This transcript was auto-generated

In 1989 My wife and I had been going out together as boyfriend and girlfriend for a while. Several times particularly during the recent days I told her that I loved her. I knew I wanted to marry her I also knew she probably wanted to be married to me. It was sort of understood between us that we would get married someday and spend the rest of our lives together. Then one night we went out to the cinema there was nothing unusual about that we had gone to the cinema many times before. But on that occasion, I paused and looked at her full in the face and said will you marry me. We loved each other, we wanted to be together, even though it was unsaid at that time I new we both wanted to have a family together. I made a promise that day, to love and cherish her not matter what the future held, and she said, “I will”. That promise became real but not for about 10 months when we stood together in a church and promised before God and our families that we would both willing embrace the promise we had made to each other that day 

God did something similar; he makes a promise to Abraham and by nature he makes a similar promise to every believer way before he ever performs it, but when he finally does what should be our response. That's what I want us to think about over the next few podcast because that was the experience of no less than Abraham. God made him a promise, but God took a long time to get around to fulfilling that promise. I'm interested in looking at Gods promise and Abraham's response to it.

Chapter 21 contains two entirely different episodes in the life of Abraham, over the next four or five podcasts we are going too initially look at the first 21 verses. The opening section of chapter 21 talks about Abraham and his two sons. We’re going to initially begin by just looking at the first son and then later on we will get to the second son.

“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. Abraham gave the name Isaac to the son Sarah bore him. When his son Isaac was eight days old, Abraham circumcised him, as God commanded him. Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. Sarah said, “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.”

(Gen 21: 1-7)

I want you to notice is that this passage is telling us that God finally fulfilled his promise to Abraham. When Abraham was in the midst of his covenant sacrificial life, one characterized by contract he made with the idea of constantly re-setting his life and pursuing the greater good by pursuing God. Illustrated by his decision to embrace the promise God had made with him. One which included an heir, despite his wife’s advanced old age. Of course, Sarah was very sceptical about that, as she had every reason to be. However, this chapter begins with the fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham.

I suppose one of the purposes of this story—is to illustrate for dramatic purposes, the importance of a child. When people are young, and I think this is particularly true in the modern world—they seem too often regard the possibility of having a child as an impediment to their career or lifestyle.  I know that what I thought from I was about 18 for about 10 years. Today we can make a decision when to have a child—which, of course, people couldn’t in the past ages, but, sometimes, you see people delay, and they delay too long, and then they spend a decade doing fertility treatments. Having a child in your life is actually something that’s remarkable You can have a relationship with a child that is better than any relationship that you’ve ever had with anyone in your life,  Here by delaying the arrival of Isaac continually, God is highlighting the important significance of a child, because it’s truly not until you’re deprived of something that you have any sense of what its value is. Abraham was a very long time—and the same with Sarah. So, they’re unbelievably excited when it happens which also heightens the drama that’s inherent in the entire story that is about to be revealed. Only because it appears that Abraham will be called upon to sacrifice Isaac, which would be bad enough under any circumstances. The fact that he’s been waiting a century for this child, and that he has lived a faithful live and lived in the appropriate manner and has made all the proper sacrifices, dramatically heightens the literary tension in the story. So, Isaac arrives, and the promise of God has come to pass. But something unimaginable is about to happen to Abraham. How in the world are you supposed to make any sense out of that?  It’s exactly that sort of story that makes modern people, who are convinced that the faster we put the Biblical stories behind us, the better, because it seems like such an incomprehensible and barbaric act, on the part of God. I hesitate to even approach it, because there’s so many ways that an interpretation of these sorts of passages can go wrong.  But we’ll see how it goes. Let’s walk through it and see what happens.