“We See Affliction, God Sees Us”

This passage is about many things, but mainly it is about how we see people versus how God sees people. And how we see ourselves, and how we see God. And how those perspectives shape how we see right and wrong. Are we doing what is good in our own eyes, or what is good in God’s eyes?

What I hope we see today is that in your most vulnerable moment, God sees you, He hears you, and He will redeem your most painful experiences. We see this in the drama that unfolds in Genesis 16. Verse 1 introduces the main characters.

Genesis 16:1 ESV

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar.

Hagar means, “the foreigner”, “the immigrant”. So, remember, Abram and Sarai have been called to follow God by faith and He would bless them so that they would be a blessing to all nations. But so far, their interactions with the nations so far have included Lot’s capture, war, deception, and enslavement of some number of people, one of whom is Hagar. We are not starting well.

How will Abram and Sarai become a blessing to the nations? It will come through their seed, their offspring. And when we meet them in chapter 16, God has not enabled them to have any offspring yet. But we meet a new character in the story. And this is where people start making choices that reveal how they see God, themselves, and others. As we read this, let’s be thinking about this question,

How Good is My Eyesight?

This passage is like a test at the ophthalmologist. How do I see God? How do I see myself? How do I see others? How do I see what is good and bad?

The new character in the story is Hagar. How do we see her in the text? She is a slave and she is a foreigner. She is unprotected, vulnerable. What do we do with vulnerable people? Unless you see her as a human being created in God’s image with all the dignity and worthy of flourishing as you have, you can do whatever you want. Abram and Sarai use Hagar in their plan to do what is good in their own eyes. Let me show you where we see that in this text.

As we have seen before, human plans to accomplish God’s will only multiply pain. When we look at Sarai’s words, they show that the way she sees this situation is problematic.

Genesis 16:2 ESV

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.

Sarai can see that it is the LORD that has prevented her from bearing children. But instead of waiting to hear from the LORD, she devises her own plan to fulfill God’s will. Only, it includes abusing a foreign slave in their home. This was an accepted cultural practice in their day but it doesn’t make it good in God’s eyes. And in fact, Sarai’s actions show us how she sees herself. What the LORD has prevented, she will make happen by her own wits and wisdom.

Abram’s perspective is also problematic. He listened to the voice of Sarai. This takes us back to the Garden of Eden. When Adam listened to the voice of Eve instead of to the voice of the LORD, that’s when things went wrong in the first place.

The consequences of the plan are somewhat predictable. The plan succeeds from a human perspective. But it immediately multiplies pain. Verse 4 tells us,

Genesis 16:4 ESV

And he went in to Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress.

Literally, “she was small in her eyes”. The tables have turned. Sarai had seen Hagar as an object to be used. Now, Hagar sees Sarai as worth less than herself.

And we go back to the garden again - the blame game starts. Sarai blames Abram, and his reply? He literally says,

Genesis 16:6 LEB

And Abram said to Sarai, “Look, your slave is under your power. Do to her that which is good in your eyes.” And Sarai oppressed her, and she fled from her presence.

In the home in which Abram and Sarai formerly taught the world to know God and listen to Him, no one is listening to God and everyone is hurting each other. Rather than looking to God, listening for His voice, they are doing what is good in their own eyes.

What is good in Sarai’s eyes is to afflict Hagar. That word “oppress”, in the ESV is “dealt harshly”. It means to bow someone down under you. She made Hagar’s life miserable. When everyone does what is right in their own eyes, we multiply pain.

Examine your own heart. How do you see others, yourself, and God? Does God make promises He doesn’t keep in our eyes? Is He limited in what He can do in my life? Maybe we don’t see Him as really caring much about our life at all.

Do I see myself as more capable of choosing what is good for myself, my family, my work, my community, than God is? Do I see myself as the one who has to get things done when God seems slow in accomplishing His plans?

How do you see other people? Test yourself. When I use the label, “immigrant”, “lower class” “alcoholic”, “trucker”, how do you see those people in your mind’s eye? Or in another way, do we see others as objects to be used in our plans?

All of these distorted views are behind all the pain we cause in our relationships and in our societies that are built on these viewpoints.

But as soon as God shows up in our story, we see everything differently. The whole perspective changes.

How Does God See Us?

God shows up in verse 7. Let’s make some observations.

The angel of the Lord found Hagar. The angel of the Lord is a mysterious character that shows up all through the Hebrew Bible, and this is the first time. I believe along with many Bible scholars, that this is the pre-incarnate Christ. This is Jesus showing up speaking and acting on God’s behalf long before he came to Bethlehem. Who is the first person He appears to in the Bible? It’s not Abraham, the father of faith. It is the foreigner, the slave, the abused victim.

The angel of the LORD found Hagar by a spring of water. That seems like a random detail. But the word here for spring is literally, “eye”. A spring is like an eye of water coming up from the ground. It is as though the very earth is weeping for what has been done, and this is the place the angel of the LORD met Hagar. This is a place of seeing. By this eye, what does each person see?

Genesis 16:8–9 ESV

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.”

Hagar sees her affliction. She answers both questions at once. She’s coming from an abusive situation. She’s going anywhere else.

The angel of the LORD makes a point of identifying her pain. The word “submit” is the same word used 6 to describe Sarai’s oppression of Hagar. It carries the idea of being bowed down with burdens. Sarai had bowed Hagar down with abuse. Now Hagar needs to go back and bow down under Sarai. The angel of the LORD named her pain. He understands. So, is He cruel, sending her back to be abused by Sarai? Let’s keep going.

3. The angel of the LORD blesses Hagar and her son. He gives her the blessing God had given Abram. He will multiply her offspring beyond number. She is receiving the blessing of Abram. And the blessing includes two parts:

Genesis 16:11 ESV

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 heard your mistreatment.

The name Ishmael means, “God hears”. The LORD heard her mistreatment. God sees her and knows exactly what she’s going through. The LORD is saying to her, “In your oppression, don’t think you’re alone or unseen. I will be with you.” When Hagar cried out, God heard her.

The nation of Israel hearing this from Moses would have been stopped in their tracks. This is their own story in reverse. He had heard their cry because of their being bowed down under the Egyptians.

Exodus 3:7–9 ESV

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, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, ... And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them.

It might have been shocking to hear that God first spoke these same words to an Egyptian who was mistreated by a Hebrew. God doesn’t care what nation you’re from. He sees and He cares about the mistreatment of anyone, especially when they are a foreigner alone in a strange land. He commands over and over in His word,

Exodus 22:21 ESV

“You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.

Deuteronomy 10:18 NIV

He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing.

God sees how we treat foreigners. He hears their cry when they are oppressed. He takes it personally. So, what did He do for Hagar?

The second part of the blessing to Hagar sounds strange to our ears.

Genesis 16:12 ESV

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.”

We have images of donkeys being stubborn, kicking beasts. But the biblical context is an animal that is free of oppression. Wild donkeys were untamable (Job 39). Hagar’s son will not be oppressed by his kinsmen. We will read in chapter 25 that Ishmael and his descendents settled in a land neither in Egypt nor in Canaan. God had a plan for Ishmael. And we read in chapter 21,

Genesis 21:20 ESV

And God was with the boy, and he grew up. He lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow.

God was with Ishmael and fulfilled His plan for him.

This blessing makes something clear to Hagar.

Genesis 16:13 ESV

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.”

All she had seen before was her affliction. But now she realized that all that time, God saw her. He was looking after her. He heard her affliction and had an answer. He would carry out His plans in her life. The one place she felt unseen is the place to which the LORD tells her to return, now knowing He sees her, He knows about her affliction, and He has a plan to bless her and her child. She memorialized this discovery and named that place for the moment she saw the God who sees her.

In our own afflictions, it’s easy for that to become the only thing we see. And it is easy to feel alone, unknown, unseen, and unheard. Truthfully, most people are so caught up thinking about their own problems, they don’t really listen to us. Or they only listen long enough to say, “I know what you mean, let me tell you about my life...” and that only proves they don’t really care.

This chapter was written in the Bible to tell everyone, no matter who you are, how other people see you, where you come from or where you are going, God sees you, He hears your cry for help in your pain. When you can only see your affliction, God sees you. And He sent His Son Jesus to show us that not only does He see, but He cares, and He will be present with us to bless us. He may not end all our affliction or make all the pain go away, but on the cross, Jesus put to death the curse of sin, which is the worst affliction our souls will ever face. And on that cross, He experienced exactly what you go through when you experience affliction. Not just the physical pain, but abandonment of friends, the abuse of others, and the sense of separation from God Himself.

Matthew 27:46 ESV

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

When He says, I see you, and I know what you’re going through, you can believe Him. And when He says, take my hand, let’s walk through this together; there is blessing on the other side, you can trust Him. I have experienced that and many others among us have.

And when you look at others, what do you see, do we see people with unfixable problems that you don’t want to become your problems? Sometimes we turn away because we truly don’t know how to help and we know we can’t fix their pain. But I think we are all the same. Anyone who is experiencing some affliction, trouble, abuse, or oppression wants to be seen and heard. In fact, even if you can’t take their pain away, it is a relief to their spirit to know that you see them and hear their cry of affliction and are willing to walk with them through it. Most people know you can’t take their pain away. But they don’t know you care unless you sit down with them to listen.

And you and I have the opportunity to do more than that. Like the angel of the LORD was the preincarnate Christ, you and I now are the incarnation of Christ in our own time as members of His body. We can visit others in their affliction and listen long enough to them and to the Holy Spirit of Christ in us to name that person’s pain so they know we hear them, we can also help them know the God who sees them and has plans for their life if they will walk with Him in faith.

Communion

Questions for Discussion

What have been some highs and lows from this week?

What were you able to put into practice from last week’s passage (Genesis 15)?

What do we learn about God in our passage this week, Genesis 16?

What are some reasons we sometimes doubt that God sees us?

What do we learn about people in our passage?

What are all the ways sin affects people’s relationships in this passage? How does God intervene?

How does the gospel impact how we see God, how we see others, and our understanding of how God sees all of us?

How will you respond to this passage this week?

With whom can you share this passage this week?