How do we know what work is ours and what can only be done by God?
As I noted last week, God made promises to Abraham about land and descendants, but the Lord still expected Abraham to do a lot on his own. God didn’t produce food when the famines came (Genesis 12:10-20), and the Lord didn’t rescue Lot from the local tribesmen (Genesis 14:12-16). Clearly a lot of responsibility rested on Abraham’s shoulders.
When Abraham and his wife resort to using Sarah’s maidservant Hagar as a surrogate mother so that Abraham can have an heir from “his own body,” it seems like the same sort of thing to us. Because Sarah can’t conceive, it makes sense that Abraham will have to father a child with a different woman.
Hagar gives Abraham his son Ishmael, whom he loves, and despite some understandable jealousy from Sarah, all seems well for the pioneer family (Genesis 16:15-16).
When Ishmael is thirteen, however, God appears again to Abraham and gives him the covenant of circumcision (Genesis 17:1-14). But tacked on to this announcement is God’s proclamation that Sarah will have the child of the divine promise (Genesis 17:15-16). Abraham’s reaction is twofold: how can he and Sarah have a child in their old age – and – why isn’t Ishmael good enough (Genesis 17:17-18)?
Sarah laughs when she hears the news, but God’s messengers retort: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” (Genesis 18:14).
Perhaps this idea of God as the master of the impossible was something that Abraham and Sarah had never considered before. In ancient times, people expected gods to produce rains in times of drought, but babies from post-menopausal women? Not so much.
But this is an important thing for us to learn about God. The Lord finds solutions in unexpected ways.
Still we’re left wondering – what draws the line between our job and God’s?
Though we resonate with the practicality of Abraham and Sarah’s solution to the promise of a child, the story shows their choice only making life more difficult for all concerned. Sarah comes to resent Ishmael as a rival to her son, Isaac, and, though it breaks his heart to lose his child, Abraham has to send Hagar and Ishmael away to preserve peace in his home (Genesis 21:8-14).
Perhaps the key rests not in accurately discerning the line between our job and God’s but in recognizing our work as collaboration with the Lord. Instead of settling for the best we can think to do, we need to learn how to trust that where our abilities end, God picks up the slack.
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