Getting In God's Way

Introduction

Patience is a virtue, but it’s difficult in a culture that demands instant gratification. We bristle at waiting rooms, traffic delays, and slow internet. Yet patience becomes even harder when we’re waiting on God.

Consider Abram and his wife Sarah. At age 75, Abram received a promise from God himself—not begged for, but offered graciously and freely. Sarah, at 65, would finally have the status and dignity a child would bring. With great hope they left their homeland to become wanderers in a foreign land. They held onto the promise through ups and downs. But how long should they wait? Ten years is a long time.

Before we condemn Abram and Sarah, we must recognize that this story reveals something about all of us. For all our faith, we struggle with patience. Abram and Sarah demonstrate their impatience, and by doing so reveal that we aren’t much different. The question isn’t just about them—it’s about us. Can you wait ten years for God to solve a problem before you wrestle it away from him? Can you wait ten months? Ten hours? Ten minutes?

The Dilemma

Sarah is unable to have children. She and Abram have been trying for years, and God’s promise has been their security all that time. In desperation, Sarah decides to use a surrogate—a common practice in their culture. Slave girls would take the place of women unable to conceive. Sarah’s attitude reveals her true thinking: “So much for promises.” Whatever God had promised means nothing now. Have you ever given up on God? Have you ever wondered where God’s presence was when everything was falling apart?

In Sarah’s world, having children validated a woman’s life. Nothing was more important than bearing a child to carry on her husband’s family name and inherit the family blessing. God had failed to deliver. Sarah reasoned that she needed to fix things herself. In her desperation, she made a terrible decision. But we must understand: desperation makes us all a little strange. In our desperation, we lose focus and begin saying and doing things we would never otherwise do. We delude ourselves into wrong thinking, and wrong thinking leads to wrong actions.

Sarah offers her slave girl Hagar as a surrogate mother. Abram accepts the plan and impregnates Hagar. Realizing she is pregnant, Hagar plays her newfound status for all it’s worth. Sarah may be older, may be mistress, may be married to Abram—but she is childless. Hagar’s pregnancy makes her feel superior, and her attitude grows as the child grows inside her. Sarah quickly senses this change and realizes her well-devised plan didn’t account for her own emotional response to being in second place.

So Sarah does what seems rational—she blames her husband. Abram, caught in the middle and trying to please his wife, agrees to let her have her way. Things appear to be working. A child will be born. But Sarah remains dissatisfied. Now Abram is blamed for following the very plan she created. So Abram does the only rational thing—he takes no responsibility.

This echoes the Garden of Eden. God’s promises were always made to Abram. He heard them with his own ears, yet he didn’t take a stand of faith. He took the path of least resistance, and it cost him dearly. Where is Abram’s faith? Where is his leadership? We see his weakness revealed again. Instead of providing leadership and assurance to trust God’s promises in God’s time, he gives up and turns everything over to Sarah.

This is not about gender—it’s about faith. Abram displays a lack of faith. He has no clear direction, no spiritual focus. Ten years is a long time, and he has let the earthly man override the spiritual side. Sarah’s plan seems reasonable, but the path of least resistance doesn’t demonstrate faith. As Ronald Wallace wrote, “Sometimes God has to allow us to prove ourselves fools through our own mistakes.” Abram substitutes what is second best, hoping it will produce the real thing. It doesn’t.

Sarah does what seems right to her—she mistreats Hagar. Hagar flees from Abram’s camp, heading back home. This Egyptian will escape Hebrew oppression and return to her own land. But the story doesn’t end there. Abram and Sarah have clearly demonstrated their lack of faith. They have taken matters into their own hands, and the man of faith has shown himself to be faithless. The man who heard God’s promise with his own ears has abandoned it for human scheming.

God Sees

Hagar is out in the desert, alone and confused. She was just a pawn in Abram’s camp, a slave to Sarah. She slept with her master and, knowing that staying might result in losing her baby, she fled. It is her child now. It’s abundantly clear that Abram, as the father, doesn’t intend to care for this child. Sarah, for whom Hagar was the surrogate, doesn’t want the child. Hagar is left to fend for herself in the wilderness with no support. She will return to Egypt with little hope of anything better than slavery again.

But the one person who has been forgotten has seen everything that happened. The one person who was never consulted, the one person who has been ignored, is still very much aware. God appears to Hagar on the road to Shur. Although she is afraid, alone, forgotten, and abused, God hasn’t left her. In fact, God gives Hagar remarkable promises. She is to go back to Sarah and have her baby there. Like Abram, her descendants will be too numerous to count. She will name the boy Ishmael, which means “God hears.” He will be a vigorous man living in constant conflict.

Hagar hears these words and is so overwhelmed that she gives God a name: “God sees.” By naming God this way, Hagar makes a pronouncement of faith and dependence. She commits her life to this God who has seen her affliction and answered her. The Bible doesn’t explicitly tell us, but it must be true—Hagar goes back to Sarah. Verse 15 tells us that Abram named the boy Ishmael. We might assume he simply came up with that name, but more likely Abram learned it from Hagar’s story.

Imagine the scene: Hagar comes walking back into camp several days after leaving. Sarah is still angry, but this time Hagar arrives with a story of faith in the God who sees. Abram listens and is convinced that his God has appeared to Hagar. Two things happen. First, Abram is assured. Second, Abram is shamed. He had forgotten God and acted in ways that demonstrated that forgetting. According to Genesis 21:11, Ishmael is accepted as his son. The child born of human scheming becomes the bearer of God’s blessing—not because of Abram and Sarah’s faith, but in spite of their faithlessness.

So What?

What are we to learn from this story? First, when we want something desperately, our thinking and actions become confused. We get fixated on a goal. The goal may be good, but eventually what matters isn’t the goal itself—it’s having something, anything. This is what happened to Sarah and Abram. They wanted a son. A good thing. But they got so caught up in having the son that they stopped thinking straight. They quit trusting God and took matters into their own hands. Their messed-up thinking resulted in disappointment, confusion, shame, and heartache—all of which could have been avoided if they had maintained their focus.

We do the same thing. We get so concerned about having what we think we’re supposed to have that we lose focus. Our thinking becomes skewed. We tell ourselves we deserve this goal, we should have it. But gradually it becomes about what we want, not what God wants. God wanted Sarah to have a child. She wanted a child desperately. But she paid a terrible price to get it, and the child was supposed to be the result of God’s initiative. Sarah forgot that and traded her faith in God for what she could do herself.

Second, this story teaches us about patience. It’s hard to know when we’re supposed to wait and when we’re supposed to act. Looking back on Abram and Sarah, it’s easy for us to say they should have waited. After all, God had promised them a child. But what about God’s promises to us? Are we any different in learning to wait?

God promises to never leave us or forsake us; therefore, we are to be content with what we have. That’s easy to read and say but difficult to act upon. Faith learns to wait on God. God promises that he sees all things and will deal with injustices; therefore, we are to leave it to God to deal with. That’s easy to read and say but difficult to act upon. Faith learns to wait on God. When we jump ahead of God, the results will be disastrous.

The final lesson is that God is sovereign. The whole story of Abram is a story of learning that very lesson. Most of us have to spend a lifetime learning it as well. In this case, God blessed Hagar in spite of Abram’s foolishness and lack of faith. Such is not always the case. But notice that the blessing did not leave the faithless Abram and the vicious Sarah. Hagar’s blessing came back in the midst of trial and suffering. Perhaps that is the hardest lesson of all. Faith learns to trust God who sees all and deals with all things in his time.

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