Temptation: When the Wrong Voices Offer Shortcuts to Success
August 6, 2023
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Genesis 16:1-16
16 Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. 2 And Sarai said to Abram, “Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. 3 So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram her husband as a wife. 4 And he went in to Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress. 5 And Sarai said to Abram, “May the wrong done to me be on you! I gave my servant to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt. May the Lordjudge between you and me!” 6 But Abram said to Sarai, “Behold, your servant is in your power; do to her as you please.” Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she fled from her.
7 The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. 8 And he said, “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” She said, “I am fleeing from my mistress Sarai.” 9 The angel of the Lord said to her, “Return to your mistress and submit to her.” 10 The angel of the Lord also said to her, “I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude.” 11 And the angel of the Lord said to her,
“Behold, you are pregnant
and shall bear a son.
You shall call his name Ishmael,
because the Lord has listened to your affliction.
12 He shall be a wild donkey of a man,
his hand against everyone
and everyone's hand against him,
and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.”
13 So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, “You are a God of seeing,” for she said, “Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.” 14 Therefore the well was called Beer-lahai-roi; it lies between Kadesh and Bered.
15 And Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram called the name of his son, whom Hagar bore, Ishmael. 16 Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram.
In a few weeks we’ll go back to full children and youth classes on Sunday morning. But until then, we’re glad to have more children in the sanctuary. Parents might have noticed that some details of the passage touch on difficult topics, and I’ll do my best to speak to them in way that is meaningful and appropriate for our context. And the main way I’ll do that is by talking about the difficulty of waiting.
If you’d like to draw a picture to help you focus, there’s some paper in the bulletin to use. You can put it on the stage, and we’ll hang them up during the week. Perhaps you could draw a picture of something you have to wait for, maybe waiting for your birthday or a vacation . . . or maybe for school to start again. Children, if you think it’s hard to wait for things, you’re right. We’ll see in this passage that it’s not easy for adults either, even those who love God. It wasn’t for Abram and Sarai.
Let’s pray as we begin. “Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
If I came up to preach this morning, but instead of starting the sermon in the usual way, I said, “Hang on a moment. Please wait for me. I’ll be right back.” And then I walked down the side of the sanctuary and out the door. How long would you wait for me? I would suspect that just thirty seconds of dead air, thirty seconds of silence, would feel really long. But you might wait a few minutes. You’d all look around at each other. You’d expect someone who knows me well to get up and check on me. Eventually, Pastor David would probably get back on stage and say something like, “We’re going to check on him; just sit tight.”
But what if he didn’t come back? How long would you wait? Five minutes? Thirty minutes? At some point someone from church leadership would stand up and say, “I guess we should go home. Let’s pray real quick together because as for Benjamin and David, we don’t know what’s happened to them. We’ll send you an email later today.”
That may sound strange, but I’m sure in our collective experience at churches, somebody has a story about a pastor not feeling well and having to exit during a sermon. I’m thankful that’s never happened to me.
Waiting can be hard—but not only hard; waiting can be weird and disorienting. You’d start second-guessing yourself. Thinking about my little illustration of me walking out and you waiting here in the sanctuary. As you sat there, you’d be going backward in your mind; you’d be replaying the moment before I left. “Wait, wait, wait. When he left, did he say for us to wait for him, or did he say just go ahead and leave? What did he say and what didn’t he say? I thought he told us to wait, but it’s been so long. Surely he didn’t mean for us just to sit here. He must have said something else,” you’d think.
You see how it works? Waiting can be disorienting. And in the context of our Christian faith, waiting can cause us to question what God has said and whether he is good. And waiting can cause us to come up with a plan to shortcut to the waiting. [FCF] That’s certainly what happens in our passage.
Our temptations while waiting. Vv. 1–6
All summer long we’ve studying what God wants to teach us through the person of Abram. Abram lived a long time ago, something like four thousand years. But when rightly understood, his struggles are not so strange, at least in principle. God called Abram to follow him while he was still very pagan. And since that first calling, Abram has seen the Lord work mightily in many areas, and he’s received many promises from the Lord, and some of those promises have already started to come true. Indeed, at this point in the story, he’s living in the “promised land.” That part of the promise is coming true.
But a central aspect of the promise he receives is the promise that he will have many children. And that part of the promise remains unanswered. God told Abram that he’d have children as many as the stars in the heavens, but when Abram looks around, the night sky is black. No stars, no children.
Last week Pastor Tony led us through Genesis 15 where Abram discusses that struggle with the Lord. We saw Abram use candid, raw language with God. He says to God, “Behold, you have given me no offspring,” (15:3). When he says “Behold,” Abram essentially says, “Look, God, what’s become of your promise so far. Nothing.”
God is not brittle. He can handle our doubts and honest concerns when we bring them to him. That’s what God wants us to do. We call it biblical lament, the bringing of our concerns about the Lord to the Lord. That was Abram last week.
This week, Sarai, Abram’s wife, is struggling with the same part of the promise. The night sky looks black to her too. No stars, no children. Only despair. Let me read vv. 1–3 again.
16 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. 2 And Sarai said to Abram, “Behold now, the LORD has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. 3 So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram her husband as a wife.
This may seem strange to us. But it’s not so strange. Sometimes today when couples struggle to have children, they pursue other options. There’s adoption and surrogate mothers and several kinds of fertility treatments. And while the practice described here in this passage seems strange, if you had lived back in Abram’s day, this practice was the way for a struggling couple to have a child. It’s not so strange. It’s what people did. I won’t bore us with reading them, but we have several documents from this time that say this is the way to have a child when you can’t. It’s normal in their world.
But God is not so neutral about this way, especially for this couple. For Abram and Sarai, this shortcut was sinful. We see this in the way the story is described to us. It’s told in a parallel structure and with parallel themes of Genesis 3, which is the story of Adam and Eve’s sin. And by putting this story in Genesis 16 in parallel structure, we’re invited to consider them in the same way. Here’s some ways they are in parallel.
In Genesis 3, the serpent comes to Adam and Eve and says, “Did God really say?” Satan plants the seed of doubt and it grows. Maybe God didn’t really mean exactly what we think he said, they wonder. In our passage of Genesis 16, we don’t see the serpent, but it’s not hard for us to imagine that Abram and Sarai were asking the question, Did God really say? They might not have necessarily doubted the promise of God, but they were considering that maybe it didn’t apply to them in the way that they first thought it did. Yes, God did tell Abram he was to have many children, and, yes, we had thought that would mean it would happen in the ordinary way of a husband and a wife—but maybe not. Maybe God didn’t really say that. Maybe this way, instead, the way the world does things, is the way the Lord will bless us. Maybe God needs our help. Maybe God is holding out on us. The doubts are planted and they grow.
Look at v. 2. We read in v. 2, “Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.” Now, ordinarily, listening to the voice of your wife is a good thing. In a later chapter, God even tells Abraham to listen to his wife (21:12). Again, ordinarily, listening to your wife is a good thing. However, if you’re in the Garden of Eden and your wife is talking with Satan, and then she hands you forbidden fruit, that’s not a time to listen. I say it that way because the same wording is used here in Genesis 16 of Abram that is used in Genesis 3 of Adam. Adam listened to the voice of his wife; Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. Ancient readers would have read that and said, “Uh-oh, this sounds familiar.”
And not only that, but in v. 3, we read of Sarai that she “took” and she “gave,” which is the exact same language used of Eve. Eve took the fruit and gave it to her husband Adam who was with her. And just as Adam was passive in the Garden, here Abram is passive. He’s just sorta there.
This parallel picture is not a pretty picture. God wants us to see that waiting was so hard for them that they begin to replay the story of the fall. They begin to doubt that God is good. They begin to doubt what God has said. They begin to make a shortcut to end the waiting.
We have some sympathy for them, though, don’t we? We don’t condone their sin, but we can appreciate the struggle. Note how v. 3 begins. “So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan . . .” Ten years is a long time. Every month hope would rise, hope would build, and then she’d get a monthly reminder as her body would whisper back at her, “You’re not pregnant yet.” August goes by, September comes, and again she hears, “You’re not pregnant yet.” October, November, December, and another year is gone. Twelve months each year for ten years. She’s had 120 brutal reminders.
It is almost like all these desires for a child and her desires to be “normal” and all her insecurities that she had been guarding and nurturing over these years—it’s like they became these little fragile pieces of glass that she tried to protect. She’s offering up to God these little, fragile pieces of glass, offering up as prayers to God, throwing them up to Heaven. “Here, God, can you see and hear? Can you catch this?”
And then, all of a sudden, for her, it was like every fragile prayer she ever prayed came smashing to the ground into a thousand pieces. And she quits waiting.
Her plan worked. But she’s not so happy that it did. Look at what happens vv. 5–6.
5 And Sarai said to Abram, “May the wrong done to me be on you! I gave my servant to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt. May the LORD judge between you and me!” 6 But Abram said to Sarai, “Behold, your servant is in your power; do to her as you please.” Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she fled from her.
You can see Abram’s passivity continues. “This is your problem,” he essentially says. Again, he’s replaying the script of Genesis 3, passive and blaming others. And as for Sarai, she makes these big, pious claims about justice and the Lord judging between them and so on, but then she immediately goes and deals harshly with Hagar. This is ugly and vile. So, understandably, Hagar flees. Abram and Sarai found out that it’s hard to be in the world for ten years and not have the voice of the world challenge your faith.
What voices are the loudest for you? They were ten years in the land of Canaan, and rather than being distinct from the world, it seems in this area, anyway, they are being shaped by the world. Perhaps we’d even say they were being discipled by the world.
So we ask: In what ways are we being discipled by the world? Certainly there is the area of sexuality. In many ways, the world telling you things are okay, when they are not.
Consider other ways. Consider beauty. How do you know what beauty is? Is your view of beauty shaped more by the world or more by the Bible? Is beauty simply something you can see on the outside? Is beauty something only for the young? What happens if you spend ten years immersed in versions of worldly beauty that are not actually beautiful, not from God’s perspective anyway? There will be consequences.
What about success? How do you know what success looks like? What happens if you spend ten years immersed in versions of success that are not actually success, not from God’s perspective anyway? There will be consequences.
I don’t want this to sound out in left field, but I want to consider two areas, alcohol use and news media. I believe that Scripture speaks to the blessings of alcohol when consumed in moderation. But how do we know what moderation is? If you spend ten years in the craft beer subculture or the “mommy wine” subculture, how might that change your view of “moderation”?
Or consider the media you watch. What will spending ten years watching entertainment news about political and social commentary do to a person? Well, you might say, “It keeps people informed.” Sure, I’ll totally concede that. But what else does it do? I mean, living in the land of Canaan was good for Abram and Sarai, but what else did it do? We have to be so careful.
And with news media I’m not sure that it matters whether the political and social commentary comes from a perspective that is more left, right, or center or center-right or whatever. Regardless of the perspective, often the most popular political commentary, the most watched shows, and the most shared viral clips, come with an adversarial tone where there are only allies or enemies, winners or losers. Ten years of that will change you. Consider the frantic anxiety that comes with raising issues to apocalyptic levels. News media helps keep us informed, but it can also shape your expectations for what a good and strong leader should sound like. And to be frank, ten years of media might make normal, healthy leadership in a local church seem boring.
There are other ways living in the land of Canaan shapes us. I’m sure you can think of ten other areas. Feel free to talk about them on the way home.
If this passage had ended here, we would be very discouraged. The temptations abound. Sin abounds. This family, this marriage, is blowing apart. And Hagar, oh Hagar. This poor woman, a soon-to-be single mother, is gone. And we don’t read that anyone has gone looking for her. Abram went to rescue his nephew in chapter 14, but we’re not told he goes after Hagar. But someone does go looking for her. God does.
Our hope while waiting, vv. 7–16
Thankfully, we have more to the passage than just the beginning. I won’t read the rest of the passage in detail. But I do want to summarize what happens and point out the hope in this passage.
But before I cover what I’ll call the “big hope” while we wait, I want to mention a “lesser hope,” so to speak. The passage doesn’t say this, but you can sense this couple is very alone. In our words we’d say that they don’t have a church where they can come each week and be reminded that God loves them. The voice of their doubts can get really, really loud when they don’t have regularly opportunities to sing with other believers about the goodness of God. Abram and Sarai didn’t have a chance each week to sing until their doubts—at least for another week—got quieted down.
I wonder if Abram and Sarai even had anyone they could meet with for coffee to say, “Honestly, you know, this is a bad week. Again.” I wonder if they had someone who could say back to them, “Yeah, your is waiting hard. I’m not going to tell you it’s easy. But hang on. Don’t let go. God is good.” Did they have a small group of believers they meant regular with—a group who knew them, the real them, the real Abram and the real Sarai? Did they have people who would weep with them each month?
You can tell, of course, that I’m not so much talking about them as I am about us.
I’m not so naïve to think that everyone in the church, even a good church, has no problems or that the problems we do have always get fixed quickly. But I am saying that the church is not merely for individuals who are weak, wounded, and wayward but for the community of the weak, wounded, and wayward who strive, together, with one voice to enjoy the living Jesus.
And speaking of Jesus, he is always our greatest hope. In fact, the church is really only a hope in so much as we embody his message and we point to him.
When we look at this passage, it’s really really bad. I’m not going to try to sanitize it for you. There is sexual sin, passivity, domestic abuse, slavery. And God approves of none of it. Abram and Sarai are not heroes as we normally understand heroes, especially religious heroes. They are so broken.
Think about what we’re reading. Can you imagine being married and taking one of your worst marital fights, and then recording the transcript from that fight, and cropping the transcript to the most cutting insults, and then recording those in the best-selling book of all time? Can you imagine?
The only hope is hope in God.
This is true for Hagar too. Hagar is an Egyptian. When she runs, she runs back home; that’s the direction she goes. No one cares about her except God. The angel of the Lord showed up to her. And he addressed her by name. Abram and Sarai don’t call Hagar by name—but God does. I’m told that in all the literature from the ancient near east, this is the only place where a deity addresses a woman by name. And it’s this lowly, disregarded woman. How like our God to seek the outcast. Just like he did for Abram. This is just what Jesus does for us. While we were still far off, the Bible says, God came to us in Jesus to bring us near (Eph. 2).
And God makes promises upon promises to her. She’ll have a child who is blessed. The child’s name will be Ishmael, which means “God hears.” And not only will she name the child, but she also names God. Look with me at vv. 13 and 14.
13 So she called the name of the LORD who spoke to her, “You are a God of seeing,” for she said, “Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.” 14 Therefore the well was called Beer-lahai-roi; it lies between Kadesh and Bered.
You can see from the footnotes that all these cryptic names get at the idea that God sees. This discarded woman learns that God loves her and hears her and sees her and that he will make from her great nations. I’m sure Hagar treasured up all these things in her heart. As should we.
Conclusion
I’ll close with this. The late counselor and author David Powlison described the process of sanctification as a yo-yo walking upstairs (cf. Kevin DeYoung’s book The Hole in our Holiness). Sanctification is the process of becoming more like Jesus. And what he meant by the yo-yo and the stairs is that sometimes it looks like the yo-yo is going up and other times it looks like it’s going down. But overall, because the yo-yo is in the hand of God walking upstairs, the overall movement is up, even when individual moments look to be going down. And we see this in Abram, and you probably see that in your own life. We’ve seen Abram grow in his faith, the yo-yo moves up in maturity. This week, the yo-yo seems to be going only down. But then there is the ending. Look at vv. 15–16.
15 And Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram called the name of his son, whom Hagar bore, Ishmael. 16 Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram.
Before, the passage said that Hagar was going to name the child. And in a way, she still did. But she told the name to Abram, and he named the child. This man who was for too long passive, is beginning to change; the yo-yo is starting to come up. This boy is going to grow up with a father who loves him (cf. 17:18).
And we don’t read about it yet. But God will talk to Sarai too. She will learn that the child of promise will come through her. But that’s for another week.
Some people come to the Bible as a book of heroes mainly to be inspired by. If that’s you, you’re going to be pretty disappointed. But if you come to the Bible looking for the God who is good, you won’t ever be disappointed.
I’ll invite the music team forward so we can have a time of response through singing. Let’s pray. “Dear Heavenly Father. . .”
Sermon Discussion Questions
Do you have trouble waiting upon the Lord? In what areas? Have you grow frustrated with him?
Have you been hurt by the Christian community? Does that cause you to have doubts about God’s goodness?
In what ways have you experienced the blessings of a Christian community to help you while you struggle? What did they do that was so helpful in causing you to keep following Jesus?
How do we see Christian hope on display in this passage, that is, the good news of God breaking into a situation to make things better?
How can others pray for you and your faith?
