All In The Family ... Sort Of Series

Yesterday there were ceremonies all around the nation remembering the tragic events and loss of life that happened on September 11, 2001. Nineteen Muslim men hijacked four commercial airliners and converted them into flying bombs. Two crashed into two of the World Trade towers, causing the towers to collapse and killing 2,977 people … 415 of them were firefighters, rescue workers, and police officers. Another plane crashed into the Pentagon, killing everyone on board and 55 military personnel.

The story of 9/11 started over 2,300 years ago with a man by the name of Abram. We spoke already about the covenant that God made with Abram … promising to make him “the ancestor of a multitude of nations” (Genesis 17:5) … an amazing and seemingly impossible proposition for a childless couple who were well into the seventies and eighties, amen? Such a thing seemed impossible … even for God … so Abram’s wife, Sarai, decided to use a legal loophole. She offered her Egyptian slave, a woman by the name of Hagar, as a surrogate. What sounded good on paper, however, well, didn’t turn out so good in real life, did it? The Bible says that Hagar looked at Sarai with contempt. After all, Sarai was 75 years old and getting older by the day … her inability to produce a male heir meant that her son would inherit Abram’s vast wealth and property … and no doubt she could convince her son, Ishmael, to kick Sarai out to fend for herself … but that’s not how things happened, amen?

Sarai made things so miserable for Hagar that she decided to run away and return to her homeland in Egypt. Perhaps she was afraid that Sarai would convince Abram to sell her and son … or worse. “The angel of the LORD found [Hagar] by a spring of water in the wilderness … and he said, ‘Hagar, slave-girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?’ She said, ‘I am running away from my mistress Sarai.’ The angel of the LORD said to her, “’Return to your mistress, and submit to her.’ The angel of the LORD also said to her, ‘I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude.’ And the angel of the LORD said to her: ‘Now you have conceived and shall bear a son; you shall call him Ishmael, for the LORD has given heed to your affliction. 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 16:7-12).

Oh, my God! That should send a shiver down your spine when you see what’s going on in the Middle East today, amen?

True to His word, Sarai does become pregnant and give birth a male child 14 years after the birth of Ishmael at the age of 90 and named him, as the LORD commanded, “Isaac.” Here’s the thing, Abram loved both of his sons but only one son, Isaac, was the son of the covenant promise through whom would come the great nation promised to Abram. But what about Ishmael? God remembered His promise to Hagar. “I will bless him and make him fruitful and exceedingly numerous,” the LORD reassures Abram, “he shall be the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation” (Genesis 17:20).

Isaac gave birth to Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel, and he had 12 sons who became the heads of the 12 tribes of Israel. Ishmael also had 12 sons who became what we call today the Nation of Islam … which is not entirely accurate … since the “nation” of Islam is not really a nation but a body of believers or practitioners of the Muslim faith that span the globe … just as there is no “Christian Nation” but a body of believers or practitioners of the Christian faith that spans the globe, amen? There are 2.3 billion Christians in the world today … 1.8 billion Muslims … and only 827 million Jews … God has clearly kept His promise to Ishmael and Isaac, amen?

Flick on the news today and what do we see? The hand of Ishmael’s ancestors against everyone and everyone’s hand against the ancestors of Ishmael? Yes … and no. And given what we are experiencing today, it is important to understand who is behind the terrorism and what their motivation is since it appears that we will be dealing with this for perhaps generations to come.

I want to go back to what the angel said to Hagar when she ran away from Abram and Sarai. He told her to return to her mistress and “submit” to her (Genesis 16:9). Does anyone know what the name “Islam” means? It’s Arabic for “Submission.” The root of the word is “sal’m” … which sounds a lot like the Hebrew word “shalom” and means the same thing … to be filled with the fullness and peace of GOD. Sadly, even the name of “Islam” is rife with conflict and sad irony. “Submission” can mean several things. In the case of Hagar, it meant to submit to the will of her master and mistress, Abram and Sarai. In returning to her mistress, Hagar was also submitting to the will of GOD, amen? While the name of “Islam” does mean to submit to the will of God it has unfortunately also come to mean submitting to the will of radical Muslim political and religious leaders and philosophies.