Sarah lived one hundred and twenty-seven years; these were the years of the life of Sarah. So Sarah died in Kirjath Arba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan, and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her. Genesis 23: 1, 2, NKJV.
LORD, How excellent is Your name in all the world. You are a God who keep Your promises. May we never forget that. In the precious name of Jesus we humbly pray. Amen and Amen,
At first sight you might ask yourself what does our Scripture for today have to do with God’s faithfulness. That is a fair question. When God laid this text upon my heart, I said, LORD, You will show me where to go with this. Let us walk through it together with the aid of the Holy Spirit, the One who “knows the things of God” (1 Corinthian 2: 10, 11)!
Sarah was approximately sixty-five years old when the promise that God had chosen her and Abraham as the couple, through whose seed, “all the families of the earth” [would] be blessed” (Genesis 12: 3). Abraham and Sarah were married, and as such, it was expected that if God was going to use Abram to be the “father of nations,” his wife Sarai, would, naturally be, the “mother of nations.” For some reason, unknown to us, they both lost sight of this obvious fact. I say lost sight of, and not, were ignorant of, because of what Sarai said, when she encouraged her husband to take another wife to himself, and the fact that he agreed to it, “ ‘ “The LORD has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.” ‘ Abram agreed to what Sarai said. So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. He slept with Hagar, and she conceived.” ‘ ” (16: 2-4, NIV).
In other words, LORD, we have been waiting for more or less ten years, and You have not given us the child that You promised. Our childbearing years will soon be past. We will now take things in our own hands, thank You! Does the monologue sound familiar? We do this to God all the time, don’t we? We read His promises in the Bible. If we are reading well, we know, that if the Word goes out of His mouth it has to perform what it was sent forth to perform! Yet we still believe, that at times, we can do God’s work better than He can. So we take matters into our hands.
This morning, instead of “beating a dead horse dead” (going over their mistake), I believe we would be greatly blessed, by contemplating God’s faithfulness in the face of our doubts, fears, and failures. Let us take some time to do this:
When their mistake caught up with them and they threw poor used Hagar out of the home, “the Angel of the LORD found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, by the spring on the way to Shur” (7). Jesus Himself descended and gave her hope (8-13). He revealed Himself to an abandoned slave, turned her around and made Himself known to her, by a name of her choosing, You are “El Roi, the-God-Who-Sees” (13a)! God is so faithful!
Thirteen years later, God is still keeping His part of the bargain because His grace and mercy will out-do anything we could ever imagine (17: 1-6). The promised seed is about to be born, so their names are changed. Sarai is now Sarah, “Then God said to Abraham, “ ‘ “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. And I will bless her and also give you a son by her; then I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations; kings of peoples shall be from her’ ” ” (15,16). God reminds Abraham that the covenant is extended to his descendants (7, 8). Oh, the faithfulness of our God!
Even after this clear and concise declaration of God’s plan, neither Abraham nor Sarah dare to believe. Both of them “laugh” in disbelief, (17: 17; 18: 12). And in His long-suffering, and tender mercies, He remembers that we are but “dust” (Psalm 103: 14). He will keep Abraham from perpetuating his error by s p e l l i n g out His plan:
“And Abraham said to God, ‘ “If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!” ‘ Then God said, ‘ “Yes, but your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will call him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him. And as for Ishmael, I have heard you: I will surely bless him; I will make him fruitful and will greatly increase his numbers. He will be the father of twelve rulers, and I will make him into a great nation. But my covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah will bear to you by this time next year” ‘ ” ‘ ” (17: 18-21, NIV). Emphasis provided. Praise God for His faithfulness!
By the time we come to our Scripture for today, the promised son Isaac, is now approximately thirty seven years old! In spite of the fact that both Sarai and Abram doubted God, God’s faithfulness allowed Sarah to see her son become a grown man. By the time Abraham died, at one hundred and seventy five years (25: 7), Isaac was approximately seventy-five years old! What a faithful God we serve! His faithfulness out-does, by far, our unfaithfulness!