By Carla Williams
This is part of a Team Expansion story series looking at relationships in the Bible and what they tell us about God’s heart.
Where is the story?
Genesis 16, 21:8-21
Remind me what happened.
God promised to make *Abraham’s descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky. Yay! But, shoot, Abraham and his wife Sarah were old, and getting older by the minute. So one day, Sarah reminded Abraham that they didn’t have any kids yet, and she offered her own solution: her Egyptian slave, Hagar. And like a dope, Abraham agreed. The plan worked, Hagar had a son (Ishmael), and everybody was predictably unhappy.
Later, God gave Abraham and Sarah a son – just like He always said He would – and things got even worse for Hagar and Ishmael. Abraham packed them up and sent them out into the desert. The water ran out and Hagar thought they would both die. But God delivered them and promised to make Ishmael into his own nation.
What does this tell me about God?
God had a specific plan for Abraham. It involved Sarah and a miraculous baby at the last possible moment. It involved uncountable descendants. It involved a season of Abraham needing to trust God’s faithfulness.
But then there was Hagar.
She wasn’t even one of God’s people. She was an outsider with no control over her life. She was already a slave, which was hard enough, and then she became a concubine. Doomed to provide intimacy to a man who had no intention of loving her. Pressured to provide a son. Smug, envied and mistreated when she succeeded. Cast into the desert without hope when the son she had been forced to bear was no longer welcome. She was “the other woman” in Abraham’s story of God’s faithfulness. The mistress. The villain.
And yet, to God, she was precious and chosen. She wasn’t the one who would propel Abraham’s legacy forward, but she was valuable for her own story.
Through the course of her trials, God directly intervened in her life twice. First, when she was pregnant and running away because Sarah’s jealousy was unbearable, God’s angel comforted her and sent her back to her abuser. And even though the angel warned her that Ishmael was going to live a life of hostility, she responded by declaring, “You are the God who sees me.”
The second time God directly cared for her, she was in the desert, sobbing desperately far enough from her teenaged son that she didn’t have to watch him die. She’d been given to Abraham to bear him a son, and that very son’s existence had been her undoing. They were alone in the desert because Abraham and Sarah had used her to short-cut God’s plan, and now that His plan had been set right, they disposed of her and the reminder of their impatience.
With no more water and no more hope, she simply cried.
But the God Who Sees her still saw her. His angel sent comfort for her broken heart, specific direction to resolve that desperate situation, and hope for her future.
She had been cast out of Abraham’s protection, but she was still held in God’s hand. He had no reason to care for this outsider or her son, but He loved and protected her fiercely.
Hagar was not one of God’s “chosen” people. She was a foreigner living among people who didn’t show her God’s gracious love. They had their God, but she could only see Him from the outside – until He stepped in and proved that His love was not confined to His people.
The story of Hagar shows that God has a gentle, soft place in His heart for the people who are used, abused, and rejected. He fights for them. He comforts them.
He sees them.
Maybe we should see them, too?
*In the first half of this story, it’s Abram and Sarai. For the second half and beyond, it’s Abraham and Sarah. To avoid confusion, I used their eventual names.
