In Genesis 16 people try to make God's promise happen for Him. But in the middle of it, one person says something no one else in the Bible ever says. She is the person with the least standing in the whole book of Genesis.
What people call her. Sarai calls her “my maid” (16:2, 16:5). Abram calls her “your maid” (16:6). Verse 1 introduces her as “an Egyptian maidservant.” To Sarai and Abram she is only a servant. Neither of them ever calls her Hagar.
Then God comes. “The Angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness” (16:7). The first thing He says is “Hagar, Sarai's maid, where have you come from, and where are you going?” (16:8). He says her name. God is the only One who calls her by it.
Who He came for. This is the first time in all of Scripture that the Angel of the Lord appears to anyone. He does not come to Abram, who has just behaved badly. Nor does He come to Sarai, whose plan it was. He comes to a foreign slave girl running down the road to Egypt. Nobody was looking for her.
She names God. “Then she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, You-Are-the-God-Who-Sees” (16:13). People name children all through Genesis. They name altars and wells and towns. Abram calls ON the name of the Lord (12:8). But nobody else gives God a name — not Abraham, not Moses, not David, not Paul. Only Hagar does, and she had nothing at all.
The name she picked. In her own language it is two short words: El Roi, the God who sees me. She did not call Him the strongest God or the God who wins. The people who owned her had looked right past her. What she found out about God was that He looks.
Then the name went on the map. “Therefore the well was called Beer Lahai Roi” (16:14), the well of the Living One who sees me. People kept that name for many years. The well comes up twice more in the family story. Isaac is living near it at 24:62 and settles beside it at 25:11. God's care for Hagar was part of the story of Abraham's family. And the God who saw her sees you too.
In 16:9 God says, “Return to your mistress, and submit yourself under her hand.” God sends a mistreated woman back to the house she just escaped from.
It was hard. She had been treated so badly that she ran into the open desert while expecting a baby. Now she is told to go back. God does not pretend that hard things are easy.
God gave her a promise. In the very next sentence God says, “I will multiply your descendants exceedingly, so that they shall not be counted for multitude” (16:10). This is the promise God made Abram, now given to a slave girl. One verse later He says, “the Lord has heard your affliction” (16:11). She is not told it was nothing. She is told that God heard it.
God was not on Sarai's side. He never says Sarai was right, and He never calls the mistreatment acceptable. The Bible uses a hard word for what Sarai did. It is the same word used later for what Egypt did to Israel. God saw that it was wrong, and He cared about Hagar.
Her son's name matters. “You shall call his name Ishmael, because the Lord has heard your affliction” (16:11). For the rest of his life, every time someone says that boy's name, they are saying God hears. His name would always remind her that God had heard her.
God sees and hears. God saw her (16:13) and God heard her (16:11). Exodus 2:25 says, “And God looked upon the children of Israel, and God acknowledged them.” And Exodus 3:7 says, “I have surely seen the oppression of My people… and have heard their cry.” When Israel was enslaved in Egypt, God saw and heard them too. He did the same for an Egyptian slave woman first.
Ishmael was not a villain. 16:12 says he will be a wild man whose hand is against every man. That is a picture of a free desert people who would not be ruled by anyone. It is not a curse, and it is not a verdict on his descendants. Later Genesis says, “God was with the lad” (21:20), and 25:12-18 lists his twelve sons by name. God cared about Ishmael, and we should care about his descendants too.
Complete all sections to finish!
Read each section and answer the questions correctly.