Yesterday, Abram stood under a sky full of stars and believed the impossible promise of God. It was one of the great moments of faith in the entire Bible. Today, we find out what happens when the waiting gets too long.
Because the promise was made in Genesis 15. And the child hasn’t come. And Sarai is still barren. And time is moving. And someone in the tent has an idea.
Yesterday, Abram stood under a sky full of stars and believed the impossible promise of God. It was one of the great moments of faith in the entire Bible. Today, we find out what happens when the waiting gets too long.
Because the promise was made in Genesis 15. And the child hasn’t come. And Sarai is still barren. And time is moving. And someone in the tent has an idea.
The distance between a moment of faith and the moment of trying to engineer the outcome yourself is often shorter than we think. Yesterday’s surrender is not a guarantee of today’s patience.
Chapter 16. Sarai brings her Egyptian servant Hagar to Abram and says: the Lord has kept me from having children. Go in to my servant; perhaps I shall be built up through her. And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.
— That phrase “And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai” echoes something. The last time a man listened to his wife over the voice of God, they were standing beside a tree in a garden. The parallels in Genesis are never accidental.
Hagar conceives. And immediately everything fractures. Hagar looks on Sarai with contempt. Sarai blames Abram. Abram hands the situation back to Sarai. Sarai treats Hagar harshly. And Hagar the one with the least power in this entire arrangement, the servant who had no say in any of it flees into the wilderness alone and pregnant.
When we try to help God along with our own plans, other people usually pay the price. The consequences of our impatience rarely stay contained to us.
And here is where the chapter does something breathtaking. God does not follow Abram into the wilderness. He does not appear to Sarai. He appears to Hagar. The Egyptian slave, the woman who had been used and mistreated and driven out God finds her beside a spring in the desert and asks her where she has come from and where she is going.
She tells Him. And He speaks to her. He sees her. He names the child she is carrying and tells her to go back, and promises that Ishmael will be the father of a great nation. And Hagar says something that has never been said in Scripture before:
“She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her:
‘You are the God who sees me.’”
— Genesis 16:13
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