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| "... reaching forth unto those things which are before ... toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus " (Philippians 3:13-14) Vol. 8, No. 5, Sep. - Oct. 1979 |
Harry Foster
WE seldom pay much attention to little Hagar. The allegorical use of her as the slave mother in Paul's letter to the Galatians, tends to make us think slightingly of this Egyptian and her son. We are told that they had to be cast out, and on the whole we are prepared to leave it at that.
But Hagar was more than an allegorical figure -- she was a human being whom God loved. It is true that she was a stranger by birth and a slave at heart, but is not that where we all begin? She has things that can be said against her but she has left us all in her debt, for she it was who first pronounced this wonderful spiritual truth: "Thou God seest me". I, for one, thank her profoundly for such comforting words.
It is typical of graceless men that they distort this happy confession and make it into an attack [97/98] upon the God of the Old Testament. Is there a single writer with some early experience of the Bible who can resist a sneer at this conception of a malicious snooper upon human affairs? One after another, in their biographies or novels, they describe the wall-text with a large EYE, and the ominous warning that a fault-finding God is spying on you in your most private room. It almost seems a 'must' for those who want to have a sly dig at the Old Testament. If they sincerely considered the matter they would discover that the description applies equally to the Jesus of the New Testament, and if they really verified their reference by turning to the actual story in Genesis they would find that Hagar -- far from resenting God's all-seeing eye -- found the sweetest comfort in her discovery of an understanding God.
"Thou God seest me." Is it a warning? Well, if Abraham's daughter-in-law, Rebecca, had just remembered that story of Hagar, she might not have plotted with Jacob to deceive Isaac. Her old husband was blind, and fair game for their deception, but God is not blind. He sees it all. She might have saved her family from that disgraceful quarrel if she had kept Hagar's words in mind. True, she did not foil God's purposes -- nobody can do that -- but she lost her pampered son Jacob, and never saw him again, and all because she ignored that all-seeing eye of God.
Later on, a happier recollection of this divine title took place down in Hagar's native Egypt, for Joseph rejected the immoral advances of Potiphar's wife with the reminder that although her husband might not see them, God could. As he fled the temptation he exclaimed: "How then can I do this great wickedness against God?" (Genesis 39:9). "Thou God seest me." That reminder sent Joseph to an unjust prison but it preserved him for God's highest purposes. Had he not heeded that warning he might have avoided immediate trouble, but he certainly would have missed the throne!
So even as a warning, the phrase can be most helpful. Nevertheless, it was not coined with this in mind, but was the grateful ejaculation of a greatly tried slave-girl, who found that God loves slaves.
IT must have seemed to Hagar that nobody cared for her at all. She was far from her native land. We remember that the visit of Abram and Sarai to Egypt was a matter of wilful unbelief, so we have no reason to think that their employment of Hagar was a matter of prayer. She was available; she was probably cheap; possibly she was actually sold by her parents to these affluent Hebrew visitors. It is unlikely that her wishes were consulted, either then or later. She was a mere chattel.
"Ah," but somebody will say, "What a privilege to live in such a godly home!" That is a very doubtful assumption. The truth is that there is only a godly atmosphere in a home where husband and wife honour God's Word and pray together. Did Abram and his wife share the promises of God round a family altar? If they had done so, then Sarai would never have made her unbelieving proposal to exploit Hagar for their own convenience, and if she had, Abram would not have listened to her. Did the husband and wife wait together on God in family prayers? If they had, God would not have left them to their own carnal devices and would not have let them spend thirteen empty years with no message at all from Himself. No, I fear that the truth is that Hagar lived and worked in a home where there was little, if any, evidence of God's presence. Any home where there is no regular sharing of God's Word and no mingling of praise and prayer at the Throne of Grace is a place where people do not meet God. Hagar never did.
SO she ran away. What else could she do? Nobody loved her. Nobody cared what happened to her. Life was dealing very hardly with her and nothing made sense. Those who wish to do so can say that it was her own fault for despising her mistress. Well, what else could she do? At this stage there was nothing in that home to provoke anything but contempt. In her deepest heart, Sarai despised herself. There she was, first provoking her husband to faithless action and then complaining to him about the results, and there was he, a man of faith out of touch with God and as miserable as any of us are when we neither trust nor obey.
Hagar did what many of us have tried to do at times. She ran away. She felt that nobody cared, and we may be tempted to feel the same when God shows us hard things. But how wrong she was! We are told that God "found" her. The very word shows that He must have been looking for her. He found her and disclosed that He knew all about her: "Hagar, Sarai's maid", He called her, for His is a very personal knowledge. "Thou God seest me" was no general comment on God's omniscience but a personal realisation that my individual case is well known to Him. "Whence camest thou?", He asked, not because He did not know, but because He wanted to give her the relief which comes when we have someone with whom to share our troubles. He went on to ask: "And whither goest thou?" That was a question she could not answer. She did not know. Hers was a blind fleeing from trouble. Had she some wild idea of returning to Egypt? Did she just feel that anywhere would be better than living with Sarai? She had no idea where she was going. God, however, knew the answer to that one too, and would tell her all in good time and even give long term promises about her future. For the moment, however, let her just enjoy the comfort of God's understanding love. "Thou God seest me." This truth brought peace into her troubled heart. Somehow everything seemed all right if God was near enough to let His face shine on her.
She was assured not only that God's eye was upon her but that His ear was open to her cry: "the Lord hath heard thy affliction". To us the wild Ishmael is not an attractive figure, but his significant God-given name should confirm to us the encouragement of the whole passage. Ishmael means, 'God hears', and the name was given in particular connection with Hagar's affliction. When we least feel like it, God sees us and God hears us too. That day made history. From then on the well was known as "the well of the living one who sees me" (v.14 R.V. margin). It is surely a great day in the history of any one of us when we come to know the Lord in this way.
As we have said, Hagar did not know what to do, but now God could tell her: "Return to thy mistress and submit ...". God sees us when we are running away from our difficulties and He comforts us with His look of love, but He does not excuse us from obedience. The word He used to Hagar is a great New Testament word -- 'submit!' It seems to apply in every circumstance of life; at home, at work and in the Church. God did not tell Hagar to submit to Him -- that would have been easy, or at least we think it would -- but to submit to her mistress "in the Lord" or "for the Lord's sake" (1 Peter 2:13).
She could go back then to those same people and the same circumstances, but if she went back saying, "Thou God seest me", it would all be different. One imagines that it was never easy. Nothing worthwhile for God ever is. It seems, though, that Abraham became very fond of Ishmael (Genesis 21:11), so perhaps the atmosphere in the home was relatively happy for his mother. But it could not last. In the will of God her son and Sarah's could not go on living together. In the end Hagar and Ishmael had to make the final break with Abraham's household, but this time Hagar did not run away, she was expelled. Abraham himself sent her away (21:14). For my part I am always averse to 'resignations'. I believe that when God's time comes for us to abandon a situation, He will allow us to be forced out of it, and if He does, then we can count on His meeting us with His provision and His promises as He did in the case of Hagar. That, however, is another story.
"THOU God seest me." Seest me in my loneliness, seest me in my submission to difficult circumstances, and seest me in the wider setting of a great future. For this was the result of Hagar's encounter with her seeing God. He disclosed that He had vast purposes of fruitfulness to be accomplished through her yet unborn son: "I will greatly multiply thy seed, that it shall not be numbered for multitude". With us all God is working for the future. It is not very clear to us just how this Ishmaelitish nation fitted [99/100] into the divine purposes, but this was what Hagar was told. You have a future! You have a very wonderful future! Nobody can calculate the vast outworking of this personal encounter with the God who has seen you in your unhappy wilderness experience and is silently planning over you in love!
I say that it is difficult for us to be wholly reconciled with this future promised to Hagar, but there are no problems about God's promises to us who are in Christ. He sees us in our trials and needs and He assures us that in them all He will work together in such a way that through eternal ages we will be "unto the praise of his glory", "God's own possession, unto the praise of his glory" (Ephesians 1:12 & 14). In Hagar's case He could look beyond her present plight and immediate future into a glowing prospect which to her may have sounded like a dream. In our case also God sees us, but He looks beyond our present limitations and immediate prospects and sees the eternal purposes into which He has brought us in Christ. "Thou God seest me", in this sense, involves something which Hagar could never know, the eternal destiny reserved for those who are to reign with Christ.
SO much for the Old Testament story. What has the New Testament to tell us of this divine title? Well, we have hardly opened the Gospel by John when we find another character whose whole life was transformed by a similar experience. Nathanael was not an Egyptian, but a true-born Israelite; the Lord did not find him by a well but under a fig tree; yet he seems to have passed from bewildered despair to radiant faith just by Christ's words: "Before Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee" (John 1:48).
Whether Nathanael's heart condition was as despairing as Hagar's, we do not know, but there must have been some deep desperation of soul which made him explode with the exasperation of a man at the end of his tether: "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" Nobody but the Lord and he knew of what went on under that fig tree (itself a symbol of Israel's kingdom), but it must have been an agonised enquiry as to why God did not seem to be caring about His people's condition. Poor Nathanael did not just despair about the best, he could not bring himself to expect any good thing at all. Perhaps he was ready to make some new committal if only God would raise up help for His people.
All this is conjecture. It arises, though, from his immediate recognition of Jesus as "the king of Israel". Somehow the fact that Jesus had seen him when he thought he was all alone under that fig tree, completely convinced him that all his questions could be answered in the person of Christ. He believed. He believed just because Jesus knew and understood what had been going on in his heart. One can almost hear him repeating Hagar's rapturous words: "Thou God seest me". Everything seems to have been transformed for him by this simple discovery. "All things are naked and laid open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do" (Hebrews 4:13). The man who really knows that, is the man who has truly entered into God's rest.
Like Hagar, Nathanael was given immediate instructions and also a predicted destiny. He had to go back to his own town, for he belonged to Cana of Galilee and the whole apostolic band moved on to this town for the miracle at the wedding feast. And he had to submit himself to the rigorous life of discipleship. For him there would be little problem about submitting, for he was now a committed subject of Israel's King, but there must have been times later when he could have given up as the pressure mounted.
For him, also, there were long-term promises just as there had been for Hagar. He was assured that he was to see much greater things, with the new break-through of the era of the Spirit. When Jesus saw Nathanael under the fig tree, He could look on and see his future under an open heaven with all the energy of God functionally at work in and through Christ. Nathanael might vaguely recognise in the words of Jesus an allusion to the dream at Bethel of the first "Israelite indeed", and appreciate that the spiritual significance of Christ's promise was that he (with the other disciples) would have an honoured place in the House of God. The Lord saw Nathanael in his need, but He also saw him in the setting of his eternal destiny.
"Thou God seest me." He sees me in Christ and sees me in eternal union with Him in the heavenly places. No, God is not snooping on us, as if to catch us out in some misdemeanour: He is looking on us with the eye of understanding love and of purposeful grace. In Christ He has brought us to Beer-lahai-roi -- "the well of the living one who sees me".[100/ibc]
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