Shortcuts in God's Promises

Genesis 16

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said to Abram, “Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram her husband as a wife. And he went in to Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress. And Sarai said to Abram, “May the wrong done to me be on you! I gave my servant to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt. May the Lord judge between you and me!” But Abram said to Sarai, “Behold, your servant is in your power; do to her as you please.” Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she fled from her.

The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. And he said, “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” She said, “I am fleeing from my mistress Sarai.” The angel of the Lord said to her, “Return to your mistress and submit to her.” The angel of the Lord also said to her, “I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude.” And the angel of the Lord said to her, “Behold, you are pregnant and shall bear a son. You shall call his name Ishmael, because the Lord has listened to your affliction. He shall be a wild donkey of a man, his hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.”

So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, “You are a God of seeing,” for she said, “Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.” Therefore the well was called Beer-lahai-roi; it lies between Kadesh and Bered.

And Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram called the name of his son, whom Hagar bore, Ishmael. Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram.

In the ancient Near Eastern times, if a wife was barren, she could legally have a surrogate child by one of her servants. We see this, for example, you can read it in the Code of Hammurabi. We're in the Code, in rule number 146, it reads, "If a man take a wife, and she gives this man a maidservant as a wife, and she bear him children, then this maid assumes equality with the wife because she has borne him children. Her master shall not sell her for money, but he may keep her as a slave, reckoning her among the maidservants."

This ancient moral code specifies immediately afterwards, if she had not borne him children, then her mistress may sell her for money. And so we should recognize that at first glance, Sarai's plan here is not a scandalous thing for their culture as it would be, you know, in our culture today. But in Genesis, it does show a kind of weak faith that both Abram and Sarai have. This is not faith-filled action to, you know, produce the heir for Abram. They are actually kind of doubting God's promise that Abram would have a son. And so it's kind of this tale between two different ways of seeing things.

Sarah saw that she had born no children. Abram listened to her voice and Hagar saw that she was pregnant and therefore looked down on Sarah. But it was the Lord who sees, as we see at the end in verse 13, the spring becomes named El Roy. The Lord is the one who sees. And so this chapter is structured around these frames of seeing things in different kinds of ways.

Now, interestingly, chapter 16 sits between the covenant chapter of chapter 15, which we looked at just before, and the sign chapter, which will come next in the next verse. And so the narrator here, Moses, who wrote this, wants us to feel this tension. Will God's promise come about because of human action, human cleverness, or because of God's divine faithfulness? And at the moment, all we can see is human cleverness. And so Abram has this child with Hagar, and it is one of his surrogate heirs. But that is not the way that God wants it to happen. That is not the people whom God had chosen. And so the child that is born to Hagar will be this wild donkey of a man, the person who is not a child of the promise through which God is working to bring about his promise to save the whole world.

Now, this matters for us because like Sarai and Hagar and Abram, we are people who serially take shortcuts. We want to jump from waiting for God to fulfill his promises to fixing things by ourselves. We do this by scheming, by relationships, by trusting in our own cleverness instead of trusting in God. Genesis 16 here is a kind of sharp warning to us that helping God get on with the show is a terrible way of living out our faith.

And in fact, the conflict that happens here will go on for generations. And ultimately, Ishmael becomes this great prophetic figure in the religion of Islam. And so the conflict that exists between Sarai, as child of the promise, as the chosen people of God, and Ishmael and his future prophetic line in Islam continues in the conflict between Christianity and Islam to this day.

At the same time, this passage also reminds us that God sees the unseen and names the nameless. Hagar here is an exploited Egyptian slave, but she's the only person in Genesis who names God. This is the outsider who discovers that the covenant God is the one who watches over people that are in a situation like hers. He still sees the refugee, the hidden people, the people that are suffering, the sojourners, the widows, the orphans. He is a God who cares about the afflicted.

So Abram's household here ultimately explodes, right? His marriage is under stress. There's conflict that arises between Sarai and Abram and then between Hagar and Abram and then between Sarai and Hagar. And so the household itself falls apart. But God reroutes the story. He changes the destination. And ultimately, this wrong turn of Abram and Sarai's doesn't void his covenant. God will continue to bring about his rescue plan even when we stuff it up.

Ultimately, of course, the true offspring, that is Jesus himself, comes not because of the plot of people, not because Hagar or Sarai and Abram decided to help God out with his plan, to hurry it up, to speed it up. No, Galatians chapter 4, verse 23 to 27 shows us and contrasts Ishmael as being according to the flesh and Isaac as being according to the promise or through the promise of God. Ultimately, this shows up in Jesus himself, who is the ultimate promised seed. He is the one through whom all of the promises made to Abraham, a name, a nation and blessing for the whole world who will come to fruition.

And this God who sees in this passage becomes the God who is seen when Jesus comes. In Jesus, El Roy, the God who sees, takes flesh and becomes a living baby that we could see. And instead of Ishmael, we meet Emmanuel, God with us.

Prayer:

Dear God who sees us, we pray that you will forgive it when we try and take shortcuts, when we try and speed up your work in our lives, when we don't really trust that you will do what you will do. Our hearts are slow to believe and slow to trust. We pray that you will open our eyes so that we will see the one who sees us. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.