Note: Devotion taken from last Sunday's sermon on Genesis 16.
And
she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me: for she
said, Have I also looked after him that seeth me? (Genesis 16:13).
After
conflict with Sarah, Hagar fled “by the fountain in the way to Shur” (16:7b). She
was fleeing toward Egypt, her homeland.
In v.
7a, he read, “And the angel of the LORD found her….” This is the first time in
Holy Scripture that we have a reference to this figure who is called the angel
of the LORD. An angel is a servant or messenger of the LORD. But here this
angel speaks as if he is God (see vv. 10-12), and his words are received as the
words of the LORD (see v. 13).
Many
have seen the angel of the LORD here as a manifestation of the eternal second
person of the Godhead, the Son of God, the so-called pre-incarnate Christ.
Calvin said, “The ancient teachers of the church have rightly understood [the
angel of the LORD to be] the Eternal Son of God in respect to his office as
Mediator” (as cited in John Currid, Genesis, 305).
Here,
at the least, is the triune God finding someone damaged by her own sin and the
sin of others, in her distress, and making himself known to her.
In v.
8 the angel of the LORD poses two questions to Hagar. It is like a spiritual
exam or a spiritual inventory.
First,
he asks, “whence camest thou?” Where are you coming from? What has been your
previous experience?
Second,
“whither wilt thou go?” Where are you heading? In what direction are you bending?
What is your destination? What are your aspirations? What is your end or goal?
These
are two of the great spiritual questions that the LORD is constantly asking sin-damaged
refugees.
Hagar
responds, “I flee from the face of my mistress Sarai” (v. 8b). She conveniently
omits mention of the fact that she had despised her mistress and acted haughtily
toward her, bringing, at least in part, some of this distress upon herself (cf.
v. 5). We too tend to shade our answers to God for our advantage, making us
appear in the best light and our adversaries in the worst.
Notice
then the angel of the LORD’s response in v. 9: “Return to thy mistress, and submit
thyself under her hand.” I suppose this is not the response that Hagar wanted to
hear. She wanted to hear, “Keep heading toward Egypt.” The LORD so very often
asks us to do what is counter to what our flesh instinctively desires to do. She
wanted to hear the LORD bless her bid for personal freedom. But the LORD calls
her to submission not only to Sarai, but more importantly to his will, to his
command.
The
angel of the LORD continues in v. 11, “Behold thou art with child…” His name
will be called Ishmael which means “God hears.” It is related to the name
Samuel, which means the same thing.
There
is something of a foreshadowing of the Great Commission in this. The LORD has
compassion on an Egyptian servant. He finds her in her distress. He is the LORD
of the nations.
in v.
13, we have the grateful response of Hagar to the LORD’s kind intervention on
her behalf through his Mediator. She names or calls the LORD who spoke to her, “Thou
God seest me.” Moses adds, “for she said, Have I also looked after him that
seeth me?”
If
not too anachronistic to assert, this has a Calvinistic flavor to it. I was looking
for the God who sees me. I was searching for the God who found me. It has the
flavor of 1 John 4:19, “We love him, because he first loved us.”
We
can even see in Hagar’s experience a vague evangelical outline. We are like her
in that we flee in our distress, wincing under the experience or our own sin
and the sin of others, only to be found by the LORD, found by the Mediator.
We
find the God who found us, and we say to him, as Hagar did, “Thou God seest me.”
Grace
and peace, Pastor Jeff Riddle
