What was the significance of weaning a child in the Bible (Genesis 21:8)?

For we get both the birth and the weaning. And each of these events was the occasion of joy in the house of the father. The child born was called "laughter," the child weaned was celebrated by a feast.

Wondrous and gracious secrets these are. It is the father's joy to have children, it is his further joy that his children should know themselves to be children. This was the birth and the weaning of Isaac in the Book of Genesis. And all this, after so long a time, is revived in the Epistle to the Galatians. For what was represented in Isaac is realized in us through the Spirit. In that epistle we learn that we are children by faith in Christ Jesus. And there we learn also that, being children, we receive the spirit of children. We are weaned as well as born. Paul travailed in birth for them again, as he says: "My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you." The Christ of this passage is Christ the Son; and Paul longed and laboured that they might be brought into the Isaac-state, the liberty of conscious adoption. They were under temptation to feed again upon the ordinances which gendered bondage, and which the tutors and governors of an earlier dispensation had enjoined. But opposed to this, the apostle would draw them again into liberty, as he himself had proved the virtue of it in his own soul. It had pleased God, as he says, to reveal the Son in him. The life he lived in the flesh he lived by the faith of the Son, who loved him. He could, therefore, go down to Arabia, where he had no flesh and blood to confer with, no Jerusalem or city of solemnities, no apostles or ordinances, no priesthood after a carnal order, no worldly sanctuary, to countenance, to seal, or to perfect him. He did not want what any or all could give him, for he had the Son revealed in him. He was a weaned Isaac and he would fain have the Galatians to be such likewise; and to hear the word which of old had been heard in the house of Abraham over Isaac, "Cast out the bondwoman and her son; for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman."

All this is given us, mystically, in Isaac the child of the freewoman, whose birth caused laughter, and whose weaning was celebrated with a feast. And this mystery is, we thus see, largely and expressly revived and opened, in its full character, in the Epistle to the Galatians.

It has often been said that the first reference to a matter in Scripture gives us the full thought of God in relation to it, and hence there is great blessedness in seeing that this first reference to weaning describes a scene of holy mirth and joy. I have no doubt that it is the day which morally was in the heart of Abraham, to which the Lord Jesus refers when He said, "Abraham rejoiced to see My day; he saw it, and was glad" — when the habitation of Abraham, through the exercise of weaning, was filled not with the laughter of irony or unbelief which had previously marked it, but the laughter of holy mirth. It is a laugh which is contagious, and having a place in our own hearts will spread to others, as Sarah said, "all that hear will laugh with me." What a blessed thing, dear brethren, to be so filled with the holy mirth which the incoming of Christ gives to the soul, that others are affected by its joy.

It may seem a curious matter to us that Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned (v. 8). But the typical teaching in this is of striking importance. Dispensationally, the birth of Christ is foreshadowed in the birth of Isaac; then the death of the Lord Jesus is pictured in Isaac's circumcision. The weaning of Isaac therefore would speak of the establishing of Christianity as seen in the book of Acts.

He could not live in you if He were not formed in you. You see in the type that when Isaac was weaned there was a great feast; he was to have a recognised position. Ishmael and Isaac had been going on together as is the case with many believers. Ishmael born after the flesh, Abraham's son, brought up in his house, was there. While all the 318 servants were acknowledging Isaac as the heir, this Ishmael, a youth of fourteen, mocked. That is, the cultivated man does not like Christ. It is a terrible fact - the legal man does not like Christ. Isaac was acknowledged. I believe it is a wonderful moment when Christ gets His place. The great good of it is this. Once you have acknowledged Him, you will not have a good conscience if you do not continue doing so. There is a moment when you have done it, but if tomorrow you are drawn away by Ishmael, until Christ be restored to His right place in your heart you will not be happy, you will be like a bird with a wounded wing.

Unmoved from His purpose of wisdom and love, despite the failure and unfaithfulness of Abraham, God fulfils the promise He had made. A son is given to gladden Abraham's life: Isaac is born; a type surely of a greater, in whom all the promises find completion. The "great feast" which Abraham provides signifies that wondrous day in the history of the soul when Christ is acknowledged as the only One to have the place of unchallenged supremacy. This has been called the "coronation day;" setting forth in figure "Christ's day," when He shall be supreme and without a rival.

But there is one discordant voice heard amid the rejoicings of the great feast — Ishmael mocks! When Isaac is given his rightful place, the true character of Ishmael is exposed. And it is the bringing in of the true Isaac, and according Him the place of undisputed pre-eminence, that exposes all that man is after the flesh and arouses the deep enmity of his heart. If we insist that man after the flesh must go, and that Christ alone must have the place of pre-eminence, we shall find that Ishmael is still a mocker. The flesh in us cannot endure the thought of being set aside; but it must go! The bondman and her son must be cast out; and this having been accomplished, we see Abraham in moral superiority in the place where his weakness had been so apparent, so that Abimelech has to own that God is with him. This is the result of Isaac getting his rightful place.

And now the promise is fulfilled, and Isaac is born to dwell in Abraham's tents: the consummation of the life of faith is when Christ dwells in the heart through faith; the true fruit of faith in us is Christ thus abiding. Dispensationally, it is the coming of Christ and Christianity that we reach here, the two, as it were, identified, for are they not one? Therefore the child is circumcised, (as I take it, at the cross,) and weaned gradually, and there is a great feast when the child is weaned. Is not this the blessed truth which was given through Paul, and which especially brought out the mockery of unbelief and persecution of the Church by the Jews? Then the bondwoman and her son are sent away, the nation is in the meantime as such rejected. The wandering in the wilderness of Beersheba (the "well of the oath"), is a striking picture of their present condition. The water, the word of life, is spent for them, and the well they see not, though the oath of God, the covenant with their fathers, secures it for their final possession. This, therefore, their eyes are yet to be opened to, and Hagar herself to become a means of blessing to them (Deut. 30:1-3); their dwelling still and ever outside of Canaan — the heavenly inheritance.

Now the grace of God bears its most important fruit in the history of Abraham. Sarah, at the unlikely age of 90 years, gives birth to Isaac, at the time God Himself had appointed (v.2). Though faith (that of Abraham) had waited long, till he was 100 years of age, yet grace (as seen in Sarah) eventually bore the fruit that God had promised. This pictures the fact that believers throughout the Old Testament had waited through centuries before the grace of God is seen in all its beautiful fruition in the birth of the Lord Jesus. What an answer to their patient waiting in faith! He came at God's appointed time, after the law had proven itself unable to bring forth any fruit for God. He has come to fill the hearts of the faithful with deepest joy, just as Abraham and Sarah were so delighted with their son that they named him Isaac, meaning "laughter".

ISAAC WEANED AND ISHMAEL PUT OUT

It may seem a curious matter to us that Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned (v.8). But the typical teaching in this is of striking importance. Dispensationally, the birth of Christ is foreshadowed in the birth of Isaac; then the death of the Lord Jesus is pictured in Isaac's circumcision. The weaning of Isaac therefore would speak of the establishing of Christianity as seen in the book of Acts.

After another failure in Genesis 20 (more guilty than the first occasion in Genesis 12), Jehovah visited Sarah as He had said, and Jehovah did to Sarah as He had spoken. For Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age at the set time of which God had spoken to him. And Abraham called the name of his son that was born to him, whom Sarah bore to him, Isaac. Him on the eighth day Abraham circumcised; and Sarah's laughter was now of overflowing joy and gratitude. But the great feast on the child's weaning drew out Ishmael's mockery, and the expulsion of the bondmaid and her son on Sarah's remonstrance, an allegory to which Galatians 4 gives us the key.

The appearance of such a child was a great era. And soon was it found that he was set for a sign that should be spoken against, as well as for the joy of the elect. Abraham makes a feast, but Ishmael mocks over the same event. Here was the revealing of hearts. One taunts what the other glories in. But Sarah is bolder still. She will not merely take part in Abraham's joy, but she is for judging the scorners. "Cast out the bondwoman and her son," says she. Here was another heart revealed, a great heart truly. Here was an energy of faith which far outdid even Abraham's. Abraham would personally and quietly enjoy the child of promise, but Sarah will not only do this, laughing with divine believing delight over him, but is for cleaning out by a summary dismissal all that would disturb his full unrivalled heirship of everything.

But if there were those who rejoiced at the birth of Isaac, there were also those who mocked, and we see what calls forth their enmity. There came a day when "a great feast" is made in honour of the heir. This honour put upon the heir arouses the jealousy and enmity of those who had long held a position in the household of Abraham.