Genesis 18 begins with Abraham receiving three visitors. There is a reference to the Lord, then to three men, then later to two angels, so it seems that Abraham was visited by three men, one of who was God and two of whom were angels. However, in the light of the Christian belief in the Trinity, I can't help wondering if the fact that there were three men is significant. Could it be that the two figures the writer took to be angels were actually the Son and the Spirit? Did Abraham unknowingly see God in all His fullness? Is it possible that we sometimes see God without knowing it?
However He appears, God repeats His promise that Abraham and Sarah will conceive a child together. Sarah overhears this, and just as Abraham did, she laughs. "I'm too old," she must have thought, "I can't have a child". It's an understandable reaction, but this isn't about what Sarah can and can't do. It's about what God can do. It's always about what God can do. Sometimes His plans for our lives may seem utterly ridiculous, even impossible, but He knows what He's doing and He knows how He's going to do it. We just have to trust Him and run with it.
Having reiterated His promise and told Abraham and Sarah that He will return in a year, by which time they will have a son, God tells Abraham that He will go to Sodom and Gomorrah because "the outcry against [them] is so great and their sin is so grievous" (verse 26) that He wants to see for Himself if they really are as bad as they seem. If they are, He will destroy them. In the passage that follows, Abraham bargains with God, pleading with Him to spare the cities for the sake of any righteous men in them. God answers every plea until finally He agrees to spare the cities if just ten righteous men can be found in them. God doesn't just hear what we say to Him - He listens to us and He is moved by our cries, and so He responds. And just as we saw when He saved Noah and his family from the flood, God will not harm or destroy the righteous.
And so the two angels who are with God go down to Sodom and Gomorrah, where they are welcomed by Abraham's nephew, Lot. It's not long before the men of the town descend on Lot's house, demanding that he send the angels out so they can have sex with them. In one of the most startling examples of diplomacy the Bible has to offer, Lot goes out and suggests the men take his two virgin daughters instead. Lovely. Fortunately the angels have a slightly better plan, and they pull Lot back into the house and blind the men of the town. They then tell Lot to flee with all of his family and not to look back, because God has decided He will destroy the city. So Lot takes his wife and his daughters, and together they flee for a nearby town. And then God rains down burning sulphur on Sodom and Gomorrah, destroying the cities and all who live in them.
And this is where things get slightly...odd. Lot's wife ignores or forgets the angels' instruction and she turns back and is turned into a pillar of salt. Weird, huh? I've heard that story a million times and I still don't get it. Maybe the point is that when we leave our sin behind, we must leave it and not look back at or dwell on it. Genesis 19 then ends with an account of Lot's daughters taking it in turns to get him drunk and sleep with him in order to continue their family line. It just gets weirder.
In Genesis 20, Abraham and family start travelling again, and again they tell people that Sarah is Abraham's sister. And again the king takes Sarah to be his wife, and again it causes trouble for all involved. Abraham hasn't learnt his lesson, and it very nearly brings a great deal of harm to a great number of people. We really must learn from our mistakes and avoid repeating old sins, or we'll just keep hurting ourselves and others. Fortunately for the king, God is gracious. He recognises that the king was ignorant of the truth and acted with a clear conscience, and so He gives him an opportunity to make amends. And God treats us with the same grace and understanding. He knows that we sometimes make innocent mistakes, and so He will show us the error of our ways and give us the chance to put things right. It is only when we continue in the full knowledge that what we are doing is wrong that it becomes a sin.
In Genesis 21, God makes good on His word, and Sarah gives birth to a son who she names Isaac. Clearly Sarah could only conceive and give birth at the age of ninety because God was at work in that situation, but without getting unnecessarily graphic, Abraham and Sarah would still have needed to take certain steps in order for that to happen. God wants to do wonderful and miraculous things in our lives, but He needs us to work with Him.
After the birth of Isaac, Sarah once again begins to resent Hagar and Ishmael, the son she bore Abraham, and so she sends them away. They walk off into the desert, where Hagar lays down to die, but once again God follows them and protects them, promising that He will make Ishmael into a great nation. Hagar was a servant and an Egyptian, and according to Jewish and Islamic tradition, Ishmael was the ancestor of the Northern Arabs. In other words they were not Jewish, not part of the chosen nation. Yet God still cared for them. Right from the start, God has loved every one of His people regardless of race or colour or creed.
Genesis 21 ends with an account of some of Abraham's dealings with the people of the land in which he was living. It is here that we realise that even though his descendants had been promised a land of their own, Abraham was living as a foreigner. In the same way, we must live as strangers in this world before we come into our inheritance in the next. But like Abraham, we must still deal with the world so that others may see Him at work in ourselves say of us "God is with you in everything you do" (verse 22).
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