Sarah’s Laughter Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7

This Sunday we’ll consider the scene in which Sarah laughs at God’s promise.  God had promised Abram and Sarai an offspring twenty-four years prior.  Through long years the family had been disappointed.  The couple had advanced in years far beyond the stage of childbearing.  When the angel of the LORD reaffirms the promise and provides a specific date, we can sympathize with Sarah’s incredulity. 

Yet indeed, God did provide the child of the promise.  Isaac was born and he gave Sarah great joy.  Isaac foreshadows the greater child of promise, the Lord Jesus Christ.  In his first advent, he came in weakness and poverty.  In his second advent, He promises to come with glory and power.  More than this, Jesus’s present power is available to the believer through the indwelling Spirit.  John Murray writes, “Faith is concerned not only with a Christ who came and with a Christ who will come again, but with the Christ who now is and now is as the one exalted far above all principality and power and might and dominion and every name that is named, not only in this age but in the one to come.”[1]

[1] Murray, “Structural Strands” 23