Abraham & Sarah: Faith
In many ways, the Book of Genesis is about the call of God and how people respond to God’s call to be in a relationship of trust with the Lord. Adam, Eve, and Cain fail to respond properly to God’s call. Noah does better, and Abraham and Sarah, who had their times of failure, doubt, and even disobedience, end up going down in history being associated with responding to God’s call in faith.
October 2, 2011
Genesis 12:1-9, Hebrews 11:8-12, Abraham & Sarah: Faith
Douglas Scalise, Brewster Baptist Church
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“Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
4 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. 5 Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, 6 Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. 8 From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. 9
And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.”
Beginning in Genesis 11:27 we learn that Abram and Sarai were from Ur, which is in southern Iraq, then, they moved northwest to Haran which is in Turkey, just north of the Syrian border. Genesis 12 begins with Abraham hearing a mysterious voice telling them to pull up stakes and move into an unknown future. God didn’t tell them exactly where they were going or what sort of life to expect when they arrived at their destination. The Voice was not terribly specific about the details, but even without knowing the details they loaded up the camels and they moved south to Canaan, no swimming pools, no movie stars. (Underneath some of the land they journeyed over there was a bubbling crude but they didn’t know it at the time). We admire their kind of faith that hears and obeys. We want it for ourselves. Unfortunately for them and for us that wasn’t the end of the story. As they move into Canaan, God promises to give this land to their children (they don’t have any yet), but the land isn’t fabulous, it’s experiencing a famine so they journey on to Egypt. The bad news there is that Abraham didn’t trust God enough to tell the truth so he felt compelled to lie and pass off his wife as his sister, to save his own skin (putting her at risk with the Pharaoh who took her as his wife). God is faithful even when we are not, and bails out Abraham and Sarah and they emerge safely from Egypt.
The chapters in Genesis devoted Abraham have two prominent themes: how God acts toward Abraham and how Abraham acts toward God. A pattern emerges: God makes promises; Abraham and Sarah have trouble having faith and waiting for the promises. God promises to make Abram a great nation, to bless him, to make his name great, to bless those who bless him and curse those who curse him, God promises to give him land, and an heir. The difficulty Abraham and Sarah have is one we frequently share – their faith wavers or can’t wait for God’s promises so they take matters into their own hands. When we take matters into our own hands because we know better than anyone else, including God, how to do what God wants done, we often end up making a mess. After 10 years of being promised a child and nothing happening Abraham and Sarah tire of tests and empty promises so they take it upon themselves to come up with their own plan. She suggests Abraham try to produce an heir for them with her Egyptian slave girl Hagar. In a telling verse (Genesis 16:2) we’re told, “And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.” He should have been listening to God’s voice at this point.
What was the consequence of Abraham listening to Sarah? A child was conceived, but so was big trouble. His wife became jealous and then furious with both her husband and with Hagar who ends up running away. An angel of the Lord appears to Hagar and tells her she will bear a son she is to call Ishmael, which means “God hears,” because the Lord heard her cries. Hagar and Ishmael represent the temptation we all face to have faith in our own powers rather than in the promise of God. Thirteen more years go by, still no child for Abraham and Sarah and they aren’t getting any younger. Can God be trusted or not? Will God deliver on what was promised?
In Genesis 17:1-8, 15-21 it says, “When Abram was 99 years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.” Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God.”
“As for Sarah your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.” Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?” And Abraham said to God, “O that Ishmael might live in your sight!” God said, “No, but your wife Sarah shall bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him. As for Ishmael, I have heard you; I will bless him and make him fruitful and exceedingly numerous; he shall be the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation. But my covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you at this season next year.”
Receiving a new name as Abraham and Sarah do is a sign God is setting them apart to do something special. God is consecrating them to be the ancestors of a multitude of nations and the bearers of a special relationship with God through which all people will be blessed. If you’re God and your task was to create a whole new nation, would you begin with a 75 year old man and his barren 66 year old wife? Especially when you’ll be asking these folks to live in tents, move repeatedly, possess a land, and have more descendents than you can count? Get serious. Yet God begins with a family that is mired in old age and barrenness, which means from a human point of view – a family with no future. God’s future is shaped through people who humanly have no future. One of the major messages of the Bible; however, is that human hopelessness doesn’t necessarily have the last word. The last word always belongs to God; whose life-giving grace can overcome any obstacles, including old age and barrenness when it comes to producing a child. Abraham and Sarah were without potential, they lacked the physical ability to do what God was promising to do through them. There was no fertility clinic for them to go to, no little blue pills to take, if they were going to have a child it was going to be nothing short of miraculous. God uses a couple like this so that when God’s promise is fulfilled there can be no claiming of credit for our success, the praise and the glory belong to God alone.
Like Abraham and Sarah, we are expected to hear the word of God and to have faith that it is true. We are also invited to walk with God and to be blameless, to live lives of integrity, trust, and faith. As they journey on in life, Abraham and Sarah, like us, continue to learn the important lesson that faith is difficult; faith demands perseverance, obedience, and trust even when the available evidence gives reason for doubt. And as the scripture says, they journey on by stages, as do we toward the horizon and the unseen that is to come.
Abraham and Sarah have to overcome the temptation to rely on the son, Ishmael, they already possess as an alternative to God’s promise. Abraham prays in his desperation and heartache that Ishmael “might live in” God’s sight (Genesis 17:18). Agreeing to answer that prayer and to bless Ishmael reveals that God’s concern is not limited just to the descendents of Abraham and Sarah. It is also interesting to ponder that the descendents of Ishmael, the Muslims, become the enemies of the descendents of the child of God’s promise, Isaac, the Jews. God promised Abraham and Sarah they would become the ancestors of a multitude of nations and today Abraham and Sarah are significant to Christians, Jews, and Muslims. God establishes a covenant, a relationship, with Abraham that has implications right down to our time.
Both Abraham and Sarah laugh when they hear that a 99 year old man and his 90 year old wife are going to have a baby. When you get right down to it, we all end up choosing how much faith we will have in the power of God. We can doubt God’s power, be impatient, be controlling and take matters into our own hands to manipulate people and events to make things come out the way we think they should. This rarely turns out as well as having faith in and trusting God even when it may appear illogical, against our previously held notions, convictions, or beliefs, or crazy, and downright silly. The promise that confronts Abraham and Sarah exceeds and defies their expectations and the available evidence. God tells them to name the child they end up having, “Isaac,” which is Hebrew for “he laughs,” as a reminder that often the joke and the joy is on us when we have faith and trust the Lord.
Frederick Buechner sums it up well,
“Why did the two old crocks laugh? They laughed because they knew only a fool would believe that a woman with one foot in the grave was soon going to have her other foot in the maternity ward. They laughed because God expected them to believe it anyway. They laughed because God seemed to believe it. They laughed because they half believed it themselves. They laughed because laughing felt better than crying. They laughed because if by some crazy chance it just happened to come true they would really have something to laugh about, and in the meanwhile it helped keep them going.
“Sarah and her husband had had plenty of hard knocks in their time, and there were plenty more of them still to come, but at that moment when the angel told them they’d better start dipping into their old age pensions for cash to build a nursery, the reason they laughed was that it suddenly dawned on them that the wildest dreams they’d ever had hadn’t been half wild enough.”[1]
Hearing God’s voice is not easy and obeying that voice in faith comes with some risk. Thomas a Kempis wrote in The Imitation of Christ (p. 95), “Blessed are the ears that catch the pulses of the divine whisper, and give no heed to the whisperings of the world.” To hear God’s divine whisper requires turning our attention from the shouting voices of the world as well as the doubting voices which arise from our own hearts and minds. Whose voice are you listening to? People have all kinds of ring tones on their cell phones, and song lists on their iPods – there are all kinds of voices clamoring for our attention. There is only one voice that will give us something lasting to believe in, something eternal to look forward to, and someone we can love for a lifetime.
That voice belongs to God.
Prayer: God of Abraham and Sarah, inspire us to be willing to try new ventures and to dare new risks; deliver us from comfort and complacency, and purge us from the temptation to listen to other voices more than your own. We thank you for the support of family and friends who encourage us in our faith. Help all of us where we are being challenged on our journeys of faith and may we learn the lessons you are seeking to teach us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Blessing: 1 John 5:3-4
“For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments.
And his commandments are not burdensome, 4
for whatever is born of God conquers the world.
And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith.”