1. Reminder about the covenant between God and Abraham.


God and Abraham had made a covenant that Abraham and his descendants would serve God alone and that God would be their God.   Abraham had asked God for clarification about the covenant and the one in question is found in  Genesis 15.  He and Sarah were childless and he had asked about the heir who would inherit his material possessions.   God reinforced that He would give Abraham a son who would inherit the promise.

God promised that a stranger to the  covenant would not inherit the promise.   Furthermore, Abraham believed God, implying that he would  continue to have sexual intercourse with his wife until she became pregnant with their own son who would then  carry on the contract with God (Genesis 15: 1-7).

Since Genesis 15: 6 says that God counted Abraham as a righteous man because of his belief in the Word of God, we are really being told that Abraham had sworn agreement.   I also wrote that Abraham asked God to sign the Covenant and God did so with a sacrifice of animals (Gen 15: 8 – 10).

2. Abraham broke the covenant that he had made with God


Genesis 16 began with Sarah asking Abraham to marry an Egyptian servant called Hagar in order to have a child who would inherit their possessions.  Abraham “hearkened to the voice of Sarai” (Genesis 16: 2). The maid Hagar became pregnant and she began to despise Sarah, who then treated her so roughly that she ran away.   God went to visit her as she sat by a fountain of water in the desert and commanded her to return to Sarah. The Lord also instructed her about the  child that she was to bear.

2. God became angry that Abraham had broken the Covenant

Scriptures reveal that  God had become angry at the actions that Abraham had taken. He was depending on Abraham to promote true worship in the earth and to bring forth descendants who would worship and obey God.

What supporting evidence  in the scriptures reveal God’s anger?

  • When  God had sworn that Abraham would bear a son, He meant that Abraham and Sarah would have a son.
  • Scriptures clearly state that Abraham obeyed the voice of his wife and not the  Lord God who he had promised to obey.  By doing so, he provoked God to anger.
  • Sarah’ s voice represented the practices of  the ungodly devil worshippers of the day.
  • From the beginning of the Creation, God created one man for one woman. Jesus later reinforced this is His teachings.  God expected that Abraham would follow His  teachings and example  as a true worshipper.   Apostle Peter revealed that the people of the day were fully aware of  God’s existence and  His ways of  living (2 Peter 3: 4 – 7)
  • Hagar was a descendant of  Canaan the grandson of Noah.   God had already sentenced Caanan’s descendants to total extermination
  • Genesis 10 reveals that Ham, the father of  Canaan,  had looked on the Prophet’s  nakedness as he lay in a drunken stupor in his tent.  When I read between the lines,   Ham seems to have laughed  and mocked at his father’s body.  Noah  cursed his son, but  God was grievously vexed and reiterated by later giving their land to the descendants of  righteous  Abraham and commanding the Jews to totally exterminate them.
  • to uncover a person\’s nakedness could have more serious implications.
  • God was so vexed that He did not speak to Abraham for thirteen years after Ishmael’s  birth.  My calculations reveal that Abraham had married Hagar shortly after he made the covenant with God.
  • When Genesis 16 is read in the context of the preceding chapter, we see that God reproved Abraham for his actions when he said, “walk before me and be perfect…”   (Gen 16: 1-2)
  • God gave Abraham and Sarah new names that represented the Contract with God and not the Syrian society from which they had emerged.
  • Their new names match the post Ishmael saga.
  • God reinforced that the covenant would be with Abraham’s son and rejected Ishmael as the one who would carry on this privileged relationship with God (Genesis 16: 6-20)
  • God circumcised Abraham in order to symbolically break the sexual connection with Hagar.  Abraham and Sarah’s son would therefore emerge from a clean sexual union.
  • He  clearly told Abraham that the Covenant was with his and Sarah’s offspring and not that of the Egyptian (Genesis 17: 19)
  • God sent off the Jews to  Egypt to make up to Ishmael.   He had grown up believing that he was the heir and he was about to be tossed out one year later.

The argument against polygamy is embedded in God’s response to the polygamous relationship of the Father of  Faith.  The seed of  Abraham or children of  faith should NOT engage in polygamy.

More to come