The God Who Sees and Hears
Notes
Transcript
text: Genesis 16
1 Now Abram’s wife Sarai had borne him no children, but she had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar.
2 So Sarai said to Abram, “Look now, the LORD has prevented me from bearing children. Please go to my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.
3 So after he had lived in Canaan for ten years, his wife Sarai took her Egyptian maidservant Hagar and gave her to Abram to be his wife.
4 And he slept with Hagar, and she conceived. But when Hagar realized that she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress.
5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “May the wrong done to me be upon you! I delivered my servant into your arms, and ever since she saw that she was pregnant, she has treated me with contempt. May the LORD judge between you and me.”
6 “Here,” said Abram, “your servant is in your hands. Do whatever you want with her.” Then Sarai treated Hagar so harshly that she fled from her.
7 Now the angel of the LORD found Hagar by a spring of water in the desert—the spring along the road to Shur.
8 “Hagar, servant of Sarai,” he said, “where have you come from, and where are you going?” “I am running away from my mistress Sarai,” she replied.
9 So the angel of the LORD told her, “Return to your mistress and submit to her authority.”
10 Then the angel added, “I will greatly multiply your offspring so that they will be too numerous to count.”
11 The angel of the LORD proceeded: “Behold, you have conceived and will bear a son. And you shall name him Ishmael, for the LORD has heard your cry of affliction.
12 He will be a wild donkey of a man, and his hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him; he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.”
13 So Hagar gave this name to the LORD who had spoken to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “Here I have seen the One who sees me!”
14 Therefore the well was called Beer-lahai-roi. It is located between Kadesh and Bered.
15 And Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne.
16 Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to him.
PRAY
Introduction:
In the beginning, Adam and Eve had it all.
A perfect home in the perfect garden.
All kinds of good fruits to eat.
A perfect marriage with no conflict.
Walking with God in the garden every day.
Perfect peace.
Until sin came into the world.
When Adam and Eve were tempted to eat the forbidden fruit, they had no idea of the long lasting effects their choice would have.
Their choice brought…
Death where there was life
Chaos where there was order
Fear where there was trust
Shame where there was freedom
Guilt where there was confidence
Strife where there was peace
Their sin in the Garden broke relationships between people and God as well as people’s relationships with one another. Without overstating it, they broke the whole world.
Surely, they thought, it’s just one little bite. It’s no big deal.
Do you think about sin that way? (It’s no big deal.)
But just as Adam and Eve’s sin had devastating effects for all their descendants, so also as we’ll see in this chapter, one sin has devastating effects for generations to come.
The good news for us is that SIN does not have the final word. God in His grace comes to meet our need. He comes to redeem us from our self-imposed slavery to sin.
In the context of the darkness of human sin, God’s grace shines most brightly.
Human Sin (v. 1-6)
Human Sin (v. 1-6)
Verses 1-6 paint a pretty dark picture of human sin. As we go through this passage we just keep coming upon one sin after another. All three of the people mentioned in this story are guilty of one kind of sin or another.
Some of the sins are impatience, bitterness, polygamy, giving into cultural influence, passivity, disrespect, marital conflict, and mistreatment.
With the exception of polygamy (I hope!), we should be willing to admit that we’ve been guilty of many if not most of these sins from time to time. Maybe you’re even struggling with some of them right now.
What we’ll see is that even though Abraham and Sarah are held up as heroes of the faith, they were still sinners just like us. Their story ought to provide hope for us — if there’s grace and hope for sinners like them, there’s grace and hope for us too.
1 Now Abram’s wife Sarai had borne him no children, but she had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar.
Verse one starts out by telling us about a problem. God has promised seed or offspring to Abraham, but so far his wife has no children. She is still barren, just like she was back in Chapter 11.
It would seem that God's promise is running into an obstacle here. God promised Abraham seed or offspring like the stars of the sky and the sand of the seashore, and he had given him a wife, but his wife could not bear children.
The second part of verse one tells us about another character in this story: Hagar. She is the Egyptian maidservant of Sarah. Likely, she is one of the servants that Abraham and Sarah acquired when they went down to Egypt back in chapter 12.
In verse 2 Sarah comes up with an idea for how to make God's promise come true.
2 So Sarai said to Abram, “Look now, the LORD has prevented me from bearing children. Please go to my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.
Since God does not seem to be fulfilling His promise, or at least not in the way that Sarah and Abraham thought He would, Sarah starts thinking she needs to come up with a plan to help God out.
She says, “Look now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children.” Is that true?
Many people want to attribute the difficulties and problems in our world either to Satan, or sin, or something else, but the Bible makes it clear that God is ultimately in control of all things.
In many different places God is said to be the one who opens and closes wombs. God is the giver of all life. He decides when life happens and when it doesn't.
So yes, it's true.
God had prevented Sarah from having children.
But I suspect here that Sarah’s attitude is not correct. Though we don't know what was in her heart, I can't help but feel that there may have been some bitterness against God as she made this statement.
“Yes, it's true that God is in control,” she may have thought, “but I don't like what He's doing.”
Have you ever thought that?
Maybe you believe and know that God is really in control of everything. But sometimes he doesn't do things the way we want or at the time that we want them to be done.
But when we think that way, what we are really desiring is to be God for ourselves. We would never say it out loud, but maybe sometimes we think “I would do a better job of being God.”
When we get angry or bitter towards God, we are revealing a lack of trust in His goodness and love and wisdom. God is in control of all things, and He is perfectly good and loving, and His way and His timing are best, even when we don’t understand.
So Sarah comes up with a plan in v. 2: “Please go to my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family by her.”
This was apparently a common practice in the surrounding culture of the time. If a man’s wife could not bear him a son, the wife could find another woman to bear his son, to be a surrogate mother. This practice actually still happens today in some places, though the terminology is different — women (usually poorer women) serve as surrogates, carrying a baby in their womb that will belong to someone else. In exchange for their service, they are often paid a decent sum of money.
But is this a good thing? Does this practice honor God?
It was culturally acceptable back then, and many people would accept it today as well, but Moses is showing us that this is not a good thing.
Neither surrogacy nor polygamy is God’s design for marriage or reproduction. God made His intention clear in Genesis 2. One man, one woman, for life. Every kind of sexual relationship outside of that falls short of representing what marriage is supposed to represent — God’s relationship with His people.
And so, whether we view this relationship from the angle of surrogacy or polygamy, in both cases, it dishonors God.
Moses shows us this with the last phrase of v. 2 in Abram’s response, and then the actions of Sarah in v. 3.
And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.
This phrase should take us back to the Garden of Eden, where we hear God saying to Adam,
Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat, cursed is the ground because of you…
Adam listened to the voice of Eve and the results were disastrous.
Now Abram listens to the voice of Sarai, and as we’ll see, there are terrible consequences.
But that’s not the only connection to Genesis 3 here. In 16:3, it says,
3 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.
If you’re reading the BSB, the phrase “her husband” is absent for some reason (so I’m quoting from the ESV on this verse). So you’ll have to trust me if it not in your translation, it’s there in the original Hebrew and in most other translations, it’s just missing in the BSB unfortunately.
I say it’s unfortunate for two reasons:
The word husband is important because, if you’ll notice, this is now the third time Moses has told us of Abram and Sarai’s relationship. In v. 1 and 3, she is called his wife, and here, he is called her husband. Moses is using this language intentionally, I think, to draw our attention to the fact that God has already provided a marital relationship and the context for the promised seed to come. Abram’s already married. He has a wife. Sarai is his wife, he is Sarai’s husband. The current situation is one man, one woman — and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
The word husband is also important because it ties this verse to Genesis 3:6. Notice the words I’ve underlined here: “took”, “gave”, and “her husband.” Then consider what happened in the Garden of Eden.
6 When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom, she took the fruit and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it.
The actions of Abraham and Sarah here mirror the actions of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Rather than leading his wife in godliness, Adam listened to the voice of his wife — he abdicated his God-given role as the leader of his family and let his wife lead instead. Adam should have trusted and obeyed God and led his wife to do the same; instead, he followed her into sin.
Now Abram does the same thing. He should have led his wife in godliness, but instead he listens to the voice of his wife — he abdicates his God-given role as the leader of his family and lets his wife lead instead. Abram should have trusted and obeyed God and led his wife to do the same, but instead, he followed her into sin.
And the description of their sins uses the same words: took, gave, to her husband.
Moses is portraying the actions of Abram and Sarai here as a new fall into sin.
What should Abram have said here?
No! I’m not going to take advantage of this servant girl. I’m not going to marry another woman. God has already given me a wife, and even though I don’t know how, He will fulfill His promise and give us a son.
He should have trusted God and continued to patiently wait for God’s timing, and he should have encouraged Sarah also to trust God.
But what did he do?
4 And he slept with Hagar, and she conceived. But when Hagar realized that she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress.
He followed his wife into this sin.
And as just about anyone with a brain should have been able to foresee, things did not turn out well. They got the son they wanted, but their marriage started falling apart. Life is harder when we don’t do things God’s way.
So Hagar gets pregnant, and now she begins to despise her mistress Sarai.
Though in one sense, Hagar seems to be an innocent victim of this plan of Sarai’s, here she too is guilty of sin.
That word “despise” is important. It’s the same Hebrew word translated “curse” in Genesis 12:3. What did God tell Abram there? “The one who curses [dishonors] you, I will curse”
So by dishonoring Sarai, Abram’s wife, Hagar is dishonoring Abram and placing herself under God’s curse. She is siding with the seed of the serpent instead of the seed of the woman.
As is often the case, one sin leads to another:
5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “May the wrong done to me be upon you! I delivered my servant into your arms, and ever since she saw that she was pregnant, she has treated me with contempt. May the LORD judge between you and me.”
Now we have marital conflict.
Somehow both Abram and Sarai failed to anticipate the problems that would come with bringing another woman into the bedroom.
It led to tension, anger, and harsh words.
Sarai was the one who took the initiative in this plan, but now she casts the blame on Abram.
How does Abram respond?
6 “Here,” said Abram, “your servant is in your hands. Do whatever you want with her.” Then Sarai treated Hagar so harshly that she fled from her.
The sins just keep adding up.
Once again, Abram fails to lead his wife, but passively lets her do whatever she wants.
He also fails to care for the woman he has taken as a second wife. Hagar is carrying Abram’s child!!! And he acts as if he doesn’t care what happens to her or the child.
Abram is acting like a coward here. He fails both of these women miserably. He is not protecting and leading in the way God wants him to.
And Sarai’s not doing too great either. She mistreated her servant so badly that Hagar ran away.
This is not a pretty picture.
These first 6 verses show us that even the great heroes of the faith are terrible sinners, broken people desperately in need of God’s grace and mercy.
And thankfully, the second half of the chapter paints a beautiful picture of our loving God and His amazing grace.
God’s Grace (v. 7-16)
God’s Grace (v. 7-16)
Consider God’s grace to Hagar in v. 7-8. As she is running away from her mistress, God comes running after her.
7 Now the angel of the LORD found Hagar by a spring of water in the desert—the spring along the road to Shur. 8 “Hagar, servant of Sarai,” he said, “where have you come from, and where are you going?” “I am running away from my mistress Sarai,” she replied.
Who is “the angel of the LORD”?
He is referred to by this title 55 times in the Old Testament.
Many of the passages where we find this phrase show us clearly that it is God Himself, not simply an angel or messenger from God — but actually God in some kind of physical form. We call this a theophany — an appearance of God. More technically, some will call it a Christophany, since it is the 2nd person of the Trinity — the Son — who appears in physical form.
So God seeks Hagar out. And notice where she is: by the spring of water in the desert along the road to Shur. This is probably quite a distance from where Abram and Sarai were living at the time. Shur is on the southern border of Israel, heading toward Egypt. Hagar is headed back to Egypt.
In her own words, she is running away from her mistress, and it seems that she’s headed back to Egypt. But God intercepted her. He found her.
And what He told her probably wasn’t what she wanted to hear:
9 So the angel of the LORD told her, “Return to your mistress and submit to her authority.”
Don’t go back to Egypt. Go back to Abram and Sarai.
God commands her obedience, and as we’ll see a few verses later, she does obey.
And as we talked about in the case of Abram in ch. 12, God’s command is accompanied by His promise:
10 Then the angel added, “I will greatly multiply your offspring so that they will be too numerous to count.”
God promises blessing for her.
Commentator Victor Hamilton notes that, “Hagar is the only woman in Genesis who is honored with such a revelation.”
God makes this promise to several men in Scripture, but Hagar is the only woman to receive this promise.
Just as God promised regarding Abram’s seed, so also He says of Hagar’s seed that they will be too numerous to count.
God is promising His grace and blessing on her.
Then He says in v. 11,
11 The angel of the LORD proceeded: “Behold, you have conceived and will bear a son. And you shall name him Ishmael, for the LORD has heard your cry of affliction.
I love that!
Yishma’el — God hears
For the rest of her life as she raised up her son, Hagar would be reminded of this truth. Every time she called her son’s name, she was rehearsing the truth that God hears.
Because “the LORD has heard your cry of affliction.” Out there alone in the desert, she was not alone. God was there, and He heard. He paid attention. He was listening.
Even though Abram and Sarai failed to care for her, God cared for her. He paid attention to her suffering and heard her cry.
Do you ever feel alone?
Do you ever feel like no one is listening to you? No one is paying attention to you?
Even if no one else hears you, even if no one else cares about your suffering, God hears. He is with you. He cares for you.
How did Hagar respond?
13 So Hagar gave this name to the LORD who had spoken to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “Here I have seen the One who sees me!”
Interestingly, Hagar is the only one in the Bible to give God a name. God gives new names to people many times (as we’ll see in ch. 17), but this is the only time someone gives a new name to God.
She calls Him, “El Roi” — “the God of seeing” or “the God who sees me”
God has revealed Himself as the God who hears, and now Hagar also acknowledges that He is also the God who sees.
God sees everything. Nothing is hidden from His sight. Everything we do and everything that is done to us, He sees. Even when no one else sees, God does.
Hagar recognizes that by seeing the angel of the LORD, she has seen God — “I have seen the One who sees me!”
And so in response she names the well where she was resting as a memorial to God:
14 Therefore the well was called Beer-lahai-roi. It is located between Kadesh and Bered.
Beer-lahai-roi means “The Well of the Living One Who Sees Me”
This place is also mentioned in Genesis 24-25 as a place where Isaac lived for a time.
God is the God who lives.
He is the God who sees.
He is the God who hears.
Well, Hagar obeyed and went back to live with Abram and Sarai again. And God kept watching over her there:
15 And Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne. 16 Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to him.
God gave her a safe delivery of Ishmael. And Ishmael’s name served as a testimony to Abram and Sarah as well that the LORD is the God who hears.
Verse 16 concludes the chapter by telling us that Abram was 86 years old when Ishmael was born.
I skipped over v. 12, so let me briefly mention that at the end. Though both Hagar and Ishmael were recipients of God’s grace, sadly Ishmael did not respond favorably to God. God foresaw this and foretold this before Ishmael was born. He said to Hagar,
12 “He [Ishmael] will be a wild donkey of a man, and his hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him; he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.”
God tells Hagar that despite the fact that He will make her descendants fruitful, they will not follow God. They will act as the seed of the serpent, persecuting the seed of the woman.
We’ll see this starting to play out in Genesis 21 after Isaac is born and Ishmael makes fun of him. And that’s just the beginning.
Much of the conflict in biblical times is due to this sin of Abram and Sarai. The Ishmaelites were the ones who took Joseph down to Egypt as a slave (after his brothers sold him to them).
Muhammed, the founder of Islam in the 700s AD, traced his people’s ancestry back to Ishmael, and this is the religious tradition of Muslims today. And certainly there is plenty of ongoing conflict between the physical descendants of Isaac and Ishmael to this day.
One sinful act — one failure to trust God’s timing and plan — has resulted in devastating consequences for thousands of years.
And if you think about it, this sin is probably tied to Abram’s sin in Gen 12. When Abram lied about his wife, risking her safety and purity, God protected them and they left Egypt with great wealth, including many servants — and Hagar was probably one of them.
If Abram and Sarai had not sinned in ch. 12, Hagar probably would not have been living with them, and this sin in ch. 16 might have been avoided.
This should show us the seriousness of sin and its effects. One sin often leads to another. And if we allow sin to grow in our lives, the consequences can be terrible and long-lasting.
But despite the seriousness of the sin in the first few verses, God’s grace is abundantly clear here. He doesn’t leave us alone to suffer the consequences of our sin. He is a God who pursues and reaches us with His amazing grace.
Response
How should we respond to God’s grace in our lives?
If we’re honest, we’ve all sinned too. Perhaps we’ve even sinned in the same kinds of ways as we’ve seen from Abram, Sarai, and Hagar in this chapter.
Maybe you’ve been impatient, struggling to trust God’s time and plan.
Maybe you’re even growing bitter against God over some difficult circumstance in your life.
Maybe there’s some kind of sexual sin in your life.
Maybe you are allowing yourself or your family to be too influenced by sinful cultural practices around you.
To the women: maybe you are taking initiative and usurping your husband’s authority in a way that dishonors God.
To the men: maybe you are being passive and refusing to step up and lead your wife in godliness.
Maybe you are speaking and acting disrespectfully toward those in authority over you.
Maybe there’s a lot of conflict in your marriage.
Maybe you’re mistreating those under your authority.
Or perhaps there’s some other struggle in your life.
What should you do?
Acknowledge your sin. Confess it to God, and to others as necessary.
Repent of your sin — grieve over it, turn from it, and commit yourself again to God.
Turn to Him, and you will find His grace ready to embrace you and forgive you and help you do what’s right.
God’s grace is amazing, and it’s more than enough to cover your sin and strengthen you to do what’s right.
His grace is not an excuse to keep on sinning, as Paul warns us in Romans:
20 The law came in so that the trespass would increase; but where sin increased, grace increased all the more,
21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
1 What then shall we say? Shall we continue in sin so that grace may increase?
2 Certainly not! How can we who died to sin live in it any longer?
____________
I want to share another thought with you that just occurred to me last night, and I woke up early this morning thinking about it.
I mentioned earlier that Abraham’s sin here in Genesis 16 is being portrayed as a new fall into sin. As I was reflecting on that and talking with Sarah about it, I connected Abraham’s fall into sin not only with Adam’s, but also with Noah’s. If you remember from Genesis 9, we talked about how Noah’s sin there is portrayed as a new fall into sin.
In my Bible reading over the last week I’ve been going through 2 Samuel, which tells of God’s covenant with David and then his sin with Bathsheba.
And it occurred to me — this is a repeated pattern in every one of the covenants:
God made a covenant with Adam, and Adam sinned and broke the covenant.
God made a covenant with Noah, and Noah sinned and broke the covenant.
God made a covenant with Abraham, and Abraham sinned and broke the covenant.
God made a covenant with Israel, and Israel sinned and broke the covenant.
God made a covenant with David, and David sinned and broke the covenant.
In every one of these first five covenants in Scripture, the human covenant partner is shown to be a sinner who breaks the covenant.
Adam ate the forbidden fruit.
Noah got drunk and naked in his tent.
Abraham was guilty of polygamy.
Israel committed idolatry with the golden calf.
David committed adultery with Bathsheba and murdered her husband Uriah.
In every case there is shame because of the sin, and every one has serious consequences, usually involving a curse or death.
Every one of these men fails to be a perfect, obedient covenant partner.
In every case, we are left longing for someone better — someone who will not sin but will perfectly keep the covenant. The Seed of the Woman who will crush the serpent’s head is still to come.
And in this we see the glory of the New Covenant.
Jesus is the perfect, obedient Son and covenant partner. He perfectly kept God’s law. He always did what pleases the Father.
Jesus came as the embodiment of the new covenant, and He established the new covenant in the upper room with His disciples as He instituted the Lord’s Supper. “This is the new covenant in my blood,” He said.
And the next day, unlike all who came before Him, He did not fall into sin. Instead He became sin for us. He bore our sins in His body on the cross.
The only one who never deserved to die chose to die in our place. Like Adam, Noah, Abraham, Israel, and David, we deserve to die for our sins — we have broken God’s covenant and deserve to bear its curse. But Christ bore the curse for us. The sinless Son took on our guilt and shame as He hung naked on the cross, bearing our sin and dying for us.
But God raised Him from the dead to show His approval and secure our salvation. And all who trust in Him are part of His New Covenant.
This is the story of Scripture — the story of God’s glory revealed in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
__________
So receive God’s grace today as forgiveness for your failures and as help to get up and do what’s right.
God is the God who sees.
He is the God who hears.
He loves you and His grace is running after you.
Will you receive His grace today? Will you trust Him?
Pray
