The Birth of Ishmael: A Lesson in Patience and Faith

Show Notes

Episode 431: 
In this episode, Chris and Jeff dissect the complex narrative of Abram, Sarai, and Hagar. They highlight the lack of faith displayed by Sarai and Abram as they take matters into their own hands, leading to the birth of Ishmael and setting the stage for the ongoing conflict between Ishmael's descendants and Isaac's lineage. 

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You're listening to The Bible Guys, a podcast where a couple of friends talk about the Bible in fun in practical ways. Hey, everybody, welcome to the Bible Guys. I am Chris and I'm Jeff, and we together make up the Bible Guys man, and we talk about the Bible and fun and practical ways. There you go. You know, who, how clever? There are people who actually don't believe that the Bible is fun. But actually that's us were the Bible guys. I don't believe we're fun. No, but seriously, don't you believe that Jesus was fun? Sure? Yeah, I do think I believe he laughed. I believe he cut up with his disciples absolutely. Yeah. So anyway, so we are fun as well. And today we're going to start off with a very fun segment. And what is the segment? Yeah, this segment is who said it? It says Chris. You're going to read these quotes from the Bible and see if Jeff can correctly guess who said each quote. So you want to race. That's going to make me look so bad? Well, you know it is? Okay, okay, is this going to be? Is this going to be like a listener race. Yeah, let's try that. So I'm gonna time. Don't skip on the points, dude, last time. You're going to give like a thousand points. No, no, no, there's going to be one hundred thousand points. Whoa. This is a big game per question game. So if they get the answer before I do or okay, or if they just get the answer and you don't and I don't, Yes, okay, one hundred thousand points. Okay, So who's who said this? Aready? You have to understand the character? Character? How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb? That's Nicodemus three? Yes, so I guess a thousand points? Well guess what you finished before I was even done with the quote. I know that's a good. Well, I'm trying to get these points. Yeah that's really good. Hopefully Uh well, I was going to say hopefully, but no, I bet you know what he beat you out there? Here we go. Number two? What have I done to you that you have struck me these three times? Bal donkey? Yes, yes, yes, that's really good. And I don't remember what passage that is. Judge judges yes, that's what I thought. How about this one? I think maybe you ready? Huh? This is John whom I beheaded. He has been raised from the dead Herod, Herod. Yes, that is correct, King, King, King Herod. I like to finally call him, Yes, oh kingly forever. Number four. This is the one that's kind of tough. Look you have mocked me and told me lies what. Look you have mocked me and told me lies man alive. That sounds like Delilah. It is Delilah? Is it? And ironically his girlfriend? Ironically, I just wrote this message last night. I was writing for upcoming message in a couple of weeks and I just finished this writing about Samson and Delilah, and so I literally just read this first last night. Pretty crazy, okay. And then finally I have nothing to do with that man, for I have suffered many things today in a dream because of him. Uh A pilot's wife. Pilot's wife. You are five for five for five five thousand points. That might be the most points ever won in any in a game on the Bible. Guys. Yes, wow, so we're making history today. I'd like to thank everybody in my life that's helped me get to this point, however, there's probably somebody out there that got Delilah before you, because you took along till I took a long time on Pilot too. Well, Pilot's wife not as long as Delilah. Yeah, okay, both of those you get very good. Five for five. I'll take five hundred thousand points. Well, we are gonna is there like a trophy or something? Am I gonna get a T shirt? Hang on? Can I get like hanger saying how we go? Okay? I was hoping maybe there'd be like a gift certificate to Golden Corral or something. Golden Corral. Wow, you pulled that out of the eighties. Yeah, there you go. A sizzler Ponderosa. Oh I love Ponderosa. When I was a kid, I loved ponder Yeah. Okay, well, hey that makes me happy. So I keep my Bible guys. Uh hang official Bible cla Bible Guys fan club card. Hang on, Bennigan's Steak and Ale. Yeah I remember Benigans. I don't remember. I never went to Steak and Ale, I don't think. But yeah, let's try to think of other ones that were gone. Okay, so hey, we're launching a Genesis chapter sixteen, verses one through sixteen. We're in our series called Milestones of the Old Testament. Do we rest on milestones? I think so? Yeah, Okay, that feels good to me today. It does. That's what we're calling it today. Okay, So in we're going to talk about Abraham and Sarah. Are Abram and SARAHI and the birth of their first son? Okay, Now you remember we talked a couple days ago about how Abram was nervous and he lied to the Pharaoh and about his wife. Yes, but then you know, God said, hey, you know, Abram, I'm going to make you a great man. I'm going to make your family great, and I'm from your family. I'm going to bless the world. But at this point they didn't have any kids, right, so no kids, and he's old and he's getting older, and so the chances of Abram and Sarah having babies is in their minds almost gone. And so here's what it says in Genesis sixteen. This is really a weird story to be in the Bible. That's one of the reasons why you know the Bible's true, because if you were making up a religion, you wouldn't write stuff like this right. So here's what says. Now. Sarah, Abram's wife had not been able to bear children for him, but she had an Egyptian servant named Hagar. So Sarah I said to Abram, the Lord has prevented me from having children, Go and sleep with my servant. Perhaps I can have children through her. And Abram agreed with Sarah's proposal. So Sarah, Abram's wife took Hagar, the Egyptian servant, and gave her to Abram as a wife. This happened ten years after Abram had settled in the land of Canaan. So Abram had sexual relations with Hagar. She became pregnant, but when Hagar knew she was pregnant, she began to treat her mistress Sarah with contempt. Then Sarah I said to Abram, this is all your fault. I put my servant into your arms, but now that she's pregnant, she treats me with contempt. The Lord will show who's wrong, you or me. Abram replied, look, she's your servant, so deal with her as you see fit. Then Sarah I treated Hagar so harshly that she finally ran away. The angel the Lord found Hagar beside a spring of water in the wilderness along the road to shore. The angel said to her, Hagar, Sarah's servant, where have you come from? Where are you going? I'm running away from my mistress Sarah, she replied. The Angel of the Lord said to her, return to your mistress, submit to her authority. And then he added, I will give you more descendants than you can count. And the angel also said, you are now pregnant and will give birth to a son, and you are to name him Ishmael, which means God hears. For the Lord has heard your cry of distress. The son of yours will be a wild man, as untamed as a wild donkey. He will raise his fist against everyone, and everyone will be against him. Yes, he will live in open hostility against all his relatives. Therefore, Hagar used another name to refer to the Lord who has spoken to her. She said, you are the god who sees me. She also said, have I truly seen the one who sees me? So that well was named beer lehai Roi, which means well of the living one who sees me. He can still be found near Kadish and burried. So Hagar gave Abraham a son, and Abram named him Ishmael. Abram was eighty six years old when Ishmael was born. Wow, well there you go. So we all know it's the god of Abraham, the god of Isaac, and the god of jail Jacob. So the famous name is Isaac. But here some people that I've met and had conversations with, they really don't realize that Abram's firstborn is Ishmael. That's correct. Now, what's really interesting about this is, you know, when I went over to Israel and when I went into Bethlene Bible College, and we sat down and we sat down with both Palestinians and also with Jews, and they were giving their perspective of their modern day conflict, right, and they tied it all the way back. And what's really interesting is is that over there you sort of learn, you know, you're in the middle also of the world of Muslims. Right. So Jerusalem, for a lot of people who don't know, it is the capital. It is the epicenter of three of the major world religions, right right of Judaism, you know, Jews City Jews. It's the capital of the three monotheistic religions. Oh yeah, monotheistic. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So Judaism, so all the Jews that live there, they don't believe in Jesus, they believe in the Old Testament. And then Christianity, which is, you know, the Christians who believed that Jesus was the Messiah who showed up and obviously you know, lived and died in Jewusalem. And then about what fifteen hundred years later, fourteen six hundred, six hundred years, six hundred and thirty something years after Jesus, okay, was Islam. Yeah, yeah, Mohammed, Mohammed, So the prophet Mohammed. Muslims believed that the prophet Muhammad was directly related to Ishmael Ishmael. Yeah, And of course Judaism, the Jewish lineage is traced back directly to Isaac, and so does Christianity then for Jesus, right, and so this conflict has been going on. These two brothers, Ishmael and Isaac have been fighting for well now four thousand years, four thousand years. Yeah. Yeah, it's so unbelievably simple if if you look at it that way, it's like, look look at this promise from the Angel who says he's going to be a wild man, and he's going to be openly aggressive for his neighbors, to all his neighbors. And then, and if you look at Muslims and Jews in the same you know, fighting over the same capital, right, the same piece of real estate Jerusalem and Jerusalem in fact, isn't the Dome of the Rock exactly where the Temple it sits on the same foundation as the Temple? Yeah, yeah, So the Temple Mount was a giant complex where the Holy of Holies would have sat. Is maybe just off from where the Dome of the Rock sits, but yeah, it's all in that same complex where the Temple was. Yeah. And so in history, the Muslims took advantage of the fact that the Temple was destroyed and they sort of took over the land and they yeah, it was at the end of the Crusades that they take in that spot and and uh, and then and then took advantage of that and and and have the rightful claim of of of that piece of land. Actually, that's really the big debate is they currently they currently control it. Well, I was going to say they believe they have the rightful less sure, sure, but Ishmael was not the father of Islam. Right, Ishmael was the father of most of those Arabic nations right in the Middle East, and then out of that came eventually one of his ancestors, about six hundred years after Jesus, the prophet Muhammad that founded Islam. So yeah, this is really astounding that that God, that the Angel of the Lord had said to Hagar, listen, you know, he's going to be a wild man. He's going to be constantly in battle. But man, there's going to be a big family that comes from him. And it's true in the same way that God had said, there'll be a big family that comes from the one, you know, from Abram and Sarah's child. So here you have a lack of faith right right in SARAHI And they own a person. She's Egyptian, probably came from when Pharaoh gave them wealth and servants and all this kind of stuff. But Sarah felt like she owned Hagar to the point that she that if Hagar had a baby, it was Sarah's baby. Right. That's kind of the and and that concept has existed in human history for thousands of years. Anyways, the idea of a servant, you know, being a surrogate mother for a person. But anyways, the Bible doesn't say it's right. The Bible just tells it the way it is right, right, and that's what happened. But this lack of faith in this moment has changed human history, right, right. You think how many social conflicts, how many political conflicts, how many wars have been fought between Ishmael and Isaac, right and for thousands of years, and it's all all goes back to this one sinful moment, right. And you know it's interesting too because so there's a lot of people that I know who you know, they trust in God's promises. They they want you know, blessings, they want results, They pray for a result. And sometimes it's not unreasonable requests, you know, like hey, God, just please supply me a job. You know, God, please please just you know, help me to do this or this or that. Hey I pray for this person to accept Christ, you know, I mean, these are not unreasonable requests. And sometimes when circumstances build up and time goes on and there's distance and time, people start to get discouraged and they say God hasn't spoken, God hasn't worked, God is not there, God doesn't care and these are all emotions, right, I mean we're talking years here. The reason why Sarah I believed that God hasn't given her children, or that your the Lord has prevented her having children is because she was old. She was old at this point and she's like, well, there's just no way. And so, you know, not realizing that God trumps all odds, right, right, God, God is able to do whatever, regardless of circumstances. She realized that it was going to still be another thirteen more years before God actually did it right. Right, God was just waiting until it was only God that could have done this, right, that's what he's doing. God was going to get all the glory for this miracle. And she was impatient in waiting, and so is Abram. I mean, you have to say they both were, because if Abram really believed God, he wouldn't have gone down that path either. So they both kind of they just took it into, you know, matters in her own hands. I think sometimes, you know, we just have to simply wait, and that is so contrary to our nature, especially in our culture today, when everything happens so quickly. This is funny, uh, I got I started found myself getting frustrated. You ever have one of those days where you just feel like you're probably gonna have a bad day. Have you ever have you just woke up knowing this is probably going to be a bad day. For whatever reason, I just kind of had this. I don't know if I woke up on the wrong side of the bed whatever. So you know my morning habit. I like to pull in and grab a sausage MG muffin or a sausage biscuit or something and McDonald's And so I pull in and I could just see the lady in front of me as she's pulling up to the drive through is driving a little too slow. And then have you ever gotten behind somebody in the drive through? And they look at the menu like it's the first time they've ever been to McDonald's, rights, as if anybody another menu vasure. She says, Oh, gee, I wonder what they serve? Right? So she's looking, hello, can I take your welcome McDonald's? Can I take your order? Right? And she's like, hang on just a minute, I'm thinking, and she's just looking, Okay, it's various versions of eggs, bread, and two meats, three meats, right if you take the Canadian bacon. That's it. It's not super complex, and they're gonna give you a fried potato out the window, so just pick one, right, And so she took so long, and I just feel myself like almost saying bad words under my breath. So I'm getting more and more and more upset. The other lane was blocked off. Finally she pulls up. I pull up and I looked at my clock and it was three minutes. Three minutes. It just felt like forever. It felt so long, it was. It took her three minutes to figure out what her order was, This poor old lady, you know. Then she it took another minute, I think, to drive up to the window. She was just probably shouldn't have been driving, but you know, just just been moving and instead of me being patients and patients in three minutes, I kind of started losing my temper three minutes, right, and I thought, what is wrong with me that I can't just wait? And so then when I find myself praying for a thing, you know, praying for somebody, praying for God to intervene in a way, and I don't get my answer in three days, I start getting impatient. If I don't get my answer in three months, three years. I just you know, and hear Abram was waiting for decades, decades for this promise to come, And so it's easy for us to look down on them. This idea of a servant having a baby for her mistress was a culturally acceptable thing. It's not morally acceptable, but it was culturally acceptable. You can understand how they would have done that kind of thing. But they were waiting for decades for an answer to prayer. And I can't wait three minutes to drive up for my order in McDonald's. So it's hard for me to judge him, to judge either one of them too hard on this one, even though it was wrong what they did, certainly. And here the world suffers on an almost monthly basis, there's some kind of violence happening in the Middle East between Abraham's sons. Yeah. And by the way, that reminds me of I. I went to the ATM yesterday and I had two transactions. I put my card in, did a transaction, and then you know, you know how long it takes to do a transaction. It's probably a couple of minutes. Yeah, sure, And then the car comes back out, But then I had another account that I had to put something in, so I put my second card in, and then the car behind me beaped, pulled, pulled out and screamed, pulled out and went around the bank to the walk up teller to the walk up because there's a drive through a walk up and they just couldn't believe that I had two transactions. That's right, there's a I was just like, dude, come on, we should do a segment what made the person behind Chris mad this week? Right? Right? Because I was like, I was like, good gravy. I mean, like, there's no more live tellers anymore. Yeah, right, we have to do our transactions through ATMs for the most part. So yeah, so here they are. Sometimes God answered. God's expectation is that we wait. It's not that God is saying no. Sometimes God's saying not yet, and He has his purposes. And so if we can just accept that when God chooses to answer, it'll be at the best time, with the best solution for his purposes. And if we can understand that it's not about us, it's about him, then you know, we can have a lot more peace in it. There's so many times like I think in the Book of Psalms, the Bible says, be still and know that I am God right, And there's so many of those moments. Wait on the Lord in the deuce season, He'll lift you up. There's there's so many things like that that you know. There's another sermon in here altogether about the creation of you know, it says that Abram had sexual relations with Hagar and you know, and then all of a sudden what ends up happening is the feelings begin to change. Right, So there's something in there that tells us that that's how we know that that is designed for a marriage relationship. Because as much as people try to detach their hearts and look at it as a physical act and not like a soul to soul act, right, the reason why there was a treating of contempt is because it wasn't just an act of like, oh, I'm a servant, I'm going to provide a child and that's the end of it. No, there was an intimate relationship. There was a connection with you know, the way that God designed man and woman to have children together. And then and therefore there's you know, there's like an attraction, there's a there's a loyalty, there's feelings, there's jealousy, there's all sorts of things that are that are mixed up in there. And the sermon is is that, hello, it's because that none of that was meant to be a physical transaction, and it's certainly not meant to be a monetary transaction. That's exactly right, right it is. It is designed for those feelings, It is designed for those interactions. And the reason why you watch so many movies, and there's movies built on this. In fact, I just read an article this morning about it. Uh you know, uh uh it was a movie with Justin Timberlake and Male Cunis, uh, just friends with benefits and and uh and at the time it broke up their marriage, or it broke it broke them up for a time. Jessica Biel she she actually wanted to read for that part because she didn't want her husband to be or maybe it was the boyfriend at the time, you know, to to to play in that movie with somebody because they were gonna they were gonna have feelings for each other, and of course they did. And what's so interesting is is that ironically the movie itself was a movie about somebody who wanted it to be platonic, but they couldn't help themselves and they fell in love. Right, and so it's like it's like, it's because guys, let's wake up here. It's because God designed it for marriage, for relationships for all time. Right, we can't get around it, That's right. And then I think one of the beautiful things is even as a result of the sin, God eventually shows back up with Abram, but he meets Hagar in her distress, and she recognizes, hey, God sees me, even this woman that committed sin with some guy that wasn't her husband and she's carrying a child that was not the promised one. God says, hey, I haven't forgot about you. And she recognized that that this Holy One sees me. Well, imagine, if you're Hagar or Hagar or whoever you want to say it, imagine if you're heard, you probably lived your whole entire life without feeling seen. Oh sure, right, and then and all of a sudden, you know you're the one now who has Abram's child, and that's a pretty big deal. And then and then you're thinking, Hey, why are you still treating me like this? Lowly servant who's not being seen. All these emotions and then God reaches out and understands and sees her. It's no wonder why she thought that the baby would make her be seen. That was what was causing trouble in the tent, you know, in Abram's house, and instead it was her distress that God shows up, and that's when she finally really felt seen. I think we try to use all kinds of things in our life to to give us what we're really wanting, and what she wanted was to be seen by God and then she finally was right. So that's awesome. Well, hey, that's a that's a some good applications there. So hopefully we will see you next time as we pick up the series on the Bible guys. H m hmmm h