Good evening and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the Book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #16 of Genesis, chapter 21.  We have been reading Genesis 21:8-11:

And the child grew, and was weaned: and Abraham made a great feast the same day that Isaac was weaned. And Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, which she had born unto Abraham, mocking. Wherefore she said unto Abraham, Cast out this bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac. And the thing was very grievous in Abraham's sight because of his son.

We have spent some time looking at the Biblical doctrine of “weaning” or being weaned from the milk of the Word and moving on to strong meat.  Of course, that fits with the whole idea of progressive revelation.  We have come to understand that the Bible teaches that God has a program of revealing truth to His people over the course of His “times and seasons.”

In the Old Testament, there is a lot of material, but God did not reveal a great deal of spiritual truths.  In the New Testament, God completed the Bible and revealed much more truth and He also revealed several “mysteries” of the Old Testament, such as the Gentiles being fellowheirs and Scriptures that had application to the Lord Jesus Christ, and so forth.

As God said to Daniel, He had sealed up His Word until the time of the end, the end of the church and our day.  Then God unsealed His book and He began to reveal tremendous amounts of spiritual truths that we have learned during the time of Great Tribulation and into this final period of the Day of Judgment.  As He does so, we leave the “milk of the Word” and our childhood of having only partial knowledge and partial understanding and moving on and progressing to the “meat” or that which is “perfect.”  When the perfect is come, we put away childish things.  So, God is perfecting us and bringing us to maturity in the spiritual things of the Word of God, the Bible.

At this point, we are going to go back to Galatians 4.  I know I have referred to these things so many times, you are probably wondering, “Well, why not just study Galatians 4?”  Perhaps someday we will, but right now let us look at Galatians 4:21:

Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law?

This is like Christ would say when He spoke a parable: “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”  But, here, God says this regarding the Law; that is, it was written in Genesis, which is one of the five books known as the Pentateuch, commonly referred to as the Law that God gave Moses.

But, it asks, “Do ye not hear the law?”  In other words, “Do you not understand the deeper spiritual meaning of the historical parable that is in the Law?”  We find that God has written the entire Bible in a mystery or in parabolic form.  It goes on to say in Galatians 4:22-24:

For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman. But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise. Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar.

Mount Sinai is where God gave the Law, and when people attempt to keep the Law, they become bondservants and are subject to bondage.  They have no freedom.  There are those that come under the Law, but there are those born of the “free woman,” which are born by grace. 

It says in Galatians 4:25-28:

For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all. For it is written, Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband. Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise.

Now let us go back to Genesis 21 for a second.  Isaac had been born and circumcised and now he has been weaned – he is moving from the milk to meat.  And there is Ishmael, the son of the bondwoman.  Isaac typifies the elect, and Ishmael typifies those are not God’s elect, but they have relationship to him because Ishmael was a son of Abraham, just as was Isaac.  But they had different mothers.  Ishmael’s mother was an Egyptian handmaid, a bondservant, and identifies with the covenant that “gendereth to bondage,” pointing to those that try to get right with God by keeping the Law. 

For example, many Jews attempted to get right with God through circumcision, observance of the seventh day Sabbath, sacrifices, and so forth.  In the New Testament, those that are children of the bondwoman within the churches and congregations have taken a different route, but they also attempt to get right with God by keeping the “law of faith.”  They see the command, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ,” and they attempt to obey that Law, but that is a “work.”  As they try to obey God by keeping that commandment to believe on the Lord, they have entered into a works relationship with Him.  And that is what they trust in.  And they become children of the bondwoman, just as the Jews. 

Of course, even in the Old Testament there were seven thousand at one time that had not bowed the knee to Baal, meaning that they were saved by grace through God’s election program.  So, too, during the church age there were among those in the churches and congregations those that were saved by grace.  This happened all through history, but it is especially pertinent to the churches during the time the wheat and the tares grew together, as we read in Matthew 13 in the parable of the wheat and the tares.  It says in Matthew 13:24-30:

Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also. So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares? He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.

In other words, they were to grow together until harvest, and the harvest is “the end of the age,” as it says in the explanation of the parable.  The tares are the children of the wicked one, Satan, and he was the one that sowed the tares among the wheat.  The wheat is the “good seed” or God’s elect.  Both grew together until the end of the church age when the harvest came for the firstfruits, and God separated the wheat from the tares through the mechanism of opening up the Scriptures to reveal that the church age was over, and the true people of God must come out of the churches and congregations.  We were to separate from the tares, leaving the tares behind.  We were to come out and go into the world where God would continue to be with His people and to bless us.

This is what is in view here in Genesis 21, as God moved Sarah to say this.  Sarah was disturbed that Ishmael was mocking at the time of Isaac’s weaning.  He was observing and (probably) paying close attention because he was envious, and he was trying to belittle or make fun of Isaac in some way.  He was laughing as Isaac was being weaned.  Then Sarah turned to her husband Abraham and said, “Cast out this bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son.”  This concerned who was to be the promised heir to Abraham and his seed.  Isaac is the seed God used to picture the Lord Jesus and all the elect children of God in the Lord Jesus.  Ishmael was the son of the bondwoman and he would not be heir with the son of promise.  This is what happened at the time of the end.

The way God cast out the “bondwoman” at the time of the end was to make a distinction between the wheat and the tares.  His people would obey Him and come out of the churches and those that were not His people would not hearken and hear His Word: “Hear ye not the Law?”  The churches were presented with the opening up of the parable or the dark sentence made plain upon tables concerning the judgment on Jerusalem and Judea and the command to flee to the mountains when they saw the abomination of desolation stand in the holy place.  But they would not hearken.  They could not hear the parabolic meaning of the Scriptures and, therefore, they rejected it.

God was operating in the lives of His elect people to open our ears to hear His voice as He spoke in parables.  We heard it, recognized it and responded positively.  When God gives a command in a parable, we must dig to unearth it to discover what the Bible is saying.  Then we saw that it was a commandment to come out of the churches.  The fact that the command was given in a parable does not at all diminish the command of God, just because it is given on a spiritual level.  To the contrary, it carries more weight and power because God took the time to place it there, like a nugget of gold, and then He kept it in reserve until the time of the end when He knew His people would follow the correct methodology of Bible study.  Then we would be the only ones that could unearth it and obey it.  It is remarkable how God placed that specific truth in the Bible to serve as a mechanism to separate the wheat from the tares.  The opening of Scriptures on a spiritual level was the mechanism that God would use, and His people would hear.

Of course, there were some people that trusted a teacher like Mr. Camping, even though they did not have spiritual ears, but they were following along with many things he taught.  Also, some people are very independent-minded and proud; they do not like being told what to do, so they did not like being in the churches where a pastor, elder or deacon could tell them what to do, so it fit their personality: “Oh, the church age is over.  I can go outside the churches and I do not have to listen to anybody.  I can be a free agent and do my own thing.”  Some people liked that idea, so the doctrine of the end of the church age was a welcome doctrine.

Of course, God did not stop there, and He pinpointed the problem in these independent people by opening up more Scriptures.  They liked the idea of being on their own outside church authority, and they had their own ideas about doctrines.  So, the Lord “caught them up” with the opening up of truths like Christ having made payment for sin at the foundation of the world, or with the doctrine of spiritual judgment on May 21, 2011, and so forth.  They would resist and show forth their “true colors.”  That is the reason some have gone back to the churches even though they came out in obedience to the initial command, but they were not truly saved.  We cannot say that all that came out of the churches were truly saved, but we can say that all those that were truly saved did come out of the churches; that is, none of the elect were left behind.  So, there were some unsaved that stayed “in the mix,” as it were, but God had more testing programs to settle these things.  The longer we go into Judgment Day, the more the dross is being melted away and the more God’s people that are “gold, silver, precious stones” are being purified.  Those that are on the periphery are falling away and going back.  They cannot take it and endure to the end.

These things are all in view with the separation of Isaac and Ishmael at the time of Isaac’s weaning.  We saw in many verses like Hebrews 5, 1Corinthians 13, 1Corinthians 14 and Ephesians 4 that “weaning” had to do with putting away “childish things” relating to knowledge and doctrine.  It involves growing in the truth of the Word of God.  God has done this at the time of the end, as we have been learning these spiritual truths.  It is not accidental.  It is very purposeful and related to our growth.  As the people of God are learning these things, there are those that are represented by Ishmael that are children of the bondwoman and under the Law, and they are attempting to have a relationship with God through the keeping the Law.  They do not have true salvation, but they have their manmade doctrines and gospels.  These people hear doctrines about the end of the church age, the faith of Christ, Christ paying for sins at the foundation of the world, the true wrath of God against sinners being annihilation (and not torment in a place called Hell), and they mock.  They mock the things the Bible says and the things that God, in His wisdom, had hidden and kept in reserve until the end time to bring forth for His people as “meat” in the Day of Judgment.  It is all mockery to them.  It is all laughable to them.   They think these doctrines are foolish and ridiculous: “I do not need to study the Bible to know your doctrine is wrong.  The moment my ears hear, I know it is wrong.  You say the church age is over, but Christ said the gates of hell would not prevail against the churches.”  They have a very superficial understanding of the Word of God because they do not have the tools to properly dig into the Bible to search for the “buried treasure.”  So, as these doctrines are brought forth after careful analysis of comparing Scripture with Scripture and making sure conclusions harmonize with the rest of the Bible, they dismiss them with a wave of the hand and much mockery.  They have no intention of being a Berean and searching the Bible to see if these things are so: “I do not need to do that.  My pastor tells me it is not so.”

So, God has caused these two things to happen simultaneously.  He is weaning His people and as He is doing so, the children of the bondwoman (the professed Christians of the world) are observing and mocking.  Mocking and mocking.  Therefore, the command comes forth from God: “Cast out this bondwoman and her son.  He will not be heir with my Son.” 

Lord willing, when we get together in our next Bible study, we will look further into this as it ties into everything we have been learning and with everything God is doing at this time.  It is very important that we have a thorough understanding of all these things.