Let’s follow Sarah. She first appears in Genesis 11:29 where Abram marries Sarai. In the next verse, it states she is barren and unable to conceive children. It does not say how old they were when they married, just that they are both Terah’s children. (Which makes them half-siblings.) God told Abram to move to Canaan. This is huge. I did my research. Back in their time, Ur was a booming economic center and Abram was wealthy. It was like Tokyo or New York City, it was that huge city where everything is. Canaan was a wasteland at the time. Everyone thought Abram had completely lost his marbles and was a raving lunatic when he told them he was uprooting and moving to the middle of nowhere. Hmmm, let me think of a modern comparison.
What would you all think if Donald Trump announced that he was turning over all his properties to the city of New York without asking for money and moving his family to a trailer home in the middle of the Yukon, Canada where there’s nothing valuable there? You all would think he had lost his mind, wouldn’t you? What would you all think if he told you that the voices told him to do it? This, in essence, is what Abram did and how all the other residents of Ur perceived him.
Donald Trump’s wife would complain loudly about losing her modern conveniences and her warm home and luxuries. Sarai had modern conveniences at the time, such as libraries (clay tablets with cuneiform on it), having irrigation so that she had easy access to food, ability to buy textiles, flour, and beer without having to make it herself, wicker mattresses to sleep on within two story clay brick structures which had a sleeping area, burial area, lavatory, and food prepration/eating area; and for evenings oil lamps with flax wicks and warm rugs on the floor to quell the chill. These were luxuries of the rich in those ancient times.
Her husband came to her and said “God asked me to take you, our nephew Lot, our father, and all our animals and servants with me to Canaan, which he promised to give to me.” I am thinking… she must have looked at her husband in bewilderment. Who is this God and why aren’t you worshipping the other gods? What is this? But at the time, customs dictated that man had the final say, so ultimately Sarai had to go along with Abram whether or not she agreed. She must have resented him a little bit. When they arrived in Egypt, Abram told Sarai to not tell anyone she’s married to him to save his own skin. I can’t imagine how that must have felt. Abram handed her over to the Egyptians to be married to them and this makes God angry. How must Sarai have felt? Having your own husband hand you over because he didn’t want to be hurt? It was not about saving her life, it was about him. The Egyptians found out she was married and turned her back over to Abram.
Ten years later, Sarai got tired of having no children around and asked Abram to knock up her servant, Hagar. So Abram did what his wife asked him to and slept with Hagar. When she got pregnant, she started being spiteful towards Sarai and perhaps rubbed salt in her wounds of being barren. Sarai was frustrated because she knew it was only because of her that Hagar was pregnant with Abram’s child. She complained and Abram reminded her that she is the master of that servant. Sarai then turned around and gave Hagar a taste of her own medicine which promoted her to run away from Sarai. Hagar returned, though, and gave birth to Ishmael. Sarai must have been so conflicted. She had a son through Hagar, yet Hagar got to do the child-rearing because in those times the child needs to stay with the milk-mother three years.
At ninety years old, when Ishmael was thirteen, God renamed her. She is now known as Sarah and that she would have a son. Sarah overheard this and she started laughing. I wonder if she laughed derisively. The bible only says she laughed silently to herself. Was she thinking “Yeah right” to herself? God knew and rebuffed them. Is anything too hard for the Lord? You will give birth a year from now. Sarah was afraid, maybe freaking out by then, and denied that she laughed.
A lot went on in the meantime. Abraham got God to change his mind several times about Sodom, saw Lot try to turn his daughters over to the crowds only to be rescued by angels and then they run away as Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed, along with the daughters’ fiancées so they go to bed with their father instead and became pregnant. Abraham does what he did in Egypt again and denies being married to Sarah. Abimelech marries Sarah (at over 90 years old) and Abimelech finds out that she is already married. He turns Sarah back over to Abraham, along with money to compensate for embarrassing them. I don’t get this. Why is it that Abraham keeps on lying about being married to Sarah?
Anyways, after Abimelech turns Sarah back over to Abraham, they sleep together and this is when Sarah becomes pregnant. The timeline means all of the above happened in just three months in order to have a baby a year later. Wow. Sarah died at 127 years old, so she got to raise Isaac and watch him grow into his manhood years. What a blessing for someone who always wanted to be a mother.
What I learned from Sarah’s story is that if I keep my desires in my heart and let the Lord see in my heart, his blessing will come… in God’s own time in His unique way. We will not ever see it coming, we can’t watch for it. We can only trust the Lord and wait. If we try to hurry things along, it will only bite us in the end like Sarah’s giving Hagar to Abraham screwed her in the end. We must just wait… God just may surprise us and make us laugh after all.
