5. After this he had another encouraging vision of God, Gen. xv, 1; and to his complaint that he was still childless, and that his name and property would descend to the stranger Eliezer, who held the next rank in his tribe, the promise was given, that he himself should have a son, and that his seed should be countless as the stars of heaven. And it is emphatically added, “He believed in the Lord, and he counted it to him for righteousness.” He was then fully assured, that he stood before God, a pardoned and accepted man, “whose iniquities were forgiven,” and to whom “the Lord did not impute sin.” Still the fulfilment of the promise of a son was delayed; and Sarah, perhaps despairing that it would be accomplished in her person, and the revelation which had been made merely stating that this son should be the fruit of Abraham’s body, without any reference to her, she gave to him, according to the custom of those times, one of her handmaids, an Egyptian, to be his secondary wife, who brought forth Ishmael. Children born in this manner had the privileges of legitimacy; but fourteen years afterward, when Abraham was a hundred years old, and Sarah ninety, the Lord appeared to him again, established his covenant with him and with his seed, changed his name to Abraham, “the father of many nations,” promised that Sarah herself should bring forth the son to whom the preceding promises had referred; instituted circumcision as the sign of the covenant; and changed the name of his wife from Sarai, _my princess_, to Sarah, _the princess_, that is, of many people to descend from her.
6. At this time Abraham occupied his former encampment near Hebron. Here, as he sat in the door of his tent, three mysterious strangers appeared. Abraham, with true Arabian hospitality, received and entertained them. The chief of the three renewed the promise of a son to be born from Sarah, a promise which she received with a laugh of incredulity, for which she was mildly reproved. As Abraham accompanied them toward the valley of the Jordan, the same divine person, for so he manifestly appears, announced the dreadful ruin impending over the licentious cities among which Lot had taken up his abode. No passage, even in the sacred writings, exhibits a more exalted view of the divine condescension than that in which Abraham is seen expostulating on the apparent injustice of involving the innocent in the ruin of the guilty: “Shall the city perish, if fifty, if forty-five, if forty, if thirty, if twenty, if ten righteous men be found within its walls?” “Ten righteous men shall avert its doom.” Such was the promise of the celestial visitant; but the guilt was universal, the ruin inevitable; and the violation of the sacred laws of hospitality and nature, which Lot in his horror attempted to avert by the most revolting expedient, confirmed the justice of the divine sentence.