Introduction
In Genesis 12 man called Abram burst onto the stage
of salvation history. God took this one man and gave him a promise, sealed in
blood in chapter 15 by a solemn oath and covenant. A promise of land, of a
great people, and of blessing for all the peoples of earth. God binds himself
to Abram and his promised offspring. And he gives Abram the covenant formula
that underlies all his dealings with his saved people. I will be your God and
you will be my people.
The New Testament says that through Jesus we
exercise the very same faith as Abraham with the very same result. If we have
faith in Jesus, the promised Seed of Abraham, then we are Abraham’s children.
We get right with God by his grace, his sheer mercy, that we receive simply by
trusting his promise, like Abraham did.
But this promise, of blessing for the world and a
reversal of the fall of Adam, was to come through Abraham’s Offspring. Not
Abraham’s servant Eliezer of Damascus, whom Abraham earlier made his heir
because he had no children. Not even the offspring of Abraham and Hagar,
Sarah’s servant, for that child, Ishmael, was not the child of faith but of
unbelief. No, it would happen just as God said it would, not as a result of
human intervention and Abraham and Sarah trying to help God along with it. The
child to be born would be from Abraham and his wife Sarah, even though she was
past childbearing age.
And now, at last, the promise is fulfilled. In verse
one we read “Now the LORD was gracious to Sarah as he had said, and the LORD
did for Sarah what he had promised. Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to
Abraham in his old age, at the very time God had promised him.” That was the
time God had said a few months earlier when he and his angels visited Abraham
in the form of three strangers that Abraham entertained. We met the two angels
again in last week’s story where they destroyed the cities of the plain.
And Abraham does two things here. He names the
child, and he puts on him the mark of the covenant, the seal of circumcision.
Isaac’s name is full of ironic meaning. It means “he laughs,” and of course his
name recalls how Abraham and Sarah both laughed when they heard God’s promise
of a child in their old age. Now they are truly laughing, with unexpected joy.
Sarah says in verse 6: ““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.””
Who indeed? Who was it that said that to Abraham? None other than the one who
created the womb in the first place, the Lord Almighty, the one who can do
anything.
But as usual in this fallen world, there is always a
fly in the ointment. And our past mistakes have a way of coming back to haunt
us. And from verse 8 on we see an unpleasant scenario unfolding. Now the
relationship problems that result from the practice of surrogacy are constantly
in the news. Surrogate mothers often fall out with the couple whose baby they
are supposed to bear, and the result is a legal and moral nightmare. That’s
nothing new. Both the bible stories and modern experiences show that surrogacy
is a very bad idea, often with disastrous consequences. Last year back in
chapter 16 we saw the problems it caused in Abraham’s household, when he and
Sarah made a false start on the road to the promise. Sarah felt that God must
have decided she wasn’t good enough to bear the child of promise, and so she
got her maidservant to do it for her. But chapter 16 verse 4 says: “When she
knew she was pregnant, [Hagar] began to despise her mistress.” And so Sarah complained to Abraham and
Abraham said “Your servant is in your hands,” …Do with her whatever you think
best.” So Sarah mistreated Hagar; and she ran away.
Now all three of them, Abram, Sarai and Hagar were responsible for that sad state of affairs. They all contributed their own particular kind of sinfulness to the situation. Abram was persistently passive, Sarai was presumptuous, and Hagar was proud. However, chapter sixteen showed also the extraordinary kindness and gentleness and grace of the Lord, in contrast to their selfishness and sinfulness. God appears to this Egyptian slave woman and she sees God’s glory and lives, a privilege given to very few people. God commands her to return and submit to her mistress, but he also gave her a promise about her child. And with this promise, God gave Ishmael back to her as her own child, not Sarah’s child. For Sarah’s child is not to be born of human attempts to force God’s hand. Sarah’s child is not Ishmael. He is the child of promise, Isaac, who was born when God decided, not according to the will or whims of Abram, Sarai or Hagar. God said to Hagar before the birth of Ishmael: “‘‘You are now with child and you will have a son. YOU shall name him Ishmael, for the LORD has heard of your misery.” The name Ishmael means “God hears,” and that was the theme of chapter sixteen. And in telling her, rather than Sarah, to name the child, God gave Hagar back her child. But she also had to go back and humble herself before Sarah. No sundered relationship has ever been repaired without one party making that first step of humility.
Hagar went back, and submitted herself to her
mistress for a further fourteen years, until the birth of Isaac, when Abraham
was one hundred years old. And today’s reading from chapter 21 occurs a year or
two after that – it says in verse 8: “The child grew and was weaned, and on the
day Isaac was weaned Abraham held a great feast.” Now this is something
culturally foreign to us. We celebrate each birthday, right from year one. Not
all cultures do that. Some only celebrate after a child gets to a certain age.
And some celebrate, not annual anniversaries of the birth, but significant
events in the life of the child. The first such event that Abraham, and all his
descendants since have celebrated, is the marking of the male child with the
sign of the covenant, the sign of circumcision, at the age of 8 days. And we
see Abraham doing that in verse 4. But the next significant event is one that
is not because of God’s covenant, but simply something that already existed in
Abraham’s society. The weaning of the child. Weaning means when the child
reaches the time of self sufficiency, when they no longer drink their mother’s
milk. Exactly when that was according to the custom of Abraham’s tribe, we do
not know, but it was at least a year later, and possibly two. In Muslim culture
today children are weaned at age two because that’s what the Koran says to do,
and that reflects a similar kind of Middle Eastern culture to that of Abraham,
so it may even have been a couple of years after his birth that these events
took place. So Isaac’s half-brother Ishmael is now fifteen or sixteen years
old. He is a young man. And he obviously had the bravado and insecurities
common to males in that age group from every culture. It says in verse 9:
“Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham was
mocking…” Actually the word translated mocking here is the same Hebrew word
translated as laugh back in verse 6! So there is an irony that comes through in
the Hebrew that we miss in the English. The child is named “he laughs”, and
Sarah says “God has brought me laughter and everyone who hears about this will
laugh with me.” And now Ishmael is laughing! But he’s not laughing with Sarah,
he’s laughing AT her and her son.
We don’t know exactly what he said to mock the child
Isaac, but whatever it was, it severely upset Sarah, and all the old animosity
between her and Hagar comes flooding back. “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.” Notice how Sarah’s language has changed. Fifteen years earlier when she
wanted to use Hagar as a surrogate to get a child, she said to Abraham, “sleep
with MY maidservant.” But she has gone from being “my maidservant” to “THAT
slave woman.”
Well in verse 11 we see Abraham’s response. “The
matter distressed Abraham greatly because it concerned his son.” From all that
Genesis tells us about Ishmael we can see that he and Abraham had a close
relationship, and Abraham loved him and his mother Hagar. It is no wonder that
Ishmael should feel threatened and jealous at the coming of this rival for his
father’s affections and inheritance. And perhaps Sarah suspected that Abraham
loved Hagar more than he did her. It was a tangled web of emotion that we see
all too often in our own post-modern blended families.
Now what is God’s response to all this? In verse 12
the Lord reminds Abraham of his promise to Hagar. God gave Hagar promises
regarding her child back in chapter sixteen, nearly twenty years earlier. He
would also be, in accordance with the promise given to Abram, the father of
many nations. And from Ishmael the Arab peoples claim their descent from
Abraham.
Now at first it seems as though God has changed his
mind about Hagar and Ishmael. The first time this falling out happened and
Hagar ran away, he sent her back and made them all get on. But now he seems to
side with Sarah, and allows her to send them away.
But God is not being callous, or changing his mind.
He’s certainly not siding with Sarah’s bitterness, because there is an implied
rebuke in his words in verse 11. Sarah had spitefully called Hagar “THAT slave
woman,” but God refers to her as “YOUR maidservant.” He is reminding them that
it’s not Hagar’s fault she was in this situation in the first place. He does
tell Abraham to allow Sarah to dismiss them, but in fact in a way he’s being
kind to Ishmael and his mother, since they will no longer be bound to Sarah and
have to suffer her displeasure and the conflict that was obviously now
resurfacing because of the arrival of the child of the promise. Nor is Abraham
being hard or neglectful, because he believes the Lord’s promise that He will
look after them. And as the story unfolds, that is what happens. God provides
for them in the desert, and appears to her just as he had fifteen years before.
In fact he leads them to a place in the desert where there is water. Now eventually
they move to a place in the
But initially Hagar and Ishmael wandered in the
I don’t have time today to talk about Abraham’s
relationship with Abimelech, but you can read the previous chapter, which we
skipped over in our series, to find out about this honourable pagan man. The
only other comment I want to make about these verses is in verse thirty three.
It says “Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in
Abraham seems to have been a bit of a Greenie. He
liked planting and living under trees. When he came into the land God promised
his ancestors, he lived near
What are we to make of all this? The New Testament
as we saw last year, takes up this story and the two women in it, and uses it
not just literally, but figuratively, as an illustration of something else. It
says that these two women and their children represent two covenants. One is
the covenant given at Mt Sinai and the other is the New Covenant in Jesus, who
is the real child of Promise that Isaac was but a shadow of.
Ishmael was not the product of faith, but of works,
of trying to bring about God’s covenant promises by human wisdom and effort. So
he is like those who try to bring about their salvation by relying not on the
promise of God, but on their own religious efforts in keeping God’s laws. Isaac
on the other hand, is the product of Promise and faith. He is like those who
are children of the New Covenant, who put their trust in God’s promises to us
in Jesus Christ. Hagar was a slave, and she gave birth to the Arab races.
That’s why she can be figuratively used for the Sinai covenant, because Mt
Sinai is in
The apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians, who were
being tempted to go back to Jewish legalism and asked “After beginning with the
Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?” Unlike
Ishmael, the conception and birth of Isaac represents the inheritor of the
Promise to Abraham of eternal blessing. His birth is by supernatural means and
is the product of faith. If you are trying by your human efforts in being good
enough to reach God, then you are the child of a slave woman, and not like
Isaac the child of the free woman, the child of God’s promise, and not
exercising the faith of Abraham in God’s promise of salvation. Those who trust
in works are born only in the natural way. But those who trust in the grace of
the Lord Jesus alone, in the One who fulfils for us all the promises of God,
you are a child born in the supernatural way, a child born again, born from
above, born of the Spirit of God. Are you a child of the free woman? Or of the
slave? Because you know in the end who will have the last laugh, don’t you?