Genesis 16 isn’t a good chapter for Abram, Sarai, and especially for Sarai’s Egyptian slave Hagar. Sarai comes up with an idea to get a child for herself by following ancient Near Eastern custom and Abram goes along with it. The result is one huge mess and a whole lot of pain for everyone.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you things most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I now post slightly longer video versions. (Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context without reading an entire chapter every week!)
Abram’s wife, Sarai, hadn’t been able to have any babies, but she owned an Egyptian slave named Hagar. Sarai said to Abram, “The Lord isn’t letting me have any babies, go to my slave; maybe I can build a family through her instead.” And Abram agreed to do what Sarai said. So, Abram’s wife, Sarai, took Hagar, her Egyptian slave, and gave her to her husband, Abram, as a wife. This happened after Abram had lived in the land of Canaan ten years. Hagar became pregnant. When she saw that she was pregnant, her mistress became contemptible to her. Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for my suffering! I gave you my slave for a wife, and when she saw that she was pregnant, I became contemptible to her. May the Lord judge between me and you.” Abram replied to Sarai, “Look, she is still your slave and you have the power over her; do whatever you want with her.” Then Sarai abused her so much that Hagar ran away from home.
Wow, chapter 16 is a really sad story. Last week we talked about how, where Abram and Sarai came from, if a woman couldn’t have a baby she could force someone else to have a baby for her, as long as that someone else was a slave she owned. That’s just one of the many reasons why slavery is so evil. Hagar had been loyally serving Sarai since they left Egypt, but I want you to notice something important—neither Sarai nor Abram call Hagar by her name in this story—not even once. They call her “my slave” and “your slave.” How would you feel if people called you something like that? Have you ever been in a situation where someone just wouldn’t even act like you were a real person? I hope not. That’s a terrible thing to do to someone else. After all, we are all created to be God’s image-bearers, showing the world what He is like by how we act. But that isn’t how Abram and Sarai are treating Hagar because in that world, it was normal to see people who were enslaved like they were just less than nothing. “Normal” is just the way things tend to be, but we can’t ever make the mistake of confusing what is normal with what is good. Remember that God chose Abram and Sarai because He wanted to change the world into His Kingdom and not because He thought they were doing everything right. Thinking of it that way helps us deal with the bad things that happen in the Bible—we can know that the ancient world wasn’t what God wanted but that He was working to fix it. God didn’t give commandments because we were all that good at loving each other but because we were awful at it. And I am sure you have noticed we still aren’t particularly good at it!
We’ve talked before about honor/shame societies. The people at the top of the honor heap were treated well by everyone, and those at the bottom were treated badly. We know, because of Jesus, that the child of someone begging on the street for food is every bit as worthy of God’s love and our love as the child of a king or queen, but they didn’t know that, and they didn’t act like it was true either. They believed that whatever happened to people was what they deserved. If someone was a slave then it must be because they had done something really wrong, they were worshiping the wrong gods, or were just born inferior. We know that isn’t true anymore, but in a lot of places they still believe that. And all the time Hagar had been with Sarai, Sarai had always had a lot more honor. First, she was one of the wives of Pharaoh, living in a palace and being pampered until Pharaoh found out that she was actually Abram’s wife and not just his sister. And when Pharoah let her go, she was still the most powerful woman in their household. Hagar had probably counted herself lucky to be serving Sarai and not some of the other jobs she could be doing. As a ladies’ maid, she was trained to care for noble women. Life would have been harder in Canaan than it had been in Egypt, but in some ways it was also better. She was probably always frightened in Pharaoh’s palace because there were many powerful people and if she offended one, terrible things might happen to her.
Let’s have a “what if” story about Hagar, Abram, and Sarai. I will take what I know about the ancient world, and we’ll explore what I think might have been going on while Hagar was pregnant.
It would have been strange for her to be given to Abram as a wife. He was very old, but she obeyed her mistress, Sarai. Who knows? Maybe things would go better for her than just being a slave. After all, Abram was rich and powerful, so her children would be as well. She didn’t have a choice, so she would have to make the best of it whether she liked it or not. She was still a slave; she had no control over what happened to her, good or bad. But when she found out she was going to have a baby, Sarai was excited, Abram was excited, and everyone in the entire household was excited. Suddenly, everyone knew her name, and they treated her very special. They would point, whisper and get out of her way when she walked along. Sometimes, she could even hear the other women giggling about Sarai not being able to have a baby and wondering what Abram would do when Hagar’s child was born. That kind of talk had always bothered her before, but as she thought about it now, it filled her with pride that even though she was a slave, she could give Abram the son he wanted and maybe many sons—and if she did that, maybe she would be the head wife instead of old, barren Sarai.
As Hagar thought about it more and more, it became hard not to be affected by all the talk and the looks she was getting. For the first time in her life, she was a “someone”—she was more important than anyone except Abram because she would give him the son he had waited for all his life—and he was almost ninety! And she began to wonder why she should keep serving Sarai—after all, wasn’t she the mother of the heir to all the wealth she saw around her? Her children would inherit all of the animals, tents, and slaves of Abram. And that would make her powerful. Yes, Sarai said that the child would belong to herself, but certainly, once Abram had one child, he would want more, giving Hagar the power to keep her child for herself. No man in his right mind wanted only one son, after all. Life in the wilderness was difficult and hot–Hagar was often exhausted because of her pregnancy. Her feet were hurting more and more, and oftentimes, when Sarai would give her orders, she would find a way to get out of them. But as time passed by, Hagar grew more and more resentful of being bossed around by a woman who couldn’t even have a baby, and she began to talk back, “Maybe you haven’t noticed here, but I have a very important job providing an heir to the clan. I don’t want to lose this baby, so you need to find someone else to do your work for you!”
Sarai was absolutely stunned. No one in her life had ever spoken that way to her, at least not since she had become Abram’s wife. And this slave girl, whom Sarai had made a surrogate wife to her husband so she could have a child at last—she was entirely ungrateful and acting as though she was the mistress of the household! How dare she! And yet, Sarai didn’t know what to do because Hagar was carrying her husband’s child, and they needed that child very badly. Everyone in the household needed that child. Sarai wanted to get a stick and beat Hagar to teach her a lesson, but she didn’t dare lay a finger on her unless Abram said she could. Hagar had all the power at the moment because of that baby. Sarai’s cheeks burned hot with resentment and anger. She was almost eighty and had wanted a baby for so long, and this girl was not much more than a child in comparison and getting bigger every single day. It had been so hard for Sarai to watch without becoming jealous. It didn’t seem even remotely fair. Sarai had only one option available—she had to go to Abram to get this situation straightened out.
Sarai found Abram lingering outside her tent in the heat of the afternoon. He saw her and smiled—she was worth far more to him than any ten sons. But Sarai wasn’t smiling. She had been crying, he could tell, and she was also angry. He ducked into her tent so she could speak to him in privacy. He didn’t know who she was angry at, but she didn’t keep him in suspense for long. Sarai hissed at him, “Husband, you have wronged me, and so I am suffering terribly. I gave my slave to you for a wife, but now that she is pregnant, she doesn’t respect me at all. She thinks she is the mistress now and treats me shamefully, with none of the honor I deserve. This is your fault, Abram, because you have done nothing to make it clear where she stands in this family. May the Lord judge between you and me in how you have handled this!”
Let’s take a break here—was Sarai right to blame Abram for all this mess? Yes, kinda. I mean, Sarai was absolutely the one who gave Hagar to Abram for a wife. That was all Sarai, and Abram wanted a son very badly, so I am thinking he was really relieved that there was at least a plan to make it happen as soon as possible. Abram couldn’t say no because she had the right (according to the laws of the time) to force him to take Hagar as a wife. But, as the Patriarch (or the head dude in charge), Abram was the one who decided where everyone fit into the household. Sarai was telling Abram that he hadn’t done anything to make sure that Hagar knew her place, and maybe Sarai wasn’t sure about where she fit in anymore, either. Abram had let everyone down, and now he was the only one who could fix it. But what would Abram do? Well, his solution wasn’t the greatest.
Abram could have gone to Hagar himself and told her that, as far as he was concerned, she still belonged to Sarai and was still a slave and not a wife. But that is not what happened. No, Abram told the angriest person in the entire household, the most jealous person around, that Hagar was still her slave and that Sarai could do whatever she wanted to Hagar. Come on, Abram, really? Did this really sound like a good idea in your head? And so angry, jealous, and shamed Sarai went back to Hagar and abused her badly. The word translated as abused is the same word that is used to describe how the Egyptians treated the children of Israel as slaves—and they were even killing the baby boys at one point! So maybe she was hurting Hagar so much that the baby was in danger. Sarai was too angry and too jealous to have been given permission to do whatever she wanted to do. Abram didn’t understand how hard it is not to be able to have a baby and how hard it is to watch younger women have all the babies they wanted. But up to this point, no one was shaming Sarai to her face because she was the second in command. It got so bad that Hagar ran away when no one was looking, out into the wilderness where she would need food and water–but they would be about impossible to find. Where was she going? Probably she would head back to the only place she knew—Egypt. What Hagar was doing was incredibly dangerous, so Sarai must have treated her very badly.
Maybe that was how it happened—maybe you have another idea. Nobody alive was there, so we will never know and when we see them in the world to come, it will be too rude to ask. All we know for sure is that Sarai forced Hagar into this mess, and then Hagar was rude and surly to Sarai, Abram wasn’t doing anything to settle things down, and then Sarai was given permission to do whatever she wanted. Whatever happened, it was bad bad bad extra bad from start to finish. And it’s going to get even worse for thirteen more years! So what went wrong? Abram and Sarai weren’t patient. They saw an easy way to “help” God out so that they could have a son to take care of them when they got older so they could finally have an heir. But forcing Hagar to have a baby with Abram wasn’t God’s plan. God doesn’t need help. When He makes a promise, it means that He has all the details figured out already. It may happen tomorrow, or it may take fifty years, but it will happen. Abram and Sarai only had two jobs—keep following God and become the kinds of people who would be good parents when God gave them the promised child. That’s literally all they had to do. But now Hagar has a baby, and that baby is going to get in the way of God’s plans because the baby God wants is a baby that is 120% pure miracle. Hagar’s baby isn’t a miracle because she is very young and, of course, she can have a baby. God wants to do something that people will be talking about forever, and look, here we are almost 4000 years later still talking about it, right?
Why does God wait so long before giving us what He has promised? Well, I can only guess because I am not God, and everyone should be very happy about that. But I think there are a few reasons: (1) He is testing us to see if we really believe Him; (2) He is seeing if we will be patient and wait to see how He makes His promise happen; (3) He wants to see if we will do the hard work of making sure that we are ready for it when it happens; (4) He is giving us the time to become humble and understand that we can’t get it for ourself because we are just not that awesome; (5) He wants all the credit for Himself. If God made His promises happen in ordinary ways, people might get the wrong idea that they made it happen themselves or it was just a coincidence. Nope, God loves to show off what He can do, how clever He is, and how amazing His plans are. Usually, when we get what He has promised, it just seems crazy to us how everything worked out.
What He absolutely doesn’t want us to do is: (1) decide He can’t do what He is promising, like as though He isn’t God or something and can’t handle it; (2) try to help Him out by coming up with a plan to make it all happen earlier and in an easier way—we like to try to find shortcuts because we hate waiting; (3) get ourselves into trouble by not being ready because we made the wrong thing happen at the wrong time and we weren’t mature enough to handle it yet; (4) decide that He just can’t keep His promises; (5) take the credit for ourselves or to say that He did something for us because we deserved it. Those are all the road to trouble. Abram did believe God, so that was good. But they got impatient and found themselves a shortcut, and that shortcut will end up hurting people. That shortcut tempted Hagar to become prideful. In the end, God had to fix problems that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. He had made Abram a promise, and Abram should have at least told Sarai that they needed to keep waiting. But we don’t even know if Abram told Sarai about his vision of the Angel of the Lord at all. When we don’t wait, we end up with a mess.
I have told you guys about the dream I had about twenty years ago where I was surrounded by a hundred children, right? And I didn’t know what it meant. Just imagine what would have happened if I had adopted ninety-eight more kids, trying to make God’s promise to me happen. Oh man, let me tell you that I would not have time to do anything except take care of those kids. No time for reading all these books and doing all these teachings. And I wondered for a long time, but I did not want to have a hundred kids so I just kept wondering and didn’t try to make it happen by myself. When God made me a teacher for adults and then a teacher for kids, suddenly it made a lot more sense and boy howdy was I ever relieved. Honestly, I could barely handle my twins.
And maybe one day, God will make you a promise too. When He does, I want you to remember that you don’t have to make God’s promises happen, and if you even try, you will make one huge mess—or maybe more than one. This is actually one of the most important lessons that we can ever learn from Abram and Sarai—the importance of trusting God and waiting and watching to see how He is going to make His own promises happen without any help from us at all. Our only job is to make sure that we are the kind of people who will be able to do that job once it happens. And believe me, that’s hard enough!
When Jesus was twelve years old and He didn’t go home with His parents after the Passover, Joseph and Mary were freaking out and it took them three days to find Him. And where was He? He was in the Temple Courtyard with the famous teachers and scholars, talking to them about the Bible. They were amazed at His understanding. But Jesus’s parents weren’t very happy because they had been terribly worried. Jesus was confused because He thought that He should be at the Temple–it was His Father’s House. But it wasn’t time yet. It wouldn’t be time for another eighteen years. Jesus didn’t sin, but He jumped the gun and scared his family to death. When he saw that he had disturbed them, He went back home with them and never pulled anything like that again. And then, one day, Jesus went to His cousin John who was preaching at the Jordan River and baptizing people. Jesus knew that He was the example that everyone on earth would need to follow, so He got baptized too. When He did, things started to happen all at once—the heavens above Him ripped open, and the Holy Spirit came down on Him like a dove and, if that wasn’t enough, there was a voice from Heaven saying, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well-pleased.”
Wow! And then the Spirit led Jesus out into the wilderness where he had nothing to eat for forty days and forty nights—and Satan was tempting Him because Satan knew who Jesus was. But it didn’t work. It was only after that when Jesus started preaching, teaching, and doing miracles all through the Galilee. Jesus waited thirty years for God’s promise to begin, and He did all of his work in less than four years. And there were times when Jesus’s disciples thought they were ready to do whatever it took, but when the time came for Jesus to be arrested, they all ran away, and Peter even said three times that he had no idea who Jesus was. People tend to believe they are ready when they aren’t ready at all. Jesus couldn’t have done everything he did as a twelve-year-old boy. Peter and the other disciples needed to see Jesus rise from the dead, and they also needed to receive the Holy Spirit on Pentecost before they were ready to teach the world about Jesus. But once they were ready, oh man, they were ready! They did amazing things in the Name of Jesus. God doesn’t give us the things He promises until we are ready to handle them. Some promises are a lot bigger than others, and so we have to wait longer, but sometimes people grow up and mature so quickly that they are doing amazing things when they are very young. It took God a long time to get me shaped up so that I could do what I am doing now, but I know I still have more to do that I am not ready for yet.
Everyone is different. Abram will be a hundred years old when God gives him the child He promised, and Sarai will be ninety. Moses will try to save the children of Israel forty years too early, and he will kill a man because he isn’t ready yet. David had to hide in caves for many, many years before he became the King God promised he would be. Those stories are in the Bible to teach us that just because we don’t see the things we are promised doesn’t mean that they will never happen. The time just isn’t right yet.
I love you. I am praying for you. I am very excited to see what God does with each and every one of you because He created each of you to be unique and different from everyone else.