THURSDAY May 22nd
We read about the oaks of Mamre again as we move a few chapters on in Genesis, it is in chapter 18:1
‘And the LORD appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the day’.
I am not going to talk about the trees again, except to say that by the time we get to this verse, God had already reaffirmed his promise to Abraham that he would be the means of blessing to the nations and that Sarah his wife would have a son, (at this point both their names have been changed by God see Genesis 17:5 and 17:15).
Now as we come to Genesis 18:1 the oaks of Mamre were going to be the place where God would meet with Abraham and reaffirm to him the promise of a son to Sarah. The narrative continues that as they talked, Sarah was listening at the tent door behind and she laughed to herself, saying that she was worn out, beyond childbearing age and that Abraham was old. But the Lord heard her laugh and asked Abraham why did Sarah laugh and continued with those well-known words ‘Is anything too hard for the LORD?’
Is anything too hard for the LORD? Well, Abraham and Sarah were going to find out that no, there wasn’t anything too hard for the Lord for despite all the impossibilities, within twelve months they would have a son whom they would call Isaac, see Genesis 21:1-7.
I wonder how often do we limit God though our unbelief. We may not laugh as Sarah did, but we allow doubt to creep into our hearts and our minds, we allow our circumstances to stack up against us, we put ourselves into a place of personal despondency and defeat, while all the while God wants us to come to him, to call out to him, to place our confident trust in him that there is nothing, absolutely nothing too hard for him to do.
Now it doesn’t mean that we can use this like a crowbar which we use to force God to act on our behalf or to do things the way in which we want them to be done. It is a means to encourage us to seek God in all things, while at the same time ensuring that we always seek for his will to be done, for after all God knows better than we do. See Isaac was God’s will for Abraham and Sarah, he had promised them an heir, and they needed to trust in God that if it was what he had decreed then despite all the odds stacked against them it would happen.
If we had delved further, we would have seen how Abraham had tried to force things to happen by his own means and the result was the birth of Ishmael through Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian servant. But this was not God’s way, and we must always seek to allow God to have his own way and to bring about his will in and for our lives in every way and in his time.