I woke up with Hagar on my mind today. I really can’t say why. My devotional study has been in a different section of the Bible, my personal spiritual inner man (or woman I should say) has been comfortably reading the redemptive stories found in Esther and Ruth most recently, so no Hagar to be found there either.
But Hagar was on my mind.
So I started reflecting on this scriptural character this morning in a more directed manner. If I haven’t learned anything in this 53 years I have been a believer, it is to follow God’s plan instead of my own. I am not as quick in the shifting of gears as I should be, but I am better than I once was, so I will count this as noteworthy progress.
In reading Hagar’s story again, I was reminded about how hard her life really was in many respects. She was a slave, even more… an unloved concubine. She was tossed from Pharaoh’s hand to Sarah, then to Abraham, and ultimately found herself cast out by her master and mistress into the wilderness. The name Hagar means “wandering”, and her life certainly bore this out over her recorded storyline.
Hagar was never first in anyone’s life. Emotionally abandoned by person after person, time after time, she had to have shed many hot tears and internally questioned “what is wrong with me, what have I done to deserve this ill treatment?” Then the natural inclination to conclude “ I must be a very bad person, worthless.” Hagar is a heart-rending picture of all of us in our quest for emotional affection. We place the burden of our wants and needs in the hands of someone who will never be equipped to fill those needs…be it a parent, a child, a husband, a friend. We look for our own self worth in others, and when that doesn’t come, we label ourselves as worthless, and even worse, undeserving of love and affection.
Once Hagar began to experience desertion and abandonment by significant people in her life in the emotional and physical sense, her spiritual wounds grew very raw and deep. Her whole life, up to the moments in the wilderness, had been driven by others’ selfish choices and commands. Hagar had lost her own path in life far before she was cast out. She had elevated the opinions, beliefs and subsequent sinful actions of others above God and His word to her. His promises given to the family she dwelt with and served, fell on her deaf ears because their own fallible words and actions toward her screamed more loudly. Hagar had been introduced to the God of Abraham, she had to have heard the promises of God spoken in her presence as she went about her days of service there. But she chose to cast those pearls aside, as she was cast aside, and dwelt for a very long painful time in the wilderness, alone and fearful. She had a look at her circumstances and experiences, and then chose to believe man’s utterings, and not the word of the Lord concerning her.
Hagar had made a grave error in her thinking which drove her life in a different spiritual direction than originally intended. The people who had taught her all she knew about God turned out to be desperately flawed believers. Rather than looking at Abraham and Sarah as fellow truth seekers, she looked at them as truth-sayers. If they didn’t love her, care for her and spoke harshly to her…then that must become her own self truth as well. She wandered in the wilderness, finally giving up, weeping and afraid.
Hagar had been running a long time, more than once actually. She had run from Sarah physically when she was pregnant by Abraham and Sarah abused her, and then she was told by the Lord to return. Interestingly, she did as the Lord told her at that point. She went back, served in the household, her life began to come under submission once again. And then an event happened that changed her course and thinking again…Ishmael was born. When mistreated once again by Sarah, Abraham….the man who was supposed to be her protector basically packed her a bag and threw her out of the home, and Hagar was running once again. Each time she had a choice to believe man or believe God when her circumstances were presented and she had to obey the authority she found herself in service to on earth. Each time, she looked at her circumstances where she was placed and chose to believe earthly man’s words also, to her own detriment.
But God’s voice graciously came to her in that wilderness. She had had all stripped away by this point. There was no home, there was no protector, no champion. She had no friends, no sustenance for body or spirit. There was nothing between herself and the Lord. But God asked her the question she needed at her lowest spiritual and emotional point then. “What is the matter, Hagar?” Then immediately followed with “Do not be afraid.”
That was the moment, I believe, that Hagar’s faith became alive. Her circumstance hadn’t changed, her own feelings about it hadn’t changed. She had all the truths in head knowledge. Heck she LIVED with the family of the promise. What changed her?
But God.
This is what changes all of us…God pushes aside all the sad words, the unkind treatment, the abandonment, shame, spiritual wounds. He offers us eternal truth and unending faith in place of lifelong untruth and fear. Faith comes when you have something in your heart before you have it in your circumstances. There was a tiny fire within Hagar that had caused her to question her past. She ran from it, rather than face it. She hid rather than holding on to the real truth.
We do this, yes? We may even be believers, but we allow wounding of our psyche as the cruel words of others are accepted as truth. We base our feelings and emotions and wellbeing on those who are every bit as flawed and messed up as we are. We embrace shame rather than casting shame into the wilderness. Instead we banish ourselves to a life without hope while we run highlight reels of our past. Over and over and over we see pictures in our mind of what someone said or did to us, poor choices we made, sins we chose over purity of body and spirit. We all have sins in our current lives or consequences of mistakes in our past that need to be dealt with and put away. That will never change until we enter our eternal reward. The real test of our beliefs comes in those times of our personal “but God” moments. We have to ask ourselves the right questions. What is the matter really? Why do I hear the words of others so clearly when they are not edifying and leading me to the Lord? Who do I choose to believe? Is God telling me the truth about me? If He is, why do I choose to live as if I don’t believe Him?
God will always leave a few weaknesses in us to leave us humble, that’s a fact. BUT GOD wipes away all the past, all the untrue words, all the emptiness and emotional abandonment. It is up to us to choose His sweet wooing over our sorrowful wandering. There comes a moment you are called to end the war you have with yourself. Be strong in the Lord, and He will fight for you….even if fighting YOU through the lessons of hard circumstances is part of His plan. When you come to your “But God” moment, be ready to move forward, and do not look back. Ask Lot’s wife how that looking back thing worked for her…
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