You are the God Who Sees Me
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You are the God who Sees Me
You are the God who Sees Me
1 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; 2 so she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.”
Abram agreed to what Sarai said. 3 So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. 4 He slept with Hagar, and she conceived.
When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. 5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.”
6 “Your slave is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.
7 The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. 8 And he said, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?”
“I’m running away from my mistress Sarai,” she answered.
9 Then the angel of the Lord told her, “Go back to your mistress and submit to her.” 10 The angel added, “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.”
11 The angel of the Lord also said to her:
“You are now pregnant
and you will give birth to a son.
You shall name him Ishmael,
for the Lord has heard of your misery.
12 He will be a wild donkey of a man;
his hand will be against everyone
and everyone’s hand against him,
and he will live in hostility
toward all his brothers.”
13 She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.”
13 וַתִּקְרָ֤א שֵׁם־יְהוָה֙ הַדֹּבֵ֣ר אֵלֶ֔יהָ אַתָּ֖ה אֵ֣ל רֳאִ֑י כִּ֣י אָֽמְרָ֗ה הֲגַ֥ם הֲלֹ֛ם רָאִ֖יתִי אַחֲרֵ֥י רֹאִֽי׃
Names in the Bible, are nearly always significant.
Abraham = Father of a multitude
Moses - Drawn from the water
Jesus - Yahweh saves
And so each biblical name of God that we study teaches us about a facet of God’s nature and character.
This name in Genesis 16:13 is no different; El Roi. The name was given to God by Hagar, the egyptian slave of Sarai, Abraham’s wife and translated it means; The God who sees me, or The God of seeing. It’s a name that is found just once in the whole Bible, in this passage, but it is significant in a number of ways.
Hagar, who was carrying Abraham’s child had fallen out with Sarai, her mistress, she had been mistreated by her and had fled into the wilderness. And while she is there, tired, angry and scared, the angel of the LORD appears to her and tells her to go back to Sarai and submit to her and that she will have a son who shall be called Ishmael (God will listen) because God has heard of her misery.
Many believe that the Angel of the Lord who visits Hagar here in the wilderness is actually the pre-incarnate Christ.
Hagar is overjoyed, deeply moved. She says, You are El Roi, for I have now seen the One who sees me. God saw her in her misery, in her trials and watched over her as she fled into the wilderness.
What does it mean for God to be ‘The seeing God’, or ‘The God who sees us’?
I want for us to look at what the rest of the Bible has to say about God seeing and then draw our conclusions from there; first in a more general sense, and then on a personal level.
We ought to also note that this idea of God seeing, or of having eyes, is what we call an anthropomorphism - the attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to god. The Biblical text often refers to God particularly in the Old Testament using anthropomorphic language; He sees, He hears etc and it helps us to understand God using terminology and human experience that we are all familiar with.
OMNISCIENCE
We’ll see that when the Bible talks about God seeing - it’s speaking to us generally about His knowledge, about what He knows. Because to see is to know, to understand.
13 Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.
God sees everything - there is nothing in all of creation, not solar systems, not planets, not creatures, not a single atom in the whole cosmos that He does not see and see perfectly. This is what we call the doctrine of omniscience - nothing being hidden from God’s sight means that God knows everything.
We talk about know it alls - people who are love to show case their knowledge at any available opportunity, and we all know one! I know one or two extraordinarily knowledgeable people, who just seem to have an inexhaustible library of facts and trivia stored in their brain. There are people who have photographic memories, there’s actually a man who has memorised pi (3.14…) to the 100,000 decimal! But there isn’t a human alive who is omniscient, all human knowledge is flawed, incomplete. There are things that are hidden from us, the motives that drive even our own thoughts and actions, and there are other things that are just unknowable for us, like what did things look like at the exact moment of creation, we weren’t there, we can’t know that. God is the only being who is omniscient, He has all knowledge of all things. And his knowledge isn’t hazy, or flawed or changeable, He knows everything, and everything perfectly, the past the present and the future all at once. If you say that God doesn’t know all things, or that He only knows in part, or that His knowledge is flawed, then we’re not talking about the God of the Bible anymore.
God’s knowledge is infallible; there is no mistake in His knowledge. Human knowledge is subject to error. A physician may mistake the treatment of a disease; but God’s knowledge is unerring. - Thomas Watson
HE SEES US
Now if God sees all things, then that means He also sees you and I.
21 For your ways are in full view of the Lord,
and he examines all your paths.
4 Does he not see my ways
and count my every step?
21 “For his eyes are on the ways of a man,
and he sees all his steps.
God sees you and knows you in a way that no one else can, not even yourself. We can know a lot about ourselves, our stories, our deepest desires, our hopes, our fears. Our friends and family can help us to see certain blindspots that we might have, they can tell us about how they experience us, which can help us become more self aware and mature, but even they don’t see us perfectly. Even those who know you the most, will never understand you perfectly.
Sandra Sweet - Known her for 30 years, but couldn’t recognise me because of cateracts, had to introduce myself.
God knows and understands you perfectly because He sees you perfectly. Not just your physical appearance but your heart. Your past and future are present to Him, He examines all your paths, the journey you have taken through life, it says He literally counts your every step. God knows you more intimately than you could ever dare imagine.
1 You have searched me, Lord,
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you, Lord, know it completely.
5 You hem me in behind and before,
and you lay your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
God saw and knew you even in your mothers womb, when no one else could take an account of your actions, your wriggling, the first time you kicked or sucked your thumb, God saw, God remembers.
El Roi speaks to us, God’s children, not just of God’s knowledge but also of His loving concern for each of us. He sees us intimately, up close and not dispassionately, but with all the care of a parent. He sees our successes, our failures, He sees us on our good days and on our bad days and has compassion upon us.
He sees you, He knows you, He loves you.
9 For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him. You have done a foolish thing, and from now on you will be at war.”
So it is clear to us the The God of seeing doesn’t miss a thing, not even the smallest detail of our lives. This should be an encouragement for us. But it should also be a warning to us - that there’s no part of our lives that we can hide from God.
Some people are actually very good at concealing certain parts of their lives from other people. Only letting people see what they want them to see and managing their public persona very carefully. The Bible calls this ‘walking in the darkness.’
19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. 20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.
To live in darkness is to live trying to hide a sinful lifesyle from others. Some people get very good at it, so good that they can fool not just one or two people but even most or all people.
Jimmy Saville, a man who professed to be a Christian, was celebrated and loved by pretty much the entire nation turned out to be one of the most wicked sex offenders in British history.
3 The eyes of the Lord are in every place,
keeping watch on the evil and the good.
4 The Lord is in his holy temple;
the Lord’s throne is in heaven;
his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man.
17 My eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from me, nor is their sin concealed from my eyes.
The name El Roi is also a warning to all those who are hiding, those who are living two lives, those who have gotten good at keeping their sin in the shadows; God sees it, and sees it clearly. Repent and start walking in the light.
HIS SEEING IS HIS DELIVERING
In the Bible - Whenever God sees injustice taking place, or sees His people being mistreated it inevitably results in Him delivering them from the injustice, delivering them from oppression.
7 Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings,
El Roi is the God who sees our sufferings, He knows our every affliction and is moved with compassion to save us. He’s not aloof or uninterested in our trials but He is moved by them. He is the God that identifies with humanity in suffering not only spiritually but physically. God sees all human suffering up close and personal in Christ; the suffering servant.
8 You have kept count of my tossings;
put my tears in your bottle.
Are they not in your book?
HE SEES OUR HIDDEN LIFE
You see, we are not like the many hucksters who preach for personal profit. We preach the word of God with sincerity and with Christ’s authority, knowing that God is watching us. - 2 Cor 2:17 NLT
Often the works we do for the Kingdom of God go unnoticed and unrewarded by people. The hours we spend in prayer, the good deeds we do for others in secret, the shunning of fame and accolades so that God might be glorified and not ourselves. When we know that though other may not see or value the work we do for Him, He sees it and that’s all that matters! We don’t live to be seen and praised by the world, we don’t minister for profit or fame but for His glory, not our own. When you are slandered or flasely accused, knowing that God sees you is enough. He knows the truth, even if nobody else does.
“We ought to live as if always in full view of God,” Seneca.
APPLICATION
—God sees you: and if he can see you, surely he can hear you. - Spurgeon
Our prayer life should feed off of this doctrine! We pray to our God ‘who sees in secret’, our God who is intimately acqauinted with our needs and our wants, He knows our desires and can understand our prayers perfectly.
Our eldest daughter Phoebe was quite unsettled as a baby, she would cry loudly and pretty often and sometimes neither of us could understand why! As soon as she could make herself understood and communicate with us, it was like a peace came over her. To know that you are seen, and understood brings peace and comfort to our life. Some of you need to know that you are really seen, and really understood by God, He doesn’t misunderstand you, He knows exactly what you mean and He is for you.
For some of you this name of God is a reminder that you can’t hide from Him. No matter how successful you’ve been at hiding sin from others, you can’t hide from The God who sees. It’s time to come into the light, confess your sin, turn from it and start walking in the light again.
The God of seeing is a God who sees you in affliction and comes to deliver you, just as with Hagar, He sees your misery and is coming today to deliver you out of it and restore hope, some of you need a fresh encounter today with Him.
When God sees, He delivers. Just as He saw His people’s affliction in Egypt and delivered them out of bondage so too He has made a way to deliver you out of bondage to sin. He has made a way for you to return to Him. Some of you may be like Hagar, you’ve left the church, you’ve been hurt by leaders, you’ve gone out into the world but you’re feeling angry and let down. Christ has come out into the wilderness to find you. He is called the Good Shepherd, the one who leaves the 99 and comes after the 1. The only way for Hagar to live and enter into the promises of God was to be obedient to His command. The only way for you to enter into the Kingdom of God is to obey the voice of the King.
Today if you hear his voice - do not harden your hearts - Psalm 95
Repent of your sins, turn to Christ and believe.
Minsitry