Originally published on the Doxa blog.
It is the middle of the afternoon at the Oaks of Mamre, the hour when nothing in a desert camp moves, and Abraham is sitting in the shade of his tent door.
He looks up and three men are standing nearby. So a ninety-nine-year-old man runs in the heat, bows to the ground and offers them "a bit of bread" (Genesis 18:5). Then he orders a feast: three seahs of fine flour, about twenty litres, for Sarah to bake, and a tender calf. He sets curds and milk and meat before his guests "and stood by them under the tree as they ate" (Genesis 18:8).
Then one of the strangers asks, "Where is your wife Sarah?" (Genesis 18:9). He knows her name, and He uses the new one, the name God gave her only a chapter ago.
The narrator has told us from the first line that "the LORD appeared to Abraham" (Genesis 18:1), and now the LORD repeats a promise Abraham has already heard, this time with Sarah in range. "I will surely return to you at this time next year, and your wife Sarah will have a son!" (Genesis 18:10). She is behind the tent flap, listening.
She is eighty-nine and "had passed the age of childbearing" (Genesis 18:11). So she laughs, without a sound, to herself: "After I am worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure?" (Genesis 18:12). The Hebrew word behind worn out is the verb Moses used when he told Israel that their clothing did not wear out on forty years of road (Deuteronomy 8:4). Sarah is describing herself as a garment past mending.
The LORD hears a laugh that made no noise, from the other side of a goat-hair wall. "Why did Sarah laugh?" (Genesis 18:13). She had called her husband old. When the LORD repeats her to Abraham, He leaves that part out: "Can I really bear a child when I am old?" (Genesis 18:13). He knows exactly what she thought, and He passes on only the part that concerns her.
Then He asks the question the whole chapter turns on: "Is anything too difficult for the LORD?" (Genesis 18:14). He sets the date a second time, and it stays where it was.
Sarah is frightened and says she did not laugh. He answers her directly, "but you did laugh" (Genesis 18:15), and that is the last word of the scene. He names what is true. The promise goes on standing beside it.
This is what it is to be known by God. He knows her new name, the laugh she kept inside, the thing she said about her husband and the fear that made her deny it, and none of it moves the date. Knowing Him starts there, with the discovery that He has already heard what we kept to ourselves and is still speaking to us. Hebrews remembers her for the year after the laugh, when "she considered Him faithful who had promised" (Hebrews 11:11).
The LORD who ate curds and calf under Abraham's tree would one day come to stay. "The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us" (John 1:14). On the evening of the resurrection His friends could not believe it "because of their joy and amazement" (Luke 24:41), so Jesus asked for broiled fish "and ate it in front of them" (Luke 24:43). Both times God shared a meal with the people He had come to, while His news was still too good for them to believe.
So when God has said something that you laughed at on the inside, write it down with the date beside it, and read it back when the year is half gone. He heard the laugh already.
What has God said to you that you laughed at quietly, and what would it look like to hold it until the time He set?
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Also please feel free to read the Doxa Deeper Dive below where we delve into the original language and historical context.
The Doxa Deeper Dive
Too Hard for God, or Too Wonderful? What Sarah Heard in Genesis 18
Originally published on the Doxa blog.
An English Bible has God ask whether anything is too difficult for Him. The Hebrew verb in Genesis 18:14 asks whether anything is too wonderful.
What does "too difficult" mean in Genesis 18:14?
The verb is pala (H6381): to be extraordinary, out of reach, beyond what a person can do or grasp. Its noun is pele (H6382), a wonder. Israel sang that noun on the far shore of the sea, praising the LORD for "performing wonders" (Exodus 15:11).
So the question put to Abraham in the hearing of Sarah is asked in the language Scripture keeps for God's own acts. Is anything too much of a wonder for the LORD? The thing Sarah laughed at, a son for a woman long past bearing, belongs to the very class of thing His people would later praise Him for doing.
Follow the word further and it keeps appearing in stories of promised sons. In Judges, an angel of the LORD tells another childless wife she will bear a son. Her husband asks the messenger's name, and the angel answers with a question: why ask, "since it is beyond comprehension?" (Judges 13:18). The Hebrew there is peli (H6383), wonderful. Then Isaiah announces a child who will carry the word as a name: "And He will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace" (Isaiah 9:6). Wonderful is pele. The word God used to ask whether Sarah's son was beyond Him is the first of the names Isaiah gives the Son who would be born to save us.
Centuries after Abraham the LORD asked His question again, almost word for word, while Babylon's army besieged Jerusalem and He told Jeremiah to buy a field in a land about to fall: "Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh. Is anything too difficult for Me?" (Jeremiah 32:27). Same verb. Both times the promise looked absurd to the person holding it, and both times God answered by naming Himself.
What did a meal for the gods mean in Abraham's world?
The God who asks whether anything is too wonderful for Him has just eaten at Abraham's table, and in Abraham's world that meant something. Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldeans (Genesis 11:31), and in Mesopotamia the gods had to be fed. Temple staff set meals before the divine statues every day, because the gods were believed to depend on them. In the Babylonian flood story preserved in the Gilgamesh epic, when the survivor finally offers a sacrifice, the gods smell it and gather over it like flies, famished after the flood cut off their supply.
Genesis 18 runs the other way. The LORD comes to Abraham's tent as a guest at a meal given freely, and He needs nothing from it. Abraham's "bit of bread" (Genesis 18:5) becomes three seahs of solet (H5560), the same fine flour Israel's law later required for the grain offering (Leviticus 2:1). And the guest is the one who gives. The meal ends with God promising Sarah a son. In the stories of the nations, people fed the gods to keep them alive; in Genesis God eats at a man's table and gives him life in return.
How did Israel first hear God's appointed time in Genesis 18?
The guest who needs nothing then does what the hungry gods of Ur never did, and sets a date He binds Himself to. In verse 10 He says, literally, when the time lives again, the season coming back round. In verse 14 He says "At the appointed time I will return to you" (Genesis 18:14), using mo'ed (H4150).
The people who first heard Genesis read knew mo'ed as their own worship word. It named their calendar: "These are My appointed feasts" (Leviticus 23:2). And it named the place God met them, the ohel mo'ed, the Tent of Meeting. They remembered how it went in the wilderness. When Moses went out to that tent, "all the people would stand at the entrances to their own tents and watch Moses until he entered the tent" (Exodus 33:8). Then "the LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend" (Exodus 33:11).
So when Israel heard that Sarah was "listening at the entrance to the tent" (Genesis 18:10), the word petach (H6607), entrance, put their mother exactly where they had stood. At the door of a tent, a little behind, overhearing the LORD speak to someone else, and hearing a promise with a mo'ed on it. Every feast they kept was an appointed time, and here was the appointed time God set with their family, said twice: the day He would return and a son would be born. Genesis records that He kept it: "Sarah conceived and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the very time God had promised" (Genesis 21:2).
What does Genesis 18 show about knowing God?
Sarah weighed the promise against her own body and found it impossible. God asked her to weigh it against Him, in a word that means wonder, and then showed her what kind of God was asking: a guest who needs nothing from His hosts, gives them a son, and fixes the day He will do it. Scripture spends the rest of its pages attaching that word for wonder to what He does and, finally, to His Son.
Knowing Him means learning to ask His question the way He asked it. Write down what He has said, and the time He set if He set one. When it looks out of reach, weigh it against the God Isaiah called Wonderful.
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