Introduction
Radio personality Paul Harvey tells the story of how an Eskimo kills a wolf: "First, the Eskimo coats his knife blade with animal blood and allows it to freeze. Then he adds another layer of blood, and another, until the blade is completely concealed by frozen blood. "Next, the hunter fixes his knife in the ground with the blade up. When a wolf follows his sensitive nose to the source of the scent and discovers the bait, he licks it, tasting the fresh frozen blood. He begins to lick faster, more and more vigorously, lapping the blade until the keen edge is bare. Feverishly now, harder and harder the wolf licks the blade in the arctic night.
So great becomes his craving for blood that the wolf does not notice the razor-sharp sting of the naked blade on his own tongue, nor does he recognize the instant at which his insatiable thirst is being satisfied by his OWN warm blood. His carnivorous appetite just craves more--until the dawn finds him dead in the snow!"
Though it may not sound appealing to us, there is nothing essentially wrong with the wolf’s appetite for blood. It was created a carnivore, crafted with that craving. The wolf is also free, though tricked it is not forced to lick the knife. But at some point the craving takes over until the wolf is no longer free, He has become slave to a desire that God created in him. Here’s the question that the story of the wolf raises for you and I today:
Interrogative: How can God given desire cause ungodly trouble?
Transition: The answer is when we try to accomplish God’s Purpose with a Human Plan. The story in our text today about Hagar and Sarah is about exactly that kind of trouble. Paul uses it to illustrate the shortcomings and consequences of our trying to short circuit God’s promises. First let’s look at two handicaps or shortcomings of trying to do God’s work in Man’s way.
I. [Two Shortcomings]
The first problem with trying to accomplish God’s Purpose with a Human plan is that we tend to use a...
1. Human Schedule
Genesis 16:1-4 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar; 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. 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. He slept with Hagar, and she conceived.
Abraham understood that God’s plan was to make bless the world through his offspring. That was a good plan as far as Abraham was concerned. He wanted a family, he wanted a heritage. There was just one problem as far as Abraham was concerned, God didn’t seem to be keeping his end of the deal. Abraham decided that his wife’s suggestion was a good one primarily, I think, because God’s timing didn’t match up with Abraham’s timing.
I’m sure that none of you have ever felt that God was taking a little too long to accomplish the things you wanted in life.
For example, in most of our lives (but certainly not all of our lives) God has a plan that includes marriage and ultimate romantic and sexual fulfillment. It’s easy to get impatient and try to short-circuit the path to pleasure. It’s easy to allow that God-given desire to give way to something ungodly. What we really desire is what God wants most for us, but when we get impatient with God’s schedule we end up with something worthless and shameful.
The same can be said for any of the other human paths to pleasure, we get impatient with God’s timing and try to fulfill our God given desires with drugs and alcohol and inappropriate relationships, and a hundred other things in order to fulfill our god given desires and needs for happiness, significance and intimacy but when we try to end run God’s schedule we get what looks appealing until you get into it.
ILLUSTRATION: Like chicken fried by an impatient cook in a pan too hot, what looks crispy and delicious is raw and bleeding when we bite into it.
So a Human schedule is the first shortcoming of trying to accomplish a godly purpose with a human plan. The second shortcoming is..
2. Human Strength
v. 23 His son by the slave woman was born in the ordinary way; but his son by the free woman was born as the result of a promise.
When Abraham tried to take the short road to God’s plan he did so in his own power. He knew that there wasn’t anything he could do to make Sarah conceive and so he settled for what he could accomplish, he got the slave girl pregnant, so it worked, Abraham became a dad. Funny though, it wasn’t very satisfying, why? Because it didn’t fulfill the longing God had put in his heart. He knew it wasn’t God’s plan, it was man’s attempt to manufacture something that looked like God’s plan, It wasn’t done in God’s power but in man’s weakness.
And here is the application of the illustration to what Paul has been teaching us these last few weeks in Galatians. This is the weakness of the law the slavery of the law. It doesn’t really satisfy because it’s not the same thing as Christ being formed within you through the work of the Holy Spirit transforming your heart, transforming your desire. Slavery to the law amounts to our looking at what God wants for our life and trying externally to make our life look like that by following a set of rules.
Oh, to others around it may look very spiritual, you may be faithful in church attendance, you may give and help those in need, you may volunteer in the chapel. Your life may look crispy and delicious, inside though it’s still raw chicken, because you don’t have the strength to accomplish all that God wants for you. He wants you to give up trying to make yourself good enough. To recognize that He’s paid the price, he wants you to hand it over to Him, so that your transformation comes from him, by the renewing of your mind, from the inside out.
What I’m talking about here is a quantum leap, a paradigm shift, a new understanding of what spirituality and Christianity is. Not adherence to a set of rules, but trusting in the one Who paid for all your broken rules.
The Bible makes it plain that once we make this leap of faith that a change takes place from the inside out, freeing us to want God’s will in God’s way. So you see it’s not that I’m set free from God’s Plan, but I’m set free for God’s plan, to desire to do what makes Him happy because I understand that that’s really what makes me happy.
Trying to do God’s work in man’s way short circuits that Joy and it falls short of God’s Goals because it relies upon a human schedule and upon human strength.
Now let’s take a look at the consequences of doing God’s work in man’s way. The first is...
II. [Two Consequences]
1.Results in Separation
vv. 29-30 At that time the son born in the ordinary way persecuted the son born by the power of the Spirit. It is the same now. But what does the Scripture say? "Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman’s son."
Immediately when Sarah and Abraham attempt to take the shortcut to God’s plan, fellowship is broken. Hagar begins to despise her mistress, later the child of that union, despises his younger brother. Why? Because they understand the difference between the promise and the placebo. Abraham and Sarah are dissatisfied with the outcome of their plan too.
And the same happens to us when we take the path that led Abraham to Hagar’s tent. Whether it be to the camp of slavery to sin or slavery to law we experience dissatisfaction and separation. When we go the path of sin to short circuit God’s plan we are racked with guilt and guilt is a powerful isolator. We feel separated from God because we are, we feel separated from our brothers & sisters because we are sometimes because we have broken faith with them or treated them badly, or simply because of our shame.
When we are enslaved to the law we are disappointed because we don’t experience the full and joyful life God intends for us. Instead obedience to the rules becomes drudgery, because we think of the rules as what God is requiring of us we find ourselves disappointed with God. We aren’t united with our brothers and sisters because the law makes us play the comparison game.
Paul quotes Sarah’s line from the story in Genesis, "Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance." I think this is Paul’s way of making it clear that a mix of Grace and works such as the Judaizers were suggesting could never work out. We must fully understand that God alone has saved us, there is no credit for us, we have simply come as beggars receiving the Gracious gift of Christ.
The second consequence of Trying to accomplish God’s Work in Man’s Way is what we’ve been talking about for a few weeks now...
2. Results in Slavery
v. 25 Now Hagar stands for Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present city of Jerusalem, because she is in slavery with her children.
Slavery to sin is much like killing a wolf in the Eskimo way, the desire itself drives us, consuming us. What seemed to be an exercise in freedom is ultimately the cruelest slavery. The drug addict on the street has less freedom than a convict in the jail. Nor has the run of the mill good person outside of Christ any more freedom than either of them. Each of us lives in bondage to desires, desires which point ultimately to the kind of fulfilled life God intends us to have, but left to our own devices we helplessly seek to fulfill them at times, or in ways or degrees which ultimately harm us.
Slavery to the law is no better. Though we may be working for what seems obviously to be God’s will for us, we do it not out of a freedom to fulfill God’s best, but out of constraint, an obligation. Like the groom at a shotgun wedding, doing what’s right isn’t a joy but a burden.
CONCLUSION
Fortunately for us, we don’t have to be slaves to either sin or the Law. God’s grace has appeared in the person of Jesus Christ. Paul wrote in his letter to Titus, that God’s grace teaches us to say no to sin, it doesn’t force us, it teaches us, the Holy Spirit living in us helps us understand God’s best for us, and helps us to fulfill it, not out of fear but out of understanding.
As the final verse of our text says: "Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman."
