Genesis 18 sits at the hinge of the Abraham cycle. Three visitors come to the oaks of Mamre, one of whom speaks as the LORD himself. Sarah is ninety. Abraham is ninety-nine. The promise of a son was first made twenty-four years earlier, and the womb has only grown more impossible since. Moses gives this scene to a wilderness generation who knew exactly what it felt like to wait on a promise that seemed past its expiration date. The question in verse 14 is not rhetorical decoration. It is the question that organizes the rest of the Torah.

From the writers we read together

William Lane Craig

philosopher of religion, research professor at Talbot School of Theology

Craig has argued for decades that the modern objection to miracles is not really an argument; it is a prior commitment. If you assume the universe is closed, then of course Sarah cannot conceive at ninety. But the assumption is doing all the work. Once you grant the God of Genesis 1:1 — the one who made the womb in the first place — the question of verse 14 answers itself. The only thing that would be strange is if such a God could not reopen what he had made.

What Craig presses on the skeptic, this verse presses on the believer. Sarah laughed inside the tent because she had quietly concluded that her body was now outside the reach of the promise. The visitor's question is gentle but it goes through her. Most of us have an area of life we have moved into the column marked too late. Genesis 18:14 does not sentimentalize that column. It just asks whether the LORD honors it.