Monday, June 10, 2013

HAGAR I

N.B. The posts for all of JUNE are excerpts from All the Women of the Bible


I did NOT author this post. Because the piece is so good, I am STILL PROCESSING it myself. I want to share with you how El Shaddai cleaned up the mess HAGAR and others made of her life. His redemption intersected at a miracle of mercy and fulfilled promises for Hagar, Sarah and Abraham, in spite of their recklessness. The take-away is Yahweh is good in spite of our folly that can and should be an offense to Him.  That point is so poignantly and generously made in  Psalm 103 (The Voice)

"8 The Eternal is compassionate and merciful. When we cross all the lines, He is patient with us. When we struggle against Him, He lovingly stays with us—changing, convicting, prodding. 9 He will not constantly criticize, nor will He hold a grudge forever. 10 Thankfully, God does not punish us for our sins and depravity as we deserve. In His mercy, He tempers justice with peace. 11 Measure how high heaven is above the earth; God’s wide, loving, kind heart is greater for those who revere Him. 12 You see, God takes all our crimes—our seemingly inexhaustible sins—and removes them. As far as east is from the west, He removes them from us."



The Woman Who Lost a Bottle But Found a Well
Scripture ReferencesGenesis 16; 21:9-17; 25:12; Galatians 4:24, 25


Name Meaning—Hagar, an Egyptian name, closely resembles the root of the Arabic, flight, familiar to us as the history of Mohammed, descendant of Hagar. It may be taken as an adaptation of her original name to the principal circumstances of her life, and understood to mean, fugitive or immigrant, which Hagar became.
Family Connections—While the Bible gives us no record of Hagar’s genealogy, legend has supplied her pedigree, as being the daughter of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, the same who coveted the possession of Sarah in vain. This legendary source affirms that the Egyptian princess became so attached to Sarah that she told her royal father that she would accompany her when she returned to Abraham.

     “What!” cried the king, “thou wilt be no more than a handmaid to her!”

     “Better to be a handmaid in the tents of Abraham than a princess in this palace,” the daughter replied.

Hagar would not stay behind and join again in the idolatrous rites of her home, so when Abraham and Sarah moved on, she went with them. Sarah was an active missionary of the faith of Jehovah among women, as Abraham was among men, and so Hagar became a convert to the worship of the true God. While this is a pleasing tradition, the likelihood is that Hagar was an Egyptian girl-slave whom Sarah secured for her household while she and Abraham were in Egypt. Hagar bore Abraham his first son, Ishmael, and thus became the foundress of the Ishmaelites and Arab peoples from whom came Mohammed, the founder of Islam.

If Hagar was a slave girl then her mistress was legally entitled to do as she pleased with her. Knowing that it was humanly impossible for her to have children by Abraham, she gave her handmaid to him, that she might have children by her—a custom consistent with moral standards prevailing at that time. Abraham reminded Sarah that her word was law to her own slave and that he had no choice in the matter. Under Sumero-Babylonian law there is this clause in Hammurabi’s Code—

If she has given a maid to her husband and she has borne children and afterwards that maid has made herself equal with her mistress, because she has borne children her mistress shall not sell her for money, she shall reduce her to bondage and count her among the female slaves.

But Sarah ran ahead of God in giving a Gentile idolater from a pagan country to Abraham to bear the promised seed. Poor Hagar—she became the helpless victim of Sarah’s scheming! The whole affair was a sin before God—a sin all three were guilty of. Sarah distrusted God when she resorted to such a wicked expedient. As a child of faith, did she not know that God was able to raise up children out of stones unto Abraham? As for this “friend of God,” in spite of current custom, he should have stoutly refused Sarah’s scheme and obeyed the law of God, and believed the divine promise made to him. The attempt to secure the Child of Promise by Hagar was the result of a lack of faith in God’s omnipotence. Then, Hagar, although the least free and the least responsible, should not have yielded to such an unholy alliance merely to gratify any ambition she may have had. What sorrow, anguish and loneliness Hagar reaped for her compliance in such a plan to forestall God’s promise of an heir for Abraham (Genesis 15:4, 5).

Although the chapter recording the unworthy method of trying to fulfill a divine purpose is only a short one, yet like the shortest verse in the Bible, it is saturated with tears. Genesis 16 is made up of only sixteen verses and with such we have these three features— (see HAGAR II)

-Still Processing

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