Abraham was 86 years old when Ishmael was born. Between the ages of 75 and 86 several things happened: Araham and his nephew Lot split up to avoid conflict between their herdsmen. Lot settled in the rich Jordan Valley near Sodom. When enemy kings capture Lot, Abram rescued him. On the way back Abram gave tithes to Melchizedek. God made a covenant with Abram. Sarai gave her servant Hagar to Abram to have a child. The Bible tells us nothing about the silent years, between ages 86 and 99.

God had promised Abram many descendants, but Abram was growing older and his wife also was growing older. With each passing year the possibility of their having a child of their own seemed to grow less likely. How do you suppose Abram felt about God and His promise during those silent years? Most of us would have been tempted to believe that God had forgotten us. We need to remember that the eternal God does not operate on our time schedule.

At a time when Abram may have thought that his best years are behind him, God asks him to move up. This call to move hither reached Abram at a point of weakness and inability. This is amazing to consider that when we think it is all over, God may be thinking about beginnings.

Abram is now 99 years old. It has been twenty-four years since he received God’s promise and left the land of Haran. It has been thirteen years since the events recorded in Gen. 16. So far as we can tell God has not spoken since He encountered Hagar on her way to Egypt.

Thirteen years earlier Abram had taken a wrong turn and for thirteen years there has been silence from heaven. We have reason to suspect that these were years of unhappiness and unrest in the household of Abram. The presence of Ishmael in the home created contempt and bitterness, envy and strife. God used these thirteen years to each Abram the cost of acting on his own. Time used to teach Abram of the consequences of serving God in the flesh and acting presumptuously. For thirteen years he has lived with the fruits of his impatience.

It could be that you have had some similar experience; most of us do. A time when God has allowed you to have your own way, and the results have been distressing. You are permitted to go your own head-strong way, that you might learn the folly of acting apart from God. One of the most frightening things in life is that if you insist on having your own way, God may let you have it, until you are sorry you asked for it.

After thirteen years of silence, God appears to Abram and says, "I AM God Almighty." In Hebrew the name is "el-Shaddai," which essentially means "the God who is sufficient" and is used to emphasize His infinite power. This is the first time that God has been called by this name in Scripture.

These verses trouble us because we know that no one but Jesus ever lived a sinless perfect life. But look at it from the perspective of the Heavenly Father. Many of us are parents. Which of us would say to our children, ‘Be 90% honest or good" No. We tell them to be l00% honest and good. When they fall short, we forgive them and help them do better, but we do not lower our expectations for them to be the best they can be.

The root meaning of this word "perfect" is "wholehearted." If Abraham wanted to know God’s power, he had to walk, that is live, close to the Lord and be blameless, that is consistently responding to God in repentance and faith. He must be sincere and honest in his devotion and obedience to the Lord. Faith always calls for obedience if it is to be counted as real.

PLEASE READ GENESIS 17: 3-5.

God said to Abraham in Vs. 4, "Behold, my covenant is with you and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations." But Genesis makes plain that Abraham did not father a multitude of nations in a physical or political sense. Therefore the meaning of God’s promise was probably that a multitude of nations would somehow enjoy the blessings of son-ship even though physically unrelated to Abraham. That’s no doubt what God meant in Gen. 12:3 when He said to Abraham, :"By you all the families of the earth shall be blessed".

So when God said to Abraham 4,000 years ago, "Behold, My covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations," he opened the way for any one of us, no matter of what nation we belong to, to become a child of Abraham and an heir of God’s promises. All we have to do is share the faith of Abraham—that is, bank our hope on God’s promises, so much so, that if obedience requires it, we could give up our dearest possessions like Abraham gave up in Isaac. We don’t become heirs of Abraham’s promises by working for God but by being confident that God works for us.

Romans 4:20 says, "Abraham grew strong in his faith, giving glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what He had promised." That’s why Abraham could obey God even when obedience looked like a dead-end street. He trusted God to do the impossible. Faith in God’s promise—or today we would say, faith in Christ, who is the confirmation of God’s promise---is the way to become a child of Abraham; Obedience is the evidence that faith is genuine; therefore Jesus says in John 8:39, "If you were Abraham’s children, you would do what Abraham did." Children of Abraham are people of all nations who put their hope in Christ and, like Abraham on Mt. Moriah, therefore don’t let their most precious earthly possession stop their obedience. We who hope in Jesus Christ, and follow him in the obedience of faith, are the descendants of Abraham and heirs of his covenant promises. That’s the first thing I want you to take away this morning from "God’s covenant with Abraham."

In Hebrew God added one letter to Abram’s name, the letter formed by breathing. God was adding His name to Abram. The best explanation is that God took part of His own name and added to Abraham and Sarah’s names.

God promised Abraham, "I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee. The genealogy of Jesus in Matt 1:1-17 shows how David and all of David’s royal line were descendants of Abraham. The ultimate King of this line was and is Jesus Christ.

The word seed is prominent in the covenant with Abraham. The first seed of Abraham in the line of promise was Isaac, whose birth is told in Gen. 21. In a sense, all of Abraham’s descendants were his seed. However, the N.T. says in Gal. 3:16-17 that the ultimate seed of Abraham was Jesus Christ. Through Christ the promises of God to Abraham were fulfilled. Through Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, God sends forth the message of His love to all people We who have faith in Jesus are children of God and, in a sense, children of Abraham because we come to God by Abraham’s kind of faith and seek to fulfill God’s purpose of making the good news known to all people.

The heart of the Abrahamic covenant is that God will be God to us. He will be our God. The longer you meditate on that deceptively simple truth the more spectacular it becomes. Jeremiah tells us that it means. He quotes God in Jeremiah 32:38-41, "They shall be my people and I will be their God…I will not turn away from doing good to them…I will rejoice in doing good to them….with all my heart and with all my soul."

It boggles the mind to try to imagine what it must mean if the God who made the planets and stars and galaxies rejoices to do you good with all his heart and with all his soul. If God is God for you then all his omnipotence and all his omniscience are engage all the time to do good for you in all the circumstances of your life.

Paul says in Rom. 4: 13, "The promise to Abraham and his descendants is that they should inherit the earth.’ In 2 Cor. 3: 21-23 he says, "All things are yours…the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours; and you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s." When Jesus was approached by the Sadducees who did not believe in the resurrection, he said in Mt. 22:31-32, "As for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead but of the living." The Sadducees didn’t realize how spectacular it is for the creator of the universe to say to a human being, "I will be God to you…I will be your God." So Jesus tells them: When God is your God you cannot die: "He is not the God of the dead but of the livin

Finally, this covenant promise is sure, rooted in God’s unchanging truthfulness and confirmed by Christ’s coming. Ps. 90:4 says, A thousand years in thy sight, O God, are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night." If the living God had made his spectacular covenant promise to you personally four days ago would it not still be today and utterly overwhelming power in your life? Well, 4,000 years are like four days to Him. And if you trust Him as the living God, his promise will have that power in your life.

The only candidates for the blessing of Abraham are sinners. That’s why Jesus had to come to confirm the covenant. Not even Abraham could have enjoyed the blessing of Abraham if Jesus hadn’t come. Abraham, too, was a sinner. Christ confirms the covenant because in his life of obedience and innocent suffering he settles the accounts of the children of Abraham, so that God can be just and yet say to me a sinner. "I am your God. Paul wrote in Rom.8:32, "If He did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, will He not with Him freely give us all things?" That spectacular promise cannot be bought or earned. But it can be believed. And if you believe it everything changes.

God called the covenant with Abraham an everlasting covenant. This was no temporary covenant designed to give way to another covenant later. This covenant was designed to lead people to faith. If we believe that the one God has sent His Son to be the one Savior of all people, we cannot withhold the good news of Jesus Christ from anyone.

God said to Abraham in Vs. 15, "As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name." The name Sarai means "contentious." This speaks volumes about the home life of Abram and Sarai. Solomon writes in Prov. 21:9 "It is better to live in a corner of the housetop than in a house shared with a contentious woman." Having a thousand wivcs, Solomon no doubt knew what he was talking about.

Sarai was a problem wife. Yet in the N.T. Peter says that this woman is a model for all women to follow, but only after her name is changed to Sarah, which means "princess." She is never referred to as Sarai in the N.T. God does not set her forth as a pattern for women until she becomes Sarah and loses her contentious spirit. As Sarah she learned to develop "a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious." She was not naturally this way but she learned by God’s grace to be such. I suspect that Sarai was argumentative, the classic nagging wife. But through the years by God’s grace she learned that she did not have to defend herself on every occasion and she became Sarah, a princess, honored among women.

When Abraham realized that God was telling him that he and Sarah were to have a son in their old age, Abraham responded in three ways that at first sight seem to be something other than the faith he showed at other times. First, Abraham fell upon his face and laughed. We wonder in what sense he laughed. Assuming the best, he may have laughed with wonder and joy, not with doubt and skepticism. God did not rebuke Abraham for laughing. Yet in 18:12 when Sarah overheard God tell Abraham that within a year she would bear a son, she laughed. God asked Abraham, "Why did Sarah laugh?" Sarah quickly "lied and said, ‘I did not laugh." But God said, "Yes, you did laugh." Why did God call Sarah’s hand, but not Abraham’s? Perhaps God, who sees our hearts, saw faith in Abraham’s laughter and doubt in Sarah’s. At any rate God told them to name their son Isaac, which means "he who laughs.’ When Isaac was born, Sarah said, "God hath made me laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me." Whatever the motivation for her laughter in Ch. 18, in Ch. 21 she laughed in joy and wonder.

Abraham’s second response was to ask God in vs. 17, a straight question; "Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?" The honest and candid question is typical of the questions of many O.T. people of faith. God seems to have taken Abraham’s question as an expression of seeking faith and earnest payer.

Abraham’s third response was to say, "O that Ishmael might live before thee." Gen. 16 tells the story of Ishmael. His birth resulted from the efforts of Sarah and Abraham to provide a child for Abraham by human means. According to the custom of that day a barren wife could give her servant to her husband and the child would be considered the child of the man and his wife. Sarah sent Hagar to Abraham and the result was the birth of Ishmael. After Ishmael was born, Sarah became vindictive and had Abraham send Hagar away, along with Ishmael, but the Lord cared for them.

Abraham, feeling that he and Sarah were too old to have a son, seems to have asked the Lord to reconsider using Ishmael as the promised heir. At the very least, Abraham was asking that the Lord watch over Ishmael. God assured Abraham that He would care for Ishmael but that His plan was to continue the line of promise through the child of promise. God made several points about what Abraham and Sarah were to do. First, God repeated His promise that Sarah would bear this child. God told them the child’s name was to be Isaac, God made clear the fact that the everlasting covenant with Abraham was to continue through Isaac. The promise of a son to people their age was a "God-sized promise." Only God could bring such a miracle. But as the Lord asked Sarah when she laughed, "is anything too hard for the Lord?"