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 … . . .
The way to Shur was a pretty heavily traveled road at that time, about 40 or 50 miles south of the southeastern edge or shoreline of the Mediterranean Sea, it runs between Beersheba and central Egypt. Undoubtedly she was headed on her way back to Egypt using that road to get there.
The Angel of the Lord, as you probably picked up there is really Yahweh, Melchizedek, God who was there. She recognized that. He promised her a son and innumerable multitude of seed. This at least was partly for Abraham’s faith because what was in her womb was also a seed, a son of Abram. Her seed though, her child was not the promised heir. But still, she was going to be honored because he was Abraham’s, that is the recipient of the promise because he was Abraham’s son. Therefore came the blessing of the innumerable seed.
Ishmael means, “God hears.” What it is implying is that God heard her at her time of distress. Ishmael is kind of interesting, and what God says about him is indicative of the kind of man that he turned out to be. This does not mean that he was bad, it does not mean that at all. We are just making a comparison here with one of the beasts of the desert that indicates the personality of the man.
What it says here is that “He shall be a wild man.” Now what it literally says in Hebrew is “a wild ass of a man.” The reference here is to a “wild ass,” a donkey. It roams the desert area, somehow or another it is adapted to surviving in wilderness areas that did not support the life of many other animals.
That description is given in contrast to what Hagar was going through. She was being oppressed, that is why she fled, oppressed by Sarai, by Sarai’s anger. So God says, this is a blessing to Hagar, that her son will not feel that kind of oppression. In other words, he is going to be living the kind of life that is free, independent.
So Ishmael and his descendants, the Bedouins, will be free, they will be free roaming the desert on horse, on camel, they will be a hardy, frugal people, we might even say reveling in the beauty of the nature of that area. Surviving life in virtually every form and living in an almost constant state of feuds with one another and their neighbors. In other words, there would be a nature there that would have them, what we might call today, a kind of free spirit, roaming the desert, not wanting to become involved in city life.
Another thing that it says, “And he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.” The brethren here that God is referring to is undoubtedly the descendants of Abraham who would come through Isaac. Again, it literally says that “he will dwell before the face or the presence of,” meaning they will be neighbors of one another. So they will be in the same general area as the children of Abram, however, they will be independent of them. Interesting in the light of what is going on in the Middle East today.
Hagar recognized that she had seen God. She thought that she should die. But she did not. Here she was, still alive. Then she names the well, pretty much literally translated, “the well of being alive.” Now it seems to me, if you are a God of peace, you are a God of seeing, He is the all-seeing One, whose all seeing eye of helplessness and forsaken, meaning herself, is not hidden even in the farthest corner of the desert.
It became then, a very well recognized spot, because there she had seen God, and named the well because God had seen her.