The God Who Sees
Genesis 16:1-10
We’ve been looking at people in the Old Testament who passed through the wilderness, some literally and physically and others spiritually and emotionally. The Judean wilderness was a barren, harsh, bleak place and became a Jewish metaphor for the painful and difficult times in life filled with despair and hopelessness. We’re looking at these stories to learn how we might make it through our own wilderness experiences which we all will have at some time in our lives. What we find is that wilderness experiences, as painful as they can be, can also become a time of great growth in our understanding of ourselves and of God as well as our faith.
In our Scripture today, Abraham is 85 years old and his wife Sarah is 76. They’ve been unable to have children so Sarah has an idea to allow Abraham to marry her slave girl Hagar who was Egyptian and then try to get her pregnant. She would become a secondary wife with no rights, no voice and no opportunity. Yes they practiced slavery. Some people would buy others for service and others would sell themselves to satisfy their debt. This was a part of the ancient world. Hagar is probably 18 or 19 years old. She is meant to be a surrogate mother for Sarah who would take the child as her own. This was not good news for Hagar. She did not want to sleep with an 85 year old man. She had no choice. She had to do it. She also would have been the wet nurse for the child but the child was no longer her own. Hagar as she becomes pregnant begins to look at contempt toward Sarah because she has forced her to marry an 85 year old man, sleep with him and then become pregnant. On top of all this, she is going to be forced to give up her child whom she has carried for nine months. And Sarah begins to have all the insecurities of an elderly woman who has a younger woman sleep with her husband and been unable to do what she could, have a baby. So Sarah begins to treat Hagar harshly. And finally she goes to Abraham and tells him that Hagar is treating her badly and he slept with her and it was a horrible idea and he needed to do something to fix it. And yet, it was Sarah’s idea all along. Jealousy can jade our view of things. Abraham is passive and says, “You just do what you want with her.” Sarah continues to treat her harshly. Now the Hebrew word harshly is the very same word used 100’s of years later to describe how the Egyptians treated the Hebrews when they were slaves. So she doesn’t just treat her harshly, she oppresses her just as the Hebrews were oppressed.
Hagar can’t handle it anymore and though she is pregnant, she wants to run away. But where is she going to go? Back to Egypt? A journey there would take her through 200 miles of desert. She finds herself at the last spring of water in the desert. Now there will be another oasis but she does not know where it is, how far away it is or even if she will make it. She stops here and feels absolutely hopeless. We find her afraid and wondering if she and her baby will survive and perhaps even wondering why God would allow her to be treated so harshly and where God was in all of this. The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert “And he said, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?” The angel already knows the answer to these questions but through this is trying to encourage Hagar to share her pain and suffering with God. She answers, “I’m running away from my mistress Sarai,” she answered. Then the angel of the Lord told her, “Go back to your mistress and submit to her.” The angel added, “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.”
There are several things we learn from this. First, we’re not lost, God finds us in the wilderness. The angel of the Lord came to Hagar in the wilderness. She is not alone but rather God is constantly looking for us in the wilderness. When we feel like running away, God is searching for us. This is what Jesus comes for, to search for the lost. It’s why he told the three parables of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin and the Lost or Prodigal Son. So God sends this angel, which literally means messenger, to express his love and concern for Hagar and God’s will for her. The angel comes to Hagar at the well. There is a corollary in the Gospel of John where Jesus comes to a Samaritan woman standing at the well. She has been married five times and is an outcast. In both cases, there is a promise and a gift of hope and strength. What the angel said to Hagar is not what she wanted to hear. She wants to hear that she can run away or if she is going to return, God will fix Sarah’s heart toward her. But God doesn’t promise that at all.
When we are in the wilderness, we want God to fix everything. But God never does that but he does promise to walk us through the wilderness. So God says, you have to go back. Hagar found that she could go back for two reasons. First, God found her and was with her in the wilderness. And second, he makes this promise: the child in your womb will be the beginning of a people so numerous that they cannot be counted. This is a promise that the future is going to be better than the present. God says, “I see you, I hear you and I will be with you.”
Second, God knows your plight. With those promises and that knowledge, Hagar prepares to go back to Sarah. But first Hagar names God. Usually, it’s the other way around. God reveals his name but here Hagar names God, the first and only time someone names God in the Bible. She gave this name to God: “You are El Roi, the God who sees me.” El is the name God and Roi means to see. In doing so, Hagar is saying, “I was here all alone in the wilderness and you saw me.” Whatever wilderness you find yourself in and no matter how lost you may feel, God sees you and knows your plight. God is the living one who sees.
Hagar goes back to Sarah but continues to be mistreated. But she gives birth to a son named Ishmael which means ‘God hears.” Sarah takes the child as her own and raises him as such. But there is a friction and tension between Hagar and Sarah. Hagar nurses the child but it is not her own. And so it goes for the next 13 years. Sarah surprisingly becomes pregnant and gives birth at 90 years of age to a son she named Isaac. For Ishmael, it means that Sarah is no longer interested in him. And Sarah really has no use for Hagar anymore. Sarah finally gets angry one day at Ishmael for laughing at Isaac and then goes to Abraham and says, “"Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that woman's son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac." Genesis 21:10 This is very distressing to Abraham because he loved Ishmael but he doesn’t say anything. And so he sends Ishmael and Hagar away, giving them a flask of water and a loaf of bread. On a journey of 200 miles and this is all they get?
Third, God will provide in the wilderness. Part of what this Scripture is helping us to see is that God is always there for us in the wilderness to meet our needs. Hagar has run out of water and food and is exhausted and has collapsed. She sets Ishmael down by the bushes in what little shade it provided and then goes a distances away so she would not see the death of her child. And the Scriptures tell us “she lifted up her voice and wept.” God heard the voice of the crying boy and the angel of God called to Hagar and said to her, “What troubles you Hagar? Do not be afraid for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand for I will make a great nation of him. Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She filled the skin with water, gave the boy a drink and from that time on, God “was with the boy and he grew up in the wilderness.”
Fourth, there is always hope in the future. Even in the darkest of circumstances and at the door of death, God again makes a promise that he will build a great nation from Ishmael. In the wilderness, our natural inclination is to want to return to the way things were, even if it was a bad situation. But God doesn’t do that. God finds Hagar in the wilderness, sees her and hears her cries, and instead of fixing everything so she could go back to Abraham, he leads her forward to a well. God leads her forward into the future. And in this act God reminds Hagar that he has not forgotten her. He sees her, hears her and he feels her pain and desperation. And God comes to her and gives her aid and that was all she needed to get her through one more day.
God doesn’t fix our mixed up and broken relationships. It took a long time to get there. It’s not to say that God can’t fix a broken relationship. He can. If he can bring Jesus back from the dead, he can fix a relationship but it takes a lot of things to do that. God doesn’t make a person want to love you. There has to be confession, repentance and forgiveness. There has to be the willingness to work it our and to go through the pain of rebuilding the relationship. But know this: God never wants you to go back to a broken, pain-filled and perhaps even abusive situation. God says you need to move forward, I am going to be there with you and there is a future filled with hope. You may not be able to see it yet. You just have to trust God and hold onto that promise. No matter where you are, God sees you, hears you and is with you.
Fifth, God sends angels to us in the wilderness. What do angels look like? Many of us have this idea that they have wings and are angelic beings. More often than not, they don’t. They look like you and me when we draw near someone who is going through a rough time in life. We become messengers of God who give love and comfort and hope to those in the midst of the darkness. Most people run from others who are in pain but an angel is someone who draws close to one in pain in the wilderness. It’s in the wilderness that God can speak to us, often through those angels like you and me who choose to be there for those in need and to walk with them through the pain. These are the stretcher bearers who comes along and carry you through the most difficult of times. God sees you. He is El Roi, the God who sees and he draws people around you, angels, to carry you through the pain. God hears you, you are Ishmael, the one who hears and God sends his angels to minister to you in the wilderness. This is the kind of church that I want you to be. You can be those angels God uses to speak hope and promise into the midst of people going through the wilderness. You can be there for them and meet their needs. You can listen to them and carry them when they don’t have the strength to go any further on their own. But to do that, you have to pay attention to the people around you, to look into their eyes and see the pain and to enter their circumstances and speak words of hope.
In the moment when she was sent away by Abraham, it looked like the very worst thing in the world to Hagar. There was no light seen in the darkness. But it became a blessing because she would no longer be in a home where someone hated her all the time. God doesn’t cause bad to happen to us but he can use them to his end, if we let him. It doesn’t matter what you might be facing, a breakup, a separation or even a divorce, God sees you, hears you and wants you to know that the future looks brighter than present and God will be with you all the way.
