“1 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar; 2 so she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her.”
Abram agreed to what Sarai said. 3 So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian maidservant Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. 4 He slept with Hagar, and she conceived. When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. 5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my servant in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.”
6 “Your servant is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.
7 The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. 8 And he said, “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?” “I’m running away from my mistress Sarai,” she answered. 9 Then the angel of the Lord told her, “Go back to your mistress and submit to her.” 10 The angel added, “I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count.” 11 The angel of the Lord also said to her: “You are now with child and you will have a son. You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery. He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.”
13 She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.” 14 That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered. 15 So 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 him Ishmael.”
The wrong help is the opposite of help especially when work gets technical. Imagine a plumber out on an estimate. The owner of the house asks him what he charges. The plumber says, “$30 an hour.” The owner whistles as if to say, “that’s pretty steep.” The plumber doesn’t respond. The owner says he would be willing to help if that would somehow lower the price. The plumber replies, “well, it’s $30 an hour if I do it, 40 if you supervise, and 50 if you try to help.”
That’s a wise policy. It’s a wise policy because plumbing requires a fair level of expertise. The wrong help would not only be no help, it would the opposite of help. The plumber would wind up helping the helper. The wrong help is the opposite of help especially when work gets technical.
God’s work is certainly technical. Creating everything out of nothing requires a level of expertise. Rightly assessing the actions and intentions of everyone requires a level of expertise. Keeping a promise to bless the whole world requires a level of expertise.
The wrong kind of help in God’s work is the opposite of help. God wasn’t looking for Sarai’s help in this morning’s Scripture any more than a plumber is looking for a homeowner’s help. It creates more work for Him. He has to help the helpers. God doesn’t need our help to keep His promises. He calls for our faith. That’s the claim of this sermon: God doesn’t need our help to keep His promises. He calls for our faith.
We will study this in two points. First: helping God out. Second: God graciously intervenes. We see Sarai’s attempt to help God out in verses 1-6. We see God graciously intervene to mop up Sarai’s efforts to help in verses 7-16.
First: helping God out. This is our eighth study in the faith of Abram, and we are still bumping up against the first fact we learned about him in chapter 11, which is that he had a wife named Sarai who was unable to conceive a child.
We’ve bumped up against this barrenness from any number of different angles. We bumped up against it when we studied the promise that led Abram and Sarai to leave Ur. We bumped up against it when we studied the role of Lot in the family. We bumped up against it thinking about Eliezer and the question of inheritance. We bumped up against this barrenness when Abram asked questions of God. Now we bump up against it thinking about Sarai herself.
It was not easy to be barren in the ancient near east. Verse 1 was not an easy experience, “Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children.” Some of you have had difficulties conceiving. You know the sorts of conversations that occur between you and your spouse. You know the heartache of trying to rejoice with friends when they have babies. You know the questions you ask of God when a newlywed finds herself pregnant and yet you can’t have a baby after ten years of trying.
Sarai had questions. She had sorrows. She also had her own cultural barrage. As Karel Van der Toorn wrote, in that culture, “the woman who remained childless not only ran the risk of being disdained, or worse, repudiated by her husband and in-laws, she also incurred the suspicion of indecent behavior. The gods surely had to have their reason for withholding children.”
Sarai doubtlessly felt cursed at times. She knew from God that her husband would bless the whole world, but she felt cursed. Now Scripture, of course, doesn’t connect sin with barrenness so directly or universally, but the culture at large did, and Sarai was affected by the culture as we all are.
Sarai knew the promises of God. She left Ur with a promise of descendants. She knew that God had told her husband, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them. So shall your offspring be.”
She knew God’s promises, and she probably had any number of different responses to them just like you have different responses to God’s promises. She had days of strong faith and days of weak faith.
We don’t know what led to her response in this chapter. Verse 3 tells us that they had been in the land for ten years by this point. That’s 120 very disappointing monthly cycles. Perhaps she was thinking to herself; the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting different results, and that’s what we are doing.
Or perhaps she hit menopause. Perhaps she now knew it was medically impossible. It was impossible before but now it felt even more impossible. We don’t know what led her to decide, in the words of verse 2 that, “The Lord has kept me from having children.”
Sarai had the promises to Abram on one hand, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them. So shall your offspring be,” and she had her logical conclusion on the other hand, “The Lord has kept me from having children.” She had a promise and a seemingly inescapable conclusion. How could she do justice to both?
She decided that God needed her help to keep the promise. She had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar. They had probably acquired her during their time in Egypt. She told Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her.”
This strikes us as scandalous, but it was an established practice for wealthy, barren wives of that day. They thought of it in a somewhat similar way to how we think of surrogacy. The other woman carries the child for the wife. The wife becomes the child’s mother. The other woman relinquishes her rights to the child.
This was an attractive option for wealthy wives like Sarai. They didn’t want their husbands to marry another woman for the sake of a child, and so they went with the maidservant. This sounds like a strange plan to us, but to a contemporary of Abram it would have been strange if such a plan were never suggested.
Simply because something is commonplace in a culture, however, doesn’t mean that it’s right. That goes for then as well as now. Sarai’s plan may have been a common practice, but it was by no means right.
Sarai’s plan necessitated sin. The wider culture might not have seen it as immoral, but God did. The sentence structure of verse 3 makes that clear, “Sarai his wife took her Egyptian maidservant Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. He slept with her.”
The structure of that sentence takes the reader back to Eden. Remember the same author penned both Genesis 3 and Genesis 16. The structure of the sentence in Genesis 3 goes as follows, “the woman took the fruit, gave it to her husband, and he ate it.” The structure of this sentence here in Genesis 16 is as follows, “the woman took the servant, gave her to her husband, and he slept with her.” The key nouns and verbs are the same. That’s not by accident. The author of Genesis wants you to know that this plan was sinful just as Eve’s actions were sinful and that consequences would follow just as they did in the Garden of Eden.
We, like Sarai, keep repeating the sin of Eden. It’s no use blaming Eve. We like Sarai do the same as Eve did.
Now it’s easy for you to see the sin in Sarai and in Eve because you aren’t in their situation. You are able to see that their plans could never lead to God’s promises. They couldn’t see that in the moment just like you can’t see that in your life in the moment. You just think to yourself, “God wants me to be happy. This makes me happy.” Sarai just thought to herself, “God wants me to have descendants. This will give me descendants.” The fact, as you know, is that there are no sinful shortcuts to God’s promises. There are no sinful shortcuts to God’s blessings. Sarai tried to sin her way to the promises of God. It didn’t work for her. It never works for you.
Abram joined Sarai in this lack of faith and act of unfaithfulness; verse 2, “Abram agreed to what Sarai said.” Genesis doesn’t tell us all the reasons why Abram agreed. Perhaps he agreed because she was his wife. It would be hard not to sympathize with her after decades of longing for children. Perhaps he felt torn between God and his wife. Maybe he was attracted to Hagar. We don’t know why Abram decided to go along with this plan, but we know that he did and that’s a warning for the most mature among us. As Calvin wrote, “when we see Abram, who, through so many years, had bravely contended like an invincible combatant, and had surmounted so many obstacles, now yielding, in a single moment, to temptation; who among us will not fear for himself in similar danger? Therefore, although we may have stood long and firmly in the faith, we must daily pray, that God would not lead us into temptation.”
Sin is incredibly crafty. It always baits its hook quite well. It did for Sarai. It will for you. Pray that you not be led into temptation.
We’ve seen the plan to help God; let’s see the consequences in verse 4, ‘He slept with Hagar, and she conceived. When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my servant in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.”’
Sarai wanted Hagar to get pregnant, but once Hagar was pregnant Sarai found out that it wasn’t really what she wanted. That is how sin works. Sarai wanted the child, but not the changes. Hagar knew she was giving Abram what Sarai never could and Sarai knew that too and so Hagar looked down on Sarai. She thought she was better than this wife who couldn’t bear children. For her part, Sarai was jealous of Hagar. Two women in the same household despising and envying one another is nothing but drama. Proverbs 30 lists this as one of the situations under which the earth trembles.
There were changes between the women. There were also changes between them and Abram. How could Abram not care about Hagar’s welfare? She was giving him a child. Sarai’s attitude toward Abram changed as well. She blamed him for her plan. “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my servant in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.”
This was a disaster. Genesis 3 was a disaster for everyone, Genesis 16 was a disaster for the family chosen to bless this fallen world. It’s a disaster that any outside observer could have seen coming. No woman listening right now is thinking to herself, ‘you know, I thought this was going to go much better for Sarai.’ Even the surrounding culture knew this plan had unintentional consequences. “Ancient marriage laws envisage[d] the tension that [were] liable to arise in such situations and [sought] to regulate them,” as Gordon Wenham explained.
Now you knew that this plan was going to be a disaster, but they didn’t see that. They were blinded by their desires as understandable as those desires for a child were. Please keep that in mind the next time someone tries to lovingly correct you. Perhaps you can’t see what your friend can see just like Abram and Sarai couldn’t see what you can see.
Abram was now left with no good options. Any husband knows that verse 5 was Sarai’s way of saying, ‘fix it.’ “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my servant in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.”
Put yourself in Abram’s position. Sarai blames you for this situation. You obviously can’t favor Hagar in anyway even though she is carrying your child. You don’t want to release Hagar, although that was what the surrounding culture would do, because the child she is carrying might be the child God promised. You can’t convince Hagar to see this mess from Sarai’s point of view. You certainly can’t convince Sarai to see this mess from Hagar’s point of view.
Furthermore, you can’t be sure that this child is the child God promised. If this child is, that creates its own complications and if this child is not the one God promised, that brings its own complications. You have no good options. Please remember that is what sin unleashes. It doesn’t offer what it promises. It does not offer what God promises. It unleashes disaster and sometimes situations in which there are no good options.
So what did Abram do? Verse 6, “Your servant is in your hands. Do with her whatever you think best.” Abram chose, “happy wife happy life,” and whatever consequences came along with that. As for Sarai, her previous concern for a child and her concern for the promises of God were forgotten. Sin does that too. Sarai sinned further; “Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.”
Sarai mistreated Hagar. This same verb for “mistreated” is used in the book of Exodus to describe the Egyptian’s oppression of Israel. The Egyptians mistreated Israel, but the mother of the Israelites also mistreated an Egyptian. This was doubtlessly a helpful corrective for the Exodus generation. The mother of their nation had done to an Egyptian what Egypt did to them. There are no clean hands in this world. The only hope is the grace of God. Fortunately for Abram, he just so happened to enjoy God’s grace. That was his only hope and that’s our second point: God graciously intervenes.
Sarai’s attempts to help God were of no help to God. God didn’t ask for them. God didn’t want them. This unwanted help, however, didn’t change God’s plans to bless Abram. He had promised. He had passed through the pieces of the dead animals cutting a covenant as we saw last week. Abram and Sarai’s hope in this situation is the only hope that any human has, and that hope is the grace of God working through the promises of God.
God chose to intervene to start putting this situation right. Abram didn’t take the first step. Sarai didn’t take the first step. Hagar didn’t take the first step. “All parties would have left well enough alone,” as Walter Brueggemann put it, “All parties except God.” That’s a description of this messy life. That’s a good description of the story of the gospels.
God went looking for Hagar. He found her as she was returning to Egypt. That’s what’s going on in verse 7, “The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur.” Shur was in the southernmost part of Canaan en route to Egypt. She was going home.
The Lord found her. “The angel of the Lord,” as in verse 7’s, “the angel of the Lord found Hagar,” is a manifestation of God Himself. It’s the same “the angel of the Lord” who spoke to Moses from the burning bush. The phrase “the angels of the Lord” is set apart from the phrase “an angel of the Lord” throughout the Old Testament.
The Lord Himself came to find Hagar. He called her by name. This is the first time anyone calls Hagar by name in this chapter. Sarai called her, “my maidservant” and “my servant.” Abram called her, “your servant.” God calls her, “Hagar.” God cares even if no one else does.
God knew the situation. He called her “the servant of Sarai.” “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?” Now God knew what happened, just like He knew what happened in Eden when he asked Adam and Eve where they were. God, however, likes to ask to that people tell Him what happened in their own words. If you confess your sins from your heart, you know that’s true.
God was the first person to call Hagar by name in this chapter. God was also the first person to whom we hear Hagar speak in this chapter and she spoke honestly, “I’m running away from my mistress Sarai.” That’s the first characteristic you learn about Hagar: she’s honest.
God responded with a commandment and a promise. You need to see both – the commandment and the promise. The commandment is uncompromising. “Go back to your mistress and submit to her.”
God didn’t tell Hagar to go back because Sarai had softened. God told her to go back because it was His plan. She was to stop lording this child over Sarai. She was to submit to her mistress Sarai and trust God for the outcome. The fact that Hagar obeyed that commandment tells you another characteristic of Hagar: she is obedient.
God gave Hagar an uncompromising commandment. He also gave her a marvelous promise; verse 10, “I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count. You are now with child and you will have a son. You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery. He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.”
There are similarities and differences between these promises and the ones given to Abram. In other words, we don’t yet know if this is the promised child. We do, however, know from this promise that God cared about Hagar. It turns out, of course, that Ishmael is not the promised son, but that doesn’t change the fact of God’s kindness here. “God’s concern is not confined to the elect line,” writes Walter Brueggemann. “There is passion and concern for the troubled ones who stand outside that line.”
We don’t know where Hagar stood or stands with God in regard to righteousness and faith. We’ve seen that she spoke honestly with God. We’ve seen that she obeyed God. We don’t know much more about her; the best we can say in regard to her soul is to echo the words of Abram, “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” God isn’t looking for our help in judging her.
This promise God made to Hagar isn’t about salvation. It is about God working to put right what Sarai and Abram put wrong. Hagar recognized God’s kindness. That’s one of the reasons for the name she gave God in verse 13; ‘She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me.”’ God saw Hagar for who she was. God called her by name when no one else did, and so Hagar called Him, “the God who sees me.” God sees the mistreated and God cares.
God cared for Hagar. He also cared for Abram. You see this in the fact that He did what Abram couldn’t. Abram couldn’t fix this mess he had helped to make. God could. God did. Why? Because He had promised Abram that the whole world would be blessed through him. Why? Because He loved Abram. Why? Because He had chosen to love Abram. That’s as deep as you can go. God had chosen to love Abram. That was Abram’s only hope in this mess or in life. That’s the only reason any of us enjoy grace.
Sarai’s plan didn’t derail the plan of God. The world would still be blessed through Abram. Sarai would still have her own child. Sarai didn’t derail the plan of God. The line still led to Jesus despite the sin. God did, however, derail Sarai’s plan. You see that in verse 15, “So Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne. Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael.”
Sarai’s name is noticeably absent from those verses. She wanted Hagar to have a child on her behalf, but this child would not be Sarai’s. Ishmael would belong to Hagar and Abram.
God neither needed nor accepted Sarai’s help. He doesn’t need human help to bless the world. He doesn’t want human help because we invariably do as Sarai did. We really are that hopeless. You see this in the incarnation. When God wanted to work perfectly through a human, He didn’t ask a human. He became a human. He isn’t looking for our help.
If you disagree, consider your attempts to deal with sin; now consider the way in which Jesus dealt with sin. Consider your track record with Satan; now consider Jesus’ track record with Satan. Consider your attempts to make anything new; now consider Jesus how Jesus is making everything new.
God certainly isn’t in need of your help. He isn’t asking for your help. He is asking for you to trust that He will do what He’s promised to do. In other words, he is looking for faith. He is looking to put everything right by grace through faith. Amen.