Tag: Sarah

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The God Who Sees Me (Gen. 16, Part 4)

[Listen to an audio version here]

This passage is about two women struggling with significance. Do they matter at all? Sarah struggles with it because she has borne her husband no children. Hagar struggles with it because she is a slave. Today, I want to look at Hagar a little more closely. Through Hagar, we will see God’s solution to our struggle with insignificance and, by extension, the anxieties of life and our pride that tries to solve them on our own.

We have been considering how the Bible teaches that sin is a wrong response to our anxieties about life. We have anxiety over our prestige, position, and provision. We respond to this sinfully when we try to solve it on our own without reference to God. We try to make ourselves bigger or retreat into a smaller world where we can be in control. This is the pride solution. The result of wrongly calibrating our position in this world through pride is that it disrupts our relations with others and leads to injustice. How do we get out of this? Instead of trying to solve our problems on our own, we submit to God’s solution and trust Him.

The Bible teaches us the solution to sin, but it also teaches us about sin. It does this so that we can repent of our sin and turn from it to find grace, healing, and restoration in Christ. That healing is the primary focus of our message today.

Hagar Unseen
Hagar believed that she was not seen. She was invisible. She didn’t matter.

I remember visiting the Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana. Anna, David, and I took a tour of the home. They described the situation. While the people ate dinner, a black slave would fan the diners so that they could be cool. If someone came and waved a fan by you, you would probably think it a little awkward. However, after a while, you would get used to it. Eventually, the person would be virtually invisible.

A slave is not “seen.” They rarely get the respect and honor of human beings. That’s no doubt how Hagar felt. She was not seen. She was invisible. She was just a cog in the household machinery.

Then, something changed. She was chosen by Sarah to bear a child for her master. She probably looked up to Abraham as a significant man and a leader. It seems like she would have been deeply moved to be chosen for this special role. Now, she would be seen.

Then, she got pregnant. Now, for sure, she must have thought, she will be seen! I am significant! She began to like this new role. She began to think that she was seen. In fact, this dramatic shift began to go to her head, and she started to look down on Sarah.

Well, Sarah did not like that very much. In fact, she was furious at the situation and relieved her anxiety first by taking it out on Abraham.

Think about things from this perspective. Hagar was now noticed. She was no longer invisible. She was seen by Abraham. Then, Sarah brought her complaint to Abraham. How did Abraham respond? “Your slave is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best” (Gen. 16:6). He only saw Sarah. He did not see Hagar. She was unseen again.

Sarah then mistreated Hagar. Then, Hagar fled into the wilderness.

Hagar Seen
However, someone did see Hagar. Someone noticed her and cared about her. The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert. . . . “And he said, ‘Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?'” (Gen. 16:7—8). Someone took an interest in Hagar and what she was doing. The “angel of the Lord” wanted to know about her. She was seen!

Let me say something here about “the angel of the Lord.” Sometimes in the Bible, an angel refers to a spiritual being that is intelligent and powerful that performs the work of the Lord. Some of these angels turned from the Lord and are often called “demons.” Angels and demons play an active part in the history of this world.

However, “the Angel of the Lord” is sometimes an appearance of God Himself, as it is in Gen. 18, for example. In Exodus 23, the Lord says, “See, I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared. Pay attention to him and listen to what he says. Do not rebel against him; he will not forgive your rebellion, since my Name is in him” (vv. 20–21). This Angel of the Lord was none other than God Himself. He speaks of Himself as God, is worshipped as God, and is obeyed as God. I believe this is actually the 2nd Person of the Trinity, the Son of God, Jesus taking on a human or other form before His incarnation. We call this a Christophany, an appearance of Christ before the incarnation.

I believe the Angel of the Lord here is God Himself, though, even if it is an angel, I still think the passage works. I think it makes more sense, though, to see it as a Christophany.

At any rate, God saw this slave woman and took an interest in her. She responded, “I’m running away from my mistress Sarai” (Gen. 16:8).

God told her, “Go back to your mistress and submit to her” (Gen. 16:9). How can she do this when Sarah treated her so badly? The answer is that God would be with her and bless her. Her significance was not in what Sarah or Abraham thought of her but in what God thought of her. In addition, God had a big plan for her and the child in her womb, “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count” (Gen. 16:9).

Notice that the Lord was not unaware of the challenge of her predicament. He said, “You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery” (Gen. 16:11). Ishmael means “God hears.” Her challenges and difficulties were not unnoticed. God hears. God sees. God sees and hears Hagar.

Hagar was deeply moved by all of this. She finally knew that she was seen. She responded with a deep acknowledgement of this blessing. She “named” or “praised” the Lord: “You are the God who sees me.” “I have now seen the One who sees me” (Gen. 16:13). She knew she was significant. Others may not have seen her, but the Lord, her Creator, saw her and believed that she was significant.

After this, Hagar returned. How did she get the strength to show respect and honor even when it was hard? She saw the God who saw her. She found her significance in the fact that God valued her.

Conclusion
And that, my friends, is the way out of the disruption and dissolution of the pride solution. God shows up, and we see Him. That means more than mere intellectual awareness. We actually see Him, believe Him, and trust Him. We find the solution to the basic challenges of life in Him. That is the trust solution that overcomes the pride solution to anxiety. We trust God with our anxiety because above the problems we see the God who sees us.

When we see the problems of life that cause us so much anxiety but also see the Lord who is above them, we can experience a peace and joy that transcends those problems. This faith-filled vision of reality enables us to re-engage in our families, communities, and churches in a way that brings healing and restoration rather than disruption and dissolution.

Like Hagar, we can go back to our daily lives in confidence because we know the One who rules over all things and has all problems in His hand, and we know that He sees us and values us. I see the God who sees me. Amen.

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Pride, Anxiety, and Injustice (Genesis 16, Part 3)

[Listen to an audio version here]

Where does injustice come from? Humans can treat each other with astonishing cruelty, far outstripping even the most vicious animals. How does it come about that humans behave so unjustly?

When we see injustice, it’s easy to simply look at its perpetrators as evil. Now, don’t get me wrong. Injustice is evil. We should condemn it. However, we also need to seek to understand it.

Injustice is born not only out of pride but also anxiety. We worry about our position, our prestige, or our provision. We make ourselves bigger and claim more for ourselves than is due in order to maintain it.

It’s easier to see how this occurs on a large scale. Why did the United States invade two nations in the early 21st century? Was it not driven out of anxiety over terrorism? Now, you can debate whether those wars were just or not, but the point is that this action took place in the context of anxiety.

Why is China so concerned about a few rocks in the South China Sea? Is it not at least partly anxiety over their position and prestige? People can be just as anxious about maintaining their prestige as they are about maintaining their provision.

In the United States, why did slavery exist? It was anxiety over being able to maintain a particular way of life. The owners became dependent on it in order to maintain their prestige as a sort of American nobility. They feared letting it go because they feared losing that prestige, prosperity, and position. Booker T. Washington wisely noted, “Having once got its tentacles fastened on to the economic and social life of the Republic, it was no easy matter for the country to relieve itself of the institution.”

If you view injustice from this lens, it makes a lot more sense of what we see in the world. Injustice is worthy of condemnation but also of some compassion in light of the challenging position nations and individuals find themselves in.

Now, I want to try to consider how this manifests itself in daily life through this text, Genesis 16. Remember, the Bible reveals the solution to sin but in order to enable us to understand that solution, it also helps us understand sin itself. It does this so that we can repent and find healing, grace, and forgiveness through Jesus Christ.

So, let’s consider what this passage teaches us about sin from the life of Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham.

Hagar
We have already explained Hagar’s anxiety and pride. Hagar’s anxiety was that she would not be seen, that she was insignificant. Once she was “seen,” she immediately took this blessing and made it bigger than it was. “When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress” (Gen. 16:4b). That is a perfect example of pride. We take something that we have that is good, make it more important or valuable than it is, and use it to exalt ourselves above others.

If you ask people how much something is worth, they will give you one answer. If they own the very same thing, and you ask them how much it is worth, then they will say it is worth much more. We tend to value everything more highly if it is “ours.”

And what does this lead Hagar to do? What she gives to herself, she takes away from Sarah. She fails to give her the respect and honor that is due her. Instead, she looks down on her with contempt.

The most basic justice we owe each other is respect. When our anxiety goes up and our pride goes up, respect often gets thrown out the window. That’s why Peter says, “Show proper respect to everyone” (1 Pet. 2:17a). Even when we are telling people why we believe in Christ, we must do this with “gentleness and respect.” Peter says.

How do we show respect to people we struggle with? One, we can honor their basic humanity. Two, if they are believers, we can honor their faith. Three, we can relate to them with curiosity rather than a conclusion. Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to wrath. Those are the virtues of honor and respect.

Patterson, Grenny, Macmillan, and Switzler in their excellent book Crucial Conversations, note that in order for productive conversations to take place, you need two things: safety and respect. This is basically “gentleness and respect.” These authors note that when safety and respect break down, the ability to have a productive conversation breaks down. And that’s exactly what happens here.

Sarah
Remember that Sarah is already anxious in this passage. She is understandably anxious about not having borne a child for Abraham. To relieve her anxiety, she chooses a common but unjust relief for that anxiety: giving her slave to her husband to have a child through her.

There is no doubt, though, that when Hagar became pregnant, she became very anxious about the situation. When Sarah’s anxiety up, Hagar’s respect also broke down. The result was that Sarah’s anxiety went way up, and she relieved her anxiety in a common from: attack.

Listen very carefully to what she says, “Then Sarai said to Abram, ‘You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me'” (Gen. 16:5). “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering” (Gen. 16:5).

Was Sarah right? In one sense, yes. Abraham was responsible. He had not taken leadership when he should have.

On the other hand, this clearly omitted a key point, namely, that she originated the idea and strongly urged it upon her husband. So, there’s something very important here. When things go wrong, our tendency is to blame others. This began with our first parents. Adam blamed Eve. Eve blamed the serpent. Both attempts to blame had some justice but omitted their own part in it.

This is the dissolution that takes place when we employ the pride solution to our anxiety. It leads to recrimination. It separates people and arms them for war, as it were.

But there is something else here. It’s so hard for us to deal with the abstract problems of life like loneliness, insecurity, and meaninglessness, that we try to make it concrete by blaming others for it. Think of Sarah’s issues. They are big, and to some degree, unsolvable. It makes it a lot easier to blame Abraham.

And let me tell you that there is nothing more common than this in life. We feel the anxiety of life, but it’s hard to articulate that life is just hard. So, we bring it down to our level by blaming Democrats or Republicans or Donald Trump or immigrants or China or whomever. In our daily lives, we blame our parents, our spouses, our children, our neighbors, our friends, our town, our church, our pastor, our congregation, or anyone else.

I know the power of this from my own experience. I admit that when things go wrong, I will blame my wife, even if she had nothing to do with it. I know I do this. I’ve worked hard not to do this, but it’s astonishing how readily my mind goes there when my anxiety goes up. I even know it’s a lie. There’s a part of me that wants to believe it. It’s powerful because it relieves the anxiety. Our whole body starts working towards it because it naturally tends to move us toward that which makes us feel better.

Allow me to extend this out a little bit further through a common example. Loneliness is an existential problem. It is basic to existence. However, in our society, loneliness is a bigger problem than usual because of the breakdown of so many common forms of interaction, including just walking places.

Now, what happens when our anxiety goes up, and we begin to feel like we are lonely? We tend to blame our family, our community, or our church. “These people,” we say, “are just not friendly.” Take note. That might be true to a degree. It’s not always easy to break into a community.

But let’s also notice something else. Loneliness is not a problem people can really solve for us. It’s an existential problem. It’s a problem that is not wholly in any community. The community may be at fault to a degree, but we rarely ask the question, how hard have I worked to build relationships? Relationships take work! That is a more accurate view of the matter, but when anxiety goes up, all that goes out the window. We respond in pride and injustice like Sarah did, blaming others.

Abraham
By now, we have a strong sense of what Abraham is going to do. He is going to avoid the problem and distance from it. He is going to be passive where he should have been active.

How does he respond? “‘Your slave is in your hands,’ Abram said. ‘Do with her whatever you think best.’ Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her” (Gen. 16:6).

Abraham refused to take leadership and allowed Sarah to vent her anxiety and frustration on Hagar. It was wrong for him to sleep with her, but it was also wrong to allow her to be mistreated.

Standing up for just treatment of others is not always easy. Treating others unjustly may relieve the anxiety of a powerful person in our life. When that happens, it will cost us something to stand for justice. So, we need what Abraham lacked, courage. However, Abraham had developed a pattern of dealing with anxiety by avoiding the problem. When the family got tense, it was all too easy to acquiesce in injustice.

The result was not only that Hagar fled. You will also notice that Abraham and Sarah’s choices would affect the generations. When God tells Hagar that she will have a child, here is what He says about this child, “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” (Gen. 16:12). The pride and anxiety in this family will reverberate through the generations.

Conclusion
That’s a pretty bleak picture, but it’s not the end of the chapter. Even though we have looked at length at the problem of sin in this chapter, this is not primarily what the chapter is about. What happens to turn back the disruption and dissolution of this chapter? God shows up.

In the fist half of the chapter, God is nowhere to be seen. It’s all about the humans and what they do. It’s almost as if God doesn’t exist. Then, at the lowest point, when everything is falling apart, God shows up. We’ll consider that in more detail next week.

For now, note that this is our great hope. God shows up. The Son of God comes in human form and becomes a part of the human family to heal the human family and all our individual families. Pride, anxiety, and injustice don’t have to be the last word. God’s grace gets the final word. God sees us, and when we see the God who sees us above our problems, that makes all the difference. Amen.

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The Pride in Anxiety (Genesis 16, Part 2)

[Listen to an audio version of this sermon here]

Life is full of problems that we can’t solve. What will people do? Will they abandon us? Will they try to control us? Will they move on and leave us behind, alone?

Will we have enough? Will we be taken care of? Will some unexpected threat rob us of our way of life? Will those we love have enough?

Will we be able to understand the situation in the world? Can we understand it enough to function and act in our interest? Is our life significant? Does anything we do really matter?

Will we be able to do what we need to do? Will we get sick and be unable to work or serve those we need to? Will we make mistakes that will harm us? Will we be able to get the things done that we need to?

These sorts of questions can easily overwhelm us. Life is full of anxiety and unsolved problems.

So, what are we to do? We have two options. One, we can seek to solve these things ourselves. This is the pride solution. It leads to the dissolution and disruption we see all around us.

The other option is to trust God. We see the problems, but we see the God who sees us above them. This trust leads us to a joy and peace that enables us to accept our place in the world and to serve others in love.

Today, we want to consider the sinful pride solution that we all tend to employ. Pride is endemic to the human race, and it is a wrong and unjust attempt to place ourselves at the center of things. When we get anxious, we easily try to make ourselves big or retreat into a smaller world where we are in control. We will see this in the life of Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham.

Now, remember that the Bible teaches us the solution to sin, but it also teaches us about sin. The goal of teaching us about sin is so that we can repent, turn from it unto God and find healing, grace, and restoration from the Father, in Christ, and by the power of the Holy Spirit. This is one passage that teaches us about sin, and, it is a very instructive one.

Hagar
Hagar’s pride is quite out in the open. It is probably what we think of when we think of pride. “[Abraham] slept with Hagar, and she conceived. When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress” (Gen. 16:4).

Now, think about Hagar. All her life she was considered to be very low. Sarah was above her as her mistress. Hagar might have wondered if her life had any meaning or if she had any significance at all. That is certainly the anxiety of a slave.

Then, she was chosen to have a child for Sarah with Abraham. In her eyes, this must have been an amazing privilege. Then, she actually conceived and was pregnant.

It is not at all surprising that at this point that she would look down on Sarah. She was able to get pregnant, and Sarah was not. It was wrong for her to view things this way, but think about it. She had been looked down on as a slave her whole life! Now, she had the child of her master in her womb. She had significance! It’s only one small step to compare herself to Sarah in pride.

There is anxiety in pride, but there is also pride in anxiety. We can condemn Hagar, but we can also see with compassion how the difficulty of her situation might have led her there. If we can see the anxiety in pride, then we can see the sinner with compassion and condemn their sin.

In addition, how common is this pride? We seize on almost anything we do well as an excuse to look down on others. If we are in better shape, have better behaved children, are a better cook, are more successful, have nicer things, study more, or are better at sports, we value it far more than we should. If we find others doing things well, we tend to downplay it. We value ourselves in excess of what we should and do not value others to the degree we should.

We also take pride in our own particular virtues. If people are good at getting things done and being on time, they look down on those who aren’t and highly value their own virtues. If they are good at dealing with people, they look down on anyone who is impatient or rude with people. It’s the sinful tendency of all of us. We inflate our own virtues.

Of course, we learn to be clever about it. We find pride in things that are bigger than us. Patriotism is a good thing, but our love of country can easily blind us to our nation’s weak spots and become an occasion for exalting ourselves. We can have pride in our nation or group, which is more plausible than exalting ourselves. However, we get exalted with the group, and so we can have our cake and eat it, too.

Even self-loathing can contain an element of pride. German psychologist Dr. Karen Horney had an astute observation about this. She said that our imagination tends to construct our self-image as “a hero, a genius, a supreme lover, a saint, a god” (Neurosis & Human Growth, 22). But what happens when reality conflicts with this illusion? She says, “What does it do to a person when he recognizes that he cannot measure up to his inner dictates? To anticipate the answer briefly: then he starts to hate and despise himself” (ibid., 85). She said that this was so common in her dealings with people that she concluded that “pride and self-hate are actually one entity.” So, she suggested that we call “the sum total of the factors involved by a common name: the pride system” (ibid., 110–111).

Pride is the true endemic. It persistently manifests itself in human life in all sorts of ways. We are all trying to be the star of the show. We will see this a bit more as we look at Sarah and Abraham.

Sarah
How did Sarah’s pride manifest itself? She thought she could control life. She was anxious about her childlessness, which is completely understandable. The method she chose to deal with it was common in her day, but it was contrary to God’s law. She let her desire to be in control overcome her principles.

Often, this sort of pride starts as a good ambition. God has not made us to be passive in the face of the world. He has made us to be active. We should not sit passively in the face of problems. We should seek, under God, in acknowledgement of His Lordship, and in dependence on His power, to make the world a better place.

However, this desire so often gets out of bounds. We begin to believe that we should be exempt from the common problems of human life. Others may have to wait or struggle or experience illness, but I should be exempt! This is the pride in anxiety.

Then, it leads us to deal with others unjustly. It leads us to punish others when we feel out of control, either by a verbal tongue-lashing or by withdrawal. We find all sorts of ways to put others under our control. We shall see this in the next sermon.

Then, we compromise our standards. We should be able to enjoy this or that, we might say, so we steal or lie or skew things in our own direction. The lie at the root of all this is that we can be in control of the world. It is thinking that we can look down on the world as God does. We can’t.

That’s the pride in anxiety, and we need to repent and acknowledge our limited control of the world. Sarah needed to repent of her belief that she could control what she could not. This was the pride in her anxiety.

Abraham
And what about Abraham? We might not think that he is prideful. If anything, he seems to be self-deprecating. He just allows Sarah to lead. “Abram agreed to what Sarai said” (Gen. 16:2).

But if we think about it a little bit more, we can see that Abraham feels the anxiety just as much, and he also has pride. The pride of the compliant is that they can make everyone happy all the time.

So, they will go along with whatever others say, even if it is harmful and even if it is unjust. Whomever they have chosen to make happy will feel accepted and affirmed, even if they do wrong.

Abraham’s pride is to think that he can solve someone else’s fundamental issues. He can solve Sarah’s problems, he thinks. He can make her happy all the time. To do this, he will refuse to take a stand about what is right, will engage in what is actually an affair, and acquiesce in the mistreatment of others. As long as Sarah is happy in the moment, everything will be sacrificed. This is Abraham’s pride, that he can make someone happy all the time.

It’ easier to see the pride of Sarah. It’s harder to see the pride of the compliant. We often rebuke the person who is actively prideful, but we miss the pride in the passive. We see the person who wants to control everything, but we miss the person who sits passively by and refuses to control the things that they should. Both are rooted in pride, pride in our specific characteristics and personalities.

Conclusion
We are guilty before God because of our sin, but we often suffer from false guilt. We feel guilty because someone we care about isn’t happy, but this is not our responsibility. We feel guilty because we made mistakes, but we are not exempt from mistakes. We feel guilty because we didn’t anticipate every problem, but there is no way we could. Others come to us with expectations that we should have done this or that, and we acquiesce and are apologetic. Much of this is rooted in our pride, that we could avoid all mistakes, that we could make everyone happy, that we could fulfill all expectations, that we could have succeeded in everything. We need to watch out for these things.

Our true guilt begins with our pride system. It is to think that we are much greater than we are and can solve life’s problems on our own. Ironically, when we think that we can control all sorts of things that we can’t, we end up losing sight of controlling the things that we can! By refusing to accept our place under God with Him as the star of the show, we miss the role we could play.

Consider Jesus. Read His life carefully. You will find that He showed compassion to people. However, he never refused to take responsibility for what was His. He did not let others deter Him from the path the Father had set for Him. He was willing to speak His mind, though He did it with great wisdom. He trusted His Father, even when His Father said to go to the cross.

And it is the Spirit of Christ that is working in us, if we have trusted Him and invited Him into our lives. He can help us to see what is our real obligation and what is not. He can help us see our significant but limited role in this life. He can help us to take responsibility for what is our responsibility and let go of what is not. “In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires” (Rom. 6:11–12). The goal is that we would live out of the life of Christ. This will empower us to live a life of joy and peace in loving service to others instead of the disruption and dissolution that is all around us. This is the grace and the gift that is abundantly ours in Jesus Christ. This is seeing the problems of life but seeing the God who is above them and who sees us. Amen.

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The Anxiety in Sin (Genesis 16, Part 1)

[Listen to an audio version of this post here]

Where do the basic problems of society come from? Certainly there are difficult challenges that have to be overcome to justly feed, clothe, and shelter the people of a nation.

However, people can be fed, clothed, and sheltered and have many pleasures available to them and still be miserable. Families still break apart. Neighbors still look at each other with suspicion. People still suffer from depression, anxiety, bitterness, and substance abuse. So, where does all this come from?

According to the Bible, the basic problem is a disruption in our relationship with God. It is the human attempt to place oneself at the center rather than submitting to God as the center of the universe and Lord of all. It is sin.

The Bible not only teaches us the solution to sin. It teaches us about sin itself. It helps us understand our fallen condition so that we can repent, that is, turn from sin and back to God and find healing and redemption through the death and resurrection of Christ.

The Bible teaches that sin is complex. It involves many factors. It does so through numerous historical accounts or stories and through numerous explanations. This month, we are going to look at one of them. It is the story of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar. It began with a plausible choice, but it ended with severe disruption of the family system. We will see in this series how sin works, how it affected this family, and how we can find deliverance from sin.

Here is a basic outline. Sin is occasioned by but not caused by anxiety, our emotional response to the basic problems of reality. In the face of anxiety, we can seek our own solution or trust God. When we seek our own solution, then we are involved in pride. The result is dissolution and disruption in our lives and relationships. The counter-measure to pride is when we see the God who sees us and find our relationship with God restored through His favor offered freely to us in Jesus Christ.

In this sermon, we will consider anxiety as the occasion for sin.

Sarah
“She had borne him no children.” How many people suffer with an inability to have children? Not everyone wants to have children, but, for those who do, they enter into marriage with a vision of what their life will be. They will get married, they will have children, they will watch them grow up, and they will see their children moving out and eventually having children of their own.

Then, things turn out differently. At first, they may think that children are just not coming right away. Then, the years go by. They visit doctors to no avail. Time passes, tears fall, and the dream fades away.

In the meantime, they watch all around them, and they see their friends. They see the births, the birthday parties, the first day of school, the awards, the sports, and on and on. They try to be happy for their friends, but each time they see the good their friend enjoys, it is like a little dagger thrust into their soul.

That’s the situation that Sarah faced. “She had borne him no children.” The years went by, and she had borne him no children.

Remember that Sarah lived in a society in which having children was even more important for a woman’s status than it is in our own. Children were not merely a good to be enjoyed, they were often essential for the economic well-being and status of the family. To lack them was a threat to the family’s existence and prosperity.

Abraham and Sarah also had more reason to be concerned. God had promised Abraham that He would bless the entire world through his seed. But no children had come. They had to wait and wait and wait and wait and wait . . . That had been more than 10 years earlier. When would the promised child come?

It’s not surprising that in light of all this that Sarah came up with a solution to resolve her anxiety over childlessness. She would use a method that was very common in her day. We have many records of just such a solution being employed in the ancient world. She would give Abraham her slave Hagar. Abraham would sleep with her, and Sarah would have a son through Hagar that would be hers.

It was a common solution for the time. It was what many people they knew no doubt had done. It made sense in some ways. But it was contrary to God’s law for marriage, and, as the rest of the passage shows, it totally disrupted the household and the relationships in it.

Abraham
Up to this point, we have only spoken about Sarah. But what about Abraham? What was his role in all of this? “Abram agreed to what Sarai said” (Gen. 16:2).

Abraham was passive. He did not try to solve the problem. He simply goes along with what Sarah suggests. We might say that he distances himself from the problem.

If you read the life of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, you will see that passivity is their common response to anxiety. Abraham gives up Sarah to the King of Egypt to avoid their problems. Isaac does the same when they encounter the Philistines. Rebekah says to send Jacob to her brother, and Isaac simply goes along with it. Jacob’s wives tell him to sleep with their slaves, and he does so. He seeks solace for the death of his wife in his son Joseph and refuses to take leadership in the family. His daughter is violated, and he does nothing to redress the issue so that his sons act to do something instead. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were problem avoiders. That was their response to anxiety. They generally went along with whatever anyone else suggested. They distance. That is their response.

But let’s consider Abraham a little more carefully. Think of his situation. No doubt, he struggled with not having a son. However, he had watched his wife struggle even more. He knew how much she suffered. He knew how anxious it made her. He knew her tears and pain.

So, after all that time, when his wife made the suggestion, he responded by passively acquiescing. She firmly believed that this would solve the problem and relieve her anxiety. How could he refuse? Have you ever seen someone really upset? Then, they suggest something that will help them. You may not agree, but it’s hard to say, “no.” This happens all the time in our lives. Someone feels pain, and they think that something will relieve it. We don’t like their pain, and so we go along with it.

Beyond this, Abraham had no doubt seen innumerable examples of this very method for getting children. People get children from their slaves all the time, he might have reasoned. He might have seen times where this worked out with less problems.

He also knew that God had promised to make a nation of his descendants, but had He promised that Sarah would be the one who would bear the son for him? Perhaps there was another way. After all, consider the circumstances. Sarah was getting old. She may not be able to have children. Perhaps Sarah was right. That’s how Abraham might have approached the situation.

The plan was reasonable. It seemed to solve the problem. However, it was contrary to God’s law, and it brought severe disruption to the family.

What We Learn About Sin & the World’s Problems
1. Anxiety is not sin but it provides a temptation to sin. It is Sarah’s anxiety over her situation that leads her to sin. There was nothing wrong with concern over the situation. The question is, what would she do with it?

As you look throughout the Bible, consider carefully how it presents sin. You will see that it begins with anxiety over a threatening situation.

You can see this throughout Genesis. Eve saw the greatness that she could have and chose the forbidden fruit in order to solve it. After the flood, the people feared being scattered and sought to build a tower that would reach heaven. Isaac feared for his life and so lied about his relationship with his wife. Joseph’s brothers had anxiety over their relationship with their father and they let it fill them with hatred that sold their brother into slavery.

You can see this in the book of Exodus. The Pharaoh feared the threat from the Jewish people, and he enslaved them. The Israelites lacked water and food, and they complained in unbelief against God and Moses for leading them out of Egypt. Moses took too long on Mount Sinai. They had to wait and wait and wait . . . and so they built a golden calf that would lead them as their god. Anxiety provides a temptation to sin.

2. Sin is worthy of blame but also compassion. How is it that we can condemn sin and have compassion on sinners? Because there is pride in sin, but there is also anxiety in sin. Anxiety is an emotional response to the basic challenges of life that we all experience. Sinful pride is a wrong solution to the basic problems of life. However, we can have compassion on people like Sarah because they are dealing with very difficult issues, and it is hard. So, we should try to see the pride and the anxiety in sin so can properly condemn the sin and have compassion on the sinner.

3. Anxiety can lead us to want to control things in a sinful way. This manifests itself first of all in the fact that we focus on our own efforts rather than seeking God. It’s not to say we should be passive, but a righteous person approaches problems with constant dependence on God. I have often sinned in this way. I find myself working on a problem as if it all depended on me. I have often found myself well into a problem and then realized, “I should seek God for help on this.” I’m still a long way from where I should be.

What are other ways this manifests itself? How often do we seek to control others when we feel anxious about a situation? How often do we lash out at other people when we feel anxious or upset? How often have we made quick decisions that really were more designed to relieve our anxiety than being what is best? We so often want to do something that will help us feel in control. We sacrifice our own standards because we want to get on top of things. These are the sorts of temptations to sin.

The pandemic has unmasked our own sinful attempts to control things. We can do this by embracing wishful thinking that either says all this will just disappear or that if we simply embrace “science,” we can master it. We try to take control by blaming someone for this problem, whether it’s China, Donald Trump, or Bill Gates.

Conspiracy theories are simply a common human way (on all sides) of trying to make difficulties more understandable. They have a certain plausibility, but they involve jumps in our reasoning that we take because they fit our already preconceived notions. It’s interesting that immediately after this presidential election and the last election that both sides immediately claimed that the election was stolen. Both were adept in seeing the implausible jumps in reasoning that the other side made. Both were completely blind to their own. It’s a human problem. It’s rooted in our desire to be in control rather than trusting God.

4. Anxiety tempts us to sin through passivity as well as activity. It’s easy for us to see the sin of Karen. It’s not as easy to see the sin of the passive Abraham. Adam’s sin was passivity in acquiescing to his wife, and so was Abraham’s. In the face of anxiety, we can fight, but we can also flee or freeze.

So, when our anxiety is up, we should also watch out for passivity. Here the error is the reverse of the last one. In Sarah’s case, she was trying to control things that she couldn’t. In Abraham’s case, he wasn’t controlling things that he could. That was his sin. His anxiety lead him to a sinful passivity and distancing.

A friend of mine and I were talking about what happened last spring. He told me about the worship leader in his church who simply ghosted him. He just stopped communicating with him. No good-bye. No arrangements for his duties. He just ghosted him and stopped responding. This was not because the worship leader had thought clearly about how he should react. It was just an emotional reaction routed in the overwhelming nature of what was happening.

Do you find this happening to you? Do you find yourself going to silence when thing get tough? Do you find yourself abandoning your duties? Do you find yourself running to things that will enable you to escape such as food, alcohol, or sex? If so, you should consider whether you are trying to deal with the challenges of life in a sinful way. In a way, this is just as much an attempt to control the world without God. It is making your world smaller instead of trying to control the big world out there.

So, what are humans to do? They have two possibilities. They can try to be the source of their own security, or they can trust God. They can see the God who sees them. In the midst of our anxiety, God shows up and assures of His love. That’s the big picture of history. Christ sees us and comes into the world and dies for our sins and rises again. This is a foundation by which we can respond to the anxieties of life. It is a perfect solution to the anxieties of the world, not by eliminating all problems but by trusting the God who has them all in His hand. In this way, we can let go of trying to control what we can’t, control what God has put in our power, and leave the rest to the Father who loves us and has given His Son for us and so will not fail to give us all other things as well. Amen.