After the incredible experience Abram recently had with God, this next chapter shows just how quickly our mountaintop experiences can end. God’s unfathomable display of grace by establishing His covenant with Abram and passing through the pieces Himself is perfectly juxtaposed with Abram’s faithlessness in this chapter. How ungrateful we truly are! God gives us everything and we ask for His throne as well. That is essentially what Abram is doing in this chapter. He has doubted, if only for just a moment, that God could accomplish His promise of a son, and Abram thinks he can do a better job. Abram will try to do what He thinks God cannot.
It starts with Sarai, who at this point must feel brokenhearted by Abram’s constant chatter about a son promised to come. She knows that she cannot provide this son. It is likely that she never heard from God directly, as Abram had. Customs of the day, and even the law, demanded that a woman who could not provide an heir to her husband offer up her slave. The child produced would not belong to the slave but to the wife. Perhaps Sarai had been suggesting this for some time to Abram, and Abram’s faith had deterred him from relenting to the customs that demanded this action. For some reason, however, it is soon after God’s covenant that Abram’s faith slackens and he gives in to Sarai’s suggestion. By almost all accounts, this must have seemed the wise and rational thing to do. It was demanded by law and God had never specifically said that Sarai was the one through whom the son would be born. But this decision Abram made was a sin because it showed a lack of faith in God delivering on His promise. Abram had done well in the past by not choosing to do God’s job for Him, but this one failure was an usurpation of God’s role in providing an heir. This is human effort, which in the history of the world, has never come close to achieving what God is able to do.
Abram listened to Sarai and went in to Hagar and she conceived. I imagine this might have been a slight shock to Abram. Maybe for a moment he might have felt like this was finally the fulfillment to the promised heir. But I think fairly quickly, Abram would have known that he had sinned and that this son could never live up to all the things God had in store for his true heir, not because there was anything wrong with him, but because he was not the miraculous provision that would spring from God’s plans instead of a man’s.
Soon after this, Hagar began to despise Sarai. The reasons for this are not clear, but we can make some guesses. Hagar has seen Sarai and Abram at some pretty low moments. In foreign lands, Abram has been willing to drop Sarai as his wife, calling her his sister in order to protect himself. Sarai has been unable to produce a child for her husband and is at an age advanced enough that this is beginning to seem impossible. Sarai’s inability was Hagar’s strength. She would have felt a certain amount of pride at being able to produce this son for Abram, possibly even being aware that he might be the promised heir of God. She saw a window of opportunity and decided to take it. Unfortunately for Hagar, she underestimated Abram’s love and devotion to his wife, as well as Sarai’s anger.
Sarai approaches Abram with her plea for help. She now regrets having asked Abram to be with Hagar, having seen how she became despised. Abram gives Sarai the ability to do what she pleases in this situation. Sarai dealt harshly with Hagar, and Hagar fled from Sarai. This was probably one of the lowest points in the story of Abram’s journey of faith. Sending away a slave who had borne you a son was against the law. This act would have sparked gossip which probably spread like wildfire throughout the land. It was truly a scandal on par with Abram’s previous blunder in Egypt, which he had to flee in dishonor.
Up until this point, God has been silent, watching and waiting. Abram might have expected God to step in and stop him if this was not His plan. But God did not intervene. Instead, He allows this act of rebellion to occur so He can use it for His own purposes. Hagar has fled, probably quite a far distance, and an Angel of the Lord finds her by a spring in the wilderness. The angel speaks directly to her, asking her where she has been and where she is going. I don’t think this is exactly something that Scripture is directly trying to say, but something that I drew from this is that sometimes God can intervene simply by making us realize the trajectory of our lives. I think Hagar needed to be asked this question. Perhaps before she was a slave with Abram, who undoubtedly treated her well before this incident, Hagar could have been a slave elsewhere, maybe even Egypt. The path she was on right now led to extreme poverty or possibly death. Where she came from might not have been her idea of an ideal situation, but there was life there. This question would have made Hagar pause from her flight from Sarai to consider her life to this point and what her future might hold.
The angel tells her to return to Sarai and submit herself under her hand. This would have been an incredibly hard thing to do. It would mean an extreme humiliation. The issues between her and Sarai would have to be addressed, and the healing process for these kinds of things is often painful. But the angel goes on to reassure her that God will multiply her descendants exceedingly. This is not the blessing she had been hoping for. I’m sure she wished her son could be the one God had been promising to bless Abram with, but since this blessing was being reserved for Sarai, Hagar must have been humbled to know that God cared about her too. The angel goes on to proclaim that the child shall be named Ishmael because the Lord has heard her affliction. How comforting this is to have a God who hears our affliction. God is compassionate. This sole fact ought to humble us to worship. The angel continues by describing the relationship the child’s descendants will have with others. While I don’t pretend to know all the details, the Ishmaelites would later become enemies of the people of God, and thousands of years later would adopt a new religion, Islam. The family feud between Isaac and Ishmael’s descendants rages on to this very day.
This promise to give a blessing to Ishmael answered the prayer in Hagar’s heart. This is the story of the gospel. God hears the prayer of a runaway slave who had nowhere to run to and had no hope of redemption. God steps in and not only meets her basic needs, but then blesses her beyond anything she ever deserved. This point is not lost on Hagar. She gives a name to God: You-Are-the-God-Who-Sees. This might seem like a lame name, but in a world full of gods like Ra, Zeus, and Baal, a god who can see must truly be God, and much more wonderful than anything humans have ever invented to worship. This God does not only have sight, He uses it to search the Earth for those who are suffering in order to comfort them.
Hagar returns to Abram and Sarai, and bore Ishmael when Abram was eighty-six years old. Ishmael may not have been the son Abram had been waiting for, but he would be blessed nonetheless due to the overflow of God’s immeasurable grace.
Read the Bible with Me 