Abram's wife Sarai had borne him no child......................The angel of Yahweh said to her, 'Go back to your mistress and submit to her.' The angel of Yahweh said to her, I will make your descendants too numerous to be counted.' Then the angel of Yahweh said to her: 'Now you have conceived, and you will bear a son, and you shall name him Ishmael. - Gen.16:1-11 -
God said to Abraham, 'As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah. I will bless her and moreover give you a son by her; kings of peoples shall descend from her. Abraham bowed to the ground, and he laughed, thinking to himself, 'Is a child to be born to a man one hundred years old, and will Sarah have a child at the age of ninety?' Abraham said to God, 'Oh, let Ishmael live in your presence!' But God replied, 'No, but your wife Sarah shall bear you a son whom you are to name Isaac. With him I will establish my Covenant, a Covenant in perpetuity, to be his God and the God of his descendants after him. For Ishmael too I grant you your request: I bless him and I will make him fruitful and greatly increased in numbers. He shall be the father of twelve princes, and I will make him into a great nation. But my Covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah will bear you at this time next year.' When he had finished speaking to Abraham God went up from him. - Gen. 17:15-27 -
Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. Then Sarah said, 'God has given me cause to laugh; all those who hear of it will laugh with me.' She added:
'Who would have told Abraham
that Sarah would nurse children!
Yet I have borne him a child in his old age.'
The child grew and was weaned, and Abraham gave a great banquet on the day Isaac was weaned. Now Sarah watched the son that Hagar [the slave-girl] the Egyptian had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. 'Drive away that slave-girl and her son' she said to Abraham; 'this slave-girl's son is not to share the inheritance with my son Isaac.' This greatly distressed Abraham because of his son, but God said to him, 'Do not distress yourself on account of the boy and your slave-girl. Grant Sarah all she asks of you, for it is through Isaac that your name will be carried on. But the slave-girl's son I will also make into a nation, for he is your child too.' Rising early next morning Abraham took some bread and a skin of water and giving them to Hagar, he put the child on her shoulder and sent her away.
She wandered off into the wilderness of Beersheba. When the skin of water was finished she abandoned the child under a bush. Then she went and sat down at a distance, about a bow shot away, saying to herself. 'I cannot see the child die.' So she sat at a distance; and the child wailed and wept.
But God heard the boy wailing, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven. 'What is wrong, Hagar?' he asked. 'Do not be afraid, for God has heard the boy's cry where he lies. Come pick up the boy and hold him safe, for I will make him a great nation.' Then God opened Hagar's eyes and she saw a well, so she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.
God was with the boy. He grew up and made his home in the wilderness, and he became a bowman. He made his home in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother chose him a wife from the land of Egypt. - Gen. 21:5-21 -
Saint Paul explained that the seed of Abraham not only referred to his physical descendants, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, and he went even further, stating that Abraham's seed is Jesus Christ rather than the nation of Israel.
That is why what fulfils the promise depends on faith, so that it may be a free gift and be available to all of Abraham 's descendants, not only those who belong to the Law but also those who belong to the faith of Abraham who is the father of all of us. As scripture says: I have made you the ancestors of many nations - Rom. 4:16 -
It was through his faith Noah, when he had been warned by God of something that had never been seen before, felt a holy fear and built an ark to save his family....... By faith he arrived, as a foreigner, in the Promised Land, and lived there as if in a strange country, with Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. - Heb. 11:7-9 -
Compare this, brothers, with what happens in ordinary life. If a will has been drawn up in due form, no one is allowed to disregard it or add to it. Now the promises were addressed to Abraham and to his descendants - notice, in passing, that scripture does not use a plural word as if there were several descendants, it uses the singular: to his posterity, which is Christ. - Gal. 3:15-16 -
Jesus often used the imagery of seeds in His parables. In the New Testament, the Gospel according to Saint Matthew in Chapter 13:1-32, Jesus told three different parables involving seeds: the parable of the sower, the parable of the darnel, the parable of the mustard seed. The Lord Jesus Christ compared His own death and resurrection in a figuratively sense to the sowing of the seeds. Saint Paul's confirmed it.
Jesus replied to them:
Now the hour has come
for the Son of Man to be glorified.
I tell you, most solemnly,
unless a wheat grain falls on the ground and dies,
it remains only a single grain;
but if it dies,
it yields a rich harvest. - John 12:23-24 -
Someone may ask, 'How are dead people raised, and what sort of body do they have when they come back?' They are stupid questions. Whatever you sow in the ground has to die before it is given new life and the thing that you sow is not what is going to come; you sow a bare grain, say of wheat or something like that, and then God gives it the sort of body that he has chosen: each sort of seed gets its own sort of body. - 1Cor. 15:35-38 -
Don't delude yourself into thinking God can be cheated: when a man sows, there he reaps: if he sows in the field of self-indulgence he will get a harvest of corruption out of it; if he sows in the field of the Spirit he will get from it a harvest of eternal life. - Gal. 6:7-8 -
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Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
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