ISHMAEL’S name means “God shall hear.” This is true at all times, as is also the lesson Hagar, Ishmael’s mother, learned: “Thou God seest me.”
Think of it, dear young friend, “God hears” and “God sees.” Ishmael had to learn also that others could see and hear.
It was a great day in Abraham’s house when the child of promise, Isaac, was weaned, for he made a great feast; but sad to say in the midst of it, Ishmael is found mocking. Now mocking at divine things and at the ways of God is a very wicked thing. To make this plain, read 2 Kings 2:23,2423And he went up from thence unto Beth-el: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. 24And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them. (2 Kings 2:23‑24).
God had taken Elijah to heaven in a whirlwind and Elisha was going to Bethel, and “as he was going up by the way, there came forth, little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.”
They did not want the man of God amongst them, therefore they wanted him to go to heaven in the way Elijah had gone, but God heard and God saw, “and there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.”
“God is not mocked,” nor will He allow His things or people to be mocked at Ishmael had to be cast out of Abraham’s house, also his mother. But how different with Isaac, how he trusts his father! although his father gets word from God to offer him up, and in Genesis 22, they are on the way to mount Moriah, the wood is laid on Isaac’s shoulder, Abraham takes the fire and the knife.
As they journey on, Isaac speaks to his father and says, “My father ... .behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?”
Listen to the beautiful answer.
And Abraham said, “God will provide Himself a lamb for a burnt offering.” You know the rest of this beautiful story, how obedience gets its reward. The caught ram is offered up instead of Isaac, but you know a ram is not a “lamb.” The time had not come for God’s Lamb, our Lord Jesus Christ, to come; but hundreds of years after we read in John 1, “Behold the Lamb of God.” Jesus, God’s Lamb, has been offered up; by His sacrifice, sin has been put away. It is by His precious blood we have redemption.
“Precious, precious blood of Jesus,
Shed on Calvary;
Shed for rebels, shed for sinners,
Shed for me.
Though thy sins are red like crimson,
Deep in scarlet glow;
Jesus’ precious blood can make them
White as snow.”
O then to be delivered from mocking, but may we like Isaac be obedient to what God would have us to do and to say, that we might be His for time and eternity.
ML 12/06/1925