Genesis 16:7–14
The Bible4Jesus.com Podcast
About this episode
We come now to a passage that is brimming with the kind of trouble that makes modern Christians uncomfortable. We like our stories of faith to be neat and tidy, with clear heroes and villains, and problems that can be solved with a three-point sermon and a prayer. But the Bible is not that kind of book, because God is not that kind of God. He is the God of history, the God of reality, and reality is frequently a tangled mess of sin, impatience, fear, and folly. And it is precisely into that kind of mess that God sovereignly and graciously intrudes. The situation is a domestic disaster of their own making. She gives her Egyptian slave, Hagar, to her husband Abram. It is an attempt to achieve a spiritual promise through carnal means. And as is always the case when we run ahead of God, the result is not blessing, but bitterness.