NATIONAL COMMUNITY CHURCH
September 15, 2013
The Wilderness of Pain: Hagar and Sarah
Heather Zemple
{video clip}
[Heather]
God sees you. I don’t care what wilderness you are in or how long you’ve been there, He sees
you. I don’t know if you are in the wilderness that is the painful consequences of your own
choices or you are in the wilderness of pain that has been inflicted on you by someone else, God
sees you and He hears you. You may feel like you are invisible but God sees you. You may feel
like you don’t have another tear left in you to cry but God hears you. You may feel like you are
staring into the nothingness of scarcity, God will provide you will provide. You may feel like
you are all alone, God is with you. And you may feel like you are facing the irreversible but
maybe God has great things in store for you! You may feel like you are facing a big mess. In
fact, you may be here this weekend hoping to hear something that will spring you out of the mess
you are in and you might not get a quick fix for that but you are in good company because God’s
people are no strangers to mess. If we go all the way back to the beginning, God created
everything and it was good and it took us three chapters to mess it all up!
Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden, messed up Eden for all of us and then Cain and Abel. I
would say that jealousy and murder amounts to mess. Then Noah, bringing all those animals
onto that boat, I’ve got to imagine there was some sort of mess created there! And Abraham,
we’ll get to his mess in a minute. But Isaac and Jacob play favorites with their kids and it causes
all kinds of sibling rivalry and mess. And then Moses leading the people of Israel out of slavery
and into the Promised Land and they complain that they don’t have good food to eat. It is a mess!
Then you get to David and David was a relational mess! David and Saul, David and Bathsheba,
David and Nathan, David and Absalom, David’s life is like a Lifetime mini-series! It is a mess!
And then you would think that when Jesus showed up, He would clean it all up, right? Yet, He is
born in a stone feeding trough for animals. Then He starts his ministry and He gathers these
people around Him to follow Him and they are fishermen and tax collectors and political
revolutionaries and they argue with one another about who is going to be greatest in the
kingdom.
Then the church begins! The church is a big mess! Let’s just take Corinth, for example. In the
Church in Corinth, there was sexual promiscuity. There was incest. There were people fighting
doctrine and fighting about what they could eat and what they couldn’t eat. There was idol
worship and there were lawsuits and there were people getting drunk on communion. Come on!
You know you are in a mess when there are people getting drunk on communion! And it was
obviously before they invented those little plastic shot glasses for the grape juice!
God’s people are no strangers to mess. Yet, what we find in this whole story, what we see
emerging, the thread that weaves in and out of these messes is the fingerprint of God writing his
story of hope and redemption against the backdrop and through people of mess. God shows up.
I think a lot of times when we think about the Bible, we think about it as a good collection of
morality tales where there are heroes and villains and where there are questions that are
answered, where we get all the answers to life’s big questions. And yet, it seems to me, when I
read this Bible honestly and thoroughly, sometimes it raises more questions than it answers, like
why bad things happen to good people. Why good things happen to bad people or why
sometimes God swoops in to save and other times He just sits back and watches.
We get to this story of Abraham and Sarah and Ishmael and Isaac and it is one of the biggest
messes we find in the Bible. We find this elderly couple who can’t have a child and then Hagar,
the slave woman and then Ishmael born into chaos and tension, dealt a hand that he didn’t ask
for. But what we find in this is that even though the people of God are no strangers to mess, God
isn’t a stranger to mess either. In fact, that’s the place that we most often find Him, right in the
middle. In fact, it is in the midst of mess that God has a tendency to show up and to show off,
most often.
I think sometimes we come to this story of Abraham and we try to sort it all out theologically.
Maybe we even try to sort it out politically. We try to assign labels like who is the hero and who
is the villain and what is faith and what is doubt and what is righteousness and who is evil and
who are the winners and who are the losers and where is the blessing and the curse, and it
seemed that God isn’t as concerned with all those labels, He is just concerned with showing up
and He is concerned with letting the spotlight shine of his sovereignty and his faithfulness and
his ability to bring about his purposes in his timing and in his ways. What we find is that God is
the only hero of the story. Mess is one of the environments in which God works and often it
happens out in the wilderness.
When we think about the great names of the Bible, the ones that we recognize, Abraham, Isaac,
Jacob, David, even Jesus, they all spent time in the wilderness. We are so busy praying for God’s
favor on our lives and we forget that some of the ways He works the most in us is when we are in
the wilderness. Sometimes we are in the wilderness because our choices have led us there.
Sometimes we are in the wilderness because God has sovereignly and divinely led us to that
place. Sometimes we are in the wilderness because life just dropped us there. Sometimes we are
in the wilderness because somebody else’s insecurity and pride has hurled us out into that place.
But regardless of how you got there or why you are there, God is also there.
Turn to Genesis 16. That’s where we are going to see but there is a lot of backstory that we just
saw on the video clip. There is a lot of introduction that will help us make that story make sense.
So let’s back up to Genesis 12, we see that God shows up and speaks to Abram. Abram is
married to Sarai and their names get changed later to Abraham and Sarah so to avoid confusion,
I’m just going to call them by those names. So God shows up to Abraham and tells him, ‘I am
going to make you the father of a great nation and through you all the nations of the world will
be blessed.’ This is a big deal, especially because Abraham doesn’t have any children and he
was in his 60s. So God says I’m going to bless you, just go where I tell you to go. So Abraham
packed up his wife and his servants and all he has and he begins to go where God tells him to go.
Then in Genesis 13, God shows up again and says, ‘Hey Abraham, remember that promise I
made? This is the land I’m going to give you and that your people will inhabit.’ Then in Genesis
15, God drags Abraham outside and says, ‘Look up at the stars and try to count them. That’s how
numerous your descendants will be.’ And Abraham still has no children. It is interesting at this
moment because it says that Abraham believed God and it was counted to him his righteousness
and yet at the same time, I’ve got to imagine that the promise just keeps coming up over and over
and over again and yet there is no fulfillment. At this point Abraham is getting pretty old and he
and his wife Sarah have walked through infertility for not just years but decades. So by the time
we get to Genesis 16, Abraham is beginning to weigh his options. He believes God but he starts
to weigh his options. So Sarah comes in and says, ‘Why don’t you take my servant girl, Hagar,
and maybe we can have a family through her.’ On one hand, what in the world is Abraham
thinking? What in the world is Sarah thinking? But before we are too quick to ask questions or
cast judgment, it is important to understand that at this time in history and in this culture, that
was a normal practice, especially if a couple had been walking through bareness for this long. It
was a common practice to have a family through another woman. Now, the outcomes we see
when that happened in the Bible is always disastrous. But it wasn’t as though Abraham was
outright disobeyed a command of God at this point. He was just weighing his options. So in
Genesis 16, Hagar, the servant girl, turns up pregnant. We don’t know at what point Hagar
became property of Abraham and Sarah. We don’t know at what point she became a part of their
story. But she is blessed. So what happens as Hagar shows up pregnant and begins to flaunt that
before Sarah and it makes Sarah angry.
So in Genesis 16, it says that Sarah treated Hagar so harshly that she finally ran away. Ok, this is
the first time that Hagar goes to the wilderness. She actually goes to the wilderness twice. The
film we just saw is the account of the second time she went to the wilderness. This is all still
backstory. So Hagar ran away and the angel of the Lord found Hagar beside a spring of water in
the wilderness along the road. The angel said to her, ‘Hagar, Sarah’s servant, where have you
come from and where are you going?’ Notice, the text doesn’t just say that an angel showed up,
but the angel of the Lord. And when this shows up in the Bible, what it means is that God
Himself has shown up. So God Himself shows up to Hagar. He speaks to Hagar and He even
calls her by her name. He asked her where she was going. She said, ‘I am running away from
my mistress, Sarah.’ I would too.
But let’s pause for a moment and look at these two women because if we only understand what
we see and the story in the film, then Sarah looks pure evil! What mother would send any other
child away to their death? So I think it is helpful for us to rewind a little bit and understand a
little bit about the pain in Sarah’s life. She has been dragged around by her husband from here
and there and everywhere. She has been abducted by two different kings, most likely for their
own sexual pleasure, and she has walked in bareness for decades, which at that time in history
was understood to be a curse from God. And while God has shown up to tell her husband and He
has great things in store for him and made a promise to Abraham over and over again, from what
we can tell, we have no idea if God has ever spoken one word to Sarah. So when this girl shows
up and starts flaunting her blessing before Sarah, she starts to feel that pain a little more acutely
that she has been walking with all her life. Sarah hasn’t just been exposed to those sometimes
awkward and probing questions that sometimes comes from a genuine curiosity, sometimes
comes with a flavor of suspicion of judgment. ‘Hey Sarah, when are you guys going to have
kids?’ ‘Do you and Abraham want to have kids?’ ‘Hey Sarah, you’re getting up there in your
80s now, it might be time to start thinking about having a family.’ I mean, it wasn’t just that, it
was understood to be God’s curse on her life. So when Hagar shows up and shoves Sarah’s nose
even deeper into the pain of what she cannot do, all of those years and years of pain begin to
flood out of her and she begins to mistreat Hagar.
Then you’ve got Hagar. She is a slave. She is invisible except for what she can do for Abraham
and Sarah. She is a pawn in their plan. According to the law at that time, she could have had the
baby and then Sarah would have been in total rights to take that baby and then sell Hagar off to
someone else. What about Hagar’s life? What about her dreams of a family? Is there any notice
at all given, attention at all given to what Hagar wanted out of all of this? Then she finds herself
mistreated because she was actually successful at doing her mistress wanted her to do. So she’s
in the wilderness pregnant.
Two women both navigating their own wilderness of pain and the reality is, I think there is a
little bit of Sarah and a little bit of Hagar in all of us. So she was running and God showed up
and the angel of the Lord said to her in verse 9
Return to your mistress and submit to her authority. Then He added, ‘I will give you more
descendants than you can count.’ And the angel also said, ‘You are not pregnant and you will
give birth to a son and you are to name him Ishmael which means God hears, for the Lord has
heard your cry of distress. This son of yours will be a wild man, as untamed as a wild donkey. He
will raise his fist against everyone and everyone will be against him. Yes, he will live in open
hostility against all his relatives.’ Thereafter, Hagar used another name to refer to the Lord. She
said, ‘You are the God who sees me.’ She also said, ‘Have I truly seen the One who sees me?’
Hagar ran to the wilderness to hide but God found her there. He is so good at doing that. Moses
ran to the wilderness to hide in embarrassment and God showed up in a burning bush. David ran
to escape execution and God found him there and strengthened him there. Elijah ran to the
wilderness completely worn out and God spoke to him in a still, small voice. Jesus went to the
wilderness to pray and God met Him there.
God finds us in the wilderness. I think sometimes we go to the wilderness because we want to
hide from everybody, even God, especially God. Then it as though God shows up just like He
did in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve and He says where are you? Or like to Hagar, He
says where are you going? And I don’t think it is that God needs to know our latitudinal and
longitudinal coordinates. He is wanting to let us know that He is looking for us, that He is the
One who incessantly seeks and will find us, even in the far reaches of the wilderness. God sees
you.
So Hagar returns. She gave God a name. This is the only place in Scripture where we see
someone give God a name. Usually God reveals his name to people but here, Hagar gives God a
name. She says, ‘You are the God who sees.’ Then miraculously, she obeys God. Maybe this is
the first free decision she has ever been able to make in her life and she runs right back into the
mess. Months later, Ishmael is born and she named him God hears. Because it is not just that He
sees you, He hears you.
Abraham is now 86 years old and he loves Ishmael and then the Bible skips 13 years. When we
go to the very next verse, it skips 13 years. And in this time, Ishmael and has begun to talk and to
take steps and grow into a young man, and Abraham loves this only son. He listens to his first
words and he watches his first steps and he loves this kid. Then God shows up again, 13 years
later, and says, ‘Abraham, remember the promise I made to you? It is going to happen and I’m
going to bless Sarah and she is going to have a child.’ And Abraham was like, ‘Time out! Can
Ishmael be the son of promise?’ God said, ‘I am going to bless Ishmael but the promise will
come to Isaac.’
This is the point where the film we saw begins. We pick up the story in Genesis 21. Isaac is born,
the son of promise. We read in verse 9
But Sarah saw Ishmael—the son of Abraham and her Egyptian servant Hagar—making fun of
her son, Isaac.
Just a note here, in the original, I’m using the New Living Translation this weekend, but in the
original language, there is some uncertainty about what that word means. It could mean he was
laughing at Isaac or it could mean he was laughing with Isaac, like he was just playing with a
baby. We are not sure from the text. But one way or the other, this didn’t sit well with Sarah.
So she turned to Abraham and demanded, “Get rid of that slave woman and her son. He is not
going to share the inheritance with my son, Isaac. I won’t have it!”
This upset Abraham very much because Ishmael was his son. 12 But God told Abraham, “Do
not be upset over the boy and your servant. Do whatever Sarah tells you, for Isaac is the son
through whom your descendants will be counted. 13 But I will also make a nation of the
descendants of Hagar’s son because he is your son, too.”
11
14
So Abraham got up early the next morning, prepared food and a container of water, and
strapped them on Hagar’s shoulders. Then he sent her away with their son, and she wandered
aimlessly in the wilderness of Beersheba.
Hagar is the first single mom we see in the Bible. She was wandering in the wilderness away
from everything she has ever known. The first time, she ran to hide. This time, she has been
thrown out, away from comfort, away from security. She has to care for herself and her son and
they come to the point of near death.
15
When the water was gone, she put the boy in the shade of a bush. 16 Then she went and sat
down by herself about a hundred yards[c] away. “I don’t want to watch the boy die,” she said, as
she burst into tears.
But God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, “Hagar,
what’s wrong? Do not be afraid! God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. 18 Go to him and
comfort him, for I will make a great nation from his descendants.”
17
Then God opened Hagar’s eyes, and she saw a well full of water. She quickly filled her water
container and gave the boy a drink.
19
20
And God was with the boy as he grew up in the wilderness.
I’ve got to wonder what this was like for Hagar. She was in this predicament because of Sarah’s
insecurity. She has been expelled from her home because of Sarah’s insecurity. She was pregnant
in the first place because of Sarah’s instruction. And yet Sarah is still the one that God is going to
send his promise through. That is incredibly confusing.
But then we can also flip the story and think about Sarah’s insecurity. Sarah has been faithful to
Abraham and walking with Abraham in obedience to a God that perhaps she has never even
heard speak to her. Yet God choses to bless her. I think one of the hardest things about the Bible
and one of the hardest things about following Christ is that sometimes God choses to bless those
that we would consider to be our enemies. In fact, here is one way I know I have made God in
my own image. When I think that God loves the same people I love and hates the same people I
hate, I’ve made God in my own image. And when I think that God should bless those that I deem
worthy of blessing and He should judge those that I deem worthy of judgment, I have made God
in my own image. Meanwhile, God just shows up.
See, we look at it and we say nothing in this story is fair. And God steps in and says, ‘It is not
fairness that I am bringing, it is grace that I’m bringing, and I will bring blessing and I will bring
promise and I will bring my presence and I will see and I will hear and I will be with.’
Hagar is visited by God a second time in the wilderness. God shows up to Hagar not just once
but twice. And in both instances tells her He sees her and He hears her and He is with her and He
provides for her.
Sometimes we wind up in the wilderness because of a choice that we’ve made. Sometimes God
divinely, sovereignly leads us into the wilderness for a season to grow our character. Sometimes
life just drops us in the wilderness. Sometimes we are sent to the wilderness because of mistakes
of other people and evil that they have inflicted upon us. But it doesn’t matter how we got there
or why we are there. God sees us and He hears us and He is with us.
As this story continues to play out in Scripture, it is a big, big mess. Ishmael and Isaac meet up
again to bury Abraham at his death. Then Isaac has two kids, Jacob and Esau, and Esau gets
really ticked at his dad and so in order to get back at his dad, he goes off and marries one of
Ishmael’s daughters. And then the other son, Jacob, has 12 kids and those kids get mad at one of
their brothers so they sell their brother into slavery to some Ishmaelite traders. And on and on it
continues to go throughout the pages of Scripture. Then finally, Jesus shows up! That promise
He made to Abraham eons ago. I’m going to bless you and the promise of my redemption is
going to come through you, and Jesus showed up and it has nothing to do with what Abraham
did right or did not do right, and everything to do with God’s goodness and faithfulness and
sovereignty and his ability to work through the mess of our lives.
When Jesus shows up, He makes a way through the wilderness for all of us, because in the
wilderness, we can find the cross. The cross is what gives us the opportunity to be reconciled
with God. The cross is where we find relationship with God. The cross is where we can find
blessing. The cross is what gives us hope. And if you have never been to the cross, I encourage
you this weekend, do not leave without talking to a campus pastor, a connections leader,
whoever you came with, somebody. Find the cross. I don’t care what wilderness you are in, Jesus
will meet you there and He makes a way. Jesus is the hero of every story.
In a world that is broken and hurting and sometimes feels like it is falling completely apart, God
sees and hears. He is real. He provides. God is not really in the game of assigning labels of
heroes and villains. And God is not up in heaven desperately wringing his hands to try to figure
out what we are going to do next so He can determine his next action. He just shows up. No
matter what wilderness you are in, He sees you, He hears you, He is with you and He is standing
ready to show up and show off in your life.
God, I don’t know what wilderness people are walking around in this weekend but You know it
because You see it. I don’t know what it is that people are wrestling with and the prayers that
they have deep down inside of them that they can barely even utter, but You know what they are
because You hear us. Father God, I pray that You would draw close this weekend and I pray that
You would make your presence known. Father, I pray that you would make a way in the
wilderness. God I pray that You would make a way for us to be restored in Christ. God we know
You know the pain. You were tempted in the wilderness in every way we are. We know that You
know the pain of the cross for us. God we know that You see us and that You hear us. I pray
today that we would be able to see You and we would be able to hear You. In Jesus name,
Amen.
Transcribed by:
Ministry Transcription
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