Tag: Abraham

Posted on

Anxiety, Pride, & Redemption: The Story of Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham

According to the Christian faith, the fundamental human problem is not lack of money, better government, or more education. It is that our relationship with God is broken. Out of that brokenness—what the Bible calls sin—flow addictions, injustices, and abuses of every sort.

Sin is not just doing bad things. It is living out of sync with what we ought to be and do before God. It deserves condemnation, but it also calls forth sympathy, because sin is tangled up with something all of us know well: anxiety.

American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr suggested that sin is rooted in anxiety. We can see the dangers and pressures of this world, but we can’t control them. That anxiety is not sin in itself, but it becomes the occasion for sin. Under pressure, we either trust the Lord or try to take control. That second response is pride.

Genesis 16 shows this pattern clearly in the story of Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar.

Anxiety: When Waiting Hurts
Sarah’s story begins with a simple but painful statement: “She had borne him no children.” In her world, a woman’s honor and identity were tightly connected to childbearing. On top of that, Abraham carried a promise from God that he would have descendants, but years had passed and nothing had happened. No children. No clarity about Sarah’s role. No visible progress.

That is a perfect breeding ground for anxiety.

When we feel out of control, we want to do something—anything—to relieve the tension. Sarah did what was common in her culture: she offered her servant Hagar to Abraham so that she might “obtain children by her” (Gen. 16:2). It was a logical, socially approved solution.

But it was also a violation of God’s design for marriage: one man, one woman, one flesh. It was a common-sense solution that was completely wrong. Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, & Redemption: The Story of Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham”

Posted on

Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 4: How God Redeems Relationships

Genesis 16 presents us with a family mess. It starts with anxiety, leads into pride, and ends in injustice. By verse 6, the family seems at the breaking point. Abraham abandons Hagar. Sarah treats Hagar harshly. Hagar runs away with Abraham’s child in her womb. The family now consists of a separted but complicated web of relationships. Can things turn around? If so, how?

God Meets Hagar
The answer? God shows up. But He showed up in an unlikely way. If we were to ask at the beginning of the story, “to whom would God appear to get them to turn things around?”, who would it be? Probably Abraham. Maybe Sarah. But here’s the surprise of the story. God showed up for the first time in the story, and He talked to . . . Hagar.

God asked Hagar, “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” Let’s not miss the importance of this. As we noted in my past articles on this past (read part 1 on anxiety here, part 2 on pride here, and part 3 on injustice here), the anxiety of a slave is over the fact that they are unseen. Hagar seemed to be seen by Abraham, but then Abraham abandoned her to unjust abuse by Sarah. It seemed like she was unseen again. The Angel of the Lord, whom I believe is Jesus in a pre-incarnate form, the 2nd person of the Trinity, met her by the well and took an interest in her like He would in an unlikely woman at a wall a thousand plus years later (see John 4).

Hagar was honest with the angel. She said that she was running from her mistress Sarah.

Then, the angel of the Lord gave her a command, “Return to your mistress and submit to her” (Gen. 16:9).

By the end of the story, Hagar was encouraged and willing to go back.

What Motivates Hagar to Return
Why encouraged Hagar to go back to a tough situation? Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 4: How God Redeems Relationships”

Posted on

Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 3: Anxiety & Injustice

[This is the 3rd of a 4 part series. You can read the 1st part focusing on anxiety here and the 2nd part focusing on pride here]

Pride, Anxiety, and Injustice in Relationships
Why is it so hard to dislodge injustice? Why is it that families and communities can allow the worst sort of situations to go on and on? You see this happen all the time. They won’t make even the slightest change to make a bad situation better. Why do they stay in these bad relationships and make little effort to change them?

Why? Because it is scary. Injustice is rooted in an attempt to solve the basic problems of life: loneliness, insecurity, provision, and meaning. When you fight against injustice, you are battling with people’s anxiety over these basic issues. This makes these problems much more intractable.

This does not mean that we should not fight against injustice. It just means that we will fight against it better if we understand that it is rooted in anxiety over the basic problems of life.

A great example of this tragic interplay of injustice can be seen in American race relations. The treatment of African-Americans by whites in this nation has been reprehensible. However, the system of slavery was designed to solve the basic problems of labor, and it was the basis of the position of the wealthy elites of Southern society. Over this position, they had much anxiety. If they let slavery go, where would that leave them? Understand. I am not excusing it. I am just saying that there was a fear in letting that go that made it harder to apply the basic principles of Western and Christian teaching to this issue. As Booker T. Washington noted, “Having once got its tentacles fastened on to the economic and social life of the Republic, it was no easy matter for the country to relieve itself of the institution.” This is the way injustice becomes a fixture in human life.

That’s why it was so necessary for Martin Luther King, Jr. and others to work to force whites to give up their privileges in the South and elsewhere. He recognized that because of the anxiety of giving up privileges, the white community would not give up their privileges without being compelled to.

On a smaller scale, why do people stay in such bad relationships? Why do they not confront such bad behavior? Because the alternative is often being alone, and that is quite scary. The current relationship solves to some degree our anxieties over loneliness and security, and it is hard to face those issues more directly without the anxiety reducer of even a bad relationship.

In our third installment of our study on the relationship of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, I want us to consider what injustices their anxiety and pride led them to. I will show how each of their behaviors was unjust but also try to show how that injustice was rooted in their own significant challenges. The injustice calls for condemnation, and the anxiety calls for sympathy. It is a complex response to a complex problem.

The goal is to enable us to better confront injustice in ourselves and others. When we can confront our own unjust behavior by confronting our underlying anxieties. That’s what God does when He confronts this issue, as we shall see in the next article.

Hagar
We noted in the last article that Hagar’s anxiety was that of a slave: she is unseen. However, what every human longs for is to be seen and to be seen as significant. A slave is not seen that way. A slave is just part of the scenery. That’s the misery that every slave would experience every day of their lives.

Then, something happened. Hagar was chosen to bear the child of Master Abraham. She conceived, and she became a major player in the house. She let this go to her head. The result was that she looked down on her Mistress, Sarah. “And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress” (Gen. 16:4). This wasn’t something she kept to herself. Sarah noticed and brought it up to Abraham.

What was the injustice here? It was a lack of respect. Ironically, she did not see Sarah as valuable. Maybe Hagar was just doing to Sarah what Sarah had done to her, but this would not justify this behavior. Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 3: Anxiety & Injustice”

Posted on

Anxiety, Pride, Relationships, and Redemption: A Tale of Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar

According to the Christian faith, the fundamental human problem is not lack of material resources, unjust government, or lack of education. It is the disruption of the relationship between God and human beings. Out of this disruption, flow all of the addictions, injustices, and abuses of human life.

The Bible gives this fundamental problem a name. It calls it sin. Sin is the conditions and actions of being out of accord with what we ought to be and what we ought to do. It is first and foremost about a wrong relationship with God, but it disrupts human relationships as well.

Sin is worthy of condemnation, but when we look at it more closely, we often feel sympathy for those in sin. Why is this? Because sin is complex, not simple.

An insight I received from the study of American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was that sin is rooted in anxiety. He said, anxiety arises out of our ability to see the world and its threats to our well-being combined with our inability to do much about them. This is not sin in itself, but it becomes the occasion for sin.

A quick perusal of the sins of the Bible will show you that this is the case. Sin arises out of people’s anxious response to threats. Cain has anxiety about his standing with God, and so he kills Abel. Joseph’s brothers have anxiety over their relationship with their father, and so they sell their favored brother into slavery. Pharaoh has anxiety over the growth of the children of Israel and so enslaves them. The people of Israel have anxiety over Pharaoh, provision, and status and so complain against the Lord. And on and on it goes.

There are two responses to the threats of this world. We can trust the Lord, or we can try to come up with our own solution. This latter response is pride. This pride that we can solve our own problems and are bigger than we are leads to disruption and dissolution.

In this series, I am going to look at one example of this. We will see how sin grows out of anxiety. The prideful response to anxiety leads to choices and actions that disrupt the family. But the good news is that God does not leave Sarah, Abraham, or Hagar in sin. He makes Himself known, and this brings a healing element into the relationship.

Sarah’s Anxiety
“She had borne him no children.” Some people do not want children, but for those who do, how painful it is to go through this experience! Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, Relationships, and Redemption: A Tale of Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar”

Posted on

What Does Visiting Egypt Teach Us About the Bible? Part 1: Why Go (Back) to Egypt?

I arrived in Aswan, Egypt on the afternoon of May 5th. After a 20 plus hour train ride, we were met by the Spanish-speaking guide of Memphis Tours because the English one was not available. With my Spanish and his English, we were able to piece together what was going on. We were heading to the Movenpick Hotel.

There was no way to drive to the Movenpick Hotel. You had to take a ferry across the Nile River because this hotel was located on Elephantine Island (pictured above). There is something magical about crossing a river in a boat to get to your hotel.

As the night went on, I was thinking, “I know that name, Elephantine Island. Where have I heard it before?” I finally remembered. It was the island where the Jews went after the destruction of Jerusalem by King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar. Some of the remaining Jews had fled to Egypt to escape his wrath after they had killed the governor that King Nebuchadnezzar had put in power. With them went Jeremiah the prophet, whose prophecies I had read many times. “Wow! And to think, I am on the very island to which Jeremiah came with the Jews.” It was a profoundly moving experience.

And that was one big surprise of Egypt. It is the second Bible land. After Israel, Egypt is the most prominent “land” of the Bible. Besides the experience on Elephantine Island, I had many other experiences in Egypt that illuminated the Bible for me. In this series of articles, I want to share them with you. The first thing I learned was why Egypt was so inviting. Why did Abraham want to go to Egypt? Why did the Israelite former slaves even want to return there? I understood much better after visiting Egypt.

Why Go to Egypt?
When Abram went to Canaan, there was a famine in the land. Abram might have thought, “God told me to go here, and now this place is a total bust!” So, where did he go? To Egypt.

Now, why would he go to Egypt? Isn’t Egypt just a big desert? Continue reading “What Does Visiting Egypt Teach Us About the Bible? Part 1: Why Go (Back) to Egypt?”

Proudly powered by WordPress