On Sunday morning, Reverend Kenneth I MacLeod continued his series on Genesis, preaching from chapter 21, verses 1 – 3, on ‘God Said and God Did’.

There are any ups and downs in life, because that is the nature of the world that we live in. We will experience seasons of sadness and of rejoicing, just as Abraham’s household did.

Chapter 21, however, opens with a stark and bold statement of God’s steadfastness. The promise He had made, as reported in chapter 18, is here fulfilled. This is a reminder to everyone whose life is founded on the Lord not to lose heart, even if it seems as though He is slow to fulfil His promises. Their faith will be tested often in different ways because Christ does not see people merely in terms of their ‘spiritual life’ – all of life is spiritual, and so the testing may come in guises we don’t expect. Nevertheless, the Lord will take His people through these periods, and they will be refined by their experiences.

Mr MacLeod added one caveat to his entreaty that we should keep praying for what God has promised. Sometimes, he explained, we may have interpreted God’s promises differently to His intended meaning. We may derive a literal interpretation when He meant us to understand His promise in a spiritual context. For example, when someone is seriously ill, we may hear God speaking to us and promising healing. Rather than physical healing, though, this can often mean spiritual healing, and the person prayed for going home to be with his Saviour.

Isaac’s birth has two aspects to it: the miraculous and the mundane. That Abraham and Sarah should become parents so far past their natural years of childbearing is entirely of God; but the situation was biologically normal in every other way. And there is another illustration here of the completeness of God’s intervention – after Sarah’s death, Abraham went on to have more children with his second wife.

In the situation detailed in chapter 21, however, God is following His own, heavenly timetable. Abraham, though subject to the same faults and failings as other men, followed a life which exhibited his trust in God. He is, in fact, the perfect, imperfect illustration of someone who placed his hope in the Lord, no matter what the circumstances.

It is fitting that the child’s name – Isaac – means ‘laughter’, for it draws our attention to Sarah’s faith journey also. When she was told by the Lord that she would conceive a child, she laughed in derision; but when he is born, she laughs with joy. She has moved from doubt, to faith, to fulfilment in the Lord.

Her son, Isaac, is a fulfilment of that promise, and the beginning of the covenant line which would lead to Christ. There are some, to a human perspective, unlikely people in that lineage. King David, for example, behaved very sinfully indeed. Yet, it is his son with Bathsheba – Solomon – who continues the genealogy that leads inexorably towards Jesus. At times, we have all questioned God’s grace, yet it is very evident in such cases as these, and a reminder that we are all dependent upon it.

Sarah is righteously indignant at Ishmael’s mocking of young Isaac, and demands that Hagar and her son be sent away. Abraham is, understandably, upset at this, but the Lord confirms that he should do as Sarah asks. This is an illustration of the turmoil that takes place in the believer’s heart, between that which is of the flesh and that which is of the Spirit. It certainly created tension in Abraham’s household, and led to the expulsion of the two.

When Hagar and Ishmael are in despair and waiting for death to come, they cry out to God, who hears them. He reveals to Hagar a nearby well, which she had not noticed. It seems incredible that she and her son were on the point of dying from dehydration, when the means to save them was right before their eyes.

That it took the Lord opening Hagar’s eyes before she saw the way to life for herself and Ishmael ought to speak to every one of us who has heard the Gospel. We may be within reach of the well of living water that is our Saviour, yet not able to see that He is what we need. Mr MacLeod entreated any in that situation to pray that the Lord would open their eyes this very day, and finished with this, from John 4:14:

‘but whoever drinks of the water I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life’.