Genesis 17:15-22
At the beginning of this chapter, Abram is 99 years old, which means it has been 24 years since God first called Abram and promised him to be the ancestor of a great nation. It also has been about 14 years since the events in chapter 15, when Abram looked up into the starry night and believed and trusted that the LORD would fulfill His promise. God considered Abram to be righteous and makes His covenant with Abram using an eerie ritual with cutup animals.
Genesis 16 describes the birth of Ishmael. Somehow, even after God restating that Abram will have his own son, Sarai decides that the only way this will happen is to use a surrogate mother. She reasons with Abram that he should have a sexual relationship with her Egyptian slave-girl, Hagar for this purpose. After all, the resulting child would be Abram’s. Instead of believing in the promise of God for them to have a son, Abram agrees with Sarai, and Ishmael is born. Instead of having faith in the promise of God, Sarai and Abram took matters into their own hands.
However, God is gracious to Hagar and her son. God gives the son the name Ishmael, and even though they are outside of the promise, God blesses them and promises that Ishmael will be the father of multitudes. God also prophesied what kind of a man Ishmael will become – “He shall be a wild ass of a man, with his hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against him; and he shall live at odds with all his kin” (Genesis 16:12).
A bit of research will reveal that Ishmael’s descendants will come to be known as Ishmaelites or the Arabs. Like Israel, they also will divide into twelve tribes, and will end up settling throughout the Arabian Peninsula. One of Ishmael’s direct descendants is the Prophet Muhammad, who would unite most of Arabia under a single religion – Islam.
So, we can see that this act that Sarai and Abram took because they could not believe that the promised child would come from Sarai and Abram, will have significant consequences for their respective descendants, even to the present time.
Thirteen years after the birth of Ishmael, God appears to Abraham and gives him a new name – Abraham – and makes circumcision as the sign of the covenant between God and Abraham and his descendants. God also gives Sarai a new name – Sarah – and makes it clear that a son will be born to her, and his name will be Isaac. Upon hearing this, Abraham laughs, since he finds ridiculous the notion that this could happen to him at the age of one hundred and to Sarah, who is now ninety. Abraham apparently no longer believes in the original promise, and even tells God to just bless Ishmael. God tells Abraham that He will also bless Ishmael, but that His covenant will be with Isaac and Isaac’s descendants.
From all of this, we are reminded that faith is not easy. It sometimes calls for persistence which goes against common sense. It calls for believing in a gift from God which none of the present data can support.
Hagar and Ishmael represent an alternative to God’s promise that on the short term seems to improve the situation. Sometimes instead of waiting in faith for God to act, we are tempted to take the initiative from God.
Ishmael is also a good reminder to us about the people who are not within the promise of God – God has concern for them, and they can be blessed by God. Today, many people are outside of God’s promise, and go about living the way they seem fit, with no regard to what God teaches in the Bible. We see many Christians who consider these people as enemies of God and want the church to treat them as such. And yet, we should be reminded of our Lord’s command to love our enemies and bring blessings to the least of humanity. This does not mean to condone thoughts and behaviors that goes against God, but it does mean that we need to witness for Christ in whatever way the Holy Spirit directs us.
Through the work of Jesus on the cross and His resurrection, we can become the children of promise just by accepting Jesus as our Lord and Savior. Then our past, present and future sins can be forgiven, and we are ensured eternal life with our Lord and fellow believers.
Like Abraham and Sarah, even though we are given the promise of eternal life and the presence of the Holy Spirit to help us to be witnesses to those near and far that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of the World, sometimes we are tempted by alternatives to God’s promises. We can be tempted to do and pursue things that we think are good, contrary to what God would have us do.
Faith is not easy – We have many temptations for alternatives that are contrary to what the LORD wants us to do. And we will often fail. But Abraham, Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael are all reminders that God will not fail us nor break His promises to us, even though we keep coming up short on our end. This should give us comfort in time of hardship and failure on our part.
We also need to be reminded that Abram and Sarai were chosen by God not just to be great, but so that they and their descendants will become a blessing to the whole world. So, God’s intent for Israel was to become a blessing to the rest of the world. Likewise, we were chosen and saved by God through the cross of Christ not just to be blessed, but to be a blessing to others. We need to acknowledge and thank God for all that he gives us, but also know that we have a task to do in return – To be a blessing to others by witnessing to those around us about Jesus Christ and the salvation He can bring.
(The above is a summary of the message shared by Shun Takano at our worship on June 11, 2023.)
Japanese Congregational Church 