Galatians 4.

First of all, go read Galatians 4. Yes...now.

Ok, thank you. Isn't it great?! I'm mainly talking about verses 21-31, Abraham's two children. Way back in Genesis, God promised Abraham that He would make his descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky...Abraham believed God, but when he starting thinking about it, he realized that he and his wife Sarah were much too old to have children, so he took matters into his own hands. He tried to have a child with another woman, in hopes that this would fulfill God's promise. Wrong. If God promises something, He doesn't need us silly little powerless humans to do anything to make it happen. So Abraham's concubine, Hagar, had Ishmael...and Abraham thought that this was the son that would carry on Abraham's name and cause him to have countless descendants. Wrong again.

Nothing is impossible with God, so He allowed Abraham and Sarah to have a son, Isaac, who was indeed the one who would carry on the family line. Isaac was the son born to the free wife, signifying that we are free to submit to God's plan and have the marvelous things that He has planned come true. Ishmael was not the child of promise, as it appeared to Abraham and the others around at the time. (As a side note, this is the separation point between Islam and Christianity. It carries on to this day that Muslims are bound to their law, the Koran...while Christians are free from slavery to the law because of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross 2,000 years ago.)

And another thing...have we ever truly considered the intense faith it took for Abraham to obey God when he was commanded to take Isaac up on a mountain and sacrifice him to the LORD? After Isaac was born and Abraham realized that through Isaac God's promise was going to be fulfilled, I'm sure Abraham thought that God would sovereignly protect Isaac with a huge cloud of angels or something...so when Abraham was commanded to kill his own son, I can only imagine the turmoil going on inside of him. Paul tells us that Abraham was considered righteous because of his faith...Abraham learned through the birth of Isaac as the child of promise that if God wants to do something, He will do it...Abraham believed that if Isaac was going to be killed, God had another way of fulfilling His promise. Mmm.

Abraham got it.