GENESIS
ABRAHAM
Genesis 16:1-16
INTRODUCTION
God has called Abram to follow Him from the land of the Chaldeans to the land of Canaan. God has promised to BLESS Abram by making of him a great nation and by blessing all those who align themselves with him. Abram has followed God. He has left his country and his home, and has followed God to the land of Canaan. Even when Abram messed up in Egypt, God blessed him royally. His disobedient excursion resulted in him amassing great wealth. If that was not enough, he gained even greater wealth when he attacked the 4-king coalition from the east when he rescued his nephew Lot. What more could Abram want?
What more could Abram want? Two simple words: a son. When it is all said and done, the bulk of God's promise revolves around a son. He cannot be the father of a great nation, God cannot bless him and his descendants until he has a son! God promised him a son, and yet after 10 years of following God, Abram still does not have a son. He still doesn't have a son even though God had promised him at the ratification ceremony that Abram's son would come forth from his own body. God had made it quite clear that this son would not be an adopted son nor even a legal heir. He would come forth from Abram's loins. Yet no son has come. What is to be done?
SARAI'S PLAN (16:1-6)
What is to be done? Apparently Abram is not the only one pondering this question. At this stage in steps Sarai, Abram's wife. She knows that God has promised to Abram a physical son descended from Abram; however, God has said nothing about who the mother would be. The problem when it is all said and done was not Abram; it was Sarai. She was the one who was barren.
What is to be done? Is anything to be done? Actually from Sarai's standpoint it would be very wise to get Abram a son as long as she was married to Abram. But what would be done since she was barren? Abram legally could divorce her since she was barren and marry another in order to produce an heir. She is a great lady though of a huge company, and she has much to lose in that situation. So she devises a plan.
In the ancient near east if a woman could not produce a child, she could arrange for one of her female slaves to be a surrogate mom. In other words, she could present one of her ladies-in-waiting to her husband and have him lie with her. If the slave got pregnant, then the wife would be at the legs of her slave when she gave birth to the child. This act meant that the wife was claiming the child to be her own. By means of this creative way, she not only produces a son, she also retains her status as the great lady of this huge company.
On the surface it does not appear that Moses who wrote down this story disapproves of this arrangement. A closer look though reveals otherwise. The words Moses uses to describe Sarai approaching Abram are some of the same words he uses earlier to describe Eve approaching Adam. Eve's daughter Sarai is acting just like her mother Eve. Just as Eve brought disaster upon her family, so Sarai is about to bring disaster to her family. When Sarai approaches Abram with the plan, Abram readily accepts. He goes in and lies with Hagar. The Jewish rabbis claim that this happened only once. However many times this happened, the plan succeeds because Hagar the Egyptian slave gets pregnant.
All appears great. The only problem is that Hagar, an Egyptian slave, is now pregnant with the master's child. She finds herself in a very heady situation. Hagar unwisely begins to exploit the new situation. Her mistress is barren, while she is carrying the child of the sheik of the tribe. She knows how desperately the sheik wanted this child. A great future awaits the child of this sheik. Her being pregnant with the sheik's child emboldens her in her relationship with Sarai. In her mind the mistress has become the slave, while the slave has become the mistress. Jealousy has reared its ugly head.
Little though did Hagar realize whom she was dealing with. Sarai is the lady of a great host. The only reason she got Hagar pregnant was to insure her position in this great family. By no means was she going to roll over and let Hagar now supplant her as Abram's wife. Whatever it took for Sarai to maintain her position, she was willing to do. She approaches Abram:
"May the wrong done me be upon you,
I gave my maid into your arms;
But when she saw that she had conceived, I was despised in her sight.
May the Lord judge between you and me" (16:5).
The ironic thing to this whole episode is that just like her mother Eve, Sarai is taking zero responsibility at all for her part in this fiasco. She was the one who conceived the plan, but now that the plan has gone awry, she places full responsibility upon Abram.
Whereas Sarai's reaction might seem unfair, the fact is that there is truth in the matter. Abram, not Sarai, is the head of the clan. Abram, not Sarai, is ultimately responsible for what has happened in his family. Just like God held Adam ultimately responsible for his family even though Eve initiated the wrongdoing, God through Sarai is holding Abram ultimately responsible for what has just happened in his family. Compliance with wrong is the same as approval of wrong. Like one wise person said: "Evil flourishes when good men do nothing."
When it is all said and done, where did Sarai and Abram go wrong? They went wrong by not waiting and trusting the Lord. To be fair to them, we must remember that God up to this point had not said that Sarai would be the biological mother of Abram's descendants. Yet God had not told Abram and Sarai to use Hagar to produce the heir. It is true that we are not to lag behind God whenever He is leading us; however, it is also true that we are not to run ahead of God either. And that is precisely what Abram and Sarai were doing, running ahead of God. "But they were trusting God to produce the heir!" you might say. The truth is that if God was promising them the heir, then it was HIS, not THEIR, responsibility to produce the heir. Yes, we are to be engaged in the process but not outside the boundaries God has set for us. God established marriage between ONE man and ONE woman (Gen. 2:24). Now THAT part of the Bible Abram and Sarai had access to, yet they disobeyed it.
See some other dynamics operating here. Where did Hagar come from? Abram and Sarai had come from Ur in southern Iraq with their entourage; it was unlikely that she came with them from Ur. Rather when Abram disobeyed God and went down to Egypt and Pharaoh blessed Abram by giving him male and female servants, it is most likely that Hagar was one of the female servants. In other words, one act of disobedience provided an opportunity for another act of disobedience. They got off lightly with the first act; as the years go by though, this one is going to prove more painful.
The example of Hagar shows that there are things in our lives which seem pretty harmless; however, whenever we quit trusting God, those seemingly "harmless" things can actually be used against us to do great harm. The only way to insure this does not happen is to trust God at ALL times and to obey Him no matter what the circumstances might seem to say.
HAGAR FLEES (16:7-14)
Abram sides with Sarai and instructs her to do whatever she deems necessary. There's a play on words here. Sarai had said that she had given her slave into Abram's arms for sex; Abram now says that he has given Hagar into Sarai's hands for punishment. Poor Hagar is being tossed around from person to person in Abram's family. Although Moses does not tell us the means by which Sarai punishes Hagar, the text does tell us that Sarai is so harsh that Hagar flees from Sarai's presence.
Hagar is not only Egyptian by race; like we said earlier, her home was most likely Egypt before Pharaoh gave her to Abram. As a result when she flees from Sarai, she heads for home, for Egypt. When she arrives at the northwestern border of the Egyptian frontier, the wilderness of Shur, the angel of the Lord appears to Hagar at a spring of water. There the angel asks her where she has come from and where she is going. She replies that she is fleeing from her mistress, Sarai.
The angel instructs Hagar to return to her mistress Sarai and to submit to her. Then the angel of the Lord makes a stunning promise to Hagar:
"I will greatly multiply your descendants
that they shall be too many to count" (16:10)
This promise is stunning first because it sounds very similar to the promise that God made Abram, that his descendants would number as the stars in heaven, that is, too numerous to count. The second reason this promise is so stunning is that God makes it to Hagar and to her yet-to-be-born son, Ishmael. Ishmael as we shall see is NOT going to be the heir of the promise of blessing God made to Abram; that distinction will go to Abram's future son, Isaac. So why is God making this promise to Hagar and Ishmael?
The reason God makes this promise to Ishmael is that although he was not the designated heir, he was still Abram's son. God had said that God would bless Abram and his descendants (15:5). No matter who the mother was, Ishmael and his descendants are still Abram's descendants. Many Christians today need to bear this in mind. I am an ardent believer in the Jews as being the chosen people of God because God chose Isaac over Ishmael; however, the Arab today is still directly descended from Abram through Ishmael. We need to respect and honor the promises God has made to Israel concerning the land of Israel; however, God has also promised to bless Ishmael's descendants, the Arabic people. And blessed them He has. Most Arab lands are on top of some of the greatest oil deposits in the world! Many Christians would just love for the Arabic race to disappear; the fact that they have not may be very important for us to process. They may not have disappeared for the very important reason that they too are Abram's descendants. It doesn't mean we support them at every turn, just like we shouldn't support the Jew at every turn; however, we need to bear in mind that they too descended from Abram and as a result received blessing from God.
The angel elaborates on the promise:
"Behold, you are with child,
And you shall bear a son;
And you shall call his name Ishmael,
Because the Lord has given heed to your affliction.
And he will be a wild donkey of a man,
His hand will be against everyone,
And everyone's hand will be against him,
And he will live to the east of all his brothers" (16:11-12).
If ever a description described this son of Abram and his descendants, this one definitely does. First, Ishmael's name literally means "God hears" or "God takes heed." In other words, the reason that Hagar and finally Ishmael survive and thrive is due to the fact that God heard Hagar's pleas of help while fleeing from Sarai.
Second, even though it has been at the expense of so many others, the Arabic race definitely has had a history of culture and greatness. It's been a violent history of conquest and oppression in the lands they conquered. Uninformed people have mistakenly thought that there was no threat from the Middle East until 9/11; however, from 600 AD to 1600 AD the greatest threat to western civilization came from the Middle East. It was only on Sept. 11, 1683 when the Polish forces under the king of Poland, Sobieski, defeated the forces of the Ottoman empire at the city walls of Vienna that peace finally reigned between these 2 cultures. (See The Battle of Vienna.) For 300 years the Middle East has been quiet because it has been weak. With the discovery though of oil in that region, the Arabic culture has discovered itself in a much stronger position. It is prepared now to flex its economic muscles whenever necessary or desirable.
HAGAR RETURNS TO SARAI (16:15-16)
Hagar upon the Lord's instructions returns to Sarai. The story is not over though. Much pain still lies in the wings. For the time being at least there is peace in Abram's family.
The sad thing is that we are still suffering from the miscalculations of Sarai. Whatever else this lesson teaches us, it lets us know that God does not go around cleaning up our mistakes. God could have caused Hagar to miscarry, but He does not. Ishmael could have died at birth, but he does not. God wants only the best for us; however, He has given us the freedom to experience the best or to reject that best. When we do reject the best God has for us, He makes us live with the consequences of our choice. Not only we, but many times (as in the case of Abraham and Hagar) future generations actually suffer because of our miscalculations.