Genesis
16:4 ¶ 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 her’s 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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