Abraham didn’t like it. It displeased him. It distressed him. It angered him, but, according to God, it was still true.
Your response to your child will be different from Abraham’s response to his child because Abraham’s family was functioning as both a family and the church. You don’t tell your covenant breaking child that she is excluding himself from your family. You tell her that by forsaking the way of the promises, she is excluding herself from the promises and from the church. The church warns her of that too. Family and church are different categories, but for Abraham they were, in some ways, one and the same.
Your response will be different from Abraham’s, but you too must acknowledge the truth of what God says. Until you do, you won’t see what is at stake. You won’t beg God to give your wife new birth by the Spirit until you acknowledge that your wife isn’t born of the Spirit. You won’t plead for your grandchild to submit to the way of the promise until you acknowledge that your grandchild isn’t submitting to the way of the promise. If you want someone to plead with you, I’ll plead with you, and I imagine that we’ve got enough parents and grandparents and siblings and children in this very situation that we could form a mighty prayer group. That’s church. Thinking that you are alone is not.
Now when you consider Abraham sending Ishmael away, it might help you to recognize that Ishmael was likely seventeen years old by this time. It might help you to remember that Ishmael was posing a real threat to his three-year-old brother. It also might help you to remember God’s command to Abraham concerning Isaac, “take Isaac and sacrifice him as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.” Abraham wasn’t just called to turn over Ishmael. He was called to turn over Isaac. Moses wants you to be thinking about that story as you read this story. When God told Abraham what to do with Ishmael, Abraham got up early the next morning and did it; that’s verse 14. When God told Abraham what to do with Isaac on the mountain, Abraham got up early the next morning and did it. When it seemed like Ishmael would die, God opened Hagar’s eyes to see a well of water; that’s verse 19. When it seemed like Isaac would die, God opened Abraham’s eyes to see a ram in a thicket.
God called Abraham to give Ishmael over to Him. God called Abraham to give Isaac over to him. We parents of covenant children must do the same. It’s hard to turn over Ishmael to God. It’s hard to turn over Isaac to God. It must be done because they were never really ours to begin with. We will see that with Isaac in a couple of weeks. Now we see it with Ishmael in our second point: moving forward in a mess.
Ishmael was rejecting the way of the promise. He was excluding himself from the promise and from membership in the people of the promise. God told Abraham to turn the boy over to Him. He told him, “Do not be so distressed about the boy and your maidservant… I will make the son of the maidservant into a nation also, because he is your offspring.”
We tend to believe that God is either totally for a man or totally against that man, but is that the case here? Ishmael rejected the way of the God’s promises to Abraham, but God still kept the promises that He made to Ishmael. He had promised to make the boy into a nation, and He would do it. That necessitated keeping the boy alive in the desert, which is the rest of the chapter.
Abraham loaded Hagar and Ishmael with provisions for their journey. They wandered and got lost in the desert of Beersheba. They ran out of water. Ishmael sat down and cried. He was crying because he was a seventeen-year-old and God, and it seemed to him his father, had chosen a three-year-old over him and now it seemed like he was going to die of thirst. Hagar couldn’t bear to watch her son die, so she walked about a bowshot away. That is a lovely detail because it is so motherly as one commentator put it—she can’t bear to watch, but she doesn’t let the boy out of her sight.
God didn’t let the boy out of His sight. He heard the boy crying; that’s verse 17. He reiterated the promises that had to do with Ishmael; that’s verse 18. He opened up Hagar’s eyes to the well of water; that’s verse 19. He was with Ishmael as he grew up; that’s verse 20. God showed abundant kindnesses to Abraham’s boy, but don’t take that as a sign that Ishmael had faith in the promises. That’s something else entirely. This was simply God’s kindnesses as Jesus spoke of saying that He “causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”
Perhaps your child is rejecting the way of the promise. God will still cause the sun to shine upon her. She will still enjoy the taste of her favorite food. He might still advance in her career and she will enjoy her husband and family. All of these are kindnesses from God, but don’t take these as a sign that she is included in the promises if she is rejecting the promises.
That’s hard to accept but that doesn’t mean that it’s incorrect. Paul thought this truth was hard to accept, but he didn’t think that made it incorrect. He had anguish over it precisely because he knew it was correct. He wrote, “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people, those of my own race, the people of Israel.”
God didn’t accept Paul’s wish. He didn’t allow Paul to suffer hell so that others might enjoy the promise. He doesn’t allow parents to suffer hell so that their children might enjoy the promises. He did, however, allow His Son to do that. He allowed His Son to suffer hell so that we might enjoy the promises. He sent His Son away like Ishmael so that we might become like Isaac. We dare not neglect such a great salvation. Covenant children dare not neglect such a great salvation. We should never think that our heartstrings are somehow more sensitive than the heartstrings of God or that He ever asks what He is unwilling to give.
To close, let’s consider the choice that was before Ishmael because it is the choice that you and I and our children must make. Ishmael had to decide whether or not he preferred himself to the son of promise. He decided that he preferred himself. That’s why he rejected God’s promises through Isaac. He preferred himself to Isaac.
You must decide whether you prefer yourself to Jesus. He is the son of promise. He is just as much the promised offspring of Abraham as Isaac was. You face the same choice as Ishmael of whether you will prefer yourself or the son of promise. Your child faces that same choice. That is what determines whether or not are excluded from or included in the promise. That is what determines whether or not we are excluded from or included in the children of God. No one is entitled to the Kalamazoo Promise. It is a gift of the donors to give. No one is entitled to the promises. They are a gift of God to give. Amen.