When the Lord is Late

January 8th, 2008

Reading: Genesis 15-16 and Proverbs 3

Sometimes it feels like there is nothing worse than someone who shows up late. Especially when you show up early, and there is that interim period where you wonder: "Did they forget? Did something happen to them".

Remember back in the days before cellular phones, where if someone was late, they had no way of contacting you? Then there was nothing to do but wait until you got home and find out what went wrong.

Today's reading is about a promise that God made. You see, God had told Abram that he was going to have a son, and took it a step further by saying that his descendents would be like the sand on the seashore. Okay, I am assuming we are talking about every grain of sand, which would probably be some number that hasn’t even been reached in the current population of Earth.

So, here is Abram, sitting around with his wife Sarai, probably having sex every night and wondering why no baby was happening. Suddenly, they wake up to find that they are senior citizens, and, as said by Steve Carrel in Get Smart: “your ovaries will dry up and fall out”.

Can you imagine the decades of wondering what’s up? “Hey, did God forget to send the baby? Can’t have all that sand on the seashore if I don’t even have a speck, here.”

So what did they do? They had a back-up plan. “Here, I am obviously too old to have a kid, so, why don’t you have sex with my hot maid Hagar.”

“Well, if I absolutely have to, but I promise that I won’t like it.”

I can’t help but wonder how many times Abram had to “have sexual relations with that woman” before she got pregnant, but I’m pretty sure that the more it happened, the more spiteful Sarai became. No wonder she continued to hate on Hagar after Ishmael was born. I often found that Sarai’s abusive behavior toward Hagar should is really underplayed by most Bible scholars.

Yeah, Abram and Sarai screwed up, and it wasn’t the first time. If only they had obeyed the precepts obeyed in Proverbs 3:5. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understading.” (Actually, he probably couldn’t have followed that, because it hadn’t been written yet, but I think the concept existed back then.)

You see, God doesn’t operate on timetables and deadlines, because he’s got all the time in the universe because he fricking invented it. So if God doesn’t keep his promise, he’s got the whole eternity thing to make it come to pass.

Isn’t it great that these two Scriptures actually worked together, for once?