In this post, I explore a theme that I find fascinating in the Christian walk, which is that despite God having made promises, we often still need to contend/ask/plead for those promises to be fulfilled on earth. I’m not trying to answer the question of why God wants us to persist and plead in prayer despite His already stated/revealed promises, but emphasize the spiritual realization that we humans need to pray persistently and meditate on God’s word to bring His promises to pass in our lives. Happy reading!
To kick off, let’s look at the life of Isaac in Genesis 25:21-28. Isaac’s wife, Rebekah, was barren. The Bible says that “Isaac pleaded with the Lord for His wife, and the Lord granted his plea, and Rebekah his wife conceived“. Pleaded? Why? To plead here could mean that Isaac: prayed hard, begged, asked earnestly, intreated, supplicated (the action of asking or begging for something earnestly or humbly). Isaac was 40 years old when he married Rebekah. It wasn’t until Isaac was 60 years old that Rebekah bore children i.e. twins, Esau and Jacob. It took 20 years of praying earnestly and persistently to God for this prayer to be answered.
Let’s take a step back. God had made a promise to Isaac’s father, Abraham, that: God will make Abraham a great nation, his descendants shall be as numerous as the stars in the sky, kings will come from him, and this everlasting covenant will be between God and Abraham and his descendants in their generations (Genesis 12:1-2; Genesis 15:5, Genesis 17:1-7). In simple terms, God promised that Abraham will have children and his children will have many children unto many generations to come. If there was one promise that God was certainly going to fulfil in Isaac’s life, it was this one i.e. that Abraham would have many descendants, implying that Isaac would definitely also have children.