God also said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her Sarai; her name will be Sarah. I will bless her and will surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.”
Abraham fell facedown; he laughed and said to himself, “Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?” And Abraham said to God, “If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!”
Then God said, “Yes, but your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will call him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him. And as for Ishmael, I have heard you: I will surely bless him; I will make him fruitful and will greatly increase his numbers. He will be the father of twelve rulers, and I will make him into a great nation. But my covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah will bear to you by this time next year” (Genesis 17:15-21).
God promised Abraham something incredible; that his wife Sarah would bear him a son, and that nations and kings would come from her, just as God had earlier promised that nations and kings would come from him. At this point in the story we have already seen that Abraham had faith, and that his faith was counted as righteousness (Genesis 15:6). In this passage, however, we see something different.
His request, “if only Ishmael might live under your blessing!” seems innocuous enough. All he’s doing is asking God to bless his son. It’s only when we read what Abraham said to himself that it becomes clear what’s really going on. He’s lowering the bar; trying to make it easier for God to fulfill what he had promised. We know that Abraham believed God had actually promised this son, but there was still no sign of fulfillment. What if, somehow, he was wrong? What if what he was believing for never did happen? Abraham isn’t just making things easier, he’s protecting himself from the possibility that God might fail. But, interestingly, Scripture shows this happening after God has already counted Abraham’s faith as righteousness. So what happened?
What was at risk here wasn’t the son Abraham didn’t yet have (and therefore could not really lose), but his relationship with God; his trust that God truly was good. God’s character mattered to Abraham. And to believe completely that God will do something, only to have that thing become impossible, feels like betrayal. I know that from my own experience.
But betrayal is only possible where there is trust. Paradoxically, the fact that Abraham felt the need to protect himself in this way shows that he actually did believe. And that’s an insight that I think we need to see as well. The temptation to soften God’s promises, to let him off the hook, comes from a starting point of faith. That doesn’t make it right, it makes him human. Abraham’s weakness was the weakness of a believer, not an unbeliever. And I can’t help but notice that God did not rebuke Abraham, even mildly. He simply reaffirmed the fullness of what he had earlier promised, and then promised to also grant Abraham’s prayer for Ishmael – the one he had actually asked for, not what he had been thinking in his heart.
The lesson here is that sometimes faith looks like doubt. Recall the anguished father who told Jesus, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief” (Mark 9:24), and recall also how graciously Jesus dealt with Thomas (John 20:24-29). Doubt is not the same as refusal to believe, and God does not turn away from his children, even when we struggle to trust him.