Tuesday, Aug. 20
Genesis 16:1 – 17:27 Read it here

Abram and Sarai (who will later be called Sarah), do what many people had done before and we continue to do all too often – they thought God needed their help to accomplish his plans, so they took matters into their own hands.
In a time when people strongly felt the need to have an heir, specifically a male heir, one of the solutions to not having one was for the husband to father a son by a servant, with that son being considered a legitimate heir.
This is the route Abram and Sarai take, with Sarai giving her Egyptian maidservant Hagar to Abram. However, when Hagar conceives, jealousy arises between the two women. Sarai begins to mistreat Hagar, who flees.
An angel appears to Hagar promises her that her son Ishmael, too, will have many descendants. She returns to Abram and Sarai.
Later, God appears to Abram and promises that he will have a son by Sarai, even though they are both of advanced years. One of the signs of this covenant is changing their names to the ones we are more familiar with, Abraham and Sarah.
The most visible sign of the covenant, though, is that God institutes the requirement that Abraham and all his male descendants be circumcised when they are eight days old, a practice that will continue. Since Abraham and the males in his household are more than eight days old, they are circumcised at the same time, including the now-13-year-old Ishmael.
It is noteworthy that the circumcision requirement extends even to slaves who are part of the household, whether purchased or born into it. Even at this early time, the covenant included people who were not in the line of Abraham.
Historically it is significant that the Islamic faith considers Ishmael to be the ancestor of the Arab peoples…some even believe him to be a direct ancestor of the prophet Muhammad.