God Sees Our Struggles And Has A Solution

The book of Genesis tells about different people who heard directly from God. God spoke face to face with Adam and Eve in the Garden. He spoke to Noah and gave him instructions about building the Ark. Then you can see how God spoke with Abram and made a Covenant with him. This lesson, we are going to look Hagar --- a woman who never thought God would take notice of her. Hagar was not an important person. She was not wealthy. She was not full of faith. In fact, her only claim to fame was that she ended up in the middle of a big, ugly, complicated, mess. Hagar’s story is not a pretty one. But we can learn some important lessons from her story in Genesis chapter 16.

After ten years of futile waiting upon God, Sarah became convinced that she would never bare any children to Abraham. She opted for a last resort and followed the general custom of the day, which was adopted in similar circumstances. She asked her Egyptian servant Hagar to bear a son with her husband in surrogate fashion. According to the law, the child that Hagar bore for her mistress would eventually become Sarah’s. While Hagar was pregnant, she began to flaunt the advantage that she had over her mistress, resulting in tremendous tension between these two women. As a result, Hagar could not handle the conflict no longer; she fled into the desert where she was met by the angel of the Lord.

Think with me about her situation: She was away from her family. She was away from her friends. She was alone and without shelter, food, water, help, or sustenance. She had none of the things she needed. Then the Lord’s angel appeared to her and rescued her. There are two first in this text: This is the first time the term, “the Angel of the Lord” is used in Scripture. Normally, this term is associated with the appearances of Jesus Christ in the Old Testament. Secondly, Hagar refers to God as “Jehovah Roi” or the God who sees me. God reveals himself in a brand-new way, and Hagar, the least likely person receives a brand-new revelation of God. This is an indication that everyone is important to God and that God is not willing that any should perish. There are several lessons to be learned from this text.

The first thing we can learn is also the first thing Hagar learned. And that is, quite simply, that life is a struggle.

1. Life is a Struggle Genesis 16:1-6 …Have you ever watched that old classic Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life? Most of the movie shows how Jimmy Stewart’s life was NOT so wonderful … but then it has a happily ever after ending. Well, the story of Hagar is NOT a story of a Wonderful Life. And it doesn’t have a happy ending. That’s how it is with a lot of stories in the Bible and with a lot of our lives. The Bible doesn’t sugar-coat reality. Consider the following scriptures: Job 5:7 says, “Man is born into trouble as the sparks fly upward.”

Job 14:1 says “Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble.” Jesus said, in John 16:33, “In the world you will have tribulation…” .

At its best, life can be a struggle. And no one would say Hagar had an easy life. For one thing, when Hagar was sold as a slave to Abraham’s household … far removed from her own country of Egypt. The good news is that Abram treated her well. God had promised that Abraham’s descendants would be as numberless as the stars. But now years came and went, and Sarah became desperate. She decided to choose a surrogate to have a child for Abraham. Back then, that was a common practice --- but it wasn’t God’s plan.

There’s plenty we could say about the mistake of Abraham and Sarah here. But this is Hagar’s story today, so let’s look at it from her perspective. Hagar had very little control over what happened to her. She was a slave. She was far away from family and friends. She may have thought her life was going to get better when she conceived a child --- but instead things got much worse. Hagar evidently decided that … since she was going to have Abraham’s child … she no longer had to show respect to Sarah. As you might expect, Sarah complained to Abraham about Hagar’s attitude. And, as you might expect, Abraham tried to stay out of the middle. Abraham told Sarah to handle it any way she wished. If only giftedness and humbleness came in the same package! The Bible describes the end result in one short, telling sentence, “Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so, she fled from her.”