Genesis 16:1-16

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From John, chapter 4, verses 1 to 26. Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptising more disciples than John, although in fact it was not Jesus who baptised, but his disciples. So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee. Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sichar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph.

Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon when a Samaritan woman came to draw water. Jesus said to her, will you give me a drink?

Will you give me a drink? His disciples had gone into the town to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, you are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? For Jews do not associate with the Samaritans.

Jesus answered her, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and you would have given him living water.

Sir, the woman said, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our Father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself? And as did also his sons and his livestock. Jesus answered, everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again.

But whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

The woman said to him, sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water. He told her, go to your husband and come back. I have no husband, she replied. Jesus said to her, you are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband.

What you have just said is quite true, sir. The woman said, I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain. But you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem. Woman, Jesus replied, believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father.

Neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know. We worship what we do know. For salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in the spirit and in truth.

For they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks. God is spirit and his worshippers must worship in the spirit. And in truth, the woman said, I know that Messiah called Christ is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us. Then Jesus declared, I the one speaking to you.

I am he.

The next reading is from Genesis, chapter 16:1 16.

Now, Sarah, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar. So she said to Abraham, the Lord has kept me from having children. Go sleep with my slave. Perhaps I can build a family through her.

Abram agreed to what Sarai said. So after Abram had been living in Canaan 10 years, Sarai, his wife, took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. He slept with Hagar and she conceived. When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. Then Sarai said to Abram, you are responsible for the wrong I am suffering.

I put my slave in your arms. And now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.

Your slave is in your hands. Abram said, do with her whatever you think best.

Then Sarah ill treated Hagar, so she fled from her.

The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert. It was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. And he said, hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from? Where are you going? I'm running away from my mistress, Sarai, she said, when the angel of the Lord told her, go back to your mistress and submit to her.

The angel added, I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.

The angel of the Lord also said to her, you are now pregnant, and you will give birth to 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 towards all his brothers.

She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her. You are the God who sees me. For she said, I have now seen the one who sees me. That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi. It is still there between Kadesh and Bered.

So Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne. Abram was 86 years old when Hagar bore him. Ishmael, this is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. And thank you, Celia, for reading that for us.

Please do have it open in your Bibles in front of you. I'm going to pray for us ahead of what's a tricky, tricky passage, isn't it? So let's pray.

Heavenly Father, I pray that now by your spirit you might meet with us.

I ask, Father, that through these ancient words you might bring us to life.

Give us humility to be challenged, compassion to feel, and ears to hear as you speak with us. Amen. There are passages in the Bible that you see coming up and you get excited about and you want to dive into. There are also passages that weigh on you throughout the week and this is one of them. This is not an easy passage.

It's a passage which speaks of failure. It's a passage which speaks of sexual exploitation. It's a passage that speaks of abuse. And so there may be things over the next few moments that are triggering and difficult to hear. And as always, if I can say, please, please speak with someone if you need to do that.

There's prayer ministry at the end. There's a separate safeguarding team whose contact details are around the buildings. And of course, you can always speak with your growth group leaders or church leaders. This is a difficult passage. In one, Abraham fails.

Abraham, the one who Faiths around the world look to the Abrahamic faiths, they look to this guy, and we see it all go terribly wrong. We're following the story of Genesis. Genesis started, didn't it, in the garden. God created humanity, created this guy Adam, and says to Adam, look, you're going to fill the world and reproduce. It's going to be incredible.

And subdue it and look after it. And Adam's like, I need a helper. How's this going to work? So God put him into a deep sleep. And then from Adam he brought forth the woman.

And together, and only together could they create and fill the entire world. And then we saw in Genesis chapter 3 how although they were in this perfect place, that Satan, the great hater of God and his people, came and spoke with them and said, do you know what God's holding out? There's a blessing of being like him and he doesn't want you to have it. So what you need to do is you need to take this fruit and you need to eat it. And we're told Eve takes the fruit and eats it and gives it to her husband, who's right there as Satan's talking to his wife and doing nothing.

Adam is absolutely guilty in this as well, and he eats of it. And we've watched as that initial turning our back on God, reaching for what he has for Promise. But doing it in our strength goes completely wrong again and again and again. In that first instance, it started and they started blaming each other. There was shame, there was marital strife.

God turns up, speaks with them. They're exiled.

And this week, we follow on from last week where Abraham is in the land and he is absolutely beside himself. He's pouring out his heart to God, and he's saying, I don't have any children. How is it that you've promised me that I'm going to have children and descendants like the stars in the sky, and yet I don't have any children. And we saw how we pour our heart out in that pain. And God put him into a deep sleep and promises him, from your flesh will come countless generations.

And here we are. And they have been in the land for 10 years. And one of the scary things about this passage is that the actions in it seem reasonable. Let me qualify that. Not right, not good.

But they seem reasonable to the people involved at the time, or at least to Abraham and Sarai. Let's enter the story. There they are. It's been 10 years, and Abraham is expecting. I'm going to have these children.

And they've lived with that pain of expectation. And these children not coming, you can imagine, for Sarai, it's not just 10 years, but it's month after month after month, longing for that child and the blood coming and the child not. This is a place of deep pain that they are in. And you can imagine them beginning to examine the promise of God and say, well, Abraham, you're not getting any younger. And here's the thing.

God said that the descendants, they come from your body. They didn't say from mine.

Now, at that time, it was fairly well known that you'd say, well, okay, if we are childless and longing for a child, one of the things we can do is get a surrogate child. And the way in which we're going to do that is I'll take one of my slaves and you can have sex with the slave. And the child that comes brings a child into our household. And then we have this surrogate child, and that's what everyone's doing. And so for Abram and Sarai, that plan is put on the table.

And Abraham, verse two, agreed to what Sarai said. We heard about toxic passivity a few weeks ago. This is the same again. And so Abraham. And so verse three, after Abraham had been living in Canaan for 10 years, Sarai took her Egyptian slave and gave her to her husband to be his wife.

He slept with Hagar and she conceived.

I wonder if you recognise that language. Took and gave.

See, what we see in this pattern is that we're seeing the Genesis 3 pattern playing out again. It's as if, as we're going through this, the writer saying, hey, do you know the brokenness that happened back then? It's echoing down through the generations. And we're going to find it again here.

And make no mistake, this is broken. This is sinful, this is ugly.

Imagine what it would be like to be Hagar.

Was she spoken to by Abraham and Sarai? She's not. She's just spoken about. Take that one, sleep with her.

And then what does Hagar find? She finds all of a sudden she's in her master's bed.

She has his child.

This is hideous. This is exploitative.

When she finds out she's pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. Well, of course she does. Right?

And just like in Genesis 3, this breaks down Abraham, who's married to Sarai, and the two became, in Adam's words, one flesh is now one flesh with Hagar. Of course, this causes marital strife, doesn't it? Sex is never just sexual and there's marital strife.

And Sarai turns to Abraham. What do we expect to come next in the story of Genesis 3? It wasn't me. It was the snake.

You're responsible for the wrong. I'm suffering. I put my slave in your arms. And now she knows that she is pregnant. She despises me.

May the Lord judge between me and you. And you think, Sarai, this was your idea.

It's your fault, Abraham.

What does Abraham do? Well, let's follow the Genesis 3 pattern. 3. There he is. And he has the mother of his child, who's described actually earlier on in the passage as his wife.

Again, it's polygamy. And he's got one wife who's angry and bitter. Maybe she's remembering back to what happened in Egypt. Remember when she was taken and given to Pharaoh? I don't know.

And Abraham, what does he do? I'll throw my wife under the bus like Adam. The woman that you put here with me, she made me eat it. Abraham, am I going to protect this mother of my child?

Your slaves in your hands. Verse 6. Abraham said, do with her whatever you think best.

And Sarai mistreated Hagar and she fled.

And if there's a part of you that reads a passage like this and goes, ugh, yuck.

Good. This is horrible. This is where sin leads. And yet what is the sin that they're doing. The sin that they're doing is they know God is going to promise them blessing.

He knows they know blessing is coming. And what they've said is, I'm going to take that blessing for myself. It's not coming through. So I'm going to reach out and I'm going to take that. I'm going to make it happen in my strength, God, it's not good enough that you've made promises to me.

I'm not going to trust that this is going to come forth. I'm going to make it happen myself. And there is where this passage goes from to, oh, my word. This is quite convicting because the truth is that so many of us follow exactly the same pattern. You are promised, aren't you, by God, an identity that he will provide for you, that he will give you a future, that he is enough for you, that he gives you forgiveness, that he gives you love, that he gives you a church, family.

And yet the temptation so often is for us to reach out, to try and grab at that blessing. What do I mean? Maybe your identity is. You're the one who goes, I need to be known as that particularly good, I don't know, teacher. And so what happens is instead of trusting, God says he has given me identity, I need to build my own identity.

So what happens as I'm teaching is I pour my effort into it, not for the good of those that I'm teaching, but because I know that a learning walk is coming around. And in fact, on that day when I know that my head of department is going to come in, I'm going to come down like a ton of bricks on that child. Why? Because they might make me look bad. And what am I doing?

I'm not trusting in God's promise. I'm grasping for that blessing, that good teacher identity.

And what happens? The child stops being the one who I'm working for and starts being the object who can either help or hinder my identity. We can do it with churches as well, right? God's promise. I'm going to build my church.

It's going to grow, it's going to expand, it's going to cover the world. It's going to be a blessing. I have to tell you, as a church leader, that can be really challenging. Because sometimes when that doesn't seem to be coming about as we want it to, what's the danger? We reach for the blessing.

And so what happens is we start getting stronger. Why aren't you inviting your friends? We put on more and more, we're exhausting. We're on our knees because we've got to get out and we've got to get people in. And frankly, if you're not doing it, it looks bad for me.

And what happens is that in reaching for the blessing, churches become places where actually people are just being used.

Happens in families. Instead of trusting that God's the one who provides me with the love that I need, I start manipulating my family around me. I start sending messages that I know really are going to elicit that kind of response, that they. They're going to come and check in on me so that I feel good about myself. And what am I doing?

I'm treating my family like objects just to bolster up my own feeling of self worth.

And it's manipulative.

Maybe we do it on the school run.

Maybe the way that we speak to our kids at the school gates, we do because actually we want people around us to think that we're a really good parent and they're either helping or hindering with that. And so therefore we come down on them hard.

We do it in families, we do it in business. We do it with our money as well, don't we? Like, maybe we're a businessman and we're like, I need the blessing. I know God's going to provide for me, but I need the blessing. So I'm going to reach into it and say what I'm going to do as a man or a woman in charge of business is I'm going to set it up to squeeze every penny out.

And I don't really care about them. I just care about the returns. Are they coming in? Are the shareholders going to be all right with it?

I'm reaching for the blessing that God gives and I'm going to make it happen in my strength.

And I hope, I pray that it doesn't come to the point of exploitation that it does with Hagar.

But it's the same route, isn't it? Am I going to trust God to provide or am I going to reach for it? I need to move on because of time, but it's a challenge. Second part of the passage, we see that this angel comes and speaks with Hagar. We don't have time to dive into this.

In the Old Testament, there are times when an angel, specifically the angel of the Lord, appears to be speaking for and may even be God himself. In this instance, I think that's probably what's going on. Hagar speaks later of him as being God. So I'm going to go with him being God turning up. If you disagree with Matt, that's fine.

You've got your own Bible. We can chat more about that afterwards. And I'm really happy to chat. I've done some work with that. It's really exciting.

But that's another sermon. But what happens is this angel of the Lord turns up. God turns up.

And this is really, really beautiful, as well as really hard. You've got Hagar, who has been physically, emotionally and sexually abused by Sarai and Abram.

And the one person in this passage whom God turns up to is Hagar.

What's his first words to her? Verse 8. And he said, hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from? And where are you going? Like in Genesis 3, Adam, where are you?

Same question again. And he says, hagar. Everyone's been talking about Hagar.

God speaks to Hagar by name. In that place of pain and brokenness, God turns up and he speaks to her. And this means everything to Hagar. Look at how she responds at the end of the passage, verse 13. She gave this name to the Lord.

Incidentally, who's the first person in the Bible to give a name to the Lord as Hagar? She names God. You don't find that very often. Such was her intimacy that she said, you are the God who sees me. I've seen the one who sees me.

She says, God, you know, you know me.

You get me. It may be that there is all sorts of pain that you are carrying in your life, hurt that you are carrying today. And what you need to hear from this sermon, what you need to hear from this tricky and difficult passage is that God says, I know I have heard you crying. Those times when you weep on your own and you think nobody sees. I see.

I know you. That history that you have run from for many, many years, I know it.

I get it.

But then God speaks and he carries on to her. And actually, if I'm honest, verse nine is verse that I honestly wish wasn't in the Bible. I've come back to it again and again. God said, go back to your mistress and submit to her. Now, I need to be really, really honest with you.

Part of the difficulty I find with that is because of how that could be heard today. So let me be really unequivocal. I think that's the right word. Let me be absolutely clear. This passage is not saying that if you are running from abuse and running from a dangerous situation, that you need to return to it.

That is not what this passage is saying this is describing a particular point in time when God is literally turning up between two of the biggest chapters in the Old Testament. He's about to do something incredibly different and challenging for Abraham and literally say, there are things that you need to cut off in your life. There's a whole name change that needs to go about following these passages. There's big changes that are happening. It's also true that Hagar is in a very, very vulnerable place, travelling on her own as a pregnant woman, running as a slave between Canaan and Egypt.

Yet this passage is not saying you need to return to that situation.

It is saying that when you are in a situation and you can't get out of it, the Lord is with you and he knows.

He carries on. He says, I'm going to increase your descendants so much they'll be too numerous to count. What's he saying? It sounds almost as if God's taken the promise to Abraham about his children, he's now applying it to Hagar. It's not quite that and yet there's similarities there.

He goes on to say, look, there's going to be consequences. This child and the other children of Abraham, they're going to clash and they're going to keep clashing and you're going to see that throughout the generations. But what he's saying is, he's saying, look, I want to bless you. I know and I understand the pain, the real pain that you're in, the real brokenness that you're in, and yet I want to still bring a blessing to you. God longs to bless this world, incidentally, and as an aside, he longs to bless this world whether they are part of his family or not.

As you go down through Ishmael's line, they're not. And yet God says, I want to bless. I want to bring blessing on that family. As a church, we need to be those who hold out Jesus to the world around us. We need to do that.

That's absolutely right. But we also need to be a blessing to a community when they don't follow Jesus. That's why creation time, it's so important that we care about the world around us. But God says, I know, I see, and I want to be a blessing to you, Hagar.

So what do we do with a passage like this?

Well, it may be that you're reading this passage and you know that there are areas in your life where, where God's promised something and you're trying to make it happen in your strength. You know that there Are places where you're strategically moving people around, manipulating them. And this passage is saying, see the horror of that? Stop today.

Stop it.

One great diagnostic question is where is it that you're using that line in your head at the end just to put Abraham and Sarah, they're saying, oh, do you know Abraham's got to have kids. The end justifies the means. Why are you saying that? One needs to stop. But maybe you're in a place where you're hurting.

Maybe you relate heavily with Hagar in this passage. Stuff has happened, maybe nobody knows about it. And you are hurting today. And you need to hear the Lord saying, I know. I promise you that I am with you.

I promise you that I will wipe every hurt from your eyes.

Incidentally, and I have to say this really gently, there are times when we are dealing with hurt in our life where we reach to try and make that promise happen sooner, where we don't trust that one day God will wipe the tears from our eyes. And so we self medicate or we do what we can to numb the pain, find it at the bottom of a bottle, overindulge.

And in those places we need to watch our own hearts. Now, do I truly believe God is with me? Do I truly believe that he is going to wipe every tear from my eye? Do I believe that he's working for my good even in this moment?

Because the truth is that all of us will probably experience something of both of these people in our lives.

Because every single human is a bit like Abraham. Maybe you are beginning to like him as a lovable rogue. Every single human is sinful. Every single human will reach for that blessing and be manipulative. Yes.

Including church leaders. Yes. Including me. I will let you down. I'm sinful.

Every single human, except for the one that we saw in the other passage. The one who turned up at the well. The one who though he had the power to be served by everybody around him, came not to be served, but to serve. The one who, who though he could demand and make anything. I mean, he could turn water into wine.

He could have made a lot of money out of that. Yet he doesn't reach for the blessing, but he gives it away. Name me a miracle in Jesus life that he does for himself.

And so today, if you're convicted, run to that Jesus. And if you are hurting, run to that Jesus. And if you're repulsed by this passage, run to the Jesus who's far better than Abraham.

We're going to have an opportunity to do that as we respond in prayer and song in a moment. Our next song is a song which speaks of the goodness of God.

A God who knows. I'm going to lead us in a prayer and then we'll play through it. If you want to spend that time sitting and singing, or standing and singing, that's fine. If you need to spend that time just praying, maybe repenting. God, I'm doing this.

That needs to stop. I'm sorry. That's okay. If you need to listen to others singing that song in the darkest night, you're close like no other. And you need to hear that, then maybe listen as it's sung.

Father, I pray that by your spirit you would convict us today. Show us where we're thinking things are rational, but they're wrong. Show us where we're thinking things are reasonable, but we're not living in accordance with your revelation. Show us those places where we're hurting others, but also, Father, where we feel lonely and that nobody gets us. And this is painful and untrapped.

Would we know that? You hear us? You know us.

Amen.