1
¶ Now Sarai Abram’s wife bare him no
children: and she had an handmaid, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar. 2 And Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now, the
LORD hath restrained me from bearing: I pray thee, go in unto my maid; it may
be that I may obtain children by her. And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai.
3 And Sarai Abram’s wife took Hagar her
maid the Egyptian, after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan, and
gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife.
Sarai acknowledges that her not having children is
God’s will at that point. God has restrained
her from having a child. How many modern Christian women acknowledge God’s
hand in something like this? Since the time of Isaac Newton, Christians have
reduced God to the First Cause of things only and do not typically acknowledge
His hand in the fundamental processes of life. The modernist’s watchmaker God
who winds things up and stands back, available perhaps to wind it if it runs
down or correct the time if in error, is not the God of the Bible. Any honest
reading of the Bible, in particular, the Book of Job, will show us that God is
directly involved in the daily processes of our lives and life’s complexity
goes beyond its existence to its moment-by-moment function. If God can be
likened to a watchmaker then He is a watchmaker that not only built the clock
but moves the hands.
At this point in the narrative we could understand if
the promise that God made to Abram, that a great people would come from him,
did not include Sarai. But, she is part of the promise as we will find out.
Still, as we will see later in Jacob’s life, a woman of substance in those days
might regard children coming from her personal servant as her own.(43) This
never worked very well emotionally as jealousy and a sense of being held in
contempt would rise up in these situations where the patriarch afforded himself
intimacy with a servant woman.
Sarai may not have known about the promises made to
Abram although I doubt he kept her in the dark. But, if she knew what God had
promised to Abram, here is a classic example of going ahead of God. We need to
wait on God and not try to improve on His plans and His will. God will do a
thing in His own time and our impatience and ego can cause a world of trouble
for us when we try to push ahead without God. Sarai is going to “help” God.
This is an unfortunate mistake.
Sarai has given her servant, Hagar, to Abram for the
purpose of producing a child. We would rightfully regard this as wicked and sin
today but remember the culture that Abram and Sarai were brought out of and
understand that our veneer of Christianity, even civilization, is very thin.
God is merciful, though, and His grace abounds all through the Bible as we will
see.
Here, also, we see how the concept of wife is bound to sexual intimacy and we
understand the meaning of go in unto my
maid.
(43) This shows one of the great differences between
slavery and servanthood in the world of the Bible and that of Antebellum
(Pre-Civil War) America. The thousands of sexually abused slave girls in
America forced to bear their masters’ offspring was never viewed by the
unfortunate wife of the slaveowner as representing her. In fact, there are
diaries of the wives of slaveowners which revealed that those women were
heartbroken over the culturally accepted adulteries they had to suffer.
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