December 9, 2001 Heb. 11:11-12; Gen. 15-16
“How can this be?”
INTRODUCTION
Do you know what the three most feared words at Christmas time are? “Some assembly required”. Oh, there are lots of good words at Christmas. Words like “Joy to the world”, “Merry Christmas”, “50% off sale”, and “Thank you”. But none of those can overcome the fear and apprehension that every dad and many mothers feel when they see those horrendous words on the boxes that their children’s presents have come in. For those words mean that inside the box, along with that wonderful present, will be…instructions!
Last year, on Christmas Eve night, after the kids had gone to bed, I spent several hours experiencing the joy of instructions. Tammy and I had bought Ben a foosball game. (That’s a table-top soccer game for those of you who don’t know.) We knew that if we let Ben open his present the next morning with the game still in the box, he would be bugging us and pestering us the whole time that we were putting it together. So we decided to put it together ahead of time. Have you ever noticed that the portions of the instructions that are the shortest and are supposedly supposed to be the easiest turn out to be those things that could almost make a preacher cuss? Everything was going along fine in this process until it came time to put in the playing field. That’s the board that has all the soccer field markings and that the ball rolls around on. This board had slats that it had to go into on all four walls of the table. I tried doing this by myself, but every time that I would get the board into the proper slat on one side, it would pop out on the other side. What was worse was that each corner of the playing field was supposed to be a little higher than the rest of the board to prevent the ball from getting stuck in the corner. I worked and worked and worked to get it in…with no success. I was getting totally frustrated. So I called for the professional. I called for Tammy. Piece of advice – never call your wife into a frustrating situation when you are already at your limit. Tammy and I almost had a fight on Christmas Eve night. In spite of our frustration, we worked together to get it done. Tammy held one side in while I worked on the other. She pushed and I pulled, and finally we got it in. Then quickly, I put in some screws to hold it all in place. With that portion of the task completed, we turned the table back over to see how our handiwork looked. It was then that I discovered that I had put some of the players in the wrong positions. I hadn’t followed the instructions completely. The only possible way of correcting my error was to take the whole thing back apart, switch the players around and go through that whole process all over again. Guess what we decided to do – leave it! What does it really matter if some of the players are facing the wrong direction and if some of the players that are supposed to be on the same team are the wrong color? It will still work. Ben wanted a foosball table. Now he had one. Did it really matter that it was put together a little bit wrong?
Many of us ask a similar question when it comes to our relationship with God. What does it really matter how I do things for God? Isn’t what I do for God more important than how I do it?
If you get the how wrong in putting presents together, what you got doesn’t really matter. Buying a bike (the “what”) for your son won’t impress him or make him happy if he can’t ride it because you put it together wrong (the “how”).
Talk about the promises made to Abram. (Genesis 12)
The fulfillment of these promises rested on Abraham having a son.
Abraham had a choice to make – believe God or not believe God. Abraham chose to believe God, and the Bible says that that faith was credited to Abraham as righteousness (Gen. 15:6).
How many of your children know at least one thing that they are getting for Christmas? How do they know? Because it is what you, or grandma and grandpa or some other relative has promised to them. They base their confidence of getting that gift on their understanding that you or whoever it is that promised that gift always keeps their promises. That may be a safe bet, and it may not be.
I make all kinds of promises. Sometimes I fulfill them, and I must admit, sometimes, I do not. My children and my wife have a right to be a little skeptical when they hear me make a promise. I am not 100% trustworthy when it comes to my promises.
Abraham knew that God was not a human that He should lie, and that He always kept His promises. Heb. 11:11 says that Abraham considered or counted God faithful to keep His promises.
But still, there were a couple of problems that would make it more complicated for God to keep His promises to Abraham. Abraham and Sarah were getting old. Abraham was 75, and Sarai was 65 when God first made the promise. The second problem was that according to the record, Sarah was barren. She was infertile. The barrenness of Canaan only reminded her of the barrenness of her womb. The barrenness of the land mirrored the barren womb of Sarah. Every time that she looked out and saw the dryness of the land, she was reminded of the dryness in her womb and unquenched thirst of her heart.
This was one promise that required some action on Abraham and Sarah’s part in order for it to be fulfilled. This is probably the best time for me to point out and explain the difference between the way vs. 11 reads in the KJV and in the NIV. In the KJV, it would seem that the faith belongs to Sarah. “Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised.” (KJV) But in the NIV, Abraham was the one who was showing the faith.
Whose faith are we talking about here? Abraham’s or Sarah’s? I could give you several reasons from the Greek why it could go either way. But may I suggest that there is a reason why God left it kind of up for grabs of who was the holder of the faith in this instance. They both had to be involved in the process. Last time I checked, it takes a man and a woman to produce a child. They both had to have faith in the promises of God to keep on believing and to keep on trying.
Abraham and Sarah had been trying to have a son for many years – ever since they got married. In those days, there was great stigma attached to not being able to produce children. Having a son was the means of passing on your estate and your name. A son was considered a blessing from God. If God withheld a son from a family, that said to everyone that God was withholding His blessings. That family must have done something really bad, because they were cursed by God.
Every time that Abraham and Sarah had sex, they expectantly, hopefully waited to see what the outcome would be. Abraham would quietly ask, “Have you started yet?” to which Sarah would reply, “I’m late.” And they would cross their fingers and pray to God. But each time that her monthly flow began, it was like all her faith and all her hope was draining away with the blood. And this happened month after month after month until several years had passed away. They believed God, but their shield of faith was starting to get some holes in it, and some of Satan’s arrows of doubt were starting to get through. How long were they supposed to wait for God to fulfill His promises?
Nobody likes waiting to have promises fulfilled. Most of you are not kids anymore, and some of you are far enough along to make it very difficult to remember what it was like being a kid. But try as hard as you can to remember what it was like waiting for Christmas to get here. It seemed like it was an eternity between one Christmas and the next. That was especially true for me. Most people have a birthday to celebrate somewhere in between one Christmas and the next. Not me. My birthday is on Dec. 22. The waiting was terrible!
Of course, we aren’t much better as adults. When promises are made, we expect them to be fulfilled immediately. It doesn’t matter if those promises were made by a company shipping last minute Christmas gifts to us and promising on time delivery even though they weren’t ordered until Dec. 24, of if those promises were made by God who puts no timetable on when He will fulfill His promises. We want it now! A promise that isn’t fulfilled in our timetable is a broken promise as far as we are concerned. But God doesn’t operate according to our timetable. One of the promises that Jesus made while He was on earth was that He was going to come back. People started doubting His promise when a mere 30 years later, He had not yet returned. In response, Peter records these words: (2 Pet 3:8-9 KJV) “But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” But still we have a timetable. We want things done now.
And when those promises aren’t fulfilled, we come up with our own plan of how we can make things work out without God’s help.
That’s exactly what Abraham and Sarah did. Abraham and Sarah came up with their own plan of how they could help God fulfill His promise – Hagar (Gen. 16:1-4a). Figured that God’s plan wasn’t working out. They had waited long enough. (Abraham was now 85 years old. It had been ten years since God had made the original promise.)
Why would Sarah be willing to suggest something like that? Why would she put her husband in the arms of another woman? Some people will do anything to have a child. {story of dad who spent millions of dollars to fund a genetics lab in the hope of cloning his son who had died}. There’s also invitro fertilization. {couple who had been unable to conceive children and went through the fertilization process. A month or so later, an ultrasound revealed that the fertilization had been a success. She was pregnant with twins. But there was a surprise. There was another set of twins in her womb. She was already pregnant when she was fertilized. So she had two sets of twins – one set through natural reproduction and one set through the medical procedures.}
This was the second time that Abraham had put his own twist on the promises and commands of God. (review what was discussed last week concerning Abraham’s journey down into Egypt) And again, everything seemed to be working out according to Abraham’s plan – at least at first. But then, as soon as Hagar found out that she was pregnant, things headed down hill. The 2nd part of vs. 4 in Genesis 16 says that Hagar despised Sarah. Don’t know exactly what that means. It may mean that she stopped being obedient to Sarah. It may mean that she started taunting her with the fact that she had been in the arms of Abraham or with the fact that she had gotten pregnant by Abraham whereas Sarah could not. Sarah took it for a while, but then it got to be too much. Look at what she did (vs. 5). Sarah ended up throwing out the very pregnant Hagar. As Abraham watched her run away, he thought that all his chances of having a son were running away with her.
It was while Sarai and Abram were in Egypt that they acquired Hagar, the Egyptian maidservant by whom Abraham fathered Ishmael. One bad decision led to another bad decision with tragic consequences. Whenever you mess with God’s plan and try to throw in your own ideas, you are going to create pain for yourself and those around you.
Through a set of circumstances and God’s intervention that you can read about for yourself in Genesis 16, Hagar came back to Abraham’s household and was restored. Hagar gave birth to a baby boy and named him Ishmael just as God commanded. Abraham took one look at that little baby boy and immediately fell in love with him. He had been waiting for a son for so long. He was 86 years old now. What were the chances of him fathering another son.
Time passed. 5 years, 10 years, 13 years passed. Abraham is now 99 years old. By all standards, he’s an old man. Once more in Genesis 17, God comes to Abram and tells him that he is going to have a son. He even changes his name to “Abraham” which means “father of many nations”. It was more than Abraham could handle. It was the ultimate joke. In fact, when God came to him this time with the promise of a son from his own seed, Abraham laughed (Gen. 17:17).
Abraham even tried to get God to put His blessing on the alteration which Abraham had made in God’s plan. (Gen. 17:18) “Can’t you just forget your plan God and go along with mine? Mine doesn’t require the miraculous.” But that’s the problem. God’s plan is never something which can be accomplished without the miraculous. If it were, then men could get the glory and not God. Abraham was willing to settle for 2nd best.
Part of the reason that God waited so long to fulfill His promise to Abraham was that He wanted to wait until it was physically impossible for both Sarah and Abraham to conceive children. Sarah had been barren ever since the two of them had first gotten married. But Abraham had still been able to father children at age 85. He had fathered Ishmael. But now, he’s 99. He’s way past child-bearing age. And lest you think that Abraham was some kind of stud that could even produce children at this age, Hebrews 11:12 says that Abraham was “as good as dead”. That phrase doesn’t mean that he was dead physically, but reproductively. It was now physically impossible for him to produce children. In order for them to have a son, God had to regenerate Abraham and Sarah’s reproductive organs. [After Isaac, Abraham had many more children by his 2nd wife, Keturah (Gen. 25:1ff).] God wanted to wait until all were sure that a birth to this couple could be nothing but a miracle.
God can take dead men and not only resurrect them but also make it possible for them to produce life – multitudes of life. He can do the same with dead marriages, relationships, and dreams. God delights in taking dead things and bringing them back to life.
One more time, a short time later, God came to Abraham to repeat His promise of a son. But this time the promise was different. This time, God added a time-frame (18:10). “Abraham, one year from now, you will be holding a child in your arms.” Sarah was listening from inside the tent. When she heard God’s promise, she laughed. She had a right to laugh. She had heard this promise repeated over and over again for the last 25 years. It hadn’t happened yet. Why should she expect it to happen now? After all, she was 90 years old now. But even with her doubts and her fears, she responded in faith. In hope that the promise of God would actually be fulfilled this time, she and Abraham had sex together again. And this time, Sarah was not only late when the normal time came, but she was pregnant. She couldn’t believe it!
A little while ago, I posed the question of whose faith was involved in the production of this child. Was it Abraham’s faith or Sarah’s faith? No one should doubt the reality of Sarah’s faith in this process. Having this child was definitely an act of faith on Sarah’s part. It was a dangerous thing to produce a child at the age of 90. Could very well have caused her death. On top of that was dealing with the physical and emotional strains of raising a child at the age of 90. {talk about the time that Ben fell and cut his head. “There’s blood everywhere!” Almost made my heart stop.}
It would have taken faith to believe that a 90 year old woman would be able to nurse a child, run after that child, keep up with him and raise him. It takes faith for anyone to be a parent. It’s a real challenge even if you are only in your 20’s or 30’s.
“Parents spend 2 years teaching their children to walk and talk and 18 years trying to teach them to sit down and be quiet.” – Ted Engstrom, A Time for Commitment
“Child rearing is like baking a cake. You don’t realize you have a disaster until it’s too late.” – James Dobson, Strong-willed Child
A mother of 3 pre-schoolers was asked whether she would have children if she had to do it all over again. “Sure,” she responded, “just not the same three.” – Preaching magazine, May-June 1990.
Both Abraham and Sarah laughed when they were told that Sarah would produce a child at the age of 90 (17:17 & 18:12). Isaac was given his name by God. Isaac means “laughter”. Isaac’s name has a double meaning. It’s as if God was saying two things. First, “When I tell you something is going to happen, don’t laugh.” And second, “I am the only one who can bring laughter into a life where everyone else has lost all hope.” And Isaac lived up to his name. He brought joy and laughter to two old people. The son who was born through their own scheming and lack of faith brought pain (Gen. 16:4-6; 21:8-11). The son that came through God’s plan and faith brought laughter. (Psa 113:9 KJV) He makes the barren woman to keep house, and to be a joyful mother of children. Praise the LORD.
God had made a promise to Abram that he would have a son. That promise was originally made when Abram was 75 years old. It wasn’t fulfilled until he was 100 yrs. old – 25 years later! In fulfilling one promise, the birth of Isaac, God made possible the fulfillment of all the other promises (i.e. numerous descendants, making a great nation, blessing to all mankind). It had taken a long time, but at the end of it all, Sarah had a child in her arms, Abraham had a son, and God had fulfilled His promise just the way He said He would. God always keeps His promises.
Mary asked, “How can this be seeing that I have never known a man?” (Luke 1:34)
Nicodemus asked, “How can a man be born when he is old?” (Jn. 3:4)
What would you like to see happen this Christmas, but you just don’t see how? Two questions – did God promise it? Is this the right time?
God is not just the God of the what. He is also the God of the how. God provides salvation (what) through faith in Jesus Christ (how). Trying to get to God and achieve salvation (what) through a different means (how) than faith will get you nowhere.
How can He die, and come back to life? How can he feed 5000 people with five loaves and two fish? How can He heal the blind, raise the dead and forgive the sinful?
What has God promised you?
How can God forgive me? How can He love me? I’ve got to make myself more lovable before God could ever love me.
How can God heal my heart? How can God use me?
“one man” – God can do a lot through one man who is willing to be obedient to God in all respects. One man impacted the world in a great way. God can do the same through you. Will you be that one man who believes God when all the evidence and all your feelings tell you not to? Will you allow God’s improbably plans to rule your life? If you will, then He will fill your heart with laughter just like He did for Abraham and Sarah.
