The Experience

Reading: Genesis 16

Trying to do God’s will can be a challenge. Sometimes it’s a challenge because of temptation or selfish desires, but other times, even good motives and our attempts at the “right” actions aren’t enough.

For years, God had been telling Abram that he was going to be the head of a big family, despite the fact that his wife, Sarai, was barren. Often this promise was more of an assumption—really, just an aside in a larger promise—than a specific topic of conversation.

But in Genesis 15, Abram calls God on it. God’s promised Abram protection and rewards, but Abram replies:

O Sovereign Lord, what good are all your blessings when I don’t even have a son? Since you’ve given me no children, Eliezer of Damascus, a servant in my household, will inherit all my wealth. You have given me no descendants of my own, so one of my servants will be my heir.

Despite this kind-of-whiny approach, God gets specific in his promise:

Then the Lord said to him, “No, your servant will not be your heir, for you will have a son of your own who will be your heir.” Then the Lord took Abram outside and said to him, “Look up into the sky and count the stars if you can. That’s how many descendants you will have!”

“Excellent!” Abram must be thinking. God makes a covenant with Abram, complete with a ritual and a vision, and everything’s good. Except…

Abram waits and waits. No son. Waits some more. Still no son.

We don’t get an actual timeline for this bit (at least not that I’m seeing), but at the beginning of chapter 16 of Genesis, we’re told that the action starts 10 years after Abram settled in the land of Canaan, so it’s probably been a couple of years.

We don’t see any more recorded conversations with God in the meantime, and I can understand why Abram and his wife, Sarai, start to doubt. Not that they doubt God’s promise, mind you. They just wonder if they aren’t supposed to be taking some initiative.

So Sarai comes up with a plan: she has a younger servant, and she convinces Abram to sleep with her to produce a son. This is a bit shocking to our modern, Western sensibilities, but in their culture, the only real suprise is that it didn’t happen earlier—apparently it was a common solution to the “problem” of infertility.

Sure enough, the servant, Hagar, conceives, and everything quickly goes downhill. Sarai realizes she actually isn’t okay with this arrangement, and she blames Abram, who refuses to get involved. Sarai takes her anger out on the pregnant Hagar, who runs away, and it’s pretty much a big mess.

And this is where it gets tricky for me. It’s tricky because the whole mess could have been avoided if Sarai and Abram had been patient—but they would have had to have been really patient, because it took about 13 more years before God moved forward with the “you’re gonna have a son” plan.

13 years is a long time to wait—and that’s on top of however many years they waited before getting Hagar involved.

To make it worse, they didn’t have any crystal-clear instruction from God before that point that they were supposed to wait for Sarai to get pregnant. Today, we’d get fertility treatment; back then, a “substitute wife” was the closest equivalent.

This leaves me with the perplexing question: when am I supposed to take action, and when am I supposed to truly wait on God? Because my personality is always going to jump to “take action,” but clearly that’s not always in line with God’s plan.

So how do I know which is which? How do you know?