Gen 16

imagining his promises

(genesis 16)

Jason Procopio

Before we begin today, we need to have a little talk, because this is the first of several texts in our series in Genesis in which we’ll be confronted with a particular kind of problem.

I don’t know how many of you are on Disney+, but if you are, you may have noticed this. I grew up watching old Disney movies from the 50s, 60s and 70s. And if you found a lot of those movies on Disney+ when they first launched the service, you would see this warning at the beginning: “This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions.” 

This warning has recently been updated to be even more explicit: “This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.”

Now we all know what this is about, and I think most of us probably agree with Disney on this. There were certain things that were generally accepted by a large portion of culture even fairly recently that wouldn’t be accepted today. And that’s a good thing: there are a lot of things that happened in the past that shouldn’t be accepted. 

But that doesn’t mean we should act as if these things didn’t happen, and it doesn’t mean that saying they did happen is somehow a sign of approval. 

I’m saying this because a lot of people come to the Bible assuming that if the Bible talks about something, or says that someone we consider a “good guy” (like Abram or Moses or David) did something, that means that God somehow approves of whatever it relates. A good example of this, we find in today’s text. Abram’s wife, Sarai, is barren, she can’t have kids, so she gives Abram her servant Hagar, to sleep with him and get pregnant, so that she can have a baby for Sarai. So Abram takes Sarai’s servant Hagar, basically rapes her (because she has no say in the matter), and she gets pregnant.

And that’s just the beginning of the story.

Of course, this is awful; and some people are frustrated—or even disillusioned—by the fact that Moses (the author of this book) tells this story, and then never says, “This is bad,” or “This is not what God wanted.” They take his silence on the subject as a sign that God is actually okay with all this. And that’s not true. Moses (or any of the biblical authors) don’t need to editorialize and tell us, “This is not okay,” when clearly it’s not. You can see by the context—like, the point of this text—that it’s not true; you can see from the rest of the Bible that it’s not true; the fact that God allowed something to happen does not mean that he approves of that thing. 

Has God ever allowed you to do something really, really wrong? Does that mean he approves of what you did? What is more, did he use that wrong to do something in your life—for example: to bring you to a greater understanding of your need for him?

Now we need to keep all of that in mind as we read, because what we see happen in this text is pretty messed up.

Let’s go back over the chapter together.

Sarai, Hagar and abram

When we start in v. 1, we’re already reminded of the problem.  

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children.

So that’s been in the back of our minds for several chapters now. Sarai is barren; she cannot have kids. And that flies in the face of everything God has said to Abram. Remember his promise to him back in chapter 12, when God said, I will make of you a great nation, a promise he reiterated in chapter 15, saying your very own son shall be your heir… Look up at the stars—so shall your offspring be. 

That promise seemed impossible, at least the way things presently stood. We can see in v. 2 that Sarah is miles away from thinking God might actually make that promise come to pass through her—because (as she says),

Behold now, the Lord has PREVENTED me from bearing children.

Now in a sense that’s true, of course—God is sovereign—but the way she says it makes it clear that she doesn’t see her barrenness as a gift. Remember in the gospel of John when Lazarus dies, and Jesus says to his disciples (John 11.14-15):  

“Lazarus has died, and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe.”

So yes, this bad thing happened, but it happened because God wants to do something incredible with it. Clearly Sarai’s not thinking this way.

She wants a child; and she wants to see her husband receive the fulfillment of God’s promise. So she comes up with an idea. It’s not an original idea; this was a common practice at this time, in this culture. (This is why I brought up cultural biases before; we need to remember that they didn’t see this as abhorrent at the time.)

Sarai has an Egyptian servant named Hagar—a slave. Sarai asks Abram to take Hagar as his wife (a second wife—so this is polygamy on top of everything else), to sleep with her, so that Sarai can have Hagar’s child.

Now let’s set aside the fact of how awful this is. At this time, in this culture, this was common practice. That’s not the biggest problem here. The problem is that Abram should have known better. God had come to him when Sarai was his wife, and had promised him that he would give him a child (it was understood that this child would come through his wife), and through that child God would fulfill his promise. Abram clearly believed God could do it…but God hadn’t done it yet. 

So maybe Abram thinks, God made this promise, but he’s not doing anything about it… Maybe I could hurry him along. Maybe I could help. 

So he agrees with Sarai’s proposal. And that’s when the trouble begins. 

V. 4:  

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

Now, of course it’s not good to look with contempt on anyone…but can you blame her? We gather from this text and from what’s still to come that Sarai was probably a difficult woman. She’s got a very strong personality (she actually laughs at God later on, which is pretty gutsy).

So imagine how good it must have felt for Hagar, a slave, and to be able to do the one thing Sarai couldn’t do, and wanted to do, more than anything else in the world. It doesn’t excuse her contempt, but we can certainly understand it.

So in v. 5, Sarai sees Hagar’s contempt…and gets angry at Abram. Basically, “This didn’t go the way I wanted it to go—and it’s your fault.” This is, of course, an irrational response; but at the same time, she has a point. Because Abram agreed to something he should never have agreed to in the first place. 

And to make matters words, when he hears Sarai’s irrational response, Abram deflects—he gives a cowardly response. V. 6:  

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. 

Remember what we said a few weeks ago about how we shouldn’t idealize Abram, and act as if he was this perfectly good, perfectly faithful man? Here we see it again. 

We’ve got heavy shades of Adam and Eve here. Remember in the garden, when Eve is tempted by the serpent and gives Adam the fruit to eat… He doesn’t object. He doesn’t try to convince her not to sin. He doesn’t refuse to sin along with her. He simply goes along. 

Here too, Abram didn’t try to dissuade Sarai, didn’t try to convince her that they should believe in God’s promise; and now, he doesn’t try to defend Hagar who, although she is acting contemptuously towards Sarai, is still very much the victim in this situation. 

Here we have failure across the board from our protagonists.

So Hagar flees, leaves into the wilderness. And there, we see God intervene. 

An angel appears to her in v. 7, and tells her to go back to Sarai and submit to her. This is is hard for us to understand, but there are two things at work her that we need to remember.

The first is that this isn’t adding injustice to injustice; this is protection. In this culture, at this time, an unwed mother would have no means of providing for herself or her child; this is why being a widow back then was so devastating. Had she continued on her own, Hagar would have been entirely without resources. So God’s telling her to go back to Sarai, to go back to Abram’s household, is a sign of his love for her; he is making sure that her needs are met.

Secondly, what we see here is the same thing we’ve been seeing since the beginning. God has a plan. He is doing something—on a large scale and on a small scale. And as difficult as it may be to understand, God put Hagar in Abram’s household for a reason. So he tells her, quite simply, to trust in that: staying on the path God has set for you is better than trying to forge your own.

And he gives her a promise to go with the command (v. 11):  

“Behold, you are pregnant 

and shall bear a son. 

You shall call his name Ishmael, 

because the Lord has listened to your affliction. 

(The name Ishmael means “God hears.”) So Hagar—the abused slave—is the one person in this entire chapter who does what she should. V. 13:  

13 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.” 

In other words, she recognizes God’s hand at work, and she submits to God’s plan and trusts in his promise. She goes back to Abram, and eventually has a son, whom Abram names Ishmael, as God had said. (This, I think, is a small sign that Abram recognized that he had done wrong—Hagar had to have told him about her encounter in the desert; and Abram obediently names the boy as God had commanded.)

So Abram finally has a son—Ishmael is a gift…but he is not the fulfillment of God’s promise to him. Not yet.

So essentially, what do we have here? Sarai’s proposal that Abram have a child with Hagar is awful, but in that culture, at that time, it makes sense. It is in accordance with custom; that’s how things were often done back then.

But it’s not what God had planned.

And as a result, we see a rivalry born between Sarai and Hagar, we see Abram’s weakness on display, and we see God’s merciful intervention on behalf of Hagar—an intervention that would never have been necessary if Abram and Sarai had trusted in God’s power to fulfill his promise.

Now of course we can see how something like this could have happened—this story is a perfect picture of the kind of fear, jealousy and anger that we see played out in our lives all the time. They’re taken to an extreme for sure; but the insecurities and sin motivating these characters far too often motivate us as well. So we can understand how this kind of thing could be possible.

The question is, why does Moses—the author—want to take the time to tell us this story? 

It’s not just to explain how Abram happened to have another son besides Isaac. He’s trying to highlight three main difficulties God’s people have always had concerning God’s promises to them—difficulties imagining his promises, knowing his promises, and trusting his promises.

Imagining His Promises

This story is a perfect picture of what happens when God makes a promise, and that promise isn’t quite trusted. There is a strong temptation among God’s people to take matters into their own hands when God’s promises seem impossible. We see it here; we see it later on as well, when the people of Israel are being pursued by the Pharaoh, wondering how God could possibly save them. We see it after that, when they’re hungry in the desert, and can’t see how God can provide them with food. We see it again later, when they ask for a king, although God has told them the only King they need is himself.

On and on it goes. When God’s people are faced with a problem, it is incredibly tempting to try and “shoehorn in” a solution to the problem, rather than trusting the impossible promises of God. It’s understandable, right? Because sometimes God promises things that are—in any ordinary circumstances—impossible. 

“You will have a son, and through your descendants I will bless the entire world.”

“But…my wife is barren. Her womb literally cannot produce children.”

God gives an impossible promise to Abram. And Abram believed that God would bring it about…but he was a little unclear on the details—on just how miraculous God could actually be. Clearly God had some power—he had allowed Abram to defeat an enemy army with just 300 men. But causing a barren old woman to conceive and carry a baby to term…? Surely not that. Abram didn’t see how it was possible, and so he tried to find a logical solution to the problem himself.

I’ve said this in the past, but I believe one of the main difficulties God’s people face—at any given time—is a lack of imagination. This is why prophetic and apocalyptic literature in the Bible is so precious. The book of Revelation, if you’ve never read it, contains some imagery that is beyond weird. We have dragons with seven heads and ten horns, wearing crowns and getting ready to eat a baby after a woman gives birth. (The baby’s okay, God protects him.) We have beasts, hybrids of several different kinds of animals. We have Jesus showing up on a white horse, covered in blood, with shining white hair, a tattoo on his thigh and a sword coming out of his mouth.

Now we can analyse these images to death, to find the symbolism there, but in doing so we miss the fact that one of the primary goals of books like this isn’t to give us a kind of coded message from God, but to awaken our imaginations. He gives us crazy images like this to remind us that what is actually going on, behind the scenes, in the spiritual realm, is far beyond what we can actually conceive of in our limited human minds.

One of the main problems God’s people face in the Bible (and still today) is a lack of imagination. God’s people see his promises, which seem completely impossible…and because they can’t imagine how these things could ever happen, they doubt. And they try to find a more immediate solution to the problem before them. Name a king. Go back to Egypt. Let your wife’s servant have this baby for her.

But here’s the truth the Bible tells us from beginning to end: all things are possible with God. 

ALL THINGS. 

ALL THINGS.

The struggle of God’s people—our struggle—is to believe that. To trust it. To have just enough imagination to see that even if we can’t see how God could fulfill his promise, he can actually do it.

Knowing His Promises

Now I could just stop talking right here, and some of you would probably be happy. Wow, that was oddly uplifting—he's not usually so positive! Sorry to disappoint you, but we can’t stop there. Because when we say that “all things are possible with God”—when we print it on a coffee cup or a t-shirt, when we repeat it to ourselves over and over—we usually mean something the Bible doesn’t.

And here’s how that happens. 

Often we mistake desire for promise. We feel a great pull toward something—an insatiable desire for something—and if that thing is a good thing, we assume that it must be God’s will. So we assume that this desire we have is something that God will definitely bring about.

“I really feel like I can do some good in this particular field of work. So when I finally get to do what I want to do, I’ll be able to contribute, and I’ll feel fulfilled.”

“I’m single, and I hate it. I don’t feel like I have the ‘gift of singleness.’ So when I get married, I will be fulfilled; everything I feel I’m lacking today will come to me.” 

“I’m married, and we don’t have children. And we want children. So when we finally have kids, we’ll finally have the missing piece of the puzzle; we’ll finally have the thing we’ve been missing.”

“I’m sick, and I pray for healing, and I pray with faith; so God will definitely heal me.”

Do you see what I’m getting at? Almost no one would actually say these things out loud, but functionally, emotionally, that’s how many people often feel. They stake all of their hopes on the fulfillment of their desire, because those desires are for things that are inherently good. It’s a good thing to be healed. It’s a good thing to have kids. To get married. To feel fulfilled in your work. These are good things.

The problem is that they’re desires, not promises.

God’s promises for his people today are those things he has already promised us in his Word. Remember what we saw in 2 Peter 1.3? In Christ we have ALL THINGS that pertain to life and godliness. Everything we need, we have it already. 

But knowing how to trust in those promises can be tricky—because far too often we see something that speaks to us, and we take it out of context, and we try to apply it…when what we have in mind isn’t really what God was promising. That’s one reason why it’s so important to know the whole Bible—to understand what promises God has made, in their contexts, and what promises he hasn’t made.

Here’s a classic example. Romans 8.28:  

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

That is a wonderful promise we have. And it is a promise that has been twisted and misused, probably since Paul sent it out to the Romans.

This verse does not mean that even if things are bad, God will make them all better. That’s not what he’s promising here. They will ultimately get better—at the return of Christ—but in this lifetime, things may actually get worse. We have zero promise that all of the problems in our lives will work themselves out before we die. 

So what’s going on here? When Paul says that all things work together for our good, he meant it. But the “good” he talked about is not the end of our pain. It is not the end of our suffering. He tells us what that “good” is in the following verse. Let’s read v. 28-29 together:  

28 And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. 29 For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son… 

Our ultimate good—the thing that God is working in our lives through every situation we find ourselves in—is our becoming like Christ. Our being shaped and modeled into his character and likeness. That is our ultimate good. The promise of Romans 8.28 is that whatever we lose in this life, however great it may seem, we will gain infinitely more, because being like Christ is better than whatever we want the most in our lives right now. 

When you take it that way, this becomes a difficult promise to believe. Because it’s hard for us to see how some situations could ever make us more like Christ. How can moral failure make us more like him? How can being wounded by others make us more like him? How can random, inexplicable suffering—like cancer, or a car accident which kills someone we love—make us more like him? 

Sometimes we can have a fairly good idea; other times it’ll be a lot more difficult. Sometimes we’ll be able to imagine how he could use this situation for our good; other times, we’ll look at what we’re facing and say, I just don’t see how God’s promise could ever be fulfilled IN THIS.

And that is the situation in which we will find ourselves every single time God gives us a promise in Scripture. 

Trusting His Promises

Think of Sarai—this impossible promise, her advancing age, her barren womb which isn’t getting any better—and imagine how ridiculous God’s promise must have felt to her. When we’re in the thick of our pain, it will feel like God is as far away and unattainable as the moon.

But no matter how absent he feels, he is not absent. He is present, and he is working, and we will see it.

That’s one reason we have so many stories like this in the Bible. Because these stories give us example after example of people who didn’t know, in the moment, how God was working…but in whom God was definitely working. We look at Sarai, and we see her incredulity, and we want to tell her, Just wait. Just wait a little while longer. You can’t see it yet, but you WILL. God’s fulfillment of his promise is just around the corner.

The supreme example of this—of God’s fulfilling his promises when he seems to be completely absent—is the cross. 

We saw God become a man, live a perfect life; we saw his ministry take his country by storm. We saw people healed in droves; we saw demons cast out by a single word; we saw him command storms to stop, and they stopped; we saw him literally raise people from the dead.

And then we saw this same man, tried as a criminal, crucified by a mob, and dead and buried.

When has Satan ever seemed to be winning more decisively than at the murder of the Son of God? When has God ever seemed more absent? 

And yet…through what seemed to be defeat, God won not just the battle, but the war. 

No one could have imagined it. No one could have seen it coming. And that Saturday, after Jesus’s death, none of the disciples could have imagined how God could possibly fulfill his promise that through this man, he would save the world. We read that, and we want to tell them, Just wait. Tomorrow’s Sunday. He won’t be in the tomb for much longer. 

No one could have imagined that through his death, Christ was actually taking our sins on himself, and suffering our punishment in our place. No one could have imagined that at his resurrection, Christ was actually proving that he had defeated Satan, sin and death, and applying his perfect life to us, through his Holy Spirit. No one could have seen that coming.

But it did. God fulfilled his promise in the most unimaginable way, and in the moment, no one could have believed it. But that’s what happened. That’s what he did. He did the unthinkable, to prove just how far he could extend his power, just how far he is willing to go to remain faithful to his promises.

Brothers and sisters, God has given many promises to his people—and often those promises will seem absolutely impossible. How could God ever restore this person who is so utterly broken? How could God ever make me—jacked-up, sinful wreck that I am—more like Christ? How could he ever love me? welcome me? accept me? 

Don’t let your imagination get in the way of your trust. Feed your imagination, to accept that God can actually do all things.

Read his Word, and know what he has promised you.

And trust in those promises, no matter how impossible they seem. 

Because God is faithful. And all things are possible with him.