The Lord finally provided a son for Sarah and Abraham—Isaac. With great celebration he was welcomed into the family. The old animosity between Hagar and Sarah flared again, and tarnished the festivities when Sarah noticed Ishmael (by then around 14) standing around and mocking. Who knows how Ishmael felt at this point, having enjoyed the love of Abraham into his teen years? His position of favorite was now threatened, and he had no doubt been fed plenty of unkind information about Sarah from his mother to add fuel to the fire.
Sarah was determined to remove any threat to her son, a fact that greatly distressed Abraham. God comforted Abraham with promises of blessings for both sons, but indicated that it Isaac was the heir of the promise. So Abraham sent Hagar and Ishmael into the desert with provisions to sustain them.
The provisions didn’t last long however, and the searing heat of the desert was strength-sapping. Leaving her son under a bush with the little remaining water, Hagar wandered away, not brave enough to witness the certain death of her son.
God again ministered to Hagar, and now to Ishmael, again promising to make Ishmael into a great nation. The text tells us “God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer. While he was living in the Desert of Paran, his mother got a wife for him from Egypt.” (Gen. 21:20)
It almost seems that there are too many extraneous things to the story of Isaac’s birth in this part of Genesis. We read about the fate of Ishmael, and then are given details about Abraham’s administrative dealings with Abimelech. Maybe Moses felt that Isaac's birth was almost anti-climactic at this point!
To focus back on Isaac, though, Genesis 21 has an interesting parallel in Romans 4:18-25: “Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had beeen said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’ Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. This is why it was credited to him as righteousness. The words ‘it was credited to him’ were written not for him alone, but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness—for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. He was delivered over to death or our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”
We’ve seen Abraham waver a bit on his journey to promise fulfillment, but God did not count those missteps against him. Instead the record is that Abraham believed God had the power and the integrity to do as He had promised. The New Testament examination of Abraham is a great promise to us as well. Our faith is the basis on which God credits righteousness to us—faith that Jesus died for our sins and was raised to life to justify us. Praise God for the illustrative example of Abraham’s life and for the hope we have, as he did, in God’s promises.
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