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

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

God has 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 arrives 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 is eighty-nine and has never borne a child.

So Abraham goes down on his face, the posture of worship, and laughs 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 says it to himself. God hears it anyway.

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

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

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

Then "God went up from him" (Genesis 17:22). "On that very day" he circumcises Ishmael and every male in his household, and he is circumcised himself, "just as God had told him" (Genesis 17:23). The man who laughed into the dust obeys before the day is out. The honest question and the obedience stand side by side in one chapter, and Paul, reading it centuries later, says 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 speaks in the same shape 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 is conceived. Isaac, the child of laughter, was always pointing ahead to Him, the Son in whom every promise to Abraham comes true. And Paul tells 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, write it down, and write your honest question on the line beneath it, 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 on the page. 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 laugh that keeps sounding through 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.