Jesus Visits Hagar (2)

Introduction: Is “The Angel of the Lord” Jesus?

Welcome to week three of our “Finding Jesus in the Old Testament” Series. So if you’ll remember we’re exploring three different ways that you can find Jesus throughout the Old Testament. Week one we talked about Prophecy and specifically looked at the prophecies found in Genesis 3:15 and Genesis 5. Week two we talked about Types of Jesus and looked at Adam and what he teaches us about Jesus based on Romans 5. This week we’ll look at the final category Christophanies.

The first Christophany that’s fairly uncontroversially a Christophany is found in Genesis chapter 16. Now a Christophany you’ll remember is an appearance of Jesus in the Old Testament before the incarnation. Christophanies are uncertain because unlike prophecies and types the New Testament doesn’t confirm these as actually being Jesus. There is however reason to believe that they are. This passage in particular is often used as good evidence that Christophanies are a real thing. So let’s read our passage together. We’re looking at Genesis 16

Genesis 16 (ESV)

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. 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 Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram her husband as a wife. And he went in to Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress. And Sarai said 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. May the Lord judge between you and me!” But Abram said to Sarai, “Behold, your servant is in your power; do to her as you please.” Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she fled from her.

The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. And he said, “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” She said, “I am fleeing from my mistress Sarai.” The angel of the Lord said to her, “Return to your mistress and submit to her.” The angel of the Lord also said to her, “I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude.” And the angel of the Lord said to her,

“Behold, you are pregnant and shall bear a son. You shall call his name Ishmael, because the Lord has listened to your affliction. He shall be a wild donkey of a man, his hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.”

So 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.” Therefore the well was called Beer-lahai-roi; it lies between Kadesh and Bered.

And Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram called the name of his son, whom Hagar bore, Ishmael. Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram.

First for context you should know that this idea of giving Hagar to Abram to produce offspring for Sarai isn’t as weird as it may seem to us as a modern audience. According to the Lexham Cultural Ontology Glossary

Slave-Wife Substitution — The act of having one's slave bear children on one's behalf. An ancient custom of women offering their slaves to their husbands would allow the wife to claim a resulting child as her own. In this way she would provide descendants for her husband (See Gen 29:31-30:24)

So it makes sense that Sarai would think of this as a solution. She is at this point in the story about 76 years old and it’s been about 10 years since God promised Abram descendants. That being said God clearly doesn’t approve. Later on in the story when Abram asks God to bless Ishmael as his firstborn son God confirms that He will give Abram a son specifically through Sarai his wife. You’ll also notice that Sarai gives Hagar to Abram as a wife, but later in the passage the Angel of the Lord refers to Hagar as “Servant of Sarai” not as Abram’s wife.

So the mystery in this passage is this person the text calls “the Angel of the Lord.” The use of the definite article “the” is important here. This isn’t just any angel sent by God, this is the angel of the Lord. Of course the word we translate as angel is actually the word for “messenger” and can mean just a normal human bringing messages or a divine creature bringing messages. This “the angel of the Lord” appears multiple times throughout the Old Testament, but this is the first appearance.

At first this seems to be just a heavenly being sent by God. He is called the angel of the lord, (which is a translation of the name Yahweh) and not just called Lord himself. But then the way that He speaks adds some mystery. When he tells Hagar about the promise of God he speaks in the first person about things that God would do, “I will surely increase your offspring...” but then He goes on to talk about Yahweh in the third person “because the Lord has listened to your affliction.”

Then the plot thickens later in verse 13 “So she called the name of the Lord sho spoke to her...” Yahweh who spoke to her? The only person identified as speaking in this passage is the Angel of the Lord. “… You are a God of seeing,’ for she said, ‘truly here I have seen him who looks after me.”

Not that she’s seen a messanger of the one who looks after her, but that she’s seen him herself. So this angel of the Lord speaks as if He is somehow both Yahweh and seperate from Yahweh. He’s seen by Hagar even though the Scriptures say that none can see Yahweh and live.

Who does that sound like? Well that sounds an awful lot like Jesus who was God and was not the father, who is according to Colossians 1:15

Colossians 1:15 ESV

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

So you can see why many consider this to be an appearance of Jesus before the incarnation, along with the other appearances of “The Angel of the Lord” in the Old Testament. That being said nowhere in Scripture does it say “The Angel of the Lord was Jesus,” so this is all human interpretation after the fact and should be taken with a grain of salt. Still I think that these interactions are good evidence of the character of Jesus because Jesus and the Father are one, so even if this wasn’t Jesus but was just a messenger speaking on behalf of Yahweh, then because God never changes and Jesus is God than this still teaches us about who Jesus is.

It teaches us three things about Jesus:

Jesus Loves the Unlovely

Jesus Has Compassion on us Even in Our Failures

Jesus Calls Us to do Hard Things

1. Jesus Loves the Unlovely

Let’s talk about who Hagar is for a minute. Hagar was an Egyptian woman and a slave to Sarai. Likely the family picked her up in Egypt while they were living there, maybe as recompense for the time that the Pharoah tried to marry Sarai. It’s a bit of a long story, we won’t get into it. Can you think of someone more lowly in ancient society than a foreign egyptian slave? So already she’s a pretty unlikely candidate to receive a special visit from the Angel of the Lord from a strictly human perspective.

Now add on top of that the terrible situation that she’s in at this moment. Sarai’s failure in patience and faith results in Hagar being used as a substitute to produce an heir for Sarai. Meaning that she was used to produce a child for someone else’s benefit. Then when she becomes pregnant she makes her own terrible mistake. The text says Ge 16:4 “And he went in to Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress.” So not only is she a nobody, but she is the one who provoked Sarai to treat her with cruelty by acting like she was better than Sarai when she got pregnant. This of course does not excuse the behavior of Sarai. This whole thing was her idea and as the person in charge she bears the higher responsibility for what has happened.

Still, Hagar can be said to bear at least some of the blame herself. So the question is, if Hagar was the mother of Abram’s child in an attempt to make the promise happen by human means and if she in a sense brought the trouble on herself, why wouldn’t God just let her run back to Egypt and fade out of the pages of history?

The fact that God intervened in her life shows us something incredibly important, that Jesus cares about the outcasts. This is by far not the only part of scripture to make this point. Consider this entry in the law of Moses:

Leviticus 19:34 ESV

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

Or this more general scripture about outcasts in Zech 7:9-10

Zechariah 7:9–10 ESV

“Thus says the Lord of hosts, Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another, do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor, and let none of you devise evil against another in your heart.”

Or consider the type of men that Jesus recruited to be in his 12 closest disciples. They were rugged uneducated fishermen, one of them was a tax collector: a group of people despised by their fellow countrymen. Jesus was often criticized for spending time with outcasts as in Matt 9:10-11

Matthew 9:10–11 ESV

And as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

Or consider the parable of the good Samaritan. Remember that although now we call anyone who treats others with kindness a “good samaritan” in the minds of most of the Jewish people of Jesus’ day there was no such thing as a good Samaritan. That was kind of the point of the story.

So the point then is twofold: First, no matter how used, abused and abandoned you may feel you can rest assured that you aren’t too much of an outcast for Jesus to love you. No one is sinful enough to scare away Jesus. No one is beyond His redemption.

Second, no one should feel like too much of an outcast to be accepted by us. As disciples our aim is to become like our teacher, which is Jesus. So if Jesus has compassion on the most “unlovely” people, shouldn’t we? Do we as Jesus’ disciples have a reputation for loving everyone no matter where they come from or what they look like?

2. Jesus has Compassion on us Even in our Failures

Really no one (outside of God Himself) comes out looking good in this story. Sarai shows her lack of faith in God’s promise by taking matters into her own hands, then when her plan succeeds and her slave becomes pregnant she becomes so jealous that she abuses Hagar into fleeing the whole family. Abram just casually agrees to Sarai’s plan without consulting God at all and then basically says “keep me out of this” when Sarai comes to him to intervene in her conflict with Hagar. Hagar although she had no choice in becoming a surrogate mother didn’t have to lord it over Sarai and start or at least exacerbate the drama between them.

And yet God has compassion on every one of them. He doesn’t rescind his promise to Sarai and Abram because of their lack of faith, although there will be serious consequences to their actions later on. When it comes to Hagar he extends to her an extraordinary promise that almost rivals the one he made to Abram. That’s unheard of. She becomes a defacto matriarch despite her poor behaviour in this situation.

We should be really thankful that God shows such grace to failures like us. If we had to be perfect in order for God to work in our lives than no one would ever qualify. I don’t really need to prove that from Scripture even, we all know with a little bit of introspection that we’re messed up human beings. As much as culture has shifted towards taking pride in our sins and flaws you still see all over social media people posting self-depricating jokes about how messed up they are. We know we fall short.

Yet Jesus still died on that cross for every one of us. Romans 5:6-8

Romans 5:6–8 ESV

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

The good news also is that we don’t get a one time forgiveness deal and that’s it. Even after we come to Christ we are still by nature sinners and will still fail A LOT. So we need the continued grace of Jesus and thankfully He continues to give it to us. When John says in 1 John 1:9

1 John 1:9 ESV

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

He means every time. When Jesus tell his disciples that they must forgive their brother 7 times 70 times he’s not asking them for more than he would give himself.

Not only will he forgive us when we sin but He will also redeem our failures and use them a lot of the time. In this case he takes the child born out of unfaithfulness and names Him “Ishmael” which means “God hears,” as a reminder that He hears us in our afflictions, and He promises to make Him into a great nation Himself.

Think also of the story of Joseph at the end of Genesis. His brothers beat him and sold him into slavery and he got thrown into jail under false charges. Yet when at the end of the story he is in a new position of authority in Egypt and his brothers fear his retribution is coming, Joseph instead says in Genesis 50:19-20

Genesis 50:19–20 ESV

But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.

God redeemed his brother’s failures. So if you’ve done wrong and you’ve failed rest assured that no failure is too big to be forgiven. Come to Jesus and confess your sins and ask Him to help you change your ways. Then in the words of Isaiah 1:18

Isaiah 1:18 (ESV)

“Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.

3. Jesus Calls us to do Hard Things

Now we get to probably the most uncomfortable bit of this story. In Gen 16:9 “The angel of the Lord said to her, “Return to your mistress and submit to her.””

Yes, that’s right, the angel of the Lord asks Hagar to return to her abusive slave master Sarai. Now I wouldn’t blame you for being uncomfortable at this point. This is a difficult passage but one that we shouldn’t shy away from and that I think has a valuable lesson for all of us.

You see I think the Christian church in recent years has fallen prey to a dangerous theology some have called “easy believism” which sometimes borders on “prosperity gospel” teaching. Out of a commendable desire to see more people come to the faith there have been a great many movements over the years hyper focused on bringing people to salvation. Out of a desire to remove as many borders as possible to keeping people out of the faith many have narrowed down the gospel to the simple words of Romans 10:9

Romans 10:9 ESV

because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

And of course there’s nothing wrong with that as a starting point. The problem is that many of these movements brought people to an emotional moment of prayer that never went anywhere. A lot of people have been left believing that all there is to Christianity is a short prayer and then waiting around for heaven. Friends, that is just not the case. Jesus said a few things that are a bit hard to swallow if this is your point of view. Things like John 16:33

John 16:33 ESV

I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”

and Matt 10:38

Matthew 10:38 ESV

And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

These promises were fulfilled in the lives of the apostles who were beaten, imprisoned and killed for their faith in Jesus. The clear picture from the gospels isn’t that we pray a prayer and get back to our normal lives but that we surrender our normal lives at the foot of the cross and take up where Jesus left off.

What does this have to do with Jesus calling Hagar to go back to her abusive master? Well the fact of the matter is that sometimes God calls us to difficult things. Missionaries over the course of church history have heard Gods call to go into remote places of the world and many have suffered and died fulfilling that call even after the first apostles.

Does this mean that people under abusive authorities and relationships? I don’t think so. There seems to be no general command in scripture to remain in an abusive situation and abuse was against God’s law and is against the laws of our government, so unless you have a clear word from God calling you to endure abuse you have my blessing to flee abusive situations, not that you should need my blessing.

But are we willing to allow for the possibility that God might call us to endure abuse? What if God called us to get arrested for our faith? What if God called us to be beaten for our faith? Killed? Are we willing to follow God that far?

These are all things God has called His people to do in the past, is it out of the question for Him to ask the same of us? Let us strive for the attitude of Paul the apostle when he said in Acts 20:17-25

Acts 20:17–25 ESV

Now from Miletus he sent to Ephesus and called the elders of the church to come to him. And when they came to him, he said to them: “You yourselves know how I lived among you the whole time from the first day that I set foot in Asia, serving the Lord with all humility and with tears and with trials that happened to me through the plots of the Jews; how I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you in public and from house to house, testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. And now, behold, I am going to Jerusalem, constrained by the Spirit, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me. But I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. And now, behold, I know that none of you among whom I have gone about proclaiming the kingdom will see my face again.

We should be willing to endure these things because we see the bigger picture, because we know the reward that God has for us in eternity. In the words of Hebrews 12:1-2

Hebrews 12:1–2 ESV

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

Conclusion: He is a God of Seeing

When we’re going through hard times or God has called us into suffering and hardship, or when we know others in that same situation, it can be easy to give people theological answers and trite Bible verses to try and comfort them. Sometimes we’re not prepared to hear those answers and they just further harden our hearts. The true comfort that we have in Christ I believe is well illustrated in this passage we’ve been studying this morning. God hears us. God sees us. God is with us.

The hope that we have that Hagar didn’t is that we now live in the new covenant. Jesus came to earth as “Immanuel” which means God with us, and made a way for us to be reconciled to him. Remember the second half of the passage I mentioned earlier John 16:33

John 16:33 ESV

I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”

Jesus has overcome the world and nothing in it can steal our peace if He is with us. And we also have the gift of the Holy Spirit that Jesus has given to us as a helper and comfort. We read in John 14:16- 27

John 14:16–27 ESV

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you. “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me. “These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.

Let’s learn the lesson of the story to trust in God and wait on Him. In the words of Allen P. Ross:

The names provide the message: God spoke in direct revelation, and Hagar responded in faith. God sees distress and affliction, and He hears. Sarai should have known this. Since God knew Sarai was barren, she should have cried out to the Lord. Instead she had to learn a lesson the hard way—from the experience of a despised slave-wife who, ironically, came back with a faith experience. How Abram must have been rebuked when Hagar said God told her to name her son Ishmael, “God hears.”

Allen P. Ross, “Genesis,” in The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures, ed. J. F. Walvoord and R. B. Zuck, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1985), 57.