Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Today it's going to be longer than usual because this text is packed and I'm still

going to barely skim the surface so buckle up and if you're listening

faster than 1X you might want to slow this down to normal speed.

In fact you may even want to listen to this one twice.

Yesterday we ended with God making a covenant with Abram and today we picked up to read a little bit of Sarah's story.

By this point, she's at least 75 years old and she still has not had a child,

even though God had promised Abram a child when he visibly appeared to him.

So she does what many of us do when we feel like God is holding out on us. She

takes matters into her own hands. In those days, servants were considered possessions, which

let me pause here to say this very important thing. This is one of those

things in scripture that is descriptive, not prescriptive. It's telling us what is

happening, not what should happen. This is not condoning treating people

like possessions. But in that ancient culture that's what was happening.

And basically anything a servant owned, the master owned, so the child of a servant was considered the property of the master.

Serai used that cultural norm as her logic behind making her servant have sex with her husband.

Because then, if the servant had a child, Serai owned it.

Sarah was tired of waiting.

She wanted to take a shortcut.

Have you ever been there?

Let me give you cause to reconsider.

Seri's fear and impatience has yielded millennia of war and destruction that's still happening

...