The First Baptist Church of Granada Hills

In the fourteenth century an Italian by the name of Dante Alighieri wrote a book entitled The Divine Comedy.  Mr. Alighieri’s book describes the meanings of sin and redemption through an extended allegorical journey, what we might call a pilgrimage.  The pilgrimage is divided into three major sections: Dante’s journey through hell (what is often called “Dante’s Inferno”, by far the most well known of the sections), his journey through purgatory (which, as a medieval Italian Catholic, Dante believed in very much), and finally his journey through heaven.  Now, considering the contents of the first section of this book, the Inferno, with its highly imaginative and hellish tortures (people being boiled alive for all eternity in lakes of feces and others, naked, completely frozen within a glacier with only one eye exposed from the freezing ice that they might weep over their sins forever and ever) it’s a little surprising that Dante would call his book a comedy.

Generally, when we think of the word “comedy” we think of funny movies and TV shows in which people tell jokes and slip on banana peels.  But traditionally, we might say, classically, the word comedy had a somewhat different meaning.  Centuries ago, when Dante wrote his allegorical masterpiece, a comedy was simply a story that had a happy ending, a story in which everything just worked out in the end.  So while Dante sees the horrors of hell in his literary pilgrimage, his story is a comedy since, at the end, he arrives in heaven and stands before the throne of God caught up in the inexpressible love of the Holy Trinity.  In the end, at least for Dante, everything comes out okay.

There is a passage of Scripture that indicates that the life of faith is a comedy in this sense of the word, a passage that reveals that while the people of God may experience difficult times, indeed, even horrible times, in the end, through the grace of God, everything’s going to work out happily.  In Genesis, chapter twenty one, we find the following passage: “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 Abraham in his old age, at the very time God had promised him.  Abraham gave the name Isaac to the son Sarah bore him.  When his son Isaac was eight days old, Abraham circumcised him, as God commanded him.  Abraham 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 Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.’”

In this passage we find the birth of Abraham and Sarah’s son, Isaac.  This baby was the reason that God called Abraham and Sarah out of their homeland and into the land of Canaan.  This baby was the promised heir that was to come from Abraham’s own body.  This baby really was the peg upon which Abraham and Sarah had hung their hopes for a legacy and posterity.  And it’s this baby, so important and so long looked for that was named Isaac, a name which means “he laughs”.  Now that’s something of a fitting name for this article.  I mean, what better name could there be for someone who appears in an entry entitled “The Divine Comedy” than one associated with laughter?  But just as I explained earlier about the complexity that lingers over the word “comedy”, similarly there is a complexity that hangs about Isaac and the kind of laughter he evokes.

The first step to understanding this complexity is realizing that this is not the first time that the name “Isaac” appears in the Bible, in chapter twenty one, at the moment of his birth.  Instead, the first time we see the name is much earlier in the narrative, back in chapter seventeen.  And there in chapter seventeen we find God giving Abraham very clear instructions regarding the naming of his son.  Now, this isn’t the only time this happens in the Bible; the phenomenon of a child’s name being supplied by a heavenly being occurs a few times in Scripture.  There is, of course, this story, and then there is the story of the birth of John the Baptist who is named John at the command of an angel.  And then there is the far more popular tale of the birth of Jesus, again a man whose name is dictated from heaven and not, apparently, chosen by his parents.

But even so, even though Isaac is not alone in his unusual naming, his situation is noteworthy.  For while God may have chosen Isaac’s name, the Lord seems to have had some help in picking it out.

Back in Genesis seventeen, when God declared that Abraham would have a child, and what’s more, that his ninety years old postmenopausal wife, Sarah, would be the one to supply it, Abraham responded in a memorable way.  In Genesis, chapter nineteen, starting at verse fifteen we see part of God’s original promise, “God also said to Abraham, ‘As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her Sarai; her name will be Sarah. I will bless her and will surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.’” –But then, notice Abraham’s response–, “Abraham fell facedown; he laughed and said to himself, ‘Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?’ And Abraham said to God, ‘If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!’”

Abram hears what, by all outward appearances, is an impossible promise and he laughs.  But his is not happy laughter, this isn’t some light-hearted chuckle, this is a bitter laugh, the kind of laugh a man laughs when it seems fate is mocking him.  God tells Abraham that his dream of an heir will be fulfilled, fulfilled through the wife of his youth.  And we can imagine Abraham, knowing his own age and knowing his wife’s age, clenches his teeth, forces a sour smirk, and laughs.  “Yeah right, God; a kid; a kid from Sarah. What a joke.”  And it is here, in the very next verse, immediately after Abraham laughs at God’s promise, that God declares the child will be named Isaac, will be named “he laughs”.

Now, before we condemn Abraham too harshly, we must remember that he wasn’t the only one who thought God’s promise was ridiculous.  Just one chapter later, when the mysterious envoy meets Abraham at his tent and reminds him of God’s promise, Sarah overhears and responds exactly the same way.  Genesis eighteen verses ten through twelve: “Then the LORD 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.  Abraham and Sarah were already old and well advanced in years, and Sarah was past the age of childbearing. So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, ‘After I am worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure?’”

For both Abraham and Sarah, God’s promise seemed like a joke, and a cruel one at that.

But even so, despite all the physical difficulties, God fulfilled His promise.  Despite all the reasons why it couldn’t happen, it did.  And in so doing God took the laughter of Abraham and his wife and amplified it; He took it from an internal laughter and made it audible—and this time it didn’t have the bitter tinge it once did.  God called for the boy to be named Isaac so his parents would always be reminded that, in the end, life with God is something of a comedy, that with Him everything will work out okay, that all things are possible with the Lord, even the ridiculous.

Now this principle really becomes something of a pattern throughout the Bible.  Here in the story of Abraham we find God choosing to achieve some overwhelming end through distinctly underwhelming means.  A stranger is implanted into a new environment and over the course of time comes to possess warriors, territory, wives, herds, riches and on and on, including, as we see today, descendants.  That’s not bad.  But the achievement is made all the more phenomenal when we understand that the couple who stands at the center of all this is not a pair of highly skilled, youthful, rugged, muscular, action heroes; they are a pair of senior citizens. Abraham is not Arnold Schwarzenegger, he’s George Burns.

But this same thing would happen over and over again throughout Scripture.  When Joseph, a descendant of Abraham, rises to command the bureaucracy of Egypt he’s not scouted from the finest business schools of Palestine, he’s dragged out of a prison.  When the Hebrews enter into the Promised Land to embrace God’s blessings and execute His judgment on the Philistines, they aren’t a well oiled military machine, they are a poorly organized rabble a mere one generation removed from utter slavery.  When David ascends to the throne of Israel he doesn’t come from the royal family of some neighboring state, he comes from the sheepfold.  When the awesome armies of Assyria decide to throw in the towel and head home, they are routed not by some even more terrible horde but by Hezekiah and Isaiah, a frightened king and a prophet who had the unnerving habit of preaching naked.  When the Lord Himself takes on human flesh and speaks doom over all that appears holy and pure on the outside but is hollow and corrupt on the inside, He does so not from the seat of a chariot but from the back of a donkey.  When this same Christ chooses the man who would lead His disciples after He was gone, Jesus didn’t pick the unflinching John or the constant Paul, He chose the vacillating and bumbling Peter.

In each of these cases and a thousand more, when God does something wonderful He does so with people and resource one would never have expected.  Time and time again in the record, God chose to use the absolute worst, the weakest and the whiniest to usher in his thundering deeds: to establish Israel, to redeem the lost, and to perpetuate His covenant people down through the ages.  As the Apostle Paul would say in his letter to the Corinthians, “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”

Its would seem that God consistently chose to work with third rate human resources to declare this truth over and over again: our salvation, our redemption, our ability to stand before God is entirely God’s own doing.  Had the Lord worked through the best humanity had to offer, there would always be a temptation to think that the human element of the equation was responsible for the success.  Had God chosen to forge His covenant with Achilles, no one would have been surprised that that man could have held his own in the Land of Palestine; he could have held his own anywhere.  Had the Romans been the chosen people instead of the Hebrews, no one would have batted an eye at their conquest of the Philistines, they conquered everyone.  But by using the weak, the old, the foolish, the poor, the ill, and the slave, by using people that simply could not do these things and making them do them anyway, God causes us to pause and take notice.  (After all, it’s not everyday that a hundred year old man and a ninety year old woman have a baby.)  God invites us to understand that this is His doing and not our own, that He is the one writing our happy endings and not we ourselves.

Now, this pattern, as counter-intuitive as it is, reveals a truth so central to the gospel that, in a sense, it is the gospel; it’s the good news.

Last Wednesday was October 31st and that day has had a large number of meanings down throughout the years.  In the ancient past it was the day that pagans celebrated Samhain, a festival of the dead.  Later the Church would hijack the day and turn it into All Hallows Eve, a day on which Christians would remember the departed saints. Later still, October 31st was hijacked again and rededicated, this time not to pagan gods, nor to Christian saints, but to cavities, costumes and scary movies.

 But in addition to all these convolutions, there was one particular October 31st that has special significance.  In the year 1517, a lone monk living in eastern Germany nailed a list of propositions to a church door in his hometown questioning a variety of doctrines that had become fairly standard in some quarters of the medieval Church.  The monk’s name was Martin Luther and the publication of that list set in motion a theological and social movement that would attempt to purify the Church, to purge away many of the errors and accretions that had, in the course of time, grown over the gospel much like barnacles that grow over the hull of a majestic ship.  And this movement, this Reformation, would once again place the focus of theological investigation not on tradition or ecclesiastical authority, but on the Bible itself. And when the Bible was allowed to speak for itself, the Church once again discovered that it had something very striking to say: as the Apostle Paul so eloquently put it in his letter to the Ephesians, “it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”

And so, what we see happening in the birth of Isaac, in his highly improbable ancestry and in his humorously ironic name, gives us a picture, not just of how God has done things ages ago in places we’ve never been, but also of how God deals with people today, of how He deals with us.  For, according to Scripture, while God was basically the one “getting things done” in the life of Abraham and then in the Exodus and on into the Hebrew monarchy, He’s also the one doing the real work when it comes to our salvation.  In Christ, God enters into the world, takes the sins of mankind on His shoulders, and puts them to death in his own death.  Our sins are remedied, our slates are cleaned, not by any heroic acts of penitence on our part, but by God’s own activity.  He is the one who suffers, He is the one who atones, He is the one who rescues us from the monsters that we have created and which we cannot control: our own broken selves.

Like starving men too weak to obtain our own food, Christ comes to us and supplies us with what we desperately need.  And all that is required of us is acceptance, is the willingness to receive His gift and not to use our last ounce of fading vitality to clench our teeth against the spiritual nourishment the Lord offers.  Jesus Himself says this much in the Gospel of John.  In John, chapter six, beginning in verse twenty eight, we find Jesus responding to men desperate for answers, “Then they asked him, ‘What must we do to do the works God requires?’“Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’”

That’s it; no impossible standard of virtue, no terrifying acts of self-punishment, no daunting pilgrimages or Crusades—just faith.  How strange, how weirdly wonderful this seem to us who so often feel that we must do something to earn our place in God’s grace.  And yet, Jesus Himself reassures us that God’s grace is exactly that, grace, that it can’t be earned, it can only be humbly received.  This isn’t, of course, to say that God is comfortable with sin and wickedness.  Quite the opposite; God demands holiness, He demands righteousness.  But at the end of the day that which God requires He also supplies.  God satisfies His own demands through Jesus Christ and thus, by uniting ourselves to our Savior by faith, by being “in the Lord” (as the Bible so often puts it), Christ’s righteousness covers us and makes us acceptable to God.  Once again, God demonstrates that with Him, life is a comedy, that because of what He has done, everything will be okay and that ultimately neither Sarah’s physical decrepitude nor our moral decrepitude can thwart the Lord’s loving plans for us.