Now we turn to chapter sixteen in which we come to the end of this part of Abram’s history. He had believed God in giving up his home in the East, his native land and his false gods; he had come into a strange country peopled by many nations, and there God had told Abram the land should be his by and bye, meanwhile he was to wait as a stranger in the country. God had not given Abram and Sarai any children though they had been married for many years and were now no longer young, yet all that God had told Abram was founded on a promised son.
One of the things God’s children have to learn is to have patience, to wait for God’s time to come. And we don’t like to wait. That is why, I think, He makes His children sometimes wait long for something that has been in His mind to give them all the while, it isn’t that He doesn’t love them, but because He loves, and He wants to keep them from trusting to themselves and making sometimes terrible mistakes. As far as we let God into our plans and our lives we shall not go wrong.
Sarai thought she never would get the promised boy baby of her very own, since so many years had gone by—ten at least since they came into Canaan, and she and her husband agreed that it was time to act. Abram should take Sarai’s Egyptian maid, Hagar, as a sort of second wife, and if Hagar should have a boy baby that would surely be the promised son. But they didn’t ask God what He thought about their plan; He gave Hagar a boy baby, so that part came true, but Ishmael was only the cause of grief and bad temper, lots of trouble for Sarai and Abram, and his children the roving Arabs, have never been friends of the children of Abraham.