Take your Bibles, turn to Galatians 4 verses 21 through 31. And let me read this passage. Tell me you who desire to be under the law, do not listen to the law for it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise. Now, this may be interpreted allegorically. These two women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery. She is Hagar. Now, Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia. She corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free and she is our mother. For it is written, Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear. Break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor. For the children of the desolate one will be more than those of the one who has a husband. Now you brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. But just as at the time that he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now. But what does the Scripture say? Cast out the slave woman and her son for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman. So, brothers, we are not children of the slave, but of the free woman. May God bless the reading of this word. I'm very, very thankful that I live in this country that I live in. And I'm very thankful for the freedoms that we have. And I want to publicly thank somebody who's sitting here this morning for his service in helping to keep us free and safe. But brothers and sisters, I watched just a tiny bit of TV this morning to see what they were doing. And of course, in New York City, they're singing about freedom. They're singing about the city of man and how glorious and great it is, how wonderful America is. And in a sense, that's good and right. We have our feet in this country. This is who we are. We're Americans. And I would not want to be a citizen of any other nation on this earth. I'm glad to be an American. We are citizens of another place. We belong to the kingdom of heaven, to the eternal city, to Jerusalem that is above. That is where we belong. That is our home. And it will last forever and ever, long, long, long after this country is gone and all the other countries on the earth. And I want you to think about what we're going to talk about today in light of that sermon is not going to be a 9-11 sermon, but in God's providence and sovereignty, the topic certainly fits what it is that we're going through today on a 10 year anniversary of the worst thing that's ever happened in my life in our country. So I want you to think about that as we go through this passage and how those who belong to the city that is below are slaves, not free. And they're slaves to sin and to the law and to the devil, and they don't understand it. And we had best not desire and long to be part of that thing that is fading away. But we ought to long to live as free people who are free in Christ and free from all the things that hold captive all the other peoples of this world. I'm going to start off by telling you a true story, but I've embellished it just a little for the sake of telling the story. It happened a long time ago to real people. And I mention that and you'll see why as we go along through the passage. She was born and raised in the land of the Chaldeans, and we read about the Chaldeans in the law this morning, way out east in the land of Babylon, in a fertile valley along the Great River Euphrates in Ur, the home of an ancient wonder known today as the Ziggurat of Ur. She was civilized and educated in the law codes of the great civilizations of the east, Lipet Ishtar and Hammurabi. She was named contentious or quarrelsome. Now, some of this is going to sound like I'm an Indian telling you a story around a campfire, but bear with me. I want you to know that the names mean. She was named contentious or quarrelsome by her father, but she had noble blood because her name could also be meant as my ruler. And she was among the most beautiful women in the entire world. One day, an idol worshipping Semite named You May Breathe, but who was known in his native tongue as Wild Goat or Wandering Man, came across the contentious beauty, arguing with some women in the city streets. He had been looking for a mate for his son named Exalted Father. When he came to his son, he cried out, Go and take for yourself the beauty named Sarai. And then we will leave this God forsaken place in search of riches and fame to the east or to the west. Abram eagerly complied, and together with his brother and sister-in-law and nephew, they set out west and came to a place that they settled and named after one of Abram's fallen brothers named Haran. Now, Sarai was barren and she bore no children to the exalted father. But one day the mighty angel came to Abram and he said, I will make you the father of many nations. Abram believed this promise and it was credited to him as righteousness. For the one in whom he trusted was none other than the creator himself, the God of gods and Lord of hosts. He told his wife and she was grateful. And her contentious disposition changed and she adorned her soul with a gentle and quiet spirit. which was precious in God's sight. A year passed, then two, then ten, and still Sarah bore no children. Then the day came when she was no longer to even bear at all. Her womb dried up, her hope vanished. She believed the promise with her husband, but perhaps they'd been going about it all wrong. Being the student that she was, she remembered the provisions made in the law of the lands of the East. Where she came from, the story was famous in both legend and law. Lakapum had married Hatala, the daughter of an important governor. Hatala, like Sarah, was barren, and Lakapum had in mind to give her a divorce. That day, the courts decreed, Lakupum may not marry another woman, but he may marry a hierodule, which is a temple slave or a shrine prostitute, or perhaps even the very priestess of the goddess. This woman would not be an equal in the marriage, but she could bear him a son legally. But if after two years there was no child, then Hatsala may purchase a slave woman to bear. Then after the child was born, he may dispose of her by the sale of whoever he pleases, but he must pay her five minutes of silver. This is right there in the legal codes of the East. The idea was ingenious and perfectly legal. Abram had grown powerful in Haran and Canaan and in Egypt. Wherever he went, God prospered him. So Sarai took for herself an Egyptian slave woman named Hagar. And her name means flight or fugitive. And after the allotted time had passed, she approached her husband with her simple plan. She said, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go into my servants, and it may be that I shall obtain children by her. But the best laid plans of men and women, if they are in conflict with the promises of God, will never pan out the way we plan. Like his father Adam before him, it says, Abraham listened to the voice of his wife. On cue, Hagar gave birth to a child. The slave woman gave birth to a slave's son. For no son of a slave can be born free. A covenant was born that day. It was a covenant wherein a man tried to bring about the promises of God through his own strength in a way that seemed right to him, faithful to God in his own eyes, but which despises the power of the Almighty One. When she saw her son or the boy, her son, the slave looked at contempt upon Sarah. The free woman began to panic. The law was unclear at this point. She had miscalculated. Not only could the slave woman be divorced, if Abram decided it, so could she. Her old nature reared its ugly head. The old quarrelsome disposition returned with a vengeance. Like her first mother, she blamed her husband. May the wrong done to me be on you. I gave my servant to your embrace. And when she saw that she conceived, she looked on me with contempt. May the Lord judge between you and me. But Abram consoled his bride, his true love. Behold, she is your servants in your power. Do to her as you please. The anger of quarrelsome boiled over at the maid and she dealt harshly with her and Hagar fled. The Lord intervened on her behalf and she returned to Abram under an unsettling peace. But she and the child she bore would be the cause of trouble for him and Sarah the rest of their lives and on down to this very day. One day, several years later, God came to quarrel some and he told her, you will bear a son in your old age. And he repeated the same thing to Abram. He changed their names to princess and to the father of many nations. And they laughed in incredulous joy. A year later, the impossible came to pass, the dead womb of an almost 100 year old woman revived and the spirit of power through the word of promise created life. in the union of two people a century old. And Isaac and a second covenant, a covenant of grace and promise was born. And later, the slave woman's son began to laugh in mockery and disdain for Sarah's blessing, and she made Abraham divorce the slave woman. Abraham was not happy, but God told her to listen to Sarah, for there could no longer be any fellowship between slave and free, between works and faith, between hope and disdain, between flesh and spirit. Only one could stay. The other had to leave. This is a story that's told in Genesis 16, 17, 18, as you go on reading. And you know it well. In Galatians 4, 21 through 31 centers upon this story as part of the climactic argument that these opposites can never be spouses in the same household. The household of faith cannot live with the slave of works and flesh and disdain and futility. The polygamous marriage is a destructive, corrosive abomination, but too many Christians both yesterday and today, refuse to get the message. Like Abraham, they love two different sons because both came from their own bodies, though only one originates in the heavenly promise. Our pride does not want to let go of those earthly works we give birth to, because our stiff-necked pride refuses to let us bend our knees and our necks to see the riches that God has set below us For the one who humbles himself in the sight of the Lord. Paul has completed the most emotionally charged part of this letter to the Galatians, where he tells them to turn back to Christ and away from those smooth talking ear ticklers. He reminds them of where he come from, how he came to them, how he's so sick, how they took care of him. But now he leaves that again and returns to more reasonable things. With the most ironic turn of an argument in verse 21, he says, tell me you who desire to be under the law. Do you not listen to the law? Now, this will become a regular argument. He uses it in the letter of the Romans. He says, you brag about the law. Do you dishonor God by breaking the law? You must not let the power of this irony pass you by, because we all have those parts of the law. that we would hold to rigorously, legalistically in self-righteousness and pride. Anyone who wants to keep the law so badly that they will be justified or sanctified by it have to realize that they simultaneously refuse to read other parts of the very same law that tell them such a thing is impossible and absolutely contrary to the promises of God. This is picking and choosing religion as we want it to be. Like the lawyer who asked Jesus, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Or the ruler who asked the very same thing to him. Jesus always answers, keep the commandments. Which ones, we ask? He says, try the top ten for starters. Oh, I kept all those, we respond smugly. Well, how about then if you sell everything you have, rich man? Or how about if you let the buried the dead bury their own dead family man and come and follow me? Or how about if you stop lusting in your heart or hating your brother? Try those. And so we go away sad. Because Jesus searches our hearts and he catches us in our idols of works that we worship. Tell me you who desire to hold on to that one thing under the law In order to show God what a good, faithful Christian you are, don't you listen to the same law and what it tells you about slavery? That's what Paul's saying. I can think of dozens of places Paul could go in the Torah to make this very same point here. As a reformed Christian, I'm rather inclined to going to the passages on total depravity that are right there in the law in order to prove this kind of a thing, like Genesis 6, 5. Every intention of the heart of man is only evil all the time. Or in Deuteronomy, the Lord has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear. Or in Leviticus, where fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the sons of Aaron. Because among those who are near me, I will be sanctified, God says. Each of those verses show from the law our inability to keep the law. But Paul chooses a more literary tact. He goes to the story of Ishmael and Isaac and Sarah and Hagar. And he uses this real life historical event to prove that in the law there are two competing covenants personified in the very life events of Abraham, the man of faith. And because this is a story and it's not a command or it's not a doctrine, it works on a deeper level of your soul. Like a fable tells you a moral through a story, Paul uses a story to get his point across. And this story is no mere story. It is true history. And yet God saw fit to typify the very struggle that the Galatians are facing in the very lives of Abraham and Sarah, because no one, not even Abraham and Sarah, are immune from the struggle between the flesh and spirit. He says Abraham had two sons. And I've told you about them. They are Ishmael and Isaac. They are born in that order because God often lets us do things our way before finally showing us that it will be his way. And it seems to me that he does this, at least in part, because it seems to be the only way we ever learn through difficult trials and experiences. Now, Ishmael, he notices, is born by a slave woman. But Isaac, he notices, is born by a free woman. For nearly two chapters, Paul has been talking about slavery under the law versus freedom that comes in Christ. What better way to cap off his point than with two women that exemplify it in their very lives? Next, he notices that the son of the slave woman was born according to the flesh, but that Isaac was born through promise. And so he brings up an antithesis in the text, doesn't he? Slave versus free or flesh versus promise. If I was going to define flesh for you, I would say it's something like this. It's anything that we try to do on our own terms, through our efforts, by whether they are legal efforts or not. Flesh is what belongs to the present evil age. It is that which is natural, that which is possible, that which is common sense to us. Sarah's entire plan was hatched, believe it or not, because she knew the law codes of the East and she wanted to help God bring about the promise. Sometimes the worst ideas are hatched with the best of intentions, aren't they? And this is the way we so often justify our own continued grasping for the last few legalistic handholds that we have as we're claiming. It isn't even that the laws of Hammurabi and the others were necessarily bad. It isn't that refusing to drink alcohol or dance or fill in the blank of all these things we've talked about through this letter are bad things. It is that we use them for evil purposes of helping God's promise come to us. This is called what we call synergism. It's a symbiotic relationship, a desire to help God out. Because what he says is just, well, it's just too impossible. Or his timing just doesn't seem to be the way I would like it. Or the idea seems to involve too much suffering or whatever. As we will see, God doesn't need our help in anything, especially to fulfill his promises. The promise, you see, is God's monergistic. Sovereign work of power and grace to bring about the impossible all by himself. All we bring to this table is faith. Belief that God has the power to do what He promised, like it tells us of this same story in Romans 4. Just as we believe that God calls all things into existence by His Word alone, and that He gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were. As He told Abraham and Sarah in Genesis, when He gave them the promise and they laughed, is anything too hard for the Lord? Hope, life, salvation, sanctification, peace with God. It all comes through the promise. Now, this is a slightly different kind of a sermon with stories and. Talking about covenants and women and children, because it's a different kind of a passage in Galatians 424, Paul says this story of the slave slave woman and the free woman, the son of the flesh and the son of the promise may be interpreted allegorically. Now, I'm not going to camp on this for long, but I could. In today's conservative Christian circles, allegory is demonized as probably the worst of all possible things that an interpreter of scripture could ever think of doing to a text. And yet here we find the apostle doing just that. Allegory is an ancient method of interpretation. It was used by Jews like Philo and Christians like Origen and many others. There's no question that it's been abused and used improperly, but frankly so is every other method of interpretation that you can think of, including literalism or historic grammatic or historic redemptive or whatever the case might be. Where allegory goes astray, in my view, is when the interpretation of the text is used as a launching pad for the creativity of the interpreter, irrespective of the thing that's being interpreted. Think, for example, of my favorite whipping boy in the allegory, which is Goliath. Allegory tells you, slay the Goliaths in your life. Here, Goliath becomes a symbol, and that's all he is, for giant obstacles in your life, like financial distress or debilitating health or irreconcilable marital differences. It is this use of allegory, in this use of allegory, it does not really matter at all if Goliath was a real giant slain by a real shepherd boy, much less does the historic redemptive context of the story make any difference. Never mind that God will not allow his name to be mocked by his enemies. Forget that this battle continues the battle of the seed of Eve and the seed of the serpent. Don't worry that Goliath and David ultimately point to Christ versus Satan. All that matters is that you get to the deeper meaning of the text, which, of course, always and only ever has to do with you and your immediate problems. Paul does not use the story of Sarah and Hagar that way at all, does he? In fact, it's just the opposite. It is because the story is real history. It is because Abraham and Sarah really had to go through these things that their life can be used allegorically for the same struggles that we go through. It is because Abraham and Sarah sinned that he's able to relate Ishmael to use figuratively as representing our work's righteousness and justification according to the flesh. It is because they believed the promise by faith that he's able to relate Isaac To us figuratively is a covenant of grace, a covenant that comes only through the miraculous work of the sovereign God. As Hebrews 11, 11 tells you, it was because Sarah had faith that the womb was opened up. The story, therefore, grounds the history, grounds the allegory in the best possible sense. The story is interpreted allegorically in order to show you from the very lives of the most famous people in the Bible. in the very law where you read all the other laws, that we can never think of attaining righteousness through our imperfect obedience. So if we're going to look at it, how does the allegory work then? Well, he says these women are two covenants. Now, here is this clear place in the Bible that I know where there are two opposing covenants in the scripture. We Reform Christians call them the covenant of works and the covenant of grace. And they don't begin with Abraham, but he certainly finds himself right in the middle of both of them. Paul uses a little different terminology, and maybe this is why he chooses this particular story. For him, one is a covenant of slavery, and one is a covenant of freedom. Now that's a little bit more practical, I suppose, in some ways, than works and grace. Slavery and freedom. And he uses this because this is what he's been talking about for a couple chapters now. And he says that this covenant of slavery or covenant of works is from Mount Sinai. And it bears children for slavery. Now, imagine if you're a Jew reading this letter, you'd be perfectly thrilled with that Mount Sinai. He says that Hagar represents this covenant because in a very literal sense, she is the slave woman. And then he starts to get more focused against these false teachers. And the attack is a lot more intensity. He says Hagar is Mount Sinai. And when you think about Mount Sinai, you think about the law. And Sinai was hinted at in chapter three, when he says that the law was introduced 430 years later, when he says that angels came and administered, put it into effect. So here in Hagar, there's a thick irony. Hagar, who was a woman at the beginning of the book of the law, ends up standing for the very law that these Galatian Christians are thinking about returning to. But the problem is that Hagar is the slave woman. He adds that Sinai is in Arabia, and this is one of the chief reasons why more recent treasure hunters have gone looking for Sinai rather than in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula over in Saudi Arabia. But the point here is not geographical, it's theological. Arabia is outside of the promised land. And as such, it is a perfect representation of something that is opposed to the promise. But at just that point, he turns the table. A smug Jew would appreciate the imagery, but certainly not what comes right after it. Because he says she, that is, Hagar, corresponds to presence Jerusalem. Now, suddenly Sinai and Hagar become Jerusalem, and what is Jerusalem? Well, it's the heart and soul of the promised land, it's the capital city of David, it is the home of the temple, it's the center of the Jewish world, it's only everything. What Jew in his right mind would make that kind of a comparison? There isn't a Jew that's ever lived that would do that, but there are plenty of Jewish Christians that would because they understand the truth of the matter and they would see it quite naturally. What is present Jerusalem? What stands for all of the Jewish people, those who had been given who had been given the law by God and given the promises, the patriarchs, the covenants, and yet they refused to see the end of all of those things as he presented himself to them as he was the Messiah and the Lord Jesus. Present Jerusalem stands for the children of Abraham, who are children of the flesh. It stands for biological Jews. It stands for children born in the natural way. And so you can extend it all the way out to any of the city of men. New York City, Denver, Boulder. Take your pick. Stands for those false teachers in the midst of the Galatians. Now, there's one child of Abraham who better represents this than does their actual biological ancestor. And so here's even more irony. They came physically from Isaac. But it's Ishmael who represents these faithless people, because Ishmael is the son of slavery, the son born through quarreling, scheming, jealousy, returning to the Garden of Eden. For Paul, present Jerusalem is in slavery with her children. Now, if I were to ask you the opposite of the present, What would your answer be? What's the opposite of present? You'd probably say either the past or the future, right? We would expect Paul to contrast present Jerusalem with future Jerusalem or something like that, wouldn't we? He doesn't do that. This is where it gets really fascinating to me. He contrasts it with Jerusalem above. Above is the opposite of below. heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, God and man, not present and future. Jerusalem above is just as present as present Jerusalem. That's why it doesn't do that. And this is the glory of the covenant of grace and the kingdom of Jesus Christ. But many Christians do not understand this, and it's a great travesty. In Revelation 21, for instance, the apostate sees the holy city, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, which is why we read it for the gospel. Many Christians see this as some kind of a post-millennial futuristic city, not to mention some of them even see it as like a literal cube city, like a boring ship that you will be able to look at with a telescope. And some people, National Enquirer, once in about a year usually says somebody spotted it. But what does John add to this Jerusalem? She's prepared as a bride, beautifully dressed for her husband. Who is the bride of Christ? It is the church. In other words, heavenly Jerusalem of the Apocalypse is none other than the church of Jesus fully made prepared. Now, there's a sense, of course, in which the church, the city is not yet fully prepared. And yet for both John and Paul, the church is here now. As Paul puts it, she is our mother. Is is a present tense verb. Now, this is allegorically speaking, of course, but for most of the past 2000 years, there has been a sense in which the famous line of Cyprian is exactly right. Remember what he said? He can no longer have God for his father who is not the church for his mother. It is exactly biblical to understand the church as our mother. The mother Paul has in mind here has her roots in the law that is in the story of Abraham. She is Sarah. What does this mean? She is the free woman, the first, the best wife, the apple of Abraham's eye. The one who laughed in delight at the promise of God, she is the church. She represents the covenant of grace. Notice two things are intertwined here, the church and the covenant, because God has chosen the means of grace, word and sacrament in the church to be the primary way of saving and sanctifying people. This is where it becomes such a travesty when you don't understand the present nature of what's going on here. This takes place in corporate worship, the very thing that we're doing right now. When you don't understand what we're looking at here, it makes church superfluous and tedious and monotonous, without purpose. People fail to have open eyes when they come together for worship. They can't see what they are assembling around heaven itself. But Hebrews says you have come to heavenly Jerusalem, doesn't it? You have come to thousands of angels in joyful assembly. To the place where names are written in heaven. To God, who sits on his throne, teaches from the holy mountain, and saves people through Jesus Christ. How many children have been born spiritually in the past 2000 years as they have heard the word preached just once in a church or over the course of their life, and they suddenly come to the awareness that now they believe. But how many today are keeping their children from the means of grace because other things are more important than somehow going to heaven itself? How many things are Christians inventing that serve as cheap substitutes for the real thing? Because it seems like it will work. Such replacements are the schemes of Sarah and Abraham to make the promise come more quickly and more naturally, but the promise can never come naturally. Think for a moment about what is taking place here in the heavenly city when a soul is saved. Salvation, though it seems totally natural to our natural minds, perfectly ordinary, the product of a will bent towards God through excitement or emotions or reason is actually the sole result of an extraordinary miracle of God, which comes through his chosen means to the power of the Holy Spirit. As he says, even here in verse twenty nine, look, they're born according to the spirit. And I don't throw out the word miracle lightly here or light, lightly or often ordinarily miracles are rare. You understand that, right? This isn't the Pentecostal church where we get to see 12 miracles every morning, right? But this is one exception. God has chosen to make the miracle of the new birth a regular occurrence because of his grace. But how can I say it's a miracle that happens all the time? Well, I say it because the allegory. Who is Isaac? Isaac is the son of the barren woman. He's the son of a barren woman. Notice that the apostle now proves his allegory by quoting from Isaiah, who has used the story in the same way in Isaiah 54.1. And remember, in your mind, where does Isaiah 54 one come right after Isaiah 53? Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear, break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor, for the children of the desolate one will be more than those of the one who has a husband. Now, of course, this comes immediately after the most famous messianic prophecy in the entire Old Testament, and so I think it has more than one reference It can refer to the Virgin Mary, for she is barren through virginity, and yet she begets the Son of God through a miracle. In the broader context of the book, it can refer to the return of Israel out of captivity and the blessings that come from the divine intervention in the days of Cyrus, God's chosen, when God ordained that he should, for absolutely no reason, let the Jews go back to their land and rebuild the temple. but can also refer to the spiritual offspring of Abraham. And that's how he's using it here. The verse has in mind, Sarah could also have in mind Hannah when she wore Samuel. But of course, the Hannah story has the precedent with Sarah. The birth of Isaac was a miraculous birth, though, wasn't it? Abraham was 100 years old when God said, You're going to have a child this time next year. Sarah was even in even worse shape, even though she was probably a little younger, because her womb was completely dead, old, shriveled, gone. She was well past reasonable childbearing, and yet because the promise in the Holy Spirit, Isaac was born to Sarah. Now, if the new birth is likened to the birth of Isaac, then it stands to reason that the new birth is a miracle. And if the new birth is the opposite of the birth of Ishmael, it stands to reason that the new birth is a miracle. But too many people see the new birth the same way they see Christian obedience to the law, including going to church, worshiping with the saints and living life during the week. as a perfectly natural use of human will applied to God's command to repent. Now, it is, of course, true that Abraham and Sarah had relations. Isaac was not a virgin birth. But they could have been doing that 24-7 for the next million years and nothing would have happened. In the same way, people can respond in the flesh in a kind of temporary faith and human belief to the command. And for a moment, Jesus says, they can bear fruit. They can spring up. But unless God does the work, bringing both the ability to conceive and the new life itself, nothing we do in the flesh will matter. It is just giving birth to slavery. Of course, again, we do respond to God in the Gospel call, just as Abraham went to be with Sarah. before Isaac was born. And of course, we live obediently to God as Christians. But these are the results of the new birth and the ongoing of the Holy Spirit, not the cause of it, because it comes because of the promise through faith. Too many Christians get this backwards, and it has caused no end of trouble in churches and in lives because of it. Now, it is the confusion here between these two and the mixing together of them that must no longer be allowed to remain in your heart, whether it is a confusion over salvation or sanctification or the place of the law or of legalism that you still hold on to, because this confusion is a mixing together of things that are opposite oil and water. They cannot stay together. It's not possible. And if you try to keep them both, guess which one will always evaporate in the hot sun of your doubt or your suffering? Grace never wins that battle in a human heart that's full of self-deception. This confusion over the two covenants creates a battle that wages in your soul and for your soul. You want to have God be sovereign. And you want to be sovereign. You can't have two kings. You want to be justified by grace and by your works. You want sanctification to be about you letting God work in your life, rather than the Word of God by the Spirit producing new life through you, one direction. What happened in the story of the sons in verse twenty nine, just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the spirit. So also it is now. I could apply this in all sorts of ways to you, as I'm sure you've been doing your own head and maybe are doing now, but let's go to the story, see what he's talking about. He picks out Genesis 21, verse nine, that we read earlier, or that at least I kind of cited. In that verse, the ESV does a really good job, I think, of preserving the word. It says Sarah saw the son of Hagar, the Egyptian, whom she had born to Abraham laughing. Now, other translations opt to opt to explain what the laughing is. And so they say something like mocking. But I like the word laughing better, because you when you're reading the story, you know what has just come before it. There's been other people laughing in this story, hasn't there? What was he laughing about this Ishmael? Remember, when God gave the promise to Abraham and Sarah, what did they do? They laughed. Now, I tend to think at that point that it was a mixed laugh. Half of the laugh was faith and hope, and half of the laugh was incredulous wonder. You know, yeah, right. We're a hundred years old. Now, the two of them ended up arguing over it with the angel of the Lord. The angel says, Sarah laughed. I didn't laugh, I didn't laugh, because she was afraid. He goes, no, but you did laugh. When Isaac was born, Sarah laughed again. And now her laughter was different. Genesis 21.6 says, God has made laughter for me. Everyone who hears will laugh with me, not at me, like Ishmael. For Sarah, when Isaac is born, there is no longer any doubt. There is only joy. Can you imagine? I mean, I can't even imagine what she was going through. There was no more confusion about the promise and how to bring it about. But Ishmael saw the happiness of his non-mother when she gave birth to Isaac. And later on, when Isaac was weaned, she caught Ishmael in a mocking laugh. Making fun of Sarah, who had earlier left, and Isaac and making fun of God. And Sarah became infuriated. You get the hint that because this happens when Isaac's weaned, that Ishmael's been doing this a lot. The mocking of doubt and disbelief and human achievement is embodied in Ishmael, who was born out of all of this. And now the child of the sin, the one of slavery, wars with the person of freedom. It's a Roman seven. Ishmael's laugh is what Paul refers to as persecution, and it refers to the battle between the flesh and the spirit, which is a battle that we all have. And we prove that we have this battle every time we sin. It is disbelieving, incredulous mockery of God's promise and his power. and his sovereignty and his right to do things his way apart from us. Every time we sin, that's what we're doing. We want to do things ourselves. We want to take the credit or at least half the credit. We want to hold on to our pride or our work or accomplishments. They make us feel good. They make us feel needed. And so, rather than laugh at our good fortune and enjoy the blessings and the freedom, we laugh in disbelief at what God tells us. I can't really be justified through faith alone. Like Finney said, that's the most absurd idea that anybody's ever thought of. Like Abraham, we try to keep the family of slavery and of freedom together. But in the end, one of them must go. Sarah realized this immediately, and now that the promise has come, she's happy in God's grace and she grows great disdain for her sin and the result that it produced. And Ishmael was the produce. She cries out to Abraham, just 2110, cast out the slave woman and her son for the son of a slave woman should not inherit with the son of the free woman. Now, do you see how the actual historical event serves as a figure of our own temptations to turn back again to sin and the law and the devil and slavery? It is because it all really happened to Sarah that she was able to make the right judgment at that moment. And basically, Sarah was telling Abraham, divorce this woman and send her away. But Abraham loved his son Ishmael and did not want to be harsh to Hagar. But Christ came to him as the angel and said, do not be displeased because of the boy or Hagar. Whatever Sarah says to you, do do as she tells you. For through Isaac, your offspring will be reckoned. He reconfirms the covenant to him. And he says, I will make a nation of this slave woman and he will be your offspring, too. And God shows kindness to Hagar and Ishmael. But at the same time, he also shows that he will Continue to keep the two covenants intact throughout our lives. And I think God does this in order to test us to see the quality of our faith. Keeping these two covenants together serves to purge us and to purify us like Abraham and Sarah, and it serves always to be a reference to you so that you can see where you have come from. He concludes, brothers, we are not children of the slave, but of the free one. And the point is, God has set you free and he concludes with this whole long section that way. God has taken the covenant of works from you and sent it away. The fruit of that covenant no longer belongs in our homes. You've been set free from slavery to sin and the law and the devil, the promises come. The seed of Abraham was born. He passed the temptation and obeyed the law, bound the strong man to give you grace. And now you may enjoy your freedom and laugh at your good fortune because of what Christ has done for you. So do not be bound any longer to those things that you hold on to, areas of prideful legalistic Fought in obedience, empty, powerless superstitions or vain strongholds of sin. But be free. And Paul will take this now in chapter 5 and he will show you how to apply this freedom. Turn to Christ and love His church and worship God and give thanks for the covenant of freedom and grace. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for your word and the great promises that it holds for us. And I would pray that you would apply them to our hearts. Help us, Father, today on this day, especially as we live in two cities, to remember that we are but pilgrims and strangers and aliens in the one that we are in with our feet and that our head, who is Christ, is seated in heavenly places in the heavenly Jerusalem above and that he has lifted us up into heavenly places and seated us alongside with him. And that even now, as we continue to worship, we are in the very heavenly places that angels have gathered around that we've approached the throne of God, that through faith you do miraculous things for your people. You save those who have not believed and you sanctify those through your word because it pleases you to do so just as the power of the word goes out and it changes us. Pray that you would give us faith. Strengthen our hearts. Help us to know the truth of these things. And may your word be powerful in our lives today. In Jesus name I ask. Amen.