Now we’ll go on to the twenty-first chapter. “And the Lord visited Sarah as He had said, and the Lord did unto Sarah as He had spoken, at the set time of which God had spoken to him”. So at last the little boy baby, Isaac, came to live at Abraham’s and Sarah’s home. How happy they must have been and so much the more because they had had to wait so long for him. Older folks than you, perhaps (only I don’t know how old you are), have found many a time that God answers prayers, God does what He says He will, and not just in Bible stories, but in our own lives right now, today. A Christian man said to me one day a few years ago when he was feeling sad and lonely, and thought. God wasn’t caring about him very much: “Do you think God answers prayers?” And because I have had so many, many answers to my own prayers, I answered just as quickly as I could “Ask me instead if God ever doesn’t answer prayer!” I just love to read those words at the beginning of chapter 21: “And the Lord visited Sarah as He had said, and the Lord did unto Sarah as He had spoken” Our bad ways and cold hearts may make- Him slower than He wants to be to give us answers to our prayers, but depend upon it, if we take our cares to Him and ask to be taken care of, to be given what is good for us, He will answer us, and we shall know without His saying a word, that God has answered us.
But when Isaac came, Ishmael had to go. Sarah rightly said that the son of the bondwoman could not be heir along with her son. Abraham found it very hard to say to Hagar that she had to go, but God told him Sarah was right, for “in. Isaac shall thy seed be called.” So early the very next morning as I suppose it was, after God spoke to him, Abraham gave a lot of bread and water to Hagar and she went away with her boy and wandered in the wilderness to the south. By and bye the water was all gone, and Ishmael was dying from thirst, and Hagar put him in the little shade that a bush gave and went quite a distance away from him and sat down and cried very sadly. Poor Hagar! sent away from the place that had been home so long, with no husband to care for and protect her and the fourteen-year old boy, lost in the wilderness and apparently no one cared! But as the angel of the Lord had found the mother before (chapter 16:7) when she was hopeless and helpless in the wilderness not very far from this place she was now in, so now we read that “God heard the voice of the lad” (verse 17). Isn’t that encouraging to us? Notice it doesn’t say He heard the sound of the mother’s crying, though of course He did, but that boy Ishmael,— I wonder if he was praying to God as he lay there apparently soon to die? There came a time while the Lord Jesus was on earth when mothers brought their children, and little ones too, to Him, and the disciples roughly said to them, O take your children away; Jesus hasn’t any time for any but grown folks, but the Lord not only rebuked his disciples but said, “of such” (little children, and grown folks who would trust Him like them) “is the kingdom of heaven” and took them up in His arms and blessed them.
So the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven and told her “Fear not, for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is.” And God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water and got the water her boy needed so badly. “And God was with him” verse 20 says. He must have learned at home about God, don’t you think? I do; Ishmael I think had trusted God for salvation.
The next thing we read is that King Abimelech of Gerar, about whom we read in chapter 20, came over to see Abraham from the land of the Philistines with Phichol, the general of his army. But not to complain this time! No, it was to ask Abraham to promise not to do him harm, that Abimelech came to God’s servant, because he saw, as verse 22 tells us he said, that God was with Abraham in all that he did. That’s what comes of those that are saved earnestly trying to please God.