“People to meet in heaven: Sarah”
Genesis 18:9-15
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
I don’t know about you, but in my opinion, any woman over seventy is too old to have a baby! Can’t happen. There’s no possible way!
But apparently, that’s not what Daljinder Kaur of Amritsar, India thought. For at the ripe old age of seventy-two, she had a baby!
You see, she and her husband Mohinder had been married for some forty-seven years, and never had a child of their own. Their family and friends told them to adopt, but they never wanted to. They believed in God, they said, and knew that, someday, they would have a child of their own.
So finally in April of this last year, sure enough, Daljinder gave birth to a bouncing baby boy. She even named him, Arman, a name that means, “wish.”
But she’s not the only one. Each year, here in America, some six hundred women in their fifties give birth, and in Germany, this last year, a sixty-five year-old teacher gave birth to quadruplets—three boys and a girl. No one was really surprised. She already had thirteen children ranging in age from nine to forty-four.
I don’t know about you, but it’s not something I would recommend.
The book of Genesis chapter 18 tells of a woman who gave birth not at the age of fifty, sixty, seventy or even eighty. She gave birth when she was ninety! She was a beautiful woman and an amazing woman. And she’s a woman we want to meet in heaven!
Please turn with me in your Bible to page 16, as I read the words of our text. I’ll start at chapter 18, verse 1: “And the Lord appeared to him, (that’s Abraham), 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. 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.’”
It was the hottest part of the day, the Bible said. It was so hot, poor old Abraham couldn’t work. He could hardly even sleep. So there he sat in the shade of his tent, as waves of heat rippled across the horizon.
And notice, his name isn’t Abram; it’s Abraham.
You see, twenty-five years before, he was merely Abram, a name that meant, “exalted father.” But when God called Him to follow Him, He changed his name to Abraham, “father of many.”
But how could he be the father of many, when he wasn’t even the father of one?! Sure there was Ishmael, born of his servant girl Hagar. But that was not part of God’s plan. So where was his child, the one God promised would come?
And if you think it was hard for Abraham, it was even worse for his wife, Sarah! Oh, she was beautiful. Stunning, actually. If you know the story, her’s was a face that almost cost the lives of a king and a pharaoh!
And when she and Abraham first married, she fully expected to be not only a loving wife, but a loving mother! She was dying to be a mother—to have a child to hold, to shape, to nurture. And while all those around her were having one child after another, every night she desperately prayed for just one.
She was sixty-five when God first made that promise. But weeks turned to months that turned to years. And now she was a full ninety years old.
Maybe Abraham misunderstood! Maybe there was something she had done wrong! Finally, not knowing what else to do, she gave up hope in herself and in God. She would never have a son after all.
Which surprised her, and even shocked her, when those three mysterious strangers showed up at the entrance to their tent. Verse 3: “O Lord,” Abraham said, “if I have found favor in Your sight, do not pass by Your servant.”
“O Lord,” he said. Who could this possibly be? And who were those two men standing so silently beside Him?
And as any good middle-eastern man would do, he prepared a feast. Verse 6: “And Abraham went quickly into the tent to Sarah and said, ‘Quick! Three seahs of fine flour! Knead it, and make cakes.’ And Abraham 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. And he stood by them under the tree while they ate.”
And along with that meal came a promise. Verse 10: “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.”
So what did Sarah do when she heard the news? What would you do if you were ninety years old, and someone told you that you would have a son?
She laughed! Somewhere down deep it started and, as hard as she tried, she couldn’t hold it back till it erupted out of her mouth. Impossible, she thought. Can’t happen. There is no possible way!
Funny thing--she wasn’t the only one who laughed! Turn back a page to page 15. You know what happened when Abraham first heard the news? Look on the right-hand column at chapter 17, verse 17. It says: “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 ninety years old, bear a child?’”
But you know what they found out about nine months later? Nothing was impossible with God.
It’s been said that one of the most important questions we could ever ask, and one of the most challenging, is this: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”
If the answer is, “Yes, there are some things that God cannot do,” then God is not God, and we live in a closed universe where the things we learn are all there is to know. And when time comes to an end, there is nothing but blackness and death.
But if the answer is, “No, nothing is impossible with God,” then we live in a world that’s full of possibility, hopefulness and surprise. And we have taken the leap of faith.
As the Lord Himself said in chapter 18, verse 14: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”
Do those words sound familiar? They should, for it’s the same words that an angel named Gabriel once said to a young woman named Mary.
Remember? It happened in a little town called Nazareth in Galilee. The Bible says, he came to her and said, “Don’t be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call His name Jesus.”
“How can this be,” she asked, “since I am a virgin?”
And in the quiet embrace of time and eternity, Gabriel answered, “Nothing is impossible with God.”
It was 1939, and George Dantzig was a doctoral candidate at the University of California-Berkeley. And one day, as he arrived late for a graduate-level statistics class, he slipped into his seat and noticed two problems written on the board. He assumed they were homework, so he copied them down.
A few days later, he apologized to his professor, Jerzy Neyman, that the problems were a little harder than usual, and asked if he could have just a little more time. Neyman told him to just put it on his desk when he was done.
Six weeks later, on a Sunday morning, he was awakened by someone banging on his door. It was his professor, who rushed in, holding papers in his hand. He said, “I’ve just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication.”
For a minute, George had no idea what he was talking about, until finally he realized that those two problems that were written on the board weren’t homework assignments. They were two famous unsolved problems. And he had solved them!
We too are surrounded by impossibilities of all kinds—impossible work, impossible relationships, and impossible expectations.
But we believe in a God not of the impossible, but the possible. As He once said to an old man named Abraham and his wife, Sarah, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”
One more thing I can’t help but ask. We know Sarah laughed, and Abraham did too. But we wonder, does God sometimes laugh too?
Maybe He does, for it says in Psalm 2: “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together.” Then it says, “But He who sits in the heavens laughs.”
Even the angels laugh a little too. For as Jesus said in the book of Luke: “I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.”
And there’s more. Who would have thought that the weak would inherit the earth, that the foolish would teach the wise, that a little child would lead, that those who lose their lives find them, that the last will be first and the first last, that a virgin could give birth, that a King is born in a stable, that the dead come back to life, and that a crucified Savior is both Lord and God?
As the prophet Jeremiah once wrote: “O Lord God! You have made the heavens and the earth by Your great power and Your outstretched arm. Nothing is too hard for You.”
Sometimes, dear Lord, we see only the impossible and the incomprehensible. Help us, by Your grace, to find our hope, joy, and strength in You. This we ask in Your name. Amen