Slices
Prepare
‘Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him’ (Psalm 37:7). Be still now.
Bible passage
Hagar and Ishmael
16 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; 2 so she said to Abram, ‘The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; 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 slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. 4 He slept with Hagar, and she conceived.
When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. 5 Then Sarai said to Abram, ‘You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.’
6 ‘Your slave is in your hands,’ Abram said. ‘Do with her whatever you think best.’ Then Sarai ill-treated Hagar; so she fled from her.
7 The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. 8 And he said, ‘Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?’
‘I’m running away from my mistress Sarai,’ she answered.
9 Then the angel of the Lord told her, ‘Go back to your mistress and submit to her.’ 10 The angel added, ‘I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.’
11 The angel of the Lord also said to her:
‘You are now pregnant
and you will give birth to a son.
You shall name him Ishmael,
for the Lord has heard of your misery.
12 He will be a wild donkey of a man;
his hand will be against everyone
and everyone’s hand against him,
and he will live in hostility
towards all his brothers.’
13 She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: ‘You are the God who sees me,’ for she said, ‘I have now seen the One who sees me.’ 14 That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered.
15 So Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne. 16 Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael.
Explore
Waiting for God to fulfil his promises is hard. Eventually the strain begins to tell. It is human nature to want to nudge events towards fulfilment. While God takes his time, Abram has been weighing up the possibilities for succession – his nephew Lot or his servant Eliezer (15:2,3). It seems that Sarai has had enough of waiting and is desperate enough to share her husband with another woman, Hagar.
Waiting for God does not necessarily mean that we remain passive. Abram had clearly been busy. By now he is a wealthy man with a large, extended household. However, taking things into our own hands in order to ‘help’ God is never wise.
God’s graciousness to Hagar is deeply touching. He attends to the messy consequences of Abram and Sarai’s faltering trust with compassion and care.
You may be struggling to continue to trust God as he seems to be taking his time. You are not alone, and you are not the first. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote:
‘Faith is the ability to live with delay without losing trust in the promise; to experience disappointment without losing hope, to know that the road between the real and the ideal is long and yet be willing to undertake the journey.’*
*Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Covenant and Conversation, Toby Press, 2019, p93
Respond
Use Psalm 90 to pray with a long view of history, but with honesty and urgency.
Bible in a year
Read the Bible in a year: Job 3,4; Luke 14
Pray for Scripture Union
Pray that Mission Partner Lighthouse Project Crawley may have opportunities to serve more secondary schools. Pray that they would be invited into schools to lead secondary school assemblies, and that God would provide the resources and personnel needed for this.
