Hagar in the Wilderness …God sees and takes care of the troubled

As a child, I was told “God is watching you all the time. He sees everything you do.” Unfortunately, this was communicated in a negative sense … ‘God is watching you, so shape up kid!’ So the idea of God watching me became a distinctly uncomfortable concept, because I knew I sinned fairly frequently and that God didn’t like that. My childlike response was just not to think about that.

But a few years ago, I noticed for the first time the story of Hagar. She’s the mother of Abraham’s other son … the mother of Ishmael. (You can read the story in the Bible here.)She becomes a type and symbol in the Bible of lack of faith and illegitimacy, along with her son Ishmael. She represents doing things the world’s way instead of God’s way. Also, she’s Egyptian, so she probably worships not Jehovah but Ra and Ishtar. What’s more, she has been rejected by her master’s wife, whose orders she was following in the first place in getting pregnant with Abraham’s son. So she does what all of us do when we experience hurt and rejection. She runs. And the results of her running are about as positive as the results when we run … she ends up not only hurting, but alone in the wilderness and in danger of starving to death or worse.

Suddenly, she is confronted by an angel of God. Amusingly enough,he asks her where she’s come from and where she’s going. Isn’t this the question we all need to be asked? After all, God already knows Hagar’s answer as he knows ours. But we so often don’t think, don’t consider … all we can see is the moment. And all Hagar can see is that that old barren crone Sarai has chased her out into the desert. She is not considering or thinking, but feeling and responding. “Where have you come from, and where are you going?”

Hagar knows the answer to the first part of the question, but not the second. So he tells her where she’s going. He shows her what she needs to do next, and promises God’s good plan for her. She listens, and as she’s preparing to go back, she says, “You are a God of seeing. Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.” To understand the depth of that, we have to remember all that we know about Hagar. This is a slave woman, owned by foreigners, used as a child-bearing object, who has been looked right through for years. Her masters probably don’t even notice she is there most of the time. She is not a person of worth; she is property. But when she is at the end of her rope, alone in the wilderness … God sees her. And he helps. He doesn’t let her die or get lost. And in his care for her, he lets her know that she does have value, she does have worth. He sees her.