This week we will be talking about one of the themes of Scripture—miracle babies! Sarai’s will be the very first of seven and that calls for a new name, new promises, and new problems for Abraham.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I now post slightly longer video versions. (Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context without having to read an entire chapter every week!)
Last week, all the focus was on the guys in Abraham’s household—which consisted of Abraham, Ishmael, and all of the people who travel with them taking care of the critters and the camp. But this week, the focus is on Abraham’s wife, Sarai—remember Sarai? She’s eighty-nine years old, still beautiful, but barren—I am thinking like Lena Horne, who was almost ninety-three when she died and still gorgeous and she could sing. But Sarai was barren which means that she can’t have any babies. I mean, it’s normal for an eighty-nine-year-old woman not to be able to have babies, thank goodness, but Sarai couldn’t even have babies when she was young. Once it became obvious that there was no hope, about thirteen or fourteen years earlier, she decided to give her female slave, Hagar, to her husband as another wife, while still keeping control over her as a slave and claiming the child as her own. Hagar had a son named Ishmael, but God told Hagar that the child belonged to her and not to Sarai, because Hagar would name him. So, Abraham has a child now but Sarai doesn’t. Of course, if you have been listening all along then you know the story is much more complicated than this, but this is what my generation (and I am Gen X, thank you very much and not a Boomer) calls the ”Reader’s Digest Version.” It’s a very short summary where I only talk about the things that matter to the story we are talking about today. And now, we can read this week’s verses:
God said to Abraham, “As for your wife Sarai, do not call her Sarai, for Sarah will be her name. I will bless her; in fact, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she will produce nations; kings of peoples will come from her.”
Okay, can you imagine what it was even like for Abraham to hear this news? It is impossible. Eighty-nine-year-old women can’t have babies. They just can’t. Not then and not now. I don’t even care about the advances of medical science in our modern world. It is still impossible today and even if it wasn’t, what eight-nine-year-old woman would even want to have a baby. I am fifty-four and my back and knees aren’t what they used to be. Even though I am barren and can’t have babies, just like Sarah, I wouldn’t want to have a baby now—no way, no how. When the twins were born and we adopted them, I was almost thirty-two years old, and I was so exhausted all the time. I was watching the news one day when they were just a few months old and there was a story about how doctors had made it so a woman in her early 60s had babies and I was like, “That woman gonna die because I am half her age and sooo tired that I sleep whenever the babies are sleeping and wish I was sleeping even when they are awake.” And doctors can do some amazing things now that weren’t possible in the past, but no one has ever had a baby in their 80s and Sarai is almost ninety at this point. In fact, she will be ninety when she has her baby. And that’s just crazy. You know what I call that? I call that God showing off!
Sure, God could have given Sarai a baby when she was twenty, or thirty, or even fifty—but ninety? That’s just how God is sometimes, He wants to make sure that everyone knows that the only explanation is a miracle—like parting the Red Sea. There are women my age who have babies, sometimes, but dang. It isn’t normal. A lot of times, when there are miracles now, people will come up with excuses for how it really wasn’t a miracle at all. We will talk about that when we get to the book of Exodus and the plagues. People have some really interesting ideas about what they think really happened. But the simplest explanation is that God made a total ruckus in Egypt so that the slaves would be freed and the people keeping them captive would see that their gods couldn’t protect them from the God of Israel, our God. But I don’t even think anyone could come up with a good story to explain how Sarai would have a baby when she was that old. Having a baby is hard work and a lot of things can go wrong even when women are young and strong. Not only was it a miracle that Sarah could even be pregnant, but every day she lived was also a miracle. Sarai should have died because no one’s ninety-year-old body can handle something like that. God was going to make a miracle and then He would have to keep making new ones every single day. Sarai being pregnant was like a sign—just like circumcision was a sign—and a sign shows us that God is doing a new thing because there is simply no other explanation.
Oh, and let’s talk about one of my favorite verses from the prophet Isaiah. In Isaiah 43 and 48, God is telling His people who have been taken away to Babylon, far from home, that He will be doing something that they can’t give the idols they were worshiping any credit for. They were doing that, you know. For hundreds of years they were supposed to give God credit for the rain, the babies they had, the food they grew, the size of their flocks and herds of animals, and the fish they ate. But instead, they gave credit for the rain to Tammuz and Ba’al Hadad, the grain to Dagan, and the babies to Asherah. But now God is promising to do something that no one has ever done before. The people are in exile, which means they have been taken from their homes and aren’t allowed to go back. Just like Adam and Eve were exiled from their Garden home and weren’t ever able to go there again. Exile is always a sad thing. The Jews living in Babylon who were faithful to God and loved Him and loved Jerusalem weren’t allowed to just pack up and go back. Only a king could give them permission. And God was going to make the Persian King Cyrus send them back and even pay to rebuild the city and the Temple. Wow. After God tells them this, He says:
“Don’t focus on what happened in the past; don’t pay attention to it. Look, I am about to do something new; it’s coming soon. Don’t you see it? I will make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert to bring you home.” (Is 43:18-19)
“You have heard everything I said to you through my prophets. Aren’t you going to admit that it all happened just like they said it would? But from now on, I will be telling you new things; things that I have hidden from you up till now.” (Is 48:6)
You know why I love these verses and why they remind me of Sarah? Because, as we go through the Bible, God is always doing something new and unexpected to save His people. God is going to take a crazy, bad, and hopeless situation and turn it upside down to use Joseph to save His people from starvation. In the Exodus out of Egypt, God parted the sea and His people escaped from the Egyptian army on dry land while He held back the Egyptians with a wall of fire too scary for the soldiers to try and go through! And Jesus was sure unexpected—no one knew for sure what had happened until it was all over! But really, the first big unexpected, impossible miracle that God created was giving a baby to a ninety-year-old woman. It was something that everyone knew could never happen. In fact, everyone would laugh if they heard it—and they did! It was a sign that God was doing something brand new in the world in making a brand-new impossible family.
And talking about signs, God renames Sarai and calls her Sarah. She’s the only woman in the entire Bible who gets her name changed. Sarai, the name she was given by her parents, is a name that archaeologists have found among the Amorites and Hittites and there is some debate about what it means. In Hebrew, the word sar means prince—and Jesus is called Sar Shalom, Prince of Peace. And so, Sarah means princess. But what was wrong with Sarai? What did her name mean? Well, we really don’t know for sure, and people have been debating about it for a long time because Sarai sure isn’t a Hebrew word. But there are words like it among the Hittites, and possibly the name of one of their gods. Remember that Abraham and Sarah were born into an idol worshiping family, according to Joshua. It wasn’t strange to name a child after one of their gods or goddesses. It was considered to be lucky because it honored their gods. And they hoped that a certain god would protect a child named after them. But it doesn’t work out in real life.
I suppose that normal names just wouldn’t be appropriate for the two people responsible for creating a nation of people unlike anything that had ever happened before. And so we have Abraham, the father of nations and Sarah the princess. Of course, my name doesn’t mean anything in Hebrew! None of my names do. Maybe you have a name from the Bible and if so, you can find out what it means. Of course, Abraham and Sarah weren’t really responsible for creating a new nation of people. They couldn’t. They were too old. God had to create that family. No one else could take any credit. It had to be Him and everyone had to know it. We haven’t talked for quite a while about Moses telling these stories to the children of Israel and the mixed multitude hundreds of years later. But these were their family stories of how God had created a family when it was impossible—making them children of promise, just like Abraham and Sarah’s son. And we are all children of promise too. We are all adopted into the family of God through Jesus. And that’s the best promise of all, that we would be included in God’s family and that He would solve the problem of sin and death and that we will all live here with Jesus in the world to come when He reigns over us as King of kings and Lord of lords. And every year, we will go to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles with Him. Just imagine that party! It’s eight days long! Do you think there will be fireworks? And your favorite foods? It will be more amazing than our imaginations, for sure. And when we are there, celebrating together, we will laugh when we think back to how it all started—with a one-hundred-year-old man and a ninety-year-old woman having an impossible baby!
But remember that just because Abraham and Sarah have been chosen for a special role in the world, starting this new family, doesn’t mean that they are perfect and that they do everything right. And we can be honest and talk about it when they do things that are wrong, which just makes them like us. If God only used perfect people, then only Jesus would have gotten anything done. People in the Bible did things that would get them sent to jail now, but the ancient world operated by different rules. God was starting with Abraham and Sarah, who were from Babylon. Babylon was a wicked place where the strong were cruel to the weak, and the rich took advantage of the poor—and they got away with it because no one who could stop them was willing to. God removed them from all that and sent them to the Land of Canaan, and we can see from the fact that Abraham travels all around without people messing with him that at this point, the Canaanites are peaceful. But, we know from history that there were people, called the Amorites, who were coming into the Land and they would be changing things as they got more and more powerful. By the time the children of Israel returned from Egypt, things would be very different. We’ll talk more about that later.
Something interesting that I never noticed before was that God told Abraham, “Your name isn’t going to be Abram anymore; your name will be Abraham, for I will make you the father of many nations.” That’s pretty straightforward and obvious, right? Abram is getting a new name and people will start calling him Abraham. But with Sarai, what happens is very different, “As for your wife Sarai, do not call her Sarai, for Sarah will be her name.” God is giving Abraham an order. Do not call your wife Sarai. Was it because she was named after another god? Or did her name mean something terrible in Hittite or Amorite or some other language? Some books say that Sarai means “my princess” but we really don’t know that. It’s a guess. For some reason that God never tells us, He doesn’t ever want to hear her called Sarai ever again. Sarah is now royalty, just as Abraham is going to be the father of many nations. And that’s as far from reality as they can possibly imagine right now.
God tells Abraham that not only is Sarah going to have a baby, but that baby will be a boy. As we will see next week, that’s a problem for Abraham and Ishmael. In fact, it means that everything they did was for nothing. Sarah was Abraham’s first wife and a free woman. Any child she would have, even if that child wasn’t a miracle like Isaac will be, would inherit at least twice as much as any other child. This baby would grow up to lead the entire household—not Ishmael, even though he is older and has been trained and educated all his life to be a great man and leader. Ishmael will still be a great leader and a great man, as God promised Hagar in the wilderness, but he will do it somewhere else. Imagine how happy and how sad Abraham is right now. When we are patient and do things God’s way, His promises are good news; when we try to make things happen ourselves and take matters into our own hands, His promises can be bad news. For Abraham, this is great news and terrible news all at the same time. He loves his son very much. Ishmael had been expecting one sort of life but from now on, he will be living an entirely different life. He’s the son of Sarah’s slave, who Sarah and Abraham never even call by her name. And that’s a lot different than being the son of the matriarch, the head woman in charge of the household. How will Abraham react to this news? We’ll find out next week.
And it is easy to miss something even more important than Sarah’s new name. God has just made Sarah part of His covenant with Abraham! He hasn’t even mentioned her before now, even though He did save her from Pharaoh. That doesn’t mean that God hadn’t noticed her, but that He doesn’t tell His full promises all at once. God doesn’t tell everyone His entire plan, and how it will all happen. He gives us a little bit of information and expects us to trust that He has all the details worked out. And when Moses told this story to the children of Israel, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, he was teaching them that even though they were still in the wilderness and far from the promised Land, that God had it all figured out and all they had to do was obey Him day by day and not try to do things their own way. Did they learn that lesson? Not really. They are not much different than we are. Except they didn’t have cell phones because if they did they would have all been taking selfies of themselves walking through the Red Sea, right? I totally would have! I would have posted it on social media and said, “Ha! Didn’t even get my feet wet!” #byebyeEgypt
Just like God promised in His covenant with Abraham, God is saying that Sarah will produce many nations and that kings will come from her. God is giving her the same promises as Abraham. God promised Hagar a great many descendants, but not kings. Of course, there are going to be many kings who come from Abraham and Sarah—some of them will be the kings of Israel, like Saul, David and Solomon and others would be over the north and south after the land got split up when Solomon died. And there would be other kings too—ones from Edom like Herod the Great who lived when Jesus was born, as well as his sons who were mostly named Herod as well. And so, Sarai had to become Sarah the princess. She was like the Queen of a new people. She was royalty. I think she was called princess because when Pharaoh married her, she was a Queen of Egypt and I don’t think God wanted her to remember that because it wasn’t her fault at all and it must have been a very scary time for her. If people went around calling her Malkah, which means queen in Hebrew, it would have been disrespectful and a painful reminder of what she went through and how embarrassing that would have been for her. And anyway, it is better to be a princess serving God than to be the Queen of Egypt any day!
Abraham has to start looking at his wife differently than he has been up to now. Even though she couldn’t have a baby up to this point, they have been together all their lives and he must love her a lot. He could have sent her away and no one in that world would have blamed him or even cared. They would have seen Sarah as cursed or something. In fact, they probably wondered why he never did get rid of her or at least get another wife. Abraham did some really wrong things when he was scared and unsure but something he never did was divorce his wife. By the time Isaac was born, they had probably been married for seventy-five years. That’s a long time to be with someone and to never give up on them no matter what. I want you to know something very important.
God is like that with us too. I mean, without all the mistakes and sins of Abraham. Remember that the Bible is God’s story—not Abraham’s story, Moses’s, David’s, or Paul’s. It is because of how God deals with these people, no matter what they do, that we learn about how perfect, trustworthy, and merciful He is. Abraham was seventy-five years old when God called on him, Moses was eighty. David was younger and so was Paul but the important thing to remember is that God waits until the time is right and isn’t really concerned with how old a person is. It wasn’t so long ago that a guy on the news said that a certain woman couldn’t be President because she was “past her prime” meaning she was too old. And she is younger than me!!! And the current President of the United States is thirty years older than she is. It was a silly thing to say because God uses men and women both of all ages and in all sorts of jobs and He really seems to enjoy picking the people that no one takes seriously.
No one took Sarah seriously. Not as a mom, anyway. It was totally impossible and had never happened before. Everyone knew that Sarah was barren. She had never had any babies and never would have any. That’s what they were saying. She was too old. People would just laugh at Abraham and Sarah both if they told people what God had promised. It just couldn’t possibly happen. But impossible things become possible when God makes a covenant promise. In fact, in Paul’s letter to the church at Phillipi, he tells them that even if he is poor or rich, healthy or sick, hungry or full, he can still do everything that God wants him to do because he gets his strength from Jesus. Paul doesn’t have to worry about how to get the work of God done, He just has to keep doing it and watch God make it happen. Paul worked hard, but it was God clearing the way for him—just like Isaiah promised God would do for the exiles who would be returning from Babylon.
That reminds me of another story about a woman named Gladys Aylward. She was the missionary no one wanted. She was a housemaid, didn’t have an education, couldn’t learn to speak Chinese no matter how hard she tried, had no money, and none of the missionary societies would pay her way over to China. But she told God that she would go if He showed her what to do. The story of how she got there and what she did is amazing. She might be the bravest person I have ever heard of. There is a movie about her but a lot of it was made up but some of the most amazing things in it are true. I included a link in the transcript from YouTube where you can learn about her. Just like Sarah, she is proof that God can do absolutely anything He wants in our lives. That doesn’t mean we get to do whatever we want, but that anything He wants, we can do in His way and when He wants.
I love you. I am praying for you. I hope that you will watch the video about Gladys and know that God can use you just like He used Gladys.