Who is the first person to actually see the Angel of the Lord? It’s Hagar! In this episode, we’re going to see how much God loves Hagar and even calls her by name when Abram and Sarai don’t. God has some amazing promises for Hagar that would eventually mean a completely different and better life for her. In fact, God makes Hagar a promise that He has only ever made to Abram at this point.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler, and welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you stuff 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!)
The last episode was full of drama! No one was behaving well—not Abram, Sarai, or Hagar. Abram’s job was to make sure everyone was clear on who they were and what they were supposed to do—and he didn’t do that. Sarai was furious and probably jealous of Hagar and abused her once she got the chance. Hagar wasn’t being very mature about how people were treating her—she had become a sort of celebrity, and she was treating Sarai badly. Not a great plan. None of this was a great plan. At the end of the last program, things had gotten so bad for Hagar that she ran away from home. This week, we’ll see what will happen to her—and it wasn’t anything anyone would have expected! This whole mess is like a full-blown soap opera, and there will be plenty more of those in the Bible! The great thing about this week’s lesson is that we get to see how God feels about Hagar, compared to how Abram and Sarai feel about her. How does God feel about people who have been enslaved? A lot of the Bible talks about it, and through the stories of Hagar, Bilhah, Zilpah, Joseph, and the children of Israel, we will see a huge difference between the human attitude and God’s attitude about the things that happen to people like Hagar. Let’s look at this week’s verses:
The angel of the Lord found Hagar by a natural spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur, on the way to Egypt, where she came from. The angel said, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?” She replied, “I’m running away from my mistress, Sarai.” The angel of the Lord said to her, “Go back to your mistress and obey what she tells you to do.” The angel of the Lord said to her, “I am going to give you so many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and they will be too many for anyone to count.” The angel of the Lord said to her, “You are going to have a baby, and that baby will be a son. You will name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard your cry of suffering. Your son, when he grows up, will be like a wild donkey. His hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand will be against him; he will settle near all his relatives.” (Gen 16:7-12)
Let me tell you, this is so exciting to everyone who has ever been told that they don’t matter or were treated like they don’t matter! It’s so easy to skip right over this and not see how God loves and blesses Hagar. First of all, this is the first time in the whole Bible that we see the angel of the Lord. This angel also speaks to Abram, but not for another fifty years! And this is the angel who will talk to Moses out of the burning bush! The angel of the Lord doesn’t show up all that often, so it would have surprised the original audience when Moses told this story in the wilderness. Everyone there knew they were descendants of either Abram’s son Isaac, who wouldn’t be born for another thirteen years in the story, or came from Egypt. And most everyone listening had been probably enslaved in Egypt. This is only the first time in the Bible that someone who is owned and abused as a slave has an encounter with God out in the wilderness. And guess what? The children of Israel were out in the wilderness, too; from their tents, they could see the Tabernacle with the Lord’s presence over the tent of meeting—a flame of fire by night when it was cold and a cloud of smoke by day when it was hot. It was even the same angel of the Lord who led them out of Egypt and into the wilderness! They knew this angel, and Moses told them all that the first person this angel ever appeared to was a slave, a woman, and an Egyptian. And she is someone who has been badly mistreated. They would all be seeing Hagar as “one of them” more than they would be identifying with Abram and Sarai right now. They had more in common with Hagar, and so they would have heard what God said to Hagar through the angel as being spoken directly to them too. They were closer to understanding Hagar than Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. How God treats Hagar will show them that God can be trusted to care for the people that no one else wants and who have no real home of their own.
So, we see that Hagar is going back to Egypt, the only other place she has ever lived. Hagar is pregnant, which means that she needs more food and water than normal, and she isn’t exactly someplace with anything to eat. Fortunately, she has found a natural spring of water bubbling up from the ground. Maybe Hagar remembered it from the last time they had passed it. This place is about seventy miles from Abram’s campsite in Hebron, and so she has probably been traveling for a week at this point—on foot. But the angel of the Lord found her there, which means that he was searching for her. This wasn’t an accidental meeting. God cares for Hagar very much, and He sent the angel of the Lord to go and search for her. Where Hagar came from, gods and goddesses didn’t care about slaves, or the poor. They cared about kings and queens and priests and wealthy people, and that’s pretty much it. And they didn’t even care for those people anywhere near as much as they cared about themselves. The gods of the nations were extremely selfish and even ridiculously lazy. Except for Ra—he had to really work. All day, he was supposed to be rowing a boat across the sky with the sun in it, only resting once a day when his boat could park on the top of a sun needle, which the Greeks called an obelisk because it looked like a meat skewer for like shishkebabs. And all night, he was fighting this huge snake Apophis under the earth. And this happened every single day, or so they thought.
And then the angel of the Lord actually spoke to her, just like he will do later for Moses. He said, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?” In modern English, “What on earth are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere?” And did you catch what happened there? Abram and Sarai only call her “my slave” or “your slave.” The angel calls her “Hagar,” and only after that does he call her Sarai’s slave. And that might not seem very important to you, but what if, all your life, people had just called you boy or girl. “Boy, do that,” and “Girl, take care of this.” And then, all of a sudden, someone comes to you when you are feeling the worst you have ever felt in your life and calls you by your first name? Maybe you wouldn’t have even remembered what your first name was anymore. But it would feel really good, because the person who called you that name would have to know a lot about you. It wasn’t something that they could have overheard anyone else say because no one ever used it. Hagar must feel like someone is finally really seeing that she is a person because Abram and Sarai sure weren’t treating her like a person.
What do you think was going through her mind once she ran away? Probably a lot of things. Was she kicking herself for mouthing off to Sarai?–when if she had just continued to do her work, things wouldn’t be perfect, but at least she wouldn’t have been abused so badly that she would need to leave the camp. She was probably regretting that. Was she muttering nasty stuff about Sarai for getting her into this mess in the first place and then beating her to the point where Hagar might lose the baby from a miscarriage? Was she scared that she wouldn’t make it to Egypt? That she would die of hunger or thirst or from the heat—or that she might be captured again by someone even worse who might sell her and her baby to different people? Was she angry at Abram for not protecting her or even his own child? Was she wondering what she could even do if she got back to Egypt? So many questions and no answers. I would be thinking all these things. I would be hurt, scared, angry, confused, and a whole lot of other things. I would be feeling all my emotions, but just not any of the pleasant ones.
And calling her “Hagar, slave of Sarai” might seem pretty rude, but that’s how names worked back then. A person was “first name, daughter/son/wife of such and such.” Like David, son of Jesse of the clan of Judah, Jesus, Son of God, Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite, Simon son of Jonah, Mary of Magdala—people were only all of who they were once you said their name and then described who they were related to. They didn’t have last names. And, I mean, Jesus’s Jewish name, Yeshua, was such a common name when he was alive that there would be no way of telling them apart if you didn’t know who their fathers were and what town and tribe they were from. That’s why we say “Jesus of Nazareth.” But you know what is really strange? When the apostle Paul writes to the believers in Rome, in Romans chapter 16, he only uses first names for men and women. Almost nothing about who they are related to or married to because they are all family in the Lord God. Who are you? You are a member of the family of God, so it doesn’t matter where you were born, who your relatives are, how much money you have, or what you might do for a living someday. None of that matters in the family of God. You are you, and that means that you are part of us. That’s why Paul says that once you are part of the family of God, it makes no difference whether you were born a Jew or a Gentile, whether you are free or living as a slave, or a man or a woman. None of it matters anymore in the family of God. We still have relationships and all that, but they don’t stop us from becoming who God wants us to be. Next to being related to Him, nothing else is nearly as important.
The angel of the Lord told “Hagar, slave of Sarai,” that he knew everything about her. He knew her first name. He knew her job. He knew who was hurting her. Next week, Hagar will tell us why all that is so important and how amazed she was. But as for right now, Hagar needs to answer him, and what she says is really interesting, “I’m running away from my mistress Sarai.” Some people run toward something. Less than two hundred years ago, many enslaved people here in America were running toward freedom. That was their goal. They believed that if they could make it all the way north, they would have new lives where no one owned them or could treat them like animals. Yes, they were running away from being abused and owned by other people and forced to work very hard, but they knew what they wanted. They were ready to be free because that was their goal. They weren’t just running away from something; they were running to something much better. And did you know that their favorite book of the Bible was Exodus? When they read it, they learned that God cared about people who were kept as slaves, and that He is the God who sets slaves free. So, they had hope in a God who cared what was happening to them. Hagar doesn’t know anything about a god who cares about slaves. In her world, no one cares. And so this is one of the most important things you will ever read in the Bible to learn about how God cares about people in surprising ways.
Now, the angel of the Lord could have sent her somewhere that she could be free or given her money or whatever, but he doesn’t—this is what he says, “Go back to your mistress and obey what she tells you to do.” And I was like, “Say, what? Are you kidding me??? Don’t send her back there! Send her to some moisture farmer named Lars, who will marry her and give her a good life. Don’t be like the Jedi!” Oh wait, that’s Star Wars. Why does God send her back? Well, we don’t know for sure, but I have a few ideas: (1) Hagar didn’t have a plan, and she still saw herself as belonging to Sarai; maybe that was the only place she had ever really felt secure and safe before everything went crazy; (2) Hagar was having Abram’s baby, a baby that God wanted to bless and the best way to do that is for Hagar to go back to Hebron; (3) God needed to teach Abram and Sarai some lessons and He was going to judge them for what they did to Hagar. When we are part of God’s family, God makes sure that we don’t just get away with the bad things we do to other people. This situation was Abram and Sarai’s fault, so they needed to live with the consequences—which wouldn’t happen if Hagar just disappeared forever.
But then, just when we are disgusted at the angel for making Hagar go back to life as a slave, she gets this amazing promise that only one other person in the entire Bible has gotten. This is a very rare promise in the Bible: “I am going to give you so many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and they will be too many for anyone to count.” The angel of the Lord said to her, “You are going to have a baby, and that baby will be a son. You will name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard your cry of suffering. Your son, when he grows up, will be like a wild donkey. His hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand will be against him; he will settle near all his relatives.”
Whoa! God is making a promise to Hagar that, like Abram, her descendants will be so many that no one would ever be able to count them! And they will be HER children and not Sarai’s! And she will have a son, and SHE will name him, not Sarai. That had been the plan—for Hagar to have a baby and nurse the baby but for Sarai to name that baby and raise him as her own son. God is telling Hagar that Sarai won’t be naming the baby—Sarai will be rejecting him. That was great news in a lot of ways for Hagar. And his name would be Ishmael—which means “God hears”—because God heard Hagar’s cries of suffering. God heard. God paid attention. God cared. God acted. God blessed. Do you know how few people in the history of the whole world have had something like this happen to them? Not many! In a world where women weren’t always considered to be entirely human, and slaves were there to be used and thrown away like garbage, God is showing us that isn’t the way He feels about them, not at all. So neither should we. We aren’t better than God, right? So, we need to see what He sees and how He sees. God saw Hagar as someone to listen to, care for, and bless.
But what’s this about Ishmael being like a wild donkey once he grows up? That sounds super sketchy and even insulting, right? But it isn’t. Tame donkeys belong to people like Abram and Sarai, but wild donkeys are free and they live out in the wilderness wherever they want. Wild donkeys aren’t owned, they aren’t slaves, and they are very resourceful. Ishmael would be an entirely different sort of person than Hagar, who still sees herself as someone’s slave even though she has run away. Even though Sarai will be rejecting Ishmael as her own son, he still isn’t going to live life as a slave. When the angel tells her that his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand will be against him, that means that being Abram’s son isn’t going to be much of a blessing for him, especially since Ishmael will be living near his relatives and not with them. Ishmael is going to make the lives of Abram and Sarai difficult and their children and grandchildren too—he is not going to be an answer to prayer or a solution to their problems. He will be a thorn in their sides, a pain in the butt or neck, a total pill, and he will make them sorry that they treated Hagar the way they did. Ishmael wouldn’t be blessed to be the son of Abram, but Abram wasn’t exactly going to be blessed either—at least not in the long run.
Put another way, Hagar will get justice from God for how they have been treating her. She wasn’t right to be nasty to Sarai, and she did pay for it, but God isn’t a fan of slavery or any other sort of abuse. He allowed it because that was normal in the ancient world, and He kept taking more and more steps to get rid of it by changing how people could treat each other, but it doesn’t mean that it is part of how we should live in God’s Kingdom. The bad we do has a way of coming back on us as consequences. God is telling Hagar that this story isn’t over and that He will do right by her in the end. And He does! But the next sixteen or so years aren’t going to be easy for her.
Jesus said something important once—actually, everything He said was important, right? “Come to an agreement with the person you have wronged while you’re on the way with him to court, or he will hand you over to the judge, and the judge will give you to the officer, and you will be thrown into prison. Honestly, you won’t ever get out of there until you have paid him everything you owe him anyway.” (Matt 5:25-26)
Jesus was teaching us something very important about how the Kingdom of God works. When we do something wrong, owe someone money, or whatever, we can’t just pretend like nothing happened. And what we do wrong, we have to make it right. If we steal, then we have to give back to the person we stole from. If we hurt someone, we have to help them. Just going forward like nothing bad happened is not how the Kingdom of Heaven works. When the people who were enslaved were freed here in America, there was one General who tried to do the right thing. He took the land away from the people who had held them as slaves while living in luxury and gave it to the people who had worked that land and been held captive there. And that is a very Biblical thing to do. And they kept it for a while; things would have been very different for their families if it had stayed that way. But someone else came along and gave the land back to the rich white people. And the people who had been slaves were sent away with absolutely nothing. That broke a ton of commandments, lemme tell you. And so, where there could have been a lot of blessings if people had done what was right, things are still very wrong many years later. And things are wrong for everyone because we still haven’t done what is right.
We are going to see the same sort of thing happen in the future with Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, and Ishmael. God gives us a lot of chances to turn around and admit we have sinned, to do what is right, and when we don’t, someone will always pay the price. Everyone will pay the price for what is going to happen with Hagar and Ishmael. But right now, we can just be happy for Hagar that she has seen the angel of the Lord, knows that God hears her and sees her, and has amazing plans for her future and for the future of her son—whom she gets to keep for herself and will not have to give away!
I love you. I am praying for you. God hears you. God sees you. God sees your enemies if you have any, and what they do. Even if they believe they have the right to treat you badly, God doesn’t agree. As long as you keep doing what is right, you can trust God to take care of things in time, even when you can’t see what is happening in secret.