Bible Women: Sarah’s 90 Years of Patience

And the LORD visited Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did unto Sarah as he had spoken. Gen 21:1 

God’s School of Faith

I knew a man once who had a wife. But for seven years they had no child. And their relationship broke at the seams after seven years because of that. Many more break for even the shortest time than that. But Sarah had been patient without a child for ninety years. As for Abraham, his solitude had lasted one hundred years.

'Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born unto him that is an hundred years old? and shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear?' (Gen 17:17). 

Faith is Crazy

In life something happens which changes the course of one’s life forever. Abraham’s came when God appeared to him in Mesopotamia with orders to move.

But Abram (for that was his name then) was seventy five when he heard this. He had great substance and a great wife but no children. The people God chooses are strange. He loved Abel (in accepting his offering) but Cain’s he rejected. Yet Abel dies without uttering a single word in the Bible though his voice is still speaking from the grave. We feel Abel’s goodness up to this day, though in another sense, we don’t really know him.

One feels something like that about Abraham.

At seventy five and with a barren wife for that long, he should’ve married another, for insurance purposes, but he didn’t. We know he loved Sarah, so much so that he seemed quite ready to die childless with her though he had great substance. And I say a crazier love than that I have never met.

Silent fellows are queer and I suspect Abraham was a silent fellow. Silent fellows almost look dumb from outside. They do things, which to majority of people, are simply crazy. And they can stick with one thought (even when it bears no fruit!) for ages. They are never in a hurry. So Abraham at seventy five, married and childless, doesn’t even begin to sound alarmed. He moved around with his tent (and his grief, for silent people are also heavy grief carriers), and wife and substance, planting an altar everywhere to a God people didn’t see, and obeying him heroically. Can it get crazier than that?

And so through one man’s obedience (and patience) God shows us very calmly and almost imperceptibly how faith looks like. 

The Beauty of Sarah Never Diminished with Age

She was beautiful. Even at her age kings still lusted after her. First it had been Pharaoh and his whole household who wanted her for their wife. Next it was Abimelech king of Gerar. And in both instances Abraham pleaded with her to save his skin by saying she was his sister and not wife. But in both instances God stepped in to save her (and her queer man) from libidinous men.

The next we hear of Sarai (for that was her name before) is when she is pleading with Abram to ‘go in unto’ her handmaid Hagar. Out of desperation she gave her to him for a wife. And Hagar conceived immediately. And the result of that fission is our present day Middle East.

Sarah’s Hidden Pains

For much in Abraham’s life Sarah is quiet. We can picture Eve as gusto, but not Sarah. Mostly she is much inside the tent than out. Abraham is the one who is out a lot, at one time with visitors (but who in reality are angels), at one time with God himself, and at other times with Lot his nephew, and of course, he is first and foremost a herder. 

But Sarah is inside the tent a lot. That seems to be where her whole life was concentrated – and her grief. Outside the birds had ceased to sing for her. And why would she want to flaunt her unhappiness out there? It is never a glad thing to be pitied, and, to be at her age and without a child, is to invite a lot of pity.

There is a laughter which one can give through clenched teeth. I suspect Sarah’s laughter was like that inside that tent when the angels heard her.

God is very Considerate Especially towards Women

There is much that God kept from Sarah’s knowledge, for her own sake. Like the knowledge about sacrificing her only son. That knowledge might’ve been heartbreaking, even inconsiderate for God.

Ladies, it is not that God is anti-women. It is only because he is considerate.

Try for a moment, to place a woman, in the place where Christ stood on the hill to Calvary, her face and skin bloody, her hair a twisted mass of thorns, her back slumped under the weight of her cross, and with a rowdy gang of men jeering at her, spitting, and piercing at her angrily with the tip of their swords.

Perhaps you can, but God cannot.   

A woman (in most instances) is like a bruised reed, which in God’s mercy, he cannot further break.

There is a place for suffering for all of us, but God cannot test one beyond what they can endure.

So for Job, after his famous lamentations, God reprimands him with a call to behave like a man. God would never ask a woman to behave like that.

But in the matter of offering comfort and encouragement, a woman is more like God than a man (whereas men, like Job’s friends, are usually very blind on that score).

In Abraham and Sarah’s life the ladder of faith only went up but never down. Every activity of their lives seemed only directed at testing their faith. And is that not so with every Christian living today? But pray without ceasing so that you don’t fall into temptation.

For the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham, or to his seed, through the law, but through the righteousness of faith… Rom 4:13…22

Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise. But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now. Nevertheless what saith the scripture? Cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman. So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free. Gal 4:28-31

Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised.

Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable. 

These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. Heb 11:11-13