Signs of promise
Tuesday, Sept. 22
Genesis 16:1 – 17:27 Read it here Listen to it here

Abram and Sarai (who will later be called Sarah), do what many people had done before and we continue to do all too often – they thought God needed their help to accomplish his plans, so they took matters into their own hands.
In a time when people strongly felt the need to have an heir, specifically a male heir, one of the solutions to not having one was for the husband to father a son by a servant, with that son being considered a legitimate heir.
This is the route Abram and Sarai take, with Sarai giving her Egyptian maidservant Hagar to Abram. However, when Hagar conceives, jealousy arises between the two women. Sarai begins to mistreat Hagar, who flees.
An angel appears to Hagar promises her that her son Ishmael, too, will have many descendants. She returns to Abram and Sarai.
Later, God appears to Abram and promises that he will have a son by Sarai, even though they are both of advanced years. One of the signs of this covenant is changing their names to the ones we are more familiar with, Abraham and Sarah.
The promises God makes respond to two deep desires of God’s people that continue to be seen through the Bible: a desire for an identity that continues into the future, and a place to call home.
Those promises are addressed in 17:6-8. “I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God.”
The most visible sign of the covenant is that God institutes the requirement that Abraham and all his male descendants be circumcised when they are eight days old, a practice that will continue. Since Abraham and the males in his household are more than eight days old, they are circumcised at the same time, including the now-13-year-old Ishmael.
It is noteworthy that the circumcision requirement extends even to slaves who are part of the household, whether purchased or born into it. Even at this early time, the covenant included people who were not in the line of Abraham.
Many Christian traditions, including our own, consider baptism to be the equivalent of circumcision. Colossians 2:11-12 supports this, saying, “In him [Christ] you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead.”
As was the case with circumcision, these traditions consider baptism as an infant to be normative, but will baptise older persons who convert to the faith later.
Historically it is significant that the Islamic faith considers Ishmael to be the ancestor of the Arab peoples…some even believe him to be a direct ancestor of the prophet Muhammad.
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In today’s meditation from Proverbs, adultery can be understood in both its literal meaning and beyond. The Bible often uses “adultery” to name anything that entices a person away from righteousness, whether into sexual sin or some other sin.

Tuesday meditation

Proverbs 2:16-19
You will be saved from the loose woman, from the adulteress with her smooth words, who forsakes the partner of her youth and forgets her sacred covenant, for her way leads down to death and her paths to the shades; those who go to her never come back, nor do they regain the paths of life.

Prayer focus
Pray for the wisdom to recognize and resist the temptations of attractive words and appearance.

-Rev. Mark Fleming