Running Away

WALKING WITH GOD. No.4

Gen 16:7.8 The angel of the Lord found Hagar… “where have you come from and where are you going?”… “I’m running away from my mistress, Sarai.”

I know this is supposed to be a meditation about ‘walking’ but as I pondered Scripture, this passage stood out to me as important – fast walking, urgent walking, if you like! I’ve always felt negative about this passage of Scripture; it’s not Abram and Sarai’s finest moment! The Lord has promised them children but the years have passed. To be precise, the Lord had promised Abram children and that may be why Sarai makes the suggestion she does. She sees herself as the stumbling block to Abram’s family name being continued and so she suggests that Abram continues it through her maid, Hagar. Casually this looks like a crisis of faith, but perhaps it was more a crisis of understanding. That is the difficult thing about prophecy. The Lord speaks but often He only gives a small amount of information and we have to rest with that. Sarai became fed up with waiting and perhaps wondered if there was some other way that the prophetic word is to be fulfilled. Hence, Hagar.

Hagar is just a servant-slave, and so Abram has intercourse with her and she conceives, so it was Sarai who was infertile; she had been right! But once she is pregnant, Hagar can’t help looking down on Sarai for her inability to conceive. It was a big thing both then and now, this ability to conceive, and many today still know the heartache of the inability to have a child. Hagar somehow conveys what she feels and Sarai is upset, so much so that she ill-treats her. So bad was this ill-treatment that Hagar flees, but the only place she can go is the desert. It is there that she is confronted by the Lord in the form of an angel and there she confesses, “I am running away.” God’s word comes, go back and I’ll bless you with more descendants than you can count. This she does and Ishmael is born, the father of the Arab nations, who so often have been a thorn in the side of Israel.

But consider Hagar, as if you knew nothing of the rest of the story. She is a servant girl to a wealthy merchant and his wife. She particularly serves the mistress of the house. She is aware of the undercurrents of the household, but is powerless to do anything about it when she is drawn right into them. She is powerless to resist when Abram says he wants her to bear his child. Perhaps she feels honoured, but this course of action results in life getting even harder and harder. Eventually she finds herself in the desert with no future.

The circumstances of life seem to have conspired against her so now she is running away – walking at a pace with urgency, if you like. She doesn’t know where she is going and what will happen, until God turns up. She has revelation of God and names Him, ‘the God who sees me.’ In the place of crisis she has come to a place of major understanding – God is there, He sees and He knows all about us; I’m not alone. In the place of crisis, running away, she receives revelation of destiny, she will be a mother of many, the mother of many nations we now know.

This is a picture of life in this Fallen World. It is ‘fallen’ because Adam and Eve fell into sin and sin entered the world, so that every one of us has been tainted with it since. Thus we live in a world where people – other people as well as us – make poor decisions and we are affected. Their sins, their shortcomings, can sometimes affect us, so much so that we try to flee those circumstances and find ourselves in a desert with no apparent hope and no future. “What did I do to deserve this?”, we wonder. Nothing! We just happen to be in a Fallen World! But this desert is not the end, it is a place of isolation and opportunity where God can come and speak and reveal what is going on and what He plans to happen, through these disastrous things.

On the run? Get ready to meet God. Get ready to listen to Him and get ready to go back in faith like Hagar did, and pick up your life and your destiny.