Really probably the second recorded dysfunctional family in the Bible, but dysfunctional nonetheless. As you know, God promised Abram and Sarah a son through whom the nations of the earth would be blessed, and the promised Messiah would come. You also know that when the promise was given by God, Sarai was beyond child-bearing years — estimated probably to be around 90, 91 years old. Between the giving of that promise and the fulfillment of it, Abraham and Sarah — formerly Abram and Sarai — had to wait 25 years for the birth of the promised son. And they were like many of us: we’re not very good waiters. We don’t like waiting around for something to happen. You often feel compelled — if it’s taking too long, we have to do something to move the whole process along.
So tonight we find ourselves in Genesis chapter 16. It’s now 10 years after the initial promise that God had made to Abram and Sarah. Sarai had become impatient with the long wait, and she proposed a plan to Abraham to move things along. Since the Lord hadn’t fulfilled his promise yet in those ten intervening years, perhaps she could find, by way of the law, another route to achieve the same purpose. See, according to the ancient world — in fact, well into the 1800s, and still even today in those places around the world that permit or have slavery in one form or fashion or another — the offspring of slaves belongs not to the parents, but rather instead to the masters and the mistresses of the household.
It’s kind of like the thing that we’re hearing today, as a matter of fact: that children don’t belong to their parents; they belong to the state and the schools of the experts. “Let the experts raise your children. You just feed and clothe them and send them off to us.” Well, in the ancient world and in the state of slavery, the child of a slave woman who doesn’t belong to the mother of the child — rather it defaults, and it becomes the property of the owners. Even Exodus, surprisingly, 21 verse 4, has the same law for the Hebrew people: “If a master gives a slave a wife, and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall belong to the master, and the slave man shall leave alone.” So if he wants to leave, he can go, but he has to leave behind his wife and the children, because they don’t belong to him. In other words, Hagar would be a surrogate mother. Sarai wasn’t getting any younger, and all the evidence proved that she was in fact barren.
So she proposed the idea, verse 3: “So after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Abram’s wife Sarai took Hagar the Egyptian, her slave woman, and gave her to her husband Abram as his wife.”
When he had relations with Hagar and she conceived, and when Hagar became aware that she had conceived, her mistress was insignificant in her eyes. So two things happened in this moment. First, two things happened to change really human history: Abraham consents to his wife’s plan, and the slave woman conceives his son — and a dysfunctional family is born. And some think that the trouble between the Hebrews and the Arab Middle Eastern people begins here, between Ishmael and Isaac. Second, Hagar doesn’t seem to understand that even though she has given birth and has become a second wife to Abram, that she doesn’t outrank the first wife, the Hebrew Sarai. She is, after all, an Egyptian — an Egyptian slave. The pecking order of the household remains the same, and the pecking order and the rules of the household are to be respected and observed, regardless of whether she gave birth or not. But Hagar thinks, because she’s been able to do what Sarai could not do, she now has the upper hand. She will have the influence over her growing son. After all, Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar all believe that Hagar now carried in her womb and gave birth to the promised son, even if by a surrogate arrangement.
And she begins to treat her mistress, her master, disrespectfully. Her behavior becomes so painful for Sarai that Sarai retaliates, which causes the pregnant woman to run away. She won’t tolerate the treatment anymore. She eventually stopped at a spring for water and rest, and the angel of the Lord comes to her and says to her: “I will greatly multiply your descendants, so that you will be too many to count. Behold, you are pregnant, and you will give birth to a son, and you shall name him Ishmael, because the Lord has heard of your affliction.” Just as Abram and Sarai have a promise attached to their son, God now attaches a promise to Hagar’s son. Hagar and Abram’s son will give birth to a nation; his people will be many. It will be notable that this is no small promise. He has just guaranteed Hagar that all will be well — that they will be on their own, but they will make it, and they will be very fruitful and prosperous as they do. The Lord God will multiply Hagar’s descendants so that there will simply be too many of them to count. The promise to Abraham and Sarai is that their son and his descendants will be as many as the stars in heaven and the sand on the seashore, and that through their line will come a promised Messiah, the Savior of Genesis chapter 3.
But the sins of families have consequences. The angel said that Hagar’s son would be “a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand will be against him, and he will live in defiance of all of his brothers.” Hagar’s son is not going to be a well-behaved boy. He’s going to be a rebellious boy who turns into a rebellious, troublesome man who’s constantly looking for a fight with someone.
As to his name, Ishmael — that’s given to him by God as well. But it’s not a name that has anything associated with Israel and what he will do as he grows into maturity. The name refers to the relationship between God and Hagar, not between Ishmael and God. Ishmael means “the Lord has heard” — that is, the Lord heard Hagar’s crying for help. And by giving the name Ishmael to the boy she would give birth to, God would have before her a constant reminder that he listened to her cry, have mercy upon her — and that she too was now a recipient of a promise from the Lord, the Most High. In light of that, the angel tells her to go home, to submit to her mistress and serve her.
Well, several years later, in Genesis 17, when Abram was 99 years old, the Lord came again, this time giving him the name Abraham. He promises that Sarah would produce a son, as originally promised. Nothing in the plan has changed. Nothing they did changed what God himself was going to do for them and through them. He says in verse 16: “I will bless her, and indeed I will give you a son by her.”
Abram again met this promise with some skepticism, and he attempted to do what Abraham attempts to do from time to time in the book of Genesis: he wanted to make a deal — to deal with God. He wanted God to accept Ishmael instead of some yet-unnamed future baby boy. He said to God, “Oh, that Ishmael might live before you!” But God said no: “Your wife Sarah will bear a son, and you shall name him Isaac, and I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him. As for Ishmael, I have heard you. Behold, I will bless him and make him fruitful and multiply him exceedingly.”
By the time Isaac is born, Ishmael is now 14 years old — a teenager. Just think of it. Now you know what’s going to happen. Sarah saw that the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, was mocking Isaac. The big boy began to pick on the young one. We don’t know exactly what this mocking meant or how it was formulated — what was said. What we do know is that when Sarah heard it, she came to the conclusion that Ishmael and Hagar were going to attempt to unseat her son Isaac as the rightful heir to Abraham’s empire.
Well, there’s all this. By the way, this whole mess is an attempt to overthrow the true Christian church for the false one. He wrote: Sarah, subject to Hagar. So the false church condemns, despises, and afflicts the true church, and arrogates to itself alone the title of the people of God. That is, Hagar and Ishmael wanted to regard themselves, and wanted others to regard them, as the heirs of the promise — the heirs of Abraham’s kingdom.
Now Abraham had no alternative other than to send her to the wilderness, where, once out in the wilderness, this wild donkey of a man prospered. He became an archer — an expert with a bow and an arrow — and a hunter. He became the father of many people. We know them as the tribe of the Ishmaelites. But Ishmael was never, ever going to be the son of the promise. It made no difference what Abraham or Sarah, Hagar or Ishmael himself did. It simply wasn’t what God had ordained and set in place. Nothing was going to derail God’s only-begotten Son as a descendant from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — God’s only-begotten Son, who would be born of the Virgin Mary and be the legal son of Joseph from the tribe of David.
Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, and Ishmael thought they could alter the plan of God by taking the plan into their own hands. It’s a very human thing to do, isn’t it? To think that we can somehow take matters into our own hands and to thwart the will and the way and the judgments of our Lord God and our Savior Jesus Christ. Right? Humanity is trying to govern the planet, for Pete’s sake, in things they have no jurisdiction or ability to do. They cannot control what they think they can control — though they will try. And we do often think we need to take certain steps and do certain things in order to persuade God to let us know what his plan is, or how it ought to be carried out, or what we can do to sort of move the thing along. And other times we think we have to activate God’s plan. That’s, by the way, what the prosperity preachers are all about. They’re going to tell you what principal steps you need to take in order to activate God’s blessings, like an automatic machine paying out because you did the right thing and drew the right numbers.
We think we can manipulate God by our good works. “I promise, God, I will be better and do better, if you just get me out of this mess.” We want to know why things happen to us, but more important, what we really want is a resolution. We want a positive resolution. We want the happily-ever-after ending, and we want it right now. And that’s what Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar wanted for 25 years. Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar tried to force God’s hand. They tried to bring about the happily-ever-after way of living by way of the law — specifically the law in Exodus 21:4, even though it hadn’t been written yet. It was simply how things were done.
In fact, this is how Paul sees the story of Sarah and Hagar in the epistle lesson that I’ve read this evening. He sees it as a story of law and gospel, of the false religion versus the true religion, of the false church versus the true church. In Galatians 3 he wrote: “For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse. Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for ‘the righteous shall live by faith.'” After writing that, Paul provides examples and an argument that in fact the law works one way and produces nothing good, and the gospel works another way and produces everything that is good. He writes in Galatians 4:24 and following, speaking allegorically — I find that interesting, that a writer does that in the Bible: “These women are of two covenants: one coming from Mount Sinai, giving birth to children who are to be slaves. She is Hagar and corresponds to the present Jerusalem — the one that’s occupied by the Romans, under the law of the Romans — for she is enslaved with her children. But the Jerusalem above, that is the heavenly church, she is our mother. And you, brothers and sisters, like Isaac, are children of the promise. But as at that time the son was born according to the flesh persecuted the one who was born according to the Spirit, so it is even now.”
So the one that wanted to conceive control by virtue of a law, a covenant under the law — the one who wanted that — why, that was going to end always in a disaster. That’s how the church is working these days: the true church, persecuted, tried, convicted by the world, by its own church bodies sometimes. But what does the Scripture say? “Drive out the slave woman and her son.” So then, brothers and sisters, we are not of the slave woman, but we are of the free woman. That is, we are not of Hagar. Hagar represents the Law given at Mount Sinai, and all those who live under the burden of the law — they are children of Hagar, descendants of Ishmael, slaves. They are in fact individual little Ishmaels. The children of the law are driven out, as Hagar and Ishmael were driven out and separated from the family.
Isaac was born according to the Spirit and according to the promise. He was born out of the withering womb of an old woman, Sarah. Thus Isaac’s birth is a miracle, and Hagar and Ishmael didn’t like that miracle one bit. The children of the law are always at odds with the children of the church. The law is always at odds with the gospel. Paul teaches that those who think they can and do inherit heaven have an innate hatred for those who belong to the true church of Jesus Christ, who are born of the promise of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now you, brothers, Paul explains, like Isaac, are children of promise. We are not children of the slave, but we are children of the free woman. Those who live by faith, not by works, are sons and daughters of the promise, true descendants of Abraham and recipients of his blessing.
We don’t know what ultimately happened to all those Ishmaelites running around. There’s no direct evidence, for example, that you can go from Ishmael to Saudi Arabia. There’s no direct evidence you can go from Ishmael to Mohammed, even though all of those claim to be from the line of Ishmael — and people who were promised many nations. But what we do know is the promise given to us through Abraham and Sarah and Isaac and Jacob. We know that we in fact are children of the heavenly Father, made so by faith in Jesus Christ. For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith. For as many of you who were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.
The reason of the law brings one thing, and one thing only: final condemnation. Only the gospel liberates and brings salvation. In Christ, you are — 1 John 3:1 says: “See how great a love the Father has given us, that we would be called children of God, and in fact we are.” We are children of God, in whom God is well pleased. Amen.
May the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.