Transcript of Day 017 (Genesis 16-18) - Year 8

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 one X, 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 Abraham, and today we picked 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 Abraham 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 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 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 Abraham finally have their first child together, whose name is Isaac, he begins the line of Abraham from which the Israelis descend. Genetically, the Israelis 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 Sari, don't let your fears or impatience or your mistrust of God determine your actions. And lest you think I'm pitting 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, Sari abuses her and Hagar flees from the home into the wilderness 'donus', 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. 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/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. And that's entirely different. When you see the phrase the angel of the Lord, or more specifically, the messenger of Yahweh, most scholars agree that that's a reference 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.

So for all of you who say you can't wait to get to the New Testament when we can read about Jesus, guess what? He's here. He's been here all along. The word for these divine, earthly appearances is theophony, which means a visible manifestation of God. And this particular theophony, where God the Son shows up, is called a a Christophonie after Christ. Yesterday, we talked about a different theophonie, where God the Father appears as fire in the covenant ceremony with Abraham. But in this instance, God the Son shows up as a man. You're probably like, No, no, Taralee, it's 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 appear to have not read the Bible at all. Exhibit A, they give us a blonde-haired, blue-eye Jesus, even though he was a Jewish man who likely wore a turban. And Exhibit B, they give us flying haloed angels with wings. No angels in scripture have two wings. Messenger angels, like the ones that show up on Earth to speak to people, have zero wings. Scripture always depicts them as adult human males who speak the local language.

And some people believe they are really large and imposing, especially since the possibly related Nephalim from Genesis 6 were giants. If angels do appear as 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 these 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 these creatures, their wings are covered with eyeballs. You will never see that in a Renaissance painting. But how do we know this angel man is 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. And pretty much every time we see the angel of the Lord appear in the Old Testament, we see him saying and doing things only God can say and do. I have to speed through chapter 17 here, even though it covers a lot of important stuff like how God changes 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 are circumcised that very day. Abraham is 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 Abraham a child, but this time he clarifies that Sarah will be the birth mother of the child, even though it should have been obvious. So 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 theophony in chapter 18. Today is just chuck full of God's earthly appearances. Again, there are references to the Lord appearing to Abraham in verse one, along with two other men who are identified later in 19: 1 as angels. Also, you may have noticed that when it says the Lord appears, that it's 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 like Yahweh or Jehovah. Abraham is a pretty powerful, rich man, but he is so struck by God's God's appearance on earth that he bowels down in reference and offers worship. And he does not want God to leave. He wants to stay in God's presence. Verse 10 confirms again that this is God by saying, The all caps L-O-R-D 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 is what he's 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 theophony was not a Christophony, 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 is 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 shot for today. What was yours? Mine was early on in the passage when the story zooms in on Hagar, the slave who's been forced to sleep with her 85-year-old master, then is 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's 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 a downer because he also tells her how that child, Ishmael, and his offspring would become an enemy of God's people.

But I bet in that moment, She cares far more about the fact that God speaks to her at all in the midst of her plight. God sees, and he's merciful, and he's where the joy is.

Many of you are new to the Bible Recap, or TBR, as we like to call it. So I want to introduce you to the TBR team. You might be surprised at everything that goes into bringing you the Bible Recap every day. And here are the people who help make that happen. You already know me, Tara Lee. I research, write, and record TBR. Now, let me tell you about our behind-the-scenes team. Emily Piquel is our Recaptains Manager and the TBR Kids podcast host, Ms. Emily. Abby Dane manages our communications and oversees church partnerships. Brooklyn Stuart runs our TBR store. Sari Yocam, Emily Truax, and Sally F. Phillips oversee our social media. Arlette Blackwell manages La Sinopsis De La Biblia. Kirsten McClosky and Emma Daueter are the hosts of TBR Deep Dive, our companion podcast. Laura Buchelt helps with TBR operations. Olivia Lee and Emily Watkins and Jen Hubbard are my assistants. And Bonnie Hartwig, our TBR director, leads the whole TBR team. What a team. I'm so grateful for all they do so that you and I can read, understand, and love the Bible together.