Genesis 17–18

0:00 I was a little bit hopeful that Eric was going to get up here before the call to worship and start the sort of slow clap for the cards chant this morning. See if we could get you all to burst into the C-A-R-D-S cards. I'm not going to do that now though because we have been called to worship not the cards but Jesus Christ. There is apparently a video that's going around of me and about 60 of my closest friends celebrating a lot on Friday night when the Louisville Cardinals won that game.

0:39 I know a few of you have gotten that video and seen me and a lot of people celebrating really kind of exuberantly. I got a text message from somebody in the wake of that video, and she said, hey, I very much expect to see you jumping up and down and celebrating like that for Jesus on Sunday, as much as you did the cards. And I thought about that for a second. I was like, you know what? We don't do that, do we? We don't go nuts about Jesus. I mean, we come here and we sing, and you guys sing loud, but there's no sort of jumping up and down and pumping a fist and screaming and yelling and hugging and all that kind of stuff.

1:16 And I thought about it for a few minutes. I was like, why is that? Why do we do that for a football team, but we don't do it for the king of the universe? Now, you may think I'm chiding you here, but I really did think about it, and I came up with an answer. And the answer that I actually think is the legit answer is because when you're watching a football game, there is the possibility of losing. And I thought, yeah, this is how I answered the person who wrote me. She did it in good faith.

1:47 It was jokey. But the way I answered back, you know, kind of halfway joking as well was, well, you know, if we all knew that Jesus was entirely capable of losing this game, and if, in fact, he inexplicably fumbled the ball in the fourth quarter and then barely managed to hold the whole thing together, we probably would go nuts for him when he finally won the game. But it's not like that with Jesus, is it?

2:20 Because there is no possibility of loss. There's no chance that he's going to lose this game. There's no chance that he's not going to bring us all safely home to the new heavens and new earth. There's no way he's going to lose. And so instead of this sort of unexpected, exuberant celebration, I think what you get in a church like ours is a kind of solid, confident celebration. You know, when you play, for example, Eastern Kentucky University and you beat them by 45, everybody on Twitter is like, hashtag never in doubt, right?

2:52 Solid, confident celebration. It's only when you think you might lose that you go nuts. We don't go nuts for Jesus because there is no possibility of loss, but we do. We do worship him and we do praise him with a solid, confident celebration of what he's done and what we know he's going to do. Something like that is what we're talking about today as we look at the next chapter and a half or so of the book of Genesis. So let me invite you to take a Bible, turn over to Genesis chapter 17. That's where we're going to start. If you're using a red pew Bible, you can find Genesis 17, at least a tiny little bit of it there on page 11 of those pew Bibles.

3:29 and then you'll turn over and see the rest of what we're going to look at on page 12. We're actually continuing a study of this book that we've been in for several weeks, looking at the life of a man named Abraham. It starts out as Abram gets his name changed eventually to Abraham. He's just this pagan guy whom God plucks out of the deserts of Babylon and makes these incredible promises to. I'm going to give you this land of Canaan. I'm going to make your descendants more numerous than the stars of the sky and the sand of the seashore. And through you, Abraham, God says, I'm going to bless all the nations of the world.

4:05 The story so far has been one of just enormous ups and downs in the life of Abraham because we've been watching as sometimes he trusts God in those promises and other times he loses faith in God to keep those promises. And based on, you know, what sort of, you know, state of mind he's in and spiritual state, He does things that even sometimes put the promise in grave, grave danger. Last week, for example, we looked at one of the great low points of Abraham's life. It was a moment when faith entirely failed him.

4:38 His trust in God just completely collapsed, and he takes matters into his own hands. And the result, of course, over the course of centuries, in fact, is chaos and disaster. Well, this week, in the wake of that disaster, we're coming to another of the most fundamental chapters of the Bible. one that's going to move the story forward significantly as God once again confirms his promise and locks it down in yet another step of making that promise more secure. So over the course of the story, that's one of the dynamics that we've been watching is God's work to make his promise more and more secure as time goes on. So in chapter 12, for instance, he brings these promises to Abraham and they're just mere promises. It's just God's word. He's just saying, I am going to do this thing, and you need to trust me in doing this thing. But they're just words. They're just bare promises. Well, then a few years later in chapter 15, God formalizes those promises into a covenant. Remember, he cuts the animals in half, and he walks through it, and it's putting those bare promises into a structure, a formalized covenant that he's making with Abraham. Well, today

5:44 in chapter 17, we're going to see that God takes another step in this whole process and seals that covenant. It's like taking a, you know, a scroll and rolling it up or folding it up, right? And then you take a, you've probably all seen it, a wax seal. You pour out a little wax and you take the king's, you know, stamp and you put it into that seal. And that says, this thing is a done deal, right? Signed, sealed, and delivered is the way we talk about it. So that's what God does in chapter 17. He seals this covenant with a sign that he gives to Abraham. But as always, here in 17, just like it was in 15, just like it was in 12.

6:21 The question is, exactly how is Abraham going to respond to all of this? God's being kind to him. He's giving him these promises. How is Abraham going to respond? Is he going to believe and trust God's promises? Or is he going to disbelieve and try to take matters into his own hands? And in today's text, we're going to see two very different responses to those promises. One by Abraham and then one by his wife, Sarah. So let's read some of the text.

6:51 We're going to read it kind of in two parts. We're going to start by reading chapter 17. Chapter 17, verse 1. When Abram was 99 years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, I am God Almighty. Walk before me and be blameless that I may make my covenant between me and you and may multiply you greatly. Then Abram fell on his face and God said to him, Behold, my covenant is with you and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you.

7:27 I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God. And God said to Abraham, with your money shall surely be circumcised so shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people he has broken my covenant and God said to Abraham as for Sarai

8:32 your wife you shall not call her name Sarai but Sarah shall be her name I will bless her and moreover I will give you a son by her I will bless her and she shall become nations kings of people shall come from her. Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself, shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Shall Sarah who is 90 years old bear a child? Then Abraham said to God, oh that Ishmael might live before you. God said, no, but Sarah your wife shall bear you a son and you shall call his name Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him. As for Ishmael, I've heard you. Behold, I've blessed him and will make him fruitful and multiply him greatly he shall father 12 princes and I will make him into a great nation but I will establish my covenant with Isaac whom Sarah shall bear to you at this time next year when he had finished talking with him God went up from Abraham and then Abraham took Ishmael his son and all those born in his house or bought with his money every male among the men of Abraham's house and he circumcised the flesh of their foreskins that very day as God had said to him

9:35 Abraham was 99 years old when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin and Ishmael his son was 13 years old when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin that very day Abraham and his son Ishmael were circumcised and all the men of his house those born in the house and those bought with money from a foreigner were circumcised with him all right so you can see I think the general breakdown of this text. First, you've got chapter 17, which we just read. That's God's restatement of these promises yet again. It ought to be sounding really familiar to you by this point. And then at the end of the chapter, he gives Abraham this sign of circumcision that seals the covenant in, right? It puts Abraham in an irrevocable position before God. Then we haven't read it yet, but if you look down through there in the first part of 18, you've got Abraham being visited by these three men, as they're called. It turns out that they're not men, but that's what the text calls them at first because it's kind of revealing it to you a little bit at a time. And this time the focus when we read it in a few minutes is going to be on Sarah and her laughter

10:40 as she overhears these promises being made again to her husband Abraham. And that's where the interest of this text comes in, right? That's where it comes from. Abraham and Sarah in 17 and 18 represent two very different responses to God's promises. One of belief and one of disbelief to the point of laughing at the promises. So that's the main idea. God's promises to his people always bring a response. Some bow down in faith and trust.

11:15 Others stumble in disbelieving mockery. But God's promises always bring a response. Some of us bow down in believing faith. Others stumble in disbelieving mockery. So two points to the sermon. We're just going to unpack each of those. First point is about the whole of chapter 17. Second point is about the first 15 verses of chapter 8. That's as far as we're going today. So point number one, chapter 17, the covenant confirmed and believed.

11:47 Number two, the covenant confirmed again and laughed at. Those two points. The covenant confirmed and believed. Number two, the covenant confirmed again and laughed at. All right, let's dive into it. Point number one, the covenant confirmed and, at least in chapter 17, believed. So the last time we left our hero, he was at one of the lowest points of his life. He and his wife Sarah, or Sarai at the time, had basically given up hope entirely in God's promise that they were going to have a son.

12:20 And they decided to take matters into their own hands. So Sarah hatched this plot. She gave Abraham her servant Hagar. And finally, in the wake of that, a baby was born named Ishmael. But that hadn't come anywhere close to solving the problem. Instead, Hagar got haughty. Sarah got jealous. And Abraham just kind of got out of dodge. And the result was Hagar fleeing into the wilderness only to be met by God telling her in this kind of mixed blessing that basically she and her son were going to be all right. You need to go back to the family of Abraham, get yourself under the blessing that I've put on the family of Abraham.

12:54 But basically, he said, you and your son are going to be all right. Though he's going to turn out to be a donkey of a man who is at constant conflict with everyone around him. So it was a sort of mixed blessing. So by the end of chapter 16, you as a reader and I as a reader have to kind of be wondering in the wake of all this that's going on. Okay, I know God has made this promise, and he's even formalized it into a unilateral covenant. But now look around, like the whole story is just in wreckage.

13:30 So what happens now? I mean, Abraham's just made a hash of this whole thing. So surely this promise is in dire trouble, or at least it's off the table, right? And then 13 years passes and nothing happens. Abraham just sits in the wreckage for 13 years. You can see that in the last verse of 16, in the first verse of 17, right?

14:01 16.16 says, Abram was 86 years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram. 17.1. Now, when Abram was 99 years old, this next thing happens. Thirteen years of nothingness in that little tiny white space between 16 and 17. God leaves Abram to just sit in his wreckage. And it's hard to overstate the importance of that. I mean, it's easy to jump over it because the white space there is so small and our minds don't really grab onto numbers the way that they should.

14:34 But it's hard to overstate the importance of those 13 years. When Abraham takes Hagar into his bed, he's already at the point of redlining in his impatience with God. I mean, it had been 10 years at that point since he got to the promised land. Another year since God had turned those promises into a covenant. And now God makes him wait 13 more years. Why? Well, it's really kind of always like that with the people of God.

15:07 isn't it? Christianity, if it is nothing else, is a religion. It is a life of waiting. It always has been, and it always will be. After the resurrection, maybe just think about some of the things that have happened in the New Testament. After the resurrection, what happened to Jesus's people? They waited on him to appear to them. Then they waited some more for the Holy Spirit to come at Pentecost. And now for 2,000 more years, we've been waiting on Jesus to return.

15:41 Why does God do that to us? Why does God do that to us? Well, it's because of all the blessings that God could shower on you in an instant. For all he could give you if he just snapped you right up to heaven the minute you became a Christian, the most important and most glorious blessing to you of all of it. Streets of gold, glassy seas, mansion on a hilltop, all that stuff of all of it that God could give you.

16:12 The most valuable thing is you learning to trust him. That is the most valuable of heaven's treasures. And the only thing that will create that trust in a human heart is waiting and having God keep his promises at the end of the wait. I mean, think about it. You only wait patiently on someone if you trust them to do what they've promised.

16:44 And even the wait itself is constantly pushing the question on you. It's pushing the challenge on you. Do you think he's going to do it? Do you think he's actually going to do it? Do you think he's actually going to come through on your promises in the very definition of waiting and not getting impatient and not redlining in your distrust of God is to answer that question day after day after day with, yes, I do think he's gonna do it. Today, I think he's gonna do it. I still think he's gonna do it and I still think he's gonna do it. You think about all the stuff we're waiting for as Christians.

17:16 We're waiting for some glorious things, for the end of sin, for the return of Jesus Christ, for the final Sabbath rest when we're with him in the new heavens and new earth, for the new Jerusalem, for millions upon millions upon billions of people. Praising the Lord Jesus for what he's done. We're waiting on some glorious stuff. Friends, don't despair of the waiting. When you sign up to be a Christian, you are signing up to wait. And it turns out that waiting is one of the most important tools that exists for growing your trust in God.

17:50 The roots of trust only grow, it turns out. in the rich, rich soil of time. Don't give up. That's where Abraham is, waiting when God finally comes to him again. In chapter 17, if you want to kind of look at it, it breaks down into four sort of big parts. You can see them in the paragraph breaks there in your Bible. So you've got that first paragraph, reaffirmation of the covenant. This is God speaking the promises again. Then you've got the sign of the covenant, the giving of circumcision.

18:24 Then you've got the specific promise of Isaac, so it's no longer just a son at some point in the future. God kind of puts an end to the waiting here and says, it's going to happen in a year, and you're going to name the kid Isaac, right? So you've got specific promise of Isaac. And then you've got the last paragraph of Abraham's obedience. He does what God has said. The reaffirmation of the covenant, if you want to look at verses 1 to 8, the reaffirmation of the covenant, those promises, is exactly that. It's just a restatement of promises that God has made over and over and over throughout the course of Abraham's life.

18:58 I mean, he comes to Abraham at intervals, right? Usually pretty long intervals. And he basically says the same stuff over and over again, though it's a little bit of a spiral. It moves forward in glory and intensity. It sort of gets better and better and better. But the roots of it are the same. Building blocks are the same. And essentially what God promises to Abraham is three things. Every time he comes to him, he promises him three things. He promises him land, seed, or offspring, or descendants. So land, seed, and then blessing. You're going to be a blessing to the whole world.

19:30 And those three things get sort of logically related to one another because it turns out that the blessing to the world is going to come through the seed, out of the land, right? So there's a logical connection to them. But it's all land, seed, and blessing. In fact, if you like memorizing little rubrics to help you understand the Bible better, that's a really important one. Land, seed, and blessing, right? And you'll see those things play out throughout the whole story of the Bible. You can see them all here too. I mean, you look at verse eight, you've got the promise of land there. You've got seed, offspring, descendants being promised again all over verse four, five, six, seven.

20:06 And blessing to the nations is implied throughout all that as well. But like I said, every time God comes and promises land, seed, and blessing, it always gets a little bit better than it was the last time. He pushes the whole thing forward and you can see that happening here too. So if you look at the end of 6, for example, now here in 17, it's not just offspring and descendants that you're going to have, but it's kings will come from you. I mean, we've seen it before. The promise has always had kind of a golden sheen to it, right? It's always had this kind of royal language to it.

20:38 But this is the first time it's been explicit that Abraham is going to be the father of kings. And that's a promise that you can trace all the way through the Bible, through the long line of Israelite kings, and finally to Jesus, the King of kings and Lord of lords. That's why Matthew in chapter 1 makes such a big deal of saying that Jesus is the son of David, the son of Abraham, right? It's a fulfillment of this promise right here. You also notice in verse 7 that this thing is now called an everlasting covenant. Same thing down in 13. Now that's been implied in other places because the Lord will talk about, you know, 400 years of slavery and then your descendants are going to come back to the land.

21:21 So it's been implied that this thing is going to last a really long time. But again, this is the first time that's been explicitly said. So God keeps pushing the promises further and further. He keeps making them better and better. And that's always how it is with Him. It's always how it is with God. I mean, you can ask anybody in this room who's a Christian and has some gray hairs on their head and they've been a Christian for a few decades and that's what they're going to tell you that you'll discover in God. You're going to find that what you discover is that he and his word and his people are treasures inexhaustible.

22:02 You can study the word of God for every day of your life and you're never going to find the bottom of it. You can get to know God's character every day of your life and you'll never get to the bottom of it. I assume that one of the greatest things about eternity is that we're just going to spend the whole thing learning more about God and having our minds blown every day for eternity about what we learn about him. He is inexhaustible. It's like walking through a palace where every room, every year, every experience with him is more amazing than the last.

22:37 It's not to say that there aren't challenges and hardships and all the rest. For a Christian, there are. It's just that you find treasures even in the hardship. You find treasure even in the difficult experiences. Here's a question, though. Looking at verses 1 to 8, is this covenant, this glorious, beautiful, formalized set of promises, is it still unilateral in chapter 17?

23:08 That's one thing that we've said about the covenant. From the very beginning, God makes promises in 12. They are unilateral. I am going to do this. In 15, they're formalized into a covenant where God alone walks through the cut pieces of the animals to make the covenant. It's a unilateral, one-way covenant. I will do this. Is that still the case here? Because that is not what verses 1 and 2 sound like. I mean, look at them. When Abram was 99 years old, the Lord appeared to him and said to him, I am God Almighty, El Shaddai.

23:47 Walk before me and be blameless that I may make my covenant between me and you and may multiply you greatly. Now, what does that sound like to you? I mean, what that sounds like to me is, Abram, I am El Shaddai. I am God Almighty. I want you to do right things so that I will be able to make this covenant with you. That's what it sounds like.

24:18 Now, I don't normally like to draw very much attention to bad translations. But this one is a doozy of a doozy of a bad translation. Because the Hebrew just doesn't say that. It doesn't even get close to saying that. What it said, let me read it again in the way it's actually in the Hebrew. 17.1, when Abram was 99 years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, I am God Almighty, walk before me and be blameless, and I will make my covenant between me and you, and I will multiply you greatly.

24:59 There's no change. We have not gone from I will to so that I'll be able to. It hasn't happened. We've gone from I will to I will. There's been no change in the covenant at all. There's no stepping back from the promise. God is going to do it. Yes, of course, like there has been from the very beginning, there are things that Abraham's going to do in response to all of that, just like he had to respond to God's promises back in chapter 12 by leaving his homeland and his family. But here, 17, as there, chapter 12, Abraham's actions, his going, his walking before God, his living a blameless and upright life, all of those things are the result of his already being in covenant with God.

25:48 They are not the basis of him being in covenant with God. Does that make sense? The covenant comes first and its basis is solely on God's grace. And then Abraham's obedience and his good works and all the rest of it is what results from that grace. Now, let's pause and talk about this for a minute. We just need to spend a little time on this because this is one of the most important. It's a critical concept in Christian theology. And if you mess it up, it tends to badly mess you up.

26:23 And it manages, I think, this misunderstanding about what obedience is and where it falls in the logic. It messes Christians up on the one hand because Christians begin to think that they have to continually earn their place in God's presence, right? We get it wrong and we start to think, oh, my good works are the cause of my relationship with God. They're the basis of my relationship with God. And so you start to think, well, I had a bad day on Thursday, so God must have been upset with me on Thursday. But I had a really good day on Friday, so God was happy with me on Friday.

26:53 And it really just messes up our minds when we mess this up. It also messes up non-Christians. right? It completely messes up non-Christians. It prevents them from coming to Jesus for salvation because they're constantly trying to figure out what they have to do to get God to want to save them. What do I have to do? Do I have to have to do this thing? Do I have to do that ritual? Do I have to say that set of prayers? Do I have to earn this much merit? What do I have to do to earn God wanting to save me. You see, in both of those cases, the fundamental error there is that we desperately want for Genesis 17, 1 and 2 to read like that mistranslation. We want salvation to work like this because we're self-sufficient people. We want to contribute. We want to pay for our salvation in some way. And so we desperately want the gospel to be, you walk upright so that I may save you because you walked uprightly. That's what we want it to be. In other words, we desperately

27:54 want to put our works, we want to put our obedience, we want to put our good deeds into the root of our salvation. We want to make it the cause of our salvation. When actually, it's not the root, right? Our good works are not what create the tree of salvation. It's the tree of salvation that creates the fruit of our good works do you see the difference there our good works are not in the root of salvation they do not cause it they're not the basis of it they're not fundamental to it God doesn't look at you and see good works and say because of that I will save you that is not how it works the root of your salvation is grace and grace alone and the tree of salvation grows out of that, and then on the tree of salvation, from the tree of salvation, comes the fruit of good deeds. If you get that confused, if you get that confused as a Christian, let's just say, you will constantly live in cowering fear before God, because you'll never have enough good deeds to make your

29:00 salvation make sense to you, and it'll scare the living daylights out of you. You'll never have enough to make it reasonable that God should save you. And same thing if you're not a Christian. If you're not a Christian and you get this messed up, it will forever keep you from coming to faith in Jesus. Because you will constantly be looking and working and trying to earn God's favor and you will fail again and again and again and again. When the reality, the reality is that Jesus Christ wants you to come to him right now, just as you are.

29:45 And then the tree of salvation will grow, and the fruit will appear. Friend, don't, don't, don't try to stick your good works into the root of salvation. They don't belong there. One of the fruits of Abraham's being in covenant with God, of course, was that he and his descendants were going to have to carry now in their own bodies this seal and sign of this covenant by being circumcised. Now, we're not going to go into a whole lot of detail about what circumcision actually was physically.

30:18 If you really need to look into that, you can Google it later on your own time. But people have debated for centuries what circumcision signified. What did it mean? Why did God pick that particular sign? Like, why not like a tattoo on the shoulder, or why not, you know, something else, right? Why that, and what did it signify? Well, at the very highest level of signification, and this would be true for really anything, even if it was a tattoo or a kind of jewelry that you had to wear, anything, really. At the highest level, circumcision was a seal on the covenant that God made with Abraham.

30:53 It was like that wax seal that we talked about. It sort of locked it in place, signed, sealed, and delivered. That's always the case with covenants in the Bible. Anytime you see a covenant in the Bible, it's always going to be accompanied by some seal. So, for example, the rainbow was the seal of God's covenant with Noah. It locked it in place, right? Noah, I want you to remember my covenant that I'm making with you and do it because you're seeing this amazing thing in the sky that you've never seen before. And it had all kinds of significance to it. What was the seal of the covenant with Moses?

31:26 It was the Sabbath. The Sabbath was the recurring thing that happened and is talked about as the seal of the Mosaic Covenant. It reminded the people that God was with them, that they were his people and he was their God. What about the Lord's Supper? Or what about the, gave it away. What about the New Covenant? It's the Lord's Supper, right? Every other week here at Third Avenue, we take the Lord's Supper together. And that is the sign and the seal that we are together in this New Covenant with Jesus. This is the new covenant, Jesus said, in my blood.

31:59 And the Lord's Supper, when we eat that broken bread and we drink that poured out juice, it signifies Jesus' broken body and his poured out blood that signed, sealed, and delivered the covenant. But still, what did it mean? I mean, it was a seal, it was a sign, but what did it mean? Well, people have talked about it. The Bible never actually gives us a straight-up meaning of why God chose that particular thing. So basically, people have just had to do theological thinking and guessing.

32:31 And they've come up with all kinds of things that it might mean. So, for example, there probably was a kind of renunciation and throwing away of human power, human virility, human ability to move forward through the generations. There was probably a kind of renunciation of self-dependence in it. There was also a setting aside of oneself as being uniquely identified with God. Circumcision wasn't entirely unique to Israel, but to have an entire nation where everyone was circumcised was actually a fairly rare thing, a pretty unique thing, and it marked out the Israelites as those uniquely identified with God.

33:13 Probably there was a taking on of a priestly office as well because the one place that we know circumcision was used kind of across the board in the ancient Near East, is that priests were often circumcised, even if the rest of the people weren't. So it was probably a taking on of a priestly office as well, as one who, as the Lord says there, I want you to walk before me. What that is, is that it's a priestly office of walking before God and being his representative in the world. And the thing that was unique about Israel is that every single member of that community was to have that priestly office. It wasn't just going to be this elite cast of people. It was everybody. I mean, you start to think about all those things, all those different meanings, potential meanings of circumcision. There's a really striking parallel right there, isn't there, with our own new covenant sign with baptism, the sign that brings us into the visible church of Christ. I mean, you think about it. In baptism, what we're doing is giving ourselves first over to death in the water, right? It's a renunciation of human power as we symbolically

34:13 die as we go down into this watery grave. There's that first. And then we rise out of it symbolically to newness of life, to a life of being identified with Jesus forever and representing him before the world for the rest of our lives. It's got all the same kinds of things as circumcision. Well, from 15, if you look down at that, chapter 17, verse 15, from 15 on for the rest of the chapter, God makes all these promises more specific, focusing now on Abraham's wife, Sarah. At first, when God makes this promise of his wife giving birth to his son, Isaac, Abraham's just incredulous. And in fact, he begs God to just favor Ishmael, the son of Hagar. Oh Lord, this is very hard to believe that my wife, Sarah, is going to have a biological baby. So Lord, would you not just look with favor on Ishmael and let him be the one who carries the blessings. But God doesn't have

35:14 any of it. The promise is going to fall to a son that comes biologically from Abraham and Sarah, a son named Isaac. Look at 17, 17, 17. Look at Abraham's response here. Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself, shall a child be born to a man who's 100 years old and shall Sarah, who is 90 years old, bear a child? He laughs. So what does God do in response, he says, okay, you're going to laugh at it? Then I'm going to make your son be named he laughs. Now, there's a couple of layers of meaning there, of course. I mean, one is absolutely, most definitely a kind of sarcastic jab at Abraham's laughter. It's a sort of divine, I told you so. And he was going to remind Abraham of that every time he said the word Isaac.

36:02 He laughed, he laughed, he laughed. But there's also the fact, I think, that those who bear God's promises are and ought to be people marked by laughter and by celebration. We ought to be a people who are marked by laughter and celebration because of what God has done to us. It's one of the great ironies of history that Christians have somehow along the way gotten a reputation largely of being severe, dour, unhappy, scolding people. Not sure how that happened. It's a shame that Christians have gotten that reputation. And one of the things that I love about pastoring this church in particular is that over and over when I do membership interviews with new people who are joining our church, one of the things that people mention again and again and again is how happy people seem to be here at Third Avenue Baptist Church. They say it over and over and over again. That, friends, is a good thing. And it's something worth preserving. And brothers and sisters, let me just encourage you to be a part of that.

37:04 Check your own heart and your own face and make sure that you look like a person who has been blessed eternally by God. I mean, think about it. I'm really serious. How do you think you present to people when you're just sitting, when you're talking? Do you think you present to people as somebody who's been given the greatest promises in the entire universe? Or do you think you kind of present to people as somebody who's just like eating a rotten lemon and had your dog shot?

37:36 It's an important question how you present to people, especially as somebody who's a representative of the king of the universe and the throne of grace. When our kids were growing up and they would get in trouble, one of the lines that we would use on them constantly is, fix your face. I don't know if you guys use that as parents, but we use it all the time. Because you could get in one of their faces and you could light them up and fuss at them. And you'd say, all right, what are you going to say? And you'd say, yes, daddy.

38:08 And I would say, buddy, you better fix your face and say it again. Right? So take that look of rebellion off your face and say it right. Well, Christians, some of y'all need to fix your face. Because you don't look like somebody who's headed to heaven. I don't mean that to be just an artificial, funny thing. What I mean is this. Be a person of laughter. The promises of God have fallen to you, and it's all by grace.

38:45 So let that show outwardly in your eyes, your words, your face, your laughter. Let's be a people of celebration. And what do you do if you're just not? If you're just like, I just don't feel that way. Friend, there may be a lot going on there. But I would submit to you that maybe part of it, maybe part of it, is that you have not spent enough time meditating on just how glorious the promises are. I can give you some books about that if you want to spend some time doing that. But I promise, you let that light get into your heart.

39:16 It will fix your face. Here's the second point. The covenant confirmed again, and this time laughed at. The covenant confirmed again, and this time laughed at. So in the last paragraph of 17, Abraham obeys God, circumcises himself, circumcises Ishmael, all the males in his household. In other words, he seals this covenant in his own body, and he's now irrevocably identified, both himself and his family, with God. And then the story moves forward really rapidly, like the waiting time is over.

39:50 Chapter 18 introduces a kind of, it's going to become a sort of side story to the main narrative. And it's going to play out over a few chapters. But we're going to get to that in time. In the first half of it though, verses 1 through 15, there's one more bit of business to handle when it comes to the covenant. And that's Sarah. So let's read what happens. 18.1. So the Lord appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the day. He lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing in front of him.

40:23 When he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them and bowed himself to the earth and said, O Lord, if I have found favor in your sight, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree, while I bring a morsel of bread, that you may refresh yourselves. And after that, you may pass on, since you have come to your servant. So they said, Do as you have said. And Abraham went quickly into the tent to Sarah and said, Quick, three sands of fine flour, knead it, and make cakes. And he ran to the herd and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to a young man who prepared it quickly. Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared and set it before them.

40:57 And he stood by them under the tree while they ate. They said to him, where is Sarah, your wife? And he said, she's in the tent. The Lord said, I will surely return to you about this time next year. And Sarah, your wife, shall have a son. And Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years. the way of women had ceased to be with Sarah. So Sarah laughed to herself saying, after I'm worn out and my Lord is old, shall I have this pleasure? The Lord said to Abraham, why did Sarah laugh and say, shall I indeed bear a child now that I am old?

41:30 Is anything too hard for the Lord? At the appointed time, I will return to you about this time next year and Sarah shall have a son. But Sarah denied it saying, I did not laugh for she was afraid. But he said, no, you did laugh. Well, so far in this story of Abraham, Sarah hasn't exactly covered herself in glory, has she?

42:01 She has not been a heroine in the story. Really, all she's done, every time she comes on the scene and the camera kind of focuses on her, she's causing some trouble. All she's done, really, is agree, so far, to join Abraham and his lies down in Egypt, if you remember that from chapter 12. And then she hatches this plot to hurry God's promise of his son along by giving Abraham Hagar. And by this point in the story, you can tell by what she says that she's just basically lost all hope. She's done with this faith in God's promises. So God comes to confront her and to show her the same kind of grace that he's shown Abraham.

42:34 That happens when he shows up in the form of three men who come to visit Abraham. Now, the three men that show up are fascinating. They've been fascinating to people throughout history because they show up out of nowhere. Like there's no history, there's no backstory. They just show up and Abraham is super deferential to them. And the whole thing feels a whole lot like the appearance of Melchizedek back in chapter 14. But this is different too because it becomes clear as the story progresses.

43:05 Moses, the author, doesn't tell you everything all at once. But he sort of unwraps the package a little bit at a time. But it becomes clear as the story progresses that what we have here is actually one figure that's obviously an appearance of God himself. Like it might be the angel of the Lord that we talked about last week. But at any rate, it's an appearance of the Lord himself, of Yahweh, and then two angels who are accompanying him. So if you were to read through the rest of 18 and just the first verse of 19, that becomes really, really clear. So this is another appearance, not just of three men, not just of three angels, but two angels and the Lord himself.

43:41 And this time, it's for Sarah's sake. We'll look back up at verse 9. After the men have washed and eaten, the Lord asks this question, where is your wife, Sarah? Now, in the next sentence, Abraham answers that really simply. He just gives a kind of geographical answer to that question. She's in the tent. But we have become more careful readers of Genesis. And we know that a question like, where is your wife, Sarah, is way more significant than just asking about her physical location, right?

44:18 I mean, it's reminiscent of the question that God asks when Adam and Eve were hiding from him in the garden after they sinned. It's a similar kind of question when Hagar is running away from Abraham's family and the Lord asks, where are you, Hagar? It's a confronting question. Where is Sarah your wife? It's a question that causes somebody to realize that they are out of place. And that's what he did with Adam and Eve, right? Adam, where are you? I'm here. I hid. And then there's a conversation about his sin. Where are you, Hagar?

44:50 You're not where you're supposed to be with your mistress, Sarah. And sure enough, Sarah's not just in the tent, is she? She's hiding. I mean, look at verse 10 of chapter 18. The Lord said, I will surely return to you about this time next year. And Sarah, your wife, shall have a son. And Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him. It's not surprising, right?

45:24 It's not surprising that she's listening. She's hearing these promises for the umpteenth time. Abraham has probably told her these promises for the umpteenth time. So it's not that surprising that she just flat disbelieves. She knows what's true. In verse 11, Abraham and Sarah were old and advanced in years. And even the way of women, the cycle, had ceased to be with Sarah. She was beyond childbearing years by a long shot. And so it's not that surprising, I think, when Sarah laughed to herself and said, I'm worn out and my Lord is old. Shall I really have this pleasure of a child? But then look what happens next. God confronts her with her unbelief and goes right at her unbelief with this question that just drives all the circumstances out. Is anything, Sarah, too hard for the Lord? Anything?

46:21 See, the problem in Sarah's heart was that she was very much convinced that God was limited in what he could do by the circumstances on the ground. I am old. My cycle has stopped. I am beyond childbearing years. My husband is old. These facts on the ground limit what God can do. And so she disbelieved. And the very promise to her just seemed absurd. You know, I think when it comes to salvation, Some of you today might be in a very similar place to where Sarah was even this morning.

47:01 Because as I'm standing up here and talking to you about Jesus Christ and about salvation and forgiveness of sins, confronting you with the promise of salvation through Jesus, you look around at the facts on the ground, the circumstances of your own life, your own sin, your own rebellion against God, and all of that just makes those promises sound absurd. Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. That's it. Look at the wreckage of my life. That's absurd. God would never save somebody like me. But friend, if you're saying that today, if you're looking at the wreckage of your life and saying God won't save me, if that's you, do you know what question God would ask you as you look at those circumstances on the ground?

47:45 Is anything too hard for God? And the answer's no. And I'm asking you today to really think about that. Think about that question that the Lord asks Sarah. Is anything too hard for God? And apply it to your own life. My friend, do you really think that your sin is so big and so heavy and so enormous that it outweighs the blood of the Son of God?

48:20 Do you really think that of all the people in the world, of all the millions of people that God has ever saved, you're the one who is too big a challenge for him? I promise you, I promise you from the bottom of my heart, you are not that one. You are not the one that is too far gone to be saved. And if that's what you're thinking, you need to understand what that is. You need to understand that that thought is a lie from hell that is meant to keep you from coming to Jesus and finding grace and forgiveness and salvation.

48:55 I promise you, you come to him in faith, you come to him in trust, acknowledging him for who he is as the Son of God, the King of kings, the Lord of lords. You come to him acknowledging him and who he is and what he can do. Nothing is too hard for the Lord. Put your faith in him and see what happens. when you look at the end of this story down through 15 this particular part of it didn't end well for sarah at all which is a little bit surprising i think i think as you're reading the story by the time you get to this point if you're not you know if you haven't read it so many times that you you just know what's going to happen i think if you're just reading it for the first time you expect her to just kind of be shattered by that divine question.

49:46 Is anything too hard for the Lord? And you expect her to go, no, of course not. And now I believe in you. But her response in verse 15 is not that at all, is it? Her response is just another round of self-protection. I did not laugh because she was afraid. But of course, God knows the truth and he doesn't let her get away with it. He just kind of, you know, nods at her with a knowing look. No, but you did, you did laugh. It's a fascinating little line, isn't it? I mean, it's funny in its own way.

50:16 You all laughed when I read it. It's a fascinating little line because it's kind of equal parts grace and judgment, right? He's not going to let her get away with it. He's not going to let her lie to herself about the whole thing. But he's also not going to just, like, blow her away in judgment. It's almost just like setting a little candle right in the middle of Sarah's self-deception and saying, no, you actually did. You left. And you have to own up to that. but here's the thing God's ultimate purpose in all of this was to put Sarah's sin her unbelief even her lying in such sharp relief that one day she would rejoice at how much God had forgiven her and given her and as the story carries on we're going to see it in weeks to come that's exactly what happens. When Isaac is finally born, she finally says, you know what? I did. I did laugh.

51:16 There's no more lying. There's no more self-deception. It's, I did laugh. Can you believe that? I laughed at God's promise. But look what God has done. Now I have this little baby boy whose name is, he laughs, and I'm laughing, and my husband is laughing, and everybody around me is laughing. This time though with joy, not mockery. Friend, I don't know what spiritual state your soul is in. I don't know if you're in a state of just doubting the truth of the gospel or whether you're in a state of rejecting the truth of the gospel or maybe you've gone so far as to start mocking the gospel of Jesus Christ. But friend, my prayer is that one day you'll have a day just like Sarah's going to have in like chapter 21 where you realize when your eyes are wide open to the fact that you did in fact doubt you did in fact disbelieve you did in fact mock but even those sins have become trophies of God's grace because you've now been forgiven of them in Jesus Christ that's his promise and he will always keep it why don't you come to him

52:28 and let him prove it. Let's pray. Our Lord, we thank you and praise you today that you are the great God who always keeps your promises. We thank you, Lord, that you never make a promise that you do not fully intend to keep and that you do not finally keep. Our Lord, we are utterly dependent on you. Our entire eternity depends on you.

53:00 And so, Father, we pray that you would help us to know you better and know you more and therefore trust you more. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.