(Angel of the Lord) 01 - Hagar — Ed Miller

Good morning, brothers. I'll ask you to open your Bibles, please, to Genesis chapter 16, if you would. Before we actually begin, I want to thank all of you brothers for praying for Hannah. Give something to Jim Kick, and then everybody gets it.

We really appreciate that ministry. We do appreciate your intercession on her behalf, and the Lord has delivered in a wonderful way. We're so thankful. There's still some recovery that takes quite a while, and so there's still some ways to go.

But how we thank you for your fellowship and prayer. It's outpouring. It's just such an amazing outpouring. We just so appreciate it and want to let you know that. Psalm 68, 9 says, You shed abroad a plentiful rain, O God.

You confirm your inheritance when it was parched. I wonder if anybody's come parched this weekend. You confirm your inheritance when it was parched. We certainly welcome all of you brothers. I join with Bob and Dana in welcoming all of you.

If there are those here for the first time, in a special way, we welcome you. Our gathering here is to see the Lord, to know the Lord, and ask the Lord to work in you the ability to just allow Him to minister unto your heart.

This weekend, get off the world. Let it spin by itself. And let's just meet with the Lord, and be open to Him. Not only in the messages, but in the fellowship we have with one another, and in the singing together, and in His creation, and as we minister one to another, He wants to meet us.

And He certainly has visited us in the past, and He's promised to do it again. As we come to the study of God's Word, there is a principle of Bible study that is absolutely indispensable. A principle that we can't take for granted.

A principle that really we can't live without. And that is total reliance upon God's Holy Spirit. And when all of the scholarship is finished, and you've done all the donkey work, and you've studied all of the commentators, and aids, and word studies, and all of the rest, you need to come as a little child before the Lord, and say, Lord, now you've dawned the Savior on my heart.

Show me Jesus. And then the Bible lives, and then you live. Because as we see Him, we become like Him. We need to see the Lord. We need to hear from the Lord. Wonderful as Dana's messages are, wonderful as my messages are, He hasn't promised to bless the Word that goes out of my mouth, or Dana's mouth.

But He has promised to bless the Word that goes out of His own mouth. And so He needs to speak. And so I'm going to ask you to join with me, please, brothers, as we commit our time to Him, and then we'll look in His Word.

Our Father, once again, we pause and we thank You that we have such a privilege to gather in this place, and by Your mercy, for so many years, to meet with You and to have You meet with us. Pray that You'd tune our ears, that we might hear the music, that we might know Your heart and Your purposes, as we draw near, that we might hear Your heartbeat, catch Your passion.

We thank You so much that You're singing over Your people. We pray that we might draw near unto You this weekend in a special way. You know every one of us, individually, how we got to come this weekend.

Our needs, our hungers, our capacities. Meet us where we are. Take us where You'd have us. We ask in the matchless name of our Lord Jesus. Let me set before your hearts what I'd like to share in my sessions this weekend.

The Angel of the Lord as Christ in the Old Testament

Actually, I'd planned to do this last year, and the Lord had some other plans for me last year. But I was preparing several messages on the angel of the Lord, and I'm so glad for the extra year that the Lord allowed me to meditate on some of these things.

This is not necessarily true in all of the New Testament, but in the Old Testament, when you see that title, angel of the Lord, it most certainly applies to our Lord Jesus Christ, the second person of the Godhead, before Bethlehem, Jesus in His pre-incarnate form.

I would have liked to have taken the time to go through all of the angel of the Lord appearances, but Bob wouldn't let me have twenty-two sessions. In the New Testament, it's not always, when you see angel of the Lord, it's not always the Lord Jesus.

Sometimes it's Gabriel or one of the angels like that. But in the Old Testament, that wonderful title, the angel of the Lord, sometimes it's interchangeable with Elohim and with Jehovah. Sometimes it comes right out and calls Him Almighty God.

It just calls Him God. It's God. It's Jesus. It's the Lord. And when you go through those stories, and you see the angel of the Lord doing what only God can do, and when you see Him receiving the worship that only God can receive, and when you see Him giving out, in some cases, the wrath of God, you know who it is.

And when you go through, I've listed out on that paper, the angel of the Lord appearances, and when you see the titles ascribed to Him, Jehovah-Jireh and El-Roi and I Am and Jehovah-Shalom, you know who He is.

It's the Lord Jesus. And since God has chosen to reveal Himself in Christ, made Christ central in the Godhead, when the angel of the Lord appears, it's always Him. On those handout sheets that I've given you, you can glance at them and put them away.

What I do on these handout sheets is, well, I wanted to prove I did a little bit of donkey work, so that's one of the reasons. But I also think it's a handy reference sheet for your disposal if you want some time to get into that.

Jesus appears clearly more than twenty times as the angel of the Lord. And since there's no way we can look at all of the appearances, here's what I'd sort of like to do this weekend. I'd like to follow the idea in Psalm 34, verse 7.

Two times the expression, angel of the Lord appears in the psalm. Once it's positive and once it's negative. In Psalm 34 it's positive and 35 it's negative. If you enjoy mental images, you'll enjoy the one in 35, but I hope it doesn't apply to you.

Because it talks about a dark night and a slippery path and the angel of the Lord pursuing you. Imagine being chased by the angel of the Lord on a dark night, on a slippery road, and being chased like wind scatters taff, and so on.

But we don't want to look at that one. We want to look at chapter 34, verse 7. The angel of the Lord encamps around about those that fear Him and rescues them. The angel of the Lord encamps around about.

That includes His omnipresence. But what a precious truth that is. I remember years ago, some of you brothers that came to the early Black Rocks, the men's conferences, we used to have skits. I think some of you remember those wonderful skits.

And I remember one skit one time. I forgot who the brother was, but it was a skit where they were going to rescue someone in a big house. And one of the brothers said, I'm going in. You surround the house.

Well, of course, that doesn't work for one guy. You surround the house. But isn't it true that the angel of the Lord encamps around about those that fear Him? The Lord surrounds the house. And it's not like a circle on the ground, like He just in one plane surrounds us.

It's almost like you're inside of a globe or inside of a sphere or ball. And everywhere you look, you're encamped round about by the angel of the Lord. I remember in my early, early days when I was saved from a Lutheran background, and I went to Concordia, a Lutheran school.

And we had to learn some of those Lutheran things. And I remember we were given an assignment to learn Luther's list of adverbs on how he describes the Lord's table, the presence of the Lord in the bread and in the wine.

And Luther said, He is an auf hinter neben in iber unter vorsewitzen. The bread and the wine. He's on it. He's in it. He's through it. He's around it. He's about... Now, I don't necessarily agree with Luther's description of the bread and the wine and His presence, but he certainly describes the presence of the Lord.

And I'm here to tell you, brothers, that the angel of the Lord is an auf hinter neben in iber unter vorsewitzen. And if you don't carry anything else away this week, He's around about those that fear Him.

And the Bible says, In order to rescue them. I like the verse that comes before it. It says, This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and rescued him out of all his troubles. It doesn't say most of his troubles, or pretty nearly all of his troubles.

It says all of them. This poor man cried, and the angel of the Lord rescued him out of all of his troubles. The angel of the Lord encampeth round about those that fear Him in order to rescue them. I'm not going to do it now.

I have done it. But I'm going to suggest that you do it. On page 4 of those notes, I listed 19 individuals and 3 different groups that the angel of the Lord appeared to. And every time the angel of the Lord appears, He appears in order to rescue.

That's the thing that's in common with all of these. And if you look through the record, and see He rescued her from this, and Him from this, and Him from this, you'll have pretty much in picture form how you can expect the Lord Jesus to appear in your life, and what He'll rescue you from.

Oh, it's a glorious study. And I encourage you to go through that. Now, we'll all look at it probably a little bit different way. And you might say, well, here He's rescuing from self-sufficiency. And someone else will say, no, no, it's really a little deeper than that.

He's rescuing from the flesh, or from works, or from something like that. But every time He appears, He rescues from thirst, or from discouragement, or from some kind of a trouble, and so on. And so go through those, and I think you'll enjoy them.

The First Mention of the Angel of the Lord

What we're going to do this weekend, this morning, I'd just sort of like to mention the first. I believe in this first mention thing. And the first time something appears, it sort of sets the stage for how it's going to be developed throughout the rest of the Scripture.

When I had prepared this message, I had actually said, I'll do the first and the last appearance. But there's just no way to get to the last one. You'll have to do that one on your own when He appears to Zachariah, you know, in the middle of his eight dreams in one night, and at the right hand with Satan accusing.

That's the last time He appears as the angel of the Lord in the Old Testament to rescue from condemnation in all of its forms. But anyway, for the next three sessions, I'll give you... We'll look at the first one this morning.

And then I tried to find some appearance of the angel of the Lord that had something in common. And I found that, of course, it has to be three, you know. Three in a poem. And I found that three times He appeared with a sword in His hand.

And so what I'd like to do this weekend is look at those three appearances where the angel of the Lord appears with a sword in His hand in order to rescue us from something. He appeared to Balaam with a sword in His hand.

We need to look at that. He appeared to Joshua with a sword in His hand. He appeared to King David with a sword in His hand. And so we'll be looking first at Hagar when He appears to Hagar. And then we'll look at the three appearances with a sword in His hand.

I'm going to ask you again, you've probably already done it, to turn to chapter 16. Now, He actually appeared to Hagar twice. Sometime He appeared to people twice. Three people. He appeared to three times as the angel of the Lord.

And you'll see that in the notes. Chapter 16, verses 7 to 14 is the appearance of the angel of the Lord to Hagar the first time. And then chapter 21, He appears again 17 years later to the same woman as the angel of the Lord in chapter 21, verses 8 to 19.

Now, it's not an accident that both of these appearances have to do with a well and have to do with a fountain and have to do with drinking and have to do with thirst. Because the first time the angel of the Lord ever appeared to anybody on the earth, it was to rescue them from thirst.

And that is suggested. And you'll see as you go through all of them how these things fit together. I'm going to begin reading at verse 7 from chapter 16. Now, the angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness.

By the spring on the way to shore. And he said, Hagar, Sarai's maid, where have you come from? Where are you going? And she said, I'm fleeing from the presence of my mistress, Sarai. Then the angel of the Lord said to her, Return to your mistress and submit to her authority.

Moreover, the angel of the Lord said to her, I will greatly multiply your descendants so that there will be too many to count. The angel of the Lord said to her further, Behold, you are with child and you will bear son.

You shall call his name Ishmael because the Lord has given heed to your affliction. He will be a wild donkey of a man. His hand will be against everyone and everyone's hand will be against him. He will live to the east of all his brothers.

Then she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, You are a God who sees. For she said, Have I even remained alive after seeing him? Therefore the well was called Bir Laha Roy. Behold, it's between Kadesh and Barak.

In this story, we've come to a sea of instruction. Paul says of this story, Now these things are an allegory. It's in Galatians, so Dana is going to fill us in on all of that. It's an amazing story when you come to Hagar the picture.

We're not going to look at Hagar the picture. We're going to look at Hagar the person. And you need to trust God to help you make that transition because there's so much in Hagar the picture. Our father Abraham, man of faith, had two children.

And this was all a picture, one of the bond woman, one of the free woman, one's the flesh and one's the spirit, one's works and one's the promise. One is a slave and the other one is an heir. There are two Jerusalems.

There's Mount Sinai and there's Mount Zion and there's the Jerusalem that is and the Jerusalem that's above. And there's a freedom that's like this donkey freedom. And there's a freedom like Isaac's freedom.

And the whole thing is a picture. And forever, Hagar is going to be picturing the flesh. But Hagar the picture, like Moses the picture, is a lot different than Hagar the person, like Moses the person.

He might picture the law, but he had face-to-face fellowship with the law. And Hagar the person is something else. And so trust the Lord with me. I'm really going to get away from that whole picture of the flesh and the spirit and so on, law and grace.

As I said, Dane is going to unfold all of that for us. But for our purposes, I want you to see the angel of the Lord the first time He ever comes to earth and He meets with somebody named Hagar the person.

Hagar: A Gentile Slave in Distress

We can get rid of all the other and just come to that. Let me make these three observations. I've already mentioned the first one. It's a little surprising, you know, on the level of earth when you come with these eyes.

I'd expect maybe that the first time He ever appeared as the angel of the Lord He'd come to Abraham or to Moses or to Daniel or to David or some big name. But the first time He ever came to earth as the angel of the Lord He came to this Gentile woman.

And just for interest, this is the first time in the Bible that the word well appears. If I said to you, name the place in the Bible where Jesus first met the woman at the well. I bet you might say John chapter 4.

That's what we have here. We have the Lord Jesus meeting the woman at the well. And He's meeting the woman at the well in order to rescue her. In order to rescue her from thirst. And it's just a glorious first appearing of the angel of the Lord.

Now in order to get it before you and to get away from all of the theology of Hagar and Ishmael and so on and to just home in on the person Who was Hagar? You say, well, according to the record she's a Gentile.

Yeah, she's an Egyptian. And she was part of the payoff to get Abraham out of Egypt, remember when he lied about his wife. She was an Egyptian. She's a Gentile. She's not only a Gentile, she's a Gentile slave.

Watch how the Holy Spirit paints the picture of Hagar. She's not only a Gentile slave, but in those days this meant a lot. She's a Gentile female slave. Not only a Gentile female slave, but she's a Gentile female slave in trouble.

She got in a lot of trouble. She'd been harshly treated. In one sense, not completely, but one sense she was victimized as a female slave. We got a girl in real trouble. She's pregnant. And a man of God got her pregnant.

Here's a female Gentile slave in trouble. A lot of it brought upon her that she didn't have a lot of choice. She's left to carry a burden. And now she's a fugitive. She runs away. The Holy Spirit is almost like saying, I wonder if I can paint a more graphic picture of somebody thirsty.

Somebody in need. A fugitive. A female Gentile slave. A runaway. And when we meet her, she's despairing of life. She's directionless. She's just running. She doesn't even know where she's going. And she's weary.

And she's fainting. And she's dying. And she's all alone. And in case you didn't get the whole picture, the Holy Spirit adds, in the wilderness, on the way to shore. Scholars tell us that that wilderness that they're referring to was a 150 mile stretch of sand between Palestine and Egypt.

And so God begins this picture. He's going to come many times as the angel of Jehovah in order to rescue. But He starts off with this poor, needy, dying, fugitive, runaway, in trouble, slave girl in the wilderness.

You couldn't get a more helpless situation. The first question He asks her. Verse 8. Sounds like a philosophy class. Where have you come from? Where are you going? There's some depth in that. Think about it.

Where have you come from? Where are you going? Look at verse 13, please. The comments that Hagar makes about the Lord and the place where He met her. And she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, You are a God who sees.

For she said, Have I remained alive after seeing Him? Therefore the well was called Bir Laharoi, which is between Kadish and Bered. The footnote names the well, the well of the Living One who sees me.

And then put that with verse 11. The angel of the Lord said to her further, Behold, you are with child. You will bear a son. You shall call his name Ishmael because the Lord has given heed to your affliction.

And she named the place El Roya, the God who sees. Some think that means that she was so impressed with His omniscience. He shows up. He is a God who sees. He knows my name. He knows who I work for. He knows my condition.

He knows I'm pregnant. He knows I'm carrying a boy. He knows the destiny of this kid. He sees everything. Some say, No, it's not really what it means because the word sees and the word reveals have the same root.

He's a God who reveals, who sees, who shows up. And they say, Maybe that's why she named it that. And then there are those who say, Well, the word see and that particular word that's used is almost like regards.

You know, you're going through something and somebody puts his hand on your shoulder. The Lord sees. He knows. He understands. He enters in. He regards. He has compassion on you. Hagar relates her seeing Him to His seeing her.

Verse 13, Have I remained alive after seeing Him? Scholars tell us that the Hebrew here implies order of time. In other words, Who saw whom first? Did Hagar discover the angel of the Lord or did the angel of the Lord find Hagar?

I like the way it's worded right away in verse 7. And the angel of the Lord found her. The idea is, He sees me. And now I see Him. But I would never see Him if He didn't see me. And He sees me first. He found me.

He sought me. He discovered me. Isn't it true, brothers, that you would have never lifted up your eyes to heaven if He didn't find you at some well, thirsty and hungry and broken and running and lost and weak and helpless, fugitive?

This is a little off the subject, but I can't get out of this. Ezekiel 16, listen to this verse. As for your birth on the day you were born, your navel cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water for cleansing, nor were you rubbed with salt or wrapped in cloth.

No, I look with pity on you to do any of these things for you, to have compassion on you. You were thrown out into the open field. You were abhorred on the day you were born. And then I passed by, and I saw you squirming in your blood.

And I said to you while you were squirming in your blood, live. Yes, I said to you while you were in your blood, live. Remember that day? Dana was sharing yesterday about how he remembers the day. And, of course, he brought back memories in my life.

I remember the day when I first trusted in the Lord. Verse 11, You shall call his name Ishmael, because the Lord has given heed to your afflictions. Hagar was to name him Ishmael. You know what Ishmael means?

The Lord hears. Here's an amazing thing. The Lord comes down and meets her and says, You've got a son. He's going to be the father of a nation. Name him The Lord Hears. And so when he leaves, she names the well The Lord Sees.

I speak as a fool. I would have named it The Lord Hears. The well of the living one who hears. I would have named it after my son Ishmael. What did God hear? What did God see? Why did she name him The Lord Sees?

Well, I know He didn't hear her prayer because she didn't pray. As far as the record goes, she didn't cry out. He just sort of showed up. Even though she was messed up and even though she was in that condition, she didn't just say, If there's somebody up there, anybody, hear me.

I'm crying out. I'm needy. She didn't do that at all. Verse 11 says, The Lord gave heed to her affliction. He heard her affliction. Affliction has a voice. Affliction is eloquent. He heard her trouble.

He heard her heart. He heard her spirit. Her being was crying out thirst. And I think it's instructive that all this took place at a well because it represents her thirst. It represents that desire, her helpless condition.

And so she names it The Name of the Living One Who Sees. What did He see? He saw her thirst. He saw her hunger. He saw her ache. He saw her affliction. He heard the rumblings of her inner heart. You remember when you were lost and lonely and weak and weary and God heard your affliction and He responded.

Maybe somebody has come to this conference. That's one of the things. We don't know all the backgrounds of every brother that's come. Maybe you've come to this conference and some of these things like Hagar are parallel in your life.

Maybe you're saved. You've come out of Egypt, but your life is sort of barren. Maybe you've been hurt in the church. You've been dealt harshly like she had been dealt harshly under Abraham's tent and you've been used.

You're saying, I don't find what I'm looking for under Abraham's tent. I'm thirsty for something else. So maybe it's possible you're just running away. You don't really know where you're going, but way down deep there's this thirst.

There's this affliction. In your heart, I remember how it happened in my life. I came to the place and said, there's got to be more to this Christianity than I'm experiencing. Everybody talks about Christianity and there's just got to be more than this.

Will the angel of the Lord appear to those who thirst? Brothers, there is more. And as you lift your ear to hear the music, God lifts His ear to hear thirst. Thirst. Above all things, pray for thirst.

Thirst is the coin of heaven. Oh, everyone that's thirsty, come. Buy without money. Thirst, desire. If you've come with a thirst, I promise you Jesus is going to show up. And like He did then. Black rock can be a fountain for you, or God can use it to take you to the fountain who is Christ.

Her response is so suggestive. Her response, she responded in submission and obedience and so on. It's wonderfully subjective. Now, the point is this, that the first time Jesus appears, He appears to need, He appears to a woman with a thirst, and a song was created in her heart.

And if she could have written a gospel song, it would have gone something like this. I'm not going to sing a song. I'll just give you the title. The title of the song would be, I Have Found the Well. I have found the well.

I've found the Lord. I've entered into that triangle that Dana was talking about. He satisfies my heart. Now turn to chapter 21, please. This completes the story. The best scholarship tells us that this is about 17 years later.

Losing and Rediscovering the Well

And this story, like Genesis 16, is laden with instruction. We've got to go by that. We've got to pass by the fact that weaning in the Old Testament, getting off the milk, is adoption in the New Testament, coming to age and so on.

There's so much instruction. Cast out the bondwoman and her son. See, that's Dana's book again. He'll deal with all of that. We want to look at Hagar the person. And when we focus on Hagar the person, for 17 years, she's been singing, I've found the well.

I've found the well. Verse 4, chapter 14, Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar, putting them on her shoulder, and gave her the boy and sent her away.

And she departed and wandered about in the wilderness of Beersheba. When the water in the skin was used up, she left the boy under one of the bushes and she went and sat down opposite him about a bow shot away.

She said, Do not let me see the boy die. She sat opposite him and lifted up her voice and wept. And God heard the lad crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, What's the matter with you, Hagar?

Do not fear, for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, lift up the lad, hold him by the hand, I'll make a great nation of him. And then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water.

She went and filled the skin with water and gave the lad a drink. Seventeen years ago we saw Hagar, weak, helpless, fugitive, slave, barren, running, thirsty. Seventeen years have gone by and it looks like she's in the same situation.

She's back out of fellowship with the believers. She's back in the wilderness. She's running again. The first time the angel of the Lord met her, she was singing, I found the well, I found the well. However you sing that, I found the well.

Seventeen years later, I lost the well, I lost the well. She lost the well. I wondered why Abraham, rich man that he was, didn't send out, we know it was painful for him to send out Hagar and Ishmael, why didn't he send her out with camels and water and all of that?

He gives her a flask of water. How soon that's going to be empty? One canteen, out. And she has that canteen and I don't know, I got an idea that Ishmael let his mother drink it and that's why he was weaker and so on.

But the whole point is, it soon runs empty. And what happens when we have lost the well and we turn to a canteen and the canteen begins to run dry and here we are at square one and we scratch our heads and say, man, I've been in this thing for 17 years and I'm right back where I started.

I'm out in the wilderness. I'm hungry, I'm empty, I'm thirsty, I'm dry. You might be here as a veteran Christian who walked with the Lord. I've been to Hilltop or to Black Rock for all 25 years. People would be shocked if you confess, you of all people, that you're back at square one.

They'd be shocked if you said, I lost the well somewhere along the way somehow. I don't see any difference than when I started. Empty, nameless, I don't know what's going on. I'm dry, I'm parched, and here I am again.

What happens if after years and years of singing, I found the well? All of a sudden, you're singing, I lost the well. Will the angel of the Lord show up? Aw, brothers. Do you hear the music? I tell you, it's with great news I can announce to you that the angel of the Lord will show up again if you've lost the well and open your eyes to show you the well that is already there at your feet.

He will appear again. Second time, third time. He appeared the second time to show that He'll always appear. Verse 19, God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water and she went and filled the skin with water and gave the lad a drink.

I read one commentary that suggested that she cried out and, and behold the well. And God created this well and it sprang up out of the ground. I don't see that a water sprang up out of the ground, but I see God opened her eyes.

I have an idea the well was already there and she just didn't even see it. It was at her feet every moment. Sometimes it takes a miracle of God to open your eyes to see what's already at your feet. A miracle of God to open my eyes to show me what's already at my feet.

We get into this situation in our Christian lives and we look for something more and something higher and something deeper and something to supplement and something in addition. I need more than Jesus.

I need some blessing, some second blessing or third blessing or some kind of a baptism. All you really need is to rediscover what you already have. You need eyes to see the well that's right at your feet.

And I need eyes to see the well that's right at my feet. The first time the angel met Hagar, the Bible clearly says, I've heard your affliction. I've seen your thirst. I've responded to your thirst. But this time it's different.

Did you notice verse 16? She lifted up her voice and wept. But it doesn't say, and he heard her voice. It doesn't say, and God heard her cry. Or God heard her weeping. Or God heard her calling out to Him.

She was crying. And the angel of the Lord said, I heard Him. And she's the one that's crying. Verse 21, God heard the lad crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, What's the matter with you, Hagar?

Do not fear. God has heard the voice of the lad. Why was Hagar crying? Verse 16, Do not let me see the boy die. That's why she was crying. Let me put it in principle form. Why did she lose the well? Why was she crying?

And the answer is unbelief. She got out of the triangle. You say, how unbelief? Because she thinks he's going to die. And what did God tell her 17 years earlier? He's not going to die. He can't die. He's immortal.

He's going to live. He's going to get married. He's going to have children. He's going to have children's children. He's going to be the father of a nation. She lost the promise. She forgot what God had said.