Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)
2 This was Hannah’s prayer:
“How I rejoice in the Lord!
How he has blessed me!
Now I have an answer for my enemies,
For the Lord has solved my problem.
How I rejoice!
2 No one is as holy as the Lord!
There is no other God,
Nor any Rock like our God.
3 Quit acting so proud and arrogant!
The Lord knows what you have done,
And he will judge your deeds.
4 Those who were mighty are mighty no more!
Those who were weak are now strong.
5 Those who were well are now starving;
Those who were starving are fed.
The barren woman now has seven children;
She with many children has no more!
6 The Lord kills,
The Lord gives life.
7 Some he causes to be poor
And others to be rich.
He cuts one down
And lifts another up.
8 He lifts the poor from the dust—
Yes, from a pile of ashes—
And treats them as princes
Sitting in the seats of honor.
For all the earth is the Lord’s
And he has set the world in order.
9 He will protect his godly ones,
But the wicked shall be silenced in darkness.
No one shall succeed by strength alone.
10 Those who fight against the Lord shall be broken;
He thunders against them from heaven.
He judges throughout the earth.
He gives mighty strength to his king,
And gives great glory to his anointed one.”
21 1-2 Then God did as he had promised, and Sarah became pregnant and gave Abraham a baby son in his old age, at the time God had said; 3 and Abraham named him Isaac (meaning “Laughter!”). 4-5 Eight days after he was born, Abraham circumcised him, as God required. (Abraham was 100 years old at that time.)
6 And Sarah declared, “God has brought me laughter! All who hear about this shall rejoice with me. 7 For who would have dreamed that I would ever have a baby? Yet I have given Abraham a child in his old age!”
8 Time went by and the child grew and was weaned; and Abraham gave a party to celebrate the happy occasion. 9 But when Sarah noticed Ishmael—the son of Abraham and the Egyptian girl Hagar—teasing[a] Isaac, 10 she turned upon Abraham and demanded, “Get rid of that slave girl and her son. He is not going to share your property with my son. I won’t have it.”
11 This upset Abraham very much, for after all, Ishmael too was his son.
12 But God told Abraham, “Don’t be upset over the boy or your slave-girl wife; do as Sarah says, for Isaac is the son through whom my promise will be fulfilled. 13 And I will make a nation of the descendants of the slave girl’s son, too, because he also is yours.”
14 So Abraham got up early the next morning, prepared food for the journey, and strapped a canteen of water to Hagar’s shoulders and sent her away with their son. She walked out into the wilderness of Beersheba, wandering aimlessly.
15 When the water was gone she left the youth in the shade of a bush 16 and went off and sat down a hundred yards or so away. “I don’t want to watch him die,” she said, and burst into tears, sobbing wildly.
17 Then God heard the boy crying, and the Angel of God called to Hagar from the sky, “Hagar, what’s wrong? Don’t be afraid! For God has heard the lad’s cries as he is lying there. 18 Go and get him and comfort him, for I will make a great nation from his descendants.”
19 Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well; so she refilled the canteen and gave the lad a drink. 20-21 And God blessed the boy and he grew up in the wilderness of Paran, and became an expert archer. And his mother arranged a marriage for him with a girl from Egypt.
21 Listen to me, you friends who think you have to obey the Jewish laws to be saved: Why don’t you find out what those laws really mean? 22 For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one from his slave-wife and one from his freeborn wife. 23 There was nothing unusual about the birth of the slave-wife’s baby. But the baby of the freeborn wife was born only after God had especially promised he would come.
24-25 Now this true story is an illustration of God’s two ways of helping people. One way was by giving them his laws to obey. He did this on Mount Sinai, when he gave the Ten Commandments to Moses. Mount Sinai, by the way, is called “Mount Hagar” by the Arabs—and in my illustration, Abraham’s slave-wife Hagar represents Jerusalem, the mother-city of the Jews, the center of that system of trying to please God by trying to obey the Commandments; and the Jews, who try to follow that system, are her slave children. 26 But our mother-city is the heavenly Jerusalem, and she is not a slave to Jewish laws.
27 That is what Isaiah meant when he prophesied, “Now you can rejoice, O childless woman; you can shout with joy though you never before had a child. For I am going to give you many children—more children than the slave-wife has.”
28 You and I, dear brothers, are the children that God promised, just as Isaac was. 29 And so we who are born of the Holy Spirit are persecuted now by those who want us to keep the Jewish laws, just as Isaac, the child of promise, was persecuted by Ishmael, the slave-wife’s son.
30 But the Scriptures say that God told Abraham to send away the slave-wife and her son, for the slave-wife’s son could not inherit Abraham’s home and lands along with the free woman’s son. 31 Dear brothers, we are not slave children, obligated to the Jewish laws, but children of the free woman, acceptable to God because of our faith.
5 So Christ has made us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get all tied up again in the chains of slavery to Jewish laws and ceremonies.
The Living Bible copyright © 1971 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.