Genesis 16:1-16 – The Plan of God

I remember very well the day that I realized I was taller than my grandma.

It felt like a big accomplishment to me at the time to have grown tall enough to look ever

so slightly down at her when she was talking to me. And I remember when I got tall enough to hug

my grandma around the shoulders, which was maybe the first time that I felt like a man instead of a

boy. Now, it's important to know that my grandma was all of about five feet tall and needed a couch

pillow on her car seat to see over the steering wheel. So while I felt like a giant around her at

five foot seven, I was short to average in the rest of the world. My mom assured me, though,

that I would grow well into my college years, and I believed her. But when I came home from college

and had managed to grow many inches wider and not a single inch taller, I kind of made my peace with

it. But the worst part of that whole thing was the waiting and the hoping that growth would come.

We talked last week about how we can trust the promises of God far more than I could trust the

promises of my mom for vertical growth. And we've been walking with Abram and Sarai and witnessed

them growing in their faith as they take one step after another and then quite often make some

missteps as well. But even after all of that and all that they've seen God do, it's still hard to

wait. And we can totally empathize with these people who are waiting specifically on the growth

of their family, having their first child be born. Believe it or not, it's been 10 years since they

obeyed the call of God and came to Canaan in the first place. Can you imagine waiting 10 years for

anything? In the culture and age of immediate gratification, we can barely wait 10 minutes

for some things. I start to get upset if a program takes longer than 10 seconds to load

on my computer. And you get less than three seconds before the average person scrolls away

on social media. And these folks have waited for 10 years by Genesis 16. And while they've waited

all this time, Sarai in particular has started to wonder if God's delay in giving her a child

is actually a denial of his promise.

And I think we can understand why she might think that

if we put ourselves in her shoes.

She's seeing the years go by.

She sees their household, their servants, their community,

all having families and growing.

And she sees the wrinkles on her own face at 76 years old

and starts to think that maybe it's time for her to come up with another solution.

And as we go through the passage today,

I want you to pay close attention to all of the places that we hear some mention of seeing

and to what is being seen.

You'll notice the repetition of words like seeing and looking and beholding all throughout

this chapter.

And I think we'll start to understand how important it is that we keep our eyes fixed

on the faithful one and his plans for us instead of letting our eyes fall ever so slightly

to our own solutions.

Let's go ahead and read the first six chapters of chapter 16 of Genesis together.

So after Abram had lived 10 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 on her mistress.

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

I gave my servant into 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.

Make no mistake that what has just been described is pretty horrifying on a couple of levels.

The way that Sarai introduces polygamy as a solution, and the way that Abram listens

to her, and the way that Hagar is treated like property instead of like a person.

There's no way that we can read through this and not come away unsettled by it.

But what is even more unsettling is finding out that everything they did was according

to the law of the surrounding cultures and even within cultural norms for ancient Mesopotamia

at the time.

This plan that Sarai comes up with to give her Egyptian servant to Abram and then take

her child as her own isn't just a weird and perverse plan.

It's what any Egyptian or Ammonite or Canaanite woman would have suggested in her place.

For a woman of wealth like Sarai, who could not conceive a child, the expectation would

be that she gave one of her servants to her husband to become pregnant, and that the child

born of that union would legally belong to Sarai and Abram.

So Sarai has lowered her eyes from the plan of God to create her own culturally acceptable plans.

And Abram, instead of protesting, does the same thing.

If this seems wildly familiar, it's because the author is using the same language to describe

this couple that he used to describe another couple in Genesis chapter 3.

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

The woman rejects the plan of God, brings something forbidden to her husband.

He listens to the voice of his wife instead of God and sins.

So it should come as no surprise that things start to fall apart pretty quickly.

When Hagar becomes pregnant by Abram, she despises Sarai.

She has been mistreated by them both, treated as property in the worst way imaginable.

But instead of repenting, Sarai gets angry.

And she goes to Abram and she blames him for the situation.

Now, is this Abram's fault?

I mean, should he have stopped this before it started?

Of course.

But it was Sarai's plan.

And suddenly, she wants no part of it.

I was just watching a TV show a few nights ago where a lawyer stood up and said,

Go ahead and move forward with your plan.

But if it fails, I'll deny ever approving it.

which is essentially what's happening here. When our plans to force God's hand fall apart,

and they always do, we want to blame someone else for the consequences. And here, Abram does have a

chance to set things straight. He is the leader of the home. He could, in this moment, choose to

repent with his wife before God and before Hagar. To be clear, that would have been the expectation

of God at this point. But again, they lower their eyes to a plane of their own. Abram doesn't call

Sarai to repent with him. He actually quotes the code of Hammurabi, which was the law of the land

at that time. And it says in that code that if a servant isn't acting properly submissive,

then the master of that slave could punish them to put them in their place.

Gross, right?

That's what Abram is telling his wife to do here, to the woman who is carrying his child.

And apparently, Sarai's treatment of Hagar is so bad that she chooses to flee into the desert

instead of staying in the tents of Sarai and Abram.

In today's language, we would say that Hagar is a victim of both sex trafficking and domestic

violence, which is horrendous. And we would be right to call out Abram and Sarai's behavior here

for what it is. They have sinned against Hagar, against each other, and against God. And it all

started with a lowering of their vision, looking to the plans that seemed so normal, so human,

so culturally acceptable, and in doing so, failing to wait on God's timing and living according to

God's standards. The shortcuts of man are not the way of God. If we're going to sit under the

teaching of God's word, we can't stop here. We have to consider our own plans and cultural solutions

in light of God's standards. Certainly, there are applications here for the Christian to have a

biblically informed stance on the offerings of the modern day, specifically modern medicine,

when it comes to fertility. We can be empathetic toward those who are suffering with infertility,

while at the same time holding firmly to biblical truths, like every human being is made in the

image of God from the moment of conception. And that truth will cause us to reject the modern

options that try to pretend like a human fetus is somehow less than a human life. We can't afford

to make the mistake of Abram, whose empathy for his wife caused him to abandon the truth of God,

even for a moment. But we also can't hold this passage at an arm's length and pretend like it

doesn't apply to us if we're not talking about having children. Because the problem for Abram

and Sarai wasn't at its core about not having children. Their problem was that they started

looking for a shortcut to get their way instead of trusting the way of God. Now we're in uncomfortable

territory for all of us, aren't we? Because we are no strangers to falling back on culturally

normal solutions when it gets uncomfortable to wait on God. When the stress gets to us,

American culture says there are plenty of substances to help with this. Have a drink,

have a smoke, stream a few hours of shows. It won't give you rest, but it will make you forget

that you're tired for a little while. And I know that some of you are going to feel like I'm calling

you out, but I promise you I'm not done yet. I'm not going to stop until we all feel called out,

hopefully. To those of you who are not yet married, culture says that if you don't want to wait for

the sacrificial commitment that is marriage, you know, love is free and so is sex. And so do what

you want with who you want, when you want. That's what the culture would say. And while the

consequences are very serious for you and them, as long as you don't have to deal with it today,

why worry about it, right? You don't want to be uncomfortable saving money. Why not charge it now

and deal with the debt later? You can see how our culture offers dozens of solutions every day that

seem like a shortcut to the joy that we want so badly. But the truth is that none of these things

are forming us into men and women who are more like Jesus. If I didn't name something specific

that applies to you. In this case, I'm just going to have to wait for the Holy Spirit to point out

the remaining shortcuts that we have all fallen prey to at some point in time. The way of Jesus,

the work of discipleship, looks like rejecting the shortcuts and seeking God's plan instead.

And the best news in this is that God sees our struggles and our failures and the ways that we

have been treated unjustly by others, seeking the same kinds of shortcuts. So let's keep reading

Hagar's story with verses 7 through 12. 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 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 and 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. Hagar is really and truly out of hope as she runs into the desert.

This place where God speaks to her is on the way to Egypt, but even if she would have made it to

Egypt, Hagar would find no safe place there either. The treatment at the hand of Sarai is so bad that

she essentially has chosen death over it. And it's here at the lowest possible point of her life that

she is found by God. Now, we know that God did not have to look to find her. The meaning of found

here is something like how we would say, I found myself out in the heat yesterday.

There are a few interesting parts to this. The first is this character, the angel of the Lord,

which is a term not used simply for an angel, but to describe the presence of God himself.

And there are many scholars who think that this very specifically is the pre-incarnate

person of Jesus. And I agree with them. We know that Jesus, as part of the Trinity,

existed, of course, before he took on flesh, became human, was born to Mary,

so the timeline isn't a problem. But the thing that tips the scale for me

is the similarity between this encounter and the one that we look at in John chapter 4. We actually

John 4 · chapter mention

just looked at this a few weeks ago. The woman by a spring in this story, and there the woman at the

well. This woman runs out to the heat of the desert to avoid her mistress. That woman ran out in the

heat of the day to avoid her village. And both of them encounter God, one of them in spirit only,

and one of them in the flesh. So whether it is or isn't, Jesus does have a track record of seeking

out the marginalized because that is who he is. That is who our God is. And God makes this promise

to Hagar that is completely unique in all of scripture, actually. Nowhere else does God promise

a lineage or great number of descendants to a woman. The child's name will be Ishmael, which means

God hears. And even this bit about him being like a wild donkey who lives in conflict isn't the curse

that it appears to be. It's not a curse like the curse that was put on Cain.

Wild donkey of a man is a phrase that means a free-roaming person, a Bedouin, someone who lives

and travels. So what God is saying about Ishmael here is that he will never be a slave like Hagar

was. And while he will live in conflict with others, particularly with Abram's other children,

he will never be subject to them. The hardest thing to swallow in this whole passage though,

is that God tells Hagar to return to Sarai. And so I want to be very clear about this.

This is not a general instruction for victims to return to their abuser for further mistreatment.

The whole of scripture shows us the character of God is actually to bring justice for the

oppressed and the mistreated.

And in many places, he commands his people to do the same.

His command to Hagar is specific to her, and it is about the way in which God is going to

provide for her and her child.

Sometimes God uses our affliction for our good, and that is exactly what he intends to

do here.

She could not survive in the desert and she could not go back to Egypt.

And the way that God will care for her going forward is actually through the provision of Abram and Sarai.

God sees our hurt and he can work it for our good.

Make no mistake at all that everything that's happened to Hagar at the hands of Abram and Sarai was wrong and it was broken.

And yet, God is so great that he is even able to use that for the good of those who trust him.

And incredibly, Hagar recognizes this and sees God even more clearly than Sarai and Abram at this point.

And she proclaims his character.

In the last three verses, verses 13 through 16, it says,

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 Bir Lahai Roy.

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 86 years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram.

Do you notice who is absent from those last few verses?

Sarai.

We know that Hagar must have relayed everything that happened by the spring to Abram because

he names the boy Ishmael.

And we have this repetition of Hagar and Abram, their names being used multiple times at the

and making it very clear that this child will remain Abram and Hagar's.

And Sarai, for all her planning, is left out.

The bitter irony here is that the matriarch of this nation,

who will become known as God's people, Israel,

completely fails to see God's plan and completely fails to wait for it, as does Abram.

And of all people, we have an Egyptian slave who recognizes God as the one who sees her

and trusts God's plan, even though it leads through suffering.

And she is blessed for it.

Now, God has not abandoned Sarai or Abram, and he's going to keep his promises to give

them a child, even in spite of their disobedience.

But we do know that it is now another 13 years before Isaac is born to Abram and Sarai.

Whether that would have been the case otherwise, I don't know.

We know that the Ishmaelites become brutal enemies of the Israelites, and they cause much

grief to them as a nation.

We know that in the modern day, actually, the religion of Islam claims ties to Ishmael

as an ancestor.

So certainly this resulted in conflict from this decision all those years ago.

Abram and Sarai turned to cultural methods to pursue their own plans instead of trusting

the plans of God.

And there were consequences for these choices, but there was also so much grace shown to

them as well.

And so as we close up today, I want us to consider the plans of God, particularly the

plan that is fulfilled in Christ. If you have not yet decided to follow Jesus, the plan of God for

you is for your salvation. And the path to that is really pretty simple. It's that you would repent

of your sin, that you would turn to Jesus for forgiveness, that you declare him as Lord instead

of you being Lord of your life, Jesus is Lord of your life, which is where baptism comes in.

and then that you would choose to walk with him. If you have made that choice to walk with Jesus,

you are following Jesus. The plan of God for you is to simply become more like Jesus in every way.

And this means so often taking the long road of obedience and rejecting the shortcuts

that are offered to us. The apostle Paul writes about this long road of obedience

to the leaders of the church in Ephesus. And I just, I want to read you three verses out of this

because he captures it so well. This was what it looks like to walk the road with disciples

of Jesus. Ephesians chapter 4 verses 12 through 16 says, equip them for the work of ministry,

Ephesians 4:12–16

for building up the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the

knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of

Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every

wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth

in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.

We'll talk more about that in house churches this week, but you can start by considering

every part of your life and asking the question, am I looking for a shortcut or am I trusting

the plan of God to transform me into the image of Christ?

Ekklesia is a church of house churches gathering weekly in Council Bluffs, Iowa and in homes

throughout the week.

We are a Bible-centered church focused on preaching from Scripture and making disciples of Jesus.

You can learn more about what we believe and contact a pastor at ecclesiachurches.org.