4
¶ And he went in unto Hagar, and she
conceived: and when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised
in her eyes. 5 And Sarai said unto
Abram, My wrong be upon thee: I have given my maid into thy bosom; and when she
saw that she had conceived, I was despised in her eyes: the LORD judge between
me and thee. 6 But Abram said unto
Sarai, Behold, thy maid is in thy hand; do to her as it pleaseth thee. And when
Sarai dealt hardly with her, she fled from her face.
Abram knew what God had promised him. But, at the
urging of his wife he did not wait on God to provide what was promised in God’s
own time. This is understandable from a human perspective. Abram knew what the
promise was but he did not know how God was going to accomplish it. By going
ahead of God he caused emotional turmoil in his own family and thousands of
years of political struggle, most notably manifesting itself in the struggles
in the Middle East in the last hundred years. The offspring of this union
between God’s man and this Egyptian servant-woman will be who the Muslims
consider to be their progenitor, an ancestor of Mohammed and the father of the
Arab peoples.
Sarai is blaming Abram for Hagar’s contempt for her as
now Hagar has done something that Sarai could not. She has conceived a child. Abram,
lacking in moral courage and a sense of responsibility from our perspective,
like Adam, tries to remedy this situation by affording Sarai the opportunity to
get revenge by mistreating Hagar for the perceived wrong which is hers and
Abram’s fault. Hagar is a servant. She had no power to deny either Sarai or
Abram. If anything she is the victim in this. But, now she will suffer unless
God intervenes, which He does.
Hagar does the only thing she can do at this point,
pregnant and powerless. She runs away.
God permits man to exercise his free will even to
evil, to great evil I might add. God worked out the successful completion of
His will taking into account man’s proclivity to violence, malice, and evil.
Jesus will tell us that offences will come, they must come, but woe to him
through whom they come. (Matthew 18:7; Luke 17:1). Even God’s people are fully
capable of doing wrong but they are not capable of thwarting God’s will. He
will permit what He will permit and block what He will block.
We often are amazed and disturbed at stories we hear.
A child is born to worthless parents who abuse him or her and raise them
without nurture and love. That child grows up to be a drug-addicted adult and
then dies of a heart attack. All seems to be lost, randomness seems to be
reality, and nothing makes sense to us. But, God told us through the story of
Job that a great many bad things can be done to perfectly unblameable or even
good people and we may never know, in this life, the reason. We are to trust
God, He has it under control. Understanding that God is involved in every
detail of existence, good or evil, and that He is in control, is very important
Theology 101. It is difficult to understand when genocide is committed or a
child is abused. But, the Bible makes it clear, abundantly, that somehow, in a way
we will probably not understand, God works out His will through the chaos, man’s
malice, and man’s heart-wrenching cruelty.
As Job said that he did nothing wrong to deserve what
happened to him and God did not argue with that, so we must understand when an
injustice is being done to us, God will work this out. We can and must do the
right thing, as we know it to be, as that is our part. We can, if possible,
remove ourselves from a bad situation, have a malefactor brought to justice, or
defend our persons from attack, again, if possible. But, we must remember that
God is in control. Trust Him. Expect Him to work things out. In the end, it is
to be for His glory, not for our immediate benefit. We expect things to be made
clear in eternity, or perhaps even to be forgotten as greater and more
magnificent things await us than the sufferings we might endure here. But, God
is in control, as we will soon see here.
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