# Too Hard for God, or Too Wonderful? What Sarah Heard in Genesis 18 **Author:** Garth Watson **Published:** 2026-09-26 **Last updated:** 2026-09-26 **Canonical URL:** https://doxa.app/blog/daily-deeper-dive-31-genesis-18-1-15 ![An ancient woven tent curtain half drawn back, warm sunlight falling across a clay jar of fine flour and a lit oil lamp on a wooden stand inside, desert hills beyond, no people, no faces, no text](https://doxa.app/images/blog/daily-deeper-dive-31-genesis-18-1-15-hero.jpg) An English Bible has God ask whether anything is too *difficult* for Him. The Hebrew verb in Genesis 18:14 asks whether anything is too *wonderful*. ## What does "too difficult" mean in Genesis 18:14? The verb is [pala (H6381)](https://doxa.app/bible/strongs/h6381): to be extraordinary, out of reach, beyond what a person can do or grasp. Its noun is [pele (H6382)](https://doxa.app/bible/strongs/h6382), a wonder. Israel sang that noun on the far shore of the sea, praising the LORD for "performing wonders" ([Exodus 15:11](https://doxa.app/bible/EXO/15#v11)). So the question put to Abraham in the hearing of Sarah is asked in the language Scripture keeps for God's own acts. Is anything too much of a wonder for the LORD? The thing Sarah laughed at, a son for a woman long past bearing, belongs to the very class of thing His people would later praise Him for doing. Follow the word further and it keeps appearing in stories of promised sons. In Judges, an angel of the LORD tells another childless wife she will bear a son. Her husband asks the messenger's name, and the angel answers with a question: why ask, "since it is beyond comprehension?" ([Judges 13:18](https://doxa.app/bible/JDG/13#v18)). The Hebrew there is [peli (H6383)](https://doxa.app/bible/strongs/h6383), wonderful. Then Isaiah announces a child who will carry the word as a name: "And He will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace" ([Isaiah 9:6](https://doxa.app/bible/ISA/9#v6)). *Wonderful* is *pele*. The word God used to ask whether Sarah's son was beyond Him is the first of the names Isaiah gives the Son who would be born to save us. Centuries after Abraham the LORD asked His question again, almost word for word, while Babylon's army besieged Jerusalem and He told Jeremiah to buy a field in a land about to fall: "Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh. Is anything too difficult for Me?" ([Jeremiah 32:27](https://doxa.app/bible/JER/32#v27)). Same verb. Both times the promise looked absurd to the person holding it, and both times God answered by naming Himself. ## What did a meal for the gods mean in Abraham's world? The God who asks whether anything is too wonderful for Him has just eaten at Abraham's table, and in Abraham's world that meant something. Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldeans ([Genesis 11:31](https://doxa.app/bible/GEN/11#v31)), and in Mesopotamia the gods had to be fed. Temple staff set meals before the divine statues every day, because the gods were believed to depend on them. In the Babylonian flood story preserved in the Gilgamesh epic, when the survivor finally offers a sacrifice, the gods smell it and gather over it like flies, famished after the flood cut off their supply. Genesis 18 runs the other way. The LORD comes to Abraham's tent as a guest at a meal given freely, and He needs nothing from it. Abraham's "bit of bread" ([Genesis 18:5](https://doxa.app/bible/GEN/18#v5)) becomes three seahs of [solet (H5560)](https://doxa.app/bible/strongs/h5560), the same fine flour Israel's law later required for the grain offering ([Leviticus 2:1](https://doxa.app/bible/LEV/2#v1)). And the guest is the one who gives. The meal ends with God promising Sarah a son. In the stories of the nations, people fed the gods to keep them alive; in Genesis God eats at a man's table and gives him life in return. ## How did Israel first hear God's appointed time in Genesis 18? The guest who needs nothing then does what the hungry gods of Ur never did, and sets a date He binds Himself to. In verse 10 He says, literally, *when the time lives again*, the season coming back round. In verse 14 He says "At the appointed time I will return to you" ([Genesis 18:14](https://doxa.app/bible/GEN/18#v14)), using [mo'ed (H4150)](https://doxa.app/bible/strongs/h4150). The people who first heard Genesis read knew *mo'ed* as their own worship word. It named their calendar: "These are My appointed feasts" ([Leviticus 23:2](https://doxa.app/bible/LEV/23#v2)). And it named the place God met them, the *ohel mo'ed*, the Tent of Meeting. They remembered how it went in the wilderness. When Moses went out to that tent, "all the people would stand at the entrances to their own tents and watch Moses until he entered the tent" ([Exodus 33:8](https://doxa.app/bible/EXO/33#v8)). Then "the LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend" ([Exodus 33:11](https://doxa.app/bible/EXO/33#v11)). So when Israel heard that Sarah was "listening at the entrance to the tent" ([Genesis 18:10](https://doxa.app/bible/GEN/18#v10)), the word [petach (H6607)](https://doxa.app/bible/strongs/h6607), entrance, put their mother exactly where they had stood. At the door of a tent, a little behind, overhearing the LORD speak to someone else, and hearing a promise with a *mo'ed* on it. Every feast they kept was an appointed time, and here was the appointed time God set with their family, said twice: the day He would return and a son would be born. Genesis records that He kept it: "Sarah conceived and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the very time God had promised" ([Genesis 21:2](https://doxa.app/bible/GEN/21#v2)). ## What does Genesis 18 show about knowing God? Sarah weighed the promise against her own body and found it impossible. God asked her to weigh it against Him, in a word that means wonder, and then showed her what kind of God was asking: a guest who needs nothing from His hosts, gives them a son, and fixes the day He will do it. Scripture spends the rest of its pages attaching that word for wonder to what He does and, finally, to His Son. Knowing Him means learning to ask His question the way He asked it. Write down what He has said, and the time He set if He set one. When it looks out of reach, weigh it against the God Isaiah called Wonderful.