Where He Lead I Will Follow: The God Who Sees Me

 

Then the LORD’s angel said to her, “Return to your mistress and submit to her authority. I will greatly multiply your descendants,” the LORD’s angel added, “so that they will be too numerous to count.”  Genesis 16:9-10

 In Genesis 16, two women are highlighted: Sarai and Hagar. These two women found themselves confronted with the option to believe and obey God, or not, and they made different choices. Neither was perfect, neither did exactly as she should have, but we can learn from them both.

 Sarai was Abram’s wife and had traveled with him across the known world. Presumably, she knew about the promises God had made to Abram in Genesis 12:2,7 , Genesis 13:14-16, and Genesis 15:4, but ten years had passed since they entered the land that God had called them to, and still she had no children. It would make perfect sense for her to determine that she couldn’t have children as she was well past the child-bearing age and had not conceived. But this is where her test of belief came in. If God had wanted Abram and Sarai to do something in order to bring about the fulfillment of His promise, He would have told them. He told Abram to leave the place and household that they lived in, making it clear that they were supposed to act, to change their circumstances. But when it came to Abram’s descendants, God said, “I will make you into a great nation…” (Genesis 12:2a). Abram wasn’t to do something special to make it happen, he just needed to believe, which the New Testament records that he did (Romans 4:3, 18; Galatians 3:6, James 2:23). But, after ten years of waiting for the promise to be fulfilled and not seeing any hope of fruitfulness on the horizon, Sarai decided to take matters into her own hands, giving her Egyptian servant, Hagar, to her husband to have sex with. Could Abram have said, “No”? Certainly! He is just as much at fault in this situation as Sarai was. But then Abram was confronted with the results of his choice – Hagar became pregnant and saw herself as better than her mistress because of it. His household was divided and his peace lost. Was it worth it? I doubt he would say yes at that stage in the story. In an effort to console his wife, and perhaps avoid personal responsibility, he told Sarai, “She’s your servant, you decide what to do with her,” (personal paraphrase of Genesis 16:6).

 So where is Hagar in all this? She’ s had quite the crazy story so far already. Who knows how she ended up a servant, perhaps she was born into it, but it’s likely that she was brought into Abram’s household and Sarai’s service while the couple was in Egypt (Genesis 12:16). Perhaps she had lived with them for nearly a decade when, one day, her mistress tells her that she is giving Hagar to her husband to have sex with. That had to be a surprise! I feel pretty bad for her, but this was not uncommon with women in these times. They were typically given or sold into relationships not of their choosing. Not that being usual makes it better, but it can give us context. Likewise, it can inform why Hagar might have felt superior to her mistress, Sarai, once she realized that she had become pregnant so quickly when Sarai hadn’t after decades of trying. Maybe she felt like God was favoring her, perhaps it was like a reprieve, a good thing that had happened to her after all she had endured in life, but she didn’t respond to it well. Instead of treasuring up all the good things in her heart as Mary did (Luke 2:19), she began to rub it in – scripture says that she despised Sarai, she treated Sarai with contempt and saw her as insignificant. This led to what I referenced earlier, Abram told Sarai to do with her as she saw fit, and she did. The Bible says that Sarai dealt with Hagar harshly. We don’t know exactly what this entailed, but it made life so terribly miserable for Hagar that she decided running away to the wilderness would be better. Never in a million years could she have guessed what was about to happen there!

 What was Hagar’s plan? Where did she intend to go? What did she intend to do? As a woman there were very few options available to her, and as a pregnant woman even fewer. Before she got very far though, she met up with someone very special, the LORD’s angel. The Bible tells us in Genesis 16:7-14 that he met her near a spring of water in the desert, no doubt she was thirsty and had stopped for a drink. When he asked her where she came from and where she was going, she didn’t try to be deceptive. A runaway slave would not have found favor with anyone most likely, but she didn’t try to hide what she was nor excuse it. She simply said she was running away from her mistress, Sarai. In return, the angel told her some incredible things! He said that she was to return to her mistress, which seemed impossible I’m sure, but then he told her that her descendants would be too numerous to count and made some very specific promises about her son that she was about to give birth to. The result of all this? Hagar felt seen.

 That’s such a basic, critical need for all of us. Being one of billions of humans roaming around on the earth, we can feel so insignificant, so inconsequential. Why does anything we say or do really matter? What’s the point? And this would be compounded even more for a servant, a slave, who had no will of her own, who was mistreated and abused. But through this encounter, God showed Hagar that He sees her and He cares for her. That changed everything. That made her be willing to return to the place of abuse and torture she had just escaped from. That gave her something special that made it all worth it. The Bible tells us that in this encounter, Hagar gave God a name, El Roi, “the God who sees me.” I want you to pause there for a moment. This slave woman gave God a name. That didn’t have to be recorded. God could have let that little fact pass into obscurity, but instead, He held onto it. He recorded it for posterity. God owned that name. Even further, this is the only time in the Bible that a human gives God a name. There are times where people describe the characteristics of God, and the time at the burning bush where God tells Moses His name is “I Am” or אֶהְיֶה, but here the Bible specifically says, “So Hagar named the LORD who spoke to her.” This shows me so clearly how much God cared for her.

Here’s the Thing: Sarai disobeyed God by trying to fulfill His promises in her own power and it backfired on her, causing their family much pain and misery not to mention hundreds of generations of conflict to come. Hagar, though faced with a terrible situation, chose to obey God and return to her mistress. Why? Because God saw her. Because she felt seen. God sees you too. No matter how insignificant you might feel, know that the Creator of the universe sees and knows you personally. He loves and cares for you. What can that empower you to do?