Genesis 16

Culture or Conviction? (Flesh or by Faith)

Lot was a threat to the Land promise of God

Ishmael is a threat to the family promise of God.

Illus: House continued...

Judges 8:24 CSB

Then he said to them, “Let me make a request of you: Everyone give me an earring from his plunder.” Now the enemy had gold earrings because they were Ishmaelites.

Psalm 83

broken into....then damaged in a hail storm....

reduced, reduced, reduced....

Decision making should be based on Scriputre

1. Cultural practices should not trump Convictional truths. 1-3

10 years had passed since God’s promises had come in .

You can imagine Sarah’s situation…and her rational. Pressure on women to have children. In fact, culturally divorce was allowed if a woman had not conceived after 10 years.

Culturally, it was completely normal to have multiple marriages and children with multiple partners.

Instead of trusting God’s word…Abram listens to Sarai’s word.

—Let’s be real clear…Sarah is the only women in the Scripture who women are told to emulate. ( and ).

But Here…Sarah is living by the flesh and she leads Abram into sin…just like Eve.

Men—Abram is responsible. Instead of driving Sarai to God’s promises and reminding her of the Word of God…Abram uses reason and logic…who uses cultural practices instead of convictional truths.

We are to be people who live by conviction, by faith, and not by culture first. There cannot be any “ands” with God...

God and Country

God and Family

God and Money

Matthew 6:24 CSB

“No one can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

Build? Culturally, we try to avoid having children through sex and we try to have children with out sex.

2. Doubting God’s Word leads to foolish mistakes. 4-6

Abram doesn’t take leadership here…instead, he throws the ball back into Sarai’s court…just like Adam his Father.

Father’s what we are going to see here is that your sins will be passed on to generations to come.

False Pride—4 Hagar mocks Sarah....

Hagar will be blessed because of her relationship to Abram. But the Scriptures are clear that there will be tension, enmity.

False Blame—5

False Neutrality—6

3. Our sins have global consequences. 7-16

Hagar flees for her native Egypt

Culturally this might even sound normal, then and now.

“Well, it’s for the best…sin, sin, sin”

Even though it was wrong for her and Abram to be married, culturally they still were and the Lord intervenes.

Ishmael means God hears. He too will be a nation, but he is not the heir of the promises of God for land, and blessings.

***Foreigners: while they are outside the covenant yet have a place if they submit to it. Israel's general sympathy toward outsiders was motivated by the outsider status the Fathers and enslaved Israel experienced.

Hagar and Ishmael typify in reverse Israel's experience of Egyptian hostility (16: 6; ), expulsion (21: 10; ), and flight (16: 16; ).

Hagar is a play on words from the Hebrew word for Stranger.

Hagar and Moses share in a pattern of events: oppression (), flight in the desert where theophany occurs (; ), return and expulsion when miraculous deliverance occurs (; ; ).

The historical irony in Hagar's revenge is the Egyptian enslavement of Sarai's descendants (cp. 15: 13; 16: 6). Also Hagar's son, who taunts Isaac, foreshadows the Egyptian purge of the Hebrew children (15: 13; 21: 10; ).

Mathews, Kenneth. : An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture: 1B (The New American Commentary) (Kindle Locations 4359-4365). B&H Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary Hagar and the Angel (16:7–16)

To some degree this son of Abram would be a shadow, almost a parody, of his father, his twelve princes notable in their times (17:20; 25:13) but not in the history of salvation; his restless existence no pilgrimage but an end in itself; his nonconformism a habit of mind, not a light to the nations.

v12—

Genesis 3:15 CSB

I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.

Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary Hagar and the Angel (16:7–16)

Beer-lahai-roi means literally ‘the well of the living-one, my see-er’. So the name commemorated the abiding rather than the transient element in the experience.

(1) “A wild donkey of a man” indicates a lifestyle outside accepted social conventions () and also anticipates his desert residence (; ). The image of a wild donkey could also convey Jerusalem's willfulness (). (2) His independence is described further by his hostile behavior toward “everyone,” (3) eliciting a corresponding response, “everyone's hand against him.” (4) The final colon explains the extent of his violence, aimed against “all his brothers,” hence breaking the bonds of family loyalty. The fulfillment occurs in 25: 18, where the similar phrase describes the practice of Ishmael's descendants. Taken together, each part of v. 12 intensifies the picture of Ishmael as antagonist whose hostilities are indiscriminate and without restraint. Hostility toward one's “brother” characterized the nonelect line in Genesis, beginning with Cain (4: 8,23-24); Esau, like Ishmael, is portrayed as a wild belligerent (27: 39– 40).

Mathews, Kenneth. : An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture: 1B (The New American Commentary) (Kindle Locations 4621-4628). B&H Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Galatians 4:21–31 CSB

Tell me, you who want to be under the law, don’t you hear the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave and the other by a free woman. But the one by the slave was born as a result of the flesh, while the one by the free woman was born through promise. These things are being taken figuratively, for the women represent two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai and bears children into slavery—this is Hagar. Now Hagar represents Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. For it is written, Rejoice, childless woman, unable to give birth. Burst into song and shout, you who are not in labor, for the children of the desolate woman will be many, more numerous than those of the woman who has a husband. Now you too, brothers and sisters, like Isaac, are children of promise. But just as then the child born as a result of the flesh persecuted the one born as a result of the Spirit, so also now. But what does the Scripture say? “Drive out the slave and her son, for the son of the slave will never be a coheir with the son of the free woman.” Therefore, brothers and sisters, we are not children of a slave but of the free woman.