BEMA 11: Here I Am (2025)

Transcription Status

25 Jul 25 — Corrections by Michele Moultrie approved

17 Mar 25 — Initial public release

16 Mar 25 — Transcript approved for release

Transcription Volunteers: Sergey Bazylko, Michele Moultrie

Here I Am

Brent Billings: This is the BEMA Podcast with Marty Solomon. I’m his co-host Brent Billings. Today we’re with Josh Bossé to continue our look at the kind of partner God has chosen in Avraham.

Marty Solomon: We got to start with a recap. We’re not going to do this forever, but we’re going to do this a lot in session one towards the beginning. It just helps us keep our head around the narrative that’s building. We’re not used to looking at the story of the Bible as a narrative, as a singular arc. And so I just love this practice.

Brent: One other thing, Marty, I think this episode is going to be pretty big. We got a lot of stuff to cover today. This might be a longer episode than you’re used to of what we’ve been doing.

So I’m going to actually maybe put in chapter markers here because I know when I’m listening to something, I’m like, I need a break. I got to figure out where to stop this. I don’t know where to stop it. I’m going to give you a place to stop. So I’m going to put chapter markers. If your podcast app supports chapters, you’ll see like, oh, this is a good spot to stop.

Marty: Yeah, absolutely.

Brent: So I’ll throw that in there to make it easier on if you need to break up your listening session.

Marty: I love that. Alright. “Chapter One,” our little recap. We had a preface, Genesis 1 through 11. We’re just going to do this in one sweeping statement. The preface was like eight different stories, 11 chapters, trying to convince humankind to trust God. God and not live from fear and insecurity. Eleven chapters of just, “Hey, everything is good. I got this. Trust me.” And generally, a bunch of people not doing that. They didn’t trust. They did live out of their fear and the world was falling apart.

But then God met this guy named Avram. And Avram was willing to set his insecurity aside. I’m sure he still had it. Goodness, he’s got to have his fear and his insecurity. He was willing to set it aside to the best of his ability to the benefit of others. He wasn’t perfect. Avram’s made a few mistakes up to this point, at least a few. He’s not perfect. He’s not just a pure hero. He’s not a fantasy character in the biblical Text, but he’s learned from his mistakes in large part, not perfectly. He’s learned and he’s kept trusting.

He was willing to give up Lot twice, which was the only way. He doubled down on it. It was the only way that he could see God’s promises coming true. But he’s continued to like trust, “I’m going to do the right thing, even though I don’t understand how it’s going to work. I’m going to walk in righteousness and justice.” And then we looked at how God makes a blood path covenant. He lets Avram push back. Like you see this push and pull. You see Avram leaning in. You see God leaning in. They lean towards each other in covenant, but also God says He’s going to expect a little bit more, like their relationship is growing.

Like over the course of four chapters and maybe four decades, I don’t know how much time has gone by, but over the course of years of walking with God, God is expecting that this relationship is progressing. That dysfunction that we’ve seen, it’s going to continue. We saw in the last episode, the dysfunction continues with the mistreatment of Hagar. This family is not perfect. They’re not a bastion of like, this is exactly what faith looks like. It's a messy faith, just like your faith and just like my faith. They mistreat Hagar.

God meets him there in that spot, and he takes them further into righteousness and justice. And that’s where we pick up the story here. We have these questions. Who is Avram going to be? Is he going to keep growing? Is he going to keep learning? Is he going to keep becoming better? And there you go. Josh, do you have anything to add before we have Brent start reading? There’s so much goodies in here.

Josh Bossé: Oh man, this episode is going to kill me. Avraham is... We’re covering so much text. I used to lead a Bible study and we were going through Genesis and we took a year going through like five chapters of Genesis.

Once we got to the Avraham stuff, everything just slowed down to a snail’s pace because there’s so much here. There’s so, so much here, but this is just a wonderful story. And yeah, no, I’m ready to keep pushing.

Marty: Alright, no biggie. We’re just going to do Sodom and Gomorrah. We’re going to do Avram and Avimelech. We’re gonna talk about Hagar. We’re gonna do the sacrifice of Isaac all in one episode today. No big deal Brent you better get us into that. Genesis 18. Let’s go.

Brent: Okay. The Lord appeared to Avraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. Avraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground.

Marty: Alright I’m going to interrupt you Brent, right in the middle of this section. What we are seeing and we have kind of hinted at it here and there, but we really need to talk about it here, is this Eastern premium.  In the Eastern world, there is this unbelievable premium on hospitality. Like most Jews will point out, like we had an episode break, Brent, but what had Avraham just done? Why is he sitting in the shade of a tree?

Brent: Yeah, he’s not just chilling. He’s resting and recovering from his circumcision.

Marty: He’s had a little surgery recently and he’s resting in the shade of a tree.

Josh: [laughs]

Marty: He’s going to need some time to recover. And here these visitors show up and Jews have pointed out in their teaching, the kind of character we see in Avram. It’s that same thing that God’s seen in Avram. He’s going to get up and hurry. Doesn’t say that he runs, runs necessarily, but he gets up and he hurries to serve, to show hospitality to three visitors that he doesn’t even know.

And this is a part of the world that I have experienced firsthand. I’ve experienced it in both Turkey and in Israel. I can remember the first time I experienced this, I was over with Ray Vander Laan and we were just, we were outside of Tel Arad and we took off, it seemed like away from the bus in the middle of nowhere. We walked over this hill, and as we walked over this hill, we could see this little Bedouin village.

So Bedouin village, I don’t know, maybe five, six families live in this village, large extended families. They’re going to be Muslim Bedouins. And we start heading, we’re heading right towards this village. I’m like, what are we doing? Because I had grown up like in America, where I was told, I had been told about Muslims, Brent, like I had been told by the news, I had been told by my faith group, I had been told growing up, like, like, we’re heading towards this village.

And as I, as we start to get closer, we’re probably like half a mile out, three quarters of a mile out. And we see all these little kids, and they, they come out of the houses, and they start running towards us. And they come out to us, and there’s these little five, six, seven, eight year old kids, a whole group of them, and they greet us. And we can’t, like, we don’t speak Arabic, they don’t speak English. But they come out, they greet us, and they usher us into the village.

And we got to the village of this woman. Her name was Hadija, which is the Arabic form of Hadassah, if I remember correctly.

Josh: Oh.

Marty: And we get to her house, and there’s 54 of us, 54 white Americans. And we just show up, and she has this huge porch. And we all cram together in her porch. And she just starts making honey tea and baking bread on this flat iron stove. And she just serves us bread and brews us tea until they literally run out of supplies. Like they’ve served us everything that they have. And you can tell it’s like the whole village stopped, like everybody came in, all the women and the children were all there serving these guests. It was this unbelievable hospitality I had never seen.

And I remember Ray, while she’s making this bread, he’s talking to us about Eastern hospitality and this world of hospitality. And he says, “I don’t know how many of you, if you were back home in America and you saw 54 Arabs come over the hill, how many of you would send your six-year-old children out to greet them from a mile away?” Like, I’m not sure how many of us, even with our great American wealth, even have 54 teacups to serve 50 guests tea. We’re just not built to be—but this world is built—

I can remember we had a translator that day. And at one point we were just having tea and she was all done making bread. We’re just eating bread and drinking tea. And we asked her, one of the people in our group asked her, “What is your greatest dream in the world?” And she has a smile on her face and she’s on her knees and she kind of spins around with her arms out. And she says, “Salam.” And she says something else, and the translator says, “She wishes for peace. She wishes that we could all do this, just like this, forever in eternity.” It was like, “Oh my goodness.”

And Ray told us, like, “If this village were to come under attack, like this whole village would lay down their life on behalf of us as visitors to protect their visitor.” This is the premium. We’re going to see this in the story today. This premium on hospitality that I don’t think we are used to or that we understand. And I’ve seen it more than once, like, this is the real deal.

Ray told us she didn’t know we were coming. I didn’t call her ahead of time. She wasn’t ready with her 54 teacups. But even when I was done, I was like, okay, but like, really? But then it happened literally in a whole other country with a setting with people I didn’t even know. I remember walking down a back alley of a Turkish city, and all of a sudden we heard this shriek behind us. It was the middle of Ramadan.

And we turned around and there was this woman and she was making, they looked like elephant ears. I was told they were honey cakes, but they looked like giant elephant ears like you would get at the fair. And she had a stack of like 30 of them. She was making it for when they would break their fast that evening. So this is what she was making for her family to break the fast.

And she saw a group of 50 some odd Americans walking down an alley who didn’t even see her because she was behind us. And she came out and she handed us, she just started handing each of us one of these elephant ear type honey cakes. And she ran out and she just went back and started making more as fast as she could. This is the world.

And I remember asking a Muslim friend of mine over there, like, “Why do you all do this?” And his response was, “Because we’re all children of Abraham. And Abraham changed this corner of the world. And I just love to tell that story whenever we get here to Genesis 18, because we see that. It was Avraham.

And in a very literal way, we are all Avraham’s kids, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Avraham is our father of faith. And he did teach us something about hospitality. I just thought that was so beautiful. My friend said that. But this is what Avraham is like. He’s not going to function. I function out of my own security. Ugh, gross.

Josh: [laughs]

Marty: Marty, I function out of my own insecurity. Avram, I think like the Tower of Babel, like the last time we had Josh on, we were chatting about the Tower. That’s how I think, goodness. But anyway, Brent, give us the next verse.

Brent: He said, “If I have found favor in your eyes, my lord, do not pass your servant by. Let a little water be brought, and then you may all wash your feet and rest under this tree. Let me get you something to eat, so you can be refreshed and then go on your way, now that you have come to your servant.” “Very well,” they answered. “Do as you say.” So Avraham hurried into the tent to Sarah. “Quick,” he said, “get three seahs of the finest flour and knead it and bake some bread.”

Marty: Now, three seahs. That’s three measures. A seah—I mean everybody argues about measurements—so we don’t know, know, know for sure. But the common understanding of a seah is 20 pounds. That means three seahs is, I’m no math major, but that’s 60 pounds of flour.

And Brent, years ago you did a Google search on how much bread 60 pounds of flour would make. And I feel like this is a conservative estimate, but can you remember how many loaves?

Brent: 80 loaves is what it was.

Marty: Feels like enough for three visitors, even if we include all of Avram’s household. I mean, I don’t know, there was 318 people we heard about in the past episode, but maybe he did need 80 loaves of bread. But this is a task he’s just asked.

And I know that we would say, “Well, yeah, they have a bunch of servants.” Jewish tradition, Josh, you might know something about this. Jewish tradition says she didn’t have much, she did it, that it was a miraculous work because they gave themselves to hospitality, a radical hospitality that God worked a miracle in her baking that bread. Yes?

Josh: Absolutely. And in fact, one thing I want to highlight about this too, one of the things the rabbis say about that, they learn from Avraham is they say, “Say a little, do a lot.” Because what Avraham says to them is literally, “Let me get you a little piece of bread.”

Marty: Oh, yeah.

Josh: And I love too that he goes back there and he’s the one that says, “Three seahs,” you know, “one for each person.” They all need, you know, they all need 20 pounds worth of flour for the bread we’re going to give them. Like, I’ll bring you a little water, a little bite to eat, you know, hang out, we’ll be refreshed. And they’re going to like dump this, this like huge amount of sustenance on them.

And that to me is just like such the, the soul of, of hospitality of, of just wanting to have like kind of, it reminds me a little bit of the story of Hadija, of just this idea of Salam, Shalom, like we’re, this what seems to be a small moment of drinking tea and eating bread, but it, with this magnitude of like take everything I have that’s..

And yeah, they say that importantly, Sarai is the one making this, which if, I don’t know if we want to get into it, but there’s a question later of why the bread never comes out, which is explained if it’s only Sarai making it.

Marty: Absolutely. I just love to play on words. Say a little–seah.

Josh: Oh, there we go.

Marty: That one was for you, Brent Billings. Oh, goodness gracious. Better keep us reading before I start building on that. I start building that tower. That won’t be good.

Josh: (Chuckling)

Brent: That was for me, I don’t know, I’m not sure if I should take that positively or not.

Josh: (Chuckling)

Brent: The other thing I noticed is that it doesn’t actually say that they have any camels or donkeys or anything. I would assume that they do, but it’s like, what are they going to do with all this bread if they don’t even have a good way to carry it?

Marty: Sure. Yep.

Brent: Moving on. He then ran to the herd and selected a choice, tender calf and gave it to a servant who hurried to prepare it. Then he brought some curds and milk and the calf that had been prepared and set these before them. While they ate he stood near them under a tree. “Where is your wife, Sarah?” they asked him. “There, in the tent,” he said. Then one of them said, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son.” Now Sarah was listening at the entrance to the tent which was behind him. Avraham and Sarah were already very old and Sarah was past the age of childbearing. So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, “After I am worn out and my lord is old will I now have this pleasure?”

Marty: I once heard that the emphasis in the Hebrew on what she says isn’t in the material, the idea of having and conceiving a child. That when she says this, part of what she’s seeing, she’s seeing even a larger picture of the sexual pleasure of sexual union with her husband. She’s like, “Really? That’s really how this is going to work?” And I don’t know if that’s exactly how the Hebrew works. I’ve been taught that before, but I do—any insight on that, Josh? Have you heard that before?

Josh: Actually, no, I mean I’ve heard the rabbis talk a lot about this to answer the little thread I pulled earlier of why the bread never shows up in this story. They say oh, well, you know, her menstrual cycle started up. So she was interrupted in making bread and that’s why the bread never gets to them.

Marty: Oh, goodness.

Josh: They’re more concerned with that and all the cleanliness stuff.

Marty: Wow.

Brent: [laughs]

Marty: Sure.

Josh: But I love this angle because I think it also speaks to kind of like maybe even a deeper level of like—I wonder if for her with the way that you know the identity of women at this time is so societally structured to be tied into having childbirth.

I wonder if there is something about sexual union that is kind of bittersweet for Sarah and if she’s saying like is it actually gonna? To stop being that? Is it going to be like, could it really be so good, so sweet that it’ll actually produce a child?

Which, man, yeah. For the context of the audience, I very recently had my first son born to me by my wife. That felt like an awkward way to phrase that, but it’s what happened. Anyway, I have a newborn baby. I was actually up all last night. It’s miraculous that I am this cognizant at this hour of the day. But yeah, I really like that reading of it, Marty. That’s great.

Marty: Brent, do you have a few more verses here?

Brent: Couple more. Then the Lord said to Avraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Will I really have a child now that I’m old?’ Is anything too hard for the LORD? I will return to you at the appointed time next year and Sarah will have a son.’” Sarah was afraid, so she lied and said, “I did not laugh.” But he said, “Yes, you did laugh.” Such a way…weird ways to say things.

Marty: Yeah, it’s, yeah, it is. It is. stuck out. One of the things you pointed out a few years ago when we recorded this, Brent, was you did note how the way the words—lord, God, and then capital Lord referring to the name of God, Adonai—how those, like, it seems like Avraham comes to a discovery.

Now, there’s lots of Midrash and commentary in the Jewish rabbinical conversation about that. But there comes a point where Avraham becomes aware. He might not know at the beginning, maybe he does, lots of different arguments about that, but there comes a point in the story where he becomes aware of, like, “Oh, this isn’t just any visitor.”

And the way that the names get used is in there. And that’s going to become important because we’re going to start summarizing some stuff here so we can get to the end of our episode. But...

Josh: I want to bring up a small thing that I just noticed. So this whole chunk of the Text, there’s kind of a running theme of seeing being very important. The very first thing when God appears in the plains of Mamre, it uses the word for “to appear,” means to be seen. And then Avraham sees and that’s why he starts running around. And here the word for to be afraid sounds identical to the word for see.

Marty: Yes.

Josh: And so I wonder if there is some play on words going on of how people see God. And anyway, I don’t want to develop that too much, but I just want to put a marker down on it because I think it’ll become really relevant later.

And that Sarah’s fear in this moment is kind of born of her being almost like kind of seen in a kind of a psychological way. Like God has just struck at like her core insecurity, like which runs through all of her story.

Marty: And we’ve already seen, like, Foreman’s done a big teaching on the God who sees, because to see and to look has, and now you’re putting in the fear word, which you’re totally right. And I keep that, that shows up in so many places. That will be, we’ve already seen Hagar say, “The God who sees me.” This is a theme. Does God see us? Does God—part of trusting the story is really truly believing that God sees us and those kinds of things.

So, but they’re going to leave this dinner and God’s going to say, “I can’t keep what I’m about ready to do.” I’m going to summarize some texts so that Brent doesn’t have to read it all. And so he tells Avraham, “I’m here because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah has reached my ears.” Sodom and Gomorrah later. For now, we’re going to put a hold on the Sodom and Gomorrah story. We’re going to come back later. Later, we get to the story of Exodus. We’re going to deal with the three stories of wrath.

There’s three major stories of wrath that we see in Genesis and Exodus. That’s going to be the Exodus, it’s going to be Sodom and Gomorrah, it’s going to be the flood. And we’re going to circle back, we’re going to look at those stories. What I wanted to point out as we go through until then, is I want us to keep seeing this same God of grace, the same God of forgiveness, the same God that meets us where we’re at, a very Gospel God, for those of us that are followers of Jesus, like I call it a Gospel God, like the same God of the Gospel of the New Testament is the same God we’re seeing in the stories of Avraham.

The stories of wrath are unique, and they stand out in that way, because it’s not the stories we keep hearing over and over again. So we’re going to come back to the Sodom and Gomorrah story.

But what I do want to touch on is this conversation where God says, “I’m here because I’ve heard the cry, and I’m going to obliterate Sodom and Gomorrah.” And Avraham engages with God. And he says, “God, you can’t do that. You can’t do that. What if there are 50 people in Sodom and Gomorrah?” God says, “Alright, well, for 50 people, I won’t destroy it.” And Avraham says, “Okay, what about 45 people?” And God says, “I won’t destroy it.” Avraham says, “What about 40?” God says, “Nope, I won’t destroy it.” What about 30? 20? 10? Like Avraham engages God with like this almost bartering conversation about...

And what I love about this story here for our session one journey is we’re seeing another part of the character of God’s family. The family of God has something that we’re going to call chutzpah throughout the whole story. It’s a Hebrew word that means guts. It means fire in your belly. It means—I once had another listener say, “Well, in another language, it means cojones.” Like it means, it is this—it is the stuff inside of you.

Josh: Moxie.

Marty: Moxie, I like that. Yeah, absolutely. It is chutzpah. Avraham has this chutzpah to stand with God face to face on a hillside and say, “No, you can’t do that.” This is going to be an element and a component of the character of the family of God that we’re going to see in multiple people, not just Avraham, but we definitely see it in the fathers, the family of faith, I’ll put it that way. So we get to Sodom and Gomorrah, we see Lot, by the way, and there’s a whole story about Lot and his daughters, but we do see Lot for now, we’ll point out that Lot is where when we find him?

Brent: It’s in the city gates.

Marty: He’s in the city gates. And we have an episode that we’ll end up doing later in the podcast, out in session six, before we even met Josh Bossé on the podcast. But there’s a Midrash episode we did about the man in the fur coat.

And it’s worth pointing out as we go here that you find these three different characters that the Jewish tradition likes to hone in on. One of them is Lot, he’s the assimilator. Lot went and he went to Sodom and he sat up in the city gates. And he’s kind of assimilated with this pagan culture.

He was still a guy of incredible character. We see that in the story. He’s willing to protect his visitors. He’s willing to show unbelievable hospitality. I think even hospitality that goes too far for most of us as readers, willing to sacrifice his daughters and all those kinds of things. But Lot has a particular, he still has the stuff, like the stock of Terah inside of him, but he’s assimilated so much that it doesn’t do him any good. There’s no teeth to his testimony.

Josh: I’ve actually found something in the Text that perfectly illustrates this.

Marty: Love it.

Josh: He’s in the city gates, he sees the strangers coming in, and he stands up and bows to them.

Marty: Oh no, another sees.

Josh: And invites them. He’s not running, not Avraham. He still has the hospitality, but he’s not willing to stand out and look like a freak and do this, humble himself, do something unbecoming of a patriarch.

Marty: Yes.

Josh: He wants to look normal to all his peers.

Marty: He’s the assimilator. Jews have pointed out Noah, Noah they call the insulator. That’s why they call him the man in the fur coat. He’s insulated. God says, I’m going to destroy all the world. And Noah says, when do I need to have the boat done by?

He’s not going to argue with God about, you can’t destroy the whole world. Avraham’s going to stand on a hillside. He’s the engager. Like he’s going to stand. And so just as a passing reflection, like, as we think about Lot, as we think about Noah, as we think about Avraham and his chutzpah, what is it that God really wants from us?

Does He just want like blind obedience, or does he want somebody that’s going to lean in, have a little grit in their teeth and be like, “God, you can’t do that.” God seems to be looking for that. God seems to be leaning into that. And we see that modeled in the life of Avraham.

And not to skip over it, but Genesis 20 is not necessarily one of Avraham’s greatest moments. It’s a story of Avraham and Avimelech. It’s kind of a repeat of his story with Pharaoh and lying about his, not one of his greatest shining moments. So we’ll just point that out. Avraham is not this spotless, without blemish hero. We don’t want to cast him as that. We want to be able to relate to him as a biblical character and the story that’s not always prescriptive, but descriptive.

But eventually we get to the two stories we want to end our episode with, Brent. The first one is a story of Hagar in Genesis 21. It’s going to start with Isaac, but that’s going to be the set up to the larger story. Will you start reading in Genesis 21?

Brent: Yeah, and just to be clear, you referenced Episode 210 from session six, the man in the fur coat. Are you giving people a hall pass for people to skip ahead and listen to that?

Marty: That’s a great question. I can’t think of anything in that episode that, I might give people a hall pass, but if you get into it and you’re like, “I don’t understand Midrash,” then just get right back out of that, come right back to session one, and just wait till later.

Brent: Okay, sounds good. So here we are at Genesis 21. Now the LORD was gracious to Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did for Sarah what he had promised. Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Avraham in his old age, at the very time God had promised him. Avraham gave the name Isaac to the son Sarah bore him.”

Now I’m mixing up my Hebrew and English pronunciations, whatever. When his son Isaac was eight days old, Avraham circumcised him as God commanded him, Avraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. Sarah said, “God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.” And she added, “Who would have said to Avraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have born him a son in his old age?”

Marty: Plenty of laughter. I mean, she was told to name him that because of her own laughter, and now Isaac’s named after laughter. It’s not going to be the first or the last time we hear about laughter, but here we go. That’s the fulfillment of what God said was going to happen at the beginning of our episode.

Josh: I feel like there’s a little bit of a redemptive spin like Sarah, like, I feel like maybe in this, she has progressed since laughing in the tent and denying it. Now she’s saying, “You know what? Like, this is, it is kind of ridiculous and crazy.” But she’s embracing it and saying like, “Yeah, God’s made laughter for me.”

Marty: Yeah.

Josh: Like, it’s, I feel like there’s some healing that’s gone on here.”

Marty: Absolutely. Like she’s had time to turn this into like, we get to, we get to figure out how we tell our stories. We can also lie as we tell our stories, but she’s not lying. She’s just figured out how to frame her story the way that she thinks God’s inviting her to frame her story. And she can tell it with an evil eye, or she could tell it with a good eye, and she’s told it with a good eye here. I love that. I love that perspective. That’s excellent. Alright, Brent, give us some more.

Brent: The child grew and was weaned, and on the day Isaac was weaned, Avraham held a great feast. But Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Avraham was mocking, and she said to Avraham, ‘Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.’

The matter distressed Avraham greatly because it concerned his son. But God said to him, ‘Do not be so distressed about the boy and your slave woman. Listen to whatever Sarah tells you because it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned. I will make the son of the slave into a nation also, because he is your offspring.”

Early the next morning Avraham took some food and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar. He set them on her shoulders and then sent her off with the boy. She went on her way and wandered in the desert of Beersheba. When the water in the skin was gone, she put the boy under one of the bushes. And she went off and sat down about a bow shot away, for she thought, “I cannot watch the boy die.”

And as she sat there, she began to sob. God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid. God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation.” Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. So she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink. God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer. While he was living in the desert of Paran, his mother got a wife for him from Egypt.

Marty: So he grew up to become an archer and she sat down and I still don’t know if this is this is just I’ve always just found this to be it’s just staring at us right in the Text. She sat how far away from the boy, Brent, a bow shot and he grows up to become an archer.

Brent: A bow shot

Marty: Like I may be projecting into this story some I feel like the Text is making some like the traumas and the tragedies that we’ve been through end up they do end up shaping us. They do end up, they’re a part of our stories. Like this, this is a part of Ishmael’s story as he grows up. Like, I think there’s some connections there. These aren’t just abstract things that happen in a vacuum. These are things that deeply shape us, scar us, hurt us, enable us, empower us. These stories are things that deeply shape our story. As we read that, Josh, what are the problems that you have as you look at these stories? I know there’s many.

Josh: Oh man, yeah. I mean, first of all, yeah, I’d say there's so much going on here, especially with Ishmael and what’s interesting is that we know we’re talking about Ishmael. The story. No one ever calls him Ishmael. They keep calling him, the son of Hagar, which is really weird. Like there is some stuff going on with Ishmael.

And I think even what we see, you know here at the end of like his mom being a bow shot away like to me it almost seems like he’s looking at things far away, so when he grows up like yeah, he’s able to hit a target a long way away because he’s used to the thing he wants being way far away.

Marty: Sure.

Josh: There’s almost like a distance between him and his mom. That’s—it kind of stays. But to wind it all the way back, you know, we have so when it says that Ishmael is mocking Isaac the word there for mocking is the same word for laughter that was used.

Marty: Yep.

Josh: So we have laughter come up a bunch of times. It’s not always positive. Sometimes it’s negative, but like, why is that the straw that breaks the camel’s back, so to speak?

Marty: Right.

Josh: Like, why is him mocking Yitzhak a problem? And, you know, obviously we’re not told what he says. We’re just told it’s tzakhak, it’s laughter. It’s making fun of him. That is, it is really strange.

And I feel like part of this is that like the trauma and the dysfunction we see before with Hagar, like now they are seeing it coming out of Ishmael and it’s almost like, maybe the reason why they don’t use his name is like, that’s not, that’s not Ishmael who said that. He heard his mom talking smack about Sarah and why, you know, Sarah shouldn’t even be the first wife Hagar should be the first wife. Because she had a child.

And maybe he’s like, maybe it’s that, and they’re just like, oh my gosh, like this dysfunction has now grown into something so poisonous, like our kids can’t even get along.

Marty: Cause you mentioned that it doesn’t say his name, like Ishmael’s name.

Josh: It doesn’t say his name, never.

Marty: It just calls him the son of Hagar.

Josh: Yes, the son of Hagar, the boy, it does not use the word Ishmael in this whole chapter. It never calls him Ishmael. It’s so strange.

Marty: It’s almost, almost like it would put the, the, the center of gravity on the Hagar character.

Josh: Yes, yes.

Marty: Yeah, sure. Yeah, and we don’t want to run past that problem. Like this is one of the trickiest, stickiest problems in Torah for a lot of us to read today, where this woman and her son are sent packing at God’s discretion, like Avraham’s trying to keep them around.

And I don’t necessarily have this wonderful, amazing, clean, beautiful... It’s a problem in the story. It’s this thing where God’s like, “No, listen, I got them.” At least we have that. At least we have God saying, “Listen, I’m going to take care of them.” And he doesn’t tell Avraham this, he’s got a blessing for them, he’s got a nation he’s going to build out of them. But there is apparently, and we won’t dive into it here, there’s apparently some sense of dysfunction in the story.

We’ve experienced these things in our own stories. Again, I find an opportunity to connect with the biblical characters here. How many of us have experienced divorce, blended families, different chapters that were never supposed to be written the way that they were written.

But God says, “We’ve got to pull what we can pull together. We’ve got to salvage what we can salvage, and we’re going to try to bring shalom and reconciliation and redemption to this chaos in whatever way.” That’s the best I have, but it’s certainly a problem that I don’t want to ignore on session one as we just read over this. “Yeah, God just sent Hagar away. Next story.”

Josh: Yeah.

Marty: Oh, no, no, this is deeply, deeply dysfunctional stuff.

Josh: Speaking of sending away too - it’s very interesting that it says she sent or put down Ishmael under a bush which is like at this point. We know he’s already at least 13 years old.

Marty: Yeah. Which is weird because is that how you picture like, I don’t know, Josh Brent, do you—when you first heard this story—do you picture a 13 year old boy that she’s laying under? My son is 14 years old. He’s a big kid. He’s just going through his growth spurt. I don’t, when I heard this story, I pictured a baby. I picture an infant.

Josh: Well, I mean, it says, it says she’s carrying him on her shoulder too. Like, and maybe this feeds back into the, like, he’s kind of a proxy for his mom at this point. Like it, it almost feels like for him to be doing that, he’s got to be very dependent on his mom, whereas like his mom is still carrying him around at that age. I don’t know. It’s so strange.

Marty: Yep. And you’re right, the idea that she just leaves him is certainly a problem. Like, I’ve had a lot of moms read this story like, “Man, it would be really hard for me to just leave my child underneath a bush and walk away and leave them to die. That’d be really hard for me to get behind.” So, okay, we got some problems there. Let’s leave those problems hanging and read the next story, Brent.

Brent: Some time later, God tested Avraham. He said to him, “Avraham!”  “Here I am,” he replied. Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love - Isaac - and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”

Early the next morning Avraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. On the third day, Avraham looked up and saw the place in the distance.

He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.” Avraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife.

As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Avraham, “Father?” “Yes, my son,” Avraham replied. “The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Avraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together.

When they reached the place God had told him about, Avraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son.

But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, “Avraham, Avraham!” “Here I am,” he replied. “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” Avraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Avraham called that place, The LORD Will Provide. And to this day it is said, “On the mountain of the LORD it will be provided.”

Marty: Alright. So we got to ask ourselves what problems we have with this story. And that should be real quick to just say, how about the whole story? Um, I can’t tell you how many times I have heard.

Josh: Yeah, how many verses are there in this? At least that many problems.

Marty: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Josh: (laughs)

Marty: I hear it all the time. People like, you know, this story is the perfect example of what’s wrong with religion. Like we hold this story up as like the example of faith. And it’s a story of God asking you to kill your son and a father willing to kill your son.

This is what’s wrong with religion. And part of what we’re trying to see in these Eastern stories is those are the kinds of problems that the Text isn’t asking you to look over or ignore or act like it’s okay. We’re wanting to learn and teach ourselves when we see those problems, those are problems.

And the Text is wanting us to lean in to say, “What am I supposed to be seeing here that seems so wacky on the surface?” But do you have any problems, Josh, before we jump in?

Josh: Oh man, yeah, I mean, first of all, it’s very weird the way God starts this off. Like God says some things that are just not accurate. He says, “Hey, take your only son.” And it’s like, well, I mean, he has more than one son. I think we also see that he definitely loves Ishmael. Like he, at many points, demonstrates this.

Marty: Yep.

Josh: Something weird going on here and I don’t think it’s like it doesn’t seem that God is trying to say well Ishmael isn’t your son anymore but there's something weird going on in their communication.

And I think this second problem I have also plays into that which is like I mean, where is Avraham’s chutzpah? Like he stood up to God and, like bargained, with him back and forth to save Sodom and Gomorrah.

Marty: Where’s this chutzpah now? Right.

Josh: And—I mean—I don’t even think you have to be a parent to understand, like, of all the things to not stop God on, your only child or your child and this child of promise, like, that’s kind of crazy.

And again, to me, it doesn’t seem like, you know, to go back to what you talked about, like, the people who see this as, like, just kind of not just, like, blind faith, but, like, even faith that is willing to do evil. It’s like, yeah, if this was just a normal conversation where God’s like, “Hey, murder your baby for me and Avraham’s like, “Aye aye, sir!” – then yeah, that would be a problem.

The Text though I think is like screaming to us like, “This isn’t Avraham’s character. He’s willing to stand up to God and also he really takes care of people. What is actually going on here?”

Marty: Yeah, absolutely. Jewish tradition has pointed out a couple of things. Like they’re assuming that his character is still there. So where do we see it, they say?

And they’re like, well, that walk should have taken one day. And it says it takes him three days. So one Jewish Midrash says Avraham walked the long way around. He actually went around a lake. He didn’t even have to go around. He went around the, was it the entire Dead Sea? I think they have him walking around just to get to the building, the mountain next door almost as an act of protest. Because he’s like, “No.”

Josh: Oh, wow. Wait a second, if it’s the Dead Sea, then that connects even more because that’s, you know, the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is also the story of how we get the Dead Sea.

Marty: Sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. So it’s Avraham saying, “Come on, God. Come on, God. Come on, God.” So then he gets there. And here’s the thing that we often remember historically, and a lot of rabbis will point this out too, this is the world that Avraham lives in. This is, they’re used to this, like all the ancient...

In fact, I’ve heard some teachers say there’s not an ancient people group we’re aware of around Avraham in the world that he grows up in, that doesn’t demand on some level in different ways, shape or form, child sacrifice, usually your firstborn. So when God asks this, it feels like a very normal command to Avraham. And yet he’s like, “Meh, but this isn’t what I...”

The Jews will tell all kinds of commentary and legends and Midrash saying Avraham believed that this is so unlike God, that God must be, he’s going to do something. He’s going to raise him from the dead. And when you think, well, that’s crazy. Think about what? If you’re a New Testament person, think about the Isaac, believing he would get him back from the dead. So if we believe Hebrews is inspired, this is what Avraham was thinking according to the book of Hebrews, like God must be up to something.

And so the rabbinic teaching says, okay, there must be something else that I’m supposed to learn here in these stories. Now we said that the last story with Hagar, it seemed odd because it seemed like the boy was young, but he was actually old. Now the very last time I just learned about Isaac, he had just been born and weaned. But now he’s old. He’s old enough to carry wood. So both these stories, it feels like they’ve been kind of moved, like out of the historical place and purposely put next to each other on purpose.

Now we have a presentation, Brent. I think, I don’t know if you’re going to put this in the chapter art or not, but if you have space and time, there’s going to be a link in your show notes for a presentation.

Brent: Indeed, I don’t know how this will fit in a chapter. I might play around with stuff and see if I can do something, but yeah, either way, you’ll see this presentation.

Marty: Alright, now, I just wanted to show how these two stories are so paralleled and work together. So there’s a slide there that has all these parallel references. Just look at all these parallels.

In the story of Hagar, 21:14a, it says early the next morning. In 22:3, early the next morning, in 21:14b, Avraham sets supplies on Hagar’s shoulders. In the Isaac story, 22:6, Avraham sets supplies on Isaac’s shoulders. In the Hagar story, verse 21:15, Hagar puts the boy under brush. And in the Avraham story, in 22, verse 9, he puts the boy on or over brush, there in the Hebrew. In the Hagar story, Chapter 21, verse 19, Hagar looks up to see a well. There’s that looking, Josh, looking up.

And then in 22:13, Avraham looks up to see a ram in the Isaac story. We might even note that the Hagar story ends with a covenant. Chapter 21, verses 22—34, the covenant of Beersheba. We could say that the Avraham story ends with a covenant. Chapter 22, verses 50.

These stories—my point being—these stories are meant to be put next to each other. They are parallel stories that were supposed to, for the author, be juxtaposing Hagar and Avraham. What is different about Hagar, not to villainize her or demonize her, but what’s different about Hagar and what’s different about Avraham. And so that’s two of the things that we want to look at.

Now, when we start looking for something, treasures, say, if we want to find a treasure buried, we will often look for literary devices, one of the ones we’ve looked for very often. Brent?

Brent: Oh, chiasm.

Marty: Oh, golly, you’re not going to tell me there’s another chiasm here. Indeed, we are. Go to that next slide. And you’re going to see, here’s the passage from Genesis 22 with the Avraham story. And you’re going to see the chiasm marked here on the slide. And I love this chiasm.

I think it’s really easy to see, personally, we have the phrase, “Here I am” at the beginning and then towards the end of the story. “Here I am,” he replied. “Here I am,” he replied. That phrase in the Hebrew is Hineni. Hineni is “Here I am.” It’s actually a really significant phrase. We won’t talk about all the references, but Hineni, “Here I am.” It’s a statement of, “Behold me, here I am. I’m here. I’m at attention. I’m at the ready.

Josh: And there is a looking quality to that, that I want to highlight like, it’s a behold see me.

Marty: Absolutely. See, absolutely. What a great grab. Absolutely. The next layer in, we have Avraham putting wood, placing it on his son Isaac, and then later he puts his son Isaac on the wood. The phrase, “They went on together,” that one jumps out at me every time I hear Brent read this story now. And they went on together. And then they went on together, which means the center of this chiasm is how the NIV reads, “Yes, my son,” Avraham replied. “Yes, my son,” Avraham replied. And that phrase, believe it or not, what is it, Josh Bossé?

Josh: You might be surprised to learn, dear listener, that it is, in fact, Hineni.

Marty: Hineni. Here I am. So we have this same phrase showing up right in the middle. And this is where Rabbi Foreman, the rabbis of old, they say, this is where we find our gold. So here’s, let’s work this towards a conclusion.

If you are going to sacrifice your son, when we first recorded this Brent, you didn’t even have, you didn’t even have a son yet. Can you believe that?

Brent: Yeah, now I have two.

Marty: And now Josh has one. Okay, I can, I can pick on either one of you now. I picked on Brent before, I’ll pick on Josh this time. Let’s say Josh, it’s hard to even imagine this, but you’re the Abraham character in the story. And your son is older, he’s 13, he’s carrying wood for you.

You’ve been told you need to sacrifice your son at the top of this mountain. You’ve taken the long way to this mountain, you’re now at the bottom. What is your demeanor? This is all, you can hear Rabbi Foreman teach on this at Aleph Beta as well. But what’s your demeanor as you’re walking up the mountain?

Josh: Oh boy, yeah. I mean, I’ve heard the Rabbi Fohrman teaching, so I won’t beat around the bush. I’m just going to, I’m totally masking.

Marty: Yeah.

Josh: I am, and especially if I’m Abraham and I know that God’s gonna do an uno reverse and say just kidding or something, like, I’m not trying to traumatize my son.

Marty: Absolutely.

Josh: I’m gonna be like, “Oh, hey, you know, it’s really nice being with you. I love you.” Like, I’m gonna be engaging my son and, you know.

Marty: Yeah. Totally. Oftentimes, people will say like, “I’m going to be crying. I’m going to be dis-” and I’m like, “No, you’re not. Because if you’re crying, what is your son going to ask you at the bottom of the mountain?

Josh: What’s going on?

Marty: Like why are you crying? Why are you upset? And that’s going to make for a really long walk up to the top of the mountain. So yeah, you’re talking about the Reds game and what’s going on and hey, what about that?

Brent: [laughs]

Marty: It looks like there’s some storm clouds on the horizon, like, oh, weather and you’re doing everything. You are, you’re masking, you’re trying to do anything but, and the Hebrew actually insinuates that Isaac interrupts.

And that’s why Fohrman teaches that, as Avraham’s trying to mask, he’s trying to talk about anything he’s trying to avoid. He doesn’t want Isaac to know. And Isaac interrupts him, it says in the Hebrew, Isaac interrupts him and says, “Father,” and Avraham is confronted with the moment.

And this is where the rabbis say, this is where we see Avraham. It’s this moment where he’s either going to have to fight or flight. He’s going to run away. He’s going to, I don’t know, maybe lie. What is he going to do? This is the moment where he has to, I’m trying to ignore this connection with my son. And my son interrupts me and his response is, “Hineni.”

And the rabbis teach this is the character that we see in Avraham, where Avraham says, and of course they have the continued conversation, where’s the lamb? The Hebrew is all ambiguous about, well, God will provide the ram for the burnt offering. My son is the son of the burnt offering. Avraham doesn’t know. He’s trying to dodge this moment.

But the one thing the rabbis say we see in the chiasm is Avraham is not going to abandon. He’s not going to the desert. He’s going to stick with this story all the way through to the end and not desert. Where in the other story, we said one of the problems was that Hagar would leave her son under the bush and then abandon him. Avraham is not going to abandon.

And in that we see—the rabbis teach us—in that piece, trauma aside, in that one piece, we see the character of God, a God who’s not going to abandon us in our moment of greatest need. We see a Hineni God, a God that says, “When you need me, no matter what your circumstances, here I am.”

And so when I think about all the other places where this word, where this phrase shows up, I think about the here I am of Isaiah, the great commissioning. I think about the here I am of the burning bush later in the story of Exodus. As my people sit in slavery, and who are you, God? And God essentially says a version of Hineni.

I think about the story of Jesus before Abraham was. Before Abraham was Hineni. I wonder if what Jesus is saying is not an abstract before Abraham’s existence. I wonder if part of what Jesus is saying is before Abraham decided to be present on the mountain, I was present on the mountain.

They come to the garden to arrest Jesus. They’re like, “Who are you looking for?” / “We’re looking for Jesus.” / “Hineni.” Like in these moments, in Jesus’s greatest moment of fight or flight—not to get ahead to the New Testament—but he chooses to stay there and say, “I’m not going anywhere.”

This truly is a part of the character of God and a part of what Abraham understands. And God does end up teaching when this story is all over. That’s not, “I am the Hineni God. I am the God that will be present. I’m the God who sees. I’m the God who will provide. I am the God who, that is who I am. I’m not the God that’s going to leave. I’m not the God that’s going to ask for your firstborn son. I’m not like the other gods. I’m the God who’s going to. And you keep pointing out the “see” part of this, and that’s actually what the phrase the LORD who provides.

Josh: Exactly. Well, not only that, when Avraham is talking to Isaac and he says, “God will find a lamb for himself,” the word there for “find” is the word “see.”

Marty: Yeah.

Josh: God will see the lamb that he wants.

Marty: Uh, yes, absolutely.

Josh: As I’ve been reflecting on this dad question that you asked earlier, I realized that the reason why as a dad you kind of do the distracting thing is when you can’t fix a problem, right? When it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to have to do something that my son is going to hate, but he needs to go to sleep. He needs to take this medicine, so I’m going to get him in a good mood so we can just rip the Band-Aid off and whatever.”

And in those moments it’s very hard to be seen, to be seen when you are not up to the task, when you are not able to take care of the problem with your own two hands, where you have to kind of just be subject to whatever God decides to do, to whatever. And, you know, not only is he aware that God’s going to see them, but his willingness to be seen, our willingness to be seen.

I mean, we started the episode in the review talking about all the loss that Avraham has had and got like this whole moment. If we want to understand the secret understanding between Avraham and God, God is hitting right on that point like you’ve been through a lot of loss. Most of that loss God called him to. God was the one who’s like, go, like, yeah you and Lot sorry, you and Hagar and Ishmael sorry, even his own father.

And we can kind of see something similar with Hagar where like, you know, she joined them in Egypt and there’s some fun Midrash there I won’t touch, but like she was also abandoned and in that moment she couldn’t bear to be seen. She had to get as far away from that trauma as possible and Avraham is willing to stand there and be seen.

Like you know, talk about seeing a God of grace, like I think here Avraham understands that, you know, he has no moral defense here. He can’t say, “I made the right decision.” He’s way out on a ledge of faith, and he is trusting that God is not actually asking this from him, but even in that moment of powerlessness and, you know, right in the center of his trauma,

Marty: Yeah.

Josh: he’s willing to be seen, and that is such a vulnerable place.

Marty: Absolutely. And such a thread for all these stories that being seen by God is the person’s redemption, being willing to be seen, being willing to recognize the fact that you’re seen, seeing other people, Avram seeing Iscah, Avram seeing Hagar, Avram seeing Isaac. I love how you pointed out God will see the Lamb, see the Ram for the sacrifice.

Like that’s even in his language, Avram is saying, like, God’s going to see us in this moment. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I just know that God’s going to see us. And that will be enough because I have been seen before.

And I love that connection, Josh, because it means that Avram has learned his character to see others. Not perfectly, but he’s learned how to see others. He sees other people and that’s what we see here in the story of the Akedah.

Josh: I love that too because, you know, we could read the conversation between him and Yitzhak number of ways, but you highlighted it in the in the chiasm parallels of “they went on together,” and I think that is worth highlighting because in the Hebrew it’s a much stronger phrase. It’s the word echad, “one.” “They went on together as one.”

Like, even after letting the mask slip, letting his son see him as someone who is just figuring this out, seeing how it goes, going up there just not knowing what the path ahead is. And I think a lot of times we run from that vulnerability like Hagar, because we are worried that if the other person sees us, that they’re going to run away from us, which ironically, when we think of Hagar and Ishmael, like Ishmael as the archers, just he’s trying to catch up even from far away.

Marty: Yep.

Josh: And Hagar ends up creating that distance herself. Whereas Avraham by being right there and leaving himself open for Yitzhak to say like, what the heck dad, that’s not cool. Like, uh, I’m out, I’m going back down the hill, but no, like in that moment, his willingness to be seen, I think is why Yitzhak is not just going with him still, but going together still, as one, like that is how we bring community built family, even in the midst of these chaotic and testing moments.

Marty: The challenge of going to therapy and starting counseling. And because what you’re doing is you’re trying to open yourself up to be seen, to start a healing process. And that’s a very difficult thing to do. I think that’s—point well said. Alright, Brent, we have talked enough.

Brent: Okay, well. I do like, you mentioned a couple times, the lamb and the ram thing. I like that God is subverting their expectations. Like Isaac was like, “There’s going to be a lamb, right?” And God, or Abraham’s like, “Yeah, God will provide a lamb.” They’re both thinking it’s going to be a lamb. And in the end, God says, “Nope, this doesn’t work the way you think it is. It’s going to be different.”

Marty: Yeah, sure. Yeah, beautiful.

Brent: Lots of those little textual goodies to find in there to discuss with your group. So if you don’t have a group, now’s a good time to go to bemadiscipleship.com and check that map and find some people to discuss this with or form your own group.

You can use the contact page to get in touch with us and everything you need will be on the website. Presentation if you didn’t have a chance to look at it. I do love this chiasm because it’s an easy one to see in the English so it’s a good one to kind of play around with, see if you can find more elements to the chiasm than what we highlighted. Lots of stuff to do.

So enjoy the week, enjoy digging into the Text. Thanks for joining us on the BEMA podcast. We’ll talk to you next week.

Tessa Hoffman: Hi, I’m Tessa Hoffman, a BEMA listener in Wichita, Kansas, and here is the prayer from Episode 11’s Companion.

Heavenly Father, thank you for being a God who sees me, that will never abandon me. When I am joyful, you are there. When I am grieving, you are there. When I am angry, you are there. When I am at peace, you are there.

In my greatest moments of radical hospitality and my darkest moments when it is so hard to feel and be seen, in my chutzpah and in my greatest time of need, may I always remember that you are here. Amen.