Genesis 18:14 — the question comes with a date attached
14Is anything difficult for God? According to the announcement, he will return to you at this same time, with life as a companion, and Sarah will have a son.”
The question does not hang in the air. An appointment follows it in the same sentence, which turns rhetoric into a commitment.
Short answer
Genesis 18:14 asks whether anything is difficult for God, and in the same sentence names the time when the promise will be kept. The question answers Sarah, who had laughed at the announcement that she would have a son in old age.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 3 min read
The first half is the part that gets quoted, and it works on its own. The second half is what keeps it from being a slogan.
Notice who prompted the question and why. It does not arise from a theological debate. It arises from a laugh a woman gave to herself, believing nobody had heard it.
Where this verse appears
Abraham receives three visitors near the oaks of Mamre and prepares a meal for them. In the middle of the visit comes the announcement that Sarah will have a son within a year.
The couple is old, and the text says so without euphemism: for Sarah the years of childbirth were behind her. Her laugh in verse 12 is the reaction of someone who has done the arithmetic and found that it does not work.
The question in verse 14 is put to Abraham, not to her. The chapter then continues with Sarah denying the laugh out of fear, and receiving in reply nothing worse than the observation that she did laugh.
What it says
The question is rhetorical in form but not in effect. It asks for no information: it hands back the arithmetic Sarah has just done and shows that a variable was missing. The King James sharpens it into whether anything is too hard for the Lord, which makes it a question about a ceiling; this edition keeps the plainer form, and the expected answer is the same.
The second half blocks the magical reading. It does not say that anything at all is possible at any hour and in any manner. It says that at the same time next year, within the normal span of a pregnancy, the announced thing would happen. A promise with a date is not the same as a promise in general. The phrase this edition uses for that span — with life as a companion — is unusual, and it treats the waiting itself as accompanied.
It is worth marking what the verse does not do. It does not rebuke the laugh. Sarah laughs, denies it, and the only thing she hears back is that she did. The text treats her disbelief as something to be corrected by the outcome, not as an offence to be charged.
The narrative keeps one detail for later. The name the child was eventually given carries the idea of laughter in it. What began as a private joke about her own age ended up as the family name.
What to do with it today
The question is usually deployed to shut down the doubt of somebody else, which is the opposite of what happens here. It is said about a person who doubted, and she loses nothing by it.
An honest use for today. If you have a request you stopped making because it seemed too late, notice that Sarah had the same objection, and the answer came with a day on it. Making the request again does not require the doubt to have left first.
What the passages say
12And she laughed secretly, saying, “After I have grown old, and my lord is elderly, shall I give myself to the work of delight?”
The laugh Sarah gave inwardly, with no audience. It is what the question in verse 14 is answering.
A prayer to carry with you
Lord, I have done the arithmetic and it does not work. If your answer to that is a date I do not know, give me patience to wait without pretending I have no doubts. Amen.