From Victim to Victor

   His name was Yah-Shama-El: Yahweh is the God Who Hears.  His cries were painful to her ears.  He was crying out to Yahweh—to the God who seemed to have abandoned them. She had taught him to pray, but it all seemed too hopeless now.  Why would God care about a slave woman and her slave son?
   Her dehydration headache throbbing incessantly. The white sands, ever shifting, cast back the heat in waves, the deception of water mocking her.  But she knew it was false.  Everything in her life seemed false. 
   She couldn’t bear to look at him.  It was too painful to watch him die.  There was nothing left that she could do. She had given him the last of the water in the skin, and there was none left.  They were alone in the desert and Hagar was acutely aware of the desperation of their situation. 
    Her name meant Fleeing One and that is what she was doing….again. Yahweh had promised—but now He seemed to be nowhere.  She had heard Him and obeyed, but now her son was dying and she had nothing and no one left. Hagar remembered with bitterness how this pain had been forced on her. 

   All she could do was collapse into the hot sand and weep.

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar.  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 be built up by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.  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.  And he went in to Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress.  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!”  But Abram said to Sarai, “Behold, your servant is in your power; do to her as you please.” Then Sarai humbled her, and she fled from her. Genesis 16:1-6

    Hagar was pulled away from her homeland in Egypt. This is where Abraham stayed when there was a famine. Egypt was often a place of refuge during famines because of the Nile river and their independence from rain.  It is where Abraham was mistreated as a foreigner, his wife taken to be Pharaoh’s wife as if she was a concubine slave.  This also where Pharaoh expelled Abraham out of Egypt with gifts. One of these gifts was Hagar, the slave woman.
     Hagar, הגר, means The Fleeing One. It comes from the verb Gar, meaning to be pulled or dragged away as well as the noun Gar, which was a temporary, foreign resident or wanderer.  
    Sarah was Hagar’s “gabar,” the mighty one who had power over her.  In Sarah’s pain at feeling left out of God’s promise of a child, Hagar was conscripted into service for them as a surrogate mother in order to build up Sarah’s house.  This was a very common and legal way of treating slaves in the countries where Abraham and Sarah journeyed as “gars,” or foreigners.  In their household, though, it is now Hagar who is the “gar.” 
   When Hagar saw that she had conceived, she naturally thought that she would have a higher status as a true wife, as the inheritor of the wealth of Abraham, and that she could now look down upon her gabar, Sarah.
   Sarah “humbled” Hagar.  This is the same word for how Egypt later humbles, afflicts, and oppresses the Hebrews, Abraham’s descendants, by conscripting them into forced slavery.  Sarah had the legal right and power over her slave, but at this point in the story only used her power selfishly.  Sarah wanted to make sure that Hagar knew her place—she was only a slave, never a real wife. This directly contradicted God’s command to His people:

“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God. Lev. 19:33-34

   The New Testament carries this concept over into our command to be “hospitable.”  This Greek word, philoxeno, literally means to love strangers or foreigners living among us. 
   Abuse, however, happens.  These things are necessary to develop Christlike character in us.  We are naïve to think that normal, human people who are themselves, like us, still in the process of being shaped by Christ into His image, will not wrong us.  Of course they will.    

    God isn’t done with us yet, and He is not yet done with them.

    Someone else’s issues don’t take away our need to deal with our own wrong responses.  God was dealing with Abraham and Sarah’s sins separately—we must not get hung up on what other people are doing wrong; we deal with God directly and only about our own issues.
   God allowed this to happen to Hagar so that she could experience God personally and have relationship with Him. God doesn’t make mistakes. God uses all things for good to those who love Him, who are called according to His purposes. In the same way that Abraham and Sarah had to come out of Ur, Hagar needed to come out of Egypt to experience the God of Abraham. 
   We find that as Sarah oppressed Hagar as a foreigner, and Hagar remained true to her name:          She fled.  
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The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur.  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. Then the angel of the Lord told her, “Go back to your mistress and submit to her.”  The angel added, “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.” 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. 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 toward all his brothers.” She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: El Roi: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.”  That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered. So Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne. Genesis 16:7-16
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​   Sarah, whose name means chief ruler, was the mighty gabar, Because she had always been oppressed in slavery, Hagar ran with a victim mentality. 
 
A Victim Mentality. A victim…

• Runs from their issues before it’s a proper time or for a right reason;
• Holds onto pride at the expense of relationship;
• Doesn’t trust God’s plan
• Refuses to submit to God’s plan in leadership;
• Sees only the physical
• Takes actions based only on faith in what they can see.
• Projects blame.

 
   God doesn’t want us to live as a victim. Instead, He wants to open our eyes to see the depth of His care and provision for us.  He wants us to trust that in His love, He will see to our needs. He wants us to trust that because He is truly the gabar, the Mighty One, He can do anything.  He can use the wrong choices of others to bring us to Himself and to give us new life in Christ.
 
God’s Response:

• He acknowledges and reminds us who we presently are;
• He asks us to state where we presently are and where we are headed with our choices;
• He promises to make us something new if we put our trust in Him.

 
   The process of submission in hardship is the process of becoming like Christ. The Bible tells us that even the Son of God learned obedience through the things He suffered. The Apostle Paul also had places where the Holy Spirit warned him to escape, and places where the Spirit warned that he would suffer for Christ.  There is a time and a place for being released to leave.  This is one reason why it is imperative for us to learn to know the voice of our Savior. It could be that God is providing and using even wrong situations and people to accomplish a better, more eternal purpose for us than we could imagine.
   The Apostle Paul, who counted more hardships in His life of ministry than any other apostle, advised the slaves in his churches to not be afraid or troubled by their humbled position because in Christ they were truly free:

Were you a slave when you were called? Don’t let it trouble you—although if you can gain your freedom, do so.  For the one who was a slave when called to faith in the Lord is the Lord’s freed person; similarly, the one who was free when called is Christ’s slave.  You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of human beings.  Brothers and sisters, each person, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation they were in when God called them. 1 Cor. 7:21-24
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​   Hagar was not in a position, being pregnant, to care for her needs. God knew that Abraham and Sarah would no longer take advantage of Hagar in the way that they had.  God knew that for the time being, it would be a place where Ishmael could grow in strength as well as his faith in God.     We can trust El Roi, the God who Sees, because He is the Mighty One who gives us freedom everywhere we are.  No matter where we are living, no matter who seems to have control over us, whether we are serving others uncompensated and unappreciated or not, we are still free in the Lord. 
 
A Victor Mentality.  A victor…

• Returns to God’s plan in repentance;
• Receives the promise of God that He will build them up in their own house;
• Trusts that God is taking care of them even when it feels hard;
• Takes actions that declare their faith in what God has said

 
   Hagar returned home and submitted to God’s mighty hand.  She humbled herself and by faith named her son Yah-Shama-El (Ishmael): Yahweh is the God Who Hears.
   God’s word promises us that when we humble ourselves under the mighty, the gabar, hand of God, He will lift us up.” Hagar was about to experience the mighty hand of God in releasing her from her bondage and into freedom. 

And the child grew and was weaned. And Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, laughing. So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not be heir with my son Isaac.”  And the thing was very displeasing to Abraham on account of his son.  But God said to Abraham, “Be not displeased because of the boy and because of your slave woman. Whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for through Isaac shall your offspring be named.  And I will make a nation of the son of the slave woman also, because he is your offspring.”  So Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba.
When the water in the skin was gone, she put the child under one of the bushes.  Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot, for she said, “Let me not look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept.
Genesis 21:8-16

God’s Response:

• Frees His people. 

 
   One of my sons is learning about negatives in math.  In his equations, it is odd to him that two negatives can make a number positive.  While this may be true for math, my son’s motto this year recognizes the fallacy of living with that life-mentality: He often reminds himself and others that one bad choice isn’t made better by a second bad choice. 
   Yahweh sees and will Judge justly.  Jesus said that it was necessary that offenses will happen—but woe to the one by whom they come!  The fact that God uses even our wrong choices for His glory does not give us an excuse to do wrong!
    Abraham and Sarah made a terrible choice when they engaged in abusing their slave. But God still wasn’t done with them.  They still needed to do the next, right thing.
   The laws in the Old Testament represented principles of love that we find in the Old Testament stories.  Though the law was not codified until much later, God still cared before the law was written about how His children, His creation, were treated. Though God did not condone slavery, he made a law of accountability for anyone who treacherously abused a woman who had been sold in slavery as a man’s wife:

If she does not please her master, who has designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has acted treacherously deceitful  (bagad) with her. ….If he marries another woman, he must not deprive the first one of her food, clothing and marital rights. If he does not provide her with these three [food, clothing, marital rights] things, she is to go free, without any payment of money. Ex. 21:8, 10, 11
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    Hagar fell under this category.  It was never God’s intent that people should marry multiple wives.  One man covenanting with one woman in a free choice to love and submit to one another in the Lord was the pattern He had given from the beginning.  But God doesn’t end with Plan A.  When we fail miserably, we still have more choices to make. 
    The Hebrew word here is an act of deceitful treachery where the woman feels that she is to be a true and loved wife and is instead denied this love and her rights. The next right choice after being treacherously used is to give absolute freedom to the slave woman, even without her redemption price—without her debt being paid.  
    God knew just how to place Sarah and Abraham into a situation in which they would both decide to give Hagar and Ishmael their freedom.  God sees and knows you and me and is intimately acquainted with all our thoughts and ways.  While the things we do are still our choices to make, God knows how to influence our hearts with our experiences, past, and circumstances.
   Since Abraham had no right to give Hagar her marital rights, including inheritance for her son and continuous love and marital relations, he gave Hagar her freedom.  As he sent her out he gave her gifts and provisions (Gen. 25:5-6) for their future. 
   Hagar now found herself wandering in the desert of Beersheba, the Well of the Covenant, without knowing where she was or the significance of why she was there. Though Abraham had given her gifts and provision for her future life, her water supplies had run out and she was desperate and exhausted.   She was traveling south, possibly to go back home to Egypt, and seemed to have lost her way.  The verb to describe her “wandering” about in the wilderness of Beersheba is תעה (ta'a), to err, to go astray.
 
A Victor…

• Struggles sometimes when it feels like God is not coming through.

 
    Sometimes we lose our way when we feel like God is not keeping His promises.  Sometimes when we are depressed or discouraged we plan to go back to Egypt--back to our sin, our "safe spots," back our wrong ways of thinking and acting.  In His love for us, God will allow us to lose our way and become lost.  In our text we do not even find Hagar crying out to the Lord anymore.  It is her son, Ishmael, whom the Lord has heard, who is crying out.  But we are never lost to Him—We are in the land of the Covenant. 

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And God heard the voice of the boy, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Up! Lift up the boy, and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make him into a great nation.”  Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. And she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.  And God was with the boy, and he grew up. He lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow.  He lived in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother took a wife for him from the land of Egypt. 
​Genesis 21:17-21
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   God showed up. For the second time the Angel of Yahweh spoke to Hagar, and promised her that Ishmael would be a great nation. God opened her eyes and she saw the Well of the Covenant. This is fortunate for two reasons. First of all, she and Ishmael now have life-giving water. Secondly, they know again where they are and who they are--they are children of the mighty God living in His covenant of abundance.
 
God’s Response:

• God will open our eyes to “see” as He sees when it is His doing and His timing for a new direction.
• God will open our eyes to see His provision for the rest of our journey. 

 
   God’s ways are higher than our ways, His thoughts are higher than our thoughts.  God’s timeline and method are often quite different than our natural inclinations and fleshly plans. Sometimes what we think is an exile or a rejection is instead God freeing us to serve Him more fully.  When God opens our eyes, we know right where we are—in the epicenter of His good and trustworthy plan for our lives. 
   Hagar and Ishmael, refreshed and encouraged, resumed their journey.  Ishmael became an archer and lived in the wilderness of Paran.  He became a great nation---Arabia.  For generations to come they would place their faith and trust in the true God-- in Yahweh. 
   Not only that, but God has a greater plan for the nation of Arabia.  Though the angel of the Lord had promised Hagar that Ishmael would live in hostility from his brothers, that was not the end of the story of redemption and reconciliation that God has for Ishmael. God wants reconciliation to Himself and to their brothers through Christ.  The prophet Isaiah mentions Ishmael descendants among the nations that will be gathered up into the Kingdom of God (Isaiah 60:7). When Abraham died, Ishmael and Isaac prophetically buried him together in peace and reconciliation.
   At this time we see extreme tension and hostility in the Middle East.  With the war in Israel causing many devastating casualties and hatred escalating, there is a revival going on in Israel as Arabs, Jews and Palestinians come to the Lord.  Right now there is a college in the heart of the country where pastors from each ethnic background are trained and room with one another, learning to love both God and their brothers and sisters in Christ.  God’s Word brings reconciliation and peace that nothing on earth can ever accomplish! 
   Sometimes we think that the hatred, division and discord among us can never be reconciled.  But nothing is too great for our God.  God can bring reconciliation in the darkest of places. 
 
A Victor…

• Grows in discernment in recognizing our own attempts to escape humbling circumstances vs God’s divine rescue;
• Is provided for as they are led out of bondage to new life;
• Drinks of the living water and becomes a giver of life welling up from inside;
• Is given our own inheritance and kingdom with a house of spiritual descendants built up just for us;
• Learns to use the power and freedom we have in Christ to love others who are vulnerable;
• Lives as peace with all people as far as is possible with us.

 
   Not only is God One Who Sees, but He is also the Mighty One, the Gebar.
   God does not show favoritism. A person harvests what they plant.  Very soon the tables would be turned for Abraham and Sarah’s descendants. The lack of kindness they had shown to the foreigner in their midst, by humbling her through force, would come back upon them: They would themselves be enslaved to the Egyptians, the mighty ones. They would themselves need God to see, hear their cries and deliver them.  Their deliverer, Moses, would also flee into the wilderness until God would meet him and call him to return. They would not march out from Pharaoh’s bondage without divine help and guidance—it would be God who would cause Pharaoh to let His people go, just as God influenced Sarah to demand Hagar’s release.  And when God’s people were delivered to go worship Him, they were sent away with a vast amount of wealth by the Egyptians. 
   When the time had fully come, God brought them out with a mighty hand. 
   Who is the Gebar in your situation?  Is there someone God wants you to submit to until your time has fully come to be released?  In what ways do we need to trust God more fully so that we can live in freedom while waiting on God’s timing and method for bringing us to a new place in our lives?
   What do we do when we are the mighty ones, when we are free?  Do we use our freedom to oppress or to show love?  How are we to treat the strangers and sojourners who come to live among us?  “Gars” include new people at church, someone who doesn’t know anyone at work, a neighbor coming into the community, a foster child, a destitute, poor person without connections and help and even refugees from other nations.
   When we walk in obedience by faith, we will find that El Roi, The God who Sees, will become for us Yah Shama El: Yahweh, the God who Hears us. 
  

Yahweh will turn our running into relationship,
our hostility into harmony and our victimization into victory!