Abraham’s Mistake

Most people have heard of, or know who Abraham was. The man chosen by God who came to him and spoke to him directly. That in itself was unique. God told him to leave his family, head out into the desert, carry a little food, water and supplies; and don’t take anyone with you. Can you imagine?

That was about 5,000 years ago. Living in the desert was not uncommon, and Bedouins continue to do so today. Abraham, named Avram/Abram at that time, did what God commanded, well sort of. He did leave The Land of Ur, home of the Chaldeans, but he took his nephew, Lot, with him; and his father went with them for a while. He was to leave his family but did not.

The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”

Genesis 12:1 NIV

Abraham was a descendent of one of Noah’s three sons who survived the flood, Shem. Eventually Abraham married Sarah, Sarai at the time, and waited. And they waited, and waited and kept on waiting. God had promised that Abraham would have a son whose descendants would be numerous.

“I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

Genesis 12: 2,3

Abraham and

continued to age, approaching an age where having a child would be impossible. That’s when they decided that God needed a little help to handle the descendants situation, so Abraham decided to sleep with the servant girl. Sure enough, in no time there was a son, Ishmael. Unfortunately for all of Abraham’s descendents, including us, having this illegitimate son opened a Pandora’s Box that affects global politics and religion more today than in the history of mankind.

Ishmael became the father of a religion that would appear thousands of years later, a religion that would teach world domination and a “convert or be beheaded” philosophy. Ishmael was, and is, the father of Islam in the Arab lands.

Do you ever think about how different the world would be today if Abraham hadn’t slept with Hagar?

Walid Shoebat (Arabic: وليد شعيبات‎) is one of the most well-known Muslim-turned-Christian personalities in the world. A few years ago he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group designated as terrorists by the United States until recently.

“For the record, my name is Walid Shoebat. I used to be a radicalized Muslim willing to die for the cause of Jihad until I converted to Christianity in 1994. As a member of the PLO I was involved in terror activity, and was imprisoned in Jerusalem for three weeks. In prison, I was recruited to plant a bomb in Bethlehem as a result of which, thank God, no one was injured. My mother was an American and my father a Palestinian Arab.” ~ Walid Shoebat

After 9/11, the first 9/11, not the Benghazi fiasco, President Bush often described Islam as a “peaceful religion,” trying to allay possible rioting in our own land. It was not a good time to be a Muslim in the U.S. after the collapse of our buildings and the murder (not martyr) of nearly 3,000 innocent people. But the President’s statement was misleading, because the Quran teaches peace to Muslims; not Jews, Christians, atheists, homosexuals; or anything non-Muslim.

The Quran does instruct to be kind to strangers but then turns around and demands that the “strangers” be converted, enslaved or expelled from the land. If the stranger doesn’t like those choices, then he can just lose his head. Islam is the only major religion that endorses and encourages beheadings as justified.

Walid Shoebat went on to say the following:

(click on paragraph to learn more)

“We need to stop recognizing the legitimacy of Muslim pressure groups. We must understand that these so-called moderate Muslims have been proven as misrepresenting themselves to the media and the public. They are part and parcel of the Muslim Brotherhood apparatus to distract the public and mislead people on the issues of the Radical Muslim agenda.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is promoted in the U.S. as a moderate Islamic organization, level headed and insightful, not radical. However it was discovered that CAIR designees were sending millions of dollars to Hamas (Arabic: حماس Ḥamās), another terrorist Islamic organization. CAIR did this through their “Holy Land Foundation.”

They are the moderates?

In 1998, Omar Ahmad (Arabic: عمر أحمد‎) , CAIR’s founder, apparently alleged that Islam would one day dominate the United States. It’s well on the way, twenty years later. Estimates, which for some reason are hard to come by, state that the U.S. Muslim population in 2001 was 2,800,000. Estimates ten years later in 2011 range from 2.8 million to 9 million.

Islam has approximately 1.5 billion adherents in the world and estimates of the radicalized, range from 10% to 15%. Lovely. That means only about 200 million Muslims want to kill all the rest of us.

As Europe and America continue to portray Islam as a peaceful religion, Christians are being slaughtered (and beheaded or worse) throughout the Arab (Ishmael’s descendants) world. In Egypt, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, Palestine and Iran, it’s open season on Christians.

There is a clear lesson here.

If God speaks to you directly, you should do exactly as He instructs. God did not ask Sarah and Abraham for any help in making a baby. He knew how to make it happen. Their impatience changed the outcome of the world, negatively. A world without a religion of 1.5 billion that wants to convert, enslave or kill all the rest of us would be a better world, in my opinion.

The philosophy of Islam is inherently anti-Christian. Their continued jealousy of anything Isaac (Jewish) has led them to believe that they are really the chosen people. They believe, apparently, that God meant Abraham’s heritage and blessings would be through Ishmael, the illegitimate son. Hagar was told that her son would be a "wild donkey of a man", now loosely interpreted as he, Ishmael, would be free from the slavery she had endured.

However, God’s promise was to Abraham and Sarah,

Genesis 17:15-19… Then God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. 16 I will bless her, and indeed I will give you a son by her. Then I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.” 17 Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said in his heart, “Will a child be born to a man one hundred years old? And will Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?” 18 And Abraham said to God, “Oh that Ishmael might live before You!” 19 But God said, “No, but Sarah your wife will bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac; and I will establish My covenant with him for an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him.

The lack of faith and patience bore Ishmael into this world. Imagine if we had faith in God's plan for each of us, and patience that it would come to fruition.

How many situations in your life have you lacked faith or patience, only to find if you would have had it, the outcome would have been for the better?

Please share your own experiences in comments.