The following are thoughts I wrote Sunday as I pondered the story of Hagar in my Bible reading.
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If ever a poor young woman was in a hopeless mess, Hagar was.
If ever anyone did everything wrong, Hagar did.
She had cooperated in something very stupid and wrong--lying in the bosom of another woman's husband.
Then when she became pregnant, she turned up her nose at her mistress, Sarai.
And then, when her mistress treated her harshly, she ran away.
There she was, running away, proud, pregnant, mistreated, hurting.
There she was, by a spring in the desert.
Crying.
Not a pretty picture. What a mess!
Yet it was there that the angel of the Lord found her.
He always finds us right in the middle of our messes.
He always finds us when we are trying to get out of them and can't.
And He asks the simplest yet keenest of questions in the tenderest of ways.
"Where have you come from,
and where are you going?"
Because if anyone knows that where you came from, and where you are going certainly
relates to where you are right now, God does!
Our family, our religious background, our past choices--
they all relate.
And it's important for us to be honest about it.
We may as well be. God knows anyway.
God did not ask, "Who?" or "What?"
He didn't ask who had mistreated whom.
He asked, "Where?"
"Where have you come from and where are you going?"
Hagar needed to take personal responsibility for where she had come from, where she was right now, and where she was headed.
How many times have we run away from mistreatments and problems?
How often have we gotten tangled in messes that really aren't completely our fault at all and tried to find our own way out?
To be realistic, every last person in Hagar's situation carried his share of blame.
It's true that poor Hagar was the one that got pregnant,
acted snooty and ended up causing and having so many problems that she ran away.
But the ones back home acting so innocent were not innocent at all.
Sarah was to blame for instigating the pregnancy, much as she tried to pretend it was Abraham's fault--or God's.
Abraham was to blame for being afraid to stand up to his wife and instead complying with her stupid advice. He never asked God about it at all.
And Hagar complied to the whole thing.
What a bunch of idiots they had all been!
And then it only got worse.
When Hagar, so used to being a nothing, got pregnant and started acting like she was somebody now,
Sarah, who had always been somebody and now was being treated like a nobody, got mad.
And of course, when she got mad, she had to blame someone besides herself.
It's a great cop-out to pass the buck and make sure the blame you deserve
lands on someone else.
So she blamed Abraham.
Who in turn made sure it was Sarah's problem.
Who started to treat Hagar harshly, because it had to be Hagar's problem.
And Hagar ran away.
Every last one of them had done wrong, but not one of them would take personal responsibility.
There wasn't a whole lot of hope for any of them.
Until God met Hagar in the desert.
God--the One Who has a way with hopeless situations and stupid, dumb, sinful people--met
Hagar, the slave girl.
Not the rich, wise, religious, pious, righteous, powerful, mature master Abraham--the man who had heard God's voice and received God's promises.
Not the refined, in-charge, efficient, companion-in-every-right-or-wrong, matronly Sarai.
But the slave girl.
The one who had played along with the schemes of those in authority over her.
Perhaps she was quite young.
Perhaps her life had been hard and lonely, taken from her family for a slave--if she had a family at all.
She had been trained to obey implicitly.
So when she was needed for the service of providing a son for a childless master
whose wife had a barren womb,
perhaps she knew nothing but to obey.
Perhaps she had hated the whole disgusting affair, and perhaps Abram had, too.
But perhaps they had both enjoyed their sin.
We don't know.
We just know that sometimes our sin is hateful, and sometimes we enjoy it.
And some who would not be caught dead in Abram's and Hagar's immoral act
may find themselves lying in bed at night secretly enjoying the pain inflicted on some poor soul
that they dislike and whom they have purposely abused, avoided, neglected, or rejected.
They would never commit adultery, but they would gloat when someone who has hurt them
is surprised by humiliation and wounded by retaliation.
You don't have to commit adultery to wound another soul.
The sin doesn't really matter.
It all ends up the same--a great big mess!
And it was a mess for Hagar.
A fine, very fine mess out here in the desert by this spring that was the only ray of hope in Hagar's life right now.
Amazingly, God chose to meet the slave girl.
It would be thirteen long years before God would speak to Abram again, Matthew Henry notes.
And He never spoke to Sarah directly except when she denied that she had laughed, and then God roundly corrected her lie.
But He did speak to that runaway slave girl--
pregnant, hurting, lonely, crying.
It's possible that Abram and Sarai had messed up so bad and were so upset and proud and bigoted about it that God couldn't do anything with them concerning keeping His promises
until something changed.
And it took the runaway slave girl to make the change in the situation.
He did not come to the mature, mad old people,
but to the poor girl who was crying.
She had summed up her situation in a few words:
"I am running away from my mistress Sarai."
And God never did say anything about how right or wrong any of them had been.
He never brought up about who mistreated whom.
He never even tried to set the matter straight.
He just asked Hagar, the slave, to be the first one to take responsibility.
He said, "Go home.
Go home to your mistress and obey her."
The young, pregnant slave girl had to take personal responsibility for her part in the fiasco.
She had to wipe the scorn off her face and the snide remarks from her lips.
She had to go back to her mistress Sarah,
back to her lowly tasks,
back to the protection of Abram
and back to the promises of God.
God had taken notice of the whole situation, and "even where there is little cry of devotion, the God of pity sometimes graciously hears the cry of affliction. Tears speak as well as prayers."
--(Matthew Henry commentary)
Very often, God meets us in our mess with a way back or a way out.
And that way is
to take personal responsibility for ourselves and our choices.
Very often, God's first word is, "Go," or "Get up."
Sometimes it is to go back home.
Sometimes it is to go away from home.
It depends on the situation and what God is asking.
"Go back to your mistress."
"Go back, submit yourself, and obey."
"Get up, Joshua! Why are you lying on your face?"
"Go, and sin no more."
"Go, Abram. Leave your idolatrous country and your father's house."
"Go down to Egypt, Joseph, to save My Son."
"Go out of Egypt and return to Canaan."
"Go back home, Elijah, for I have seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal."
"Go ye, disciples, into all the world."
God doesn't leave us sitting in our mess crying.
He gives us something to do--something to take personal responsibility for.
There is something special about personal responsibility.
It places value on the person humble enough to take it.
Hagar's proud heart was humbled that God Himself had met her.
And the part of her heart that was human and tender and vulnerable was awed and touched.
God had met her and had given her a responsibility.
But He also gave her a promise to give her courage and strength to bear it!
He had seen not only her, but the babe in her womb, and He let her know that the child she was expecting was precious to Him.
This result of three people's sins--was a baby that was precious to God.
He had to have known that the descendants of this son would persecute the descendants of promise, but God places so much value on life
that He placed a blessing even upon this boy
who was the result of faithless sin,
who would turn out to be such a wild, unrestrained man.
Despite these things, He gave the child a name--Ishmael.
Did having her child given a name already give Hagar the courage and
hope to go back to her mistress and all the mess? Did it give her the value she needed as
a poor slave girl?
How much did it mean to her to know that God not only saw her,
but saw what was inside her--her heart, her feelings, her hurt, her spirit, soul, body--
and her baby?
We don't know many more details.
We do know that Hagar was awed that God had seen her.
She called Him--The God-Who-Sees.
"Have I really seen God-Who-Sees-Me?" she whispered to herself.
Yet, He had seen her--the worthless, lonely, devastated slave girl.
And in any and every mess, fiasco, and hopeless situtation
that finds us crying in our desert--
He is still to us today the God-Who-Sees.
He sees us, inside and out--the good and the bad, the sins and the shame,
the part we are responsible for and the parts we are not responsible for.
He sees our babies, our little ones, our children, our teenagers,
the next generation!
He sees!
