- Genesis 16 - Sarah and Hagar
Introduction
There is a REALLY weird story in the chapter we’re looking at today which is about two women not getting on …
But actually, what it’s about is the most revealing and basic spiritual question you will ever have to answer, and that question goes like this:
‘Are you going to TRUST God, or what?’
And the follow up discussion that arises out of that concerns patience and impatience!
So look, the book of Genesis is made up of two main parts:
The first part begins in Paradise, the Garden of Eden, where humanity listened to the Satan who’d dressed himself up to look like a snake rather than listening to God and humanity therefore spiralled downward in self-destruction which led right up to the Tower of Babel.
And at that Tower of Babel, rebellious humanity is scattered by God and the different (divided … that’s the issue) nations of the world spread out across the face of the earth.
Then the second part of Genesis zooms in and focuses on just one family, and right in the middle is this panel of stories about Abraham (the founder of that family) and his faith.
So we’re looking today at what links the two parts of Genesis together and helps us understand what the whole book is about.
After the scattering that followed Babel there's a genealogy, and it follows one of the tribes all the way down to this man Abram (later renamed Abraham … same man.).
And God starts makes a set of promises to Abraham … a covenant, that is, a pledge to do stuff.
God says He's going to bless Abraham, and give him a large family and that through Abraham and his family all the scattered and divided nations of the earth are now, instead of being broken up and outside God’s blessing, going to receive again many of the good things they’d lost at the Fall and in the spiral away from God that had followed it.
Basically, God is trying to restore humanity back to the experience of the goodness of Paradise … which was His original intention for the world.
It’s all tied up with His rescue plan for humanity.
It’s through Abraham and his family that God has planned to do this and that's why the whole second half of Genesis is about this one family of faith … Abram’s offspring.
Abraham has a son called Isaac who has Jacob and then Jacob has twelve sons.
And to each generation God renews His promise to bless both them and then all nations through them.
Now here’s a problem on account of this promise to use this family to rescue the world, people tend to assume the big plan is to restore Paradise to just or even especially (somehow) to those people genetically descended from that one family.
Or alternatively to read these stories as examples of how to be a good person to inherit the promises made to Abraham and his offspring, rather than to trust God … put your faith in Him … which is very clearly started to be the reason Abraham gets put right with God and the key to being a beneficiary of all God’s promises to Abraham.
We should have realised … not just because that’s what it says in Genesis 15:6 slap bang in the middle of these stories in the middle of Genesis, but also because for the most part this family get things so repeatedly wrong, this family is clearly totally dysfunctional!
And it starts right here with the great patriarch of that family who God intends to use to bring humanity back to Paradise … it starts with Abraham himself whose faith (not conduct or genetics) the Lord had already reckoned to him as righteousness in the previous chapter.
This whole story is about God giving him and his wife Sarah a family, the HUGE promise that was central to the purpose of re-peopling Paradise … a promise which time was beginning to look like passing by.
It’s because of that, that in this chapter first of all …
1) Impatience strikes, vv. 1-3
The whole point here is that Abraham’s faith … and Sarah’s … fell to impatience.
(Genesis 16:1-3) “Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had not been able to bear children for him. But she had an Egyptian servant named Hagar.
2 So Sarai said to Abram, “The Lord has prevented me from having children. Go and sleep with my servant. Perhaps I can have children through her.”
And Abram agreed with Sarai’s proposal.
3 So Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian servant and gave her to Abram as a wife. (This happened ten years after Abram had settled in the land of Canaan.)”
The passage records the birth of Ishmael to Abram through an Egyptian woman.
The story illustrates the limits of Abram’s faith as he tries to obtain a son through this. social custom of surrogate mothering.
The barrenness of Sarai poses a challenge to Abram’s faith, just as the famine did in chap. 12.
And as in chap. 12, an Egyptian also figures prominently.
(Perhaps Hagar was obtained as a slave during Abram’s stay in Egypt.)
Now, we need to acknowledge that childlessness WAS a serious problem in that culture.
And Sarah offering up her menial servant on a plate to Abraham like this may well have been accepted in the surrounding culture.
Sarai simply sees this as the social custom of having a child through a surrogate.
For further discussion see C. F. Fensham, “The Son of a Handmaid in Northwest Semitic,” VT 19 (1969): 312-21.
Bu we need to say that to draw any conclusions about the ethics of modern surrogacy misses the point totally here.
The context in this account is that God has already promised that He would, against the odds, give a son to Abram and his wife Sarah TOGETHER … and what they planned here wasn’t going to be anything like that.
In v. 2 what Sarah says flies in the face of God’s promise …
- 2 “So Sarai said to Abram, “The Lord has prevented me from having children.
Go and sleep with my servant.
Perhaps I can have children through her.”
God had specifically NOT prevented Sarah from having children with Abram … He’d actually promised that she would have them.
And then what God had promised was children for Abram and Sarah, and what Sarah was proposing was not that.
And yet we read next in v. 3 is that “So Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian servant and gave her to Abram as a wife. (This happened ten years after Abram had settled in the land of Canaan.)”
Just as believing a lie and not taking God at His Word led to the loss of Paradise back by the tree in the Garden, so now the same things leads to catastrophe, with awful consequences, right up until now.
Putting it mildly, the immediate result was relationships got poisoned by this.
2) Relationships are poisoned, vv. 4-6
Genesis 16:4-6 “So Abram had sexual relations with Hagar, and she became pregnant. But when Hagar knew she was pregnant, she began to treat her mistress, Sarai, with contempt.
5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “This is all your fault! I put my servant into your arms, but now that she’s pregnant she treats me with contempt. The Lord will show who’s wrong—you or me!”
6 Abram replied, “Look, she is your servant, so deal with her as you see fit.” Then Sarai treated Hagar so harshly that she finally ran away.”
The fundamental inclination of the triune God is to create and preserve good relationships.
God is a God Who exists in relationship … one God Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
But there’s only one devil and He hates the unity of Divine relationship, doing all he can to dismantle Paradise’s characteristic of fundamental unity held alongside the cherishment of core creative individuality … the essence of the relationships that exist within the Godhead.
A) Hagar turns toxic
- 4: “But when Hagar knew she was pregnant, she began to treat her mistress, Sarai, with contempt.”
Honestly, I have seen two women in one kitchen in other people’s homes in the past … just funeral teas and stuff like that … and I have NO idea how THAT can ever work.
But this is two women sharing one man’s bed and then continuing to live under the same roof, where ONE of them was the mistress of the house who could not conceive and the other was the mistress in the bed and rapidly conceived …
And I cannot begin to imagine how anyone but a desperate person would ever want to resort to this as a way to SOLVE a problem rather than create a massive one.
Well that’s what happened.
It created a MASSIVE problem.
And it is initially Hagar who turns toxic on Sarah, who then complains …
B) Sarah turns toxic
- 5 “Then Sarai said to Abram, “This is all your fault! I put my servant into your arms, but now that she’s pregnant she treats me with contempt.
The Lord will show who’s wrong—you or me!”
Now you will notice that this had been all Sarah’s idea … which Abram had gone along with … now Sarah is doing to her man exactly what the man Adam did to Eve his wife in the Garden … ‘this is YOUR fault’ she says when actually it was HER idea in the first place.
Human guilt does this, and no doubt Sarah in that culture carried a burden of guilt (which she SHOULDN’T have) for her childlessness.
So … look at all this toxicity here:
Hagar turns toxic, Sarah turns toxic and next … look how surly Abram seems to be with Sarah …
C) Abraham turns toxic
- 6 “Abram replied, “Look, she is your servant, so deal with her as you see fit.”
The Hebrew says; ‘she is in your hand’, meaning ‘she is in your power … do to her as you see fit’.
Now wait.
Hagar is a child of Adam.
She is Egyptian, so we’re told in v. 1, but she is human and therefore of the genealogy of Adam and Eve and therefore an image bearer of the Almighty.
The Hebrew word for that Egyptian woman is
שִׁפְחָה
(shiph.chah)
And what it means is that Abram and Sarah have not just got a char lady, but a maid-servant (as belonging to a mistress) … we’d say a household slave.
And Abram turns testy and toxic with Sarah and say … well you have the whip hand with her YOU sort it out!
He might as well have said: ‘over to you, then, to treat her as if she were NOT created in the image of God’.
Hagar turns toxic, Sarah turns toxic, Abram turns toxic … but still Sarah did not see the red lights flashing, and we end up where …
D) Hagar turns tail
We’re told (v. 6 )“Then Sarai treated Hagar so harshly that she finally ran away.”
The word for what Sarah did means ‘to afflict, oppress, humble, to mishandle’.
Now, comparing the ages given for Abram and Sarah in these chapters I reckon Sarah was about 76 years old at the time.
I doubt she was likely to be much of a street fighter … so I’m not sure Sarah would be handing out physical beatings.
But whatever it was, it was harsh enough for Hagar to prefer to take her chances alone with her child in the wilderness than to stay around in Abram’s household … and alone with a child in a wilderness of itself seems a fairly threatening prospect.
Whatever Sarah did to threaten and humble Hagar, it was pretty serious.
So Hagar put up with it, but finally felt she HAD to run away.
3) God steps in with promises to Hagar’s rival lineage, vv. 7-12
Genesis 16:7-12 “The angel of the Lord found Hagar beside a spring of water in the wilderness, along the road to Shur.
Wait - Who’s this ‘angel of the Lord’?
Some identify the angel of the Lord as the preincarnate Christ because in some texts the angel is identified with the Lord Himself.
However, it does seem more likely here that the angel merely represents the Lord; he can speak for the Lord because he is sent with the Lord’s full authority.
In some cases in Scripture the angel is clearly distinct from the Lord (see Judges 6:11-23).
It is not certain if the same angel is always in view.
Though the proper name following the noun “angel” makes the construction definite, this may simply indicate that a definite angel sent from the Lord is referred to in any given context.
It need not be the same angel on every occasion.
OK – I’m glad we’ve cleared that up … what next?
The angel said to her, “Hagar, Sarai’s servant, where have you come from, and where are you going?”
“I’m running away from my mistress, Sarai,” she replied.
9 The angel of the Lord said to her, “Return to your mistress, and submit to her authority.”
Sometimes the Lord’s deliverance doesn’t seem like that at first!
Just imagine how Hagar could have responded here:
‘Are you KIDDING Lord? That woman’s a maniac!
Have you forgotten I’m a runaway slave?
And as you know this isn’t only about me … what do you think that she would do to my little baby?
Well, you get the gist of it.
(Bear in mind Hagar isn’t a faithful Hebrew, she’s Egyptian.)
But the Angel of the Lord is still speaking …
10 Then he added, “I will give you more descendants than you can count.”
What does that sound like?
Doesn’t it sound like God’s promise to Abraham later on in Genesis 22 to give him as many descendants as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the seashore?
It does seem to be a bit of a reminder that there is not one but TWO Semitic races … only one of them numbered through Isaac and this other through Ishmael, because with the huge challenge to her faith to go back, Hagar also receives tremendous promises from God …
- 11 And the angel also said, “You are now pregnant and will give birth to a son.
You are to name him Ishmael (which means ‘God hears’), for the Lord has heard your cry of distress.
12 This son of yours will be a wild man, as untamed as a wild donkey!
He will raise his fist against everyone, and everyone will be against him. Yes, he will live in open hostility against all his relatives.”
The Translators Handbook of the Old Testament’s entry under the Hebrew word for Isaac says the word means:
“son of Abraham and Sarah's handmaid Hagar and the progenitor of the Arabian peoples”
So here, my friends, is the first mention the Bible makes of so much of the ancient and modern history of the Middle East.
Hagar will bear Isaac’s half brother Ishmael, and he will be the father of a numerous people, but the hard fact is it is going to get very messy.
4) The God Who sees me, vv. 13-16
Genesis 16:13-16 “hereafter, Hagar used another name to refer to the Lord, who had spoken to her.
She said, “You are the God who sees me.”
She also said, “Have I truly seen the One who sees me?”
14 So that well was named Beer-lahai-roi (which means “well of the Living One who sees me”). It can still be found between Kadesh and Bered.
The thing I hear very often when I listen to people who have gone through - or who are going through - suffering or personal trauma is that what they want is to be heard and to be seen.
We can make the mistake of assuming that the person who is going through hard stuff wants to be helped or advised or … corrected or something.
If they are ASKING, then that’s fine, that’s great … it is highly appropriate!
But time and again what I find is that people who are going through hard things are making statements, not asking questions … and if we start giving answers to statements it’s often not just inappropriate but dysfunctional behaviour.
I would cite you, by way of example, the bulk of the book of Job in order to illustrate this point, and I think it bears thinking about fairly seriously.
What is so significant for oppressed and abused Hagar is that God sees and hears ME.
But that’s to some extent tangential to the big picture of what’s going on here.
15 So Hagar gave Abram a son, and Abram named him Ishmael. 16 Abram was eighty-six years old when Ishmael was born.”
Conclusion
What’s the point of all this story about Sarah, Abram, Hagar and Ishmael?
Abram and Sarah get really old and you begin to think God’s promise is going to fail because there's no way they're going to have a kid of their own.
They think the same, they take matters into their own hands turning from trusting God’s promise to their own cobbled together solution which is disastrous, and we end up with Ishmael and a race that will be ever at war with the lineage that God intends to give Abram.
But then, miraculously, Abram and Sarah do have a child in God’s own grace and goodness, the right way with no dodgy business.
It's Isaac and God’s promise is kept and then the lineage of God’s covenant with Abraham is preserved.
The basic thrust of this story is all about whether you’re going to trust God … even when He seems to be taking a long time about something … or depend on schemes and devices of human design to make His promises happen the way He says they will.
And the question is this:
Do you recognise that faith entails patience with the promise of God?
Faith is content to not have everything handed to you in your way, to your specification, and to have it now.
Are you up for that?
Now this faith (as for Hagar) might be dangerous to act on.
It might mean going back to or enduring circumstances that seem most threatening … in the faith that God sees you and hears you and can be trusted, even on the days when that looks scary.
Faith in the Bible, you see is not simply faith ‘that’.
Faith in the Bible sees the truths of the faith ‘that’ certain things are true, and therefore trusts IN the One Who tells these things to us … trusts patiently in the One Who hears me, sees me and pledges His Word to me that the things He’s brought me to believe ‘THAT’ is the One Who absolutely can be trusted IN.
And I’m going to trust Him.
