Hagar, Sarai’s maid, where have you come from and where are you going?

Sometimes in our obedience to God, in living with the instructions and promises He’s given us, we can go astray by trying to help God fulfill His own promises. Rather than waiting to hear from Him, we sometimes start searching our own minds and employing our own skills without seeking Him first. Seriously, do we really think He needs help from us? He is the Sovereign, Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and All-Powerful Mighty God beyond time and space. What could we possibly include on a resume that would impress Him?

And yet, we don’t always trust God to fulfill His promises so we try to help God. We start thinking that His promises depend on us, and we try to manipulate the circumstances in our favor. It is at this very destructive point that the fire alarms should be going off in our heads and hearts. It starts subtly. Our focus goes away from loving God more and moves toward the path we envision to get to His promise, or rather, our own vision of His promise. We get caught up in thinking how great life will be once we get there.

It’s fine to do our best in obeying God, to research and make wise decisions, to ask for advice, to seek and take opportunities, and to move ahead boldly as long as God is our greatest focus. Once we lose sight of Him, we’ve lost everything because His promises never exclude Himself.

Over and over in scripture, we are told that His way is peaceful and restful. When we are trying to control God’s promises, we are missing something. We don’t have to control circumstances or people; our job is to listen and obey and then listen some more. That’s it.

God gave Abram the very clear promise that he would have his own bloodline descendants. He trusted God, but then some very logical reasoning stepped in. I have heard it said that “Logic is the systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.” When we leave God out of the equation, we are bound to come up with erroneous conclusions. If we go further and take actions based on those wrong conclusions, we end up with trouble. Abram and Sarai learned this the hard way.

Abram and Sarai were living in the land of Canaan with all of their possessions – including those they had acquired from their time in Egypt. In Genesis 16 we see the barren Sarai give her own touch to God’s promise based on her untrusting reasoning. She offered her Egyptian maid Hagar to Abram in order to have a child through her servant. This was not an uncommon practice in the region at that time. Sarai perceived that God wasn’t doing His part so, as far as she could tell, God needed some help. Or maybe God was just waiting for them to do their part, whatever that was. If Abram was going to have a child and Sarai couldn’t produce one, it made sense that it must come from Hagar, who technically was under Sarai’s headship so, in a manner of speaking, it would come from Sarai. That’s logic.

Abram took Hagar, the Egyptian maid, as his wife and she became pregnant; however, this led to a severe “falling out” between Sarai and Hagar. Hagar began to despise Sarai and Sarai mistreated Hagar. Somehow, I don’t think circumstances turned out quite as Sarai had envisioned when she applied her logic to God’s promise. She expected to get to the promised destination by taking a road in a completely different direction. And with God, the road is important because it is His desire that we walk with Him. Our “destination” is His presence.

It sounds as if both women were at fault, but Hagar finally reached the point where she could no longer take the stress. She ran away and the angel of the Lord found her, pregnant, in a desert, near a spring beside the road to Shur. Can you imagine this? God spoke to Hagar and asked her this question…

Hagar, Sarai’s maid, where have you come from and where are you going?

To answer this question literally, we can look at a map. What do you think the answer to this question is?

Introduction to Abraham

After the account of the tower of Babel, in Genesis chapter 11, we are introduced to the man, Abram, later named Abraham. His wife was called Sarai (later known as Sarah) and she had a maid, Hagar.

The following lineage chart illustrates the ancestry line from Adam to Abraham and notes the significant historical events during their lives. The elliptical shaped names are those in the ancestry/family line of Abram. Sarai’s shape is elliptical because she married Abram. God made some specific promises to Abram/Abraham about his descendants and those promises were carried on through Isaac. Future genealogy charts will use elliptical shapes to follow those promises.

Abraham was originally known as Abram, which means “high father.” Genesis 11:26 tells us that he was the son of Terah and lived in the land of the Chaldeans, in Ur, the capital of Chaldea. This would not have been far from the attempted construction site of the tower of Babel.

While there, he took a wife, Sarai, who was unable to have children. Then he and part of his family moved to Haran where his father died.

We are told in chapter 12 that the Lord spoke to Abram and instructed him: “Go forth from your country, And from your relatives And from your father’s house, To the land which I will show you; And I will make you a great nation, And I will bless you, And make your name great; And so you shall be a blessing; And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.”

So, Abram left with Sarai and his nephew Lot and moved to Canaan.

A famine in the land drove Abram, Sarai and Lot to Egypt. Abram, fearing the people of the land, instructed Sarai to tell others that she was Abram’s sister, rather than his wife. The Pharaoh of the land took Sarai into his house and gave gifts of cattle, sheep, donkeys, oxen and servants to Abram. This is probably where the woman, Hagar, came into the picture, and she was acquired as a slave for Sarai.

In order to protect Sarai and guard Abram’s bloodline, the Lord sent plagues on Pharaoh and his house and Pharaoh realized that Sarai was actually Abram’s wife. The Pharaoh returned Sarai to Abram and sent them on their way. Abram, Sarai, and Lot took all of their possessions and moved back to the Negev and then on to the place he had been before, between Bethel and Ai.

Abram and Lot prospered greatly such that the land wouldn’t sustain them both if they stayed in close proximity, so they parted ways. Lot chose to move to the luscious area of the Jordan River Valley and the city of Sodom. Abram moved to the land of Canaan. For more details you can read Genesis 12-14.

In Genesis 15, we come across a highly significant interaction between God and Abram. At this time, Abram had no children and the possibility of having any children of his own seemed bleak. The Lord made a covenant with Abram that his descendants would possess the whole land that Abram could see. God also told Abram a little about the future of his descendants. God said,

“Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years. But I will also judge the nation whom they will serve, and afterward they will come out with many possessions…Then in the fourth generation they will return here, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete.” (Genesis 15:13-16)

We will see in future chapters how this information from God came to pass.

Abram had received very clear promises from God that he would have his own bloodline descendants. However, as we will see in the next chapter, people sometimes try to help God fulfill His promises, and it never turns out well.