When God's Voice is Unreasonable

Orig: 10/24/07

Go, Sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her. -- Genesis 16:2

God made Abraham a promise: "'Look up at the heavens and count the stars -- if indeed you can count them.' Then he said to him, 'So shall your offspring be'" (Genesis 15:5). "Abraham, I will make of you a great nation. Your offspring shall be as the sands of the sea" (Genesis 12:2 and 22:17). For a while Abraham believed. But eventually the facts of life set in, and Abraham started to think, I am an old man. Perhaps God wants me to do something to make things happen.

You know the rest of the story -- how Abraham heeded his wife's advice and fathered a son by her servant Hagar. Today when we see the strife between Israel and the Arab nations, we are seeing the result of Abraham's impatience, the emnity between Hagar's son Ishmael and Sarah's son, Isaac. Thousands of years later the world still pays a price because one man lost hope for a moment and yielded to the voice of reason instead of to the voice of God. Let's face it, God's ways often do not make sense to our earthly minds. It just didn't make any sense for God to wait until Abraham was in his nineties to make the kind of promise to him that he made. But we need to let God be God!

Father, I know your timing is perfect. Give me an undivided heart to wait for your promise without wavering.

Living Faith -- Daily Devotional


(Of course we also thought that this is a prime example of what happens when you listen to a woman ..... :-) )