Why Did Abraham Laugh? God Names Isaac a Year Early (Genesis 17)

Abraham was face down in the dust for the second time in one conversation, and this time he was laughing.

God had just told him to stop calling his wife Sarai. "Her name is to be Sarah" (Genesis 17:15). Both names mean princess, and the new one arrived with a promise far too large for one tent in Canaan: "she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will descend from her" (Genesis 17:16). Sarah was eighty-nine and had never borne a child.

So Abraham went down on his face, the posture of worship, and laughed into the ground. "Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah give birth at the age of ninety?" (Genesis 17:17). He said it to himself. God heard it anyway.

Then Abraham said out loud the thing he actually wanted. "O that Ishmael might live under Your blessing!" (Genesis 17:18). Ishmael was thirteen and already in the house. He was the son Abraham could see, and after thirteen years of silence it would have been easy to settle on him as the answer to everything God said.

God kept to what He had said. "Your wife Sarah will indeed bear you a son, and you are to name him Isaac" (Genesis 17:19). He gave the child a name and a date, "at this time next year" (Genesis 17:21), while there was still no child to name. And the name He picked was Yitschaq, which means he laughs. God took the laugh Abraham let out into the dust and handed it back to him as his son's name.

God answered the plea for Ishmael too. "As for Ishmael, I have heard you" (Genesis 17:20). Ishmael's own name means God hears. God promised to bless him, to give him twelve rulers and make him a great nation, and He kept the covenant line exactly where He had first put it. Abraham was known here, the laugh and the longing both, by a God who heard what he muttered to himself and what he begged out loud, and answered each one.

Then "God went up from him" (Genesis 17:22). "On that very day" he circumcised Ishmael and every male in his household, and he was circumcised himself, "just as God had told him" (Genesis 17:23). The man who laughed into the dust obeyed before the day was out. The honest question and the obedience stand side by side in one chapter, and Paul, reading it centuries later, said Abraham "did not waver through disbelief in the promise of God" (Romans 4:20). He looked straight at "the decrepitness of his body" (Romans 4:19) and acted on what God said anyway.

Two thousand years on, an angel in Nazareth spoke in the same way to a young woman: "you will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to give Him the name Jesus" (Luke 1:31). Another impossible son, named by God before He was conceived. Isaac, the child of laughter, was always pointing ahead to Him, the Son in whom every promise to Abraham comes true. And Paul told everyone who trusts Jesus that they, "like Isaac, are children of promise" (Galatians 4:28).

So bring God the laugh. When He has said something to you that sounds too big to be true, record it in the Doxa app, where His words are kept with the date, and add your honest question to the same entry, the one you would rather keep to yourself. He hears both. Then do the one thing it asks of you today, on that very day, while the question is still sitting there with it. This is how you come to know Him, in the back and forth between what He has said and what you can see.

What has God said to you that made you laugh, and what would it look like to act on it today?

Deeper study today in the Doxa Deeper Dive: the Hebrew word for laughter that comes back again and again in Genesis, what the law of Abraham's world said about Ishmael, and the phrase Israel used for the night they left Egypt. Read it here.