Genesis 16:1-6

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Hey friends, thanks for being back.
So our favorite pie discussion may be the,
by far the lightest part of today.
We get into a kind of heavy text,
a really culturally anchored kind of text,
a text that’s hard for us.
This story…
Michael,
I don’t use this word
very often of Scripture,
but this text may border on offensive for some folks.
It just comes from such a different time and place that I think it is
incredibly difficult for us to get into some of the details.
Now,
some of it will make perfect sense,
and we’ll try our best to unpack it as we go here.
So,
16th chapter of the book of Genesis.
“Now Sarai, Abram’s wife,
bore him no children.
She had an Egyptian slave girl,
whose name was Hagar.
And Sarai said to Abram,
‘You see that the Lord has
prevented me from bearing children.
So go to my slave girl.
It may be that I shall obtain children by her.’
And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.
So after Abram had lived 10 years in
the land of Canaan,
Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her slave girl,
and gave her to her husband Abram as a wife.
He went into Hagar and she conceived,
and when she saw that she had conceived,
she looked with contempt upon her mistress.
Then Sarai said, ‘Abram,
may the wrong be done to me beyond you.
I gave the slave girl to you to embrace.
And when she saw she conceived,
she looked on me with contempt.
May the Lord judge between you and me.’
But Abram said to Sarai,
‘Your slave girl is in your power,
due to her as you please.’
Then Sarai dealt harshly with her and she ran away.”
Okay, so bear with us for a minute here.
Try to put the end of this story on hold for just a moment
and we begin where we started chapter 15 with the fundamental problem that stands in the way of the covenant.
Abram and Sarai are not able to conceive.
They’ve been promised an heir.
They’ve been promised a son and it is not happening.
And this time Sarai,
as we’ve seen Abram do in the past,
for instance, going into Egypt,
we now see Sarai try to take matters into her own hands
and she comes up with a plan.
She has this slave girl, this servant,
and she has the power,
and this is where it gets very uncomfortable,
she has the power to present her to her husband
as a wife is too strong a word,
probably we would use a word like concubine,
and this is her plan.
And I want to,
again, we will get to the awkwardness of that,
but I think where we start is,
again, this idea of
the struggle to trust God,
the idea that these two people have to take it upon
themselves to solve this problem because it seems to them that the Lord is not acting.
In fact,
Sarai says almost the opposite,
that the Lord is keeping me from it,
which is a good thing in that
she gives God credit even for the bad things.
However,
she almost implicates God in her inability.
Yeah, let’s try to break this down and let’s look at this a little bit more clearly here.
I’m looking at the end of verse two,
right underneath the yellow here,
and Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.
Let’s just pause there for a second because this brings back around a lot of themes
we’ve already seen in Genesis,
the question of who do you listen to?
One of the things that Abram has done repeatedly in this book already has been to listen to God.
When God calls him out,
Abram goes.
When God calls him to the next step or calls him to the covenant,
Abram is faithful to do that.
We clearly see in this text that in this moment,
Abram takes that same ear and instead of listening to God and holding on to God’s promise,
he now hears this address from his wife and he becomes a full partner in it.
Interestingly,
let’s make this very clear from the start.
The text doesn’t go out of its way to implicate either of these individuals.
Fundamentally, they’re both in it.
They’re both trying to,
as you say, Clint,
solve God’s problem for God.
Ultimately, to whatever extent they have decided to take matters
into their own hands,
they’ve fundamentally moved a step beyond God’s promise.
They’ve taken
the matters into their own course.
Maybe probably where we get stuck in seeing that essential
narrative is that fundamentally the means by which they do that is at the extreme expense of another person.
In a way,
that wouldn’t have been the barrier to this story to its original
audience.
It would have led to the barrier of,
well, that was a poor choice because of these other reasons.
We often, I think, would struggle to get to that point beyond what seems to us to
be a flagrant abuse of someone else’s freedom and privilege and all the rest.
In no way is this condoning,
but the reality here is that the wife in this day, in this context,
her highest duty is to provide offspring, specifically sons.
That is her calling,
her mission in life,
particularly in this case where this idea of divine promise even rests on
her ability to do so.
There are provisions made for when that’s not happening,
when that’s not possible,
that this isn’t something she comes up with on her own.
There are provisions for treating
her property, her slave,
with this she then becomes the next line in succession.
There were cases this is a thing that could be done in that culture as odd as it is to us and
maybe close to offensive to us,
the idea of property,
the idea that this girl didn’t have a
say in it, that Hager perhaps was an unwilling participant in this.
There are lots of layers
in this that are problematic.
Behind it, though, lay this central question,
will God be faithful
or not?
Do Abram and Sarai need to do something in order to earn God’s favor and to be the
beneficiaries of this covenant?
Now, I want to also point out, having said that,
this is one of those passages, if you notice,
the one character conspicuously absent is God.
This is another one of those stories where characters are doing things and the Lord doesn’t
show up.
There’s no yes, do that.
There’s no stop doing that.
There’s nothing, much like we saw in
that Egypt narrative where he told them that Sarah was his wife.
God is a background character
in this part of the story.
And when that’s true,
it is often in Genesis a story about people kind
of going off to try and do things on their own.
And that seems to be the case here.
Yeah, we won’t push to the part two of this story.
It is to say, though,
notice how the thing that
upsets Sarai so much is this look of contempt,
this idea that now that this girl has become
pregnant, it has become clear who’s at fault for the ability to keep that promise.
What’s wrong with Sarai?
Sarai becomes her own stumbling block to trusting God.
She becomes in that moment
the one who’s unable to see that even God can be faithful regardless of who is the one who’s causing the problem.
And realistically, this is, I think, very practical.
I think we all do find ourselves
in situations where we don’t see things progressing at the pace that we would like to.
We feel like we’re being faithful to God.
We feel like we’re being faithful to our family.
We’re trying to do
the best that we can,
but things just simply don’t move.
The season doesn’t change or the
fulfillment doesn’t come that we thought was coming.
And then we go to force the hand.
And I certainly haven’t been in a situation explicitly like this one,
but I certainly have been in ones
where I have forced the hand.
I push things ahead quicker than I should have,
and I later regretted
it.
And here it’s done in really a kind of
cosmic form,
because when
Sarai and Abraham make this choice,
they do create offspring.
And it creates a new situation where the reader is left to ask,
“Well, now what’s going to happen?” Because is this one going to be the heir?
Is this going to be the
one that God will use to carry this forward or not?
And it’s interesting as we move forward here,
we’re going to see how the text deals with that.
But not only do they rush ahead and make things more difficult,
they actually in doing so create much larger problems that now are going to come
into the account of how God’s going to be faithful to these promises.
And I think that is an
interesting thing to note here,
that by their lack of faith,
it doesn’t just impact their
relationship with God.
It has ripples that extend
far beyond them into the story.
I want to point out
two things.
One,
we’ll both maybe
relate it to the story tangential in a way of speaking.
Not to defend Sarai’s actions,
but as we seek to be compassionate,
we have to remember
this line that they’ve been here in the land 10 years,
that for a decade they’ve lived under the
idea of this promise.
And
10 years in,
that promise of an heir sounds probably
much more hollow than it did.
At the onset of the promise of the covenant,
they were probably thrilled.
Sarai was probably thinking to herself, finally,
but now 10 years later,
10 years of waiting,
10 years of disappointment.
And if you have experienced or know anyone who has experienced
walking through the ground of trying to conceive and struggling,
then you know that that is one of
the fundamentally most frustrating and painful and difficult struggles that people can find themselves in.
It is soul sapping.
And in Sarai’s defense,
it may have led her into an unwise place.
It may have led her to a kind of sensitivity that creates issues in the aftermath of Hagar’s pregnancy.
And then the other thing I just want to point out,
because these things matter in Genesis,
notice here the things that we get told.
We get told that Hagar is an Egyptian before we get told her name.
That matters.
There is this constant interplay between Israel in Abram and Sarai’s
future, the promise of Israel and the reality of Egypt.
We didn’t get Egypt named last chapter
when God told Abram,
“Your people are going to be slaves.
They’re going to be mistreated.”
We now get Egypt named in this slave girl who is somewhat victim,
but also is Egyptian.
And the interesting connection is in verse 6,
Abram says,
“You can treat your slave girl however
you want.” And it says,
“Sarah dealt with her harshly.” This is the exact word that we saw in 1513
when God was predicting to Abram that the nation that took Israel as slaves would treat them
harshly, would oppress them.
It’s the exact same word.
And here we have the prediction that Egypt
will do that to Israel.
And here we have the reversal of an Israelite doing it to an Egyptian.
And there’s more happening here than just the story of the characters.
There is a kind of
meta story that involves the nations,
and we’ve seen that consistently through Genesis.
It’s in the backdrop here as well.
Yeah, that’s actually going to bear out in the following text as well.
We’re going to see that this is connected to much like we saw with the Tower of Babel narrative.
We’re going to see how this does have a much more kind of universal explanatory kind of nature to it.
That doesn’t remove the troubles of the text.
That’s a thing that we sometimes don’t get right.
We sometimes think that alternate explanations or different layers somehow removes the difficult
terrain of the biblical stories.
But that’s simply not the case.
It’s all here on purpose.
And the people who put it here often were aware of all of those layers as well.
Even if there’s significant cultural difference, there’s still the awareness that having an Egyptian in the house,
in the midst of this kind of air conversation,
was a substantial deal.
That Abram would be linked
to the nation of Egypt would be in many ways offensive to even those who wrote this.
So for all of these layers to be combined,
it was intended to reflect all of this difficult,
troublesome kind of reading.
It’s a prism, and it’s intended to be that way.
So try as best as
we can to hold that intention.
I think that helps us as we read it.
We will finish the story.
There’s the second half of this story tomorrow,
and it will be in some ways a little quicker,
I think, to unpack.
Maybe less troubling.
This is a tough story,
and we’ll take a look at the
conclusion of it tomorrow.
Thanks for being with us,
friends.
We will see you tomorrow.