Genesis 21

¹ The Lord visited Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did to Sarah as he had promised. ² And Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age at the time of which God had spoken to him. ³ Abraham called the name of his son who was born to him, whom Sarah bore him, Isaac. ⁴ And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him. ⁵ Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. ⁶ And Sarah said, “God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh over me.” ⁷ And she said, “Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.” ⁸ And the child grew and was weaned. And Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. ⁹ But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, laughing. ¹⁰ So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not be heir with my son Isaac.” ¹¹ And the thing was very displeasing to Abraham on account of his son. ¹² But God said to Abraham, “Be not displeased because of the boy and because of your slave woman. Whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for through Isaac shall your offspring be named. ¹³ And I will make a nation of the son of the slave woman also, because he is your offspring.” ¹⁴ So Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba. ¹⁵ When the water in the skin was gone, she put the child under one of the bushes.¹⁶ Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot, for she said, “Let me not look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. ¹⁷ And God heard the voice of the boy, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is.¹⁸ Up! Lift up the boy, and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make him into a great nation.” ¹⁹ Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. And she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink. ²⁰ And God was with the boy, and he grew up. He lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow. ²¹ He lived in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother took a wife for him from the land of Egypt.

As much as I deeply wished to maintain my staunch indifference to the goings of the royal family, the news this week was hard to miss and hard not to watch! Here is one summary of the situation:

Prince William has told a pal he can’t “put his arm around” his brother anymore – after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle abandoned their royal duties.

He revealed his “sadness” over the tense relationship with his younger brother and the splitting of the Royal Family, according to The Sun.

It comes days after Harry and Meghan announced they are stepping down as senior royals and plan to spend much of their time abroad.

The news took Buckingham Palace by surprise, with the Queen, Prince Charles and Prince William, 37, given 10 minutes notice before the button was pressed.

Amid crisis talks and upset at the bombshell, The Sunday Times reports the Duke of Cambridge hopes one day everyone will “play on the team” again.

He said: “I’ve put my arm around my brother all our lives and I can’t do that anymore; we’re separate entities. I’m sad about that.

“All we can do, and all I can do, is try and support them and hope that the time comes when we’re all singing from the same page.”[1]

It is apropos, is it not, to our journey through Genesis: two brothers, two sons of promise, divided by a gulf. The particulars are quite different, of course, but the broad swaths of the stories are similar. Genesis 21 tells us of two brothers—Ishmael, the older, and Isaac, the younger—who were both part of the patriarchal “royal family,” we might say, but between whom there was a gulf, a chasm, that could not be crossed. Unlike the modern separation between the British brothers, however, these two sons of Abraham absolutely require our attention, for their story indeed is our own story, and we dare not turn away from it.

This is a story of two boys and one promise.

We begin with the story itself. Here, Isaac is born and, once again, tensions erupt in the household surrounding Hagar and Sarah.

Genesis 21

¹ The Lord visited Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did to Sarah as he had promised. ² And Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age at the time of which God had spoken to him. ³ Abraham called the name of his son who was born to him, whom Sarah bore him, Isaac. ⁴ And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him. ⁵ Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. ⁶ And Sarah said, “God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh over me.” ⁷ And she said, “Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.” ⁸ And the child grew and was weaned. And Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. ⁹ But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, laughing. ¹⁰ So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not be heir with my son Isaac.” ¹¹ And the thing was very displeasing to Abraham on account of his son. ¹² But God said to Abraham, “Be not displeased because of the boy and because of your slave woman. Whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for through Isaac shall your offspring be named. ¹³ And I will make a nation of the son of the slave woman also, because he is your offspring.” ¹⁴ So Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba. ¹⁵ When the water in the skin was gone, she put the child under one of the bushes.¹⁶ Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot, for she said, “Let me not look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. ¹⁷ And God heard the voice of the boy, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is.¹⁸ Up! Lift up the boy, and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make him into a great nation.” ¹⁹ Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. And she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink. ²⁰ And God was with the boy, and he grew up. He lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow. ²¹ He lived in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother took a wife for him from the land of Egypt.

We are struck first by the goodness and faithfulness of God. God had made a covenant promise to Abraham that he would have a child through his own marriage, by Sarah, his wife. And, as we have seen, Abraham and Sarah, in their old age, gave up believing that would happen. The faithfulness of God is emphasized nicely in verse 1:

¹ The Lord visited Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did to Sarah as he had promised.

“As he had said…as he had promised.”

God does not lie. God tells the truth, even if the truth is hard for us to fathom or grasp. Verse 1 might be paraphrased loosely as, “Told you!!!” And this, surely, is one of the foundational theological tenets of all scripture: God’s word and character can be trusted. God is faithful. Abraham and Sarah name the child Isaac, “laughter,” which is both fun and self-deprecating. Fun because it reminds us that God’s word is true even when it strikes us as funny. Self-deprecating because it served as a reminder that their earlier laughter was misguided, that they should have trusted in God.

This is a joyous scene, Abraham, Sarah, and baby Laughter, but, like most things in Genesis, the joy is short-lived. This is because human folly soon enters the scene. It does so when Sarah believes that older brother Ishmael is mocking her baby.

⁹ But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, laughing.

Notice that the text is purely descriptive on this point. It does not say if Sarah was right in her assessment of what was happening. It should be noted, however, that Paul, in Galatians 4:29, when speaking of these boys, wrote, “at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit.” Paul argued that Ishmael was being mocking in his behavior.

Martin Luther argued that Sarah was acting nobly in casting Hagar and Ishmael out, that Sarah was “regarding the promise” more “assiduously” than Abraham in acting as she did and that she was not speaking “according to her feminine feelings but by the Holy Spirit.”[2] Robert Alter has interestingly commented that “Sarah is concerned lest Ishmael encroach on her son’s inheritance, and given the inscription of her son’s name in this crucial verb, we may also be invited to construe it as “Isaac-ing-it”—that is, Sarah sees Ishmael presuming to play the role of Isaac, child of laughter, presuming to be the legitimate heir.”[3] This is not hard to imagine, and perhaps we can all agree with this: the family dynamic between Ishmael and Isaac was fragile even if Ishmael and Isaac were themselves unaware of it (and we do not know that this is the case with Ishmael).

Sarah, once again, has Hagar and Ishmael cast out. Abraham is not pleased with this (¹¹ And the thing was very displeasing to Abraham on account of his son.), but, again, he acquiesces. In what follows, God twice affirms, however, that He will bless Ishmael. First, to Abraham:

¹² But God said to Abraham, “Be not displeased because of the boy and because of your slave woman. Whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for through Isaac shall your offspring be named. ¹³ And I will make a nation of the son of the slave woman also, because he is your offspring.”

Then, to Hagar:

¹⁷ And God heard the voice of the boy, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is.¹⁸ Up! Lift up the boy, and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make him into a great nation.”

In both cases God says He will make a nation of Ishmael. At this point we need to understand how the covenant and its blessings work. We begin with God and His promise. God is faithful and God knows all things. He sees the future and He has a plan. He makes a covenant, a binding promise, with Abraham. The covenant is that He will give Abraham offspring (through his own marriage) and that out of this there will come a great people, a home (land), and the blessing of all the people’s of the earth. On this side of the cross we know that the whole plan was calibrated for the coming of Jesus out of the line of David (though Christ was virgin born and divine). In other words, God has a plan that will reach its end (and its true beginning) in the person and work of Jesus Christ, the Savior. And, as we saw in the beginning of this chapter, God is faithful to His word and to His plan. He did what He promised He would do. He gave Abraham a son, Isaac, through Sarah and, in time, the people of Israel will come and, in time, an Israelite named Jesus, the Son of David.

But before this happened, Abraham and Sarah, in a moment of doubt and despair, worked their own plan. Sarah, the wife, gave Hagar, the slave woman, to Abraham and Hagar bore Abraham a son, Ishmael.

Ishmael is born through Hagar. Then Isaac is born through Sarah.

So how does this work with the covenant promise? After all, Ishmael was indeed Abraham’s son! It works like this: Ishmael, as Abraham’s son, becomes a partial participant in the covenant blessings because God is true to His word. But Ishmael, not being the intended son, the son of the original promise and divine plan, will not see the covenant fully fulfilled in Him. He sees some of the blessings, but not all. What does this look like? How are the blessings that come upon Ishmael different than those that come upon Isaac?

Old Testament scholar Ken Mathews notes that the promise made to Ishmael “falls short of the grander promises made to Abraham and his chosen line, who will enjoy an eternal relationship with God, inherit the land, and be a blessing for all peoples (12:2-3; 17:7-8; 18:18; 22:16-18).[4] John Walton further notes:

Ishmael is going to be beneficiary to some of the promises to Abraham. However, he does not gain any of the land, and he is not a channel of blessing to others, but he does share in the blessing by becoming a great nation (cf. 16:10). In addition, the nations coming from the Ishamaelites, alongside of the Moabites and the Ammonites, find themselves beholden to Abraham as the one who brought them into existence and on whose behalf they prosper.[5]

The blessings that Ishmael receives appear to be, therefore, largely temporal but are limited in scope. Jesus does not come from the lineage of Ishmael. Isaac is the channel of blessing. The promised land will belong to Isaac’s line, not Ishmael’s. And, as Walton points out, Ishmael’s line will be beholden to Isaac’s in certain ways. R.R. Reno observes that:

Ishmael is the worldly son, produced according to a human plan that accepted what seemed to be the realistic constraints of the situation. For this reason, Ishmael inherits a worldly promise…Isaac is the heavenly son and through him will come the nation that lives by the power of God to fulfill his promises, rather than by worldly skill in gaining the upper hand.[6]

The plan of God is perfect. The plan of God is fulfilled. God does what God says He will do. But the machinations of man invite confusion in the human sphere. God does not deny or turn away from the son of human planning. He will make of Ishmael a nation. But His ultimate plan will only be fulfilled, as indeed it must if God’s promise is true, through Isaac.

The scheming of man does not negate the sovereignty of God!

This is a story of two ways of living life.

In a certain sense, then, this is a story of two boys and one promise. In another sense, it is a story of two ways of life! We find this deeper reading of the story in Galatians 4. Here, Paul allegorizes the story of the two boys to tell us something about two different paths we can take in life.

In the context of Galatians 4, Paul is addressing a church torn by controversy. In the church of Galatia, there was a movement to take the early Christians back to the observances of Old Testament laws and customs. This was not just traditionalism run amuck. Rather it was an insidious threat to the church itself, for the folks pushing this return to law and custom were tying the observance of these things to one’s standing with God. In other words, they were arguing that Jesus was not enough. One also had to keep the law and the customs and the rituals and the feasts and the holy days. This was a problem that plagued the early church. And while the New Testament nowhere condemns Jewish followers of Jesus who retained an observance of Israel’s customs and rituals, Paul in particular wrote vociferously against any and all efforts to collapse those observances into salvation.

Paul is arguing in Galatians 4 that there are two ways, two paths, two ways of doing life. The one is bound to human effort, to legalisms, to the blood, sweat, and tears of our own attempts at righteousness. The other is of God, is founded in faith, and is a path of trust and love and obedience.

To make this point, Paul points to Ishmael and Isaac, to the son of the slave woman and the son of the free woman. Here is what he says:

²¹ Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? ²² For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. ²³ But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise. ²⁴ Now this may be interpreted allegorically: these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar. ²⁵ Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. ²⁶ But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. ²⁷ For it is written, “Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear; break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor! For the children of the desolate one will be more than those of the one who has a husband.” ²⁸ Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. ²⁹ But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now. ³⁰ But what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.” ³¹ So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman.

Paul is hereby viewing the boys as two types. Ishmael is spoken of as fleshly (being the product of a fleshly plan), as a type of slavery (being the son of a slave), and, we might summarize, as a type of manipulation. He represents an earthly approach to things in the grand contours of the narrative itself. He is himself the result of human effort and human attempts to correct what was deemed deficient in God’s plan.

Isaac, however, is spoken of as a type of promise, freedom, and, we might summarize, faith.

Indeed, Paul says they represent, in his allegorizing of the story, two covenants. One is the covenant of the law (“one is from Mount Sinai”) and the law brings slavery. We cannot effort our way into holiness or into our relationship with God. Human effort and ingenuity—as typified in the birth of Ishmael—will always be pain and confusion. But Isaac is pictured as a contrasting covenant. He is of “the Jerusalem above,” a place of freedom and joy and promise and fulfillment.

Believers in Christ, Paul says in verse 28, are “like Isaac…children of promise.” Paul then reaches his grand conclusion:

³¹ So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman.

In terms of salvation and our relationship with God, we must walk the path of Isaac: promise, fulfillment, faith, and joy. We must reject the path of Ishmael: human manipulation, human effort at fixing things as we perceive them, and fear.

The question becomes this: which path will you walk, the path of Ishmael or the path of Isaac as typified in the New Testament? Will you try to live life on the basis of your own perception, your own fears, your own efforts? Or will you live a life of faith, of trust, of hope, of freedom, and of joy?

Walter Brueggemann discerns in the story of Ishmael and Isaac “the fate of ‘natural man’ and the ‘pilgrimage of the children of promise’” as “two distinct ways in which life can be discerned.” He continues:

Isaac is a gift to be explained in no other way than as a wonder. And Ishmael is a child gotten by skillful determination and planning. As oldest son, Ishmael is the child of “entitlement” in possessing all natural rights…It is clear that living in the world of skillful determining, planning and competence is problematic. Such a way easily crushes the spirit and consigns one to the world of compulsion, control, and alienation. Such a way tries to live “by bread alone”…Against that, Paul understood that to live in the arena of “wonder” is the way to freedom and joy.[7]

I love that concluding line: “to live in the arena of ‘wonder’ is the way to freedom and joy.” God had invited Abraham and Sarah into “the arena of ‘wonder’” but they had panicked and introduced an element of confusion and strife into their lives. Had they trusted, had they waited, had they believed, this element of confusion would not have muddied the waters.

Make no mistake: God’s plan continues forward, as is evident in our text and in all of human history. The question is whether or not we will step into his plan and trust or whether or not we will create pain and confusion by second-guessing and acting out in panic and fear.

Are you trusting God for the living of these days? Remember, the whole point of the story is to get us to Jesus. Are you following Him? Have you trusted in Him? Are your eyes fixed on Jesus?

 

[1] https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/royals/prince-william-breaks-silence-on-megxit-i-want-everyone-to-play-on-the-team/news-story/e0248775adf5df37ac8d7cc54ebf858a

[2] Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis. Revised Edition. The Old Testament Library. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1972), p.232note.

[3] Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses. The Hebrew Bible. vol. 1 (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2019), p.69n.9.

[4] Kenneth A. Mathews, Genesis 11:27-50:26. The New American Commentary. Old Testament, vol. 1B (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, Publishers, 2005), p.273-274.

[5] John H. Walton, Genesis. The NIV Application Commentary. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001), p.496.

[6] R.R. Reno, Genesis. Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2010), p.29-192.

[7] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis. Interpretation. (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1982), p.184.