We’ve been waiting for ten chapters, since Sarah was introduced at the end of chapter 11, and finally Isaac is here. But why is the story so short??? In fact, why are all the stories about Isaac so short? For someone we’ve been anxiously waiting for so long, he doesn’t get nearly as much attention as his father Abraham and his son Jacob. Sometimes the mysteries tell us just as much as the long stories do.
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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 usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
Okay, so we’ve been waiting since the end of chapter 11 for Sarah to have a baby and now we’re starting chapter 21! That’s ten chapters of waiting! Sarah was introduced as being barren—which means she can’t have any babies. We don’t know why she couldn’t have babies. Doctors can give you about a hundred reasons why but all that matters is that she can’t. Sometimes, the Bible doesn’t give us the answers so we can think about it and sometimes, the answer flat out doesn’t matter. Like here. Sarah sure wouldn’t care why. All she has ever cared about is having a baby. But why would she care? Why can’t she just be like me and adopt some babies? Sometimes, when we ask these questions it’s because we assume that things now are the way things have always been. But there are no adoption agencies or orphanages out there in the ancient world and you wouldn’t see much of anyone abandoning healthy baby boys. It just didn’t happen. Baby boys were needed because they grew up to be soldiers if your town was attacked and when women had boys, they were somehow considered to be especially blessed by God. Girls in those days had to be carefully watched over, and so having girls stressed a family out. Boys could go out and get more reputation for their family, but girls couldn’t. Girls had to be protected from getting into any sort of trouble or even being alone because it was so easy to humiliate an entire family by saying that the girls did something wrong. It’s pretty messed up and I am very happy that Jesus wasn’t like that.
All that was just to say that it would have been almost impossible for Sarah to adopt a baby boy. But, if she had, the way adoption worked in her world was pretty awesome. I wish it was so easy now. All the dad had to do was to pick up the kid and name them and that was that. There was no difference between adopting them and having a baby. Just like with my kids. We adopted Matt and Andy and even if I had a baby after that, they are still my oldest and first kiddos. I couldn’t possibly love the new baby more than I already love them. They’d be the same. I’d just be more tired after they were born, is all. But, we haven’t even talked about our Bible verses so maybe we should just go ahead and look at those and talk about them.
The Lord visited Sarah just like he said, and the Lord kept his promise to Sarah.
So, we need to backtrack all the way back to chapter 17 when God told Abraham that Sarah was going to have a baby and instead of being really happy about it, Abraham begged God to make Ishmael his heir instead—to inherit all of his critters and stuff. I don’t want you guys thinking that there was anything wrong with Ishmael because he was just barely a teenager, but Ishmael wasn’t God’s idea. Ishmael was Sarah’s idea when she gave her slave girl Hagar to Abraham so that they could have a baby and give it to Sarah. Abraham went along with it and I have to believe that he was thrilled at the idea of finally having a kid, but it created a lot of problems and everyone was mad at everyone. Thirteen years later, Ismael was growing into a man and working with his father, Abraham, and then God dropped a bombshell; God wasn’t going to just go along with their plan to solve all their problems by making a baby boy instead of waiting for God and trusting Him. God told Abraham that he would be a dad and that meant it was up to God to keep that promise, He didn’t need any help. We aren’t clever enough to make God’s promises happen in ways that aren’t going to just mess everything up. But since they got away with it and Ishmael was born, they probably believed that they had done the right thing. Fast forward thirteen more years and God tells them, “Um, nope. This isn’t what I had in mind so I don’t have to do things your way. I want to make a miracle baby so the world knows that something new and different is happening here.”
And God came in person (disguised as a person, anyway), to announce that Sarah was going to have a baby in about another year right where Sarah could overhear them. And she laughed, just like Abraham had when he first heard the news. She didn’t believe them, but God wasn’t going to change His plans just because Sarah needed more convincing. He was going to prove Himself to her, and that He can be trusted to do what He says He will do. I suppose no one really starts out trusting God completely, right? I sure didn’t and sometimes I still don’t when things get scary or crazy in my life.
The Bible says that God came to Sarah and that He kept His promise. But what does it mean that He came to her? Did she see Him? Probably not, because that’s also what the Bible says about Hannah and Elizabeth, who also had miracle babies. That word is paqad and it’s kind of a complicated word because it means that God visited her and looked over her situation and then acted to save her from her sad situation of not having a baby. It’s sort of like when we see that God remembered Noah right before He dried up all the water of the flood. God doesn’t forget, but He isn’t always doing something to solve problems either. When He does, it’s called remembering or visiting in English. God isn’t just going, “Oh yeah, those dudes in the ark or that woman who needs a baby… I had forgotten all about them.” Instead, it’s more like, “Okay, it’s the perfect time to do what needs to be done! And we don’t know why it was the perfect time; we just know that it was. God had made a promise to Abraham and Sarah and for whatever reason, now is the time. And so God changed Sarah somehow so that she could have a baby—and she did! And she was ninety years old! Lemme tell you, I was almost 32 when the boys were born and I was so tired I thought I would die. I don’t know how Sarah did it but it was definitely part of the miracle!
Sarah became pregnant and gave Abraham a baby boy even though he was very old, at the exact time God had told him. Abraham named his son who was born—the one Sarah gave birth to—Isaac.
I think this sounds like it is repeating the same thing over and over again. Like, we get it, Abraham is old and has a son now and the son’s mom is Sarah and it happened exactly when and how God said it would happen and they named him with the name God gave them. What’s the big deal? Well, the big deal is that God made a crazy promise and even though everything about it seemed impossible for literally every reason out there, He made it happen just as He said but in a way that no one could have ever seen coming. Really, the only thing that could have made this story stranger is if Abraham had the baby or if Sarah was already dead. Other than those two possibilities, God had proved His power and also His trustworthiness as much as was even possible. God literally couldn’t have done anything more amazing to prove how awesome He is and that this was all proof that God’s choice was Isaac and not Ishmael. Moses wants us to understand that Isaac is Abraham’s son. Period. And that God made Isaac happen. Period. We aren’t supposed to look at this and say, “well, maybe this just happened naturally and Isaac is just a normal baby whose mom and dad were just super old.” We can’t have any doubts at all. It was Sarah who got pregnant and had a baby and Abraham is the dad of that baby and it happened exactly when God told them it would and Abraham gave the kiddo the name God told Him about back in chapter 17. And oh, btw, in case you missed it the first time—Abraham and Sarah really are the mom and dad. There is no wiggle room to believe anything else. The Bible isn’t usually this specific about stuff and so we can tell “what if” stories about what might be going on but not this time. Moses just flat out told it like it is.
When his son Isaac was eight days old, Abraham circumcised him, just as God had commanded him.
Do you remember back in chapter 17 where we talked about circumcision? Just a year before Isaac was born, God told Abraham to do a surgery on himself and all the other men who lived with him and worked for him. They had to have some extra skin at the end of their penises cut off. That was something that happened to priests in the ancient world, to the people who could speak to God and give the people messages from God and to serve Him. God was making Abraham and his family and everyone who traveled with him special, including Ishmael, and commissioning them to do a certain job in the world. That job was to prepare the way for Jesus and so it all had to happen before Isaac was born because Isaac was the second step in God’s plan to bring Jesus into the world. And the next step after that was when Jacob was born and then when Judah was born and King David hundreds of years later all the way to the first century when the time was finally right and God remembered His people and gave us Jesus. Isaac was probably the first person in the whole world who was circumcised when he was just a baby. It meant that he was commissioned too—which means to be given a specific job from God. When we make Jesus our king, we get commissioned too. We are sent out to act like Jesus. The world needs Jesus but they can’t see Him unless we are living like He did according to His example and His teachings.
Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born.
In case we missed it all the other times, Abraham was super old when Isaac was born. It took God twenty-five years to keep His promise to Abraham that he would have a son. Yeah, I know that Ishmael is like fourteen years old now, but God didn’t have anything to do with that—it just wasn’t the plan. God doesn’t change His plans just because we decide to take shortcuts. And Moses is telling us, again, that Isaac is Abraham’s son, which may seem strange now but it’s important that we know two things (1) Isaac came from Abraham and Sarah because God made a miracle so that Sarah could have a baby but (2) Isaac isn’t like Jesus, with God for a father and adopted by Joseph who was his dad. But there’s something else because God and Sarah call Isaac Abraham’s son but Abraham mostly just calls Ishmael his son and calls Isaac, “the lad” or something like that. In the next chapter, that will be really important. This is a hard time for Abraham because he has to let his son Ishmael know that it is Isaac who will be the next boss of the family even though Ishmael has thought his entire life that it would be his own job as Abraham’s oldest and only son. He grew up knowing that there was no way Sarah was ever going to have a baby and so his place leading the family was guaranteed. Abraham must have been heartbroken for Ishmael, whom he loved, and that would have made him confused about how to feel about Isaac. Maybe he felt guilty, or angry, or whatever. Isaac was still just a baby, and in those days dads weren’t really active in the lives of their babies. A lot of them died and they were always with their moms or older sisters and brothers. It wasn’t until they began to become men that they started to spend time with the men of the family. Abraham and his son Ishmael had a lot of history together.
Sarah said, “God has made me laugh, and everyone who hears will laugh with me.”She also said, “Who would have ever told Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? But I have given birth to a son for him in his old age.”
This verse is kinda strange because it can mean more than one thing and we aren’t sure exactly what. Lemme explain. Sarah says that people will laugh with her, right? Well, it isn’t that simple. In Hebrew, with is a preposition. Do you know the preposition song? About, above, across, after, against, along, among, around, At, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, between, beyond. By, concerning, down, during, except, for, from, in, into, near. Of, off, on, over, since, through, to, toward, under, until, up, upon. With, within, without, like, past, aboard, amid, throughout Underneath, unto, onto, and these are prepositions. Okay, not going to win me a grammy award but I wanted you to see all the words that count as prepositions. And prepositions help us to figure out what’s going on with the different words in a sentence, like The quick brown fox jumped OVER the lazy dog. Which is very different from The quick brown fox jumped ON the lazy dog or The quick brown fox jumped OFF the lazy dog. In English we have different words for all of these different meanings but not Hebrew. Translators and even people reading in Hebrew have to make a decision because it could mean that Sarah was saying that people would laugh with her or at her. And those are two very different things. Sarah, either way, was right because some people would see her with a baby and laugh at her and others would laugh with her because an old lady having a baby was so cool. One way, Sarah is laughing because she is happy and the other way she’s complaining. Boy, I hope she isn’t complaining or worried about what people will think. I guess it’s possible, but I would like to think that she is just assuming that everyone will be happy for her. It would be pretty mean if they weren’t, right?
Why would people laugh? As she says, because she had a baby when they were both so old! She can’t hardly believe it herself, I bet. And she knew that no one would have ever guessed in a million years that God would keep His promise that way. But the truth of the matter is that if God wants something done, He can do it any way He wants to do it. Sometimes, God is sneaky and does things quietly—like He did with Esther and Mordecai and Haman and Jesus was that way too when He would sometimes heal someone and then say, “Now, don’t go telling anyone about this!” And then, sometimes God makes the sea split down the middle so his people can walk on dry land right before Pharaoh and his armies get one last bath. God does what God wants to do and He does it how He wants to. But this is really God’s first flashy miracle in the Bible where no one could explain it any other way. God wanted everyone to look at Abraham and Sarah and their baby and to say, “Wow, this must be some sort of special family! I wonder what is in store for them in the future!” I bet Hagar and Abraham’s oldest son Ishmael were totally confused about all of this—I sure would be. He was about fourteen and his life was about to totally change from the second most important guy in the camp to a distant third. People used to be looking at Ishmael for leadership but now they would be looking toward this tiny baby.
You see, even though Ishmael was the oldest child—a lot older—his mom was a slave and not a wife. Sarah had wanted Hagar to have a baby so that Sarah could adopt him as her own but for whatever reason, Sarah never did. Sarah never loved Ishmael, which is totally strange. When our boys were born, I loved them so much I thought I would die from happiness. I didn’t care that they didn’t come from me and my husband because I just wanted to be a mom more than anything else. But Sarah didn’t like Ishmael, which we will see next week, even though Abraham loved him. That’s a messy situation. It’s going to get a lot worse in another three years when Sarah is going to decide to get rid of Ishmael and his mom. No, she isn’t going to kill them, just get rid of them.
Isaac was born because he was God’s plan all along, from even before God told Abraham that he would have a son in Genesis 15. In the same way, exactly the same way, Jesus was also God’s plan all along. Sarah shouldn’t have ever been able to have a baby, but she did. And Jesus’s mother Mary shouldn’t have been able to have a baby either because she wasn’t married yet. In some ways, Jesus was the end of the story of Abraham’s miracle family but He was also a brand new beginning. Jesus was the last of the seven miracle babies in Abraham’s family and Isaac was the first. It’s like God was saying, “Look, I am doing something new but it’s also something old too!” I guess we can say that when God wants to make a new family, or a bigger family, He starts it with a miracle. Just to make sure everyone is paying attention.
I need to tell you a new secret, one that is going to become more and more obvious. We are going to see hints about Jesus all over the place in different peoples’ lives and this is the first big one. Isaac might not do much in the Bible, as we will see, compared to his dad and son but he is very important to God’s plan to give us Jesus. That’s why God’s choice couldn’t be Ishmael. There wasn’t anything wrong with him, but Ishmael wasn’t ever going to give us a hint about Jesus. I don’t want you to think that all these hints about Jesus made it obvious what everyone should expect. If the Bible teaches us anything, it’s that the hints about Jesus are only obvious to people after Jesus came and died and was resurrected. It’s the same with all of the clues in the Bible—people try to figure things out beforehand and they think they have a good bead on things but then when whatever it is happens, everyone was totally wrong and it’s a total surprise how God worked things out.
God told Abraham that he would have a son. No one would have ever looked at Sarah and thought that she would be the mom. I guess they thought they had it figured out when Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham so they could have a baby. It made sense. Abraham wasn’t getting any younger, right? So, they looked at God’s promises and believed they had things figured out about how to do that. Maybe they had a conversation something like this: Sarah said, “You know when we were down in Egypt and you told everyone I was your sister and Pharaoh made me his wife? Well, he gave me that slave girl and then God sent all those plagues on his family and Pharaoh let me go and we left. Doesn’t that seem strange to you? That now we have that slave girl and she’s just the right age to be a mom? Wouldn’t it make sense that you should have a baby with her? It just can’t be a coincidence, right?” And maybe Abraham said, “Yeah, dang, I always knew there was a reason why I kept telling you to pretend you are my sister when we are around strangers. I guess God used that to bring your slave girl into our lives—all the other women are either married or too old or too young. This definitely seems like a “God-thing” to me. Yeah, He said I would become a dad but He never said anything about you being a mom and I am not getting any younger. We need to get this taken care of right now.”
Of course, that is a total what-if story that I made up but I wrote it that way because I have heard people do just that—talk themselves into doing exactly what they want to do by telling themselves that it just must be God’s plan. And I have done it too! And when we do it that way, we really mess things up big time. God never makes us a promise unless He has all the details figured out first. He doesn’t need us to be clever and come up with a way to make what He says come true. That’s one of the most important lessons in the Bible. When we try to do God’s things our way, we end up doing our own things instead. Why do we do that? One, because we hate waiting and we want what we want right now. Two, because we like to be totally in control of our own lives and we are often secretly scared of how God is going to do things. Three, God wants us to be everything we don’t want to be. God wants us to be servants to everyone and we want to be rich, famous and the bosses and all that. When we try to get God’s things done our way, we tend to do it in such a way that will impress people and make them want to be like us and listen to us and give us money instead of teaching them to be like Jesus and love Him and listen to Him.
I love you. I am praying for you. I hope you come to understand that you really can trust God to make His own promises happen and that it’s more than okay if that doesn’t happen the way you want it to. In fact, it works out much better for everyone when we let Him do things His way. Our only real job is to become more and more like Jesus so that when God does make things happen, we are as ready as possible.