Genesis 16, Wanna help?, Dr. John B. Carpenter

Genesis 16: A Dysfunctional Family and the Danger of Enabling

Genesis chapter 16. We'll be reading the entire chapter. Hear the word of the Lord. Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said to Abram, Behold, now the Lord has prevented me from bearing children.

Go into my servant. It may be that I shall obtain children by her. And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. So after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar, the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram, her husband, as a wife.

And he went into Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress. 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. May the Lord judge between you and me. But Abram said to Sarai, Behold, your servant is in your power. Do to her as you please.

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

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

And the angel of the Lord said to her, Behold, you are pregnant and shall bear a son. You shall call his name 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, and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.

So she called the name of the Lord, who spoke to her, You are a God of seeing. For she said, Truly, here I have seen Him who looks after me. Therefore the well was called Beer-lahai-roi. It lies between Kedesh and Bered.

And Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram called the name of his son whom Hagar bore Ishmael. Abram was 86 years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram. And the Lord had his blessings to the reading of his holy word.

Helping God Out vs. Actually Helping People

Well, would you like to help? We need help. We need help finding kids for Jim Jr. We need help picking them up. We need help looking after them, playing with them. We need help financially. We need help getting the word out.

We need help with the maintenance around here, cutting the grass come spring, odd jobs around this building. We need help with an oven in the kitchen. We need help translating notes and songs into Chinese.

Anybody can do that here? Maybe someone can. In other words, we have lots of ways that you can help. Would you like to help? Anybody? Volunteer? Raise your hand. Be careful what you help people do, though.

Should we help someone who is out of money and out of food? Should we give them a meal? Help them out like that? Well, yes, we want to say. But what if they just quit a job because they don't want to work?

If you just give them money, are you helping him by enabling him to be irresponsible and lazy and undisciplined? Do you know the difference between helping and enabling? Well, helping means actually doing what is good for others.

Enabling means doing what they want. In dysfunctional families, usually there's not just like one ogre, one very abusive person who terrorizes the other family members. Usually the other family members are enablers.

The enabler, at first, may appear to be the innocent party. He's just a victim. She's just a victim. Perhaps even cast as the hero, the one trying to bravely hold the family together. But the reality is that the enabler makes the dysfunctional family possible.

One lady around here said that she was molested as a little girl by her uncle and that her mother knew about it but did nothing. Her mother treated the uncle like family, holding the family together. The mother was an enabler.

I heard of a pastor, where we used to live, whose wife in his house was carrying on an online affair with some man hundreds of miles away in the days before smartphones, so on the computer, required a computer.

He was likely an enabler. He could have solved the problem with the judicious use of a sledgehammer. Sledgehammers have a remarkable capacity to stop computers from being conduits for affairs. It's very useful for that.

My grandmother was an old-fashioned southern racist, commonly using the n-word to refer to black people. Once at a family Thanksgiving dinner, someone had the temerity to challenge her racism, mentioning about dating a black girl, and she was so offended by that she stormed out of the table.

And my aunt, my grandmother's daughter, trying to keep her voice down, trying to keep up this semblance that this is a great family meal, but very angry, said to him, don't you make her upset! She didn't raise her voice that much.

My grandmother's racism would go unchallenged, but daring to mention it, to rebuke her for it, that deserved rebuke. Southern racism depended on widespread enabling. In a dysfunctional family, the members enable the problems.

The alcohol, the pornography, the laziness, the affairs, the abuse, the hypocrisy, the racism. I mean, they know it's there. They pretend like it's not, and they help it continue. They won't challenge their family members with the truth.

You know, you drink too much. You don't go to church because you don't care about God. You don't give because you're greedy. You hate some people, you're racist, because you don't have the love of God.

They'll accept the excuses. They won't pour the whiskey down the sink or take away the computer. They won't confront the problem and tell the truth about it. I had a man who wanted to stay here in the church, but his wife just refused.

He came to me and told me all the ways that I could go to her and grovel, hopefully getting her back, and asked him if he had talked to her about these things and challenged her unwillingness to follow him.

He looked like a deer in the headlights. Like that was just a terrifying thought of confronting her. He was an enabler. Enablers help the family stay dysfunctional. The experts say that such families typically live in denial.

That is, they're refusing to acknowledge the problem, like alcohol or some other kind of elephant in the room. That probably most people outside the family get to see is obviously there, but those in the family pretend it's not there.

They often swing between the extremes and conflict, either fighting or hurtful insults. Usually when they're pent up frustrations with this problem, you know, they've been keeping them down for so long, kind of burst out.

But most of the time, they'll usually affirm and agree and support, sometimes just practically. Well, like the mother who takes her child's side on anything, against the teacher, the school, the coach, the pastor.

My little darling must be right, and so won't allow anyone to discipline their child. Or like my aunt, trying to protect her racist mother. They are driven by the goal of a peace at any price, but their peace is artificial.

It's like a Band-Aid over a wound. Under the fake happy face they show the world, they're hurt. But they dare not rip off the Band-Aid and expose the wound and call it what it is. Instead, they enable each other.

They may be miserable, as they are, but the one thing they are in united agreement about is their determination to avoid the truth, the light of reality, from disrupting this hellish balance they've achieved.

That's why the one place that such people will want to avoid at all costs, will stay away from, be repulsed by, is what we're trying to be. A true, functional, Christian community that speaks the truth, hopefully in love, that enables each other to be our best, not accommodate to our worst.

Understand that those who want to remain in their sin, or want to help others remain in their sin, refuse to challenge other sins, who want to stay in their dysfunctional status quo. Such people, they may come here.

They may like the music. They may like the warm people. They may even, sometimes, like the preaching. But when they begin to realize that the light will eventually shine into their lives and expose all the dysfunctional darkness there, they will find a reason to go play church elsewhere.

Unless, of course, the light so shines into their hearts to transform them first. So, you want to help or enable? In Genesis 16, we see a dysfunctional family with an enabler and a helper. We see here three things about it.

Motherhood, Surrogacy, and the Quest to Help God

First, motherhood. Second, fatherhood. And finally, godhood. Well, this chapter begins with a dysfunctional wife who only wants to help. Don't you want to help? Sarai wants to help. For ten years now, it says that they've been in the land for ten years.

That's what he got the promise. He'll have as many descendants as the stars in the sky, the land, blessing to the nations, got all that. So, for ten years, they've had this promise from God that Abel won't have all that, but they haven't had any children.

She wasn't getting pregnant, even when she was in her fertile years, and now she's in her 70s. So, let's be serious here. Let's talk facts. Be practical. If Abram is going to be a father, he's going to need some help from someone other than Sarai.

And God's promise was very specific, at least to Abram. Out of your own body will come the promise. So, adoption was out. That doesn't work. It couldn't be fulfilled by this Eleazar of Damascus, Abram mentions in chapter 15.

So, let's help God out, they think. Why not? Now, the promise of much man-made religion is that it allows us to help God. God wants to save people, but, so we're told, he's not able to do it without our help.

And so, we can help by, maybe we can help by baptizing. Baptism saves, they say. So, baptize your babies to save them, or maybe some quote, reform people, but baptize them to put them in a covenant that somehow helps save them, somehow.

Or wait until they get a few years older. If you're Baptist, wait until they get a few years older, then manipulate them into saying a prayer they don't really understand. After all, God needs our help to save our children.

Have an altar call with the music playing lightly in the background, you know, just as I am, something like that. The invitation, appealing to the emotions, come home, come home, you who are weary, come home.

I actually thought about singing that, but I thought I'd spare you that. The reason they do stuff like that is because they assume God needs the help. Sarai wants to help God, and there was a custom in their day, just take it for granted that this is okay and moral and right, nothing wrong with it, it's their custom, that a man could do exactly what Sarai proposes here, use the servant of a wife to bear children, and the children would then legally be considered the children of the man and the first wife.

So, in this example, it would be Abram and Sarai, even though it's actually Hagar who bears them. But, you know, that's in their theory. The servant girl is actually giving birth for her master. And after all, in verse 2, Sarai says, Behold, now the Lord has prevented me from bearing children.

So it's the Lord, the same one who promised Abram will be a father, who has prevented her from being a mother, and unless the Lord is doing a miracle, the reality is he's going to need some help, right?

And let's live in the real world. She must have been thinking, this is what she was thinking, we ought to live in the real world. Not all this talk of miracles and promises. The Lord isn't doing a miracle.

We've been here ten years, it hasn't happened. She's preventing, he, the Lord's preventing me from having children, and she's thinking, and so let's try the servant. Everybody does it around here anyway.

It sounds so logical, so practical, so helpful. Don't you want to help? Well, Sarai wants motherhood. So notice in verse 2, she says, Since the Lord has prevented me from bearing a child, at the end of the verse, let's try the servant girl.

I, notice that, I shall obtain children, I shall obtain my children by her. Today we call it surrogacy, and it's just, it's kind of messed up, but whatever. We got a new name for it, it's the same thing.

Well, this is for Sarai. She thought that she could use Hagar to make herself a mother, and the normal jealousy most women would feel over their husbands was overcome by her longing to be a mother. And, of course, we have the same today.

Fertility clinics are big business. Some people will spend as much money as they can get a hold of to have a child of their own, and if they can't have one biologically, they don't want to adopt. They only want children of their own, so they maybe try surrogacy now, perhaps blaming God for their inability to be a mother or father.

Motherhood is the quest. Here, what's wrong with that? And so Abram consented to Sarai's plan, and voila, it worked. Abram was an expected father, but Hagar isn't going according to plan. She understood that she was the mother.

She was called to servanthood, but now to motherhood, something her mistress, meaning of a female master, had not yet been called to, and that makes her feel superior. She's able to do something Sarai isn't.

In verse 4, she looked with contempt on her mistress. Sarai thought that she could help the Lord make herself a mother, but even though Abram fathered a child, she realizes, in the smug look on Hagar's face, condescending, this wasn't, Sarai realizes, this wasn't her child.

Sarai would do whatever it took for motherhood. She thought she could help, but instead all she got was scorn. Hagar was elevated by motherhood and let herself get smug as if she didn't need to submit in any more because now she's a mother.

While we often lament the widespread problem of some mothers not taking their motherhood seriously, we also have sometimes a problem of mothers using their motherhood to run away from servanthood. There are other responsibilities, maybe to a husband or a wider family or even to God.

Motherhood becomes an excuse to avoid servanthood, but the angel greets Hagar, even though the wife of Abram, elevated by motherhood, she is still in servanthood. Notice the way the angel greets her. Hagar, servant of Sarai.

That's what he calls her. Not wife of Abram or mother to be, but as a mother of the flesh, not of the promise of works, not of the Spirit. She's still a slave and she is told in verse 9 to go back and submit, not simply to the head, to Abram, but to his wife, to the one who mistreated her.

Submit. That horrible word our flesh hates. In Galatians chapter 4, the Apostle Paul uses this story, in Genesis chapter 16, to show us what our attempts to help God out are like. We think that we can help God with our morality or with our religion, it's our rule keeping, and some religions are all about helping God out.

We help him out, they think, by keeping the Ten Commandments. We help him out by being decent, by being moral, or by going to church. We help him out and once we've helped him out, he should help us out, right?

I mean this is quid pro quo, right? This is you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, right? We help him out, he helps us out. He might help us stay healthy, right? We help him out, we keep his rules, he helps us stay healthy, or to get rich, or to give us that family we always wanted, and at the end, he'll help us out by judging us to be good.

We kept his rules, he says we're good, and we're in heaven, and so we're all happy. We helped him, he helped us, everybody's happy, right? But such helping God out is exactly what Paul calls being of the flesh, dependent on our own efforts, our own flesh, ourselves, our ability to help God out.

All such people think, well they're just being practical, they're being helpful, how am I supposed to be saved? I got to do something, let's be practical while they talk about grace, I got to do something, right?

Their way of changing people is to make up rules and tell them to obey them. Rituals, you got to do it, that's how you get right with God, that's how you help God out. What Paul calls in Colossians chapter 2 verse 21, regulations about do not handle, do not taste, do not touch, which he says appear to help be religious, to help be disciplined, but in reality, he says, are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

No value, think of that, no value. These religious rules are of no value, he says, because either one or two things happen. Either we fail to keep these made-up rules and we give in to the things they were trying to keep us from, we give in to drunkenness or the passions, the sexual morality, or, and this is just bad, or we actually do manage to keep the rules, we obey them.

We don't eat or drink what we're not supposed to, we don't have sex with anyone we're not supposed to, and yet Paul, some of the made-up rules are not supposed to have sex with anybody, but Paul says we still, we still have not stopped the indulgence of the flesh, because the flesh is not just kind of bodily cravings, the flesh is ourselves without God's promise and power.

It's us, the flesh is us trying to live as we please, even if the way we please to live is moral, and so we can, in the flesh, we can keep the rules, and when we do that, we think we have helped God, we helped him, he asked for my help in this rule-keeping, I gave him the help he asked for, and maybe just helped him by making the right decision.

That's what, that's the only thing where he needs help when, he needs me to help him by making the right decision, to walk in the aisle, made ourselves proud, we, that's the result. We think we helped him, so we became proud, we became smug, like Hagar here, harder to reach with the gospel than we were before.

We've helped God out, and so condemned ourselves. The quest was for motherhood, but instead of relying on God's promise, they thought that they would help God out, and so ended up enabling the flesh. There's not only a problem with motherhood here, but also with fatherhood.

Fatherhood, Enabling, and the Failure to Lead

Second, fatherhood. Abram here, instead of leading as the father and applying his faith and determining the weight on God, Abram becomes the enabler. Sarai is obviously a strong personality, he was a strong-willed wife, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that in this place, but that place is under Abram's fatherhood.

For the first time in the story, she takes the lead and is the dominant character in the first six verses. I mean, she appears very dominant, almost overbearing. She makes this plan in verse 3, and she's very much the active one.

Notice in verse 3, Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar, the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram, her husband, as a wife. That last her, his wife, whether you believe it or not. Anyway, but that's about the point here.

Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar, the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram, her husband. That sentence sounds like Abram and Hagar are just passive, doesn't it? Sarai is the active one, doing all the work.

It's like Abram and Hagar are just pieces on a chessboard. Hagar, or Sarai, is moving. Then in verse 5, when her plan doesn't turn out like she wanted, she blames Abram, which is the classic move of the manipulator, who won't take responsibility.

You know, they'll blame someone else. Maybe the person supposed to be in charge, but he's not really in charge because he's an enabler, the authority. They'll blame him for their problems that their plots have caused, right?

They made the plan. They did the work. They moved everybody about, and when it doesn't work out, hey, you who should have stopped me, it's your fault. Of course, she's not made to take responsibility because Abram is enabling her.

Before, he should have taken the lead as the father. He should have said, no, we're not doing the surrogacy thing. Sarai, forget that. We're going to wait on God in faith. Now, at this point, after Hagar's already pregnant, now he should stand up and say, listen, this was your idea, and you're going to have to live with the consequences.

Take responsibility for what you have done. But he doesn't do that either. In verse 6, he forfeits his responsibility and tells her, do to her as you please. You're the boss. It's your call. No concern for this woman, Hagar.

No concern for her at all, whom verse 3 says was now his second wife, whom God says here is really his wife, but Abram doesn't understand that. Sarai certainly doesn't. There's no willingness to correct her for her smug attitude.

I mean, Abram should have done that. Listen, Hagar, you've got to understand your place here. None of that. Nothing for him of Abram intervening to make this right, to protect Hagar from abuse and protect Sarai.

She's respected. None of that. He's not making anything right. He's just going along with Sarai. Abram enables Hagar being abused. This is a dysfunctional family. It would be easy to blame it all on Sarai, but she's out of control.

She lacks sympathy for her own servant, whom she put up to this, and now her husband's own child, which I guess makes her the child's stepmother. Okay. She's abusive, but Abram is the one enabling it.

It can't happen without his enabling. And as the father, he has a responsibility to lead. He serves through leading. Enablers often forfeit their real responsibilities. They neglect what they're really supposed to do, that is to do right, and neglect that for their quest for superficial peace, maybe by pleasing their children.

They want to be their kids' friends, and so they don't discipline them by appeasing the dominant actor. Here, Sarai. And that enabling is rooted in unbelief. Just as Sarai wouldn't believe God would do the miracle, Abram didn't believe that standing up here, being the leader, speaking the truth, you know, listen, Sarai, you did this.

You take responsibility. You shouldn't be abusive to her. Hagar, you need to work on your attitude. He didn't believe that that would bring a better peace. Enablers don't have faith in truth or in justice.

That's why the enabler today cannot understand or even tolerate what the Lord Jesus talks about in Matthew 18, verses 15 to 17. Remember, you know, where he says, if your brother or sister sins, you go to them, you confront them, initially gently, but you call it what it is.

You expose it. You name it. And if that didn't work, you take two or three others, and if that didn't work, you go through this process to the church. And if after the process, they still haven't repented, you don't accommodate it, you don't pretend that it doesn't exist, practice denial, you tell the truth.

Jesus says, you tell it to the church. That's what the Lord Jesus said to do. That is the exact opposite of what so many people today, so inundated we are with dysfunctional families, dysfunctional churches, and a dysfunctional society think that decent people should do.

They think everyone, even God, should help preserve their miserably balanced dysfunctional world. Do you want to help? In the first six verses, we see dysfunctional motherhood and fatherhood. In the last 10 verses, we see perfectly functional godhood.

The God Who Hears, Sees, and Is Seen

The last 10 verses reveal the Lord to us, and they show us three qualities of the Lord, that he is the God who hears, the God who sees, and the God who is seeing. First, he is the God who hears. Hagar has been harshly treated.

The works of the flesh are anger and jealousy and cruelty, and Sarai's plan to help God out has produced all of those. So, Hagar flees. In verse 7, the angel of the Lord, a messenger from God, meets her by a spring on the way back to Egypt.

He tells her that she should go back to Sarai, that she is to find her freedom through submission. Then the angel of the Lord gives her a promise that's remarkably like the one he had earlier given Abraham.

Remember the promise to Abraham? It's like this. You'll have a multitude of descendants, so many you can't count, except two things are missing from Hagar's promise that were promised to Abraham, two things.

There is no promise of land, that is to live in a promised land under God's rule, free of all enemies. And second, there's no promise that you'll be a blessing to all the families of the world. Those promises don't come to the child of the flesh.

Instead, the child will be, in verse 12, like the works of the flesh, untamable, uncontrollable, fierce, and implacable, like a wild donkey. He'll be a wild donkey of a man, the angel of the Lord says.

The works of the flesh are dissensions and divisions, conflicts, and so will be the descendants of this work of the flesh. He'll be at war, his hand against everyone and everyone's hand against him because Abram, in a moment of enabling weakness, chose peace at any cost.

Peace with Sarai when she was throwing a fit. And because of that, there will now be no peace. There will be the curse of ongoing conflict. The enabler today chooses surface, superficial, apparent peace at any cost, but lives in perpetual, deep-seated, simmering misery.

Then in poetic verse, the Lord says to Hagar, you're going to have a son. You can skip out on the ultrasound. We'll tell you right now, he's going to be a son. Name him Ishmael. Ishmael means God hears.

Abram, in his enabling, in his dysfunctional fatherhood, didn't hear his second wife's cry for justice, but only the shrill, manipulative demands of Sarai. No one heard Hagar except God himself. And so the son will be called God hears.

And he gives a reason at the end of verse 11, because the Lord has listened, Hagar. He's listened to your afflictions. Some of you need to know when it seems that no one is listening to you. No one has heard you.

The Lord has listened to your afflictions. He is the God who hears. Second, he's the God who sees. Verse 13, she, that's Hagar, called the name of the Lord who spoke to her. In other words, this is what she calls God.

You are a God of seeing. The well where she encountered the Lord, she names the living one who sees me. God had seen her trouble, seen how she was treated harshly by Sarai, seen that she was used and abused.

She was taken advantage of and uncared for, used for motherhood and neglected by enabling fatherhood to the outcast on her knees. He is the God who really sees. Just as today, God sees through all the denial.

He sees through the perpetuation of injustice by those who prefer to live their precariously balanced world of dysfunction and selfishness. God sees. Dysfunctional families and dysfunctional churches want superficial relationships where if you're not a perpetrator, at least you're an enabler, helping to keep the miserable and sinful balance and their deep, dark secrets, keep them hidden.

Some churches today are going through a crisis of trauma because there was much sexual abuse in them, and the people who weren't guilty of the sexual abuse at all, trying to cover it up. Keep it hidden.

God will not participate in that enabling. God sees through all our attempts to hide, and he expects us to live like we know it, like we know that he sees. We can keep out the gaze of others. We can fool them for a while, but God always sees.

He sees through our closed doors. He sees past our Band-Aids, our mask, our fakery. He sees our secret thoughts, our motives, our hearts. When we fool everyone else, he sees. He sees what's really going on, even when we're keeping the rules.

Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch. Even if we keep them all, he sees us inwardly congratulating ourselves and thinking that we've helped God to save us. He sees our pride. He sees it to the bottom of our hearts and sees that our hearts are in bondage to sin, that we are helpless.

We are Adam's helpless race. He sees that we need a savior. To the outcast on her knees, he is the God who really sees, and by his might and truth, he sets his children free. He not only is the God who sees, he's also, third, the God who is seen.

Hagar declares in verse 13,. We don't know exactly what she saw, what the angel of the Lord appeared to her like, but she saw something. She saw the Lord appear to her in some form. Here, God is seen in the messenger, the promise from him, God's direct intervention in the world.

She saw it. Now, God is not just an idea to give us feelings, soothing us, but unable to do anything about our problems. He's not just a drug numbing us to the pains of life. You can feel him, but there's nothing to see.

He can be seen in what he does. Here, I have seen him who looks after me. Unlike enablers who may say soothing words to help the victims of their dysfunctional families feel better for a little while, but won't actually intervene to help.

They won't look after the people they should. The Lord can be seen looking after his people. Of course, some will say, where is God? I don't see him. You say he can be seen where? I don't see him helping me.

But maybe that's the problem. We want him to enable us, enable us to do our own thing. And we don't see him doing that because he's not. And we don't see him helping us by working all things for our good.

Well, here the Lord is seen intervening to help his, the Lord's plan, not Sarai's, not Hagar's. Sarai wanted a motherhood through Hagar. Hagar wanted to go back to Egypt to get away from her. The Lord wants to fulfill his promise to Abram without human help.

But as the Lord is helping his covenant, he will help Hagar. He will protect the son she is pregnant with. He will multiply him. And unlike the enabler, the Lord will tell her the news she doesn't want to hear.

And she doesn't want to hear this instruction. She didn't want to hear this order. She needs to go back and submit as smug as she's become. She's still the servant. That's how God was to be seen in her life.

Helping her to submit. God can be seen in our lives sometimes by helping us to submit to hard realities, like dysfunctional families or even marriages. He won't agree like the man who came to me begging that I help him, that I enable him, really, in his refusal to confront his wife, to continue in denial, enabling sin.

He will not enable us like that. In his godhood, he comes with the truth that sets us free. Sometimes he might call us, like Hagar, to go back to those families. If there's no physical abuse, no one should go back to physical abuse, where there could actually be in danger.

But go back and not to pretend that they are dysfunctional and not to be an enabler, but to submit to the harsh reality that this marriage, this motherhood or this fatherhood or this family hasn't lived up yet.

To the promise, to the hope I had for it, of being loved and cherished until death do us part. God's truth can transform this world, this sometimes dreadful reality. And then if we will tell the truth, tell the truth and trust God, then what he does can be seen.

We are all here, even if we're a perpetrator or an enabler or none of that, to understand that God sees and can be seen. He insists that his ways either be seen in our life, in our submission, or his judgment will be seen.

Sooner or later, it will be seen on us. He sees our affliction and he sees our afflicting. And he wants us to understand that though he may sometimes wait a long time, he will be seen on the earth. God is seen in Jesus.

He is seen doing the very thing that he tells Hagar to do here. He submitted himself to a harsh master. He put aside the privileges of Godhood and submitted himself to the restraints of humanity, to the limitations and temptations of a fully human life.

He submitted himself to trials, but never yielded to sin. He submitted himself to disciples who seemed so dense that though your word contained the plan, they just could not understand. And most of them abandoned him when it came to when he needed them.

One of them even betrayed him. He submitted himself to punches and to rods and to lashings and to thorns and to a cruel hike, dragging his own cross. He submitted to three nails and the mockery of a dysfunctional religion that believed it could help God with all its rules and regulations, even while it was hanging God on a cross.

And as he hung there, lifted up for all to see, he was the God who was seen helping us, us, Adam's helpless race, helping us have forgiveness, a life that we could not help ourselves to and helping us to be able to do what we could never imagine doing before.

Submit to God. You want to help yourself? Stop trying to help God. You can't. Just trust him and submit to him now.