Oh man, I hate this portion of the Bible. It’s so messy and sad and frustrating. Abraham is upset about Sarah wanting Ishmael gone forever—I mean, of course he is! God hasn’t chimed in but when He does, it’s shocking so we will need to get an explanation. God isn’t done with Hagar or Ishmael yet, and Hagar is going to get one more visit before she exits the Biblical account of her life.
If you want to view this on YouTube, check this out! If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.
Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys 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 usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
Oh man, three weeks ago we ended on a cliffhanger! Do you know what a cliffhanger is? In early TV shows like the Lone Ranger and Batman, every week they’d get themselves into some sort of crisis and they’d stop the program right before you found out what happened! Is someone tied down to railroad tracks with a train coming? Oh no! Will they get rescued or will they die? Well, on tv they always got rescued which probably wouldn’t happen in real life because who the heck even hangs around railroad tracks? On TV, they had to get rescued, or else the show would end. So, a cliffhanger is what we call it when we leave the story at an exciting or upsetting moment without finding out what happens next. Of course, you guys can go open up to chapter 21 of Genesis if you want to know, but for news of the Lone Ranger’s fate you had to wait another week. When we left Abraham and Sarah, she was really angry because Abraham’s seventeen-year-old son Ishmael was being rude at three-year-old Isaac’s party. We don’t know exactly what Ishmael was doing, only that it made Sarah really angry and she gave Abraham an ultimatum—which means she was telling him what to do, or else. Sarah told Abraham to get rid of Ishmael and his mom Hagar. And the problem with all that is with Hagar being Sarah’s slave, her property, the laws back then said that she was allowed to give Hagar her freedom and in exchange, Ishmael couldn’t get anything from his dad once he died. Oh man, this is a mess, right? What is Abraham going to do? How is he feeling about this? Well, let’s find out.
This was very upsetting to Abraham because he loved his son Ishmael. But God said to Abraham, “Don’t be upset about the boy and about your slave. Whatever Sarah tells you, listen to her, because your family, the ones who will inherit the Land of Canaan, will be traced through Isaac, and I will also make a nation of the slave’s son because he is your child.” Early in the morning Abraham got up, took bread and a waterskin, put them on Hagar’s shoulders, and sent her and the boy away. She left and wandered in the Wilderness of Beer-sheba. When the water in the skin was gone, she left the boy under one of the bushes and went and sat at a distance, about a bowshot away. She said, “I can’t bear to watch the boy die!” While she sat at a distance, she cried loudly.
This is really sad, right? And it’s surprising. I can’t even imagine a situation like this. Of course, Abraham was upset—I mean, Ishmael is seventeen years old, and Abraham has been loving him and teaching him everything he needs to know since he was just a young boy. When you only have one kid and that kid is an answer to your prayers (or even if you think they are), that kid is going to be special and the center of your life and thoughts and love. Until like four years ago, Abraham didn’t think that there would be any more kiddos and especially not from his wife Sarah. So, he poured all his love and attention into Ishmael. He didn’t think anything could go wrong to mess it up. Remember how upset Abraham was back in chapter seventeen when God told him Sarah would have a baby? He didn’t celebrate, he got upset and begged God to let Ishmael be his heir. But God said no because His solution to their problem of not having children was always to make a miracle that no one else could deny. God was making a people out of nothing. In a way, we can say that the only reason Isaac is even alive is because God took part of Sarah’s body that was dead and made it so that she could make a living baby! I mean, wow! Remember how I said there would be similarities between Isaac and Jesus? Well, not only was Isaac a miracle baby like Jesus was but when Isaac came out of old Sarah, so old that she was practically almost dead, it was like Jesus coming out of the tomb after he rose from the dead. Sarah’s body was like that tomb, a place to store dead people with nothing alive inside it but God made a miracle. It’s crazy but that’s why it was a miracle. Only God can do something like that. But it created a big problem with no good solution.
Ishmael was caught making fun of Isaac at his party, and Sarah was so angry that she told Abraham to get rid of him and his mom. Abraham was upset, and so I wonder if he went to God and prayed about it and asked God what he should do. Abraham knew that Isaac was God’s choice to inherit the Land of Canaan—or at least his children’s children would inherit it four hundred years in the future. He knew they had made a terrible mistake by trying to have a baby any other way. But still, Ishmael and Hagar were real human beings and neither of them had a choice in what had happened to them. It isn’t being mean to Abraham and Sarah if we are sad about Ishmael and Hagar. It also doesn’t mean that Ishmael and Hagar didn’t do anything wrong. Everyone here did wrong—except baby Isaac, of course. He probably has no idea anything is wrong. He’s probably just chomping down on the fatted calf and fresh dates and bread and having a grand old time. And Sarah was probably really happy too, until she saw Ishmael being rude.
“Get rid of them!” That’s what Sarah said. “He’s not going to get anything, it all belongs to my son, Isaac!” And Abraham didn’t know what to do so God spoke to Him about it, and what God said must have surprised Abraham—at least a little. Abraham had known for a long time that Ishmael wasn’t going to get the promises but he probably didn’t know that Ishmael would ever really be going away. After all, they were family. But God had other ideas. God sided with Sarah, kinda. God told Abraham that he needed to listen to Sarah and to do what she says, which really put Abraham in a hard spot. Did God see Ishmael as dangerous to Isaac? We just don’t know. All we know is that God is agreeing with Sarah to send them away from the camp. Sarah says that Ishmael won’t get anything that belongs to Abraham. God is allowing that too—but why? Well, God has a funny way of blessing people and sometimes He doesn’t want anyone else to take the credit for it. Sarah wanted them sent away with nothing, and God agreed but promised Abraham that He would make Ishmael into a whole nation of people. That was God’s way of telling Abraham not to worry no matter what Sarah told him to do. Sarah could get rid of them but couldn’t curse anyone whom God wanted to bless and God had made it clear three times that He wanted to bless Ishmael because of His love for Abraham. He told Hagar in chapter sixteen when she was pregnant and alone in the wilderness after having run away. He told Abraham in chapter seventeen and now again in chapter twenty-one and He will tell his mom Hagar one more time. That’s four promises to bless Ishmael—and that’s not bad.
Of course, we should always want to do kind things to everyone and not be cruel, and if we are cruel then we aren’t cooperating with Jesus but people still get blessed whether we want to be involved or not—they might just suffer more or longer without our kindness. But it makes God very happy when we are kind even to the people we hate and who hate us. And I know Abraham wanted to be kind to his son, but he was also really good about obeying God when he was directly told to do something. God wasn’t saying He would destroy Ishmael the way He was going to destroy Sodom, but that He would bless him. Ishmael was going to be okay. So, Abraham got up early the very next morning (which has me wondering if God told him in a dream that night or something) and gave Hagar a waterskin and some bread and sent them away. I believe that he would have sent them away with camels and food and servants if he could have but God told him to listen to Sarah. Maybe this was all she wanted them to have. We don’t know. We know from the laws of the ancient world that Sarah didn’t have to give them anything when she set them free. This story only has a happy ending because God promised to protect them and bless them.
I imagine there was a lot of crying and hugging between Ishmael and his father Abraham. I wonder if Ishmael was sorry for having been so sassy about his little brother or if maybe this made him feel like he was right to do it. Was he sad or was he angry? I am sure he was sad about leaving his father and that Abraham was really sad about losing Ishmael forever and maybe never seeing him again. By sending them away with so little, he was really having to trust that God would do what was right to protect them once they left the camp. But where would they go and how would they get there? Well, they would be walking, for sure. And she would probably head for the only other place she had lived—Egypt! They were out in the wilderness, which meant any land that wasn’t farmland or city lands. They were in the desert which means that there wasn’t water available all year around or just anywhere without a well, so once they ran out, they could die. And just like the first time she left the camp, she got lost but this time she didn’t find a water spring. This time, she thought they were going to die and so she left Ishmael under a bush and walked away so that she wouldn’t have to see her son die. And she cried and cried very loudly. I wonder if she remembered God’s promise seventeen years ago, or if she had forgotten. It probably seemed impossible right about now, whether or not she remembered.
God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What’s wrong, Hagar? Don’t be afraid! God has heard the boy crying from the place where he is. Get up, help the boy up, and take him by the hand, because I will make him a great nation.” Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well. So, she went and filled the waterskin and gave the boy a drink. God was with the boy, and he grew; he settled in the wilderness and became an archer. He settled in the Wilderness of Paran, and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt, where she came from.
God doesn’t always rescue us right away when bad things happen. Sometimes, He waits for us to give up. Hagar had totally given up. And who can blame her? The situation definitely seemed hopeless. Yeah, we can say she was wrong not to trust God but we also have to learn how to be understanding and kind because all through the Bible we will see people doing messed up stuff that we think we wouldn’t ever do but we might have if we were them. Actually, there’s a really good chance that we would have. They didn’t have Bibles to read or long histories of knowing about everything God has done in the past. They were like the first people on the Oregon Trail who were heading out to who knows where and just hoping that they weren’t all going to die of dysentery (if you know, you know) but some of them went bad on the way and some of them thought it would be fun to kill the Native Americans they saw on the way. Others killed them because they were scared. Most folks probably never killed anyone at all or even got the chance to. Hagar is scared, and when we are scared we tend to forget to do the right thing and we also forget the things that God has promised. And God will give us a chance to forget before suddenly reminding us and putting us back on the right trail again. Not the Oregon Trail, though.
Hagar was crying, very loudly. Any mom would be crying if she thought her kid was going to die. The strange thing is that God heard Ishmael crying, not Hagar. But when God heard Ishmael crying, Hagar was the one He talked to. For the second time. Was Ishmael crying out to God for help? I would certainly hope that Abraham was teaching Ishmael to obey God and to trust Him and to cry out to Him when there is trouble. Or maybe Ishmael has lost hope too. We don’t know how many days have gone by since they were sent away. Humans can’t live that long without water to drink and especially if they are walking in the desert. After three days without water, people start to die. Now, she might have had a lot of water because they would take the skin off of a sheep or a goat and would sew it up tight and fill it with water. Yeah, I know it is super gross but it was better than dying of thirst. They would put grape juice in them if they wanted wine because all of the bacteria from the skin would ferment the grapes. Blech. Boy, am I glad they finally invented bottles even though I still think wine tastes like goat bacteria!
So, God heard Ishmael crying and He called out to Hagar through the Angel of the Lord. He said, “what’s wrong, Hagar? Don’t be afraid!” I bet that was a shock—after all, this was Abraham’s God speaking to her again even though Abraham had rejected them. In those days, gods and goddesses were believed to be very territorial and to play favorites. They didn’t much care about doing what was right unless they got something out of it, which means that they also didn’t care about whether what they were doing was wrong or not. Hagar probably thought that saying goodbye to Abraham meant saying goodbye to the promises his God had made her before Ishmael was born. She didn’t understand yet that with God, a promise is a promise so let’s look at what God said to Hagar back in chapter 16: 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, because 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 but not with them.” (Gen 16:7-12)
I believe that Hagar knew it was God right away because He did something with her that no one else in the Bible does—He called her by her name and didn’t just call her “that slave” like Sarah and Abraham did. Wow, that must have been a surprise. Not only did God know her name and her son’s name because, duh, He named her son Himself, but He hadn’t abandoned them after all. Abraham’s God was her protector too. This was the second time God had come to her rescue in the wilderness—making her promises like she was some sort of king or priest when everyone else just saw her as a slave woman. Peter is going to tell us in Acts 10 that God is something called “no respecter of persons” which means He doesn’t care who you are. God isn’t impressed with kings and priests as though they are more special than anyone else. He notices people like Hagar every bit as much as people like Abraham and Sarah. Truth is that God is so high above us and so much greater than we are that there is no way on earth that anything we do can get us closer to who He is. Like, can you imagine God getting all impressed with a famous singer or actress or politician? Like maybe He would ask for their autographs? Hagar was created as the image of God no different than Abraham—all humans are. And we are all pretty much hopeless gooberheads compared to God. If He hadn’t made us to be His representatives in the world, He wouldn’t be any more impressed with us and all our nonsense than with a sparrow, a little bird.
And the Angel of the Lord said, “Don’t be afraid!” That’s actually what happens a lot of the time when people met angels or heard their voices out of nowhere, because they’d be terrified. I saw an angel once a long time ago, and I screamed bloody murder and when my husband came into the room I was white as a sheet. God doesn’t want us scared when He has a message for us, because if we are too scared then we won’t listen to Him. The Angel also told her that God heard Ishmael crying and that she needed to go over and take him by the hand and get up and go because He had made promises and he was going to keep them! If Hagar had forgotten those promises so long ago, she sure remembered them now. And best of all, God opened her eyes and she saw a well nearby. She took the water skin and filled it up and gave Ishmael some to drink. But what does it mean for God to open our eyes? It’s important to understand because we see it a lot in the Bible. And it’s something only God can do.
If it sounds strange to you that someone can’t see a well when it is right there in front of them, imagine walking and talking and eating with Jesus without knowing it was Him, or a good friend seeing Him in a garden and not knowing who He was. Or how about not seeing the angel army protecting the prophet Elisha! The Bible tells us that we only see so much of what is around us and that there is a whole lot more that we can’t see. And that’s a good thing because it means that God and His Kingdom is a lot more powerful than what we see all around us. God opens our eyes to see things in many ways, and one of the most useful is when we believe something about God or the Bible or Jesus but then all of a sudden, God lets us see more of what is really there. Every time that happens to me I am incredibly shocked. God also lets me see the invisible things about myself sometimes—not like I have invisible body parts but I have wrong things I do that I can’t see for myself. Last year, my husband Mark and I were driving down to the river walk in our city and he was saying something about the Bible and I just corrected him for no good reason. All of a sudden, I knew that even though I was technically correct that it was just mean and embarrassing for him. Mark will never know as much about the Bible as I do, and that’s okay. He knows lots of stuff that I can’t understand. And I remembered back and realized that I do it to other people too. I just never saw it before. God showed me that and I felt terrible about it but now I don’t do it anymore. I am more careful. Unless someone is saying something so completely wrong that it’s going to hurt someone, I keep more of my opinions to myself. It’s way easier to see what others are doing wrong than what we are doing wrong.
The Bible actually tells us that God wants to give us eyes that see and ears that hear. That doesn’t mean that we are all blind and deaf to the world around us. Most of us can hear and see regular stuff. It means that when our focus isn’t right, that we have trouble seeing and hearing what God wants us to know. That was one of the big messages from the prophets, that the wrong things they were doing were just making them unable to hear from God and see what He is doing all around them. When Mary of Magdala saw Jesus and thought He was the gardener, it was because she knew that Jesus had died. She didn’t understand that He had been raised up to live again and so she couldn’t see Him even though she loved Him and had followed Him. But when Jesus talked with her, she saw Him and knew it was Him. It’s the same thing with the two followers of Jesus who were walking home from Jerusalem to Emmaus after the Sabbath. They knew Jesus was dead and so they walked and talked and ate and drank with Him and He even taught them from the Bible and all of a sudden, they realized it was Him. God gave them eyes to see and ears to hear what was really going on. But mostly, God giving us eyes to see and ears to hear isn’t about being able to literally see and hear stuff at all—it’s about understanding the truth. We call it discernment when we get more and more able to see and hear what is good and right and fair and what is bad and wrong and unfair. Being able to understand those things is a gift from God.
Remember what happened with Adam and Eve? Eve wanted to know those things. Wanting to know those things isn’t bad and it isn’t wrong to want to be like God who does understand what is good and evil. But we can’t just take that for ourselves. Only God can give us that—when we try to get it ourselves, we come to the wrong conclusions and think that bad is good and good is bad. All of a sudden, after they both ate from God’s private tree in the Garden, they thought that being naked was bad and that hiding from God and making clothes from itchy fig leaves was good. That’s why they should have waited for God to give them all of that—ears and eyes to hear and see—once He knew they were ready. We’ll see that over and over again in the Bible. Adam and Eve wanting wisdom. Abraham and Sarah wanting a baby. Jacob wanting his brother’s first-born status and his mother Rebekkah wanting the blessing too. A sure sign of trusting God is asking Him to open our eyes and ears and to wait for Him. Believe me, when He does it you will know it.
I love you. I am praying for you. I know right now your lives are all about waiting. Waiting to be done with school, waiting for a vacation, waiting for dinner, and probably most of all waiting to get older. It will all happen, no matter if you are patient or not so you might as well just wait, do your best with your life right now, and trust God.