May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Strength and my Redeemer.
Good morning. I will be preaching on the Genesis 17 passage
this morning. Our readings from Genesis
over the last few days have been concerned with Abraham, our first father in
the faith. In the first 11 chapters of
Genesis we see the new Creation of God become subject to suffering, darkness
and death because of the sin of human beings.
We see the human family plunged into tragedy after tragedy—starting with
the story of Cain and Abel and culminating with the stories of the Flood and of
the Tower at Babel—that great bastion of false religious dreams, aspirations,
and human pride. And in chapter 12 we
come to the election of the family of
Abram by God . . . we see the beginning
of God’s plan of redemption, we see the beginning of God’s self-revelation to
Abram, his election of Abram and his family to be made a great nation, to be
blessed and honored, to be God’s special people by covenant, and to be the
people through whom all the families of the earth would be blessed eventually
in Jesus Christ.
In the first half of chapter 17, our reading
from yesterday, we find God confirming his covenant to Abram and assuring him
that he is going to establish his covenant between himself and Abram’s
descendants, to be the God of Abram’s descendants, and to give them the
inheritance of the land of Canaan. He
also gives them the sign of his covenant, a sign in their own bodies, the covenant
sign of circumcision.
And he does something
else quite interesting and quite unexpected that is related to much of the
narrative of our passage this morning: he changes Abram’s name to Abraham. On the surface of things, it doesn’t look
like a huge difference. Abram means
“exalted father” and Abraham means “father of a multitude”. But here God is doing something relatively
new. He does something that he did not
even do in the Garden of Eden. And our
reading today also begins with a naming or renaming. This morning, we begin with Sarai who is
renamed Sarah. Both of these names mean
princess, with Sarai apparently being an older version of the name. God specifically calls Sarai by name, renames
her Sarah, and tells Abraham that he has taken notice of Sarah and will bless
her. Consider the way that God takes
notice of Sarah. It reminds us of
Hagar’s earlier encounter with God in which she insists that God has taken
notice of her, “You are the one who sees me,” Hagar says to God. By implication, the one who sees her when no
one else has.
Sarah is an old woman
now—a woman with no heir and no children—a woman who would have been considered
a failure because of her inability to produce children for a great man like
Abraham. Does God abandon her in her
distress? Does he make his promises for
Abraham only? Or is he rather the God of
blessing who seeks to bless all the nations of the earth? God is the one who time and again chooses to
work out his promises in one for the sake of many—here he starts with Abraham, but
he sees Sarah, and he blesses her too.
God says, “I will bless
her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall become
nations; kings of people shall come from her.”
This is the first time that we see Sarah specifically included by name
into the promises given to Abraham. From
the beginning of God’s word to Abraham, God Almighty had promised to give
Abraham offspring—seed. But here we see
something that was not clear until now—that God had considered Sarah as well as
Abraham and when he promised to give Abraham offspring, it turns out that he
was choosing to fulfill his promises through Sarah.
At first, Abraham
doesn’t take this too well. He falls
down and he laughs—warring between belief and unbelief—asking if it is possible
for people their age to conceive children.
Sarah, of course, will react in a similar way when she overhears the
angels speaking to Abraham about the reconfirmation of God’s promises. Abraham
protests, asking God that Ishmael be considered the child of promise. God resists him. “No, but Sarah your wife shall bear you a son
and you shall call his name Isaac. I
will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring
after him.” He names Isaac, too, perhaps
a bit ironically and maybe a bit cheekily to remind Abraham and Sarah of their
reaction to God’s promise, though I think this name, “he laughs,” also
foreshadows the joy that Abraham and Sarah will have in Isaac. God promises to bless Ishmael as well, and to
make him a great nation: he speaks to Abraham in reassurance, much as he spoke
to Hagar so many years before. But he
also firmly tells Abraham what his plans
are, and they are to establish his covenant with Isaac, “whom Sarah shall bear
to you at this time next year.” This is
God’s plan, not Abraham’s plan, and he has chosen to bless Sarah and her son,
Isaac.
I am always struck when
I read these passages in Genesis and see God initiating with Abraham and Sarah
to give them what they most desire and what they think is least possible. I also think it is interesting that we don’t
really see Abraham and Sarah asking
God for very much. It is possible that
they have spent much of their adult lives praying for children, but what we
have recorded in Scripture is not their prayers and desires for children
(though we see that in other cases in the Scriptures)—but rather God’s
insistence that he will give them descendants beyond number. There is one sense in which God sees them, and
is responding to their need and providing them with an heir, but there is quite
another sense in which he is also making up an entirely new plan of blessing
for them which is good and bountiful blessing beyond their imagination—he not
only gives them an heir, he gives them lines of kings and countries, and his
blessing and favor and presence as an inheritance. All this is above and beyond what they
dreamed to ask for. God is good. He is their father (and ours) and they don’t
even have to ask for all this because God sees them wants to give them every
good thing—he wants to give them all the good things he has for them.
But he does it in such
a peculiar way, and with such peculiar timing!
If God is so interested in the well-being of Abraham and Sarah—if he
wants to be their God and wants to draw them into relationship with him and
give them what he has, why does he wait so long to fulfill his promises to
Abraham? Why does God let Abraham and
Sarah suffer those long years of doubt and privation of a child if he was just
going to give them one in the end anyway?
First off, it seems
pretty clear that God wanted to make his intervention preposterously and
obviously divine. The kind of
intervention that apparently God’s chosen ones laugh at when it is first posed
to them. Both Abraham and Sarah laugh
when they first hear that God wants to give them a son in their old age, when
it is absolutely impossible and really very strange that they would have
children. It is a little wacky that God
would choose for Sarah to conceive now, that he would choose to supernaturally
give her the power to bear a child in her old age. God fulfills his promises in such a way that
his people understand that it is the power of God, not the contrivance of man
that has fulfilled it. This is God’s
power and God’s wisdom operational, not the wisdom or power of the world.
In other words, God
fulfills his promises in a way that includes his people’s getting to know him
better. That is always the aim of the
promises of God, because the ultimate gift, the ultimate promise is God’s
presence, God’s own self, Immanuel-God with us.
Abraham and Sarah don’t know it yet, but they are being schooled in the
ways of God and schooled into knowing that he
is the reward and blessing that they are truly seeking, and the thing they
truly need. God gives them a son—but
gives them a son in order to create a people who might know him and out of
which eventually will come the one man and the one Son who can put all things
to right—everything that has gone wrong in the first 11 chapters of
Genesis. God does not bless us in order
that we become so cozily content with this life that we forget things have gone
wrong and we forget the purposes for which we are made. We oftentimes forget or are skeptical of
God’s desires to be kind to us, to be generous to us, to give us good
things. But on the flip side, we also
imagine that when he does give us good things, he doesn’t mind that we are
idolatrously preoccupied with them, when he really just wanted us to enjoy them
and receive them as a gift from a loving Father. So, he intervenes in our lives, with blessing
and with discipline in order to show us the true life we are made for in Jesus
Christ—to let us know that we are destined for something different and for
something more than immediately meets the eye.
This I think is the reason for the renaming. Though God does choose the names of Isaac and
Ishmael before they are born, he chooses to re-name Sarah and Abraham and clue
them in on their lives being different and yet the same, and having both
continuity and discontinuity with what they have lived previously. He’s calling them out, calling them both to
embrace a new life and a new identity with the God who gives what he has
promised. The naming of names is clearly
important in the stories surrounding the birth of Jesus and John the Baptist
and it is also clearly important in the book of Revelation, where Jesus makes
several promises to the churches concerning names. He promises to give new names to those who
overcome, and he promises to actually write on those who overcome his own name.”
(Rev 3:12b-13a) Both of those junctures
are junctures at which life has radically changed for the better because God is
doing a new thing, bringing new life out of nothingness and out of death, which
is something only God can do.
The children of God are destined for great things because
God has called us and blessed us and made us heirs with Christ and recipients
of everything he has, blessing us with every spiritual blessing in Christ. And he has told us to go, to share his
blessings with all the nations in name of God. It is my prayer for us today that we learn
more about who God is and who he is calling us to be, that we walk more deeply
into our new identity in Christ, that we recognize the love of the Father which
is working in us to give us all good things by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Father, we thank you that you have given us examples in
your word that show us that you have called us to be your people and that you
are our God. Thank you for the lives of
Abraham and Sarah and open our hearts to receive from you the fulfillment of
your promises to them in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
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