Clough Genesis Lesson 59

The birth of Isaac; Ishmael cast out – Genesis 21:1-21

In the course of the morning studies we’ve been looking at the pattern of the patriarch Abraham; we’ve noticed that there is a certain regularity in the text, that events fit into an overall scheme of things. It’s not just a set of random stories. We find in chapters 16-17 Abraham there was seen as defaulting, so to speak, on his calling, and God taking up the slack. Chapters 20-21 show the same pattern and once again we’re reminded of something that has to be told us again and again of the necessity of the grace of God, that apart from the grace of God Abraham simply would have cratered, he simply would not have fulfilled his calling. And the necessity of this is shown because where the grace of God is not exercised in turning people to Him we find the horror of the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah. So these chapters are important; it’s important because Abraham is the pioneer of the kingdom of God and he bears in his lifestyle certain key cues, cues that God wants to communicate down through history; cues that he wants to say here, watch this, the kingdom of God is made of these kinds of things and some of these cues are just insistence, reliance upon the failure of man and the saving grace of God. Over and over again man, left to his own ways, drifts. Lot, whether it was going all the way back to Nimrod, the founder of the kingdom of man, whatever, it’s the same story again and again.

The kingdom of God, if it’s to be successful must be executed by the sovereign grace of God and that’s what these chapters are all about. This is the only way the kingdom of God can be secure and assured of victory. Turn to Romans 4; we’ll review a point that we’ve brought up again and again about this saving faith of Abraham. Once again we turn to this basic of all basic pictures of faith. The Bible teaches in concrete terms so all men everywhere, at all times and in all places can understand. If the Bible taught in abstract terms only some men in some places only some of the time could understand because not all people do think abstractly. Now the Bible gives us a story and any person can simply absorb this story; a child can absorb the story and get the point. What does saving faith look like? You can’t see it, it’s not a quantity, you can’t measure it in ounces and grams and cubic centimeters but you can see it in the way people act. Romans 4 goes back to cite this picture of saving faith.

Roman 4:17, “(As it is written, I have made thee a father of many nations), before him whom he believed, even God who quickens [gives life to] the dead, and calls those things which are not, as though they were.” The principle of verse 17, the simple picture of verse 17 is the childless couple and the principle is that life is being called forth out of deadness. The old man and the old woman who are sexually dead, incapable of reproduction, it’s from them that God calls the seed of the pioneer of the kingdom of God, just so the human race understands what the kingdom of God is made out of. It’s made out of supernatural life, not normal life; it’s not anybody that is chosen to be in the lineage of the patriarchal pioneers. It’s only the seed of promise, called forth from deadness.

And so Paul goes on to comment on the passage and he says: [Romans 4:18] “Who against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations [according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seed be.]” Verse 19, “And being not weak in faith, he considered,” not “considered not” as it is in the King James, but “he did consider his own body being dead,” notice Paul stresses the deadness of Abraham’s body as well as Sarah, “when he was an hundred years old, and the deadness of Sarah’s womb.” Those were intellectually considered; saving faith is not putting your brains in a closet; saving faith does look at all the evidence and looking at all the evidence defies the autonomous analysis of the evidence and says the Word of God analyizes and interprets the data this way and says that’s the way I’m going to live; I’m going to live by the divine viewpoint interpretation of this material; I’m not blind to the material, I just see beyond the material to God’s promises about the material. And so Abraham was not weak.

In Rom 4:20, “He did not doubt [staggered not at] the promise of God through unbelief, but he was strengthened in faith, and he gave glory to God, [21] “And being fully persuaded that, what God had promised,” that is life from death, “He was able also to perform. [22] And therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness.” Why? Because he had in his possession saving faith and it was saving faith that led to justification. And so we showed in the Abraham narrative this sequence of events. There was this faith, called forth by God. Abraham didn’t crank this up himself, it was called forth by God, and the saving faith resulted in justification, and then after justification came life or what would correspond in the New Testament, regeneration. We pointed out the conflict between the sequence of events in classical Reformed thought on the subject, simply because classical Reformed thought on the subject is unrefined thought; it’s just general broad theological categories that have yet to be reformed by more careful exegesis of the text. Reformed thought is right in knowing that it must be a sovereign gracious God that calls forth His faith in depraved man, but it’s wrong in labeling the work as regeneration. The Scriptures don’t give credence to that. Regeneration is life that is produced in the deadness after one is justified. So we find, then, this situation of Abraham as the model for all time of saving faith.

Turn back to Genesis 21 and watch because Genesis 21 is the last chapter in this little mini part, mini section of Genesis, dealing with the calling of life from death. Here the life finally comes into existence over a year or more beyond the time when Abraham was justified. This chapter has three basic parts: verses 1-8 deal with the calling forth of Yitzhak, or Isaac; verses 9-21 deal with the separation of Ishmael; we won’t get to the third part this morning, we’ll just deal with these two parts; both deal with children, both deal with child rearing, both provide opportunities to answer and respond to the feedback cards that some have sent in, what are some principles of biblical child rearing; this passage tells us some good principles of biblical child-rearing and we want to pay attention because if Isaac is so important that God calls him miraculously out of a dead womb, then it stands to reason that how that child is cared for will provide us with some divine viewpoint on child rearing.

Let’s look at Genesis 21:1-8, we read them, you’ve looked over the text at least in a preliminary way, now let’s look at some of the details. In verse 1, “And Jehovah visited Sarah as He had said, and the LORD did unto Sara as He had spoken.” Quite clearly the author, from the very first verse wants us to understand this really is not just a story of one child; it’s not the story of two children; it’s not the story merely of an ancient Near Eastern couple. It’s a story of the plan of God as He spoke, as He said. The emphasis falls on the sovereign plan of God; that’s where the emphasis is. God did it and He did it in accordance with his verbal promises. These promises were not to be interpreted allegorically; when God promised life to Sarah He didn’t speak of an allegorical or metaphorical life, He spoke of a literal physical life. And the promises of God can never be legitimately verified or falsified unless we follow some sort of a literal hermeneutic.

So now we come to verse 2, “And Sarah conceived, and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the set time of which God had spoken.” The emphasis again on the conception is on a miraculous intervention into nature and this demands that the kingdom of God be accepted on a miraculous base. You cannot be a naturalist and be a Christian; I don’t care where you come from, what your background is, as long as you believe in the solidarity and immutability of natural physical law, that it cannot be violated, you cannot be a Christian because a Christian means that I believe that God alone is the immutable One, and therefore natural law does not have divine attributes attached to them. Natural laws are things that can be violated by God and He stands over, outside of and in total control of natural law and here’s an example.

The first real pioneer of the Abraham family, in the sense he was born into the family, is Isaac, and Isaac is born by a miracle; the kingdom of God starts with miracles, it doesn’t start with naturalism. And you’ve got to make a choice which side of the fence you’re going to stand on. So Abraham now becomes a father and it says “at the set time of which God had said,” it means from twelve months from Genesis 17 and 18, so it’s not just a miracle but it’s a miracle on time, once again showing who is the Lord of history, who was in charge of every event of history.

Genesis 21:3, “And Abraham called the name of his son that which was burn unto him, whom Sarah bore to Him, Isaac.” Notice the simple obedience in verse 3, very naïve simple obedience. It was hard, maybe, for Abraham to call his baby Isaac because it recalled maybe some unpleasant things; maybe it recalled for him the doubts he might have had; certainly the doubts his wife had that this would ever be. And every time they called their son “Isaac” or “laughter,” they have to remember that because the word Isaac or Yitzhak in the Hebrew is the word for laugh, or to laugh, it comes from the verb to laugh.

Genesis 2:14, “And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac being eight days old, as God had commanded him.” We have, interestingly in verse 4, something demanded by the later Torah, the later law of Moses, and it would indicate in verse 4 that the patriarchs who, living before the Law was given, had access to some of the wisdom of the Law. How they did I don’t know, perhaps they got it by traditions handed down from Noah; perhaps they got it by revelation of which we know nothing; perhaps it was given in some other way but somehow the patriarchs possessed an amazing bit of information. And the information in verse 4 is information that is related to the physiology of the infant. It’s not just God doing it the eighth day because…well, He just picked the number eight, it seemed good to Him. Eight is related to something in the blood; as we indicated earlier, the Mosaic Law, as Dr. S. I. McMillan in his book points out how the coagulates in the blood have maximal use on the eighty day after birth. And it’s no accident that Moses and Abraham both observed circumcision on the eighth day. One is very hard pressed to argue that Abraham and Moses had a lab out in the middle of the Sinai desert taking blood samples and analyzed it on the eighth day when the coagulates were at their maximum.

Obviously this information is not empirically derived; this information is revelationally derived and it a testament of the authority of Scripture and the divine authorship of Scripture. It’s one of those small little details but if you listen and pay attention carefully to the text and start thinking in terms of the real physical world around you, and you see instances like verse 4, and society has to come up with another explanation other than the divine authorship of Scripture. How did Abraham know that just on the eighth day this was the case; how did Moses know just on the eighth day this was the case. There’s only one explanation; God told him this. God is the maker of the blood; God designed the blood chemistry and therefore God is the qualified spokesman to tell him about it and to order their lives in conformity with it.

Which leads us to an application here: when the Bible tells you to do something it is not an arbitrary command hanging in thin air. When the Bible tells you and me to do something it is related, not just to (quote) “the spiritual,” it is related to how we live. In the Mosaic Law you have the sanitation code; you have the idea of washing your hands in running water, you have the idea of taking polluted clothing and laying it out before the sun for forty-eight hours as the Levitical priesthood was commanded to do. And I can hear it now, people say oh, God, why do we have to do this and go through this mess of washing hands in running water; it’s so much easier to just have a bowl of standing contaminated cruddy water and wash our hands in that. Why do we have to wash our hands in the good water? Ask Dr. Semmelweis; he was the Austrian physician who died on the funny farm because he tried to get the medical profession of his day to wash their hands before they conducted pelvic examinations of pregnant women. And Semmelweis fought and fought and fought and fought for a simple thing like washing your hands and nobody would listen to him. And the tragedy was that Semmelweis lived in a generation that knew their Bibles and tragedy was that in Semmelweis’ own generation had anybody read the book of Leviticus they would have understood that Semmelweis wasn’t crazy; the people in the profession were crazy who were attacking it.

We’ve had these kinds of tragedies in history, all the plagues of medieval Europe could have been stopped or at least hindered had the sanitation precautions in the book of Leviticus been imposed upon medieval Europe. That’s one of the great tragedies that thousands and thousands of people died needlessly because the information was available, not empirically but revelationally in the human race. But man doesn’t like to have his information told him revelationally; he wants it [can’t understand words] discover it for himself and so even if it means thousands of people die in the meantime he will not accept revelational information, he must have it empirically; if he doesn’t discover it then by definition it doesn’t exist. So verse 4 points out this very important fact of the Scripture.

Genesis 21:5, “And Abraham was an hundred years old, when his son, Yitzhak, was born unto him,” just to remind us the immensity of the miracle; a hundred year old man, life from death. The kingdom of God starts with one person, Yitzhak, and it’s going to wind up with millions of people and that living, eternally alive society, is going to be millions of people that were called out from a dying world system. And people in despondency today can look out and say oh, no hope for the world, it’s all screwed up. Well, Abraham and Sarah could say the same thing: we’re old; no way can we have children. But you see, if you have the Word of God you are an optimist, not a naïve optimist, but a realistic optimist because you know in whose hands the cards of the future really are.

So we have this miracle, this childless couple that finally gets their child, and then Sarah breaks down and she has to admit that she enjoys it. After laughing in her doubt, she says in Genesis 21:6-7, “And Sarah said, God has made me to laugh, so that all the world [all that hear] will laugh with me,” and she hopes not at her. [7] “And she said, Who would have said unto Abraham, that Sarah should have given children suck [nursed children]? For I have borne him a son in his old age.” There the third meaning of the word “laughter” occurs. Up to now we had the kind of semi dubious laughter of Abraham, what? I’m going to be father of the seed? Yes Abraham, you’re going to be father of the seed. And the absolute unbelief of his wife: oh come on; no, Sarah will conceive. And then finally the third and final meaning of the word laughter is found in this passage, the laughter of simple joy and that itself is a detail of Scripture well worth noting. When God finishes His work it results in happiness. God does consider happiness and your joy important but He just doesn’t want our joy to be based on our autonomous will, and therefore God is willing to sacrifice immediate happiness for long-term happiness. That’s the issue of the Scriptures. The Westminster catechism of the old Presbyterians put it very good when it said: What is the chief end of man? And the communicants were to answer: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. So you have joy and you have laughter and you do have happiness.

Genesis 21:6-7 are put in the text so remind you yes, God’s way produces happiness, but you see, it was quite a long trial. The laughter you see, and the joy and the happiness in this couple’s home, that you watch in verses 6-7, took 25 years of heartache, of sorrow, of tears, before they got to the point where they enjoyed it—24 years of pressure before they got there.

And then [Genesis 21:8] “And the child grew, and was weaned: and Abraham made a great feast the same day that Isaac was weaned.” Obviously verses 7-8 introduce the concept of nursing and this introduces something else. It tells us something else about this miracle of God in Abraham’s life. When God does a miracle he always does a complete job; that’s what’s so fakey about a lot of these healings today, Joe Snodgrass who is a paraplegic crawls across the stage and somebody waves holy water at him or something and he’s supposed to be healed and he kind of limps off on one leg and goes off to the side and collapses, and this is supposed to be an indication of the healing ministry of God the Holy Spirit. That is blasphemy to call that corrupt psychosomatic counterfeit, to call that a miracle of God is blasphemy; it violates one of the Ten Commandments; do you know which one? You shall not raise the name of Jehovah over that which is vain. So in this situation here’s a real miracle of God.

Notice the three parts to the miracle. In verse 2, conception, that was a miracle, the idea of a rejuvenated womb, a rejuvenated sperm, so you have a complete miracle and that alone. In the second verb in verse 2 you have the second part; you have a normal birth; a normal birth of a child from a hundred year old woman; she carried that baby healthily to term; that’s the second part of the miracle. Don’t just think of conception as a miracle, but carrying that baby for nine months to a safe normal birth, that was a miracle. And now another miracle is in verses 7-8, she can nurse her own child at age 100. Now why is this? Why do I emphasize this? Because of what I said at the beginning. The lesson in Genesis 21 is a lesson we will encounter recurrently Sunday after Sunday for some time. Biblical principles of child rearing and here we have God’s favored child, and here we have God’s provision for that child; a complete provision for the child; not just conception with errors that grow in fetal development but we have a complete normal fetal development all the way to a normal birth and then a normal period of nursing.

The weaning of verse 8 apparently, the best we can guess, happened at age four or five; that may shock a few women but nevertheless that’s how long they nursed their children in the ancient world. Not only did it provide somewhat of a contraceptive effect, it also provided the only nutrition they had; they didn’t have formula in that day and so on so we have God’s care for the child.

Now we want to pause at the end of verse 8 to give you some biblical topical principles on child rearing that we observe in verses 1-8 and then we will amplify these as we go on and observe them from the text. One of the fundamental principles of child rearing in the Bible that is philosophically opposite to child rearing in society at large and there’s a very, very serious difference between the positions, and that is that the Bible refuses to idolize children. Next year has been declared the international year of the child; it’s been declared so by the same nitwits that declared the previous year to be the international year of women in which we have a wholesale attack on the second divine institution; now not content with undermining marriage we have a concerted international attempt… international attempt to destroy the family and this will start January 1 on the television with various spots, commercials, designed by various well-known celebrities who have been conned into doing these kinds of programs, ostensibly, of course, to help children. But actually, philosophically this is an attempt to idolize children. Now the Bible does not idolize children; the Bible’s attitude to children is they’re potential adults and the Bible always looks at the child as a potential adult; it never looks upon the adult as an overgrown child.

The Bible is never content with a child; I’m going to show you a specific text that I know I can see the mark of unbelief on certain faces. The Bible does not idolize children; the Bible wants children to grow into their calling and is not satisfied until the child does grow into its calling. For example, here in verse 8 it is the first time in all these 8 verses that any kind of a feast has been prepared by the parents. A feast was a time of happiness, celebration. Now why do you suppose there wasn’t a feast at verse 2? Why wasn’t there a feast at the birth, certainly that was a momentous occasion. No, the feast is postponed until Yitzhak is up to the point where at least he’s not totally physically dependent upon his mother. In other words, the joy in the child is joy in the child’s growth; not joy in the child per se, joy in the child’s growth.

Turn to Proverbs 22; I do this knowing full well that the philosophy I’m showing you here is in wholesale collision with certain pro-child movements in our time. And I’m just trying to train you, if you want to be serious about following the Lord, and raising your child in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, you’ve got to get your mind in tune with God’s mind. After all, God doesn’t hate your child and nothing is going to happen wrong if you do it the biblical way; in fact, some nice things might happen.

In Proverbs 22:15 we have a passage that deals with discipline but before the last part of the verse that deals with corporeal punishment, the first part says, “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child,” and then it says that “the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.” Obviously, incidentally, on the side note, though we’re not majoring on this morning, verse 15 is asserting the legitimacy of corporeal punishment over against the Texas Department of Welfare that wants to close down certain Christian orphanages. Verse 15 asserts very obviously that children are fools in the mind of Scripture; there is the word for a child in the Scripture and it’s a “fool.” Now this doesn’t mean God demeans your children so if you’ve just had a child don’t get your liver in a quiver here. Proverbs is just simply saying that your child spiritually is an idiot and God doesn’t like to see idiots running around and He wants the idiocy removed as fast as you as a parent can remove it. Your children do not come saints; they come born idiots, fallen depraved, wonderful but nevertheless foolish idiots. This is the philosophy of Scripture. How else can you interpret verse 15, it says “foolishness is bound in the heart of a child,” it’s part of it and it requires some serious excision.

Now does this again mean that the child is not loved? On the contrary, the Jewish people down through history were the people known for their love for their children. Well, how do you correlate this strong love for children, and I’ll tell you a second group of people that were known for their love of their children, they’re the most maligned people in America, the Puritans. They are the people that I notice on every television show around Thanksgiving that are always knocked; somebody always has some snotty word to say about the Puritans at Thanksgiving. But both of these people, this historic Jews and the Puritans were great lovers of children. The Puritans were the one that perfected some of America’s first educational techniques for children. So how do we square this? This is how its squared. The Bible, in saying “the fool” is there it is saying that the child ought not to be this way; he ought to be better than he is. And the Bible, therefore, expects great things can come forth from the child. So the Bible sets into the heart of the parent optimistic expectations of children; it puts hope in the heart of the parents.

Turn to 1 Corinthians 3 and we’ll see how this principle is applied metaphorically to the Christian. We’ve been studying 1 Corinthians in the evening service and when you see a metaphor used to teach a spiritual principle in the Bible you want to be careful because that metaphor will also teach you about the physical origins. So if we see children being spoken of in the Bible then we better look and see what is implied. In 1 Corinthians 3:1 we’re talking about new Christians and new Christians are called spiritual babies and they’re called by a very derogative term in verse 1, carnal, used here for immaturity. Now again, why is this flavor… see what I’m trying to get is the flavor of the references to children; they are not deified as children; they’re looked upon as hey, we’ve got to do something with them. 1 Corinthians 13:11-12, here’s the famous passage that deals with love and yet at the end of this chapter look what we’ve got by way of expounding God’s attitude to children. It says in verse 11, “When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things.” The emphasis is on putting away the thing; upon growing up, leaving childhood and going on to that which a child ought to be. I think we’ve explained at least this first point of child rearing.

The philosophy of biblical child rearing begins in a future orientation to the child’s future calling. That’s where the Bible places the emphasis. So when I look at the small child I say what has God got for you in the future? God has made you, what has he made you for. See, a Biblically thinking parent is always asking what is the future for my child? What am I doing now to improve my child’s future? What kind of character am I building into that child? You see the reason we do this is because of a presupposition that’s operating here. We, who operate according to Scripture, believe in history that progresses; those who idolize children don’t believe this, their presupposition is what we call cyclic history, that history is just a series of circles. We have the sequence: birth, adulthood, death; birth, adulthood, death. Now if you believe this cycle over and over and over and over, what’s the healthiest part of the cycle? The birth part, the infancy part. Isn’t it? Isn’t that far more… medically, physically and all the ways, far nicer than this situation, degeneracy and dying in old age; of course it is. So therefore in any society that worships cyclic history people will inevitably come back to deifying and idolizing children. In societies that are progressive, that believe that history is not a series of circles, history is a straight line and there is something for the future, they will be like the Puritans and the Jews and they will invest their future into the character of their children because they believe in the calling for their children.

So the application of this first principle of child rearing means that our orientation to children ought to be to train them for the future. That ought to be the center of our occupation. Yes, enjoy them, yes go ahead and cuddle with them, of course. But having said all that it’s still what are we training them for in the future.

Now a second principle of child rearing that you see demonstrated in Genesis 21, it’s not just the rejoicing over the growth of a child but it’s obviously the physical care for the child. Physiologists tell us that most of the child’s brain is completely formed and developed and all cells functioning in place by the end of six months. Early childhood is a time when massive physical development… as I’ve said, by the time your child is five years old he’s performed the greatest philosophic feat he’ll ever perform in his life; a philosophic feat that is so complicated that two thousand years of research have never discovered how a child can do it and that is by age 5 and 6 he’s learned a language without having known a language before that. How has a child been able to take a symbol and an object and a syntax and build himself a language? No one has ever discovered that principle, yet he does it and does it all the time. Philosophy has long since said it’s impossible, but children don’t know that and they keep doing it so that by the time of six years they insist upon learning language. How? It’s amazing.

But during this earlier, earlier part, the part described in Genesis 20:1-8, there must be the physical care and notice prominently displayed in verses 1-8 is nursing. Now granted, there are exceptions to the nursing because of various medical problems, etc. but yet it’s a wonderful picture of the mother training, the physical dependency of her children, that they are from the very earliest instances of self-consciousness they are actually dependent upon their mother for their nourishment. It’s the creature-hood being enforced on the child. Besides, as other people have said in child rearing manuals, not only is mother’s milk sterile, cheap and inoculated with mother’s antibodies, not only is it filled with excellent protein, not only does it restore the nursing mother’s body, but it provides a tremendous emotional warmth for that child.

An interesting reminder of an experiment somewhat related to this and it’s a vivid illustration though it doesn’t directly apply, is the famous Harlow monkey experiment in which certain of the, I guess you’d call them comparative anatomists, got some monkeys together and they took the young monkeys away from their mother and then they made two artificial mothers in the cage with the monkeys. One was made of wire, just a wire structure holding a bottle from the baby monkeys could get their milk. And then over on the other side of the cage they made another mother, but this one had no milk but it was just a warm terrycloth. And they discovered a remarkable thing watching the baby monkeys; they would quickly go over to the wire mother to get the milk and as soon as they had finished they would leave her and all the time they would cuddle with the terrycloth mother, and the principle being there’s more than just the physical nourishment that’s going on in this period; there’s something else that’s going on in the period and it’s not just related to nutrition; it’s related to something that happens between the mother and the daughter or the mother and her son and that’s here, Sarah nurses Yitzhak.

Now a third principle on child rearing: we’ve dealt with the philosophy, we’ve shown a little bit about the physical care that’s necessary, but now something else—spiritual training. Spiritual training of a child; this is the one where most of us drift, badly. The essence of spiritual training is back to Genesis 1:26-28 and that is “subdue the earth” under My law. Any child that doesn’t get introduced to some sort of external law and rule system is not being trained spiritually. Parents who let the child dictate every phase of their life are not training their child properly. What are you training them? You are training, believe me, you are training them! You are training them that the world allows autonomy, that the environment of their future will depend completely on what they want, when they want, where they want. That’s what you’re training them to do. Now do you want that to be trained into the soul? You know, your doctrine tells you that your child starts off life depraved; do you want to reinforce his depravity by letting him have his own way, everywhere and always? Think of what you’re setting up for him to have to learn in the future, when all of a sudden he discovers there’s policemen out there, society has laws and other people might run him over when they get tired of his autonomy.

And as I showed when we dealt with the homosexuality problem, that’s how these problems of homosexuality, alcoholism, and the hundred and eight other things that are all with these strange maladies of modern society. Where do they get started? No spiritual training of the child. It doesn’t mean being cruel but it does mean form a predictable orderly environment. And the child knocks up against it and he knows it’s there, and he’s got to know this because that’s the rest of his life. Soon he’s going to understand God’s laws are there and he doesn’t bend God’s laws because he wants something. Every panhandler that comes to a church has the same story; you’ve got to do this for me, you’ve got to do that. Why? Because I want it! Why do you want it? Why are you so screwed up in your life? Why is it you can’t hold a job and you’re starving? Do you know why? Because you’re all screwed up, because for years and years and years you’ve had a lifestyle, whatever you want everybody else has got to wait on you hand and foot and finally you’ve run out of waiters and waitresses and that’s why you’re all screwed up. Autonomy doesn’t pay, even in a fallen world.

And so Yitzhak is going to have to be taught some spiritual training. But the problem here is this: that in training Yitzhak spiritually Abraham can’t train his other son spiritually because when we train our sons and we train our daughters we have to train them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, we have to train them in the godly direction and if we have disturbances and chaos in our living units, we’re going to have problems. So it’s no accident, then, that after these first 8 verses, of all the events you could think of, what is the event that now occurs beginning in Genesis 21:9? The kicking out Ishmael. Get him out of this house; get his mother out of this house, because we have a home environment, divine institution three, that will be suitable for training the Messianic seed. And we cannot train that Messianic seed while we have this continual discord, this continuous second agenda all the time, of Ishmael.

To show you that Abraham was cognizant of the problems of training and stability and predictability in the environment during this process, go back to the previous chapter, Genesis 20:15. Remember one of the things Abimelech promised Abraham? Abimelech said “Behold, my land is before thee: dwell where is pleases you.” Compare that verse with the end of Genesis 21:34 and keep in mind between these two verses you have much of baby Isaac’s training. In verse 34 what do you have? It says, “Abraham sojourned in the Philistines’ land many days.” In other words, he did not move out, he stayed basically in the area. Why did he do this? I think it’s not an accident; those verses are there to tell us he tried to maintain some stability in the home during this formative period. As much as he could; business demands are upon him, yes, but he tried to maintain some stability, not move Sarah all over the place while she was trying to bring up this child. After all, this is a pretty important child that’s being brought up here; he’s the pioneer of the kingdom of God.

Now let’s look at what happens and why Ishmael gets out; Genesis 21:9-21. It always turns out that if God wants to get rid of people that are against his program He, to follow an idiom we often use, He gives them enough rope and fools always take enough to hang themselves. And this is how God operates in history. He wants, really, Hagar and Ishmael out of there but yet He can’t let Abraham and Isaac physically force her out, for that would be immoral and unjust to both Hagar and Ishmael.

If you turn to Deuteronomy 21 you’ll see what the Mosaic Law says about this a polygamous situation. Granted, it’s kind of messy in the home because it’s a polygamous situation. We had an ordination council last night and one of the issues we were talking about was this problem, what do you do on the mission field, you’re out in Africa and you lead Chief Hauncho to the Lord and he has about 8 wives, now what happens, it says he’s supposed to be the husband of one wife in the Bible. And so what do Christians sometimes do? Oh yes chief, you’ve got to get rid of 7 of your 8 wives so he picks out, I can’t stand you, I can’t stand you, here’s this young chic, she’s the hottest number so I’ll keep her, all done in the name of piety. No, the basic wise principle that experienced missionaries generally follow is that if Chief Hauncho wives before he’s a Christian let him have eight wives after he’s a Christian; he’s just going to have to live with the polygamous situation he started with; hopefully it won’t be repeated in the next generation, but you can’t come in like a bull in a china shop and break this kind of thing up. Where do the other seven women go? This is the problem, and the problem is that there comes those times in our lives, comes in all our lives in principle, where we screw up, where we foul up the plan of God and we get ourselves in a situation where we just frankly have to work within the crud of the facts and this is it. Well, here Abraham has to work in it but he’s got a principle even here.

Deuteronomy 21:15, here was the Law to protect a mother. The Mosaic Law is loaded with protective devices for women. When I hear these creeps talk about the fact that in the Old Testament God was against all the women, He was old boogey man, He is a masculine God, ugh, in the Old Testament, I get mad at these people… with all the modern translations available they can’t read the text. Now look at this text; if this isn’t protecting the woman I don’t know what is and it shows you that the God of the Old Testament is not some sort of a boogey man. “If a man have two wives,” it’s not saying go ahead and have two wives, it just says if you have two wives, starting then, “one beloved, and another hated, and they have borne him children, both the beloved and the hated, and if the first-born son be hers that was hated, [16] Then it shall be, that when he makes his sons to inherit that which he has, that he may not make the son of the beloved first-born before the sons of the hated, which is indeed the first-born, [17] But he shall acknowledge the son of the hated for the first-born, by giving him a double portion of all that he has; for he is the beginning of his strength; the right of the first-born is his,” regardless of whether the husband loves his mother or not. See, that’s a protective device, both on the mother and on her child and it shows you the mercy of God in the Mosaic Law; very merciful social legislation here. And the idea here is that Abraham, with this principle applied, can’t boot Ishmael and Hagar out of the inheritance just because he doesn’t like her. Yes, this wasn’t articulated then but that is the general moral concept.

Now go back to Genesis 21; this is a case where God intervenes and says get her out. The general moral principle has been given in Deuteronomy 21 but in the patriarchal narratives you’ll find this characteristic, that due to God’s plan and His direct revelation He will often violate what appears to be His own moral law. We’ve got a beautiful example of that coming up in the next chapter when God tells Abraham go out and murder your son. Now try that one on for size; is it a sin to murder? If it’s a sin to murder then God commanded Abraham to sin. So you see, the point is it’s not quite so simple as just articulating a platonic moral law and saying like a computer, everything happens. Huh-un, that’s Greek ideas that have crept into ethics. The Biblical and Hebrew way of thinking is that if God orders me to murder it is not a sin. God can order me to do anything and by definition it is not a sin; moral law is second to God Himself. And God is not bound even by His own moral law. It’s hard, a hard thing to realize this because people hear this and oh, what do you mean, God’s morally arbitrary? No! But the moral laws we have are derivative of His revelation; if He chooses to add new information to the revelation that modifies these laws that’s His privilege. That’s the only way you can explain some of these texts like this. And here’s one of them where He orders the fracturing of a polygamous relationship.

How does it happen? Genesis 21:9, [“And Sarah saw the son of Hagar, the Egyptian, whom she had borne unto Abraham, mocking.”] Hagar steps into it because she starts her mocking thing, just what she did in chapter 16. Now in Genesis 16 she got Sarah so mad that she threw her out and God told Hagar no Hagar, you go back and you stay under her authority. So Hagar was commanded to respect the authority of the clan of Abraham and Sarah and she didn’t; mocking, in verse 9, is a disobedience. Mocking is a rebellion against what God told her to do. And so now Sarah… it’s Sarah, not Abraham notice. Genesis 21:10-12 contain two interesting lessons in child rearing; one that applies generally in marriage and the other one that particularly applies to child rearing.

Genesis 21:10, “Wherefore she” Sarah “said unto Abraham, Get [cast] out this bondwoman and her son; for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my old sin nature, with Isaac. [11] But the thing was very grievous in Abraham’s sight because of his son. [12] And God said to Abraham, Let it not be grievous in thy sight because of the lad, and because of thy bondwoman, in all that Sarah has said unto thee, hearken to her voice; [for in Isaac shall thy seed be called.”]

The two principles in these verses are these: the first principle it shows you that how in the marriage, even though the man is given authority in the home by God, you have the husband and you have the wife and it’s in that order, and don’t argue with me why it’s that way, it’s just that way in the Scripture; I’m sorry, I didn’t write it, I’m just expounding it. And in this situation you’ve got the wife in a position, particular who but this woman… who was picked out in the New Testament as the model of a submissive woman? Sarah. Now isn’t it striking that of all the women in the Old Testament this incident happens to? And I think it’s deliberately designed by the Spirit to show you that it doesn’t mean she turns into a yes sir, no sir, yes sir, kind of thing like that; she’s not an attachment to the wall. She is a person made in God’s image and she has spiritual sensitivity and she sees something here that’s wrong. She goes to her husband, verse 10, and she suggests to her husband a course of action. The last time Abraham listened to her he got in trouble, not because she shouldn’t have given advice but because he should take that advice to God and check it out by the Scriptures.

Now it’s not to conceive of this. If you’re in a military outfit and you’re the commanding office of the outfit and you’ve got enabling order that defines the mission of your unit, and you have orders that specify the limits and bounds of your authority, and some sergeant comes up and says lieutenant, I’ve got an idea, I think we ought to do this and forget this, let’s go around the other side of the hill and set up our placement this way, better firing zone that way. That may be a good idea. How does the office respond to that? There’s only one way he can respond to it; on the basis of experience he can evaluate it that way but then he can go back and if it’s a good idea he can say okay, do we have the authority, do I have the authorization to take that course of action. So he goes back to his enabling authority.

Now it’s the same thing biblically in the home; the wife makes a good suggestion here. Abraham takes it to the Lord who is his enabling authority and checks it out and it turns out in verse 12 God says yeah, she’s right, hearken to her. And that allows the wife to also operate as the helper in the marriage, not be squashed, to initiate even at time. But yet at the same time not destroy the whole authoritative structure. That’s why this Genesis 21 is a classic reference. Genesis 21:10-12 is a classic model of how to do it. Don’t anybody say this is an abstract principle; it’s a concrete illustration that can be applied in a thousand different ways in every home. [Genesis 21:10-12, “Wherefore she said unto Abraham, Cast out this bondwoman and her son; for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac. [11] And the thing was very grievous in Abraham’s sight because of his son. [12] And God said unto Abraham, Let it not be grievous in thy sight because of the lad, and because of thy bondwoman; in all that Sarah has said unto thee, hearken unto her voice; for in Isaac shall thy seed be called.” [13] And also of the son of the bondwoman will I make a nation, because he is thy seed.”]

But now a second principle and this tells men a lot about the principles of child rearing. Who is it that detects there’s a problem here that threatens the child rearing process? It’s not the husband that sees it; it’s the wife that sees it. And that is often the case, the woman’s eyes are just tuned to these kinds of things and she detects them, she picks them up whereas most men, oh yeah, gee, is that really true, and that’s the way we mostly are. Most men are that way and you can be thankful for that, you don’t want some sort of fairy sitting there sucking lollypops with a kid. But you do at least want some response when you do detect something wrong, you take some corrective action. And so here the woman is the one who spots it and she does something about it and what she does is right. She goes to her husband, her advice is biblically sound, God says do it.

Genesis 21:14, Abraham, in his classic pose, getting it over with early. That’s one reason why this man is always the guy that is singled out for the father of our faith. Many times we have to do disagreeable things and the only thing I can say to you about doing disagreeable things is do it like Abraham did in verse 14, just get it over with as fast as you can. That’s what he did. In the next chapter we’ll see another very very disagreeable thing. Now this was very disagreeable, verse 11 tells us extremely hurtful. The word “grievous” means it pierced his heart to do this. Why do you suppose it’d do that? Certainly he was told back in chapter 17 that Isaac was going to be the son of the covenant and not Ishmael. Why did he kind of just ignore the problem and hope it’d go away; why did he do that? Because he was emotionally attached to the woman. I don’t think Abraham just liked Ishmael a lot; I think he also had great feeling for Hagar. If you’ll notice, verse 12 says so. When God comes back to Abraham He says Abraham, don’t let it be hurtful because of the land and because of Hagar. It wasn’t just an impersonal relationship that Abraham had with Hagar and that’s why verse 14 is a very dramatic moment.

Picture it; as you read through the verse picture what he’s doing. [Genesis 21:14, “And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and took bread, and a skin of water, and gave it unto Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, and gave her the child, and sent her away; and she departed, and wandered in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.”] He’s rising up and he’s saying forever goodbye to Hagar and his own son; it is his own son. Make no bones about it, and he’s never going to see him again. And he takes this woman and he gives her one bottle of water and he gives her maybe a day or two rations of bread. Do you know what must have been going on in his mind; but if I turn her out into this wilderness she’s going to die out there, surely this woman will die; she can’t take care of herself out there in the wild, what is going to happen. What do you suppose enables Abraham to do this? Because God says in verse 13, “I will make of the bondwoman a nation,” now he can’t make a nation of her if she’s going to die out there. So Abraham must be astute enough to think through something and say hey, wait a minute, for me and my viewpoint it looks like this woman is going to die, yet I have the promise of God that says great things are going to happen so I’m going to have to cast her in the Lord’s hands, bye-bye and let her go. Which he does, and of course the story that we know from verses 15-17 goes on, God provides.

[Genesis 21:15, “And the water was spent in the skin, and she cast the child under one of the shrubs. [16] And she went, and sat down apart from him a good way off, as it were a bowshot; for she said, Let me not see the death of the child. And se sat apart from him, and lifted up her voice, and wept. [17] And God heard the voice of the lad; and the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said unto her, What ails thee, Hagar? Fear not; for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is. [18] Arise, lift up the land, and hold him in thine hand; for I will make him a great nation.”]

The interesting thing about how He provides is in Genesis 21:16-17, she comes down and her rations are out; once again she’s out in the desert as a lone woman. And once again, incidentally for the comfort of the women here, here is the second time in the Scriptures where the lone woman is cared for in a dramatic way. God does care for the unprotected woman; you have message after message after message in the Bible about this. And so she’s out there, she leaves her son because she can’t stand to see him die. And then at the end of verse 16 the writer reports an interesting fact and the fact conflicts, it appears to, with how he writes verse 17. I wonder how many of you observe that. The way verse 16 ends and the way verse 17 starts it doesn’t look like it fits together; for all the world it looks wrong because at the end of verse 16 we have Hagar weeping, and then in verse 17 God hears the voice of Hagar? No! He hears the voice of the lad. Why the shift? Biblical writers are artists at words and what the author is trying to grab us and wake us up and say hey look, what is the issue, Hagar or the promise of the Word. Verse 13, the issue is the calling of Ishmael. In both these mothers, though they may be great women, it looks time and again in the text that God is interested in the calling of their babies. And here is a clear cut case; it is the cry of Ishmael and by this time, I don’t know, maybe he’s 11 or 12, and he’s weeping, along with his mother. His mother is off in one spot, he’s weeping in another spot, and God hears the lad, because it’s the lad to whom verse 13 is promised.

Then He comes and He talks to Hagar and in verse 19 He provides. [“And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; and she went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the lad drink.” Genesis 21:19 teaches us another interesting principle about God’s provision for us, one which you want to keep in mind. It’s apparently not like the movie on television presented about here she is crawling around in the sand and all of a sudden she looks over there and here comes the water through the sand. It’s not quite so simple and it’s not quite miraculous like that. All the Hebrew text says in verse 19, it says nothing about making the well of water; all it says is He opened her eyes to the well of water. I suspect this is what happened, and if I’m right, then this shows you a principle how God will often help you out in a time of crisis. In a time of crisis what happens to your emotions? You emotions begin to rise, get out of control and they begin to hinder your powers of observation. So often times you can be in a crisis and you’ve got the answer only three feet in front of you and you can’t see it, simply because you’re all wrapped up in the problem and what God does in verse 19, He unwraps it; He opens her eyes. Hagar, before you start crying, before you start thinking this is it, this is the end of your life would you just look over there. What do you see over there Hagar? Oh yeah, look at that; it was there all the time, Hagar just didn’t see it because she was so wrapped up in her problem. So very often God doesn’t even have to provide a miraculous supply of resources, all He has to do is open our eyes and we see what was there all along.

Now the tragedy of the child rearing of Ishmael in verses 20-21. This passage concludes with a very poignant description, a sort of foil. I believe, as I’ve watched this writer and I’ve studied him closely in the Genesis series, he likes to do things, whoever compiled Genesis, puts it together this way, he likes to use foil to teach us. He starts off talking about Abraham, remember, and then he uses the Sodom Gomorrah incident as a foil to show where the world is coming to. Then, passes of to the [can’t understand word] and he comes back to Abraham and goes on. Now I think, since we’re going to be introduced to the child rearing and the rearing of Yitzhak he’s giving us a foil, and verses 20-21 gives us the other side, the other kind of child rearing. Two different babies with two different callings before God get two different kind of rearing; the rearing is a lonely one. In verse 20, “And God was with the lad; and he grew, and dwelt in the wilderness,” all by himself, [“and became an archer,”] he learned to survive with the bare essentials of life, he learned to be tough, he learned to be a loner. He learned because he was to fulfill the predicted destiny, if you’ll turn back to Genesis 16 for a moment, here’s his calling, an awful calling, but he was being trained and reared to execute that calling.

In Genesis 16:12 Ishmael was to “be a wild man, and his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of al his brethren.” “A wild man” means he will be raised as a loner; he will be raised so that it will be perpetual and always difficult for the Ishmaelites to dwell together because they’re going to be feuding among themselves. It will be difficult for them to integrate themselves with any kind of a social community because they’re inherently loners, they do their own thing, they’re solitary survivors. They have a lifestyle that’s being developed here under God’s sovereignty. And then he’s going to dwell in the presence of his Jewish brethren; he’s going to constantly be harassment.

Now Genesis 21:20-21 tell us something about the powerful effects of child rearing. Lest you think little, parents, Christian parents, of the effect that you execute on your children through your child rearing, let’s think. Ishmael was to be a wild man. Let’s ask ourselves, in 1978 where is Ishmael? I’ll tell you where he is; he’s a terrorist that lives in the Gaza strip; those are the sons of Ishmael. He’s the people that put the bombs in the Jewish buses all over the West Bank of Jordan. Ishmael is the one who recently toppled Lebanon, a peaceful country, the Marionite Christians have lived there for centuries and Ishmael comes in with his hordes of refugees and he tears the country apart in civil war. And you saw the pictures of the bloodshed in Beirut, the bloodshed in southern Lebanon; Ishmael, the wild man, who feuds among himself, he goes to Jordan and Hussein, in the September movement gets the PLO out of Jordan and we call it the black September movement.

Your papers were filled this summer with the news of the assassination of the famous Italian man, Morro, by the radical group called the Red Army in Italy. And then a while before it was the great German industrialist who was gunned down in the street and his body guards killed with another group, the Red Army of Germany. Who supplies the arms? Who supplies the training of the Red Armies of Italy and Germany? The Palestinians. Dr. Moshe Hadad, he is the one who trains them; he is the one that teaches them to go forth and to be wild men and to kill and to destroy, and to maim and sabotage. And we have just begun to see Ishmael; the next thing Ishmael will do is he will learn how to invent a nuclear weapon and then he will threaten the mayor of a major city, give me XYZ or I’ll blow your city off the map. Now imagine what we’re going to do; we’ve met with terrorists so far and they’ve had AK-47’s; they’ve had their M-14’s and their M-16’s; they’ve had their grenades and their poison but they haven’t got nuclear weapons. What happens when Ishmael gets nuclear? We’ll see the prophecy of Genesis 16, the wild man and he will dwell and he will harass and he will harass forever and ever, that’s the calling of Ishmael and the calling of Ishmael is the calling that is fulfilled by the child rearing. God brings him up out of the wilderness to be that wild man, to be the terrorist. He is groomed in his very being to be a terrorist; that’s his function in history, to terrorize. And so we see as late as 1978 Ishmael; he still lives on the basis of the child rearing he received. It’s very effective.

An application, though, on the positive note, the conclusion of our text this morning, an application physically to our children of these truths and that is the training environment of your children does count; it counts because God says it counts here in this chapter, the way He works with Isaac, the way He gets Ishmael out of the environment; He doesn’t want Isaac to have that character. Get Ishmael out of here; we can’t train two children for two different destinies in the same home that way.

Application to us spiritually; if you are born again and you have the life of eternity in you by regeneration they you are spiritually a child and as a spiritual child you are to grow and you must have a training environment that is worthwhile. And that training environment is specified; it means a daily intake of Scripture; it means participation in some local church; it means various things that the Scriptures outline. And to remember those things we’re going to close by singing….