Manipulating God
The Life of Abraham 5.0 
Genesis 16:1-16 
by Eric Stillman
July 30th, 2006

We’ve been looking this past month at the life of Abram and talking about the adventure of faith, the fact that the life of those who follow Jesus is supposed to be an adventure, full of ups and downs, twists and turns, fears and doubts, times you want to give up and times it looks like there is no hope, but that in the end you are changed for the better because of the adventure.  Abram started well, leaving his home because God told him to, and he arrived at the land God had promised to him.  However, early on he went in completely the wrong direction, leaving the land to head into Egypt with his wife, trying to pass her off as his sister, and almost losing her to Pharaoh.  In the last chapter we looked at, Abram had expressed his doubts that he would ever have a child to God, and God responded by creating a covenant with him, where he essentially told him, “if I fail, may I die, and if you fail, may I die as well.”  Right there in Genesis 15, there are already hints of the gospel, that Jesus will come and die in order to pay the penalty for the sins and failures of God’s people.

Now, in Genesis 16, Abram is going to take another major step backwards.  It can be hard from our perspective to understand sometimes, because while only a chapter goes by in our reading, years are going by in Abram’s life.  Abram is 85 or 86 years old when this chapter begins, and even though he has been in the land of promise 10 years, Sarai has still not had a child.  Despite his many promises, God is still seemingly not coming through, so Sarai begins to wonder whether Abram has heard God wrong and perhaps they need to find another way of making this child happen.  Let’s read what happens in Genesis 16.

Genesis 16:1-16  Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar;  ² so she said to Abram, "The LORD has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her." Abram agreed to what Sarai said.  ³ So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian maidservant Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife.  ⁴ He slept with Hagar, and she conceived.

Although this certainly seems odd by today’s standards, remember that there’s no adoption, no artificial insemination or surrogate motherhood in Abram’s day.  And, since women did not work, their whole self-worth was tied up in whether or not they could have children.  A woman who could produce many children was a blessing to a man, while a barren woman was an embarrassment.  So, if a woman could not get pregnant, one solution was to have her husband produce a child through her maidservant.  Since Hagar belonged to Sarai as her maidservant, any child would also belong to Sarai.  So, Sarai reasons, that if Hagar produces a child for Abram, that’s pretty much what God has been promising, right?  Abram would finally have a child, who would be their heir and bring Abram many descendants.

Although in many ways this is pretty funny to us today, that Sarai might actually believe this could “trick” God, I’m sure we all do similar things every day in our walks with God.  We are masters at rationalizing and helping God accomplish what he has promised to do in our lives.  We can rationalize the purchase of expensive clothes we don’t need, we can rationalize lies and call them truths, stealing and call it taking what we’ve got coming to us, our anger and call it righteous because of how other people act towards us.  I’m sure if we are brutally honest with ourselves we will find many ways that we rationalize sin as righteousness, outright disobedience as somehow justified.  So let’s cut this desperate woman a little break and see what happens to her, Abram, and Hagar as a result of her plan.