Genesis chapter 16

Having no children was a serious matter. If you were a man, it meant that you had no heir, and if you were a woman, it meant that you had failed as a wife. The mark of a successful wife was a brood of children running around her so to have no children clearly demonstrated your failure (despite the fact that as we now know, it could very well have been the man's fault there were no children!).

Sarai had waited years, absolutely years and still she had no children and no sign of one coming, other than the word of the Lord. So, she did what many wives did in her position in those days, gave her maidservant to Abram so he could get her pregnant, and then the child would be treated as if it was Sarai's. She ran out of patience with God, could see (and feel ) her advancing years, and decided to take matters into her own hands.

How often do we do that? We know what God wants of us, but things are moving too slowly, that promotion hasn't come, the children are not turning out how we expected, the husband/wife God has promised us seems like a far away dream so we try and sort things out ourselves. We apply for other jobs, take a firmer hand with the children, join a dating agency and so on. We rush on regardless of want God wants.

Maybe the waiting is for a reason. Maybe, like Abram and Sarai, it was to show beyond any shadow of a doubt that God was behind Sarai getting pregnant. Maybe it is because we need to grow, to learn, to experience certain things before we move into what god has planned for us. Maybe when we rush into things, we are not ready, we don't know enough, we haven't the necessary expertise or understanding.

I look at my children and see them getting moody and grumpy at times, and I see a reflection of how I was at the same age. I see how they see things in black and white, one way or another and no compromise. Yet now I have been through the things I have experienced, I know there are reasons behind the way people act, that there are grey areas, times when there is no right or wrong answer. Yes, I know some people are rude, ignorant, self seeking all the time, but there others who come out with a sharp word, a hurtful word only because they themselves are hurting. You never know why people say what they say, do the things they do, only God know theirs hearts, so I try not to judge people when they look a certain way, when they say mean things, when they are rude, uncaring, spiteful. I am not always successful, I can tell you, but you don't know what a person is going through, what their experience of life has been, so until you do, how can you judge why they are behaving the way they are behaving?

Anyhow, getting back to Sarai and Abram, after Hagar became pregnant, she started to become full of her own self importance. After all, look at her, she got pregnant when after umpteen years Sarai had never even had a glimmer of being pregnant. The relationship between Sarai and Hagar was not just a mistress/servant one any longer. They had both slept with the same man, yet only Hagar had become pregnant. So Hagar started to despise Sarai and treated her with contempt.

What did Sarai do? She went straight to Abram and told him it was all his fault!!!!!

Abram took the easy option, and just told Sarai to do what she wanted. He wanted a quiet life, he didn't want any fuss and bother, arguments between Sarai and Hagar disrupting his peace, he just wanted to be left alone. He wasn't prepared to sort this out himself, even though probably the while household knew what was going on and had been going on for some time. Abram did the equivalent of hiding behind his newspaper, hiding away in the garden shed, or disappearing to the office and left Sarai and Hagar to it.

So Sarai treated Hagar so badly that she ran away.

Then an angel of the Lord appeared to Hagar and told her to go back, that God would take care of her and increase her descendants so there would be too many to count. The angel foretold:

Genesis 16:12 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 towards all his brothers. (NIV)

Ishmael would be a freeman, free to wander where he wanted, and his name means God hears. Hagar in the desert when she ran away named the Lord "the one who sees", so in just one chapter, God is named as the one who sees and hears. Ishmael represents the child of the flesh, the Mosaic covenant, and Isaiah, the son of Abram and Sarai, or Abraham and Sarah as they become, is the child of the promise, the child of the Abrahamic covenant. Even today, the children of the flesh persecute the children of the promise, reaping the consequences of what happened when Abram and Sarai gave up waiting for God and took matters into their own hands.

It is easy to decide we know best, to take matters into our own hands and try to sort things out for ourselves yet we need to have patience and to wait on God. This is often easier said than done, and I know this from personal experience as I would rather get up and do something, to sort out the problem, rather than sit back and wait.

It is a case of having faith and trusting in God no matter what is going on around us, of believing that God will fulfil whatever he promised, no matter how unlikely it may sound. And after all, since a day is as a thousand years to the Lord, that means that ten years in our time is only 14.4 minutes in God's…..