In this insightful episode, we discuss the tension between human effort and divine promise as illustrated in the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar. Unpack the biblical allegories and Paul’s teachings that challenge us to reflect on trust and obedience in our spiritual journeys. How do ancient texts offer wisdom on the complex relationships between law and faith, and what can we learn to apply in our contemporary struggles with religious dogma and personal belief?
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
SPEAKER 02 :
There is nothing new about surrogate motherhood, you know. Actually, it’s been done for generations. No, it’s been done for hundreds and thousands of years, actually. Nowadays, it’s done by, well, artificial means, artificial insemination. They take a sperm. Sometimes they even make an embryo in a test tube and then implant it in the mother to give birth to it. But in the ancient world, they did it the old-fashioned way, and I expect you’re old enough that I don’t have to explain to you how that worked. Now, you may not know, though, that there is an example of surrogate motherhood in the Bible. And it caused as many problems then as it does today. The only difference is there don’t appear to have been any lawyers making any money on the deal. The infertile woman was named Sarah. Her husband was Abraham. And in Genesis 16, verse 1, we read this. Now Sarah, Abraham’s wife, bare him no children. And she had a handmaid, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar. So Sarah said to Abraham, Look, God has restrained me from bearing any children. I pray you go in to my maid. It may be that I may obtain children by her. And Abraham said, Okay. Now there’s no record of how Abraham felt about this. Mind you, he is around 85 at this time, and Sarah is 75 years old. So her statement that she wasn’t going to have any children seemed very reasonable. In fact, there was rationale behind the whole thing. God had promised that Abraham would have a son, and he didn’t have one. And Sarah was past childbearing age, so maybe they weren’t doing their part. Maybe they should take matters into their own hands, so to speak. Abraham was getting older. Sarah’s not going to have any children. Hagar is probably fertile. It would be nice to have a baby around the house, so why don’t you, you know. Well, yeah, I do know. And you know how it goes, you know, when you want to do something and when you want something, there’s always plenty of rationalization at hand. Normally, men are better at this than women, I think. We can’t very well own up to the fact that this new car we want to buy, we’re just buying on impulse. So we crank up our rationalization machine. The old car is costing too much on maintenance. Well, the other morning, just the other morning, it was very slow in starting. Who knows what morning it will let me down, and I won’t even be able to get to work. I need a new car to get to work. One thing you can count on, that when one of your guys you work with stops being proud of his car and starts calling it that old piece of junk, you know that a change is afoot. Well, women can find their own reason for doing things. She might say, well, I like the color of the car, so I bought it. Makes sense to me. But Sarah wanted a baby, and she thought her handmaid could provide her with one. And Sarah Abram’s wife took Hagar, her maid, the Egyptian, after they lived ten years in Canaan, and she gave her to her husband to be his wife. And he went in unto Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, everything changed. Mind you, she was nothing but a slave girl. But now she had been elevated to the position kind of wife, or at least concubine. And because having children was so important and so valuable, and the thing that she was carrying inside of her was so precious, she began to consider how much more important she was to Abraham than Sarah. She was wrong, but that’s the way she looked at it. And her mistress, the Scripture tells us, was despised in her eyes. Now Sarah was definitely not thinking when she got into this. Because in a society where children are that important, the wife who has children has more status than the wife who doesn’t. Hagar went from handmaid to number one woman in the household overnight. Well, Sarah went to Abraham and said, I was wrong. I’m sorry. My wrong is now on you. I’ve given my maid to your bosom, and then when she saw that she had conceived, she now hates me. Well, the Lord has to judge. It’s my fault. But Abram said to Sarah, Well, your maid is in your hand. You do to her as it pleases you. And when Sarah started trying to really straighten out the attitudes that were involved in it, well, Hagar couldn’t handle it, and she fled from her face. Things just hadn’t worked out. Well, Hagar finds her way into the wilderness and finds a spring out there, and she lies down by the spring on the way. And an angel of the Lord found her there, and the angel said, Where have you come from, and where are you going? And she said, Well, I’m fleeing from the face of my mistress Sarah. And the angel of the Lord said to her, Return to your mistress and submit yourself under her hands. Now, Hagar had brought some of her problem upon herself by getting uppity. Go home and submit, God said, and you’ll be okay. Then he gives her a really fascinating prophecy. The angel of the Lord said to her, I’m going to multiply your seed exceedingly so that it cannot even be numbered for multitude. Now, wait a minute. This is about the same thing he said to Abraham back when about his descendants. So in a way, I guess it makes sense, because since God had promised that Abraham’s seed would be a great multitude, this kid is going to be Abraham’s seed, so he’s entitled to at least some of the blessing, some of the promise that God made to Abraham. The angel of the Lord said to her, Behold, you are with child, and you’ll bear a son, and you’ll call his name Ishmael, because the Lord has heard your affliction. As for Ishmael, he will be a wild ass of a man. His hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand will be against him, and he shall dwell in hostility toward all his brothers. The boy to be born was Abraham’s son. So the promise given to Abraham concerning his children had to be honored. But Ishmael was not the son. and he would ultimately be driven away. There is an incredible, incredible staggering irony in all this. Ishmael, Abraham’s son, is the father of all the tribes of the Arabian people. To this day, they take fierce pride in the fact that Abraham is their father. Well, the problem is that Abraham is also the father of the Jews. Have you ever wondered why Hebron in Israel keeps popping up in the news as the source of Israeli and Palestinian conflict? Why it is that they’re constantly fighting over that town? Perhaps it will help if you understand that Hebron is where Abraham is buried. Yeah, Abraham bought a piece of land there after Sarah died, and he buried her in a cave on that land. And later, they put him in there as well in Hebron. There is a mosque. And when you go inside, there is a room where there is an opening into a subterranean cavern below. And down there, there is a flame, a perpetual flame burning that you can see down through that hole that people, I guess, take care of by reaching down to it. Tradition says that the bodies of Abraham, Sarah, and perhaps other patriarchs are in that cave. And I think it’s very likely that they are there. Right now, that spot is under the control of the Arabs. They’re very jealous of it and very jealous of their father. And the tension that exists between them and the Jews over this piece of land and all the land around it has its roots all the way back to the book of Genesis. And by a terrible accident of fate, Those peoples descended from Ishmael sit on most of the world’s supply of oil. And the description of him as a wild ass of a man who is hostile to all the people who are around him and against everybody, well, it sort of fits. A gentleman who wrote a short history of the Arab people said that, you know, the Arab people have never in their entire history been united for any, even a short period of time, except under force of arms. They want to be free. They want to roam the desert. They are a wild people. Now, there was a time when they seemed to have conquered most of the known world. They went clean across Asia. They went over into northern Africa. They cut up into Europe, into Spain. And Islam was the religion of most of the Mediterranean world. Most of those people accepted Islam because of a simple formula. Wherever they went with a sword of Islam, that sword was put to the neck of the people and they were given a choice. Accept Islam or die. It is probably the most effective missionary effort ever in the history of the world. And it was the sons of Ishmael who brought it off. Wild men, conquering men, warring men, and their hostility toward their brothers is still there to this day. One wonders sometimes how there can ever be peace in the Middle East as long as the sons of Abraham, both branches of them, are still there.
SPEAKER 01 :
I’ll be back after these words. You already know that biblical prophecy can be hard to understand. What you may not know is that without a grasp of history, it is next to impossible. Write for a free introductory program in our series on history and prophecy. It will open up a whole new world of Bible study. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44.
SPEAKER 02 :
So Hagar went home and had her boy. And they named him Ishmael. Abraham was 86 years old when Ishmael was born. And the son… and his mother turned out to be nothing but trouble in the years to come. But Abraham loved the boy. I mean, after all, he was his son. He would, however, have another son, whom he would name Isaac, and all the great promises of God to Abram would be fulfilled in that line, not in Ishmael. But there’s a lesson in this event that has to be considered. It must not be overlooked. Paul chooses this event to explain the difference in the New Testament between works and grace. Now, unfortunately, Paul is often misunderstood in this, but let’s give it a try and see if we can grasp what Paul is driving at. The account in question is found in Galatians chapter 4. Paul says, Tell me, you that desire to be under the law, do you not hear the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a free woman. But he who was born of the bondwoman was born after the flesh. He that was of the free woman was by promise. Now you know the story. Hagar was the bondwoman. We didn’t get so far in Genesis to hear the story of Isaac and realize that Sarah is the free woman by whom the son who was the heir, Isaac, was born. Now in Abraham’s day, the son of a slave was a slave. So even though Ishmael was Abraham’s son, and Abraham came to love him, God never considered the son of a slave to be the heir. He had made a promise, and this wasn’t it. Now what Paul means by born after the flesh is that Ishmael was the result of Abraham and Sarah’s physical solution to the problem. not God’s solution to the problem. And the truth is that there is often an agony in people between the question of doing what you can to make things happen on the one hand or waiting on the promise of God on the other. God promises to heal, for example, but when you have a broken arm, common sense tells you to go get the arm set. Don’t just sit there and wait for God to heal it without doing what you can. And this is where the tension between obedience and grace comes in. For how do we know when we are supposed to take matters into our own hands, as Abraham and Sarah did, and created loads of problems that exist with us all the way down to this day, on the one hand, or waiting on God and letting Him take care of it? Paul answers the question for the Galatians, And in the process, he creates some confusion for us. In fact, there may be reason to believe he created some confusion for the Galatians, too. But we just hope that they understood what he was driving at. Now, the tension in Galatia was caused by those who assumed that the law was itself a saving instrument. that the law affected salvation. But before I go on with the story with Genesis and Galatians, let me see if I can clarify the relationship between God, man, and the law. When you give an offering to God, do you make him any richer? Well, not likely, right? Because the fact is God owns everything, you included, so whenever you give him something, you haven’t really accomplished very much. Now, when you keep a law, do you make God any greater? Well, no, you really don’t. Do you give God any benefit when you obey the law? No. If you break the law, what do you take away from God? Is God somehow diminished because you break one of his laws? Well, obviously not. There’s a short passage from the book of Job that I really like because it puts the whole question in perspective. It’s in Job 35 and verse 5. Look to the heavens and see. Look at the clouds that are higher than you are. If you sin, what do you do against him? If your transgression are multiplied, what do you do to him? In other words, if you hurt God somehow, you’re going to cause him some problem by committing sins? Then he says, if you are righteous, what do you give him, or what does he receive of your hand? He’s asking exactly the same question I just asked. And then he comes to this conclusion. Your wickedness may hurt a man like you, and your righteousness may profit a man like you. For some reason, men fall very easily into the assumption that if they keep the law of God, they have somehow gained points with God. And then, when they come to Galatians and see that it is not so, then they fall easily into the assumption, well, if there’s no gain in keeping the law, then the law is abolished. But wait, wait, nobody said that there is no gain in keeping the law. They said it profits the man. It profits you. It does not profit God. But that’s not quite the same thing as saying that the law is not of any value. The assumption they make that the law is abolished, I think, is totally unwarranted. They see the law as the controlling factor in the relationship with God in the Old Testament. I think a lot of Christians assume that. They read their New Testament, they read Galatians, and they think, well, now, in the Old Testament, the law was the controlling authority of a man’s relationship with God. It was not. If it had been, David would not have had the relationship with God that he had because he was a sinful man. a violent man. And yet, strangely, the Old Testament tells us that David was a man after God’s own heart. Strange, isn’t it? He had a relationship with God, and that relationship with God was not accomplished by obedience to the law. The law was revealed to help man, not to help God. Our wickedness hurts us, not God. Our righteousness helps us, not God. The problem is with Abraham and Sarah pursuing their own way of fulfilling the promise of God, was that it expressed a lack of trust. It says, I just have lost confidence that God is going to do anything about this, so I guess we have to do it ourselves. Relationships, you know, aren’t built on rules. They are built on trust. For the closer the relationship is, The more trust you have got to have in one another, and the more committed to one another you’ve got to be. Now, what had happened in Galatia was that some people had attempted to build the relationship on rules instead of on trust. And Paul comes along and says, I’m sorry, folks, that won’t work. Paul wasn’t abolishing the rules. The rules are good for man, and they arise out of the nature of man. But the rules don’t create the relationship with God, right? That ought to be simple enough for anyone to understand. Now, breaking the rules consistently can wreck the relationship with God. It reveals a lack of trust in the one who revealed the rules. But you can’t build it with the law. Now, maybe we can understand the phrase, Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness. He trusted God and that created the basis for the relationship with God. Now, continuing in the book of Galatians, chapter 4, verse 22, Paul says it is written that Abraham had two sons. Now we know who they are. They are Ishmael and Isaac. One by a bondmaid, and we know who she is. She’s Hagar. The other by a free woman. We know her. Her name is Sarah. He who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh, that is, after the machinations of Abraham and Sarah. He that was born of the free woman was as a result of a promise, because I think Sarah was 90 years old plus when she got pregnant with Isaac, the natural way. Now these things, Paul says… are an allegory. These are the two covenants, the one from Mount Sinai, which genders to bondage, that’s Agar. This Agar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and answers to Jerusalem, which now is and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem, which is above, is free, which is the mother of us all. Now, allegories and analogies are treacherous beasts, especially after 2,000 years in translation from one language to another and one culture to another. But I’ll try to explain this analogy to you when we come back after these words.
SPEAKER 01 :
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SPEAKER 02 :
Paul presents us with an allegory. Actually, it’s really an analogy, not an allegory, but let’s not quibble. He draws contrast between these things. First of all, Hagar is contrasted with Sarah. Then the two of them are compared to the two covenants. Mount Sinai is compared to Jerusalem that exists now on the earth, and it’s contrasted to the Jerusalem above. And finally, bondage is contrasted with freedom. Now, it’s very hard to see how Paul could have considered the Mount Sinai covenant to be a form of bondage. The Ten Commandments, for example, are called in the New Testament the law of liberty. And the whole idea of the law of God was to set a man free. However, it did lead to bondage when Israel broke the covenant. And by the time Paul wrote Galatians, the majority of the Jews in Jerusalem had confused the idea of covenant. The law became an end of itself, and the law became the instrument of righteousness. You find it again and again in Jesus’ confrontations with the Pharisees that they did not understand the role of the law, that the law was made for man, not man for the law. Not only that, but in the hands of the religious establishment, the law and the covenant had become an instrument of control, and hence it was an instrument of bondage. It’s really strange in a way that something that God gave to man that was so good, so clear, and really in many ways relatively easy, and easy enough to understand, a law, a code that defines right from wrong, that a person is supposed to take and internalize and use as a guide in his own life. How does something like that become bondage? Well, any time a religious establishment is created, it has very much at stake in terms of the control, because if you can’t control what’s going on, the establishment can’t last. And it’s very common for establishments then like that to get involved with making rules. And the law of God is a very convenient framework into which to build those rules. And this happened in spades in Israel of old, or actually and particularly in the time of Christ with the Pharisees. Now it was apparently this idea that was being translated into Galatia. The law, not as a revelation of the difference between right and wrong, but the law as a controlling authority. being manipulated by someone to bring other people to heal. Hence, Paul’s idea of bondage. Not that the law was bondage, but that it had been used to bondage by men. You should really always keep in mind that when Paul speaks of liberty, he is not talking about being liberated from the law. He’s talking about liberty from men who abuse the law to abuse people. Continuing with Paul to the Galatians, Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise. But as then he that was born of the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, it’s the same way now. We didn’t get to that in Genesis, but in fact, Isaac was persecuted somewhat by Ishmael. And he said it’s that way now. That is, the people who are bound by the rules and the people who are trying to use the rules to control people. are now causing trouble to those who are the children of promise. But what does the Scripture say? It says, Cast out the bondwoman and her son, for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the free woman. He can’t inherit alongside. So, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free. You know, there’s a persistent and ugly problem that rears its head in religion wherever religion goes. It’s the attempt by the few to gain control over the many. Some of the ugliest manifestations of this are found in the cult tragedies of Jim Jones in Guyana and David Koresh in Waco. But there’s an enormous amount of damage that’s done to people’s lives in much more subtle ways, as churches, sometimes single churches, sometimes church organizations, oppress people with rules and laws to control them instead of simply teaching the right way so that people can make their own decisions, so they can live by the directions of God in their own life. This practice can crop up in any church, anywhere, anytime, when the few use a doctrine, a law, or a method, or a practice to gain control over the many. Paul seems to have had a special loathing for the controlling legalist that kept cropping up in the church in his own day. A lot of times people read Paul and they think that he is opposed or against the law somehow or teaches the abolition of the law. Nothing could be further from the truth. What Paul is opposed to are those religious establishments that use the law as a means of creating the relationship with God. instead of trust being the basis of that relationship. The lesson, I think, is that when you do things your own way, whenever you pursue like Sarah and Abraham and Hagar did, working out your own solution to the problems instead of trusting God, the law of unintended consequences comes into play. In the case of Ishmael, a wild ass of a man who to this day can create long lines at gas stations all the way around the world. Until next time, this is Ronald Dard. Remember, you were born to win.
SPEAKER 01 :
The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to… you may call us toll free at 1-888-BIBLE-44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.
