When People Play God - Genesis - August 30th, 2026 (Sermon Transcript)

All right, if you have a Bible, go ahead and open up to Genesis 16. If you don't have a Bible, the passage will be on the handout that was within the bulletin that you got on the way in.

So we're looking at Genesis 16, and it's another fascinating story in the life of Abraham, and it has a lot to teach us about who God is and how to live in wisdom and faith. Those are some real pillars of the Christian life.

If you want to grow as a Christian, if you want to live your life the way that God designed you to live, and I want to say again, if you want to grow as a Christian, that's what God calls all of us to.

Sometimes people get the idea that you can become a Christian, and then you just wait until you die and go to heaven. But the Bible makes it very clear that God has much better things in store for us than that.

God desires that all of us reach full maturity in Christ. And so what I'm going to share with you this morning is very important for all of us when it comes to reaching that goal.

Growing in maturity as Christ, living our lives the way that God designed us to live.

If we want to do those things, we want to experience those things, we must know who God is, and we must live in accordance with his wisdom, and we have to trust him. We have to trust him.

How many times in the Gospels does Jesus sort of gently reprimand the disciples for having such little faith? Over and over again, oh, you of little faith.

That seems to be such a central issue in people's lives if you pay attention to the teaching of Jesus. And what is faith but trust?

God wants us to trust him, and a big part of trusting God is letting him do his thing, not trying to take everything into our own hands. We need to have patience, and we need to have faith.

Now, Abraham and Sarah, as we'll see in just a moment, totally fail at just about all of that.

They just, they blow it, and we're going to look at their mistakes, their failures, and look at how that unfolds for them, and see what we can learn from that. And I'll, little spoiler, we can learn a lot about God.

We can learn a lot from their failures.

3:08

Genesis 16 Scripture

Please stand for the reading of God's word. We'll read the text for us. Genesis 16 verses 1 through 16.

This is kind of a long one, so if you get tired halfway through, feel free to sit down. But generally, we stand in order to honor the word of God. Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children.

She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said to Abram, Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go into my servant, it may be that I shall obtain children by her.

And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. So after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar, the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram, her husband, as a wife. And he went into Hagar and she conceived.

And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress. And Sarai said to Abram, May the wrong done to me be on you. I gave my servant to your embrace.

And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt. May the Lord judge between you and me. But Abram said to Sarai, Behold, your servant is in your power.

Do to her as you please. Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she fled from her. The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur.

And he said, Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going? She said, I am fleeing from my mistress, Sarai. The angel of the Lord said to her, return to your mistress and submit to her.

The angel of the Lord also said to her, I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude. And the angel of the Lord said to her, behold, you are pregnant and shall bear a son.

You shall call his name Ishmael, because the Lord has listened to your affliction. He shall be a wild donkey of a man, his hand against everyone and everyone's hand against him, and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.

So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, You are a god of seeing. For she said, Truly I have seen him who looks after me. Therefore, the well was called Beer Lehoi Roi, lies between Kadesh and Bered.

And Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram called the name of his son, whom Hagar bore Ishmael. Abram was 86 years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram. This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated and join me as I pray for us. Father, I pray that you would guide us as we look into your word this morning, that you by your spirit would guide us into the truth.

We pray, God, that as we see the truth, that we would embrace it, that we would obey it. God, we ask for your wisdom, for your guidance, and for the courage and strength to walk in obedience to you. We pray in the name of Jesus.

Amen.

6:29

Human Disobedience

All right. I want to read verse 1 again really quick because Moses is setting the scene for us. He's giving us an explanation for everything that follows.

It says this, now, Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. She had borne him no children. Back in Genesis 15, God had sworn on his own life.

We studied this last week. God had sworn on his own life through the covenant he made with Abram, that he was going to multiply Abraham's descendants. And yet, here he is 10 years later, and he still does not have a single descendant.

Verse 3 says it's been 10 years. Can you imagine that?

Having a radical supernatural encounter with God, and God gives you this life-changing promise, and you're all excited, like, finally, my wife has been barren for decade after decade after decade, and finally, God has promised to multiply our

descendants, we're going to have all these kids, and then 10 years goes by. What would you do in their situation? Would you start to think that it was up to you to fulfill God's promise for him? That's apparently what they thought.

It's hard for us to understand how painful this would have been for them, because in their culture, not having children was a truly devastating blow. Like it meant so much more for them than it does for almost everybody in our culture today.

I mean, look at the demographics of our world, right? Most people in Western countries are not even replacing themselves. Most couples have on average less than two children.

Our demographics are quickly going off a cliff because people don't really value children, not the way that they used to, certainly not the way that they did in Abraham's day. For them, their kids gave them meaning in life.

It gave them, having kids gave them status in their communities. It really meant everything to them. And for Abram and Sarai or Abraham and Sarah, as they're later called, they had zero kids.

They had a lot of money. But what was the point of having a lot of money if you had nobody to pass it down to? No kids to bless with it.

They had a lot of livestock, they had a lot of land, but they had zero kids. And they were probably at this point, after 10 years, tired of waiting on God. So they decided to engage in a very common cultural practice.

One of the many situations where God's people decide to live in accordance with the culture, as opposed to living in accordance with God and His will for them.

In their culture, if you couldn't have kids with your wife, you could have kids with a servant. So Sarah, in her desperation, proposes that idea to Abraham, and he goes along with it.

He has a child with their servant Hagar, and then things immediately get ugly. Now, we don't see anything explicit in the Book of Genesis up until this point, where God forbids Abraham from doing this.

Like in the whole life of Abraham leading up to chapter 16 here, there's no explicit comment by God, like, I'm going to bless you with kids through Sarah. So don't, you know, don't have kids with the servant. He doesn't make it explicit or clear.

But Moses, the author of Genesis, makes it very clear for us that this truly was a sinful, foolish decision. This was the wrong thing to do. Look again at verse 2.

Sarah proposes the plan, and then it says that Abraham listened to the voice of Sarah. Abraham listened to the voice of Sarah, exactly like Adam listened to the voice of Eve. And what happened when Adam listened to the voice of Eve?

World-changing disaster. Sin entered the world. The worst thing that possibly could have happened, and that's what happened in Moses is using the exact same words in Hebrew.

So he's intentionally calling our minds back to the fall in the Garden of Eden. The truth is, Abraham should have corrected his wife. He should have said, well, honey, I understand where you're coming from, but I think it's best that we wait on God.

He should have been the leader here, but instead he was passive. Let me say that again. Instead, he was passive, and men need to be reminded of this often.

Talk about wisdom to live the way that God designed us to live. The Bible teaches us this wisdom repeatedly, that men are called to be leaders, and leaders should not be passive.

Had a friend of mine say to me once that if you don't lead your wife, the enemy will. It's a sobering statement. So we as men cannot afford to be passive.

Just look at the fruit here of Abraham's passivity. Verse four, when Hagar saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress. Verse five, Sarah is understandably very unhappy.

It immediately leads to serious conflict in her marriage with Abraham. Verse six, Abraham submits to his wife again. He fails to lead again.

He says, okay, do whatever you want with your servant. So he let Sarah banish poor Hagar and the baby boy that she is carrying. And all of this stuff is the fruit of their lack of faith.

This is all the fruit of their sin. We see anger and bitterness and jealousy and marital conflict and exile. And despair.

Let me run through that list one more time so that we can clearly get a sense for the kinds of things that we can expect when we don't listen to God. People don't talk about this these days.

I feel like I spent, you know, pretty much my whole adult life in church, and I've listened to thousands of sermons probably. And I feel like it's pretty rare to hear this kind of thing. When we don't listen to God, bad things happen.

Here in our passage, we see anger, bitterness, jealousy, marital conflict, exile, and despair. In fact, their decision is haunting Abraham's descendants to this very day.

To this very day, roughly 4,000 years later, the descendants of Abraham are reaping the consequences of this. Looking again at verse 12, the prophecy about Ishmael.

It says that Ishmael shall be a wild donkey of a man, his hand against everyone and everyone's hand against him. He shall dwell over against all his kinsmen. And who are the descendants of Ishmael?

We can trace his lineage directly to the Arabs of the Middle East. So every attack by an Arab against a Jewish person is a fulfillment of this prophecy. In the past 10 years alone, around 40,000 rockets have been fired into Israeli territory.

By the descendants of Ishmael. You see, there are consequences for our sin. And I know the whole lineage from Abraham and Ishmael down through history is complex.

And not every person who lives in Israel is Jewish. And not every person who lives in Israel is a descendant of Abraham and Isaac. And not every Arab and Muslim is a descendant of Ishmael.

But, generally speaking, that's how the lineage played out. So there's real truth to this, real truth to the descendants of Ishmael are still wild donkeys of men, as the scriptures say, and causing a lot of problems for the descendants of Abraham.

So I just want to be clear.

If you find yourself in a situation like Abraham and Sarah's, maybe your marriage is a mess, maybe your life is miserable, maybe you're dealing with all kinds of drama and anger and bitterness and jealousy and despair and sadness and frustration.

Every Christian finds themselves in situations like this sometimes. We live in a fallen world and we are fallen people. So even the best marriages go through periods of time where they feel like an absolute disaster.

Even the most charmed of lives by the most faithful of people can be miserable at times. All of us deal with drama and anger and bitterness and jealousy and sadness and frustration.

So next time you find yourself in a situation like that, I want you to think, in what ways am I currently living in disobedience to God? I'm not saying that all bad things in your life are directly a result of your disobedience to God.

I'm not saying that. There are plenty of bad things that happen to us that we're not responsible for. There's plenty of sadness and frustration and horrible suffering that we will experience in this life that is not our fault.

And yet, the Bible warns us repeatedly that when we disobey God, bad things happen as a result. Even for Christians, the Bible says that God disciplines us and that discipline is painful. The Bible says that God disciplines us because he loves us.

And discipline is painful. And so when you, as a Christian, have pain in your life, you need to ask, is God disciplining me for something? Is there some sin in my life that I haven't confessed, that I haven't repented of?

Is there some something I'm doing where I'm living in disobedience to God? Abraham's life is proof that sin has consequences. And so Christians need to ask that question.

And again, there's a balance here. Not everything in your life is your fault or the result of your sin.

We don't want to make that error, but speaking from my own personal experience, the way that I have thought about my life and my life as a Christian, and speaking from what I know of hundreds of Christians over the past 30 years or so, speaking from

experience in churches and all the sermons that I've listened to, we are far more in danger of making the opposite error. We don't want to think everything is the result of sin. Like I got a flat tire, like what sin did I commit yesterday?

We don't want to make that mistake, thinking everything is the result of sin, but we're far more likely, and in the church today, we're far more likely to make the other mistake, where we think that nothing is the result of our sin.

And the Bible warns us about that. You simply cannot believe that and believe what the Bible says, because the Bible tells us that God will discipline us.

So again, if you find yourself in a situation like Abraham, I want you to ask, in what ways am I currently living in disobedience to God? Where did I go wrong? How did I fail to trust Him?

What commandments have I not been obeying? Don't blame the people around you. Don't blame it on bad luck.

Don't blame it on your parents. If you spend any time on the internet these days, you will be encouraged to blame anybody and everybody and everything but yourself, right? That's our culture.

If something's wrong in my life, it was this person, it was that person, it was this institution, it was society this or situation that, it was anything but my fault. But the Bible reminds us that that is not the truth.

The truth is things are often our fault. So don't blame the people around you. Don't blame it on bad luck.

Don't blame it on your parents. Don't blame it on your socioeconomic status, or your school, or whatever. Sin has consequences.

And yet, here's the good news. Here's why we can believe that and not crumble into despair. Sin has consequences, but God has grace.

God has grace. As much as we can learn from this story about human sin, we can learn even more about God and His grace towards sinners. And when I say that, there's two parts to that.

We learn about the grace of God and what we can expect from God, but we also just learn about God. And sometimes we can fall into this trap of just only being interested in ourselves and our lives and what this means practically for us.

But if we're going to live in accordance with the scriptures, if we're going to live a mature Christian life, we have to go beyond just thinking about ourselves and our own lives and practical things and just think about God.

What does this teach me about who God is? The past few weeks, I've been reading a biography of Lyndon B. Johnson.

Who knows what I'm talking about? Maybe who knows who Lyndon B. Johnson is?

I think some of the older folks in the room probably remember him very well, but until I started reading this biography, all I knew was his name and his previous occupation, president of the United States. Like, that's it.

I just knew LBJ was president at some point. So I've discovered since then that he was the 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. I don't know anything about his politics or his presidency.

I haven't gotten to that part in his biography. So far, I just know the basics, the background. And so far, the story has been very fascinating.

He grew up in the Texas Hill country, and he was smart and competitive and ambitious. From day one, it sounds like he was a very unique person. To be honest, it also sounds like he was probably a terrible person.

But all of it is fascinating because I know that eventually, he becomes president.

Eventually, that man whose lineage I've been reading about, whose environment, his family, I've been reading about all of that stuff, and it's fascinating simply because I know that one day, he's going to become the most powerful man in the world.

If he had become a manager of a factory in Dallas, if that's how his life turned out, if he just turned out to be a regular guy, nobody would care about his early life, would they?

There'd be no biography on him, but instead, he became the most powerful man in the world, and he shaped the course of human history. Therefore, millions of people have studied him. Like, what's he like?

What was his nature? What was his character? Well, let's not forget that as powerful as LBJ was, God is infinitely more powerful.

God has done infinitely more to shape the course of human history, so shouldn't we want to know about his nature, his character? Sadly, I think a lot of people just don't really care.

A lot of people who call themselves Christians are just not all that interested in God. But if LBJ is interesting, God should be a thousand times more interesting.

23:54

Godʼs Seeing Grace

In many ways, to be a Christian is to be somebody who is fascinated by God. And this passage in particular is extremely fascinating. I want to draw your attention again to verse 7.

After Sarah banishes Hagar, we read this in verse 7. The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. Now, who is this angel of the Lord?

It's not the Lord. It's called the angel of the Lord. So it's not the Lord himself, and yet he sounds like he's a lot more than an angel.

Look at how he speaks in verse 10. He tells Hagar, he declares, he promises. He says, I will multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude.

Notice how he doesn't say, the Lord will multiply your offspring. He says, I will multiply your offspring. So it brings to mind the question, does he, this angel of the Lord, does he have the power of creating human life?

Traditionally, for Jewish people, that was a power that they believed only God possessed. And this angel of the Lord seems to be implying that he possesses that power. And then he gives her this prophecy in verse 11.

But he doesn't say, thus says the Lord, like all the prophets and all the angels throughout the scriptures, he doesn't say, thus says the Lord, it's more like, thus says me. And then in verse 13, it becomes undeniable.

The Magar declares, you are a god of seeing. When she says, you are god, a god of seeing, he doesn't deny it. So it can't be an angel, because everywhere else in the Bible, when people worship angels, the angels immediately tell them to stop.

Like really, really fast, instantly, they're like stop, do not do that. But this angel doesn't stop Hagar, because he's not just an angel. This is what theologians call a theophany.

Most scholars believe that this is a pre-incarnate appearance of Jesus. So Jesus, the second member of the Trinity, became incarnate, took on human nature, became a human being, born in a manger. We all know that part, right?

But throughout the Bible, there are a few instances where Jesus appears in the worlds, in human form or angelic form, before the incarnation. So this is God, even though it's not God the Father.

Who else has the authority and power of God besides God? Well, Jesus does. The Holy Spirit does.

It's pretty cool, isn't it? Way cooler than LBJ, in my opinion, and way nicer, too. Notice how nice he is.

Notice the incredible mercy and kindness of God. Hagar is just a servant. In the eyes of the world, in their culture, she was an absolute nobody.

But to God, she is a beloved creature. God sees the nobodies. God cares about the nobodies.

He finds her in her loneliness and despair, and he comforts her and blesses her. And she declares in verse 13, truly here I have seen him who looks after me. In Hebrew, it's a little bit more literal and connected than that.

She's basically saying, clearly I have seen the one who sees me, because God saw her. God saw her. And that's who God is, and that's the way that he operates, and he's always been that way, and he will always be that way.

In the early church, in the early church, there were, the churches were filled with women and slaves and poor people, the lowest of the low in society. In the Roman world, women did not have the status that they ought to have had.

They did not have the prominence, the authority, the respect that they ought to have had, but they found a place in the church where they felt seen, where they felt respected and loved.

And the same is true for slaves and poor and other people in the Roman world who were considered nobodies. The early Christian churches were filled with so-called nobodies because that's who God is. He sees those that the world does not see.

So, rest assured, if God looks after Hagar, then God certainly looks after us. There's nobody too insignificant for God. There's no event in our lives that God fails to see.

Psalm 56, 8 says that, You have kept count of my tossings, put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book? Think about the tenderness and the absolute cherishing love conveyed by that, to say that God has kept count of our tossings.

Like late at night when you can't sleep because you're so stressed out, or so worried, or so sad, and you toss and you turn and you toss and you turn all night, God keeps count of every tossing and turning.

When you are weeping in despair, God is so concerned for you that he bottles up your tears. That's the character of God. That's the mercy and kindness of God.

30:20

Faith or Self-Effort

And now I want to finish with the grace of God. That's the big picture application that the Apostle Paul takes away from this text.

There's this really interesting section in the Book of Galatians, Galatians chapter 3 and chapter 4, where Paul talks at length about Isaac and Ishmael. Isaac is the son later in the Book of Genesis that God gives to Sarah and Abraham.

So he is the promised son that they were supposed to be waiting for, the son that they have together by the supernatural grace of God later on after they have Ishmael here. So we can describe Isaac like this.

We'll say that Isaac is the gracious gift that came through their faith in God. They couldn't have kids. God appears to Abraham and says, I'm gonna bless you with children.

I'm gonna multiply your descendants, as many as the stars in the sky. You just need to trust me. And then later on, they have Isaac, the gracious gift that came through their faith in God.

This is the analogy that the Apostle Paul is pointing us to in the Book of Galatians. And according to Paul, Ishmael is the son of the slave. So he is the result of Abraham and Sarah taking things into their own hands.

They didn't trust God for his gracious gift, so they try to do it themselves. Do you see the analogy here? The Apostle Paul is trying to get us to see our salvation works the same way.

We can either put our faith in God and receive his gracious gift of grace, like Isaac, or we can try to do it ourselves, like Ishmael, the son of the slave. If we fail to trust in God and we try to do it ourselves by, for example, going to church.

Let me just put this a different way to make sure that I'm being very, very clear here. I'm talking about trying to get to heaven when we die, being saved, like pleasing God, making sure we're in good standing with God.

If we try to do that on our own by going to church, by being really nice to people, by following all the rules according to the Apostle Paul, that's slavery, like the slavery that Hagar lived in. That's slavery. You're a slave to the rules.

And the fruit will be toxic, just like Genesis 16. People who try to earn their salvation will be self-righteous and prideful because they think they're doing a pretty good job, unlike all those sinners over there.

Or people who try to earn their salvation will be depressed and hopeless because they realize that they're not doing a good job, and no matter how hard they try, they're never going to do a good job.

But if you trust in God's gracious gift, for Abraham and Sarah, that was the gracious gift of their son Isaac. But for us, it's the gracious gift of God's son, Jesus.

If you trust in the person and work of Jesus Christ, if you admit, I'm a sinner, not just I make mistakes sometimes, not just, well, some bad things happened to me when I was younger, and that's why I'm this way.

If you admit, I'm a sinner, but Jesus saves sinners, and you trust in Jesus to save you, that's freedom, that's freedom. It's freedom from sin and freedom from the unbearable burden of trying to earn your way to heaven.

So there are two paths laid out before each and every one of us. One path represented by Hagar and her son Ishmael, the slave woman and her descendants, and the other path represented by Isaac, the promised son, like the promised son Jesus.

There's the path of self-reliance and self-effort. I'm going to be a good person. I'm going to prove to God that I'm good enough.

And there's the path of admitting that you're not a good person, and you need Jesus to save you and make you good. The path of faith in God and his promises. So which one are you going to choose?

May we all choose faith. Abraham and Sarah did not choose faith, and we see the consequences of it in our passage. We see the consequences of it even today.

They did not choose faith, but we have the option, we have the chance to choose faith, to trust in God and his promises, and his promised son, Jesus.