Beyond The Basics

Transcript:

Welcome to the Beyond the Basics Bible Study Podcast. My name is Dan Snyder and I’m your host. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode, Beyond the Basics, where we are exploring the Bible through Genesis, Revelation, one chapter at a time.

Well this week we’re going to get into Genesis chapter 16. If you remember from last episode in Genesis 15, God made a covenant with Abram and reiterated the promises that he had made to Abram in chapter 13. And these promises were to give Abram offspring, that that offspring would possess the land that God had given him in the land of Canaan.

And then in chapter 16, we pick up with the author saying that Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. So God had just given Abram all these boundaries, all these promises, but Sarai had borne him no children. So we have a dilemma. And that’s what this chapter is going to be all about.

So this is taking place about 10 years after Abram and Sarai had left Haran, which is where Abram’s father had died. And as I mentioned, Sarai sees that she still has no children and so she offers her servant Hagar to Abram as a concubine or as a wife. So Abram took Hagar, got her pregnant, and then Hagar began to treat Sarai with contempt.

So Sarai began to abuse Hagar and then Hagar fled, ran away into the wilderness. Hagar was found there by the angel of the Lord by a spring in the wilderness and there the angel of the Lord told her to return to Sarai and submit to her mistress. Then the angel of the Lord blesses Hagar. He tells her that she’s going to have a son and to name her son Ishmael. So Hagar returns to Abram and Sarai.

So that’s the overview of this chapter. So let’s get a little bit deeper into the chapter.

So in verse one, it tells us that Sarai had an Egyptian female servant named Hagar. It’s very likely that Abram and Sarai obtained this servant in Egypt when they had fled there because of the famine. If you remember in Genesis chapter 12, Abram and Sarai fled to Egypt. There was a famine. They went to Egypt and there Abram lied to Pharaoh and told him that Sarai was his sister, not his wife. Then Pharaoh found out because there were a bunch of plagues. God told him to return Sarai. And so Pharaoh did, but he also gave Abram sheep, oxen, donkeys, male servants, female servants, camels, gave Abram all this stuff. And so very likely Hagar was one of those female servants that Abram and Sarai received as a result of their deception.

So moving on to verse two, Sarai said to Abram, “Behold, now the Lord has prevented me from bearing children.”

So we see here that Sarai is blaming God for her lack of children. She’s noticing that it’s been 10 years since Abram received this promise that he would have offspring. And she’s blaming God for this.

And this reveals the pain in her heart. It reveals the pain of waiting for this child to come and never coming. In 10 years, I’m sure maybe some of you can relate to this. Maybe some of you can relate to the idea of waiting for God to keep his promises, whether it’s about children or something completely different, you’ve been tempted to blame God for not coming through on His promises.

I know that for me, it took my wife and I several years to have children. Before we were able to have children, we had two miscarriages and we faced the same temptation. We said, “God, why are we not able to have children?”

And we were tempted, you know, as anybody would be, we were tempted to blame God, but we chose not to. But here, Sarai blames God.

So she says, “Go in to my servant; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.”

So this is a common practice in ancient near east cultures where a barren wife could offer her slave girl as a wife to her husband. But it’s a strange situation because she would be considered a second class wife because she’s still owned by the first wife. She’s not quite equal to the first wife. And any children from this concubine or slave wife would become the children of the first wife. So in this situation, any children that Hagar would have would actually become the children of Sarai. They would be considered Sarai’s children.

And it gets even more messy because this slave wife can’t receive an inheritance because she’s a slave, but she also can’t be sold because she’s a wife. So this basically is sex slavery. It’s sex slavery for the purpose of producing children for the first wife.

Which brings us back to the idea that we’ve talked about in past episodes that Egypt is a picture of slavery to sin. And this Egyptian slave girl, Hagar, places Abram and Sarai in bondage to sin once again. Even though they’re no longer in Egypt, even though they left and went back to the land of Canaan, they are now once again in bondage to sin because they’re giving into the temptation of using this Egyptian slave girl for the purposes of producing children for themselves. This is selfish desire that is not consistent with God’s will and God’s plan. God’s plan is for Sarai to have this child.

The problem is that this would have been considered morally acceptable in those days. In the eyes of others around them, they would not have seen this as wrong. Abram and Sarai may not have even seen this as wrong. Remember, they’re not that far removed from leaving the pagan culture of the Chaldeans. But it is morally unacceptable to God. This is not God’s plan.

We learned in Genesis 2 that a man and a woman are to become one flesh. And when you have a man and a woman that are one flesh and you introduce another woman in there, no, you’re splitting that flesh apart. That is not how God designed marriage to be.

So this is a warning to us and we’re gonna see why it’s a warning because biblical authors, and we’ll find this many, many times throughout scripture, that the biblical authors do not tell us this is right, this is wrong.

Assuming Moses is the author here, Moses doesn’t write: And Sarai said to Abram, “Behold, now the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant, it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And then in parentheses, “This is wrong. God does not accept this.”

Moses doesn’t do that. He doesn’t provide commentary on what they’re doing. What he does, and what all the biblical authors do in the vast majority of situations, is they simply tell the story as it is, as it happened. And they allow the consequences, they allow the story to speak for itself. And we’re going to see, due to these consequences, that this is a bad idea.

And so it’s a lesson for us, because how many other things in our modern day culture are morally acceptable according to culture, but morally unacceptable to God? I can think of all kinds of things that are morally acceptable to our culture, but morally unacceptable to God. Things like divorce, things like sex before marriage, things like LGBTQ lifestyle.

And it goes beyond even sexual lifestyles and sexual sin. What about gluttony? Gluttony is morally acceptable to our modern Western culture, but it’s not acceptable to God. What about gambling? Gambling is very acceptable. You see ads for gambling services on TV all the time, but gambling is not acceptable to God. So this is going to be a problem. You can already see that this is going to be a problem.

And so it says that Abram listened to the voice of Sarai, just like Adam listened to his wife Eve and took the fruit. Even though Adam had heard God’s voice that said, “Do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” Adam listened to his wife instead.

And here Abram had heard God’s voice several times already saying, “I’m going to give you an heir, I’m going to give you a son, I’m going to give you offspring.”

And instead of listening to God’s voice, Abram listened to Sarai’s voice. And he took the fruit, just like Adam did.

So in verse 4, Abram went into Hagar and she conceived. Which means Abram and Sarai’s plan was a success. They did what they wanted and it worked out for them. But it wasn’t what God wanted. It produced results, but it was not profitable.

And we have to be careful of the same thing. Just because something that we do produces results doesn’t mean that it’s profitable for us. In fact, in John 6:63 it says, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”

So we need to make sure that when we are making plans, when we’re making decisions, when we’re trying to make things happen for ourselves or for our families or whatever, whatever decisions we may come across, that we are listening to God’s words because His words are spirit and life. Our words, our flesh is no help. Our flesh might produce results, just like Abram and Hagar’s flesh produce results, but it’s not any help. It’s gonna be destructive. It’s certainly not gonna be profitable for us.

And here we’re gonna find out why, because in verse five, Sarai says 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 me with contempt.”

So Hagar looked down on Sarai. She saw herself as more blessed than Sarai because Hagar had a child and Sarai didn’t. Even though Hagar was the slave, Sarai was the mistress, Hagar had the child and Sarai didn’t. That was a big status symbol.

And then Sarai says, “May the Lord judge between you and me,” to Abram.

Meaning this was Sarai’s idea, but Abram should have stopped it and God will determine who shares the blame. Sarai may have had the idea, but Sarai is basically saying, “Abram, you should have told me this was a bad idea. You should have stopped me from doing this, but you didn’t. So I’m gonna let God decide who’s to blame.”

And this is the meaning of headship of a family. Headship in a family refers to who is accountable to God, not who has power over the other. There’s a lot of debate today, and probably there always has been, about the man being the head of the family and the wife submitting to the husband. Many will say, no, they’re equal. They share equal responsibility for the family. Others will say the man is the head. And those who do not believe that the man is the head believe so because oftentimes they believe that refers to the man having more power over the wife or more power in the family.

But that’s not what the Bible portrays as headship. The Bible portrays headship as the one who is accountable to God, the one who is accountable for everything that happens in the family. And this is what is happening here. Sarai is saying, “It might be my idea, but Abram, you’re the head of the family. You are the one who is accountable here for letting this happen.”

And men, I believe that this is a very biblical concept. We are, as heads of our family, we are the ones that hold accountability to God for our families, for what happens in our families, for the actions that we take in our families. We are responsible for our families and what happens in them. And we’re the ones that God holds accountable. It’s an intense responsibility, sometimes very heavy, it weighs on us many times, But I believe that’s how the Bible lays it out for us.

So Sarai dealt harshly with Hagar. Abram told Sarai, “Your servant is in your power. Do to her as you please.”

So Sarai dealt harshly with Hagar and Hagar fled.

And then in verse seven, the angel of the Lord appears. And this is the first time that the Angel of the Lord appears in the Bible. The Angel of the Lord is going to appear all throughout the Old Testament. He’s going to appear to prophets, he’s going to appear to kings, but he first appears to a pregnant, arrogant, Gentile slave girl.

Why is that important? Because the author calls him the Angel of the Lord from verses 7 through 12. But then in verse 13, Hagar calls the angel Yahweh. If you’re looking in your Bible and you see the capital L-O-R-D in your English Bible, that is in place of covenant name for God, Yahweh.

So why would Hagar be calling the angel Yahweh? She knew she was speaking not just to an angel, not just to a spiritual being, but to God himself. 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.”

She says she spoke to God. She says God saw her. She says I have seen God. She has no confusion about who she’s talking to. She knows very well that she is not talking to an angel. She doesn’t even call him an Elohim. She doesn’t even use the word for just a generic spiritual being. She calls him Yahweh. She is very specific about who she’s talking to.

So why is this significant? Because the Angel of the Lord, evidence is going to show, and we’re going to see this evidence as we continue to go through scripture, that the Angel of the Lord is God in the flesh, Yahweh in the flesh. That’s very clearly how the Bible, how the Old Testament authors refer to the Angel of the Lord. In every single instance, there are blurred lines between calling him an angel and calling him Yahweh, every single time.

So this angel of the Lord is clearly God Himself, is clearly what will prove to be the second person of the Trinity, pre-incarnate Jesus. So the very first time Jesus shows up in the Bible is to a pregnant, arrogant, Gentile slave girl. He comes to a slave who had been abused, raped, and impregnated, and then who in turn tried to abuse her abuser. All sorts of messed up. And this is who Jesus appears to.

So what does that say about Jesus? What does that say about what’s important to him? And who is important to him? And how we should reconsider who we might think is important to Jesus?

So again, back in verse seven, the Angel of the Lord found her in the wilderness by a spring of water on the way to Shur, which is on the Sinai Peninsula. Essentially, this is saying she’s on her way back to Egypt. That’s the geography here. She’s running away from Canaan from Abram and Sarai and returning to Egypt.

So the Angel of God, Angel of the Lord, asked her two questions: Where have you come from and where are you going? Not because he didn’t know the answer, but to get Hagar to think about what she’s doing.

Just like God asked Adam, “Where are you?”

Just like God asked Cain, “Where is your brother?”

God already knew the answer to these questions. He wanted to get Adam, he wanted to get Cain, wanted to get Hagar to think about what they were doing, why they were making these decisions. And where Adam hid from God, where Cain fled from God, Hagar turned to God, and she obeyed God. So again, where Adam failed, where Cain failed, this Gentile slave girl succeeded. She responded to the Lord in the proper way.

She obeyed and she returned, because we’ll see here that God gives her two commands. He says, “Return to your mistress and submit to her,” which is very offensive to our modern sensibilities. In our modern culture, there is no way we would tell an abused, raped servant girl, I mean, what would that even look like in our modern context?

We would never tell somebody to return to that situation. And I’m not saying that if you happen to find yourself in this situation that you should return. That is not what I’m saying. What I am saying is we need to reconsider our view of God because this offends our modern sensibilities.

And the reason why God tells her to return is because she’s depriving Abram of his child. She’s carrying Abram’s child and she’s depriving the father of his child and that’s not right. Yes, Abram was wrong for doing this, but Hagar is also wrong for depriving Abram of his child. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Just because Abram is wrong doesn’t mean that it’s okay for Hagar to do something wrong in retaliation. Again, this is very contrary to what our culture, our modern culture, would typically advise, would typically recommend.

But we see that in telling her to go back, that God is implying protection for her. And here’s how we know, because God gives six promises to her. And these are the six promises.

First, he tells her that “Your offspring will be multiplied.”

And it turns out that her son Ishmael would actually be the ancestor of the Arab people. This is the same promise that’s given to Abram, that your offspring is going to be multiplied. God gives the same promise to Hagar. And the reason is, Ishmael is still Abram’s child. He still gets to partake in this promise.

God tells Hagar, “You will have a son.”

He says, “You will call him Ishmael,” which, Ishmael is the first person in the Bible who was given his name before he was born.

His name, Ishmael, means God will hear. And he’s called God will hear, he’s called Ishmael, because God heard the cries of an Egyptian who was being oppressed at the hands of Hebrews. And later, God is gonna hear the cries of Hebrews being oppressed at the hands of Egypt in the story of the Exodus.

Fourth, God promises Hagar that Ishmael will be a wild donkey, meaning he’s gonna be nomadic, he’s gonna be independent.

He says he’s going to be at conflict with everyone. And in fact, even up to today, 4,000 years later, the Arab people have been in almost constant conflict with Jews, with Christians, and with themselves. I didn’t say all these promises were nice, or great, or good stuff, but he does make these promises, and they turned out to be true.

And sixth, finally, God promises Hagar that he will live over against his brothers. In other words, he’s going to live in the presence of his brothers, meaning he’s going to be in conflict with his brothers always. Well, who is his brothers? His brother is Isaac. Isaac is the promised heir, the ancestor of Israel. So he’s going to be in the presence of his brother Isaac, meaning he’s going to live near, in near proximity to Isaac and Isaac’s descendants, and he’s going to be in conflict with Isaac’s descendants. The Arabs have been in conflict with Jews always.

In fact, some commentators say, to the east of, instead of, he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen. Some commentators would say, he shall dwell to the east of all his kinsmen. And of course, the word east symbolizes exile. So, God will be saying that Ishmael would be living in exile from Israel.

So Hagar responds to God. After God gives these promises, she responds and she worships God and she says, “You are a God of seeing.”

In other words, “You are a God who sees me.”

It’s at this point that Hagar knows who her true master is. She may have to submit to Abram and Sarai as her masters on this earth, but she knows that her true master is God. And she can trust God because God sees her, and God sees whatever she is going through, and she can trust him.

Do you know who your true master is? Can you trust him like Hagar trusts God?

And so it turns out Hagar does go back. She bore Abram a son, and Abram called the name of his son Ishmael. And he was 86 years old when Ishmael was born.

So how does this all point to Jesus?

First, we talked about how Abram and Sarai made a plan that was separate from God’s plan, and that while it may have been successful according to the plan that they had made, it was not profitable. Because Abram’s seed that’s gonna bless the world, if Abram is gonna have a son and an offspring that’s gonna bless the entire world, that son, that seed, must be rooted in God’s promises, not in human effort.

And Ishmael’s gonna contrast human effort with God’s grace. Ishmael is gonna be a permanent symbol of human effort, of fleshly effort, and it’s always gonna fall short. But Jesus’ blood is what brings blessing and light to the world. When God’s plan is followed, it brings blessing. Ultimately, it’s Jesus’ blood.

Jesus, the offspring of Abram, brings blessing and light to the whole world through his blood because he followed God’s plan. He did not follow his own plan. He followed God’s plan.

The second way this chapter points to Jesus is just as the God who sees was with Hagar, Jesus is always with us. He always sees. And in fact, in Matthew 28 verse 20, before he ascended to heaven, he told his disciples, he says, “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Well, his disciples didn’t live to the end of the age. He’s talking about all his disciples throughout the age. He is always with us. He always sees. He always knows. And we can trust him as our true master.

And of course, that phrase, Angel of the Lord, as I mentioned, that’s indicative of the pre-incarnate Jesus. And just a little bit more about that.

That word angel means messenger or bringer of a word. So in our modern context, I think we think of an angel as being a big spiritual being that has wings and is probably white and wearing robes and flies around and maybe has a heart, maybe has a halo. This is what we think of as an angel, but that’s not the meaning of the word angel in the Bible.

The Bible, when you read the word angel, just think messenger. That’s all it means. Angel is just a messenger or a bringer of a word. In Jesus, in John 1:14, it says that the word became flesh. So an angel is a bringer of the word, and then the word became flesh. So Jesus is a bringer of the word to mankind by becoming flesh. Jesus truly is the angel of the Lord.

So some questions for reflection.

What did Sarai do wrong when she doubted God’s promise? Besides the obvious, of course, which would be doubting God’s promise in the first place, what did she do wrong?

How do we respond when God’s promise is delayed? Do we try to obtain His promise some other way? Have you ever done that? Have you ever tried to obtain God’s promise in a different way than what He would have planned? How did it go for you?

Do we judge our actions based on the results or based on our obedience to God’s word?

How does it make you feel for God to ask Hagar to return to an oppressive situation? How would you respond if God asked you to do the same? And how does this challenge your view of God?

This is a difficult question. This is challenging for us. It’s challenging for me because I read it. I don’t know how to respond to that. I don’t know how to respond to a modern situation where this might be the case. This is difficult. This is something to wrestle with. These are some of the questions that the Bible asks us to wrestle with that really challenge what our natural tendency would guide us towards or guide us away from.

Was God more interested, and I think this is going to give us a clue, was God more interested in changing Hagar’s circumstance or changing her heart?

How does knowing God is our true master affect us when we face injustice or oppression?

And how does a face-to-face encounter with God change us?

Once again, thank you for listening. I very much appreciate all your support for this podcast.

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Thank you once again for listening. I will talk to you in the next episode on Genesis 17.