We Are an Impatient People

     Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children.  But she had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar; so she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children.  Go, sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her.”  Abram agreed to what Sarai said.  So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian maidservant Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife.  He slept with Hagar, and she conceived.

(Genesis 16:1-4) 

One needs to go back to chapter 15 of Genesis to understand why all this has happened, however I will attempt to fill you in, though I recommend you read that chapter for yourself.  You see God had made a covenant with Abram (Abraham) and promised him that he would be the father of a great nation with descendants that would be as numerous as the stars in the night sky.  God also promised him that four hundred years later his descendants would be removed from where they had been enslaved and brought to the very place where he was standing to inherit the land, which is now present day Israel.  When the Lord initially promised Abram that he would have a son, both he and his wife were already advanced in years.  God made a promise; He cannot lie or break His promise; that would go against His character since He is the very essence of truth.  The Lie Whisperer would have us believe otherwise, the way he did this through Abram and Sarai was through their impatience with God’s promise.  We are an impatient people, how many times have we felt that God wasn’t moving fast enough, so we then step in to help God speed things up. 

     It was a common practice in that day for women to give their maidservant to their husband in hopes that a child would be born through that union, the wife would then take the child after it was weaned and raise it as their own.  Such was the case with Sarai who gave Hagar to Abram and a child was conceived, this child though was not of the promise of God, it was in the flesh.  Remember the promise was that Sarai would have a child not her handmaiden.  Hagar’s name translates into “flight” and that is exactly what she did when she found out she was pregnant. The women began to despise each other, Sarai blamed her husband, and then mistreats Hagar who then fled from Sarai into the wilderness where an angel of the Lord finds her and begins to address her in Genesis 16:8-12.

     And he said, “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?”  “I’m running away from my mistress Sarai,” she answered.  Then the angel of the Lord told her, “Go back to your mistress and submit to her.”  The angel added, “I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count.”  The angel of the Lord also said to her:  “You are now with a child and you will have a son.  You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery.  He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.”  Next week we will see the significance of the impatience of Abram and Sarai and how the birth of Ishmael is of the flesh and not the spirit, which is the promise of God.

                       Dale LaFrance                (please look up Genesis 15)