Shortcutting Faith

Shortcutting Faith

Genesis 16:1-16

Open your Bible to Genesis 16.

We would reasonably think that the two previous faith-events in Abram’s life, through which he was promised both a land and a people, would have strengthened him against the slightest distrust in God.

Remember that Abram’s experience had been completed by God’s unconditional confirmation of his promise when he appeared to Abram in a flaming theophany and passed between the split pieces of animals—indicating that if he did not keep his word, he would become as those animals.

Imagine how he must have felt, how his faith would have soared off the charts. We would think that this would have made completely resistant to distrusting God. You would think that he would never again fail to trust God. We would think that Abram would be forever obedient in following the Lord.

How wrong we are!

Genesis 16’s story of Abram and two women, Sarai and Hagar, showcases falling faith and distrust and shocking expediencies. The result was the first marital triangle in biblical history. Here we have the multiplication of rejection, anger, hurt, jealousy, and vicious cruelty. Life complicated itself exponentially, and there was no resolution. The following is a warning to all children of faith. “No perfect feet walk the path of faith” (Barnhouse).

As Paul would warn,

1 Corinthians 10:12 ESV

Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.

Are you a person of faith? Then pay attention.

Let’s pray and we’ll read our text.

Pray!

Genesis 16:1–16 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.

The first thing we notice is:

Human Chaos

Aging Sarai was a magnificent woman who had been exemplary—and would be so again as a woman who did not give way to fear. But at this time, she had been in Canaan for ten years and was seventy-five years old. Her barrenness was deemed a tragedy in ancient culture, where it was a mark of success to have many children and a sad failure to have none.

From her perspective, the flower was fading, and time was running out. Anguished humiliation throbbed within her. Significantly, she knew that God had promised Abram that a son coming from his own body would be his heir, but it had not yet been explicitly revealed to her that she would be the mother. That would happen when her name would be changed to Sarah.

At present she was still Sarai, who only knew the former.

Scheming

So, Sarai began to scheme.

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

2 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.

Almost surely Sarai had acquired Hagar the Egyptian while in Egypt. As an Egyptian, Hagar was a descendant of Ham, and not a descendant of Shem (as were Abram and Sarai), upon whom the primal blessings were prophesied by Noah.

Hagar was also Sarai’s personal property, in accord with both Mesopotamian and Egyptian culture. Sarai’s fatal choice of Hagar as the answer to her barrenness discounted the power of God, Hagar’s Hametic descent, and, possibly, Hagar’s wishes.

While we are scandalized by Sarai’s solution, it was perfectly logical and acceptable in the culture from which she had come as well as in the culture that surrounded her. And it had been so for a thousand years from Babylon to Egypt.

Clearly, Sarai’s solution was conventional and proper in the eyes of everyone but God, whose will had been expressed at creation.

As best we can tell, Sarai’s heart at this time was a mixture of both good and bad. She so wanted God’s promise to Abram to be fulfilled that she was willing to sacrifice the specialness of her intimacy with her husband. She was the monogamous wife of his youth. He was the love of her life. Sarai for love did violence to love.

At the same time, there is explicit blame and implicit anger in her directive: “The Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant.” She would take care of what God had not done. As Griffith Thomas has it:

Though Sarah’s motive was good, genuine, and involved self-sacrifice, the proposal was wrong in itself, and, at the same time, wrong in its method of obtaining the end sought. It was wrong against God, whose word had been given and whose time should have been waited. It was wrong against Abraham, leading him out of the pathway of patient waiting for God’s will. It was wrong against Hagar, and did not recognize her individuality and rights in the matter. It was wrong against Sarah herself, robbing her of a high privilege as well as leading to disobedience.

There is also an ironic reversal here. Down in Egypt, trustless Abram had given Sarai over to the Egyptian Pharaoh. Now in Canaan untrusting Sarai gave Abram over to her Egyptian servant. Abram’s fiasco in Egypt was costly indeed.

If we are scandalized by Sarai’s volunteering Hagar as her surrogate, Abram’s passive, compliant conduct is even more offensive. He, not Sarai, had heard the voice of God. He had led them from Ur. He had had no divine directive to employ Hagar. Otherwise he would have led the way. And Abram was fresh from the fiery theophany.

But he did not question her idea. He did not demur. Rather, as the Hebrew blandly says, “Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.” Is this passive, pliant man the same one who chased the four eastern kings for 120 miles and whipped them above Damascus? Yes. But there his faith was soaring. Now it is plunging.

Fall

Abram’s taking Hagar as his wife was nothing less than a fall.

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.

4 And he went in to Hagar, and she conceived.

The whole matter was so ugly. Normally the girl’s father gave the woman to be married, but Sarai gave her away. And Hagar had no say in the matter. She was taken and given. She was treated as a commodity.

Moses wrote the account as a parallel to the fall in the garden. Sarai’s action was parallel to that of Eve.

· Here Abram listened to his wife, just as Adam listened to his.

· Here Sarai took Hagar, just as Eve took the fruit.

· Here Sarai gave Hagar to her husband, just as Eve gave the fruit to hers.

· And in both cases the man willingly and knowingly partook.

Their lives were in a free fall, and the bottom was coming up fast! “Do not be deceived,” says the Scripture. “God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption” (Galatians 6:7, 8). They will reap the whirlwind.

Chaos

Abram and Sarai had treated Hagar like an inanimate, unfeeling instrument—a baby machine. But Hagar became proudly pregnant. And because she had succeeded where Sarai had not, she began to look down on her mistress. Arrogant looks were cast Sarai’s way. Hagar strutted her round profile.

Sarai lost it and lashed out in anguished jealousy and bloodcurdling blame.

5 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!”

Logically Sarai was wrong to place all the blame on Abram. After all, it was her idea. But actually, she was right. He was the patriarch. He was the head of the house. God had spoken to him, not to her. He should never have allowed the situation. Abram was truly responsible for the “wrong” she was suffering.

“Abram,” she cried, “may the Lord judge between you and me!’” She appealed to the highest Judge, who sees everything in secret. And God was watching.

Here is where Abram should have been the man. He should have taken Sarai aside and assured her of his love and that she was first. He should have accepted the blame and responsibility. He should have dealt kindly and firmly with Hagar. Tellingly, he, like Sarai, never refers to Hagar by name in the account but only by label (“your servant”). It’s so much easier when you depersonalize those you abuse.

Abram should have sought God’s wisdom in prayer. Instead, he yielded again to Mesopotamian social convention.

6 But Abram said to Sarai, “Behold, your servant is in your power; do to her as you please.”

He hid behind the conventions of the Code of Hammurabi (Law 146), which stipulates that if a concubine claims equality with her mistress because she bore children, her mistress may demote her to her former status. Abram took no responsibility for the situation, or for that matter for poor Hagar who had recently become his wife, and said, “Do with her what you want, dear.”

This Sarai did with a vengeance.

Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she fled from her.

The thing that shouts loudest here in the story is that there was not an honorable character in the lot. All were dishonorable. Abram was the worst. He was pathetic, passive, impotent, and uncaring of either woman. Neither woman had any compassion on the other. Sarai was worse, but you get the idea that Hagar would have done the same if she could.

All the same, Hagar was the prime victim. And Sarai was a not-so-distant second.

Remember that it all began when people of faith began to distrust God’s word. It took shape when they decided that God needed help in fulfilling his word. It took off when Abram and Sarai took a shortcut to obtain what they knew God had promised. Their expedience brought degeneration both to the perpetrators and the victim.

What a mess this was!

So complicated, so impossible, so painful. How often do we try to take shortcuts and convenient opportunities to get what we want or solve the problems we’re experiencing? How often do we know the will of God and then try to achieve it in our own power and by our efforts? And how often does that not end well?

There was human chaos followed by:

Divine Intervention

Poor, abused, pregnant Hagar fled a great distance from Sarai’s wrath. The location of “Shur” was near the border of Egypt. Shur is the name of the desert in northwestern Sinai, next to Egypt. Hagar was going home to her people, the descendants of Ham. And she was almost there.

discovery

There, alone by a spring, Hagar was surprised by a stranger, “the angel of the Lord.”

7 The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur.

8 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.”

9 The angel of the Lord said to her, “Return to your mistress and submit to her.”

The reason for his surprising directive became clear in the subsequent revelations.

revelation

The first sentence of revelation to Hagar was astounding.

10 The angel of the Lord also said to her, “I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude.”

The patriarchal stories in Genesis feature numerous instances where individuals are promised descendants. There are six such promises to Abram. There is one each to Isaac and Jacob. But Hagar is the only matriarch to receive such a promise.

This places her alone among the matriarchs. Hagar’s descendants would be included in Abram’s descendants—as numerous as the stars. She was an honored woman.

Then the angel revealed the gender, name, character, and future of her child.

11 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.

12 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.”

The name Ishmael means “God has heard.” It’s very sound commemorated God’s remembrance of Hagar in her oppression. Whenever she called to her child, she would remember this event. Even when he was so difficult that she shouted his name (“Ishmael!”), she recalled God’s intervention.

As to her son’s character, the wild donkey is a desert animal that looks more like a horse than a donkey. He would be a wild, free Bedouin. Ishmael’s character foreshadowed his destiny. He would live in perpetual conflict with those around him. There is not a word here about the great promise to Abram. Ishmael’s prophecy is apart from the promised land, apart from the great promise to Abram.

The historical reality is that Ishmael’s offspring became a thorn to God’s people both under the old and new covenants. Through Ishmael, the firstborn, they claim Abram as their father and affirm that they are his truest representations. Little did Abram and Sarai imagine that their shortcut would originate a conflict that would run for millennia.

Abram, the father of the faithful, had begotten a wild man instead of a child of grace. How tragic was Abram’s expediency!

response

Young Hagar’s response to the Lord’s oracles was remarkable.

13 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.”

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

Surprisingly, Hagar did not revel in the information about the child she would bear but rather in God. In amazement she bestowed two names—one on God and the other on the place. Both celebrate the same reality—God’s omniscience.

· She named God, “You are a God of seeing.”

· She named the well “Beer Lahai Roi” which means “well of the living one who sees me.”

Hagar realized that all her knowledge of God depended on his initiative in knowing her. When she felt as if God were absent, she learned that he was watching over her.

She was the only person, male or female, in the Old Testament who conferred a name on God. She also obeyed God, traveling all the way back to Abram’s tents. And there she submitted to Sarai. The sense here is that she believed God and remained a child of grace.

Then we come to the factual, colorless epilogue:

15 And Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram called the name of his son, whom Hagar bore, Ishmael.

16 Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram.

The absence of Sarai’s name is significant. Hagar’s child was intended to be Sarai’s, but three times the text emphasizes that Hagar bore a son for Abram. Sarai didn’t name the child. Abram did. And he confirmed the name Ishmael (“God has heard”), recognizing God’s intervention.

It seems, too, that Sarai’s intervention and Abram’s consent may have delayed the promise for some thirteen years. Shortcuts do not promote God’s purpose.

What a mess life had become. The two women would never get along, and there was nothing Abram could do. And the conflict escalated with the birth of Isaac. Later we find:

Genesis 21:8–10 ESV

And the child grew and was weaned. And Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, laughing. So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not be heir with my son Isaac.”

Hagar and Ishmael were put out, and both almost died. But again, God protected Hagar and her son. The account concludes:

Genesis 21:20–21 ESV

And God was with the boy, and he grew up. He lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother took a wife for him from the land of Egypt.

Ishmael went back to his roots.

Finally, we read in Genesis 25 that Ishmael fathered twelve tribal rulers who would become a spiritual opposite to the later twelve tribes of Israel, and the account ends:

Genesis 25:18 ESV

They settled from Havilah to Shur, which is opposite Egypt in the direction of Assyria. He settled over against all his kinsmen.

How tragic the expediencies, compromises, and shortcuts of real life can be.

True, there is grace and forgiveness for all who turn to Christ. Christ comes to Hagars in the wilderness, and also to miserable Abrams and Sarais in the camp, and ministers grace.

But some sins cannot be undone in this world. There are times when life moves from vivid color to black and white—and never back to its original vibrancy.

Are you thinking about an expediency to get what you imagine to be God’s will in your relationship—in a friendship—in a professional pursuit—in your career—in your education—in your ministry? If so, take a deep breath.

Stand back.

Take some time.

Read God’s Word.

Think.

Pray.

And obey the revealed will of God.