Episode 68 - Hagar & the God Who Sees Us(Genesis 16 & Genesis 21)

Today for the show, we are looking at a promise but also sort of taking a glance, a little look, at the life of someone from the OT. 

You may have heard of her before. Her name is Hagar. And we find the story of her life, or at least the portions of her life that were recorded in the Bible, in Genesis. Chapters 16 and 21.

 

I am going to read first from Chapter 21 and then bounce back to Chapter 16. 

 

And I am reading from the CSB today. The heading for this section reads “Hagar and Ishmael Sent Away”. So, yeah, right away we see this isn’t exactly a happy season of her life. 

Can anyone relate to being in a not-so-cheery time right now? If so, this is for you. 

And as always, there is hope here. So much hope is available to us in God’s Word, if we just take the time to look for it. 

Just to set the stage for what I am about to read, the Lord told Abraham he would have a son - and he was elderly. His wife, Sarah, was too. So Sarah gave Abraham her slave Hagar for him to have a child with (not uncommon in that era - but if we are honest about it, this is not kind treatment of this woman. Period.) Hagar gave birth to a son, named Ishmael, and then later on Sarah, even in her old age, had a son who was named Isaac. We are reading about the celebration that took place when Isaac was weaned, so think of him as a toddler, somewhere between two and three would have been the age of weaning in that culture. When Hannah took Samuel to the temple after he was weaned, he would have been about three years old. That’s not weaning age in western society today. 

 

I’m going to read a few verses from chapter 21 now -

 8 The child grew and was weaned, and Abraham held a great feast on the day Isaac was weaned. 9 But Sarah saw the son mocking—the one Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham. 10 So she said to Abraham, “Drive out this slave with her son, for the son of this slave will not be a coheir with my son Isaac!”

11 This was very distressing to[a] Abraham because of his son. 12 But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed[b] about the boy and about your slave. Whatever Sarah says to you, listen to her, because your offspring will be traced through Isaac, 13 and I will also make a nation of the slave’s son because he is your offspring.”

14 Early in the morning Abraham got up, took bread and a waterskin, put them on Hagar’s shoulders, and sent her and the boy away. She left and wandered in the Wilderness of Beer-sheba. 15 When the water in the skin was gone, she left the boy under one of the bushes 16 and went and sat at a distance, about a bowshot away, for she said, “I can’t bear to watch the boy die!” While she sat at a distance, she[c] wept loudly.

17 God heard the boy crying, and the[d] angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What’s wrong, Hagar? Don’t be afraid, for God has heard the boy crying from the place where he is. 18 Get up, help the boy up, and grasp his hand, for I will make him a great nation.” 19 Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well. So she went and filled the waterskin and gave the boy a drink. 20 God was with the boy, and he grew; he settled in the wilderness and became an archer. 21 He settled in the Wilderness of Paran, and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.

You may feel like things are just so bleak right now, and since this is a mother/son story, of course we can apply this to our parenting. Maybe your kiddo is really struggling with something unjust, unfair, just plain wrong. I want to point out to you, to your heart as a mom or a dad today, that God sees. He has seen it all as it happened, he has seen the being sent away into some sort of wilderness without nearly enough supply (like a bit of bread and one waterskin) and He knows it is hot, there isn’t a place to really rest, you are weary and sitting your child under a bush as you go a little ways off and sob your heart out. He sees. And whatever plans He has for that child, whatever promises He has made, He is gonna keep them. 

Right now, He may be on the verge of opening your eyes, showing you a well of fresh, living water, and asking you to take your child by the hand, help them up and encourage them to keep on believing the Lord. Because He does what He says that He will do. Your waterskin may be totally dry. Your God is still in the business of bringing water from the Rock. 

Jesus, the Living Water, is very much alive. And He is moving and acting on your behalf, on your child’s behalf. 

Now, I am going to step back a few chapters in the book of Genesis, to chapter 16. Let me read verses 1 through 16 (also from the CSB). 

Oh, and the names are different, Abram and Sarai, because God had not yet renamed them Abraham and Sarah (that is in chapter 17)

Abram’s wife, Sarai, had not borne any children for him, but she owned an Egyptian slave named Hagar. 2 Sarai said to Abram, “Since the Lord has prevented me from bearing children, go to my slave; perhaps through her I can build a family.” And Abram agreed to what Sarai said. 3 So Abram’s wife, Sarai, took Hagar, her Egyptian slave, and gave her to her husband, Abram, as a wife for him. This happened after Abram had lived in the land of Canaan ten years. 4 He slept with[a] Hagar, and she became pregnant. When she saw that she was pregnant, her mistress became contemptible to her. 5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for my suffering![b] I put my slave in your arms,[c] and when she saw that she was pregnant, I became contemptible to her. May the Lord judge between me and you.”

6 Abram replied to Sarai, “Here, your slave is in your power; do whatever you want with her.” Then Sarai mistreated her so much that she ran away from her.

7 The angel of the Lord found her by a spring in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. 8 He said, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?”

She replied, “I’m running away from my mistress Sarai.”

9 The angel of the Lord said to her, “Go back to your mistress and submit to her authority.” 10 The angel of the Lord said to her, “I will greatly multiply your offspring, and they will be too many to count.”

11 The angel of the Lord said to her, “You have conceived and will have a son. You will name him Ishmael,[d] for the Lord has heard your cry of affliction. 12 This man will be like a wild donkey. His hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand will be against him; he will settle near all his relatives.”

13 So she named the Lord who spoke to her: “You are El-roi,”[e] for she said, “In this place, have I actually seen the one who sees me?” [f] 14 That is why the well is called Beer-lahai-roi.[g] It is between Kadesh and Bered.

15 So Hagar gave birth to Abram’s son, and Abram named his son (whom Hagar bore) Ishmael. 16 Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to him.

Okay, so when Abraham sent her away with Ishmael, it was not the first time she’d been out in the wilderness, nearing death. It has also happened many years before, when she was pregnant with her son. Sarah turned on her and became mean, and it seems like she was unbearably mean. And the angel of the Lord appeared to her. Verse 10 (read it again) implies God was who was speaking to her. This is often referred to as the pre-incarnate Christ, like Jesus appearing to people in the OT, before He came as a baby in a manger. It says a promise was made, “I will greatly multiply your offspring and they will be too many to count” and an angel does not have the ability to make or keep such a promise, so I see evidence that supports the pre-incarnate Christ in this passage. 

And here is more proof that it was the Lord speaking to Hagar - in verse 13 she gives God a name - El Roi. That name means “The God who sees me.” 

She asks, “In this place, have I actually seen the one who sees me?” 

What an astounding thing for her to say! 

What a remarkable life experience! 

To have God call you by name and ask you where you have come from and where you are going, this is really amazing. Would that not change your life? Now Hagar was from Egypt, and in Egypt at that time, they were the world’s greatest superpower so to speak. Egypt was the stuff. And they had a plethora of gods they worshipped. To have a living God, the one true God, speak to you personally, calling you by name, asking you where you had been and where you were planning to go, and then making you such a profound promise about your unborn child and your future descendants. Well, this must have rocked her world a bit. Or a lot. 

And He told her to go back to Sarah and to submit to her. 

So, that’s what Hagar did. Doesn’t seem to fix the problem, per se, but I am guessing that by doing what the Lord told her to do, and by remembering that this God is the God who sees her, from start to finish, beginning to end, all of it is seen, she was able to go back and bear up under whatever came next. She had a promise from the Lord. And that is so, so important.

Can you bear up under something just because God, El Roi, sees you and has given you great and precious promises from His word?

It’s sort of a rhetorical question, because I know that you can bear up. I know that you can believe Him for all His promises. I know that you can have an encounter with El Roi - and I know that He is, right now, the God who sees you. You are seen by the God who sees you, and like Hagar, you can expect to see Him at work and moving in your situation. 

So when Hagar was sent away with her teenage son, back out into the wilderness, she was not suddenly un-seen by God, by El Roi. 

There isn’t an un-seeing happening here. Not for Hagar, not for me, and not for you.

I don’t know where you may be feeling mistreated, unseen, in a wilderness, crying out and sobbing. All I know is that God’s Word is true for you in any and all of those places. 

The promise is that God is your El-Roi just as much as He as Hagar’s. 

And you can never, ever be un-seen by Him, my friend. 

 

Thanks so much for being here today - and sorry about the tinny sound of this episode! Every now and then my recording software gets wonky & results in not-my-normal sound! Yikes!

~ Jan

 

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