Gods Sabbath

H OW A BRAMAND S ARAI BECAME A BRAHAMAND S ARAH

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thirteen years, God said nothing to Abram concerning the step taken (see Genesis 16:16; 17:1). It would seem that Abram took the absence of divine condemnation to mean that God ap proved his actions. When God at last repeated the assurance that Abraham would be the father of many nations (see Genesis 17:1–6), he im mediately assumed that this would take place through his son Ishmael. We can see this in Abraham’s reaction when God de clared that His promise would be fulfilled through the son of Sarah. In his astonishment Abraham revealed that his thoughts had been directed to his firstborn son: “And Abraham said to God, ‘Oh, that Ishmael might live be fore You!’” Genesis 17:18 (NKJV). There was more in Abraham’s plea for Ishmael than may be immediately apparent. It is true that Abraham loved this youth very deeply and intensely and, in consequence, desired that he should have the place of honor promised by God. But a deeper is sue was at stake than Abraham’s love for his son. Subconscious ly, the patriarch was defending the system, or procedure, by which Ishmael had been born. It was a call for the human way of building God’s work to be accepted in the place of the divine way. It was not that these issues were clearly defined in Abraham’s mind. The divine rejection of Ishmael as the promised child stirred mixed emotional responses in Abraham that effectively prevented him from discerning the implications of God’s state ment and his own response to it. In Abraham’s thinking, Jehovah was proposing the truly im possible. He no longer believed that he and Sarah could produce a child. His wife had always been barren and now he had aged to the point where he was impotent. He questioned why God should wait so long to do what could have been easily accom plished years before. When Abraham heard God’s announce ment that he would have a son through his wife Sarah, he “fell facedown; he laughed and said to himself, ‘Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?’” Genesis 17:17. It was immediately after Abraham had adopted this unbeliev ing stance that the cry escaped his lips, “Oh, that Ishmael might live before You!” Genesis 17:18 (NKJV).