The way this is put is very interesting. It says very clearly in verse 3 that she was married to Abraham, right? She is a wife, but Sarah continues to call her "my maid." She never made the transition here. She was always the maid, not a fellow wife. And I can understand human nature enough to know that this would probably be common especially since Sarai had been married to Abraham for a long time. This was the newcomer, and it only happened because, well, Abraham needed an heir. It is very interesting to catch these little hints of the attitude.
Just a little bit of an addition on that maid/wife thing. The Angel of the Lord calls her Sarai's maid and just a verse or two before Abraham called her Sarah's maid. And what I take from that is that Hagar never did anything to throw off that particular identification. She did not do anything honorable in this either. Sarai and Hagar are both vying for Abraham's affection and they both make big mistakes. So, actually none of them come out of this story very well.
Like I said, this is the first mention of the Angel of the Lord, and as I have noted in other sermons, first mentions are often quite significant, very revealing, and they set the tone for a word's or phrase's later usage in Scripture. And here the first mention curiously occurs in a story about Hagar. You would think it would have occurred in a story of Noah or Shem or Abraham himself, but no, He appears to Hagar, an Egyptian woman, a Gentile, if you will, and with it is a prophecy about her unborn son Ishmael, who ultimately became one of Israel's bitterest enemies. God did not make this first appearance as the Angel of the Lord to the good guys, as it were. He did this to Hagar before she bore Ishmael.
Another strange thing here, which is rare; it is actually a hapax legomenon. It means, it happens once in Scripture. And that is, a person, a human, gives God a name. This is the only time that it happens in Scripture. It is highly unusual circumstance, and like I said, she gave Him the name El Roi, and that means "God who sees."
Now, perhaps the most significant thing that this first usage does is that it identifies the Angel of the Lord. And if you go through there, you could see the Angel of the Lord appeared, the Angel of the Lord said, the Angel of the Lord said, the Angel of the Lord said. It is getting this idea that this is all done by this superior Being. It leaves no doubt that this was no ordinary angel but the God of the Old Testament Himself. And as I mentioned, the only time in the Bible, Hagar gives Him a name that clearly identifies Him as God—El Roi. El meaning the generic name of deity. So in this passage not only is He called El, but He is also called Yahweh in verse 13. She called the name of Yahweh, who spoke to her, "You are the God [the El] who sees." So it is very clear here in the way Moses wrote it, that this Angel of the Lord is El and He is also Yahweh.
Also, she also calls Him the "God who sees" and only God sees everything. He is omniscient! And in the name of the well, Beer Lahai Roi, the sense is, when you unpack the Hebrew, "The well of the Living One who sees me." And so she essentially calls Him the Eternal, the Living One, the One who always lives.
And there is more. This passage shows the Angel of the Lord seeking Hagar specifically to give her a personal message. This is something God does. He seeks people, He seeks them out, and in this case, it was not as a calling necessarily like He calls us. But in this case, He sought her to give her a personal message and the personal message was a command to return to Sarai and submit. That was the main gist of the message. Now why would He do this? Why would He have to take personal action to seek this particular Egyptian woman in the wilderness?
Well, the first reason why He did is that He is rectifying Sarai's abuse. Sarai's abuse of Hagar drove her away, and that was not in the cards. That was not supposed to be. And … . . .
Well, their scheme was successful in the sense of Hagar becoming pregnant, and a life was about to be created. However, the rest of the chapter is going to show us that the works of the flesh accomplishes nothing. That is a statement out of the New Testament. It is very likely that this is one of the incidences where that principle was applied. So, the flesh profits nothing and when we add verse 5, we see the beginning of the unfolding of that truth.
Sarai was the first to feel the consequences of this plan. The first evil consequence is contempt that she feels undoubtedly was there from Hagar towards her.
When sin is involved it is not going to produce the right fruit. It is going to be something that is uncomfortable, maybe sometimes its exceedingly painful to deal with. She says, “My wrong.” The wrong here was the contempt, that is the contempt that was done to me, me upon you. Again, this was another, very well-established way of passing on a curse. I want to show you this by going to Genesis 27. This is the passage where Rebekah and Jacob were scheming to get the birthright and the blessing away from Isaac. So Isaac is blind and Rachel concocts this scheme where Jacob is going to make himself seem like Esau.
So she is making this oath that if indeed there is a curse, rather than come on Jacob it will come on her. Now that is at what Sarah did. She passed on her curse to Abram. Let us go back to another place and this time it is God speaking.
We are beginning to see that instead of securing the fulfillment of all of their desires, which was to have a son, an heir, a seed, to have the promise of God, instead they began to reap grief, frustration, and apparently they lost faith in the process.
Undoubtedly Hagar looked upon this as persecution. Let us think about this. God uses this same word in regard to the Day of Atonement.
If you look in Strong's Concordance at 6031, you will find him using such forceful and painful words to describe it as "browbeat," "deal hardly with," "defile," "force," and "ravish," among others. It is a strong word that will sometimes be translated into forms of "humble."
