Sermons

Genesis 16 - Yahweh Sees and Hears

April 22, 2012 Speaker: Series: Genesis

Topic: Sunday Worship Passage: Genesis 16:1–16:16

[Text: Genesis 16)

Scripture Intro: Last time Abram needed signs and guarantees from God about the fulfillment of his promises. Now it’s Sarai’s turn to doubt and question, but this time someone gets caught in the middle. And God sees it all.

[Read and pray]

Intro: “Tiny” didn’t hesitate. He had fought under the protection of Steve’s helicopter during the Vietnam War and now Steve, the man Tiny considered a brother, was in trouble. The two were working together moving construction equipment by air when the call came over the radio that the helicopter Steve was piloting was in trouble. Tiny heard the voice of his friend go up an octave as Steve said he couldn’t hang on. Then the helicopter turned on its side mid-air and came down hard, broken rotors churning up the mud and water as it sank into the drainage ditch. Tiny saw the whole thing happen just feet away from him. When he heard Steve’s call and saw his friend in trouble, Tiny (not called Tiny for being a small man) made his massive frame move like lightening and was the first to the smoking, fuel spewing wreck. He found his friend under water and unconscious with his feet pinned under the airframe. Tiny barked an order, like from his war days, to the man who came alongside Tiny, telling him to grab Steve’s legs and pull them out. Then Tiny grabbed the helicopter with his bare hands and dead-lifted the 2,000 pound heap of smoking metal high enough – and held it long enough - for Steve’s helpless body to be pulled out. Steve lived because his friend heard and saw his trouble and came running.

FCF: If you’ve ever felt like your calls for help have been ignored, if you’ve ever feared that no one sees your struggles, this passage stands as a witness that YHWH is a God who hears and sees those in need and is merciful to seek them out and shower them with his compassion. Hagar experienced the grace of the Lord while she was running away from her painful experience. There is grace for us, too, as God comes to us in the person of Jesus, who not only hears and sees our pain but has entered into it himself to free us from it forever.

The passage opens with pain. In the previous chapter we heard the pain in Abram’s voice asking God what He will give Abram since Abram continues childless. Now we see the pain from Sarai’s point of view. The way the text is phrased point to the source of her pain. She had borne Abram no children. Sarai knows about God’s promise to bless Abram with offspring, offspring that would eventually be a blessing to the whole earth, but see where her heart goes…

Instead of taking her pain to the LORD, Sarai takes matters into her own hands and sets a plan in motion.

Notice the state of her heart in v. 2 as she speaks to Abram. She says, “Behold now, the LORD has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.”

In this simple phrase we see two things: First, Sarai blames the LORD for her condition and assumes she knows the mind of the LORD. It’s the LORD’s fault that she can’t have children and things will always be this way, so she’d better make her own plans. That’s the second thing. Rather than turning to the LORD and waiting for what was promised, she runs after her own plan to make life right and fix the brokenness she is suffering.

Now, it was accepted in their culture for a woman who had no children of her own to have children through her servants. These children could be the legal heirs of the father, accepted as full sons. So Sarai gives Hagar to Abram as a second wife so that the promises of God might come true. But there are indications that this simply wasn’t right:

- First, consider God’s creation of marriage in the Garden. Does this line up with the beautiful beginning God made? Is Adam given one wife or two? The Scriptures say, “…and the two (not three) shall become one flesh.” Even though it isn’t explicit here, remembering the larger context of the book tells us this isn’t a good idea. Even though our culture says something is acceptable doesn’t make it so in the eyes of God.

- Second, consider the phrase telling Abram’s response to Sarai’s plan. It says, “And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.” Sound familiar? Turn to Genesis 3:17. When Eve was deceived by the serpent and thought that eating the fruit would make life better than God could make it, Adam listened to the voice of his wife and believed her more than he believed God. Here, this echo of the first fall is meant to tell us that Abram is doing the same thing. The issue here is not a man listening to the counsel of his wife. (You brothers who are married SHOULD listen to the counsel of your wife. You need her insight and wisdom.) The issue here is Abram listening to his wife when he should have been listening to the LORD who made the promises. The text is screaming, “This won’t go well!”

And that’s exactly what we see next. The plan works, Hagar is pregnant. But her own heart then leads her to look down on her mistress, treating her with contempt because she has what Sarai has wanted for so long.

And Sarai doesn’t take it well. First she blamed the LORD for not giving her children. Now in v. 5 she blames Abram for this new hurt. And noble Abram doesn’t come off too well either. Rather than protecting and defending his new wife, he treats her like she is nothing to him and lets Sarai treat her harshly.

I wish I could say I’d never acted that way. I wish I could stand and point a finger at Sarai and Abram and say, “Well, at least I never said or did anything so hurtful or unbelieving toward the LORD or another person.” But that’s me every day. Sarai is living out of her pain, but her solution to her pain is very human and broken.

Illustration: For nearly 2,000 years doctor believed that removing “extra” blood from the body was the way to make things right with sick people. “Bloodletting was used to treat almost every disease. One British medical text recommended bloodletting for acne, asthma, cancer, cholera, coma, convulsions, diabetes, epilepsy, gangrene, gout…indigestion, insanity, jaundice, leprosy…plague, pneumonia, scurvy, smallpox, stroke, tetanus, tuberculosis, and for some one hundred other diseases. Bloodletting was even used to treat most forms of (get ready for this…BLEEDING) such as nosebleed…. Before surgery or at the onset of childbirth, blood was removed to prevent inflammation. Before amputation, it was customary to remove a quantity of blood equal to the amount believed to circulate in the limb that was to be removed.”[1]

So, through their well-intended-but-horribly-misguided actions, the doctors often did great harm to the patients under their care. In the same way, our efforts to make life right again, our efforts to ease the pain we experience in this life, our efforts to heal our own hurts, even our attempts to secure forgiveness from God for our sin aren’t enough to cure us. Even our most well-intended solutions are misguided when we fail to call on the LORD to heal us.

For some of us, we’ve looked for an escape from our pain by running away from God into obviously broken ways; some run to alcohol abuse; some run to fantasy relationships where the risk of rejection isn’t possible; some run to isolation from all people who might possibly hurt them.

Others of us run from God in the opposite direction – into religion. We know something of our brokenness and sin but we try to fix ourselves by having enough quiet times in the bible, thinking that if we miss one or two or a dozen, God will become angry with us. We throw ourselves into service of the church and think that it makes us righteous before God. We reduce salvation to a collection of doctrines that one must know and have memorized and we think ourselves better than those who don’t have their theology in line with ours.

But both of these solutions for the brokenness we all experience are merely human solutions. They aren’t God’s solution. They aren’t the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And our well-intended-but-misguided efforts to save ourselves always end in the same ugliness and brokenness that we see in this text; we avoid responsibility, we blame everyone but ourselves for our unbelief and we take out our frustration on people who aren’t to blame. And God sees and hears all of that brokenness.

Hagar, the servant, is the one who gets caught up in this brokenness. As a servant, she is completely under the authority of her mistress. Hagar has no say in the matter. In the custom of the day, this was put upon her and she could not refuse even if she wanted. She is thrust into the middle of this deeply emotional situation that she wasn’t looking to enter.

I’m not saying that Hagar was sinless or perfect. We saw her brokenness in her contempt-full treatment of Sarai, looking down on her because she had what Sarai desperately wanted. But we also know that it wasn’t right for Sarai to treat her servant so harshly. We can sympathize with Hagar as she believed it was better to run than to live in the suffering she was enduring.

In v. 7, Hagar is running, but the angel of the LORD found her. The location of the spring on the way to Shur tells us that she’s probably doing what most of us would do…she’s running home to Egypt. The angel tells her to “return to your mistress and submit to her….” That sounds impossible, right? So he gives her promises to encourage her and help her to endure.

She’s going to have a son and she’s to call him Ishmael, which means “God hears.” He’ll be wild and unlike his mother, he won’t be the servant of anyone (which will cause its own problems down the road).

But focus on Hagar’s response to the God who has heard her affliction. In v. 13 she calls the name of the LORD, “You are a God of seeing” and knows that He is the one who looks after her.

YHWH hears and YHWH sees those in affliction and trouble.

That would have been a true comfort to Israel who first heard this Story as a people leaving Egypt and entering the wilderness. God was merciful toward this helpless, afflicted Egyptian servant. God would bless her and her children, even if the covenant was not being made with Ishmael, as they would see in the next chapter.

When Hagar gives birth to her son, Abram himself names him Ishmael and by doing so shows that Hagar has not been silent about how God has dealt with her. Abram naming Ishmael shows that not only has he accepted God’s word, but Abram accepts Ishmael as his own son. We’ll see how that plays out next time, but the focus in this passage is on the LORD who hears and sees and acts in mercy.

If God sees and hears the affliction and troubles of Hagar and comes and find her and bless her, would he fail to hear and see the affliction and troubles of His own covenant people and would he fail to find them in their helplessness and act to save them? This passage was meant to teach them more about the nature of YHWH and His mercy. But it was also meant to teach them that human efforts to fix the brokenness of this world aren’t enough to make things right. It takes the infinite power of God to fix a world and to fix humans broken by the corruption of sin and evil. All human efforts only lead to more misery.

Throughout the Scriptures, those who believe the promises of God have called out to God as they believe that the LORD is a God who hears and sees and acts on behalf of His people. David expressed that belief in Psalm 40 that we read earlier as he says,

“I waited patiently for the LORD;

he inclined to me and heard my cry.

He drew me up from the pit of destruction,

out of the miry bog,

and set my feet upon a rock,

making my steps secure.” (Psalm 40:1-2)

“… I am poor and needy,

but the Lord takes thought for me.

You are my help and my deliverer;

do not delay, O my God! (Psalm 40:17)

David understood what each of us needs to recognize; that we are always needy before God. We are always afflicted by the brokenness of the world we live in. We are always afflicted by the sinfulness of our own hearts that leave us helpless and unable to make ourselves well and whole even by our best human efforts. Our running from God into both sin and external religion to make life whole again are simply two sides of the same coin and both fail to satisfy us. Sex can’t make us whole. Families can’t make us whole. Work can’t make us whole. Going to church can’t make us whole. Food can’t make us whole. The right political candidate can’t make us whole. Even knowing good doctrine can’t make us whole.

But the good news of the Gospel of Jesus is that in him God has heard and seen our suffering under the affliction of sin and evil. He has heard and seen our rebellion and misery and has acted by entering into that misery for himself. The God who made the heavens and the earth was born into a broken world like you and me. He was born under the law of God so that he could set free those of us who through sin had come under the law’s curse. On the cross he endured the wrath of God that our brokenness and rebellion deserves. He was afflicted for our sakes so that we might be set free from affliction beginning now and forever in the age to come.

What brokenness does the risen Christ not enter into bringing restoration and life?

Your sins? His shoulders bore them all on the cross and he buried them in his tomb. They are gone from you as far as the east is from the west.

Your broken relationships? Some of you are now for the first time experiencing how the Holy Spirit transforms us into new creations, making us desire to love and be reconciled to people we have hurt or who have hurt us because Jesus himself came to us to reconcile us to God! Christ enables us to live in true community with others; knowing and being truly known and accepted by other people even in our brokenness.

There is no part of life, no struggle we face, no hurt we endure that Christ has not endured and conquered so that he might be able to sympathize with us and carry us through. He sees your tears and he has heard your cries even before you spoke them. God ordained that Jesus would come to you even before you came to exist and he lived and died so that the restoration we all so desperately need could be accomplished. And he lives now and gives you his spirit freely to bless you.

Call on him and know that he hears you. Look toward Jesus in faith because he already sees you and has found you for himself. Look to him and say with Hagar, “Truly here I have seen him who looks after me!” Embrace that truth and hold on to it even when you can’t see him for yourself. Embrace that truth until the day you see him with your own eyes and he makes you more whole than you ever imagined.

[1] From the Wikipedia entry on “Bloodletting.” Taken from Carter, K. Codell; Barbara R. Carter (February 1, 2005). Childbed fever. A scientific biography of Ignaz Semmelweis. Transaction Publishers.

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