Genesis 16:2 Commentary and Bible Study

Sarai approached Abram with a solution to the promise because, at 75 years of age, she had no child, and no hope of having one, and so as far as she was concerned there must be a seed to Abram. From his loins must come the seed through whom the promise will be given. We remember the New Testament commentary on this passage in 1 Peter 3, which tells us that she was a holy woman, a woman of God and a woman to be imitated. So she is not faithless, but certainly her solution is not a right solution. She believes in the promise; she believes this must happen, but in her anxiety she is going to see the child brought about in her own way. She says to Abram, ‘Behold now the Lord hath restrained me from bearing: I pray thee, go in unto my maid.’ It is very gentle, courteous speech – ‘I pray thee’, I put it to you Abram, she seems to say. I make this suggestion: ‘go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her.’ It is rather interesting, because the Hebrew says something like this: ‘I may build a family by her’, and our translators have simplified it into ‘obtain children’. But she has the family of God in mind, the issue, the seed, the great company that will arise. Maybe that can be built by this slave girl, this servant girl. ‘And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai.’ ‘Are we not a special case?’ she thought. ‘Should we take the cultural route?’ It was commonly done in the society around them, that if you had servants, if you had the money, you could make the servant girl your husband's second wife, and her children would be your children. That was the culture; that was what everybody did if they had the means to do it, and so the solution seemed a good one. They meant well. They were doing, you might say, the work of God. It was a selfless suggestion; Sarai would have to share her wifely privileges. It was all done, you might say, for Abram’s sake, for God's sake. It was a sacrificial thing that she did, but it was a wrong course of action. So they adopt a common custom from the culture of the world around them. Abram agrees. They know God's order that marriage is one man and one woman, but they feel this is a special case, and it can be done. The result is a thirteen-year silence for any big thing from God. Reproof, trouble, pain for them is the result. It is not long before Ishmael is sixteen, and Isaac is three and the hostility becomes open conflict, derision, and taunting: hatred between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. God ultimately has to separate them again and send one family, one way, the other on their own. This is the repeated story of the Book of Genesis, a cycle that repeats. God has a people., and as time goes on, for one reason or another, there occurs a merger between those who call on the name of the Lord, and those who don't. That always leads to calamity and a downward trend. God then, in a sovereign way, separates them out again. You see this happening all over again; you might call it the subplot, though the dominant theme is justification by faith. So it results in the church and the world coming together again, because now the Egyptian bond slave is welcomed into the family. She is made use of, as it were, and she becomes a participant in the affairs of the family of faith. It leads to difficulty, and in due course, God has to separate them out again. Well, Abram agrees to Sarai’s suggestion and that is sad. ‘Sarai Abram's wife took Hagar her maid the Egyptian, after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan, and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife’ – and that would mean his second wife. This was after they had dwelt in the land of Canaan 10 years.