The Bible Recap - Day 017 (Genesis 16-18) - Year 6

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

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Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap. Today is going to be longer than usual because this text is packed and I'm still going to barely skim the surface. So buckle up and if you're listening faster than 1x, you might want to slow this down to normal speed. In fact, you may even want to listen to this one twice. Yesterday, we ended with God making a covenant with Abram, and today we picked up to read a little bit of Sarah's story.

By this point, she's at least 75 years old, and she still has not had a child, even though God had promised Abram a child when he visibly appeared to him. So she does what many of us do when we feel like God is holding out on us. She takes matters into her own hands. In those days, servants were considered possessions,

which let me pause here to say this very important thing. This is one of those things in scripture that is descriptive, not prescriptive. It's telling us what is happening, not what should happen. This is not condoning treating people like possessions. But in that ancient culture, that's what was happening. And basically anything a servant owned, the master owned. So the child of a servant was considered the property of the master.

Sarai used that cultural norm as her logic behind making her servant have sex with her husband. Because then if the servant had a child, Sarai owned it. Sarai was tired of waiting. She wanted to take a shortcut. Have you ever been there? Let me give you cause to reconsider. Sarah's fear and impatience has yielded millennia of war and destruction that's still happening around the world today. What am I talking about?

Sarah's servant Hagar became pregnant with the child she would name Ishmael, and Ishmael is widely considered to be the line through which Islam began, because Muhammad's ancestry is traced back to Ishmael. Years later, when Sarai and Abram finally had their first child together, whose name was Isaac, he begins the line of Abram from which the Israelites descend. Genetically, the Israelites of the Old Testament are the Jewish people of today. And in case you aren't up on politics or world news, Muslims and Jews have been at war for basically 4,000 years. Point being, our sin affects others. We never sin in isolation.

So, unlike Sarai, don't let your fears or your mistrust of God determine your actions. Okay, moving on. After Hagar got pregnant, Sarai abused her and Hagar fled from the home into the wilderness, pregnant, abused, and alone. Then in 16.7, something very important happens. Let me set this up for us. Sometimes in scripture, we see the term, an angel of the Lord.

That phrase refers to a messenger angel who shows up on the scene to deliver a message sent by God to humans. But in this instance, the text says, The Angel of the Lord. And that's entirely different. When you see the phrase, The Angel of the Lord, or more specifically, the messenger of Yahweh, it's referring to the pre-incarnate Jesus. The term pre-incarnate just means before he was born. So all signs point to

this being God the Son appearing on earth before he was born as a human named Jesus. The word for these kind of divine earthly appearances is theophany, which means a visible manifestation of God. And this particular kind of theophany, where God the Son shows up, is called the Christophany, after Christ. Yesterday we talked about a different kind of theophany, where God the Son shows up, is called the Christophany, after Christ. Yesterday we talked about a different kind of theophany, where God the Father appeared as fire in the covenant ceremony with Abram. But in this instance, God the Son shows up as a man.

You're probably like, no, no, Tera Lee, it was an angel, not a man. You're right, and so am I. First of all, forget what you know about angels from Renaissance paintings. Most of those artists appeared to have not read the Bible at all. Exhibit A, they give us a blond-haired blue-eyed Jesus, even though he was a Jewish man who likely wore a turban.

And Exhibit B, they give us flying, haloed angels with two wings. No angels in Scripture have two wings. Messenger angels, like the ones that showed up on earth to speak to people, have zero wings. Scripture always depicts them as human males who speak the local language. And some people believe they are really large and imposing, especially since the possibly related Nephilim from Genesis 6 were giants. If angels are giants, that could account for why people are so afraid of angels when they show up on the scene. But that could also be because they seem to materialize out of thin air.

Personally, I like to think it's both of those reasons. There are a few forms of created beings that do have wings, but none of them are specifically messenger angels. There are cherubim, which have four wings and four faces, and seraphim, which have six wings. And for both of those creatures, their wings are covered with eyeballs. You will never see that in a Renaissance painting.

But how do we know this angel man was God? A few reasons. In 1610, he says, I will multiply your offspring. Angels can't do that. Only God can do that. Then 1613 says, it was the Lord who had spoken to Hagar. I have to speed through chapter 17 here, even though it covers a lot of important stuff

like how God changes Abram's name to Abraham, how he again promises Abraham the land of the Canaanites, how he orders Abraham and all his male descendants to be circumcised. And by the way, verses 23 and 26 tell us that Abraham and Ishmael were circumcised that very day. Abraham was not playing around with delayed obedience. God also changes Sarah's name to Sarah, and he promises to bless her, even though we don't

have any evidence of her repenting for how she mistreated Hagar. God visibly appears to Abraham again and repeats his promise to give Abraham a child, but this time God clarifies that Sarah will be the birth mother of the child, even though it should have been obvious, so that there's no more of this nonsense where they try to find a loophole. Both Abraham and Sarah laugh at this promise at different points, because Abraham is like 100

and Sarah is 90. Abraham actually fell on his face and laughed. It's hard to tell if that's worship or irreverence. We get another theophany in chapter 18. Today is just chock full of God's earthly appearances. Again, there are references to the Lord appearing to him in verse 1, along with two other men who are identified later in 19.1 as angels. Also, you may have noticed that when it said the Lord appeared,

that was in all caps L-O-R-D like we talked about on day one. This is Y-H-W-H, God's personal name, often pronounced Yahweh or Jehovah. Abraham is a pretty powerful rich man, but he was so struck by God's appearance on earth that he bowed down in reverence and offered worship. And he did not want God to leave. He wanted to stay in God's presence. Verse 10 confirms again that this was God by saying the all caps Lord said, I will surely return to you about this time next year. Verse 19 confirms this again when he says, I have chosen him. I could keep going, but I'll finish with this last one.

In verse 25, when Abraham is begging God not to destroy Sodom, which God is saying he's going to do, Abraham respectfully refers to him as the judge of all the earth. Now I go back and forth on this, but I'm inclined to believe that this particular theophany was not a Christophany, that this was not God the Son.

This was, I believe, God the Father showing up as a human. I'm used to the idea of God the Son's divine appearance as a human because he was Jesus, but not God the Father with skin. It honestly just blows my mind and makes me want to stop talking. But I can't stop talking before we cover our God shout for today. What was yours? Mine was early on in the passage when the story zooms in on Hagar, the slave who had been forced to sleep with her 85-year-old master, then was basically driven

out of her home and forced into the desert, where God shows up. He rebukes her a little bit, but then he makes her a promise. To be clear, Ishmael is not the child of the promise, but God still promises to multiply Hagar's offspring, and he fulfills that promise. Honestly, God really has no reason to pay special attention to her as far as loyalties are concerned. His commitment is to a specific family that she doesn't belong to. But because she has lived with that family, she knows who he is, and she knows what he is capable of.

She even gives him a name, El Roy, which means the God who sees, or the God who sees me. The pre-incarnate Christ shows up in the form of an angel man foretelling the birth of her child. And it might have been kind of a downer because he also tells her how that childish male in his offspring would become an enemy of God's people, but I bet in that moment she cared far more about the fact that God spoke to her at all in the midst of her plight. God sees and he's merciful and he is where the joy is. Are you a note taker?

Some of you have tagged us in pictures on social media where your journal is crammed with notes and we love that. But if you find yourself having to rewind and pause and listen back at half speed, then I have some great news for you. We have transcripts and we have two options for how you can get those. Option A is by joining the ReCaptains. As a ReCaptain at the transcript tier or higher, we'll send you the transcripts for each week as we move through the reading plan. If you're interested in Option A, check for a link in the show notes or click the Recaptans link at thebiblerecap.com.

And for option B, we have single episode transcripts available in the TBR store. So if all you want is one transcript, that's a great place to go. For option B, check for a link in today's show notes or click the store link at thebiblerecap.com. Happy New Year.

Maybe you've pulled out a journal to write down what you want for 2024, or maybe you've posted about your New Year's resolutions on social media. It's always wise to have a vision for the future, but we don't want to be so focused on our own plans that we fail to think about God's purposes for our lives. Thankfully, God has already revealed some of the things He has for us. To find out more, click the link in the show notes for some words from my friends at Hope Nation.