According to the Scriptures

Guest (Male): Pastor Damian Kyle says, God's word is to have the final say.

Damian Kyle: When temptations are forwarded to us by those that we love most in life, by those that we respect the most in life, by those whose opinions we hold dearest in life, that even those things have to be tested by the word of God and then be taken to God in prayer and then rejected if necessary.

Guest (Male): Hey, have you ever tempted to help God out in fulfilling what you believe to be his plan? You know, it's a common occurrence, but a huge mistake as we're going to learn today here on according to the scriptures with our teacher and pastor Damian Kyle. Welcome to the program. We come now to an alternate plan, or at least the account of it, an alternate to God's plan. It's found here in Genesis 16. And it's there that we glean an important lesson on what not to do. But I should add, we do have the tendency to do that.

Here's pastor Damian to explain.

Damian Kyle: Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had born him no children. And she had an Egyptian maid servant whose name was Hagar. And so Sarai said to Abram, see now the Lord has restrained me from bearing children. Please go into my maid. Perhaps I shall obtain children by her. And Abram heeded the voice of Sarai. And then Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar, her maid, the Egyptian, and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife after Abram had dwelt 10 years in the land of Canaan. And so he went into Hagar and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived her mistress, that is Sarai became despised in her eyes.

And then Sarai said to Abram, my wrong be upon you. I gave my maid into your embrace. And when she saw that she had conceived, I became despised in her eyes. The Lord judge between you and me. And so Abram said to Sarai, indeed your maid is in your hand. Do to her as you please. And when Sarai dealt harshly with her, she fled from her presence. Now the angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness by the stream on the way to shore. And he said, Hagar, Sarah's maid, where have you come from and where are you going?

And she said, I'm fleeing from the presence of my mistress Sarai. And the angel of the Lord said to her, return to your mistress and submit yourself under her hand. And then the angel of the Lord said to her, I will multiply your descendants exceedingly so that they shall not be counted for multitude. And the angel of the Lord said to her, behold you are with child. You shall bear a son and you shall call his name Ishmael because the Lord has heard your affliction. He will be a wild man. His hand shall be against every man and every man's hand against him.

You thought your children were tough. And he shall dwell in the presence of his brethren. And then she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, you are the God who sees. For she said, have I also seen him who sees me? And therefore the well was called Beer Lahai Roi. Observe it is between Kadesh and Bered. And so Hagar bore Abram a son and Abram named his son whom Hagar bore Ishmael. Abram was 86 years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram. We remember that God had made a promise to Abram in Genesis chapter 12 verses 1 through 3 when he initially called Abram to the unique calling that Abram would have and has in human history.

And let me read it to you once again for memory's sake. And the Lord had said to Abram, get out of your country, from your family and from your father's house to a land I will show you. I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and I will make your name great and you shall be blessed. And I will bless those who bless you and curse him who curses you. And in you all of the families of the earth shall be blessed. And then that call of God upon Abram's life, it consisted of three basic promises.

First, that God would bring into existence a great nation through Abram, speaking of the Jewish people. And second, that God would give a land to Abram and to his descendants, speaking of the land of Israel, the land of Canaan. And third, that God would then bless the entire world through Abram and through his descendants because it would be through the Jewish people that God would ultimately provide uh the world with the Messiah and the Savior that we so desperately needed. And that is in in the person of Jesus himself. God then interestingly, he reaffirmed his promise to Abram when his nephew Lot separated from him towards Sodom.

Genesis chapter 13, the Lord said to Abram after Lot had separated from him, lift your eyes now and look from the place where you are northward, southward, eastward, and westward. For all the land which you see I give to you and your descendants forever. And I will make your descendants as the dust of the earth so that if a man could number the dust of the earth, then your descendants could be numbered. Arise, walk in the land through its length and its width, for I give it to you. And then as we studied last time, God confirmed his uh promise to Abraham with the most one-sided covenant imaginable, a covenant based solely upon himself.

And concerning Abram's uh descendants, God declared Genesis 15 verse 4, behold the word of the Lord came to him saying, this one, speaking of Eliezer, Abram's servant, shall not be your heir, but one who will come from your own body shall be your heir. And then God spoke to him concerning the land of Canaan. He declared, uh I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldees to give you this land to inherit it. But it's important to understand that by the time we come to Genesis chapter 16, that 10 very long years have uh gone by since God gave those promises to Abram initially in Ur of the Chaldees.

I don't know, some of us get antsy waiting on God for 5 minutes or a day or 48 hours tops. Uh but it is important to realize now that Abram has been waiting now 10 full years. And after these 10 years, uh Abram and Sarai are as childless as they ever were. And the fulfillment of God 's promise to them seems as far off as ever it did. And in fact, the possibility of having children is becoming more and more remote uh by the day. In other words, if given the fact that now they've aged 10 years, uh if Abram had been 75 years old and was now 85 years old, Sarai was 65 years old when the promise was given.

Now 75 years old. In other words, if they had remained childless through the childbearing years of their life, the odds were getting worse by the year that they would uh bear a child. It looked as if something was missing here, as if somehow God was not managing this very very well as the odds of the promise being fulfilled would be becoming ever more remote. And so Sarai came up with a plan. Always be careful when you come up with a plan for God. But she came up with a plan to help God out. And helping him fulfill his promise to them.

And the plan is described there in the results of it in verses 1 through 6, the plan specifically in verses 1 and 2. She had an Egyptian handmaiden by the name of Hagar. And Hagar was probably given to Abram when he had gone down into Egypt. And Sarai had been sold into the harem and the whole deal as we looked at uh another time. And before Pharaoh dismisses Abram and Sarai and then gives them an official escort out of Egypt and back into Canaan, uh he did give Abram a fabulous amount of of wealth, of livestock, of herds, and also of men servants and uh maid servants.

And so she was probably uh a part of that that gift from Pharaoh. Sarai then informed Abram in verse 2 that clearly God had restrained her from having children. And as a result of the physical circumstances, it must mean that God intends to fulfill his promise of a child to them uh by some other means. I mean, it's only reasonable if you just kind of step back. And let's not continue to look at this through the eyes of God. Let's step back and look at the situation logically. In fact, this is probably what God intended all along.

Uh but uh we have been too blind uh to see it, the to do what he obviously what obviously needs to be done here. And so Sarai then proposed that Abram lie with Hagar, her maid, and that any child that resulted from the union would then become uh Hagar. She would claim as her own as a fulfillment of the promise. And you notice her words in verse 2, I shall obtain children by her. This is a very common custom in the ancient world for a rich and powerful man who had a wife that was uh barren and unable to bear children.

The husband would lie with a concubine of some sort. She would become pregnant upon the child's birth. The child would then be given to the wife. And no one would have even batted an eye in the ancient world concerning uh this plan of Sarai that she was giving to Abram. And so it was simply the ancient world's version of uh surrogacy. Now uh personally, I don't think that Sarai came up with this idea is kind of just a casual uh knee-jerk reaction to the situation, that this was something that came into her mind and then 5 minutes later she's uh now proposing it to to Abram.

Uh I can almost imagine the the painful mental process that Sarai went through and uh coming up with the idea to begin with and then the the price that would be paid on her part in making the proposal and formulating the plan. And it really did represent a significant sacrifice on her part as a wife here sharing her husband's intimacy now with another woman. This is a husband who loved her, a husband that she loved. But if this is what it took in order for God's promise to come to pass, then she was willing to make that sacrifice.

And of course, this is a terrible idea on her part. Uh for those of you who don't know the story, we ought to set that straight uh right at the beginning. Uh Abram's response to all of this is that he is told us at the end of verse 2 through verse 4, Abram heeded the voice of his wife. And the plan uh proceeded to be a smashing success on a physical kind of carnal uh level. We're told there in verse 2, Abram heeded the voice of Sarai. That is he agreed to participate uh in her plan.

Abram then uh lay with Hagar. She conceived, making clear then that it was Sarai who was uh infertile of of the two and not Abram. And after all, all of these promises of a great nation and the descendants of Abraham numbering as the sand of the sea or the stars in the sky, strictly speaking, at this point uh there's a way that Sarah could look at it and say, those promises have been given to you, Abram. There's been no mention of me at all in terms of this. And so this was no direct violation, perhaps in her mind, uh of God's promises to Abram.

As long as you ignore the nature of God and as long as you ignore his instruction concerning marriage all the way back in uh the book of Genesis that described that marriage was to be one man and one woman for life. And so uh now this was clearly what God intended all along. Uh God had never specifically uh spoken of me in terms of this uh this great blessing that would come into the world. And uh so perhaps it's another woman that it's going to happen through. Now the proper response of of Abram to his his wife's plan would have been to just simply nip it at the bud and uh put a stop to it.

He should have taken her immediately into his arms and then said, listen, I appreciate what you 're trying to do here. I really do. But you're my wife. I'm your husband. And to do this would not only be a sin against you, but it would be a sin against God. It would be a sin against Hagar. And it would be a sin against myself. We just need to trust God in the situation. If God can make a promise like this, then he can keep a promise like this. And so let's just trust in him to keep his promise, his way and in his timing.

But he didn't step up and he didn't do that. And he's very very passive here as a husband. And uh his passivity is going to be evident very soon again in verse 6 in which he abandons when the consequences of all of this begin to come even begin to bloom. He uh abandons Hagar to the harsh treatment of Sarai. Now it's interesting about this to me is that here you have Abram. He's no coward. I mean, it's just two chapters ago that he takes this this 360 men or something that constitute his servants. And he attacks a confederation of four kings in uh the middle of the night and defeats them.

I mean, this is not a uh a wimpy kind of guy. But here at home, he will not make a stand for what is right concerning his wife. He will not lead as he should. And it is very very easy for a man to be uh a lion in every other environment in life and then become a pussycat uh in the hands of his wife. And this is something that we need to be conscious of, I think, as as husbands. We love our wives. We desire to bless them. But it is important to realize that just because a loved one is okay with engaging in a wrong of some kind, it does not mean that it is then okay uh with God.

And as a result for all of us, it's important for us, whether male or female, husband or wife, important for us to recognize such temptation. Uh when these kind of temptations are forwarded to us by those that we love most in life, by those that we respect the most in life, by those whose opinions we hold dearest in life, that even those things have to be tested by the word of God and then be taken to God in prayer and then rejected if necessary. I think that if a stranger, just a perfect stranger had proposed this plan to Abram, he would have dismissed it outright.

I mean, it would have seemed a farce to him. I mean, a crazy proposal for anyone to come up with. But because she came up with it, because his wife said it, he didn't dismiss it. And here we have the importance of being wise about the misguided suggestions of uh those that uh we love even the most in life. Now I think that we can safely assume that initially uh Hagar's pregnancy was celebrated by everyone, by Abram, by Sarai, and certainly by by Hagar. As anyone would celebrate any great plan that we had come up with, and now we launched the plan, and now the plan appears to be uh a great success.

This is always a cause for celebration. And I have no doubt that they celebrated it. But then of course, the bottom fell out massively, fell out as will always happen in any any endeavor to supplant God's plan for my life with my own plan for my life. And it is God's love and his grace that he will always cause those plans to fail. The immediate in in the long-term consequences, the fallout of this carnal plan of Sarai and and Abram uh are listed to us there in the latter part of verse 4 through verse 16.

Upon becoming pregnant, Hagar immediately begins to despise Sarai. And as you might imagine, this would have created immediate tension in in what was uh presumably a peaceful relationship between the two before this. And so she begins to despise Sarai. The word despise there means to become little or insignificant. And so uh somehow here as Hagar is glowing in the pregnancy of Abram, Sarai's uh husband. And here she is now providing him with a son that Sarai could not. She begins to now look down upon Sarai in a way that Sarai recognizes it to to be happening in the dynamic of their relationship.

And so a role reversal has occurred on some level. And this is pure misery for Sarai. And this is a possibility that she had never thought of in terms of of the plan. That's always the problem with our plans. God's plan. You'll never hear God say oops or now what will I do? Uh when his plan unfolds, everything is is clear and perfect. Uh this conflict then uh produced previously unknown conflict uh into Abram and Sarai's relationship with one another. So Sarai, she becomes very irrational here and completely emotional. And she proceeded to blame Abram for the entire mess that was now unfolding there in verse 5.

She's talking about the wrong to me be upon you. In other words, you're to blame for this. You're responsible for all of this. You should have told me no. And uh this is why uh husbands take up bowling and uh hunting and fishing and long trips to Montana or whatever it might take. So Abram, I don't mean that derogatorily. You have your things that you do too. We're just not dealing with them at the moment. But here he here he is. You can almost certainly a man can put himself in Abram's shoes and sandals in that situation.

And he is in an absolute lose-lose situation. His mind is firing in all directions, trying to find just what is the way out of this situation. I mean, you can almost see his face as he's hearing these illogical accusations being brought against him. But be that as it may, sufficient to say that he immediately begins to regret the decision that he has made. And so both of them have. The consequences really fell hard upon Hagar as well as we see in verse 6. And she is guilty of pride. She is guilty of flaunting and a sense of superiority over Sarai.

She's not innocent in any way in all of this. She definitely lacks a a humility here. But she really is a victim in all of this. And Abram, unable here to find a a clear solution to the problem that Sarai's plan has launched and a solution concerning specifically the conflict between Sarai and and Hagar, he simply threw it back on Sarai to solve and said, she's in your hands. You can do with her precisely as you please. And Sarai and it's not a shining moment for her. She proceeded then to deal very very harshly with Hagar, so harshly that Hagar then fled from Sarai's presence and went out into uh the wilderness, trying to make her way now to Egypt.

Of course, the Sinai Peninsula, you have absolutely no hopes of surviving that journey if you're a triathlete, uh let alone a a slave who is now pregnant.

Guest (Male): What a mess that resulted from those best laid plans, huh? But there's still much more to glean from this actual event that impacts history. And we'll do that next time when pastor Damian Kyle returns to according to the scriptures. Interested in a copy of this message? Here's where to reach us for the ordering details. In the 209 area code, it's 545-5530. That's 209 545-5530. You can also listen online at according to the scriptures.com or oneplace.com. I'm delighted to say that you can also stream and watch pastor Damian studies through Roku and Fire TV. Look for the Calvary Chapel Modesto app in your favorite app store.

If you appreciate according to the scriptures and you'd like to see it continue on this station and others like it, there's a place to donate at according to the scriptures.com. We'd also like to hear how the Lord is using the program in your life. You can write to according to the scriptures, 4300 American Avenue, Modesto, California. The zip code is 95356 or you can email us through our website according to the scriptures.com. Pastor Damian Kyle will present more gleanings from Genesis next time on according to the scriptures, the daily radio outreach of Calvary Chapel Modesto.