Genesis 18:11 Meaning Now Abraham and Sarah Were Old

Abraham is the state in which the promise of a child is made, imagination taking on human nature. Sarah is the soul that must bring that promised child to birth. Both are called old and past the natural season, and the ceasing in Sarah is the plain fact that nothing in the ordinary way can produce what is coming. This is the point on purpose. The birth ahead owes nothing to what is possible.

The child here is the awakening itself, the joy born from above, and it arrives exactly where reason has given up. A soul that has waited past every reasonable hope is the soul in which the promise is kept. The impossibility is not the obstacle. It is the sign that the birth belongs to the imagination and not to the course of nature, and so it comes when the natural way is finished.

The barrenness of age here is the state of a consciousness that has exhausted its natural, bodily power to bring anything forth, so that whatever is born next must come from the spirit and not from the flesh. Abraham, the father of a multitude, is the higher mind, and Sarah, whose name opens toward the princess or ruling feminine, is the soul-principle joined to it, and both are shown past the reach of natural generation. That it ceased with Sarah after the manner of women means the ordinary generative flow of the lower nature has stopped, the physical channel is closed. This is the ground the promise needs. What cannot be produced by the body's own strength is precisely what the spirit is about to conceive.

The closing of the natural way is not the end but the opening. When the flesh can no longer generate, a person is brought to the exact place where a birth from above becomes possible, and the son that follows is the fruit of spirit working where the body had given out.

Abraham: the higher mind, the father of a multitude of inner faculties Sarah: the ruling soul-principle, the feminine consciousness joined to the higher mind