A God who cares about women

Hagar’s story is surely one to be retold. In Genesis 12, Abram and Sarai were promised “descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky”. Yet Sarai remained childless and the pressure of this over decades would have weighed heavily.

So they took matters into their own hands. In Genesis 16, Sarai “gave Hagar to her husband to be his wife” and they used their slave to be a surrogate and she fell pregnant.

Don’t forget, Sarai too was a victim. When Pharaoh saw that Sarai was beautiful, Abram lied and said “please tell them you are my sister. Then they will spare my life and treat me well because of their interest in you.” In return, Pharaoh treated Abram well for her sake, and Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, male and female servants, and camels, Hagar could well have been one of these.

After decades of waiting, Sarai's pain turned to wickedness as they mistreated and abused Hagar. How complex these dynamics become as the abused too easily slide into abusing. Hagar despises her mistress, and Sarai and Abram (with echoes of Genesis 3) blame each other for what has happened. According to Tim Keller the Hebrew of Genesis 16:5 says “I put my servant girl in your lap, I put my servant girl between your legs”. How does Abram respond to this graphic language which shows rawness and despondency? Abram replies “your servant is in her hands you do what you think is best.” So Abram and Sarai, the heroes of the faith, abused her, Abram didn’t protect or provide for Hagar at this point or later in the story. Her situation was so bad that she fled into the most unsafest of places for a woman like her, the desert.

Hagar, the commodity, had no hope of ever improving her situation. Yet in her wilderness, this poor, nameless, exiled, unwed, pregnant girl was met by the Angel of the Lord. Elyse Fitzpatrick in Unloved says this: “We learn that the pre-incarnate Christ in the form of the angel of the Lord was seeking and searching for her. And he found her by a spring in the wilderness. Out in the middle of nowhere, the second person of the trinity, the son, came searching for this lost woman, looking for the one he loved.”

Five things we’d never expect to come to a slave girl

I recently discussed this passage with friends. One of them was insistent that the main character in the text was the Angel of the Lord. The other (his wife) said “We can only learn about the Angel because of his interactions with Hagar”. It struck me. Take Hagar out of the text and what do we miss about God Himself? When we erase stories of women we miss something of God’s love for them and ultimately His love for us.

We’d miss that the Angel of the Lord is seeking and searching for an insignificant and downtrodden woman - it's not Hagar who is searching for God, it's the Angel that is seeking and searching for her.

We’d miss that the Angel knew her name and loved her. Until this point in the story Hagar was only known as Sarai’s slave - the nameless slave became named and is seen.

We’d miss that Hagar gives the Angel a name. She is the first person in the Bible to confer a name upon God and she calls Him El Roi, meaning 'the God who sees me'. From the lips of an unnamed slave comes a name for God Himself, signifying her personal encounter with the divine.

We’d miss that the Angel promises her a future. Hagar was a slave, a piece of property with no rights, no possessions, and no future - yet she is promised descendants too numerous to count.

We’d miss that the Angel hears her distress. How long would she have been crying out under the mistreatment and abuse of Sarai and Abram? Yet in the desert, the Angel names her son in the womb Ishmael - “the God who hears”.

Erasing these stories erases hope

I wonder if you’ve ever heard a sermon on Hagar. I don’t just mean a nod to her, but an actual preach, that delves into the detail of the four characters in the passage. I recently asked this question on a public Facebook thread and not many had. It made me wonder why.

It seems that by not speaking about Hagar or some of the other more gruesome stories of women in the Bible we continue to sideline the sidelined. What is worse though - not mentioning her, or downplaying and misinterpreting what happened? Tim Keller in his sermon on Genesis 16 says “the English translation prettifies things and keeps us from seeing the brutality of the situation”. Why is that?

So often stories are told where women are portrayed as the root of the problem. Here, it’s the dysfunctional marriage that’s the root, with Abraham consistently behaving dubiously. Hagar never has agency or true safety. But God looks after her.

So we sideline the sidelined, we prettify the unpretty and portray women as the problem. Yet men and women need this story because we need to experience God as Hagar does.

What did this encounter with the Lord mean to Hagar, a woman who’d never been heard, never been seen, never allowed a voice, a name or a future? How often the Lord meets us in the place of our deepest wounds. But then, after all, He is the Lord of Lords who became nothing, taking on the very nature of a slave.

There will be men and women in our churches who associate with Hagar’s story. So let's not erase her story or sideline the sidelined for if we do, we miss something of God Himself and deny Hagar’s hope for those in need.