06/04/2008
Genesis 17:3 - 5 (HCSB) 3Then Abram fell to the ground, and God spoke with him: 4“As for Me, My covenant is with you, and you will become the father of many nations. 5Your name will no longer be Abram, but your name will be Abraham, for I will make you the father of many nations.
Genesis 17:15 - 19 (HCSB) 15God said to Abraham, “As for your wife Sarai, do not call her Sarai, for Sarah will be her name. 16I will bless her; indeed, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she will produce nations; kings of peoples will come from her.” 17Abraham fell to the ground, laughed, and thought in his heart, “Can a child be born to a hundred-year-old man? Can Sarah, a ninety-year-old woman, give birth?” 18So Abraham said to God, “If only Ishmael could live in Your presence!” 19But God said, “No. Your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will name him Isaac. I will confirm My covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him.
Abraham is now 100 years old and Sarah is 90, both well past the age of bearing children. Yet, God promises Abraham a son by Sarah.
We see in Abraham, the very thing that makes us all human. When Abraham received the news, he immediately rationalized the situation in terms of his own understanding. He laughed in his heart, thinking there was no way that he or Sarah could bear children at their age.
Humanity seems to frequently fall into this trap. When God promises something wonderful, we try to limit Him by our understanding and thus fail to grasp the fullness of the promise. It is a struggle for us to shed the limits of our understanding to see that God is limitless.
We also have difficulty understanding God’s timing. Remember that God first promised Abraham offspring when he was 75, but now 25 years later, Abraham and Sarah still have no children between them. Why would God wait so long?
Again, we seem to want to limit what God can do by what we understand. But many times, God will run you to the point of no turning back in order to demonstrate His greatness. When I read these passages about God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah and how Abraham had reached an age where no reasonable person could expect to sire a child; how God then gives them a son, it only reinforces to me that God wants to be recognized as the One working in their lives.
We can take this example to our lives as well. Many times, we would want God to act in a situation based on our timing, but more often He will choose to wait until the situation is nearly desperate. While this may be frustrating to us, and indeed we feel such a loss of control, this is when God steps in. When we look back on those situations, we realize that, indeed, we had no control, but God was working on our behalf.
If things worked out to our timing, we would be too quick to think of God as our concierge or fail to give Him credit at all. If things worked out according to our plan, it would be too easy for us to think that we were in control. Yet God wants us to lean on Him, to have faith in Him. So, He will demonstrate His power at the point where it is unmistakable that He is moving.
Do not despair when things get tough, but look to God—He is about to do something wonderful.
Jeff Justus
Cleff Publishing
www.cleffpublishing.com
©2008 Cleff Publishing, all rights reserved.
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