Reluctant Demon (18 page)

I had wondered if Abram would get the nerve to bring it up to God that he was way too old to father anything, especially a nation, like God had promised him. As for Sarai, forget about it. She lost interest long ago. I was anxious to hear how God was going to answer.

God said, "A son coming from your own body will be your heir."

Abram looked down at his body. I also looked at his body, and I can tell you that it was not an inspiring sight.

The Lord's plan was for Abram to impregnate Sarai.

"Come on, God," I thought to myself. "Admit it's too late. Come up with a consolation prize."

That is exactly what I expected Abram would say, but he didn't. Instead, Abram believed God—again—and God credited it to him as righteousness.

There it was again: believing God. Noah had done it and found favor with the Lord. Abram did it, and he was credited with righteousness. I tried to reason out what this meant. How does it work?

I paced back and forth on my perch and debated with myself. "If a human tells God he believes something that cannot possibly be true, does it win favor with God?"

"No, probably not," I answered my own question.

It has to be something more, but it could not be too hard or humans would never figure it out. Maybe it is like a game.

"That's it, and I'll bet Adonai is behind it," I thought, remembering His outlandish sense of humor.

Here is how the game most likely works. God proposes the most preposterous scheme possible—something that cannot possibly happen—and asks a human to believe it is true. Now, the human must say he believes it to be true even though it is contrary to his prior experience and in the absence of verifiable evidence.

To win the game, the human must not only
say
he believes what God has said, he must also start to
behave
as if he believes it. When he takes some sort of risky action to prove he's on board, bingo, God delivers on His promise, no matter how impossible it seemed or how much ruckus He must cause to make it happen.

Then I wondered, "But what happens if God speaks to a human who ignores Him?"

I already knew the answer to that question because I had seen it happen many times. In fact, most times. God would speak, and if no one responded, He simply moved on to the next person in line until He found someone who would react to Him. No wonder it takes God so long to get anything done on Earth. He has limited Himself to working with humans. He cannot do a thing until He finds one who will believe that "He is" and that He has spoken a promise to him or her. As soon as that happens, without fail, God disappears and may not show up again for years.

Naturally, this really perplexes human beings. The person with the promise must continue to believe it will come about no matter how long it takes or how unlikely it seems. The man or woman in question must continue to believe when others have stopped.

"How many humans could there be who can trust God like that?" I wondered.

Not many, I was sure. I didn't know whether to laugh at their simplicity or admire the ones who could step out and believe God with such certainty.

"Believe the impossible from a voice you cannot audibly hear, from a person you cannot physically see, and call it God?" I mused. "Then spend your life waiting for God to prove Himself. Trust God? Believe God? There must be another word for it."

CHAPTER 22

ABRAM DIDN'T HAVE
to say a thing. As soon as he came back from his evening stroll

and opened the flap to the tent, Sarai knew something was up. When she looked at her husband's face, she knew he had been with God again. She had been nagging Abram for months to try to get another meeting, get a few specifics as to how and when all of His great promises were supposed to come about.

Excited to see something had happened and eager to find out what God had said to her husband, she began to pry the information out of him.

Poor old Abram, so completely unaware of the havoc about to be unleashed in his life. I almost felt sorry for him. Anyone who understands women—anyone who has ever had a conversation with a woman—could have seen this problem with Sarai coming and would have run. But not Abram; he was completely clueless.

"What's for dinner?" he asked as he laid his staff aside and took off his sandals.

"And so? How did it go?" she asked while pouring out a cool drink.

"Fine," Abram answered. "What's for dinner?"

"First tell me what He said."

"He said you were going to have a baby. Are we eating out?" Abram continued as he lifted the covers off of several pots, wondering why he didn't smell anything cooking.

"And you said to Him what exactly?" Sarai was no longer pouring a drink or making any move that had to do with food.

"I didn't say anything. What's to say?" Abram, sensing this was going to be a long talk, began looking around for a scrap of bread or cheese.

"What's to say?" Temperature rising, nostrils flaring; yes, all the signs of a coming storm were clearly there.

Her voice was beginning to take on that shrill sound.

"What's to say, old man? Nothing at all crossed your mind?" Sarai walked around the table and got in Abram's face.

"I don't know; maybe you could have said something like, 'Oh, Lord, how is this going to be? Have You noticed that my beloved Sarai is past the time of child-bearing?'"

Spotting a piece of bread behind the water jar, he reached for it, but she was not about to let him get away.

Inserting herself between him and any type of food, she continued.

"How about something like this?" Sarai adjusted her head covering and folded her hands. "'Oh, Lord, maybe I misunderstood. My hearing isn't what it used to be with my age and all. What was that promise again?'"

Unfolding her hands and planting them firmly on her hips, she waited for Abram to respond.

"It will work out as He has said," Abram replied, reaching around her for the bread.

"Really, my husband? What a relief. I am so glad to know that you and I alone are about to defy the laws of time. A lesser person with the slightest idea about where babies come from would like a few more details about how such an extraordinary thing will come about, but not you." She was pacing back and forth in a high state of agitation by now.

"Sarai, He is God, not me. Am I to question Him? It has gone well with us because I have not doubted Him."

"Tell me exactly what He said, and don't leave anything out. You were never one for details."

"All right, already," Abram began. "He said to me,

'Your servant will not inherit your legacy, but a son coming from your own body will be your heir.' That is all there is to it."

Sarai's face looked suddenly suspicious.

"What more do you want?" Abram asked as he checked the cooking pots again to be sure he had not missed something.

"He said nothing about me?"

"Of course He said something about you. You are going to have a baby. What else do you want?" He gulped down the last of his drink.

"He said I was going to have a baby—exactly?" She pressed. "Try to remember."

"He said exactly I would have a son of my own loins.

Of course you are going to have a baby. How else would I get a son?" Starving by now, Abram put on his sandals and went to the camel driver's tent in hopes that dinner was still being served.

Oh, if only Abram could have observed the behavior of human women for a few centuries as I had, he would have known never to deliver that kind of information to a woman and then leave her alone to process it. Why, the next four thousand years of human history might have been different if Abram had just a little insight into how women think. God should have warned him about how complex human women are. Personally, I think God Himself didn't always know quite what to expect from females. If the truth be known about it, God probably looked at women and wondered how one of His really clever ideas had become so much more complicated than He intended.

Nothing could have pulled me away from my perch right then; I did not want to miss the action I knew was coming. I could have written the script for what was about to take place in Sarai's mind. Women think men don't want to take the responsibility for anything, so they must take the responsibility for everything. It all started with Eve.

Remember back there in the garden when Adam told God that he had eaten of the forbidden fruit because Eve made him do it? God didn't buy his story for a minute.

The words Adam spoke, pathetic excuses that they were, still had an unexpected and lasting effect on Eve and her daughters.

I don't think God anticipated how female reasoning would go askew the way it did. Remember, there were no females in heaven. There was no prototype. The whole experiment with women was an entirely new idea.

Women have always been very complex.

Men, on the other hand, are not complex. Men are simply made with a standard emotional package; no frills, no fuss, nothing fancy like there is with women. Men have a basic range of emotions and a standard vocabulary through which they process life. This should have been the normal equipment in all humans, male and female, nothing more or less. Men understand up/down, left/

right, good/bad, black/white, hungry/eat, itch/scratch, tired/sleep, mad/yell, hit, grunt. Like that, you see? Easy and simple, that's the way it is with men.

Adam thought there were only two possible states of time: day or night. Eve insisted on breaking time into first light, dawn, morning, noon, afternoon, dusk, evening, night, just after midnight, and just before dawn.

And let me tell you about the colors. That was worse.

Adam would say black or white. But Eve would say char-coal, ebony, deep black, barely black. And of course there was not just white. There was bone, eggshell, vanilla, ivory, pale white, glossy white—I could go on and on.

See what I mean? Now take that same propensity to make things more complex than they need to be and carry it into the emotional makeup of women.

Men get mad. Women get irritated, hurt, disappointed, annoyed, miffed, piqued, ruffled, upset, enraged—like that.

Here's how God had a good idea for everybody but failed to foresee how differently it might function between men and women. He put into humans a sense of shame and guilt, intended as a safety valve for their protection, so that when they turned from Him or sinned, the valve would trigger and they would feel something inside of themselves that convicted them of their error. Smart, right?

It was a simple job to install it into the soul of men.

But when He started to put it into women, He had to work around the intricate wiring of those accessories and upgrades on the female model. God simply tightened the screw too much in the shame and guilt area. So, ever since Eve, if a man suggested to a woman that something might be her fault, she immediately thought that it was.

Adam said Eve made him eat the fruit. If you could have seen the size of him and the size of her, you would see how ridiculous that was. But in Eve's mind, because of that shame and guilt screw being too tight, her natural conclusion was, "Maybe I did. It must be my fault." A case of an overdeveloped sense of responsibility resides in every female who has ever been, because as I see it, God will not own up to the miscalculation and fix it.

It's that kind of dysfunctional reasoning that has stayed in Eve's daughters all the way to the present generation.

And don't think for a moment that men haven't figured it out.

Therefore, when Abram repeated to Sarai what God had said to him, she analyzed the sentence structure. As I have seen women do time after time, she came to a logical and yet completely wrong conclusion about what God meant. Abram had been promised a son from his own body, but she had not. The Lord had intentionally not said anything about her.

"That must be it," she thought. "I'm too old to be the natural mother. I bet they talked about it and Abram doesn't want to tell me. He knows it will hurt my feelings.

I must sacrifice my own desires. I must do something to see that Abram has an heir as God has said."

And that is when Sarai came up with one of the worst ideas in human history. She decided on her own to save the day. She believed she was too old to have children, but she had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar who was not.

When Abram came back to the tent later that night, Sarai was waiting for him. "My husband, we must talk."

"Must we talk now?" he asked, full of bread and wine, desiring nothing more than to lie down.

"It has to be now; your happiness depends on it."

Having never heard her say anything close to this before when he had come home late, Abram came to attention. "What do you mean—my happiness?" He tried to remember if Sarai had ever been concerned about his happiness before.

Sarai sighed and said, "The Lord has kept me from having children."

"But so, who cares? You will have a baby now. The Lord said so." Abram tried to console her. "Now, let's go to bed." He turned as if going to lie down.

"No, my husband," she sighed even deeper.

Abram knew this conversation was going to happen no matter what, so he sat down on a pillow and motioned for her to go ahead.

"He said
you
would have a son. He said nothing about me. I am too old. I've thought it over. Go and sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her."

Now Abram, with that basic emotion package and simple thinking feature common to man, quite naturally thought that when Sarai proposed her preposterous idea, she must actually mean it. Which, of course, she thought she did at first.

When Sarai suggested Abram have sex with Hagar in order to secure an heir "from his own body," as God had promised, there were any number of ways Abram should have responded. Any of them would have been better than what he did.

He was supposed to gasp at the thought. He was supposed to fall down on his knees in gratitude when he realized how Sarai was willing to sacrifice her own happiness for his. He was supposed to marvel at how unselfish she was and how she was willing to put aside her own desperate desire for a child to secure his happiness. The number one thing in the top ten things that Abram was supposed to have done and did not: he was supposed to say, "No. Absolutely not. Inconceivable. Wouldn't consider it. The matter is settled. Don't mention it again."