Genesis 16 – Being Human

Yes, so our reading this morning is from Genesis chapter 16, so do take a moment to open that up.

Genesis 16 · chapter mention

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 into 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 into Hagar, and she conceived.

And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt upon her mistress.

And Sarah said to Abram, May the wrong done to me be on you.

I gave my servant, 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 Birlahi Roy.

It lies between Kadesh and Bared.

And Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram called the name of his son, whom Hagar bore Ishmael.

Abram was 86 years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram.

And so reads God's word.

Welcome to you all.

My name is Mark.

I'm one of the leaders here at City Church.

Welcome to you if you're new or visiting with us.

C.S.

Lewis, who wrote the The Chronicles of Narnia, uh, said this.

He says, if you aim at heaven, you will get earth thrown in.

But if you aim at earth, you'll get neither.

Let me read that again.

If you aim at heaven, you will get earth thrown in.

If you aim at earth, you will get neither.

These words are both a promise and a warning to us.

They uh are a promise that there is a God who is there, and that orientating our lives towards Him and towards His purposes for us will ultimately culminate in fulfilling the deepest desires and longings of our hearts.

But it is also a warning to us that if you simply operate out of those desires, you will not only miss God, heaven, but you will lose or destroy the thing that you long for in the first place.

You aim at heaven and you'll get earth thrown in.

You aim at earth and you will get neither.

It's hard, though, isn't it, to remain faithful to God's promises and to follow him all the time.

That's why we come and we say things like a confession together.

It's not because of any sort of traditionalism, it's because actually it's good to acknowledge that the ground before our God is completely level.

We all stand on a same playing field looking to God for mercy.

And if you're not a Christian here this morning, one of the good things of why we say a confession together is that you get to see how it is that Christians approach their God.

We don't approach him bringing all of the good things that we have done or claiming any righteousness of our own.

We come saying, Please have mercy on me, because I've failed to trust your promises.

It's hard, isn't it, to seek him, to trust him, especially when we feel like we have these longings and desires and yearnings in each of us.

And it feels like God is being slow to bring his promises about to satisfy those longings and desires.

We feel like he is slow, that he has forgotten us, or that perhaps he is mean-spirited, and that he's punishing us by withholding from us that which we desire.

We long for things because we believe that they will satisfy us, that they will give us a kind of value, a sense of who we are, that they will fulfill whatever that emptiness that gnaws away in each of us is.

We long for intimacy and the joy of being vulnerable with another, and so we pursue sex.

And God says, well, well, actually, you should keep that for the context of marriage.

And that seems impossibly distant for some of us.

And we feel like God is just being slow and mean-spirited, and yet these desires burn.

And so what do we do?

Well, we say, Well, I'll tell you what, I'm gonna short circuit the system and I'm gonna go straight for the fulfilling of the desires.

We're aiming at earth.

Looking to earth for a value that only heaven can give us.

This whole passage is a warning to each of us, to all of us.

When we feel driven to aim at earth to find our value and our identity, when we feel those longings tempting us to short circuit what God says and to act out of our own desires rather than to act out of faith and of trust.

But it's also a promise.

It's a promise of the value that heaven can bestow upon each of us when we aim at him by faith.

So two things this morning.

First is aiming at earth, culturally driven value.

Aiming at earth, culturally driven value.

I say culturally driven value because that's actually what's going on here.

Let's start to unpack the situation before we get into the mess of the situation.

The chapter opens with a reminder that Sarah, Sarai, her name's gonna get changed soon too, uh, but they're the same person.

So Sarah and the reminder that she has no children.

Now, we were already told this back at the end of chapter 11, where we were first introduced to Abram and to Sarah, his wife, and the uh the writer Moses puts a little editorial comment there back in, excuse me, back in chapter 11, verse 30, it says that Sarah was barren and had no children.

She's childless.

And in those days, one of the reasons why Moses is bringing this up is not just because childlessness was a tragically sad family circumstance, though it is, but it's more than that here.

It is a source of great cultural shame for Sarah to go without a child.

It is a hugely embarrassing thing for her.

It lowers her status and her standing in the community where children were cultural capital.

They were cachet.

That's how you, as a woman, became respectable by having lots of children.

She was Abram's wife, and Abram was the patriarch.

He was the leader.

He was the guy who had just saddled his horse a couple of chapters before and went and defeated four kings.

He was the great leader of this tribe.

And yet she must have felt like such a failure.

Such a fraud to be married to the patriarch.

To be a matriarch, but not a mother.

What a failure.

How ashamed she must have felt.

And what's more, just to rub salt in the wounds, God had spoken to her husband and promised a son.

But God wasn't making good on his promises.

He was being desperately slow.

It has been ten years since God had first promised Abraham that he would have an heir, that he would have a child.

All of those years of waiting, of longing.

You can feel her pain, can you?

You can feel the burden that she must have carried.

The yearning of waiting, of growing more resentful, and then just sad.

To live in a culture where children were social capital, where children gave you value, and to believe that you have none.

I'm sure we all sitting here looking back at Genesis 16, we go, oh gosh, that's so that's so culturally foreign.

What a what a terrible sexist time that was.

What an awful thing to think of women in these terms and to say that a woman only has value because she's a mother.

How terrible is that?

Have we really come so far?

That world said to women, prove your worth, prove your value by becoming a mother.

Does our world continue to say to women, prove your worth worth?

Prove your value?

I think it does.

It doesn't say prove your worth, prove your value by becoming a mother.

It says, prove your worth, prove your value by achieving, by being successful, by being just as good as a man.

We're still calling on women to prove their worth.

We're just doing it in a different way.

We're still telling women to find their value in what the world esteems as valuable.

But now we've moved away from motherhood.

We don't see it as valuable.

It's something else, uh, a side order to be to be managed as you pursue those things that really gives you value and cachet in your community, which is to be influential, successful, celebrate it.

We're still asking women to aim at earth.

And I'm not saying that we don't ask that of men, but the passage is about women, right?

So I'm not saying that's not an issue for for us guys to think about, but I'm going to apply the passage the way the passage is directed.

We're talking about women here and where women find their value.

We're still calling women to aim at earth.

Sarah feels that these unanswered yearnings, and of course, we can have and should have great sympathy for her.

Because who wouldn't share these longings, and many women have.

But her answer is to forget what God has said, to stop acting in faith, to stop aiming at heaven, and to aim at earth.

There's a material problem, so let's find a material solution.

So verse 2.

Then Sarai said to Abram, Behold, now the Lord has prevented me from bearing children.

Go into my servant, that I may uh that I shall obtain children by her.

And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.

You can hear the sadness mixed with resentment in those words.

The Lord has prevented me from bearing children.

Do you ever feel that?

You feel those longings and you you reflect them upwards to God in bitterness and go, you've prevented me because of the way that you have organized my life or my internal desires, you've stopped me, God, from realizing this longing that I have.

The Lord has prevented me.

She's doubting God's goodness here, isn't she?

And it's driving her away from him.

The solution that she proposes is that Abram, her husband, should go and sleep with this servant girl called Hagar and get her pregnant and then take the child.

That solution that she proposes shocks us, doesn't it?

And it should shock us.

But one of the things that we need to know is that again, she is operating completely in line with the cultural norms of her day.

There are lots of records on stone tablets from all around the Near East saying that this was common practice.

That if you were a matriarch, if you were a wealthy or influential uh couple, and yet you weren't able to have a child, one of the things that you would do is you would use a uh a surrogate slave and then take the child and raise the child as yours.

It's shocking.

And it is not descriptive, or sorry, it's not prescriptive.

It's not prescriptive of how we ought to act, right?

It's one of the things we need to wrestle with in the Bible.

And there'll be a couple of instances of this that God is not condoning these actions.

Moses is merely describing what has happened.

Interestingly, the Old Testament never condones polygamy.

It happens, but if you read the stories, they never go quite how you might want them to.

God never condones them.

This is descriptive of what has happened.

It is not prescriptive of what should happen for us.

So if you're looking for application points, we haven't reached one yet.

There we go, right?

And so this is the plan.

And what do we read?

Well, Abram is a male, and so he listens to the voice of his wife.

He says, I have a plan.

Okay.

And off he goes.

And so he listens to Sarai, and verse 10, uh, he takes Hagar as a wife.

This is interesting, actually, just parenthetically, takes Hagar as a wife, but she's still a slave.

She's a second-tier wife.

That's one of the reasons why polygamy doesn't work in the ancient Near East, because she's still under the authority of her mistress, of Sarai.

She's not of equal standing, and yet she is a wife, a kind of second-tier wife.

And things begin to deteriorate.

Verse 4.

He went into Hagar and she conceived.

And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on contempt with 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 contempt with me.

May the Lord judge between me and you.

Then 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.

What are the consequences of aiming at Earth?

Well, they're spelt out here.

The first is that Hagar is used.

This young slave girl is the victim of a culturally sanctioned injustice.

She becomes merely a means to an end.

Abram doesn't marry her because she's beautiful.

He marries her because she's useful.

Can you imagine?

If somebody came to you, said I'd really like to marry you.

Oh, why would you like to marry me?

Well, it'd be really good for my kind of social standing.

And I hear that, you know, your daddy's very wealthy, and uh, you know, once he's once he's gone, and oh, well, do you do you love me?

No.

You're very useful to me.

It's awful, isn't it?

She's used.

She's married because she's useful, not because she's beautiful.

God's people look pretty terrible in this passage, it's worth saying.

These are the the father and mother of the promises of God.

And here they are, all arguably at their lowest, though they have some pretty low points.

But they look pretty terrible, and here they're using a young virginal slave girl.

But again, before we take the high the moral high ground and sit in judgment over them, let's think about it.

And let's try and bring it ever so slightly closer to home.

Because when we crave something, we end up using people.

When we want to bolster our power or our position, we use people.

We do people down in order to elevate ourselves.

When we want intimacy or a sense of control and place, we use people as an object for sex.

When you aim at Earth, you will not love people.

You will use them.

Not only is Hagar used, but all of the relationships begin to fracture apart.

That's what verses four and six are really uh laying out.

Hagar conceives, and because of the cultural cachet and value of children, she begins to look down on Sarah, her mistress.

There's a subversion of the relationship.

And you can just imagine the kind of the Jerry Springer, Jeremy Kyle-esque tension when they're when they're there day after day, week after week, and that and the bump is beginning to grow, and and the side glances as Sarah looks and just catches Hagar, just beginning just to.

I mean, I have a bump that I can stroke.

But you can imagine, she's just she's rubbing her belly and the and how that just begins to gnaw at Sarah, just more and more and more.

That she can't stand it.

And what's worse, she knows that she orchestrated it that way.

That that's in a sense what she wanted.

But isn't this us that we make decisions and they go terribly wrong, and we feel Angry and bitter and resentful, but one of the problems is that actually it's partly on us, and that just makes it worse.

And so, in a rage, she flies off at her husband and says, You have done this.

And yes, Abram is he takes two to tango, and he is not without fault.

So, how often do we make these bad decisions?

And we make situations worse.

And as soon as we do, we look to blame shift to others.

Abram's response, though, is perhaps worst of all.

Because what does Abram do?

He does what men love to do, he completely checks out.

He goes, She's your servant.

You go and do with her what you want.

He abdicates all responsibility.

He abdicates all leadership in his family.

And says, do with her whatever you want, dear.

Happy wife, happy life.

Blame shifting, pride, and desperate cowardice.

We should be hearing echoes of another earlier chapter in Genesis.

We should be hearing echoes of Genesis three.

In fact, Moses really, in the language that is used, wants us to pick up these parallels.

Because what we read here is that Sarah takes the slave girl and gives to her husband.

That's verse three.

So after Abram had lived 10 years in the land of Caraan, Sarah, Abram's wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave.

It's the same as the fruit.

She took and she gave.

And then there's another little parallel in the verse on up where it says that Abram listened to the voice of her wife, of his wife.

And that is not a kind of and so men never listen to the voice of your wife.

Again, not an application point, right?

It's a parallel with what was going on in Genesis 3, where God says, Because you have listened to the voice of your wife.

It's not that you should never listen to the voice of your wife.

In fact, it's recommended a lot of the time.

But in these situations, in these circumstances, what they were doing was they're aiming at earth.

They're forgetting God and causing, and what's happening is that husbands are abdicating responsibility, abdicating any leadership, and just going along with it without saying, no, hold on.

This is not what God wants from us.

God doesn't want us to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

He told us not to do that back in Genesis 2.17.

I'm stepping in here for our good and for our protection.

Similarly, here it's like, no, I'm not going to go and sleep with Hegemah the servant girl, because God has promised that He is going to give us a child, me and you, together.

We need to trust Him.

I know it's been long, and I know that it's painful, and I know that it's hard.

But darling, please, we must continue to trust Him.

And in both circumstances, they don't.

They don't do anything.

Adam and Abram go, all right then.

We're supposed to hear these echoes.

Adam stood blithely by and said nothing.

And he listened to his wife's sinful instruction.

And when it went wrong, nobody accepted any responsibility.

And here Abram says nothing to stop this, but listens to Sarah's plan.

And then when things go wrong, he accepts no responsibility.

Why is Moses drawing these parallels?

Let me tell you why.

Human nature doesn't change.

Human nature doesn't change.

You can have sympathy for Eve, can't you?

In the same way that you can have sympathy for Sarah.

Eve was stepping up because there was a problem in the garden.

There was a talking snake, which is a day, right?

There's a problem in the garden.

And her husband is playing Assassin's Creed.

Rather than dealing with the chaos that has come into their family.

And so she's like, well, he's checked out.

So I have to do something, or else nobody else is, and chaos is just going to overtake us.

So you can have sympathy for her.

Sarah was stepping up because it looked like God had checked out, that he'd forgotten his promises, that he was no longer good.

Both had forgotten his goodness and his kindness.

Both act faithlessly, and as a result, there are dire and lasting consequences.

Human nature remains the same.

We have a tendency to aim at earth.

We have a tendency to take matters into our own hands.

We have a tendency to check out and to abdicate all responsibility.

And the result is terrible.

The result translated in 6B, it says that Sarah dealt harshly with Hagar.

That's a very bland vanilla translation.

She abused a pregnant woman.

She dealt harshly with Hagar, and Hagar fleas.

They aimed at Earth.

And they were now in danger of losing everything.

A loving marriage has become strained.

A single mother is abused and now abandoned.

Culturally driven value, aiming at Earth, looking at the world around you in order to define you and satisfy you and fulfill the deepest longings of your hearts, it will drive you crazy and it will begin to fracture the relationships around you.

And ultimately, it will drive you out into the wilderness where you feel dejected and alone.

Don't aim at earth.

Secondly, aim at heaven and the value that comes from God.

Aim at heaven and the value that comes from God.

Let's look at the second half.

Hagar heads down south towards Egypt.

Where's she going?

She's going home.

She's going home.

And on the way, we read that the angel of the Lord finds her sitting by well.

In the Old Testament, the angel of the Lord is not just, he's not just another angel.

He is a visual representation of God Himself.

And Hagar realizes this later on in the passage, because she bestows this name on God.

We'll come to that in a second.

But basically, God comes.

Here is a single mother who has suffered injustice, who is in the wilderness, who is scared, hungry, thirsty, and alone.

And what happens?

God seeks her out.

God comes to her.

God draws near to her.

And when he comes, he speaks to her.

Verse 8, Hagar, servant of Sarah, where have you come from?

Where are you going?

Isn't that interesting?

He seeks Hagar out.

And the first thing that he says is not a word of condemnation.

Doesn't judge her.

Doesn't point out the ways that she's sinned with her pride, you know, looking down on Sarah as she rubbed the bio oil into her bump.

Not any of that.

What's the first thing that he does?

The first thing that God does is that he calls her by name.

You maybe haven't noticed it, but Sarah and Abram have never called her name.

It's, I have a servant.

She's your servant, the servant girl.

It's Moses, the writer, who's been saying, servant girl Hagar.

But they have never taken her name on their lips.

She was just a vessel, just a vehicle.

She wasn't a person to them.

It's all part of the being used thing, isn't it?

What does do what does God do when he comes?

Hagar.

Where are you going?

It's beautiful, isn't it?

He calls her by name.

He sees her as a person.

He values her.

He is merciful to her.

She says that she is fleeing this unjust situation.

This verse is, she says, I'm fleeing from my mistress Sarah.

And God will have known.

He is the God who sees.

And yet something very strange and something very difficult to reckon with happens in verse 9.

The angel of the Lord said to her, Return to your mistress and submit to her.

She says she's fleeing something unjust.

And very strangely, God tells her to go back.

What's going on here?

And I need you to listen to me.

This is not a proof text that should encourage women to go back into abusive situations.

This is a particular moment where God is coming to this woman and saying, You're going to be okay.

Trust me.

Go back into this situation.

I know it's scary, but I see you.

I'm not going to leave you, and I'm not going to let anything happen to you.

Trust me.

He's eliciting faith in her.

Say, I know this is going to be hard, but go back to this difficulty and trust me in it.

Aim at heaven, Hagar.

Earth won't give you what you need.

But you can trust me because I see you.

I've seen you by the well and I've come to you.

And I'm going to continue to see you as you head back.

This is often how our God works.

He doesn't save us from suffering.

He saves us through it.

Don't you see?

He saves us through it in order to help us to trust him.

But not only does God see her, he hears her.

He directs her to call her son Ishmael, which means God has heard.

God has heard my cry.

Go back to Sarah and Abram, God says, go back to the difficult situation and trust me in it.

And here's a little handhole for you.

Here's a little reassurance that I am with you in all of these moments.

Have your son there and call him Ishmael, which means God hears.

And every time you call his name Hagar, every time you beckon him in from play, every time you call him to the table at dinner, every time you yell at him to tidy his room, you will be reminded 10,000 times, 10,000 times that I hear you crying.

And you can trust me in it.

It's going to be on your lips every day as you call the name of your son that I my ears are open to you, young woman.

I see you, and I'm not going to leave you.

You can trust me.

And he goes even further than that.

He honors her.

How does he honor her?

Verse 10 the angel of the Lord said to her, I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for a multitude.

He makes her a matriarch.

This is the only time in the Bible that God comes and specifically promises a family and a lineage to a woman.

And what kind of woman is it?

It's a single Egyptian mother.

He honors her.

But then not only does he honor her, he braces her for the future.

Now, this is hard.

What I mean by he braces her for the future is the next two verses.

Verse 11 and verse 12 says, Behold, you are pregnant, you shall bear a son, you shall call his name Ishmael, because the Lord has listened to your affliction, that is, he's heard your cry.

He shall be a wild donkey of a man, his hand shall be against everyone, and everyone's hand against him.

And he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.

That is, he will dwell all of his life in hostility towards his brothers.

He's bracing her for the future.

The sun is going to be untamable.

He will live in perpetual hostility towards everyone around him.

And what's going on here?

Far too many Christians come to their faith and want simple answers to complicated situations.

We want simple answers, simple solutions to complex problems.

But the reality is that sometimes there are sins and circumstances that will not be resolved this side of heaven.

And God is bracing Hagar for that.

Saying, in a sense, he's saying, Your sins cut your sins covered.

I'm dealing with it, I'm honoring you, I see you, I hear you, forgive you even.

But what's happened is still going to continue to have consequences.

You know forgiveness of sin, but actually the consequences of those sins still echo in your life, maybe even now.

Life's complicated, sin's complicated.

Sin has consequences.

And God is bracing her before the baby is born and say, look, this actually isn't going to be easy.

This side of heaven, these things may never be resolved, but continue to trust me in it.

We've all felt this.

We feel sorrow and repentance at our sin, and we we know that it's covered by Jesus, by his grace and his mercy, and yet the effects of it are still being felt.

Or perhaps one of the reasons why you hide your sin is because you know that there will be consequences.

If you want to know grace and forgiveness, you cannot aim to control what happens here and nigh.

You cannot aim at earth and hope for heaven.

We must aim at heaven, find ourselves forgiven, enjoy the grace of God and trust him, even though things may never be right again in this earth.

Trusting that there is a new heaven and a new earth being prepared for us, for all who would turn to him in repentance and faith.

And we have seen the consequences of this chapter.

Sorry, the sins of this chapter have had consequences on down the generations to this very week.

Oceans of blood have been spilled because of this chapter.

God be merciful to us.

God sees her, he hears her.

He directs her to trust, he honors her, he braces her for the future.

And in response, Hagar names God.

Verse 13.

So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, you are the God of seeing.

You are Elrohai.

And this is so unusual.

This is the only time in the Bible where God allows someone, a human being, to name him, to give him a name.

But here he comes to this young, single mother, the slave girl, and allows himself to be named by her.

And how does she name him?

He is the God who sees.

She realized that God is the God who saw her at her lowest and most lost.

And what sort of look did he give her?

Was it a look of scorn and of judgment?

No, it was a look of love and mercy and grace.

A look which said, I will be with you, I see you, even though the road that you must now walk will be hard.

But these are the eyes of the Savior, aren't they?

There's not one of you here this morning that the Savior does not look at with mercy and with grace.

Doubtless the call to follow him and to walk in the light and to bring your sin into the light will be hard.

But that is why Jesus fixed his gaze on that cross.

That he might die for your sin.

And now he finds you sitting here.

And he says, I see you.

Where are you going?

You aiming at earth?

You aiming at heaven?

Are you looking to satisfy the desires and longings of your hearts by whatever looks best for you?

Using people and creating relational chaos and mess.

We will never be at peace or know our true value while we aim at earth.

When we short circuit faith and pursue all of the pragmatic Hagar-esque solutions.

Peace is only found when we trust the promise.

The promise that comes from heaven, the promise of a Savior, who has pursued us into our wilderness wanderings by becoming a man who hears us, who sees us, who forgives and restores us, and as a result, calls us to follow him.

The road may be hard, the road may have its consequences and its trials, but it is full of promise.

The promise of life and joy and forgiveness forevermore.

You aim at heaven, you'll get earth thrown in.

Yeah at earth, you'll get neither.

Thank you for listening to this week's sermon.

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