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Full Episode
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 the 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 might 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 Sarai'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 uses that cultural norm as her logic behind making her servant have sex with her husband. Because then, if the servant has a child, Sarai owns it. Sarai is tired of waiting. She wants to take a shortcut. Have you ever been there? Let me give you cause to reconsider.
Sarai's fear and impatience has yielded millennia of war and destruction that's still happening around the world today. What am I talking about? Sarai's servant Hagar becomes pregnant with a child she will name Ishmael, and Ishmael is widely considered to be the line through which Islam began, because Muslims trace Muhammad's ancestry back to Ishmael.
Years later, when Sarai and Abram finally have their first child together, whose name is Isaac, he begins the line of Abraham 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, these two people groups, who eventually become known as the Muslims and the Jews, have been at war for basically 4,000 years. Point being, our sin affects others. We never sin in a vacuum. So unlike Sarai, don't let your fears or impatience or your mistrust of God determine your actions.
And lest you think I'm pinning all the blame on her, I'm not. Countless other scenarios and people laid the groundwork for this situation. Okay, moving on. After Hagar gets pregnant, Sarai abuses her and Hagar flees from the home into the wilderness, pregnant, abused, and alone. Then, in 1607, something very important happens. Let me set this up for us.
Sometimes in scripture, we see the term an angel of the Lord. The word angel means messenger. And specifically, they serve as messengers between God and humanity. So the phrase an angel of the Lord refers to a messenger slash 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, not an angel of the Lord.
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