As Hagar is out in the wilderness by a spring of water it
says in Genesis 16:7 that the angel of
the Lord came to her and asked her what she was doing out there. Hagar mentioned that she was fleeing from
Sarai. The angel of the Lord told her to
return to Sarai and that God was going to bless Hagar with a multitude of her
people. She was to name her son Ishmael
or “God hears”.
Hagar responded to
what the angel of the Lord said by saying “Thou art a God who sees.” We were listening to the pastor explain this
verse today in church. He talked about
how Sarai could have had Hagar killed for running away from her since she was
her servant. He also mentioned how many
of us are like Sarai and instead of waiting on God and his timing we try to
help God by doing our own thing and devising our own plan. It wasn’t a part of God’s original plan to
involve Hagar at all.
I take some
comfort In these verses because due to my own impatience, I can often act the
way that Sarai did and try to “give God a hand”. I get impatient with waiting on His timing
and rush ahead. You notice in Genesis 16
that neither Sarai nor Abram asked God what he thought or prayed. They simply took matters into their own
hands. And now over several thousand
years later the description of Ishmael and his descendants are still true today
and Israel still has problems due to this decision that Sarai made.
I also take
comfort in the fact that God sees me exactly where I am. It is possible that at this moment in Hagar’s
life nobody else knew where she was or why she was there. God didn’t ask Hagar questions because he
needed to know something. Rather he
wanted to talk to her about why she was there and where she was going. Sometimes when people sin they can find
themselves in strange places and circumstances. But, whether it is Jonah in the stomach of a
whale or Hagar in the desert you can’t go somewhere where God is not.
Psalm 139:11-12 “If I say, “Surely the darkness will
overwhelm me, And the light around me will be night. Even the darkness is not
dark to Thee. And the night is as bright
as the day, Darkness and light are alike to Thee.”
When I say that
he knows me where I am, I mean more than mere physical location. Sometimes my
emotions get so mixed up that I don’t particularly understand how I am
feeling. There is a status update on facebook that says, “It’s
complicated”. Quite frankly, I feel
this a lot. Life is sometimes
complicated. I’m glad in those times
when my emotions and thoughts are mixed and confusing that God sees and really
he does understand, far better than I do.
He understands because he has always been with me and always sees me and
always has his eye upon me. He knows my
thoughts before they occur.
So, even when I
blow it completely this doesn’t come as a surprise to God. Nor does it mean that because I had a “Sarai
moment” that God is going to give up on me.
If we learn nothing by looking at the prophets such as Moses or Abram or
Sarai we should learn that God can do extraordinary things through the lives of
people who were very normal and sometimes got things horribly wrong. I’m glad for that because that is often where
I am.
