Faith & Works - The Ishmael Controversy

SPEAKER A You once to every time in the sight of the good or evil sky don't break on you that I choice of life forever with that darkness. And. SPEAKER B The Bible assures us in Ephesians two, verses eight to ten, for by grace you have been saved through faith. And that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Welcome to faith to faith Here are your hosts, Ettienne McClintock and Braedan Entermann. SPEAKER C Dear listener, greetings and a warm welcome. Thank you for joining us on the program again today. Braedan and myself are delighted to have your company. And just as we start our study, we just invite you for a word of prayer. Gracious Father in heaven, we thank you for another opportunity to open Your word to understand a little bit more about faith, how we connect to You, Father, how we can trust you, and also what role works play in it. Because sometimes faith can be railroaded by our works because it does get in the way instead of relying on you more fully. And Father, we just want to unpack this. We just pray for Your Holy Spirit to guide and lead us in our discussion. And also, Father, that you'll give us enlightenment from above so we can understand these beautiful truths. And our connection with you is our prayer in Jesus name. Amen. SPEAKER D Amen. SPEAKER C Okay, so this time we're looking at a promise that God had made to Abraham. And we find this promise in Genesis chapter 15. And basically our study today will run through Genesis chapter 15, genesis chapter 16 and 17. And we'll just look at what the Bible says about that. But to summarize that God had called Abram out of earth, the Chaldeans, and he had a bit of a time in Haran and then when his father died, he moved on there. God was taking him to a land. But God wanted to bring a blessing to the world through Abraham and Abraham's seed. Now, in Genesis chapter 15, we see where God actually speaks to Abraham, comes to him in a vision. He says that he is Abraham's shield and he's also his great reward. And then Abram says to the Lord, he's not known as Abram yet. He's called abram. His name was changed in chapter 17. So when chapter 15, he says, look, I'm going childless, Lord, and through adoption I have someone who will actually be able to be a blessing and fulfill the promise that through my seed, all the nations of the earth would to be blessed. And then God says, no, look, I will give you a person born from your own body. And we see there that God actually makes this promise to him. In verse four of Genesis, chapter 15. It says there, and behold, the Word of the Lord came to him saying, this one shall not be your heir. This one being Eliezer of Damascus, who he had adopted, but one who will come from your own body shall be your heir. Then what God does, he takes him outside. It's almost like it's nighttime. And God has now appeared to him in the vision. The Word of the Lord is speaking to him, brings him outside of his tent. He says, now look up to the stars of heaven. Look at them. Can you number them? And if you can number them as many stars as you can see, they say your descendants will be. Now, Abraham then abandons the thought of Eliezer, his adopted son, to be the person through whom the blessing would come. And it says there that he believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness. This is in verse six. He said he believed God, and it accounted him for righteousness. So Abraham then, by simply believing God's promise, is accounted righteous. Now, is righteousness as simple as that? Braedan? Is it just simply accepting the Word of God, and we are accounted as righteous? SPEAKER D According to this verse? SPEAKER C It is. Wow. SPEAKER D I want to read it one more time. It says, So he believed in the Lord. Another word we could use there is trusted, depended. He believed in the Lord, and he, God, accounted it to him for righteousness. SPEAKER C Okay? SPEAKER D And so basically, what we find here is basically God's solution to the problem that started way back in Genesis. Back then, God had said some things, and Adam and Eve doubted the Word of God. They did not trust in the Word of God. They depended on their own understanding and took things into their own hands. The relationship fractured and separated because sin separates us from God. And here we have a human being looking up to the stars and just getting overwhelmed at how many stars. There was no light pollution like we have today. And he's looking up. He's just taking in just the grandeur of the universe that he can see. And God says, that's how many kids you're going to have from your own body. This is how many kids you're going to have. And he looks up in a moment where he doesn't understand how. He doesn't understand how. And he looks up and he goes, okay, I believe you. SPEAKER C I believe you. SPEAKER D And in that moment where he just goes, okay, and just trusts himself to the promise of God righteousness, we've just had the relationship between heaven and earth just connected up once again where a human being is willing to trust the Word of God. Back in Genesis, that relationship was broken. And here we have a human being who looks up and says, you know what? Even though it doesn't make sense to me, I trust you. SPEAKER C That's right. SPEAKER D I want to point out one thing here with what God has said to Abram, because when we're familiar with the Bible story, we're so comfortable with the idea that God promises a child. But let's be honest here. Abram and his wife Sarai cannot have children. They just can't have kids. Biologically, they cannot have children. And yet God is promising them something that is impossible. It's something that is they've tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried again, and there's just been no show. No child has been born. And yet God says, you're going to have a kid. You're going to have a child. And it's just so hard for Abram to actually get it into his head that God can do something more than he can do for himself. And I think that once each of us realizes that that God can do more for us than we can do for ourselves, there's a journey that's about to begin. SPEAKER C That's true. Now, I just want to emphasize this point as well, because Abraham says to God, look, you have given me no offspring. Indeed, one born in my house is my heir. So he's through adoption. And then God says, behold, this one shall not be your heir, but one who will come from your own body shall be your heir. So for him to accept what God said, he had to abandon his own thoughts and ideas on how God was to fulfill his plans, because that's not what God had in mind. It was not going to be Eliezer. And God's very clear it's not going to be Eliezer as one coming from your body. And then when he looks at the stars, the multitude of the stars represent who is going to come from that seed, a huge number of people. And he simply abandons the old idea, accepts the new idea that God gave him by his word. And it's very clear we were emphasizing the fact that this came to him. It says, the word of the Lord came to him. It's by God's word that he accepted this, believed the word of God, and God accounted to him as righteousness, which is counting to Him. Right. Doing that's right. SPEAKER D Simply in believing it's very interesting with the Eliezer thing. This Eliezer was a servant in his home. His household is a very important person, probably the leader of the household under Abraham. And he's trying to process it because God has said, I'm going to bless through your seed, through your descendants, I'm going to bless the world. And obviously he can't have children, so he's just brainstorming. And this is a problem sometimes we're living in a time where the emphasis is use your brain reason through all these different things. But here we have Abram at that point, brainstorming. And he's thinking, Well, I can't have kids. And he looks around him. He's just trying to solve this problem. He says, God said that he's going to bless me and my descendants are going to be a blessing to the world. I can't have kids. And he looks at Eliezer and he's like, that's the next best option that'll solve the problem. He's like, I'll adopt him and then he can be my son and it's going to fit. And so he solved it in his head. And now God comes in chapter 15 and says, no, it's not Eliezer. That's a nice try, good idea, but I've got something better than just the household servant. I'm actually going to give you a son from your own body. And that's where he's like he has to abandon his plan that he's come up with. SPEAKER C And that's not always easy for us human beings, is it? To shift gears or to change our paradigm, to look at things very differently, especially if we've locked into that mindset for quite a while. And remember, in chapter twelve, god said in you, all the nations of the earth will be blessed. So he thought, okay, well, it's going to happen through Eliezer. SPEAKER D And he married to that idea. He just had that for years. That was the plan. And now God's like, that's nice, but I've got something a lot better than that. I'm going to give you a child from your own body. And so now he's confronted with a God who can do far more for him than he could ever do for himself. Yes, there's something miraculous about what God is promising here. He says that even though your body is incapable of having children, you will have children. Yeah, but as we're going to find. SPEAKER C Out, well, sometimes God doesn't answer the promises straight away. Sometimes there's a little bit of a delay and these delays can test our faith. So was Abraham's faith tested with a delay? It was in fulfilling the promise. SPEAKER D So he believed at that particular point, he was convinced that there's a God in heaven who's interested in his situation and who's able to help him biologically and physiologically to actually have children. And he believes it. But some time lapses and goes by and his confidence in the word of God, and Sarai's confidence as well, begins to kind of get a little bit shaky. SPEAKER C That's right, because if we look at chapter 16 and verse one, it says, no Sarai, so she wasn't called Sarah, yet Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. And then it talks about this Egyptian maid whose name was Hagar. Then Sarah comes with a solution. She's obviously been doing some brainstorming of her own now. SPEAKER D Interesting. SPEAKER C And in verse two, so Sarai said to Abraham, see, now the Lord has restrained me from bearing children. Please go into my maid. Perhaps I should obtain children by her. Now, I want you to really pay attention to this. Even though her maid was to have the child, sarah was going to take this child and adopt it as hers, because she says perhaps I shall obtain children by her. Now, what do we call that nowadays? If you have someone else have your children for you because you're not able of having it surrogacy. Surrogacy. Okay. So the first one adoption, they've abandoned that. There's some delay in God fulfilling his promise that from Abraham's seed, you will have a descendant from his own body. So then they say, well, maybe the Lord wants us to do something because time is dragging on a little bit here. I know there's a plan that we can have. Why don't we have a child? I will adopt the child and we'll do it through a surrogate. And Abraham, it will still be your child, and I will have the child through she'll just be like an incubator. I said, so she'll be the surrogate mother. So they hatch that plan, and it says, Abraham heeded the voice of Sarai. SPEAKER D Oh, dear. SPEAKER C Okay, so that wasn't a good thing. SPEAKER D This is the challenge. In chapter 15, god has spoken. He's given his word of promise, and Abraham believes the Lord as that verse. It says, he believed in the Lord, and it was accounted to him for righteousness. SPEAKER C Yes. SPEAKER D Chapter 16, his wife comes up with a plan, and then it says that Abram paid attention to or heeded and obeyed the voice of Sarah. So you got two conflicting voices. God says, I'm going to give you a son. And he kind of gets a little bit both him and his wife are like, okay, this is not going to work between you and me, Sarah. It's not going to work. And she comes up with an idea know, bringing hagar into the picture as well. And Abram just goes along with the idea. SPEAKER C Yes. SPEAKER D So again, they're trying to solve a problem. They're trying to solve a problem. They can't have kids. And so they're trying to think of every single possible way that they can get around this. Number one, adopt like, no, no, that's not the plan. And then finally, Abraham's like, okay, I'll trust you. And they're like, okay, let's do the hagar thing that's going to work. SPEAKER C So they believe the promise. There's no question that they knew that God was going to give Abraham a son. They just think that God needed some help. SPEAKER D That's right. SPEAKER C Yeah. So what happens is God promises, well, we'll help God fulfill the promise. Is that not a common response that we have as human beings to the promises of God? SPEAKER D It's enormously what we do. It's so much what we do. We know, according to the Bible, even a very brief study of the Bible, we know that we have been called to be holy. The Bible says, and God's speaking, be holy, for I am holy. SPEAKER C Yes. SPEAKER D As your father is perfect, so be ye perfect. So God has called us over and over again to be something brilliant, to be something pure, to be something holy and good. And so what do we do? We go, okay, I get that, and then we try every possible conceivable way to achieve that. Now, some of the examples, after the first few hundred years of the Church history, after Jesus, people were getting a bit frustrated because of all these desires that they had and they couldn't overcome the sins. And so what they did is they went off into the wilderness, locked themselves in a building and just tried to starve themselves and keep away from the objects of their desire, trying to solve the problem. And we call that monasticism so where monks would go and lock themselves away from the world and think that they're holy by just locking themselves away. So here we have a solution. Not a very good one. SPEAKER C Yes. SPEAKER D And what people don't realize is that there's the power of the Holy Spirit to transform our hearts and our minds. We don't have to lock ourselves away in a cave, we don't have to pay X amount of money, do all these different solutions, trying to solve our sin problem. God will do that for us. SPEAKER C Great. So we have this natural response from human beings to respond to the promise of God, thinking that they've got to help the Lord fulfill his promises. Now, we call that an old covenant response, pretty much because God had given the Ten Commandments to Israel, and then Israel said, yes, we'll be obedient. And it was a matter of 40 days when they already broken the law where they had a golden calf, they were worshipping that they abandoned God, the creator of heaven and earth. And so they, within matter of a short period of time, actually learnt the fact that they could not keep that law, that they were so keen to make a covenant with God. So we're going to be very careful with this because we really want to have a new covenant response, which is based on better promises and relying on those better promises exclusively, which is relying on the word of God, do exactly what it said it would do. Now, how long did Sarah take to abandon that idea and repudiate that idea that Hagar was to have a child? SPEAKER D Look, it wasn't very long. SPEAKER C Hagar was still pregnant. She hadn't even had a baby yet, according to the Bible. SPEAKER D And she was getting a bit upset with this because Hagar was feeling quite important now that she's the one that's able to have a baby and she's a household slave. And now the two ladies have got a bit of rivalry, a bit of jealousy between them. And Sarah starts to blame Abram and she blames him and she's upset and she wants them to be kicked out of the home. So it's amazing when we take things into our own hands rather than if we have a question like this is their question. Chapter 16 begins now. Sarah, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. So after the promise that God made. Obviously they had tried. They'd tried and tried and tried and tried to have children. And so now they've got a question. They're like, God, you promised us to be able to have children, but we can't. Instead of coming to God and saying, god, something's not working, what are we meant to do? We trust you. That's when they start to devise another method. And as soon as they've gone down this road of trying to devise things in their own brains, they either get. SPEAKER C Taken off the Lord and it starts looking at their own physical abilities to do the things, to fulfill the promise. SPEAKER D That's exactly right. SPEAKER C So they're relying on the flesh, so to speak. SPEAKER D That's what we call they're depending upon themselves. And it's just miserable now. The home is actually divided now. You've got one husband, two wives, two wives. They're jealous now and there's just problems. And I just wonder if we were to have a look at all of the problems that we have in our lives and how many of them are just simply the result of us trying to achieve God's promises by our own strength. Just the needless pain and the needless anxiety and it actually put a hold on the promises of God. God could have done something. But no, they've gone down another path and it's actually a little bit a bit of time before they get back on the tracks once. SPEAKER C Yes, that's right, because Abram is about 86 years old when this happens. Now, what happens is Hagar has a child. It's called Ishmael, which means the Lord heard because, I mean, you see the rivalry between Sarai there and Hagar. And she was a little bit rough with Hagar and Hagar fled for a life because it sounded like Sarai might have been smacking her around a little bit, trying to teach her a lesson about respect. Anyway, so she comes back, she has this child. Sarai sort of adopts the child now as hers because she's had this child now through Hagar. But Hagar is the mum and is definitely Abraham's child. But then God at the age of 99. So 13 years later now meets with Abraham again. So there's been a delay then because of the delay, they decided to fulfill God's promise. And now after Ishmael is born, there's another 13 years and God comes to him and says, look, I am making a covenant with you. Matter of fact, I'm going to teach you that you should not rely on your flesh. And this interesting covenant, the covenant of circumcision, is introduced. Now, why the covenant circumcision? Because God's saying to him, you should not rely on yourself to fulfill the promises. You'll cut off the flesh and that will be a sign or a symbol that you rely on me by faith, not on what you can do. SPEAKER D And what a little painful reminder because that's really what he'd done. He had used his flesh to try to achieve the promises of God that's right. By coming up with his own plan and obeying the voice of his wife. And God gives him a little, tiny, painful, practical reminder that taking things into his own hands is not the way forward. SPEAKER C That's right. SPEAKER D And it's going to be a symbol and a reminder for people right down through the ages. It's just so interesting, right, that the Pharisees in the time of Jesus, they were so married to this idea of the importance of circumcision, but they forgot what it actually represented. It actually represents putting full trust in God and no trust in your own abilities to do things. SPEAKER C It talks about the circumcision of the heart as well. And that's many types of symbols in the Bible, it's talking about a new heart. Basically. There circumcision of the heart. So that was supposed to represent a change of heart where the laws are written in our hearts and our minds by God, not by us externally, by our own flesh, trying to live up to the standard of righteousness, which for us in our own flesh is impossible. The flesh is too weak to do it. So we can rely on God by faith to do it. So God then comes to Abraham. He changes his name from Abram to Abraham, and he also changes Sarai's name to Sarah, saying in this is Genesis chapter 17 and verse 15, god said to Abram, as for Sarai, your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall her name be. I will bless her and also give you a son by her. So now Ishmael's 13 years old, but God says, I'm going to give you a son by Sarah, who's barren. She's been barren for many years. I mean, they've been married for numbers of years. And he says, I will bless her, and she shall be the mother of nations. Kings of people shall be from her. Then Abraham says, fell on his face and laughed in his heart and said, shall a child be born to a man who's 100 years old and to Sarah, who is 90 years old? And then Abraham says to God, now he still cannot let go of Ishmael being the fulfillment of the promise, right. Ishmael being 13 years old. He says, oh, that ishmael might live before years of fulfillment because, yes, Sarah will have a child, but it will be through surrogacy. He's still thinking that right. And listen to what God says to in verse 19 of 17. Then God said no. Straightforward no, because he's already said previously in chapter 15, there no, it will not be Eliezer of Damascus. Now, he's got to make it very clear. No, it will not be Ishmael either. No. Sarah, your wife shall bear you a son and you shall call his name Isaac. And I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant and with his descendants after him. Then God says, Look, I will bless Ishmael, but Ishmael is not the one who's the son of the promise. Sarah had to repudiate her idea about Hagar, helping her fulfill the promise of God. God here doesn't pay any recognition to Ishmael as a fulfillment of the promise either. He doesn't ignore him as a child. He says, Look, I will bless him, twelve princes will come from him. But the fact remains is this is not a fulfillment of the promise. God doesn't deviate from his original intention that it will be Sarah and Abraham who will have a child, although they are incapable of having it. SPEAKER D This is so interesting when God speaks to Abram and says, sarah's going to have a child, actually going to have a child herself, and he laughs. SPEAKER C Yeah. How's this going to be possible? SPEAKER D He laughs at God. It's interesting. Laughing at someone is a bit of a disrespectful thing, especially when they're very serious. And the more important, the know that's even more and more disrespectful. Here you've got God making this very, very he's very straightforward and very plain about this, that Sarah's going to have a child. And he laughs. He laughs at God. And I wonder how many times in our life we do the same. SPEAKER C Yeah, that's impossible. It can't be done. SPEAKER D It's like we just belittle and mock what God has said. It's like, that's cute, God, that's nice, but I've already got a solution worked out here. We don't need to go down that path. But it's interesting, what he didn't realize is that the desire of his and Sarah's heart will soon be fulfilled. All of the solutions. Number one, you've got Eliezer. He had to abandon that idea. And now we've got the Ishmael. He had to abandon that idea as well, and finally came to the place where he's a really old man. SPEAKER C Yes. SPEAKER D And he has to just go, there's no way that you and I are going to have kids. But God said that we will. SPEAKER C That's right. Now, listen, there's a book called Patriarchs and Prophets which really clarifies the whole thing that's going on there, right? It says there in page 146, it says, when Abraham was nearly 100 years old, the promise of a son was repeated to him with the assurance that the future heir should be a child of Sarah. But Abraham did not yet understand the promise. His mind at once turned to Ishmael. Again, the promise was given in words that could not be mistaken. Sarah, your wife shall bear you a son indeed, and you shall call his name Isaac, and I will establish my covenant with him. So we get to chapter 18, and here God then comes and speaks to Abraham again. Sarah hears it and we read in verse eleven, says, now Abraham and Sarah were old, well advanced in age, and Sarah had passed the age of childbearing. So not only was she barren, her ability to have children, you know, the way women have that ability. She had gone through the what do you change of life. I think that's what you call it, right? SPEAKER D Change of life? SPEAKER C Yeah. So she'd gone past that. And then the Lord said to Abraham, because Sarah laughs when she hears that, right? She says, after I have grown old, shall I now have pleasure in my Lord and also having a child? And then God says, Look, Sarah, your wife laughed. And she denies it. She goes, no, I didn't laugh. And God says, yes, you did, you laughed just like Abraham laughed. But anyway, within the year, a year after God had spoken to him in chapter 17, we see the fulfillment of God's promise. Now, did they do this by their own strength? Were they able to rely on their flesh? Was it their own scheming that brought this about? Certainly not. And we can see this from Hebrews chapter eleven and verse eleven and twelve. I just want to read that and just see what the Bible says. It says, by faith, sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed, and she bore a child when she was past the age because she judged him faithful who had promised. So she went from laughing to trust as well, from unbelief or disbelief to faith and confidence in God and in his word, when God says something, it happens that's exactly doesn't even need the material. So they were able to rely on God and said even beyond their natural abilities, god was still able to do something. And then it says in verse twelve, therefore from one man and him as good as dead were born, as many as the stars in the sky, in multitude, referring back to that promise in chapter 15 of Genesis, innumerable as the sand by the seashore. SPEAKER D Interesting. SPEAKER C Beautiful. SPEAKER D I think I've just got it written down here. It's so important for us to recognize that God wants more for us than we can achieve for ourselves. And once we get that into our heads, we open up to ourselves a possibility for an experience with God that is next level. They never thought when God first spoke to Abram and Sarai back in Ur of the Chaldees, they had no idea of who they were getting to know. They had no idea that he was capable of fixing the womb. It's interesting. God creates the heavens and the earth and they're doubting that he can actually do some little adjustments and biological adjustments to help them to have kids, and they doubt that. SPEAKER C Now, it's interesting. Just the book of Romans speaks about this as well. It talks about God in Romans chapter four and verse 17, it says God who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did. So there was no son yet born, but God was calling that, even naming the son before it had. Happened. And then in verse 18, it says that Abraham, contrary to hope in hope, believed so that he became the father of many nations according to what was spoken, so shall your descendants be. And not being weak in faith, he did not consider his own body already dead since he was about a hundred years old, and the deadness of Sarah's womb. He did not waver at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strengthened in faith. So through his belief he was strengthened, giving glory to God and being fully convinced that what he, that is, God had promised, he was also able to perform. Therefore it was accounted to him for righteousness. SPEAKER D Amen. SPEAKER C So, dear listener, God counts our faith in him, our trust and confidence in him, that restoration of the relationship in Him as righteousness. We pray that God will bless you this day. Until we meet again. SPEAKER B Thank you for joining us on Faith. To Faith. If you would like more information about today's program or if you have any questions, please contact 3ABN Australia Radio by Phoning. 02 4973 3456. Or you can send an email to [email protected] You can also contact us on our 3ABN Australia radio Facebook page. We'd love to hear from you.