Genesis 16:7-16

Well friends,
welcome back.
We are glad to have you with us again today.
We are jumping ahead really in the part two of this story.
Not a simple, not an easy story that we started yesterday as we looked
to Hagar and Abram and Sarai,
these three characters caught in a really difficult triangle.
And we’re gonna not really see the story
get much easier today,
but we are gonna see a progression in it.
So we’re glad that you’re with us here.
Yeah, just a reminder of yesterday’s story.
If you didn’t have a chance to be with us
or watch that yet,
Sarai concerned that she’s not been able
to bear a son in the light of this covenant promise.
Arranges for Abram to be with
and to impregnate her servant Hagar.
And once that happens,
Sarai feels slighted by Hagar
and essentially runs her off.
And so we get in on the story,
we pick it up at that point.
So we’re in verse seven today of chapter 16.
And we’ll read through some of this.
The angel of the Lord found her
by a spring of water in the wilderness,
the spring on the way to shore.
And he said, Hagar,
slave girl Sarai, where have you come from?
Where are you going?
She said, I’m running away from my mistress.
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 greatly multiply your offspring
that they cannot be counted for multitude.
Let’s stop there, Michael.
So this is very interesting.
We mentioned this yesterday.
This is one of those stories where God is kind of a character
in the backdrop.
God is spoken of in the story,
but not really active, not really involved.
Doesn’t say, yes, this is okay or no, this isn’t okay.
There’s really no mention of that,
which is surprising you think for something as monumental
as having your husband impregnate one of the servant girls
because of the idea of the covenant,
you think God might speak to that.
But in this case,
God does show up
and interestingly enough shows up
in order to defend
and to minister to this girl, this young woman,
or this woman, we don’t know her age,
who has gone off and she has no resources.
And the angel says to her,
return and submit.
In other words, just go along with it.
And then very fascinating in verse 10 here,
we have a kind of restatement of the promise.
The Lord said to her,
the angel of the Lord said to her,
I will greatly multiply your offspring
that they cannot be counted.
Now,
the only place we’ve seen this language
is the promise given to Abram.
So Hagar receives in a way her own version
of this overarching covenant,
though not the covenant that God has promised Abram,
a similar covenant, one like it,
that she can put confidence in as well.
Yeah, so this is a really interesting note
of this particular chapter of the stories.
It really reveals how a providential God,
a God who is sovereign, is able to
bring solutions to problems
that wouldn’t be conceivable otherwise.
And what we see with Abram and Sarai
is they’re locked on a binary solution.
God has not brought us a descendant.
Therefore, we need to take matters into our own hands.
Do we do it or don’t we, right?
But in this scenario,
when they make this binary choice, they say, Abram,
you’re gonna take Hagar,
you’re gonna push this thing forward.
What ends up happening is God,
by God’s own grace and compassion,
is able to extend that promise.
The promise that was originally,
as we saw it,
conceived of for Abram and Abram’s descendants.
Well, now Abram’s descendants have extended.
There’s more descendants than there were before.
God has yet to bring Abram his descendant through Sarai.
So now in some ways,
this promise has multiplied, it’s become larger.
Though,
I’m putting a positive spin on it,
because as we really see this promise flushed out,
it’s also a bruised promise.
It’s a
painful promise.
It extends to there will be a multitude,
but there’s more to it than that.
And this is one of the
mysteries and the difficult textures of the Old Testament text
is that God is gracious,
God is compassionate to find Hagar,
but then God also says submit to her,
submit to the woman who was hard to you.
I mean,
unpacking exactly what that means
or what we should think of it,
it’s not simple work.
It’s certainly not gonna happen in 10 minutes
as we do this Bible study, but
there’s a lot of layers here.
God is extending the promise in a very generative way.
And I think that alone is worth noting.
I wanna be careful here,
and I certainly don’t wanna suggest
that the characters aren’t important,
but there is a sense in which
the book of Genesis works backwards.
And what I mean by that is
the reason these stories are being told
is that the people of Israel become a nation,
become a people.
They look to God as the one who has guided them.
And so the story they tell of how they got there
is at times not completely concerned
with some of the ups and downs of the characters,
that they’re not troubled by this idea
that Abraham and Sarai have these difficult moments
or that Hagar is in a rough spot.
Those things, because they know the ending,
they’re less concerned about the pitfalls along the way,
because they know how it turns out,
like reading the last chapter of a book,
you have a little harder time
being deeply worried about the characters
when you’ve seen their name on the last page.
And so there is,
I think, a sense in which there’s some of that happening here.
There’s also, as we’ve seen throughout this book so far,
there’s explanation here.
So let’s go into the next section
and see what we explain.
The Lord said to her,
“Now you have conceived and you shall bear a son
and you shall call him Ishmael,
for the Lord has given heed to your affliction.
He will be a wild ass of a man,
his hand against everyone,
and everyone’s hand against him,
and he shall live at odds with all his kin.”
Will you stop there, Michael?
So this doesn’t sound like a great prophecy,
a great prediction.
Your son’s going to be a wild ass of a man,
but what does this explain from,
again, from the vantage point of the end of the story?
It explains that some of Abraham’s line
doesn’t end up being Israelite.
They end up as the surrounding people groups.
And who does Israel fight with constantly
throughout the rest of their story?
The other people groups that are kin and not kin
all at the same time.
And so this idea that Ishmael is going
to father a line of people that battle with Israel,
the people telling these stories would have said yes,
and they would have pointed to particular nations
as a sign of the accuracy of that prophecy.
Yeah, this is, I think, where this story
really kicks into the higher gear
because God is doing some really amazing work here
when you really pause to reflect on it.
You have a young woman who is brought
into the middle of a conversation
that she likely had little to no choice in.
But, you know, Abraham and Sarai make this choice.
They decide,
Abraham,
you’re going to try
to conceive with this slave.
And now as this slave has been mistreated,
we’ve been told, and has run,
now we see through this prophetic messenger,
this promise that God will be faithful to you
and to those who will come through you,
though that faithfulness will come with some struggle
and some conflict and with some,
I like that word,
that odds, live at odds with his kin.
This is in many ways the picture
that Genesis is willing to show us.
Genesis is willing to say,
God is faithful
to this young woman who is in this moment in outcast.
God is faithful,
but that faithfulness
is still on difficult ground.
And the future will not be easy.
Even though God will make and keep God’s covenant,
the living out of that covenant
also often goes through very dark valleys.
And Genesis isn’t really afraid of portraying God
at the center of that nexus.
In other words,
Genesis is willing to admit
that sometimes even God’s keeping,
God’s promises can be painful.
And though we may not particularly appreciate that
when we come to a book like this devotionally,
when we look for what God might have to say to us in it,
I do think it’s an important lesson
that with all of the New Testament stories
of the healing and the compassion and the grace,
there is still this reality that God is faithful
in these texts to these characters,
but faithfulness can sometimes be painful faithfulness,
difficult promises.
So to that end,
Michael, let’s read the rest of this.
And then I think there is some really,
there is some devotional material,
I think scattered in here somewhere.
So verse 13,
“So she named the Lord who spoke to her,
you are El-Roy,
for she said, have I really seen God
and remained alive after seeing him.
Therefore the well was called, bear whole,
Al-El-Roy, it lies between Kadesh and Bered.
Hagor bore Abram a son and Abram named the son
who Hagor bore Ishmael.”
Abram was 86 years old when Hagor bore him,
Ishmael.
So a couple of interesting things here.
This is,
I have a note in my Bible here,
this is the only time in the scripture
that someone gives God a name.
In other cases, those are titles like
God or Lord, et cetera.
This is a time in which somebody gives God a name.
And interestingly,
it’s a play on the name Ishmael.
Ishmael means God hears,
El-Roy means God sees,
or it’s not exactly the God who sees or the God of seeing,
it’s not completely clear,
but it’s a reference to seeing.
So we have here a reference to God has heard Ishmael,
God has heard this woman’s,
of this woman’s struggle,
and God has seen.
And then we get the very interesting
thing that though she was told to name it Ishmael,
we get told that Abram does that.
And again,
this is a sign of this covenant faithfulness of God,
but in a different lineage,
literally in a different direction.
And you may know this,
but Islam traces its lineage
back to Abram and does so through Ishmael,
not through Jacob as Jews and then Christians will,
sort of secondarily,
but the Muslim community
traces their lineage through this man Ishmael
back to also consider themselves
to the descendants of Abram.
And very interesting here that this story ultimately
ends with the idea that God hears and sees
and acts on her behalf to secure a future.
Yeah, and I just remind you,
it’s amazing when you are willing to slow down
and really hear these texts.
Remember who Abram listened to
at the beginning of this story.
He listened to the voice of Sarai
who put this bug in his ear.
Maybe we need to push this conversation down the road.
Here,
we see Hagar, the one who arguably
is the least seen in this text,
certainly by the human characters,
is the one who has this really transformative encounter
with the God who sees and hears.
There’s an amazing way in which when you frame
these very human experiences and you see them
from a divine or spiritual vantage,
you can see that God is at work
even in very surprising and mysterious ways.
And I think what’s beautiful about
a text like this is
that God is faithful and that God remains faithful,
though God is forced to do that,
or God is able,
maybe is a better word,
God is capable of being
faithful providentially even in the midst of human decision-making.
And this is going to be a theme
that extends throughout all of scripture
where even in the New Testament, people make decisions
and then that is wrapped into,
it’s planned into God’s will.
There’s a way in which God has chosen
to work within the human frame.
And even though that sometimes means
that you get an entire another branch
of the covenant promise,
God is able to do that
and is willing to do that
to accommodate the connection with humanity.
Yeah, I think there is a lot here.
This isn’t one of those stories
that we preach or teach a lot.
It’s a difficult story.
Lots of
ancient kind of hurdles to jump over in it
and lots of things that don’t make a lot of sense to us.
But there is faithfulness here.
There is covenant here.
It’s ultimately not the covenant
that the rest of Genesis is going to follow,
but it is God being faithful to God’s own word.
And in a sense to Abram,
though I think more interestingly to Hagar in this sense, because that is,
it is an unusual encounter
in the Old Testament that this vulnerable woman
and the promise of God intersect.
And again,
she actually names the Lord,
which we’ve seen throughout this book,
the Lord gives names.
We’re going to see it again probably tomorrow.
And in this case,
she,
from her vantage point,
has been able to give God a title or a description or a name.
And that is significant.
This is a really interesting passage.
The scripture doesn’t need us to defend it,
but it’s worth pointing out when it happens.
This is counter-cultural.
The idea that Hagar would be given compassionate, gracious treatment
was unnecessary by covenant code.
God didn’t make a promise to Hagar.
Abram is the one who God made the promise to.
So to us,
there is a sense in which this woman,
especially from our vantage,
was substantially mistreated.
But to the original writers and authors of this,
Hagar’s not the main character.
Abram is, and God’s promise to Abram
is the thing that lives at the center.
So the fact that we have this story
and the purposeful inclusion of God’s faithfulness
to this woman is substantial.
Let’s point out that though we could find a lot
troubling in this text,
we also see God
being faithful in this text in a way
that would not have been expected
or certainly predictable to those who had wrote it
and have handed it down to us.
And so that does point to an importance
of this kind of encounter that I think is worth noting
and carrying with us,
regardless of what you’ve taken
from these last couple days.
And we could miss it because in our culture
we wouldn’t necessarily be attuned to it,
but the significance of the deliverance here is very large.
Hagar, out in the desert by herself, pregnant,
has essentially zero chance.
That’s a death sentence for both her and her son.
And God not only prevents that with this instruction,
get back, go back,
Abram, Sarai, get along,
but I’m going to make of you, of your son.
I’m going to make nation.
We’ll see that restated tomorrow.
So you go from a kind of no future
to God’s own promise of a significant future.
And that is a very large intercession
that we could easily miss in the text.
So well said.
Hope, friends, that this has been encouraging.
We will see you all tomorrow.
Thanks, everybody.