Waiting for the promise: patience makes perfect

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I came across this, written eight years ago today, and considering the fact that one year later God told me to write my first Context for Kids curriculum book (affiliate link) then my Context for Kids YouTube channel and website, and now I have the Context for Kids radio show (airing on two stations and also on my podcast channel) and will be speaking to a homeschooling conference next month–well, I figured it was good encouragement for those of you still waiting on your promise from God. Or it could be your second or third promise because those trip us up too–especially when that promise comes from the dream of a scholar whom you have admired for many years. Not sure I even want that one to happen or how it would but then I never saw any of this coming or wanted it either.

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There’s this phrase I use, not sure where I got it from, but someone undoubtedly coined it long ago. It’s a great one.

“Creating an Ishmael.”

I say it whenever our impatience causes us to jump the gun on the huge deliverance planned for us when it looks as though we have been cursed, or forgotten, or when we feel there just isn’t time left for God to deliver us from our circumstances and deliver on His promises. But I don’t say it with judgment or a scowl because the people who judge Abraham and Sarah harshly have probably never had anything withheld from them–possibly because nothing great will ever be demanded from them or come from them. I am wondering if I can think of anything amazing that ever came to anyone in the Bible who didn’t have to suffer and wait for it. Offhand, I just can’t think of anything really. Except that Adam and Eve got the Garden right away, and we see how well that went.

An “Ishmael” is what we create when we try and force a blessing, when we figure we know what form God’s blessings *should* take and according to what timetable they *should* arrive. Disappointment driven by sorrow and humiliation coupled with hopelessness can really push a person towards taking matters into their own hands, which is what Sarah and Abraham did when Hagar became a surrogate mother in a misguided and impatient effort to speed up what was meant to be a purely miraculous event.

In a perfect world, Abraham and Sarah would have welcomed Isaac into a world that never heard the cries of baby Ishmael. Perhaps Hagar would have married another servant and lived a more contented, uneventful life. But that isn’t what happened, not by a long shot.

Perhaps it would have, in a world where Sarah was not branded as a failure, either by herself or others, or in a world that is willing to wait for the fulfillment of promises. Abraham and Sarah have done nothing that we all have not done in one form or another, even if we do not see it. After all, how many times have we seen someone have a dream or a prophetic word that they decided that THEY had to bring to pass? I have been a part of two congregations where a building plan inspired by a prophetic word completely altered the course of a local assembly, and the course of a minister’s life, and not for the better. And the words might have been very valid! But fulfilling such things in the flesh, as Abraham and Sarah did, is not a valid option. You see, God does not need our interference when He has promised something, He needs us to prepare ourselves and wait for Him to make it happen.

About 10 years ago I had a dream that I have never understood the interpretation of, although my husband and I have chatted about it often. Last year, a sister of mine from Africa, who I have never met, had a confirming vision. I want to use it as an example of how we could have mucked everything up, and still might muck it up, for all I know, if we get impatient.

I was sitting in an upper room watching a movie on one of those screens they used to have in school, the ones where you would pull them down from above. The movie was about a man and woman who were raising 100 children, none of them biological. I saw their tiny little house, I saw toys out front, and thought about how much I admired them. As the movie ended, I realized it was about my husband and me.

At this point, we had our two children, neither biological. I was greatly confused and yet it was one of the most vivid dreams I have ever had. So, I tucked it away. Now what could I have done? I could have said, “well this means this and in order for this to happen, that has to happen, and I had better get to work.” Fortunately, a few days earlier I had left the church system due to the first of the two situations I spoke of earlier regarding building plans hurting a congregation (or in this case destroying the congregation) by compromising a minister. I had seen firsthand what happens when we assume and do not wait–we screw everything up. David (the pastor) didn’t have to do God’s work for Him, and I wasn’t going to repeat the mistake. But over the years, I started wondering as I saw nothing happening and I got older and older.

Then in January 2013, my friend from Africa, a minister, sent me this about a vision she had while praying, “I SAW A LADY WITH SO MANY KIDS, MOST OF THEM WHEN BABIES. YR NAME WAS WRITING UNDER THE PICTURE BOLDLY WITH CAPITAL LETTER. THE SPIRIT OF GOD WHISPERED TO ME, “TALK TO HER.”

I told her the dream I had had so long ago and that I had feared that in waiting, I had missed my calling in life. We were both very glad that I had waited and she had not waited!

Now again, I had a choice, but not coincidentally, I had just come out of my second incidence, a few months before, of a minister going forward in his own power who was hurting people and himself in the process trying to make a word come to pass himself—one promising an international ministry when, strangely enough, he already had one but I suppose he thought there should be more nations than just two. My choice, in light of these failures, was to continue waiting or to make something happen. I chose to wait, based on scripture and personal experience.

I think of my life over the past 10 years if I had rushed forward and created an Ishmael. Perhaps I would have become a foster mother, and maybe my immaturity and woundedness would have been magnified, and my spiritual journey stunted in my zeal to lean on my own understanding. Not to mention what I would have done to those poor kids. I know in my heart now that path would have been a disaster. But still–what does it mean? Who are my 100 children? Are they really babies?

I can tell you this, that when my sister in Africa confirmed the dream for me, I decided it was time to grow up in a big way. I decided something I was incapable of deciding 10 years ago–that those 100 children, whatever they represent, need someone to care for them who doesn’t have a ton of issues to inflict on them. So, I started preparing myself to be their mother, whatever that means. When I decided to change for them, things started changing for me. And a few weeks ago my husband had a dream where we were living in a tent that kept getting bigger with more and more people in it — which reminded me of this:

Is 54:1-2 Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord. Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes;

And still I do nothing, except that my efforts on the behalf of my promised children have been redoubled. With every new reminder, I become more and more determined to prepare myself and wait for God to prepare the circumstances, even though the temptation becomes greater and greater to make it happen myself. Fortunately, after all these years I am still clueless as to what it all means, or I might have created an Ishmael already.

You see, creating an Ishmael happens when we start changing our circumstances, but creating an Isaac happens when we allow God to do His thing, according to His timetable. We believe that changing our circumstances is the same as cooperation and obedience when, in reality, we are usurping the authority of God. We are saying that we don’t think He can get the job done quickly enough to suit us. But the timetable is EVERYTHING. The time between promise and fulfillment isn’t the curse, it’s the blessing. If a woman only had a week between learning she was pregnant and giving birth, she would not be prepared to be a mother — UNLESS she had already spent much time in preparation before she ever got pregnant. That is what the promise is for, to give us the heads up to prepare ourselves, and not to make us hopeless and impatient. It’s about walking in trust.

Some promises, some “children,” are too darned special to be given to people who are not prepared. The longer the wait time, the graver the responsibility, in my opinion. Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Samson, Samuel, John the Baptist — great men who needed extraordinary parents refined in the fires of disappointment and the agony of waiting. How many years did David spend on the run when he could have killed his rival and grabbed the crown? There is no verse saying that God helps those who help themselves, but there is this one:

Is 40:31 But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

It is the ones who wait who will stand strongest, who will soar highest, who will run with endurance, and will simply walk. It’s all about how we walk. So don’t give up hope, you are not forgotten, you just may be being prepared for greater things than those who appear to have it all so easily but might only be succeeding through charisma instead of promises. And when you get it, remember to keep waiting and remain patient, because the next promise can trip you up just as easily as the first one. Just because we trusted and were patient once, doesn’t mean that our Isaac can’t have an Ishmael for a younger brother instead of an older one.

Are Marriage Laws Pagan? Isaac and Rebekkah in Ancient Near Eastern Context

If I had a dime for every woman who believed the doctrine that they don’t need a marriage certificate to get married and that they can just hook up with a guy, who then went and actually did just that; who got used up and abandoned, even though she was in possession of a self-made Ketubah signed by “witnesses” who then didn’t hold the man who she was shacking up with accountable (and indeed, had no legal ability to do so) when he turned out to not really be very Torah observant–and who now has no legal recourse and can’t get out of this marriage that doesn’t exist legally and yet spiritually it does exist because they had sex together…

Yeah, it was a messy run-on sentence but this is a messy run-on situation. Here’s the story I hear:

(1) Marriage by the State is pagan; (2) all you need to do is go cohabit and have sex and as long as you both love God, you are legally married in His eyes and (3) you have all of the protection you need Biblically, oh and (4) God told me this by revelation.

It sounds romantic, spiritual, and appealing, right? It sounds like a way to reclaim our heritage as believers–but nothing could be further from the truth.

Whenever I hear a doctrine prefaced or prefixed by “God told me this by revelation” then I am like a hundred times more likely to assume that it’s just something straight out of their imagination (2021 editing note: just last week I had a woman declare to me that diabetes, both kinds, are caused by octopus demons because she saw it in a dream). If they had proof, they would provide it. Those who have no proof, too often credit God with revelation–and crediting God with vain imaginations, make no mistake, is a form of blasphemy. It’s asserting God’s authority to preach something in His Name, when God authorized nothing of the sort.

Ladies, in the past (really until just recently historically) marriage was a covenant made by two fathers or other male relatives. It was a contract between two families. It was a legal act, recognized by the civil authorities because everything about it was done in a legal and civil fashion. It wasn’t just going to a man’s house and shacking up and now you are safely married after making up a paper and saying what you want on it and having random people sign it. That was fornication in the ancient world–and still is. All throughout the Bible, we have situations presented that were not thoroughly explained to the people of the times as it represented their normal everyday context–frankly, why waste the ink telling people what they already know? Until just a short while ago historically, all the world operated according to totally different mindsets than we presume today–they were honor/shame focused, dyadic (community) centered and spiritual as opposed to scientific. Our ancestors walked away from all of that and became concerned with innocence and guilt, individualism, and science–our ancestors flipped the culture 180 degrees and then set about twisting interpretations of the Word of God in order to fit the new paradigm. We cannot ignore the original culture for which the Bible Laws were tailor-made. We can’t walk away from that culture and then just drag the Bible along with us as though God’s original intentions are even less sacred than the original intentions of the authors of the United States Constitution.

Very often, and especially in Paul’s letters, we see that appearances in an alien culture are vitally important–whether it is in the form of an admonishment for married women to obey Greco-Roman legal dress codes or in warnings as to how believers should conduct themselves publicly within the cultures in which they have been exiled. We are God’s ambassadors, and when we do things that look shameful within the larger society, we are shaming God. Living with a man without benefit of a legal marriage license in this culture and calling oneself a believer looks excessively worldly, shameful to God, and, frankly, it is not Biblical. This isn’t some noble protest against the Government, it is something that makes God look really casual about His ideas of what constitutes marriage.

People will tell you, on this particular issue, that they received a “revelation” from God but what they did was simply read the plain text out of the Bible without knowing anything about the underlying culture. They aren’t aware, for instance, that Abraham’s servant went with absolute legal authority and, as an ambassador in the name of Abraham to whom he had sworn an oath with hand on (well, you know), made a covenant in his master’s name with Rebekkah’s father and brother. Isaac and Rebekkah were legally married before she ever left Haran. The Brideprice was paid. The dowry was already given for her protection should Isaac divorce her for childlessness. The entire legal structure of the Ancient Near East would have recognized the contract. This was, for all intents and purposes, a state-sponsored marriage.

This is all a matter of established ancient law and you can see it in the text if you know that context. Rebekkah had a legal contract, a legal marriage–she had legal protections should Isaac toss her onto the street. Furthermore, if Isaac wronged her he would have her entire family to deal with because they would all be wronged and would seek satisfaction.

The ancient world was one big honor/shame network and Isaac and Rebekkah were practicing an “endogamous” marriage within the clan. Nothing could have possibly been more legal than that–not only did she had civil covenant legalities in place to protect her, but she was also protected by an honor/shame culture that doesn’t exist in the west. This was as safe as marriage got in ancient times and it was exactly why people did it–because in honor/shame cultures you were required to be absolutely honest with family (making Laban’s behavior all the more shocking when read from an honor/shame standpoint). Rebekkah’s father would never have sent his daughter with Abraham’s servant unless said servant was carrying assurances–it would not be unlikely that he was in possession of Abraham’s seal, cord and staff and in fact, I believe that he was.

Out here, even in “Torah Observant” communities–men who go this “Government-negating” route are not required to deal honorably with their wives because no one understands that kind of culture anymore. We don’t even know what honor is. There is also no Covenant court set up, no legitimate Bet Din to protect a woman from being abandoned. Women cannot bring a Covenant lawsuit against a husband who has wronged them nor can they go to a secular court because they didn’t do things civilly. We are living in exile, and exile means that we do not have the benefit of pretending like women have the legal protections they would have had in the ancient world.

So #1–Rebekkah was legally married by the laws of the land, through a sacred Ancient Near Eastern covenant system between two fathers and two families. This was not something done simply between man and woman. Brideprice and dowry were legally paid and recorded. #2–Rebekkah had societal protections because of the honor/shame cultural mores that do not exist within the United States and Europe, and certainly not within the ad-hoc religious communities that are not truly operating under ancient principles for faithfulness but are based instead on a strange amalgam of what we think was going on based upon what is written in the Bible to an audience who didn’t need to be told these things in the first place any more than we need to be told that tarantulas aren’t food. Just as modern-day “neo-pagan” communities operate according to how they think ancient pagans lived, modern-day “Torah-Observant” communities do exactly the same thing–overlooking the need to study out the culture before making assumptions about life in the ancient world. We are not honor/shame centered and we are not dyadic/community-based. We are innocence guilt/individualistic/scientific people–we are the OPPOSITE of the types of people the Law was designed to work well with. We are different in every way. Our ancestors left the culture of the Bible and now we are trying to keep our culture and twist the Torah around our modern assumptions like a pretzel.

I have received so many messages from women who believed this doctrine, and were left in a bind–“married” and yet also unmarried while their “Torah observant” husbands moved on to the next woman he met online. And no one can force their “not even common law” husband to do right by them. All he has to say is “she abandoned me” and it becomes a “he said/she said.” I’ve seen it so many times in the last year that you might be shocked. Women come to me and I can’t do anything to help them. No one can help them–not until they have been with their “husband” for the seven years which provides common law recognition by the State.

A legal marriage contract isn’t pagan. They have always existed. There is a big difference between civil laws and idolatry–laws are not inherently idolatrous or pagan. Making an idol, placing it in a shrine, trying to imbue it with the essence of a god, bathing it, feeding and clothing it, and bowing down to it so that you can appease it–that’s pagan and idolatrous. Laws are simply laws, and as such, they are generally the opposite of pagan, as they are simply secular. They are either good laws or bad laws. And the secular laws have existed for one reason above all other reasons–to protect women and children from men. Hey, look at the Torah laws, how many of them tell women who not to have sex with, and how many are telling men who they had better not have sex with? How many protect men from being raped and how many protect women from being raped? Is it the man who has protections from being falsely accused of adultery or women?

Men have had to be historically commanded not to follow their baser instincts and to not rape or seduce, to not have sex with family members, to not engage in homosexual relationships, to not touch a woman when she is having her period, to not dishonor a woman without proof. Women don’t naturally do those things (or at least they didn’t before women’s lib decided we should act more like men–somehow acting like men made us more sexually promiscuous and murderous. Go figure!).

In the Kingdom of Israel, the Covenant, the constitution of the Kingdom of God, protected women from men from beginning to end. Unfortunately, in exile and without Sanhedrin courts in place, we women are left without protection unless we take advantage of the laws of the land concerning marital legality.

Like polygamy and polygyny, this is one of those areas that people feel very strongly about and preach completely out of the societal context–and amazingly, to the detriment of women and children in both cases and to the benefit of men. Again, go figure.

The Character of God as Father 4 — Patient Guidance and Increasing Accountability

I would say that one of the chief hallmarks of godly parenting is the patient acceptance that it takes time and effort and many mistakes before their children can learn and do what is being communicated to them. Like it or not, our children are not born with an adult understanding of the concepts of obedience and loving behavior. That takes years of training, and no decent parent would ever expect their 2 year old to show the same self-awareness or have the same level of self-control as a teenager. Unfortunately, and perhaps this is the result of our being increasingly separated from others, with smaller and smaller families living far from their relatives, many people are unequipped to know what to reasonably expect from small children due to a lack of cultural experience. An only, or youngest, child, for example, would be quite at a loss. As a result, we have become increasingly impatient with the learning process, wanting the kids to shape up and get with the program as soon as possible. It never occurs to many that it takes years for the human brain to become mature enough to start to want to do what we wish it would naturally do — often because we are not really interested in the day to day training up of children. We want football stars and college graduates, and often push them through the stages leading up to that with the iron hand of impatience.

But this is not how we see God operating. In the garden, Adam was given one do and one don’t and was told the consequences. He was told to guard “shawmar” the garden and was told not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. I find it interesting, therefore, that God did not rebuke him for failing to guard the garden — after all, Adam was the one who let in the deceiver! Adam’s failure in this regard introduced evil into their midst and his wife suffered for it and fell into deception, and then Adam fell into disobedience. Now, did God destroy them and start over? No, they were children. He removed them from access to the Tree of Life, and placed them outside of Eden. He told them the consequences, that the ground was cursed, and told Eve that they would bring up children in pain. And we see this is true — the world has been greatly corrupted by the mixing of that which is good and evil, initiated by Adam allowing evil into the garden and Eve being deceived by that evil. And we see that what could have been a beautiful existence in the garden raising children who were truly innocent, was marred by pain and tragedy.

Here is what we do not see in the account. We do not see God jumping on Adam’s back when he starts getting lax about who he allows in the garden and who he allows to associate with his wife. Adam is given a chance to get things right, and he does not, which leads to trouble. Eve was not careful about who she was talking with, and started questioning God after listening to someone who was questioning Him. Both of them showed a lack of discernment in their actions, but they were allowed to make mistakes without a constant barrage of insults and impatient nagging. When the mistakes came, God did not insult them, he corrected them and implemented the consequences, some of which they could not have foreseen. Certainly Adam had been told that he would surely die, but he didn’t know that to God, a day is as a thousand years. He had no concept that suffering for what we would consider almost an eternity was even among the options. Certainly if he had perceived that, if he had had experience, he would have probably have moved heaven and earth to drive the serpent from the garden as soon as he started talking trash, or maybe even before that. But how could Adam relate to the idea of having to work hard, or even sweating, or suffering, or imagine what it was like to raise a bunch of rugrats who oppose you at every step and sometimes end up committing murder? Adam had never seen sin before, he had never seen consequence before, and so like a child, he couldn’t really fully grasp the consequences of his actions.

Did God set them up to fail? No more so than we set up our children to fail by simply bringing innocent beings into this world. And so, in parenting, we need to look at the example set for us by God. Firm guidance, no constant nagging, allow failure, discipline but do not tear down, and then stick with them through the consequences of their failures. This is how we handle children. This is also how God, and how we, should handle new believers — as small children. What I described above it the epitome of the union of grace and law. Yes there are standards, but grace abounds in a loving paternal way. God never overreacts, or moves in a hasty manner, or demands more than we have the maturity to give Him.

As we move our way through the scriptures we come across many examples where God holds His children to increasingly greater standards, based on their level of maturity. Again, this is a sound, perfectly reasonable parenting practice. Toddlers are more understanding and controlled than babies, as youth are over toddlers and teens are over youth. Greater understanding, more self-control, more responsibility, more freedom — greater consequences.

In the Torah, we see that the laws concerning children are very few as compared to the laws which govern adults. In the book of Acts, we see the same pattern in effect in chapter 15 — the laws governing new believers are few compared to the laws they would learn when Moses was taught each Sabbath. In this ruling by the Jerusalem council, they followed the parenting principles outlined in Torah. Now, lets look at Abraham, a man who started out as the son of an idolater (Joshua 24:2) and ended his life as our collective father in the faith, who walked in greater and greater measures of both law and freedom through faith.

We are introduced to Abram in Genesis 11, who lived in what we would now call Babylon, Nimrod’s pagan kingdom. The first recorded contact between Abram and God is when God speaks to him and tells him to leave his life — He gives a command and a promise.

12 Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: 2 And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: 3 And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. 4 So Abram departed, as the Lord had spoken unto him; and Lot went with him: and Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran.

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So God, (1) tells Abram to leave his pagan land, and his family, and (2) tells him to start walking. But Abram disobeyed and took Lot — a decision that repeatedly worked out badly for Abram. But we see no evidence that God was nagging him about it all the way to Caanan, and it is my belief that Abram took Lot because he had no son, it may even be that according to ancient near east tradition, he had formally adopted Lot and made him his heir. But that isn’t written down, just my hunch.

Now, they came to the Land and due to a famine, decided to go south to Egypt. While in Egypt, Abram concocts a lie designed to save his own life. As Sarai his wife is very beautiful, he asks her to say she is his sister so they will not kill Abram and seize her. Now, I am not condemning Abraham, he was what we call a new believer. He had a promise that he would be a great nation, but he didn’t believe it yet, otherwise he would not have feared for his life. I can totally relate to this inability to trust in promises, I think we all can. Again, we do not see God nagging Abram about this being a bad idea, God is going to let Abram fail and learn from the consequences. So Sarai is taken, and Abram had to deal with that, and a whole lot of Egyptians suffered for it as well when plagues came down upon Pharoah’s house. Worst of all, when the lie was discovered and Sarai was set free — they came out of the deal with an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar. Like Lot, Hagar caused a lot of trouble as well.

We see a pattern emerging, sin followed by short term consequence followed by completely unforeseeable long term consequences, and yet what we should also see is that Abram was never smacked around or abandoned by God.

It is directly after this event that Lot’s presence starts becoming a problem, our first long term consequence and our first evidence of why Abram was told to leave his family behind. We have strife between the family groups which leads to separation, which eventually leads to Abram having to go to war in order to rescue Lot. All of this, of course, was entirely preventable and unforeseeable. But part of Abram’s walk was learning that God sees the unforeseen, it was part of growing up.

In Genesis 15, we see something remarkable happen — despite his failures, he has continued walking with God faithfully. God repeats His promise that Abram will be a great nation, and cuts a covenant with him. And Abram believed Him.

But in Genesis 16 we see that although Abram believed God, Abram did not yet understand that God Himself brings about those things He promises if we are simply faithful and obey and wait upon Him. Abram, encouraged by Sarai, takes matters into his own hands and takes Hagar as his concubine. Hagar’s pregnancy turns out to be a disaster due to her prideful rebellion in the wake of it, and of course the fruit of that union, Ishmael, continues to plague the world to this day. All this the unforeseeable consequence of one lie in Egypt.

In Genesis 17, we see the covenant of circumcision, and the names of Abram and Sarai are changed to Abraham and Sarah. God tells Abraham that Sarah will bear him the promised son, even though Ishmael is now 13 years old. I can imagine that only now does Abraham start to see how far he has strayed from the original plan that God had to make Him the father of “a nation” because now the promise is that he will be the father of “many nations.” God never said, “Because you screwed up and disobeyed.” Abraham probably figured that out already, but God in His fatherly mercy was making allowances for the situation as it was, even though the long term consequences were still there.

In Genesis 20, Abraham lied to Abimelech and Sarah was taken again into captivity, same exact lie he told in Egypt even though he had just been promised that he and Sarah would have a baby in the coming year — sometimes we have to learn things the hard way. In Genesis 21, Isaac was finally born, and Ishmael was sent away, probably Abraham’s most painful consequence of distrust. However, Abraham, under God’s gentle guidance, was growing in maturity. We know this because of what happens in Genesis 22.

Now before we get to what happens, I want to state that we never have an example of God raging against Abraham, no matter how badly he screwed up, no matter what sort of immaturity he exhibited. Why? Because there is a difference between immaturity and rebellion. The prophets preached against the rebellious, not the immature. We must always be careful to discern the difference between someone who lacks maturity vs someone who is willfully rebellious. A harsh word that might turn around the rebellious might needlessly discourage and crush someone who is failing and yet trying their best.

In Genesis 22, Abraham is told to sacrifice his own son as an olah, a whole burnt offering. Scholars believe that this was probably at least 30 years later, and by this time Abraham had seen God keep every promise he had ever made, in fact, the Word tells us later that Abraham had such deep trust in God at this point that he was sure that if he sacrificed his son, that God would resurrect him in order to keep the promises of a nation through him. Abraham had reached full maturity.

Wow, what a difference, and what an amazing story of parenting. May we all endeavor to live up to His exalted example. And may Messiah reign over an age where all children are parented this way.