He Hears and He Sees

ReCAST Church of Mattawan

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Welcome to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan, where you can grow in faith, community, and service.

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This is a message from the series Beginning with God, Walking Through the Book of Genesis by Pastor of Teaching and Vision, Don Filsack.

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If you'd like to learn more about Recast or access our sermon archive, please visit us at recastchurch .com.

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Here's Pastor Don. Coming from his word, and that's the way that he works.

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After seeing God meet with Abram last week, he clearly showed that he intends to keep his promise to Abram to make him into a great nation.

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He ultimately said to Abram last week, I'm going to give you a biological heir, I'm going to give you a son.

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And we are now reminded in this text that one thing still remains unresolved. God has promised I'm going to give you a son to Abram, but Abram's wife is unable to conceive.

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And so anybody see a little bit of an issue in this? Unresolved issue in the text, kind of like, okay,

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God promised, you're going to have a biological son, but your wife, we saw back in chapter 11, verse 30,

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God, through the pages of revealed scripture said, Sarai was unable to conceive, she was barren.

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And so that seems to be the issue. And so in this text, we find a bizarre and ineffective plot to try to make the promises of God happen.

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Sarai is going to come up with a plot. And even though this text shows ultimately the failure of Sarai to obtain the promises of God through her own methods, and even though this plot shows how trying to engineer our own blessings actually leads to deeper hardship, we also see that often in our foolishness,

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God has the opportunity to shine out his character all the more. And he's going to use this strange circumstances, strange plot from Sarai to shine out his own character all the brighter.

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In other words, the darker the circumstances, the brighter the light of the glory of God shines.

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And have you experienced that in your life? Sometimes it's at the darkest moments when the brightness of God shines through.

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And in our text, God reveals himself to be the God who hears the cries of the destitute, and he is the

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God who sees us in our affliction. So I want you to open your Bibles to Genesis chapter 16.

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You can find that on page 10. So if you open that paperback Bible that's back in front of you, turn to page 10, you can find chapter 16 there.

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And I say this often, but I know that some of you actually have taken me up on it, that if you don't own a Bible, please take that one with you.

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We desire for everybody to have a copy of the word of God. And even if you don't own an English Standard Version, that's the one that I prefer personally, and so it might be beneficial for you to have that to be able to read.

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But follow along in Genesis 16, the very words of God to us this morning. Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children.

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She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said to Abram, Behold, now the

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Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go into my servant. It may be that I shall obtain children by her.

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And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. So after Abram had lived 10 years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took

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Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram, her husband, as a wife. Anybody going to go, what?

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And he went in to Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress.

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And Sarai said to Abram, May the wrong done to me be on you. I gave my servant to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt.

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May the Lord judge between you and me. But Abram said to Sarai, Behold, your servant is in your power to do to her as you please.

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And Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she fled from her. The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur.

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And he said, Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?

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She said, I am fleeing from my mistress, Sarai. The angel of the Lord said to her, Return to your mistress and submit to her.

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The angel of the Lord also said to her, I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude.

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And the angel of the Lord said to her, Behold, you are pregnant, and you shall bear a son. You shall call his name

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Ishmael, because the Lord has listened to your affliction. He shall be a wild donkey of a man, his hand against everyone, and everyone's hand against him.

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And he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen. So she called the name of the Lord, who spoke to her,

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You are a God of seeing. For she said, Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.

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Therefore the well was called Bir Lahai Roy. It lies between Kadesh and Bered. And Hagar bore

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Abram a son, and Abram called the name of his son, whom Hagar bore Ishmael.

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Abram was eighty -six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram. Let's pray.

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Father, we encounter in this text just kind of a strange ancient custom that seems very bizarre to us, and yet what

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I think all of us can understand even just from the reading of the text is that what we see is Sarai trying to make your promises come true.

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She's trying her best, and she's forlorn, and she's confused and heartbroken over her barrenness and what that meant for her culture and her society was devastating to her.

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Father, there are many of us in this room who are searching and seeking for something to fill an emptiness that we experience in our lives, some maybe even very close to what

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Sarai is struggling with in the text. Father, I pray that you would open our eyes to the reality that you are a

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God who sees and hears us in our affliction. Father, we are a people that go through all of these phases of life, ups and downs, but I know there are many in this room who need to hear from you.

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They need to hear from you, and they need to know that you hear them, that you see them. Father, I pray that that would be reality this morning for all of us, that we would recognize you are a

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God who cares for us. Whether we feel like it or not, whether we have a visitation from an angel or not, ultimately you are declaring what is true of you in this text, that you hear and that you see.

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Father, I ask that you provide comfort to your people, and that as we have an opportunity to worship you this morning through singing,

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Father, that we would do so out of hearts, giving over to you, recognizing that you are super awesome and that you are worthy of our praise.

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I ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Amen. Thanks a lot to the band for leading us.

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I'm very grateful for what you guys do. I encourage you to, you know, like I say every week, we just took a break, but you can get more coffee or donuts or juice at your leisure if you need to.

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And then make sure you have your Bibles open to Genesis chapter 16. I know some of you weren't here when we read that earlier, or you lost your place.

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But open your Bibles to that spot so that you can kind of see, follow along in the text of what's going on here.

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I just want to point out to start off with that Sarai has been absent from the text since way back in Genesis chapter 12.

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We haven't even seen her name since chapter 12, and now we're in chapter 16. And remember what happened back in chapter 12,

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Abram's tried to pass her off as his sister, and she was taken into the house of Pharaoh to be Pharaoh's wife.

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And then God judged Pharaoh's household for taking some other man's wife into his household, and they ended up leaving that place with more wealth than they went there with.

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But with the promise that Abram would have his very own child in the past chapter, it kind of makes sense that the text would then turn back to his wife, who we should expect to bear him a son in short order, right?

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I mean, God just made a promise to Abram that he's going to have a biological son, so we should just anticipate that his wife is going to conceive here pretty quick, and that's what's going to happen.

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I mean, God promised, right? So that's just going to happen now. Is that what we're going to see in this text?

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Is that he's just going to have, I mean, Sarai's going to have a baby, and it's going to be, okay. You guys, some of you were here when

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I read it, or you've heard the story before. One of those two.

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But Abram believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. Abram believed that God was going to provide him offspring, that God was going to make him into a great nation, that God was going to give him the land, that God had chosen him and selected him out to make a blessing to all nations.

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But verse one reminds us that Sarai has, to this point in the text, born no children.

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We were told way back in Genesis 11, 30, that Sarai was barren, making

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Mother's Day miserable for Sarai every year. And there are women, I read a couple blogs this week, that really were directed towards pastors just saying, hey, you know, when you have all of the women who are mothers stand up in your services, it makes me extremely uncomfortable.

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And I think some of you maybe here in the room can relate to that, or maybe you've gone through that in the past, or whatever.

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But it's just interesting to see how that kind of ties into Mother's Day. But Sarai was barren. She was unable to conceive.

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And then ominously, in chapter 16, verse one, another woman shows up in the text, and it's kind of like, okay, now wait, why is she mentioned here again?

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She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. She has an Egyptian handmaid, and it seems quite likely and possibly ironic to those of you who were here back when

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I preached on Genesis chapter 12, that we know that they've been to Egypt. Where's Hagar from? Egypt.

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It seems quite likely that Hagar was acquired while Sarai was taken into the household of Pharaoh to be his wife.

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If you just kind of put things together, when did she arrive at the point where she had a handmaiden from Egypt?

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Probably within the household of Pharaoh, and it says that Pharaoh, when he gave them the boot from the country, booted them with everything that they possessed, everything that they had with them at the time, probably including one of the servants that he had given to her.

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It's interesting to note that she's a personal attendant to this very wealthy family, particularly to Sarai.

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The word that's used there for handmaiden is a very specific term. Family structure was very, very, you can see, family structure was very different back in ancient times than it is today.

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There are some differences. A handmaiden was a servant to the wife, the head wife of the house.

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That's telling you family structure's a little bit different already, right there. The handmaiden was the servant to and reported, therefore, to Sarai, where there would be other servants in the household, especially in an extremely wealthy family like Abram's.

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There were many servants, but most all of the servants would report directly to who? Who do you think? Abram. Most all of them would report directly to Abram.

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This is a unique office that Hagar holds, that she has made servant to the wife of Abram.

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She reports to Sarai. That's the hierarchy in the household.

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But now in verse two, we get what, at face value, looks like a really super bad idea. Sarai's going to hatch a plan.

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After accusing God, that right there's not a great idea, behold, now the

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Lord has prevented me from bearing children. After accusing God of preventing her from having a child, she recommends a sexual relationship between her husband and her handmaiden.

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Anybody kind of go, what? That doesn't sound like a great idea. Now the accusation that God has prevented her from having children, though,

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I'll back up to that for a second. Is she being theologically accurate in that accusation?

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Is it theologically accurate to say that God has prevented her from having children? It is. Yes, that is theologically accurate.

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God is shown to be the one who opens and closes wombs throughout Scripture. It's declared of Him multiple times in the

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Old Testament. It's almost a title for Him in various sections of Scripture, that He is the one who opens the womb,

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He is the one who closes the womb. But Sarai is not merely making a theological observation. Can you imagine how this is more than a theological statement,

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God has prevented me from having a child? Is she just kind of waxing eloquently and kind of academically stating, making this statement?

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Is that the way you picture this going down in the text? Or is there maybe a little bit of emotion tied to the way that she declares this?

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God has not given me a child. Do you think there's maybe a little bit of frustration for Sarai in the text?

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Yes. She wants nothing more than to provide an heir for her family.

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She wants her hands long to hold a son, and she has no children to hold.

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A very tough place for her. Now the suggestion that Abram takes

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Hagar as a baby maker is a crass notion, and even just stating that, I state that crass because the text is somewhat crass in the way that it addresses

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Hagar, and the way that Abram treats her is very crass as well. And it's, how many of you think that notion is kind of, am

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I accurate to say that's crass in our culture? Where we live today, is that just kind of strange that that's what's going to happen here?

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But we need to understand that this concept is pretty common throughout the Middle East during this era. We've actually uncovered, archeology has uncovered, not me personally, but archeology has uncovered prenuptial agreements drawn up prior to marriage that date back to about this era throughout the

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Middle East and in various cultures throughout the Middle East, to the effect that if the wife is unable to conceive, it is her obligation to provide a surrogate for her husband to provide an heir for him.

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That's how significant, in these cultures, to have an heir to carry on your family line was the chief, that was the goal, the drive, more than becoming

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CEO, more than anything that a man could achieve, it was to have an heir for his family to carry on the line.

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Are you getting what I'm saying? And so, if you live in a culture where everything is centered around the heir and your first born son, and that's the biggest thing to you, then can you understand how the prenuptials might even include that?

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And that's what actually was going on in that ancient culture in that time. But the interesting thing, consistent in all of these, is that the baby is accounted to the wife and not the surrogate in this case, and that's even in the prenuptials, that if she provides a surrogate mother, then the baby that's born to that surrogate is accounted to the wife as if she is the one who has given birth.

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Are you getting what I'm saying by that? And that's going to be significant here in a minute, because it is that if Hagar has a son, he is supposed to be reckoned as if Sarai had the baby.

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But then we see some strange things begin to happen by the end of the text, where we're going to find out somebody else names the baby not

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Sarai, which is what our expectations would be if this baby is indeed credited to Sarai, that she should be the one who names it, and it should be declared that the baby was born to her.

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We're actually going to see some circumstances coming down the pipeline here, where we're going to see Jacob. Jacob has how many wives?

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A couple. He has Rachel and Leah, right? Those are his two wives.

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And then his two wives have two concubines that they give to Jacob, Zilpah and Bilhah.

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And the two of them are going to have some babies too, right? But who gets to name the babies that Zilpah and Bilhah have?

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The wives. They don't ever get to name anything, right? And the babies are credited to the wives, and that's the way that it goes, but not so in our text, and that's going to key us off to something significant that's happening here, something different.

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Whenever you see the pattern broken, you kind of go, okay, what's happening? We'll get there at the end. But as strange as it seems to our modern sensibilities, it's culturally accepted in ancient culture, and yet I want to point out cultural acceptability does not make something morally good.

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That our culture accepts something does not make it morally good. That it's okay by our culture that you're not breaking any laws, that it's not criminal doesn't make everything good, not by any stretch of the imagination.

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What Sarai does is good in the eyes of everyone around her, but it doesn't come with the sanction of God.

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It's not as though God said, you shall do this. I don't want to be too harsh on Sarai, though.

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I find a mix of emotions dealing with the story. I do not think that she's crazy out of bounds in this action.

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I think she is roped into cultural methods that were just so common in her day and age that it was probably hard for her to pull herself out of what

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God is trying to do and what is her obligation. Maybe there were even some prenuptial agreements drawn up between Abram and Sarai.

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We don't know that. But there is something of an anger at God that leads her to think that she needs to take this into her own hands, and I think that that is accurate.

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We're going to see her wrath and her anger very quick in the text. And it's in this distrust of God that her primary sin lies.

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Not resting in Him, she takes on her own shoulders to complete what God is the one who has promised to do.

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Do you see that in the text? She's saying, I'm going to have to do this. She has a self -importance issue, and it's going to cause some hardships pretty quick for their family.

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Abram is passive, very much like his predecessor, Adam. I think that we are intended to actually see some imagery between Adam and Abram here, and Sarai and Eve.

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As a matter of fact, there are some verbs mentioned in the text. Verse 3, so after Abram had lived 10 years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took

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Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram, her husband. Exact same verbal phrases used in the garden when she took the apple and gave to her husband.

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The same exact terminology. As a matter of fact, if you're reading it in Hebrew, you go, I think I've heard that before. If you're reading Genesis from beginning to end, in Hebrew language, you go, that sounds super ultra -familiar.

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Where did I see that again? You go back to the garden, where Adam is there being passive.

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He said, okay, well, she says, she eats the apple. It's okay, I'll eat it too, whatever fruit it was, whatever. So we see him being passive.

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Sarai says, get with Hagar. He says, duh, okay, you said it, okay.

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The end of verse two, and that's exactly how he said it. I mean, that's how, that's how, I mean, scholars would say that's how he talked.

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So, duh. The end of verse two could just as easily be translated,

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Abram obeyed his wife. He obeyed her. Okay, well, wait a minute.

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Now, some of you guys in the house are kind of going, yeah, I can kind of relate to that. Some wisdom in that from time to time.

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Obedience is a strange word to be applied between a husband and wife. Would you agree with that in either direction, really?

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Not necessarily a super awesome, strong word for a wife obeying her husband or a husband obeying his wife, for that matter, but certainly this is going the wrong direction, at least.

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So if we push the pause button for just a moment, you kind of know the plan that's coming into play here. Can you imagine that this is going to go well?

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Just say that you, I mean, say you haven't had some history in Sunday school, you haven't read the rest of the story, you just get to this point right now, and Sarai has hatched this plot with Hagar, and it's about to go down, and is this a good idea?

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How do you think this is going to go? Knowing what you know of human nature, how do you think this is going to go?

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Human nature has not changed. Okay, we are sinful, we're selfish, we want everything to ourselves.

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You think this is going to go well? What do you think? How many, raise your hand if you think this is going to go poorly? Okay, I think most of us think that this is not going to work out.

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But Abram, who has lived for 10 years now in Canaan, takes Hagar as his wife, the word for wife is a specific word that is not the word concubine that we might expect.

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Hagar is actually elevated to the same plane as Sarai here. Many people don't catch that, but there are other offices in the family, other positions for her to hold, including concubine, that does not elevate her in social standing to the same place as wife.

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But the word that is used here is strictly wife. It is, although, how many of you know that when you see polygamy in scripture, that there's always a favorite wife?

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Have you noticed that? Again, we're talking about fallen human nature, we're talking about brokenness here. And so who's going to end up probably being the favorite wife in this family?

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Sarai. But Hagar is technically supposed to be on the same par with her as far as office is concerned.

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So there's a marriage that happens here. We do not have what some might consider illicit sexual liaison in the text, but that doesn't mean that this is a good thing.

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Again, polygamy is not a God -sanctioned thing. It is never glorified in the text. Some atheists have really attacked scripture on that point, or even attacked a biblical understanding of marriage, saying, well, yeah, if you want a biblical marriage, go ahead and get yourself a couple wives.

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Have any of you ever heard that or seen that? Or any of you read the comments at the end of posts and blogs?

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And that stuff appears frequently. But I would suggest to you that if you just follow the portions of scripture that include polygamy, follow the narrative portions, the historical texts that talk about polygamy, it reads like an anti -polygamy commercial.

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You're not going to read those texts and go, wow, that sounds like a great idea. That sounds like a fun life.

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Let's sign up for that. Are you getting what I'm saying? Go ahead and read through those sections of scripture that talk about polygamy, that where it actually occurs, and it does not look pretty.

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It doesn't look like a good thing, including this context here. So Abram takes

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Hagar as his wife, and they conceive, and Hagar immediately jumps to contempt towards Sarai.

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She's been elevated overnight to the mother of the heir of her master, and she gloats.

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And according to the term that's used there, probably even mocks and derides and calls Sarai names.

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The first interpersonal relationship that we have, according to scripture, in a polygamous marriage, and contempt is the starting line.

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Are you getting what I'm saying? That's like where, okay, you know, first time that we actually see a polygamous marriage where we actually have any interaction between the parties.

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Now, we've seen it already happen before earlier in Genesis, but now we have interaction and there's contempt immediately. Do you see how that's like the gun, the gun goes off, the marriage, the

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I do, and there's contempt right away. A correct ordering of family does matter to culture and society, does matter for human flourishing, does matter for the blessings of society and culture.

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This brings to mind a proverb of Solomon that says, under three things, the earth trembles.

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Under four, the earth cannot stand, it cannot bear up. Okay, so listen to these things.

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The last one's the one I'm concerned with the most. A slave when he becomes king causes the earth to tremble. That's a terrifying thing, in other words.

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A fool when he's filled with food, okay. An unloved woman when she gets a husband.

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In other words, a wife that's not loved. And lastly, are you ready for this one? A maid servant when she displaces her mistress.

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The exact same words in the text. Sarai is going to be called the mistress of the household, and Hagar is going to be called the maid servant, and she has now displaced the wife of the family.

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She now has the highest standing of all women in the household of Abram. Why? Because she is the one who is going to bear the heir, at least apparently according to the text where we're at right now, where the text stands.

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And I'm not quite sure how Sarai thought this was going to go. Put yourself in her shoes for a second.

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She thinks this was going to, did she really think she was going to be okay with this? Did she really think that when it all, or did she even think that far down the road, okay,

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Hagar's going to bear a son and it's all going to just be okay, and maybe she didn't count on the contempt?

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But Sarai finds out that sometimes the things we think we want come at a price that we were not counting on paying.

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I think many of us have experienced that in life. I mean, it's been around long enough to go, we wanted it, but now we're not sure why or how we're going to handle it.

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And in verse five, she attacks Abram. And Sarai said to Abram, may the wrong done to me be on you, exclamation point.

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Sarah, in the text, gets her crazy on. Okay, she acknowledges in the same breath, guys, be patient here.

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She acknowledges in the same breath that this was her idea and it's totally his fault. Do you see it there in the text?

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Verse five, may the wrong done to me be on you. So may you be, may the contempt be heaped on your head.

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I gave you my servant for your embrace. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt.

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May the Lord judge between you and me. And she even invokes God on her side of the argument.

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God is really on my side. That's what she says. God is really on my side. My idea,

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I gave my servant to you. May the contempt be on you. This is all your fault. Some people are laughing and I think we all know why we're laughing, so I'm not going to say it, but I think most of us in the room have been in conversations similar to this from time to time.

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She ultimately wishes contempt upon him and invokes the judgment of God on her husband.

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This woman is flipping out. And she is in the line of Jesus Christ, our

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Lord and Savior. He uses people who flip out and lose control from time to time.

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I'm glad that he can use all of us despite our crazy. How many of you have had your crazy on from time to time? Any of you?

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Okay. Sometime, some of you just this morning. Some of you are waiting until this afternoon, but never at church, right?

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We don't always say that. We know when to filter that. Abram, of course, his wife lashes out at him.

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And so, of course, he responds like a pile of meat. He says, she's your servant.

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Do whatever you want. Oh, great advice, Abram. This is stellar. A way to lead your family forward in godliness and in righteousness and take the leadership of your family.

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Now, he's like, okay, she's your servant. Do what you want. He takes passivity in his family leadership to a new level.

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Hagar is now, what role to him? What is the relationship between Abram and Hagar?

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Husband and wife. He has a fundamental obligation to protect her, except that this appears to be too much work to figure out.

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So he says, you know, I got an idea. Why don't you two just fight it out? Why don't you two just have a cat fight and get this taken care of?

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Now, remember, who started this? Who started heaping contempt at first?

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The tension in the relationship between Hagar and Sarai comes from who, first and foremost? Hagar. Hagar is the one who has heaped contempt on her mistress, saying, you can't have a baby.

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Girl fights are the worst, by the way. You ever see a guy fight?

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Like, they punch each other in the face, and then they go sit down and have lunch together, right? I mean, that's kind of the way it goes. Ooh, crunch, crunch, and then, oh, man, you were pretty strong.

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Okay, and that's like, dude, all right, you hungry? Girl fights, they like claw, they bite, they grab hair.

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I don't even know that, if you have to break a fight physically apart, it's almost always two girls. Like, have you ever seen that?

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Any of you see a fight in high school? You see a girl fight in high school? Oh, that is a mess. Um, not cool, gobs of hair and stuff.

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Um, not cool. And Sarai abuses Hagar. Um, Sarai, don't mess with Sarai, she's scrappy, okay?

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And she takes Hagar down. She treats her harsh enough that Hagar had to flee for her safety.

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This is like the great, great, great, great, great, add a few more greats, grandma of Jesus Christ, okay? And she's fighting with her servant, physically.

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Hagar makes it quite a ways away, down into the Sinai Peninsula. Like, a couple hundred miles away is where we find her.

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It appears that she may be making an indirect pathway to Egypt. She's down, if you can picture, anybody picture the

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Sinai Peninsula when I do this? She's getting down near the tip of the Sinai Peninsula. She's got nowhere else to go except up to Egypt.

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So it's assumed that she's heading back home in a very indirect route. Um, but she's, she's down in the

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Sinai Peninsula when the angel of the Lord finds her by a well. Probably at that point, hanging out near the well because she doesn't know where the next water source is.

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She's out in the middle of the desert, wandering. She's pregnant and alone. Can you put yourself in her shoes?

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Fearful, scared, not knowing where to go, having nobody in the world.

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And the angel of the Lord appears to her and asks her where she is coming from and where she is going to. You notice by her reply that she doesn't even say where she's going to because what is first and foremost happening in Hagar's mind, all she can process is where she's been.

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I'm running from Sarai. I'm running from my, from my master. I don't, I don't know. That's all that, that's all she can process at this point.

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This angel is a mysterious figure and appears throughout the Old Testament whenever you see that designation angel of the

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Lord. When you and I hear the word angel, we have a little bit of a problem in our understanding because we immediately jump to a specific type of being, a category of created, um, of, uh, created,

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I almost said organism, but a created entity, like angels and humans and God and different, different things out there that exist, right?

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But the word angel in Hebrew and in Greek both share some similarities in that they mean messenger.

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It's a much more generic term than we use. Now, there's definitely an indication that angels are a specific, unique creation of God, a specific order of beings, but not every time that we see the word angel does it mean that it's that, that order of created thing.

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Um, I believe personally that the angel of the Lord is something different here because he is often ascribed deity without any correction.

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In other words, people, people will call him God, will worship him, will talk to him, will bow down to him, and then name things

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I have seen God after they encounter this angel of the Lord, a very specific designation in the

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Old Testament. Here in a couple of verses, Hagar is going to say that she has seen the

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Lord. Later, when Jacob wrestles with the angel of the Lord, he declares he has wrestled with God and his name,

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Jacob's name is changed to what? Israel, which means he who has wrestled with God.

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Okay, so there's all kinds of indications that this is very unique, that this angel of the Lord is something more than just, you know, the archangel

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Michael or Gabriel or something like that. You can disagree with me, but I believe that this messenger is, this messenger of God is a theophany.

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That is a great big seminary word that just means a physical manifestation of God that he actually physically appeared in the

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Old Testament. And I lean towards this being a pre -incarnate appearance of Jesus Christ himself, the second member of the

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Trinity. I think that what we have here is God in flesh coming down and appearing to her in a unique manifestation, just like he could take the form of a burning bush, just like he can take the form of a pillar of cloud, here he appears to her as a man.

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But this messenger of God tells Hagar to return and submit to Sarai. Anybody struggle with that advice?

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Just being honest? She's just been abused and beat up by her mistress and then it's like, go back and return.

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Two comments for practical counsel on this that I think is important. First is the reality that Hagar was the first aggressor.

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She mocked Sarai and brought contempt. Sarai then, of course, responded harshly. But it's quite possible that this relationship could be healed by an apology from Hagar.

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You see the potential there for this to be healed by her going back and saying, I'm sorry and I submit to your leadership and I shouldn't have treated you that way and I shouldn't have called you those names,

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I shouldn't have done that. And that there could be healing between Sarai and Hagar and I think that it's quite possible that the

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Lord himself knows how that's gonna work out. Second is that my personal counsel will never be to go back into an abusive situation.

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That's not gonna be my personal counsel as a pastor, that you go back into an abusive situation and submit to your abuser unless God himself appears to me and tells me to counsel you that way.

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That's the only way that I'm gonna counsel you to go back to an abusive situation is if God himself has appeared to me and told me to.

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Remember that God knows the future outcome of this and he knows what is best for Hagar and Sarai in this specific circumstance and so I'd be cautious applying this to any counsel that you might give a coworker who's in an abusive relationship.

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My advice to anybody who is in a physically abusive relationship is to separate from that person immediately, get some distance between you and your abuser.

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That's gonna be my advice, again, unless God tells me otherwise. The Lord gives her hope for her future.

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She who has blessed Abram will in turn be blessed. Wasn't that a promise that God gave to Abram a couple chapters ago?

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Those who bless you will be blessed and those who dishonor you will be cursed and Hagar has been a blessing.

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She's been willing and her offspring will indeed be numerous just like his according to the text.

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The Arabs claim to have descended from Ishmael and they are indeed quite numerous. So some people see some correlation there but further the messenger plays the role of ultrasound tech here in the text and declares that she will have a son and his name is to be

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Ishmael. Of course your ultrasound tech shouldn't be giving you the name of your children but maybe that works,

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I don't know. But Ishmael means the God who God hears.

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That's what it means, not the God who but it means God hears. God has heard her inner affliction and he is never far away from the downcast and the afflicted.

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Verse 12 is pretty direct. I'm not sure I'd want to know this in advance if this was the future of one of my sons. Any of you kind of know what

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I'm talking about here? You read verse 12 and you're like, just don't even, if that's what I've got to look forward to, don't tell me about it.

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He is going to be a wild donkey of a man which is a generous translation, okay?

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He will be against everyone and everyone will be against him and he will dwell in opposition even to his kinsmen.

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The picture here of Ishmael's life moving forward is a self -defined, self -dependent man who burns bridges and lives to battle and war against everybody around him, including his own family.

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How many of you, if you're the mom, you're the mom, you're already showing and the angel comes to you and says, by the way, you're going to be numerous, it's going to be super awesome and your son is going to be a wild man.

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You're kind of like, what, what? How many of you are like exalting in God and super rejoicing?

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It's interesting because she doesn't pay as much, I wonder if she heard him. She's like, did she really pay attention to the content because what we get from Hagar is her awe in the fact that she has met

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God and I wonder if you or I were to sit down and meet God, like that would just be like, okay, I mean, whatever you have to say,

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I'm receiving this because it's super awesome to sit down here and talk with you right now. Do you know what I'm saying? So that's all that, she's just enamored.

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I have seen God. I have seen the one who has seen me and my affliction. You know, he's revealed himself as the

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God who hears and the God who sees and he knows me and not only that, but he came and he like said her name right away.

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You notice he knows who she is. He interacts with her immediately about what's going on.

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So she titles God. And by the way, she's one of the only characters, people in history who has ever given

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God a title. God's pretty good at giving himself titles. She gets to give him one and she calls him the

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God of seeing. For she has seen the one who has seen her.

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And there's a pun, a Hebrew pun on the word for seeing in verse 13, it's like as if to say, and it just kind of gets confusing.

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He is the God of seeing because I have seen him who sees me. So kind of what the Hebrew says. Her experience of God in this text is one of comfort and affliction.

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He has heard her affliction and he has seen her in her time of trial. When people encounter

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God, they often give a name, a new name to the place where they met him and she names this well, Bir Lahai Roy.

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Bir being the word for well, interesting. Lahai Roy, ultimately meaning the well of the living one who sees me.

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It's very efficient language. You know, you get those three little parts and it means the well of the living one who sees me.

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And without much fanfare, we find her back in the household of Abram. Without mention of Sarai, notice that we're not gonna see

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Sarai again in the rest of the text. We don't know what the reconciliation looked like between the two of them, but we do find

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Hagar returned to the household of Abram. She bears a son to Abram and Abram offers the name

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Ishmael. Abram is 86 years old when all of that comes down. But a couple of points leave us in tension.

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We end verse 16, unsure. I mean, you and I know the end result. We know the text.

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And so I think sometimes we miss the awe because of what we already know. So that if you're reading the story for the first time, there's some things that ought to stand out to you that we miss because we're like, oh, there's that whole

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Isaac thing that's gonna happen and we know how it's gonna go. Is Ishmael the child of the promise?

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And you can shake your head no, but you would be so utterly unreasonably unsure at this point in the story.

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You wouldn't know. And you'd be justified in going. If you were Abram, you'd be like, I think he's,

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I think God has provided me a son. I think maybe we've got the child of the promise here.

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What was Abram's promise last week? That a child would come from his own loins? Has that occurred?

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Yes. He wasn't promised that Sarai would deliver him a child. He was promised that a child would come from his own loins.

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His naming of Ishmael shows that he had some indication that this was indeed his heir at this point.

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Usually those children born of a handmaiden are named by the mistress or the head wife. This confers status to Hagar that Sarai doesn't name the boy.

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Hagar is indeed a wife of Abram. And really ultimately in this text is enough drama for your mama in the passage.

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So happy Mother's Day. I just was looking to get that in there somewhere.

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Drama for your mama. But once again, we find room to apply these things to our everyday lives.

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So how does this filter down to us? You know, there's guys sitting in the room. There's like, well, what's going on here and all of this and moms and singles and children.

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And first is the reality that the plan of salvation does not rest on our shoulders.

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We cannot bring down the promises of God to us and make them happen.

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And ultimately it comes down to what is our hope? What is our new covenant hope?

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What are our new covenant promises that God would bless all the nations through Israel carried over from the old covenant? God worked his plan through Jesus Christ.

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And that plan is a historical event that we all had very little to do with.

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Were you present 2000 years ago when they crucified Christ? How many of you were there to see it?

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Okay, none of us. We weren't there to observe. And yet I would suggest to you in a very real way,

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Golgotha, the hill of the skull, Calvary outside of Jerusalem was the place of salvation for us.

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That is the place of salvation. Now, some of you are going, well, wait a minute. No, it was a church basement. You know, for me, when

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I was eight years old and an Awana programmer, no, the place of salvation for me was out in the woods with a counselor who led me to Christ or in my mom and dad's room when my dad shared the gospel with me or whatever.

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You know, you're going, well, it was the place of... No, the place of salvation for you is the cross of Jesus Christ on that hill where he gave his life for you and me.

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That is the location of salvation. And what did you have to do with that again? What part did we play?

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How did we save ourselves there? We didn't. How much do we have control over that?

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None. We are only saved by anchoring our lives by faith to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ 2 ,000 years ago on the cross.

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If a person tells me a testimony of salvation without mentioning the cross, I'm gonna be honest,

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I get concerned. Do you know what I'm talking about? If a person tells me their testimony of how they came to faith in Christ and there is no cross there,

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I say, no, wait, what happened to your sin again? How did your sin get dealt with?

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How did that get taken care of for you? Did you take care of that by praying a prayer? Was that where you dealt with your own sin by praying to God?

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Is that what I'm hearing? Or does the cross factor into your testimony? Is the cross the place of your salvation?

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Do you recognize that? That is where salvation occurred 2 ,000 years ago.

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It was the plan of God carried out by the Trinity 2 ,000 years ago. I trusted it 32 years ago.

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You may have trusted it more recently than that or further back. But the fact of the matter is you and I did not make it happen.

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God did it as a fulfillment of his promise from the Old Testament carried over to the

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New. And that leads into a secondary application. Abram has a problem with overt passivity.

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He's just going with the flow and his party to a bad plan here because he just doesn't, he's just like, whatever, okay,

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I'll just do what you tell me to do. He's not involved. He's not engaged in the process. But equally,

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Sarai is on the other end of the spectrum, hyperactive in her faith. So can you see the model between Abram and Sarai where Abram is super passive in his faith and Sarai is overactive in her faith?

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Is it possible to find ourselves on one end of the spectrum, hyperactive thinking that we've got to accomplish it, we've got to do it.

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If anybody's going to get it done, it's going to have to be us like Sarai or just kind of like laid back, chilling.

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I like if it's going to happen, it's going to happen, whatever, all right. Are you getting the tension and the balance there?

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And certainly there's also the roles that the two of them play that are not particularly what

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God would desire for the gender that he has created us. I would suggest to you a balance, however, once again, seeking wisdom from the

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Lord on when it's appropriate to act and when it's appropriate to wait. And but then also consider the God -given roles that he has placed you in in life.

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Even by giving you a gender, he has given you roles. Adam and Abram sit back while their wives come up with the plans.

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And that is an awful lot like what life looks like in America today in a lot of families.

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Men just sitting back while the wives are trying to carry it all. Am I being kind of hard on the men?

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Maybe. I am one. So I think I can speak pretty accurately to that. But then equally,

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I can say that many of you wives are aggressive with your plans. You are trying to push through what you desire to have happen and you will do anything to try to get there, including getting your crazy on.

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And so I think that this cuts both ways in regard to the way that we interact with each other in our households, in our families.

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Men, take spiritual leadership in your household. And if you're struggling with that, come and talk with me. I know that we had a men's group that was meeting on Saturday mornings for a while.

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We've taken a break off of that and I'd like to eventually get that restarted. If you're interested in something like that where we could get together, just read a book together.

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That's what we were doing, reading a book and then studying it together, just discussing questions oriented around that.

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I found it very beneficial. We studied some stuff about being good fathers, being good husbands, just being good men, all different kinds of topics that we kind of covered there, including just some good theology and studying who

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God is. So if you're interested in that, let me know. But the third thing, we also see in the text that Sarai gets what she wanted and found out that what she wanted wasn't really what she wanted.

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Did you follow the logic in that? And that calls into question our pursuits.

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What are we pursuing? What is it that we really want to have happen? I suggest that there's all different kinds of things that we might be pursuing.

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Wealth, cars, money, technology, stuff, fame, social standing was a big deal for Sarai. She's pursuing that.

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I'm gonna be know that there's a lot of things that will pull at you for your attention in this life. A lot of things that will draw down energy and power and strength from you if you give yourselves over to them.

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And some of it's good. Some of it's okay. It's just not what is best, right? And that's the big struggle in life is we can do a lot of good things without really ever getting down to the core of what is best.

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Let me suggest to you that there's only one thing that has sure dividends in this life and that is the pursuit of God.

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That is the one sure thing that will provide dividends. All other things cannot make good on their promises, but worship, service, and pursuit of God through the

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Holy Spirit, through a right relationship with God, as a saved person who is connected with God through the cross, then that can satisfy you and will yield eternal rewards.

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We serve the God who hears and the God who sees. He reveals himself that way in the text.

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And at the fullness of time, God sent forth his son born of a virgin and he lived a sinless life and died a sinner's death for you and me.

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He has come to us in our affliction and said, I hear you. He has entered into our pain with us and said,

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I see you. So if you're trusting in Christ and his sacrifice on the cross to wipe away your sins, then take the cracker and the juice and as you hold them in your hand this morning, take pause and give up to God your burdens this morning.

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He hears you. He sees you. He is the God who hears and the

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God who sees and he is never far away from the oppressed, the afflicted and the downcast.

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Let's pray. Father, I thank you that you are a

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God of compassion. You give us things that we don't deserve and yet at the same time, some

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I know in the room are going through just very dark and difficult times. Father, you're still good.

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Even in the hardest things that we face in this life, we still have hope. Maybe it isn't even, maybe some in the room are saying,

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I don't even have hope in this life, but there is still at least hope in the life to come. I ask that you would help us to release our burdens to you, to acknowledge that you hear and you see and that those are not just, those aren't just theological observations.

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Those are not just, okay, yeah, he sees me. Yeah, he hears me, but ultimately that encompasses love and compassion.

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Father, that you are doing what you deem best in our lives, even though it may hurt and may be a struggle now.

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Father, I thank you for the good things that you give us, including the difficulties and the trials that lead us to a sharper use for you and ultimately lead us down the road of being better people in the end, because you are sharpening us and you see fit to discipline the ones that you love.

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Father, I pray that as we come to communion, we would recognize that you are not a God who throws difficulty at us to just test us and try us, but you yourself went through difficulty and trial.

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You were spat upon and mocked and derided and your arms were spread wide and nails were piercing you.

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Father, you sent your son to die a gruesome death for us, that you are not removed from our affliction, but you entered into it with us.

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I ask that you would help us to reflect on that as we release our burdens to you, recognizing that our sins were born on the cross, on the shoulders of our

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Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Let us rejoice this week and to walk with you. And Father, if there are any in this room who do not know what it means to have a life of freedom in Jesus by forgiveness,

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Father, that you would lead them to that place where they would bow their knee before Jesus and say, I believe he is King and I ask him to save me and to forgive me of my sins.

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I know you are faithful to do that for any who would call upon you. In Jesus' name, amen.