Do you ever try to control God’s plans for your life instead of trusting him to do what is best?
God had promised to make Abraham the father of a great nation. The only problem was that Abraham’s wife, Sarah, couldn’t have kids. In those days, infertility was thought to be the ultimate curse, and Sarah was running out of time. As she got older, Sarah became more and more desperate to provide a child for her husband, so one day she decided to take matters into her own hands. Imitating the cultural practices of the nations around her, Sarah gave her maid Hagar to her husband as a kind of substitute wife and surrogate mother. Abraham showed his desperation as well and went along with the plan instead of trusting God to do things his way. Sure enough, Hagar became pregnant.
You can imagine the tension in the household at that point. Not surprisingly, Sarah grew jealous of Hagar despite the fact that the whole thing was Sarah’s idea in the first place. Sarah began to make Hagar’s life miserable, and Hagar responded by running away. Only an angel from God was able to convince her to return.
Hagar gave birth to Ishmael, and Abraham finally had his heir. However, things got messy a little more than a decade later when Sarah herself finally became pregnant. When Sarah gave birth to Isaac, the tension between her and Hagar increased. Rather than taking steps to ease the tension, Sarah pressured Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael away from their home. But even that didn’t quell the family feud — a feud that has continued to fester for thousands of years. This historical event is still a main point of contention today between the boys’ descendants, the Arabs (Ishmael) and the Israelites (Isaac).
Lessons for Us Today
This story is not a fairy tale; the domestic war that was waging between Hagar and Sarah really happened and has implications for your life as well.
One of the biggest lessons here is understanding how different everything would have turned out had Abraham and Sarah simply trusted God without taking things into their own hands. God doesn’t need our help. Our job is to trust him to carry out his plan in his way, according to his timetable.
Another lesson can be found in how Abraham responded. God made a promise to Abraham, and Abraham knew it; however, Abraham still went along with Sarah’s plans and did not speak up about the promise God had made. Rather than standing up for the truth, Abraham passively sat back and let his wife and her servant fight it out. Learn from Abraham’s mistake. Stand up for what you know is true.
It’s normal to struggle with giving up control to God — people of all ages wrestle with this, as Abraham and Sarah show us. At the end of the story, though, God did exactly what he said he was going to do.
Drawn from the NIV Revolution Bible.
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