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The God Who Sees

Genesis 16:1-13; Genesis 21:8-21

June 21, 2026

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Hagar was a nobody, a piece of human flotsam tossed to and fro on the waves created by people with authority and power. Hagar had neither. She was a slave with no control over her own work, her living conditions or even her own body. She was strictly bound to fulfill the whims of her owners.

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She was so inconsequential that she didn’t even have a name — well, not a real name anyway. That’s because Hagar is a description, not an actual name. It is the English version of the Hebrew words Ha-gar, which mean the refugee or the alien. It is impossible to know now if she had been born into slavery, sold into it by her parents or reduced to it as a political prisoner. 

 

In any case, there is subtle evidence that she might have been being punished for some offense committed before or during her slavery. Why do I say that? Simply because she was Egyptian. 

 

Due to the blessings brought by the annual floods of the Nile which delivered life-giving water to otherwise arid regions, Egypt had been able to build a sophisticated culture that was already at least 1,200 years old by the time Abraham and Sarah first went to Egypt. Perhaps even older. 

 

The weight of their history and the many impressive accomplishments of their culture led the Egyptians to feel superior to all other nations. It was as if they were being specially blessed by their gods. That led them to look down with contempt on all those others who hadn’t been similarly blessed. 

 

Due to that sad fact, it would have been a gross insult for the Pharaoh to give one of his subjects as a slave to a person he considered to be from an inferior nation. And yet that’s exactly how Hagar had to had come into the service of Abraham and Sarah. 

 

As you’ll remember, Abraham was so afraid that the Pharaoh would take one look at the 65 year old Sarah and be so overcome by her beauty that he would order Abraham’s death in order to add Sarah to his harem. So, in order to save his own neck, he asked Sarah to pretend to be his sister. 

 

Abraham was right about one thing. When Pharaoh heard about Sarah and that she was seemingly available, he paid Abraham a fortune in slaves and animals to add her to his harem. But God protected her by inflicting a series of plagues on Pharaoh, foreshadowing the later plagues under Moses. 

 

Eventually Pharaoh clued into Abraham’s lie and was so furious that he returned Sarah and ordered a military guard to escort them out of the country, apparently forgetting in his anger to get back the things he had paid Abraham so that he could marry Sarah. 

 

Thus Abraham’s self-serving deception made him a wealthy man. Hagar must have been one of those who were included in that wealth of slaves and animals. Pharaoh would have readily given up foreign slaves, but he would have been highly unlikely to give an Egyptian slave to a foreigner unless that slave had enraged him like Abraham did or was a complete nonentity. I’m guessing that Hagar was the latter — an easily overlooked cypher. 

 

Then 10 years go by and Abraham and Sarah are no closer to hearing the pitter-patter of little feet than they ever were. For what it’s worth, I think God made them wait for the fulfillment of his promise so he could test them to see how much faith they had. But in any case, the months and years dragged on and I’m sure that time seemed even longer than it already was since they were living as resident aliens in the burning heat of the desert.

 

The waiting finally got to Sarah, so she essentially said to Abraham, “Look, you old geezer, your hearing isn’t what it once was; neither is your memory. Are you sure God said that the child would be born to you and me? God clearly hates me and has shut my womb. Maybe what he told you was that he would arrange for us to have a son without the usual physical formalities — just like he made us rich without having to earn those riches.”

 

So Sarah devised a plan to force God’s hand. She told Abraham to make himself comfortable in bed while she shoved her little nothing of a nobody slave girl Hagar in there with him. Sarah must have thought, “If we can use Hagar to accomplish housework around the tent, why couldn’t we use her womb to get the one thing we really want?” 

 

According to the custom of that era, if Hagar were to bear a child, she would be elevated in status from slave to concubine, which was a sort of a secondary wife. That said, she would still definitely be under the thumb of Sarah, who would remain the primary wife. 

 

Even though Sarah’s plan clearly demonstrated her lack of faith that God would do what he had promised, Abraham chose to go along with the plan. And neither of them seemed to care enough to ask Hagar’s opinion on the matter. No one cared except God, that is, as we will see. 

 

Bertus van der Westhuyzen has an interesting way of describing what happened next:  “It works, of course, and so before long Hagar is clearly with child. And suddenly she doesn’t feel like the lowly little servant she’s been her whole life until then. She’s bearing the master’s baby. She’s a somebody now. The next thing you know, in fine soap opera fashion, Hagar cops a bit of an attitude, especially whenever Sarai is near.

 

“She doesn’t let Sarai boss her around anymore, and if Sarai objects, Hagar quietly clears her throat and points to her belly. Meanwhile, Abram was doting on Hagar more than Sarai could stand. Every time the girl had a craving for dill pickles and bagels, Abram dashed off to fetch it.” 

 

That clearly infuriates Sarah, so she uses her power to make Hagar’s life even more of a living hell than it already had been. Sarah’s terrible abuse, in turn, leads Hagar to run for her life, escaping out into the desert. 

 

But God cares for Hagar, so he he sends an angel to her. Through the angel God tells her that she will give birth to a son and, though him, she will have countless descendants. However, God also tells her to return to Abraham and Sarah. And she agrees to do that because for once in her life, she has come across someone who sees her as a human being, not just a living tool. 

 

It probably didn’t hurt that she heard directly from God, something Sarah had never done. Sarah may have been the boss in human terms, but it was a different story in God’s eyes. Soon Hagar’s son Ishmael is born. 

 

Then we hear no more of either Hagar or Ishmael for another 17 years — that is, until two years after Sarah gives birth to her own son, Isaac. At the point, Isaac is weaned. That was the sign in that culture which marked the time children were likely to live all the way into adulthood.

 

In Sarah’s mind, that moment made the former slave girl and her son completely expendable. After all, Ishmael’s very existence muddied up the inherence picture. Never mind that Sarah herself was the one who started the chain of events which led to Ismael’s birth. She was determined to make Ishmael and his mother disappear. 

 

Abraham clearly loved both of his sons, so he wasn’t about to go along with Sarah’s plan until God reassured him that Ishmael would be taken care of. So God told Abraham of the promise he had made to Hagar — that Ishmael would also become the founder of a mighty nation. 

 

The point was to both reassure Abraham that Ishmael would survive and to make it clear to Abraham that Ishmael could never been more than a second-class citizen as long as he and Hagar lived with Abraham. 

 

However, once they were forced to go out on their own, they would be able to escape the stigma that had been attached to their origins in slavery and develop their own lives in the way they chose. So God was able to turn an injustice created by Sarah’s selfishness into a growth opportunity for Hagar and Ishmael.

 

Once Abraham heard that, he sadly gave provisions to Hagar and Ishmael and allowed Sarah to carry out her mean-spirited plan. That separation almost killed Abraham emotionally. But far more importantly, it almost literally killed Hagar and Ishmael.

 

Hagar and Ishmael — a middle-aged woman and a teenaged boy — soon find themselves lost in the desert, out of water, out of hope and assuming the end is near. That’s when God speaks to Hagar again, showing her a well and teaching her and Ishmael how to survive in the desert wastelands. 

 

All told, this is a twisted tale in which none of the characters act in a way that covers them in glory. Instead it is a story of spitefulness, hatred, legalized rape, appeasement and perhaps even attempted murder. It is the sad commentary on the kinds of human wreckage that can result when we try to substitute our own wills for the will of God.

 

Yet behind it all God lurks on the edges of this sordid mess, not interfering so as to not deny each person their right to make horrible and maybe even tragic choices. Nonetheless, God is actively intervening to bring blessing after blessing in spite of this procession of terrible human decisions. 

 

That said, all of this happened something like 3,800-4,000 years ago. While it may shed some far-less-than-positive light on Abraham and especially on Sarah, what does it mean for those of us living in the Twenty-first Century in a nation that was utterly unknown in Abraham’s time? 

 

This story teaches us that God is not just the God of Abraham and Sarah, the wealthy, semi-privileged couple. He’s also the God of Hagar and Ishmael, who are utter non-entities and outcasts. As Chris Brundage puts it:  

 

“Hagar represents all the expendable people in society, the vulnerable ones at the edges of the community. The migrant farm worker, the laid-off factory worker standing in an unemployment line, the single parent, the refugee, the rape victim, the working poor, the death row inmate, the mentally ill, the helplessly aged, the handicapped […] the alcoholic, the unwanted baby in the womb. A good society cares for its most vulnerable members. The weak are usually at the mercy of the strong, but often the strong fail to show mercy. 

 

“Perhaps we can never see the hidden well of water until God opens our eyes, the eyes of our heart, the eyes of faith. The eyes of faith see water in the desert, life in death, abundance in poverty. (Isaiah 35:5-7.) […] This Scripture speaks to me of our loving Father in heaven, intimately involved with his children and faithful to his promises. Like a good father, he fixes the messes that we make. This is surely good news for Father’s Day.” 

 

At this time in the life of our nation, it is important to recognize that God is also the God of the immigrant family who fled their home country in fear for their safety or simply to go in search of a better life and yet are now being hunted down by federal ICE agents regardless of whether they entered this country legally or not. 

 

He’s the God of those who have been racially profiled by ICE regardless of their citizenship status. And he’s the God of all those people in this country whose legal rights have been trampled by government officials. 

We can’t pretend these things don’t happen. We can’t simply ignore them when they happen to some other innocent person because it isn’t happening to us. We can’t simply forget all this when the news turns to some other story designed to distract us from the cries of those who have had to endure pain that is totally unprecedented in our history. 

 

David Cobb writes, this “story ultimately isn’t about Abraham and Sarah and Isaac, or even about Hagar and Ishmael. It is about God. God won’t abandon them. God hears. God sees. God saves. And if God won’t cast [anyone] out, then we shouldn’t either. Like Hagar, when we fear we have cast the children under a bush, let us pray for help. Like Hagar, let us lift our voices and shed our tears. Hagar understands that God sees her. El-Roi, she calls him, God of seeing. But God also hears [as] Ishma-el’s name bears tribute. God does hear the cries of the boy.

 

“[…] God’s promise isn’t just for the chosen, the select, the privileged. […] God’s promise is for those cast aside, and it is a promise of salvation not in some far-off time and place but here and now. God is with us on the journey. God provides living water […]. Who are we to withhold? Let us gather together that which is cast away and lift it up. ‘Do not be afraid,’ the angel is telling us. God hears the voices of the children who need it most. God hears the cries under bushes and in closets. […] God hears the cries in our nurseries, in our homerooms, and in our churches. The kids are thirsty. We have water. Let us lift them up, fill our skins, and let them drink.”

 

We must remember that the blessings that God has given to us are given so that we might share them with those who have been used and cast aside by the world. There truly is no stronger theme in the Bible — and particularly in the Old Testament — than that of God’s followers being advocates for those on the margins of society — the Hagars and Ishmaels of this world. 

 

Doing that means helping to meet their physical, emotional and spiritual needs; it means standing up with them for justice; and it means hearing their cries from the distant wilderness, just as God heard the cries of Ishmael and responded with life-saving help. Amen.

 

Jim McCrea

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