Hagar: Trust in the Wilderness

Welcome back for the next post in a new series With Child: Meditations on the Meaning of Motherhood. If you missed the first post, you can read it here. Join me as I study the mothers of the Bible and discover what lessons can be learned from their lives. Come back each week for a new post in this series . . .

Gen. 16, 21

Hagar collapses at a spring in the middle of the wilderness. Cupping dusty hands she lifts a mouthful of cool water to her parched mouth.

She’s running from the cruel treatment of her mistress, Sarah, Abraham’s wife. Desperate she must have been, to run pregnant into the wilderness. But the Lord sees Hagar’s plight, as she tries to regain her strength at the spring. It is not yet time for her to leave Abraham’s household.

“Hagar, servant of Sarah, where have you come from and where are you going?” The angel asks her.

“I am fleeing from my mistress Sarah,” Hagar freely admits.

“Return to your mistress and submit to her.” The angel tells her. “I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude.”

This news meant an attitude adjustment on Hagar’s part. No more lording it over Sarah’s head that she has a child and Sarah doesn’t. But there was no guarantee that Sarah would now treat her with kindness. The angel of the Lord just asks her to obey his words.

She is given a promise. That she’ll bear a son; that he’ll live in hostility with others, but dwell over his kinsmen. And with this promise, Hagar seems is encouraged. “You are a God of seeing,” she says of the Lord. “Truly here I have seen him who looks after me” (16:13).

Hagar, in contrast to Sarah in this passage, is a wonderful example of trusting God in a hard family dynamic. I’d assume, being Egyptian, before this experience in the wilderness Hagar may have worshipped Egyptian gods. How did she view the God of Abraham and Sarah previous to this episode? Did Sarah’s actions towards her discredit the God of Israel in Hagar’s eyes? We don’t know.

But now Hagar has a personal experience with God. A God who sees her distress and personally responds to her situation, meeting her in the wilderness and giving her hope.

Hagar trusts God with her very uncertain future. Although God gives her a promise, she doesn’t know how things are going to turn out. With less promises than Sarah’s had, Hagar’s faith is really quite amazing. Picking herself off the dusty desert floor she puts trust into action and obeys God. Hagar goes back to Abraham and Sarah and gives births to Ishmael.

Fast forward sixteen or so years.

Hagar finds herself once again in the wilderness. This time she is being sent out of Abraham’s house, and this time it’s for good. Although Sarah instigates Hagar’s leaving, it’s the Lord who ultimately directs Abraham that the time has come for Ishmael to leave. And again, the Lord intervenes in what looks like a desperate situation.

Running out of the bread and water Abraham had provided her, Hagar puts her son under a bush, out from under the hot sun, and awaits death. Hot tears run down her dusty face.

Did she wonder about the promises she’d received from God when she’d been pregnant with Ishmael? Did she think all was lost? That God had forgotten her?

No, He hadn’t. God saw Hagar.

As Leigh McLeroy puts it in her book Treasured: Knowing God by the Things He Keeps: “All-seeing God also opened the eyes of desperate Hagar, and she saw a well of water that must have been there all along. Maybe she had even glanced at it before and simply moved on, assuming it was as dry and empty as she was. Redirected to the well, she filled the parched waterskin with fresh, soothing water and gave her son a drink. And she drank in the knowledge that the God she’d once named El Roi, or ‘the one who sees,’ had seen her in her first flight and was seeing her still.”

God sustains Hagar and her son with the provision of water and they live, making a home for themselves in the wilderness. Again, Hagar experiences God’s personal care. And again God reiterates His promise that Ishmael would become a great nation.

It was in the wilderness God met with Hagar and gave her strength for what lay ahead. Isn’t that the way God often works? That’s how it’s been in my life. In the darkest, most helpless moments, I experience God’s presence and care in a way like never before. Even if I feel small, misused, ill treated, and unloved, I have a God who sees. Even if I fear for my child’s uncertain future, I have a God who sees.

I want to respond to God like Hagar. But so often I’m more like Sarah. I know God’s promises by heart—heard them for years—but so often I doubt. I decide to try it my own way. Instead I want to trust like Hagar. Even in the wilderness.

Has there been a time when you had to trust God in a wilderness season of your life or the life of your child? What did you discover during that time?