I was challenged today in reading Genesis 15-16 in how God is described. In the culturally unusual events of these chapters, the modern reader can easily be distracted from the important meaning of these chapters by the author. Abram’s continued trust of YHWH, who called him, comes to the matter of progeny. The promise of a son is given and Abram believes (15:6) YHWH and it’s counted as righteousness. A covenant ceremony occurs and YHWH makes clear that the covenant will be kept unilaterally despite the coming bondage of Abram’s descendants. The promise of a great land is given.
Chapter 16, though culturally strange, sounds like how most Christians (including myself) respond to God. The moment God is done speaking in narrative time, Sarai and Abram take matters into their own hands in following conventional wisdom of how to conceive an heir. Sarai gives her servant Hagar to Abram to sire an heir. This transaction in ANE culture is not adultery, but the surrogate use of a servant on behalf of the maiden of the house. Though conventional for the time, it of course created awkwardness and tension and eventually jealousy and mistreatment.
Two amazing descriptions of God come nestled in this awkward story: One is a self-disclosure of God in His own direct speech to reveal Himself, the other comes from human speech in response to God’s disclosure of acting in history’s space and time. The son to come from Hagar will be named Ishmael, which is a verb-subject name explaining that “God (El) Hears.” The Lord explains the reason for this name as the fact that the Lord hear of your misery. The Lord continues telling what Ishmael’s life will be like.
Hagar’s response also reveals God’s character. She calls YHWH, “the God who sees me.” The seeing is not passive or incidental, but active and intentional. YHWH sees and acts on behalf of this troubled woman .
Two implications rise out of this passage, one for personal application and the second for theological importance. 1) First, the Lord hears of our miseries and He sees us. This can be an encouragement not only about who God is but about our difficult circumstances. YHWH is a God with a heart of pity toward those hurting and those seemingly alone. There is a special relation to God’s character and the most pitiful and miserable of circumstances that people find themselves in. It is those circumstances that His seeing takes action. In the course of human history of space and time He inserts Himself in order to aid the miserable, personally (He saw “me” Hagar in the passage). God also hears me in my miseries and He responds in seeing me in response. How interesting that the flow is from hearing to seeing! The self-awareness of one’s own needs often present the opportunity for God’s interruptive action into our lives. Without the acknowledgment of our misery, we might overlook the all-seeing response of God. This is the comfort of a near and knowable God.
2) Secondly, God, though near and knowable in His description in this chapter is often painted as vastly transcendent and utterly Other. These paradoxes of immanence/transcendence, knowable/unknowable, and Another/Other can create barriers in our theological formulations about God. In Chapter 16 we learn something about the methodology of Theology Proper (the study of God) in the realm of theology. God’s self-disclosure is always independent and according to sovereign choice, yet His disclosure comes both in direct, divine speech and in human language. God accommodates the explanation of His nature in anthropomorphic terms such as hearing and seeing. These allow us a metaphorical segue to God’s attributes in care/love for the hurting. God appears to have emotion and can be touched with human emotions and plights. God is alive & active in that He responds to the pain that He sees. God is a loving God, One who brings hope to the hopeless. His actions in history seem to be discernible by humans even without their recording in literary form. In other words, Hagar recognized God’s response –she didn’t need to wait to read about it in Genesis. Likewise, the actions of God in accordance with His disclosed character can be discerned in our own lives, perhaps not unquestionably but often unmistakably. These actions of God consistent with God’s self-disclosure in Scripture can be a means of understanding experientially what God is like in His attributes of immanence, knowability, and Anotherness with us.
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