Alright, Genesis chapter 16,
we'll begin reading with verse 1. Now Sarai, Abraham's wife,
actually at this point it's just Abram, his name has not been
changed to Abraham yet, had born him no children. Now
to give you an idea of what age we're talking about, she's 75
at this point, and Abram is about 85. But she had an Egyptian maidservant
named Hagar. So she said to Abram, the Lord
has kept me from having children. Go sleep with my maidservant.
Perhaps I can build a family through her. Abraham agreed to
what Sarah said. So after Abraham had been living
in Canaan ten years, Sarai, his wife, took her Egyptian maid
servant, Hagar, and gave her to her husband to be his wife.
He slept with Hagar, and she conceived. When she knew she
was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. Then Sarai said
to Abram, You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering.
I put my servant in your arms, and now that she knows she is
pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you
and me. Your servant is in your hands,
Abram said. Do with her whatever you think
best. Then Sarai mistreated Hagar.
So she, that is Hagar, fled from her. The angel of the Lord, and
that's the Lord Jesus Christ as he was before he was born
of Mary. The angel of the Lord found Hagar
near a spring in the desert. It was the spring that is beside
the road to shore. And he said, Hagar, servant of
Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going? I'm
running away from my mistress Sarai, she answered. Then the
angel of the Lord told her, go back to your mistress and submit
to her. The angel added, I will so increase your descendants
that they will be too numerous to count. The angel of the Lord
also said to her, you are now with child and you will have
a son. You shall name him Ishmael, which means God hears. You shall
name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery. He will be a wild donkey of a
man. his hand will be against everyone, and everyone's hand
against him, he will live in hostility toward all his brothers. She gave this name to the Lord,
who spoke to her, You are the God who sees me. For she said,
I have seen the one who sees me. That is why the well was
called Bir Lahairoi. It is still there. between Kadesh
and Bered. So Hagar bore Abram a son, and
Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne. Abram
was 86 years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael." The story started
when he was 85 and ended when he was 86. Now, the Lord God
uses the most unlikely situations to bring forth the most glorious
results. And in the midst of the biggest
messes that man can create, God sets a jewel of truth, a shining
example of his sovereign grace. Think of this story. Now, Hagar,
and this is what we're going to focus on, Hagar said, I have
seen the one who sees me. And that's the basic theme. But consider the circumstances
from which these words of Hagar come. First of all, Hagar is
an Egyptian. Now, Egypt has always been used
in the scriptures as an example of the world as opposed to God. And it would show that example
in a few hundred years, most of all when God called his people,
Jacob's descendants, out of Egypt and Egypt did everything it could
to stop it. And God punished Egypt terribly
for its rebellion. And the redemption of the Jews,
which pictures our redemption, that redemption was from their
slavery and bondage in Egypt. So that puts Egypt in ill light.
Hagar comes from there. She is a Gentile of whom it is
written, and you can turn if you want, Ephesians chapter 1,
note the condition of Gentiles. And brethren, that's you and
me. I don't believe there's anybody here that's predominantly Jewish,
in your heredity. So, we're Gentiles. Notice how
the Bible described our condition before Christ appeared. Ephesians
chapter 1, no it is chapter 2. Verse 11, Therefore remember
that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth, and called uncircumcised
by those who call themselves the circumcision, that done in
the body by the hands of men, remember... Now just notice how
awful. This description is, remember
that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship
in Israel, and foreigners to the covenants of promise without
a hope and without God in this world. Now you cannot find a
more horrible description to be applied to anybody, but that
was the situation of the Gentile nations before Christ came. The Jewish nation was a rather
small nation compared to all that made up the world, and yet
the Jewish nation was the only ones that heard from God, the
only ones to whom God made any promises, the only ones to whom
God revealed the promises of Christ, the only ones with whom
God entered into covenant. Every other nation, God just
left them in darkness. And so ingrained was this in
the Jewish mind. that it was very hard for them
to come to terms with the fact that once Christ came and fulfilled
the demands of the new covenant, that the Jews were no longer
in a special relationship with God, but in Christ there is neither
Jew nor Gentile. Gentiles are received on the
same basis that a Jew is. Faith in Christ. Well, now we
go back, what, 2,500 years? Maybe not quite that long. Maybe
a couple thousand years to the time of Abraham. And here we
have Abraham, who was the head of that entire Jewish nation.
And at this point, he and his wife, you might say, are the
only heirs of the promise, the only covenant people in all the
world. Hagar was in their household.
But she was aliens, strangers to the covenant, without hope,
and without God in the world. So you got this Hagar, she's
an Egyptian. Not only that, she's a slave. No one has any business
owning another person, yet even men of faith, God's people, have
owned slaves. It's horrible, but it's true.
You know, you and I, we look at, from our modern viewpoint,
we look back on slavery and we think, how could that ever happen
in the United States of America? Brethren, slavery has always
been a part of the human experience because we are sinful. And even
believers are sinful enough to think that they have the right
to own somebody else. Do you realize, you know, our
country's still fighting the Civil War. By that I mean that
we're not fighting over the issue of slavery. I don't think there's
anybody in the United States that thinks slavery is a good idea.
But you go down to the South, don't you ever tell anybody that's
from the South that the North is a good place to be. They're
still fighting that war down there because they lost and it's
still bitter in them. But you know, We're opposed to
slavery. We think it's awful. Do you realize
our religious forebears in the South, Calvinistic Baptists,
the Southern Baptist Convention started down there, very Calvinistic,
sovereign grace, just like you and me. They tried to use scriptures
to argue for the rights of white people to own black people. You
say, how messed up is that? Horribly messed up. That's how
messed up it is. That just shows you how messed
up even believers can be. We have a book in the Bible written
to a man named Philemon. And Philemon was a man, he was
a believer, he was in fact, he was considered one of the notable
believers there in his town, so much so he was a leader in
the church. The church met in his house, and Paul was writing
to him about a man named Onesimus, and guess who Onesimus is? He's
Philemon's slave. And Abraham went out and bought
this woman to be a slave to his wife. God has put up with so much out
of his people. Now we, I use these examples
like slavery. Not as though we don't have a
horrible amount of equally wretched sin about us that God's putting
up with. But this should teach us something
about God's people. Abraham is set forward as the
father of all the faithful, and he was a slave owner. This Hagar is bearing Abraham's
son, and unbelief lie at the very root of that pregnancy.
God had told Abraham that he would give him a son. Now God
had already laid down the way children are to be created, and
the way households are to be set up, right at the very beginning. Because it said that He brought
Eve to Adam, and He said, therefore shall a man be joined to his
wife, singular, and they too shall be one flesh. And from
that one flesh union comes a demonstration of it in the creation of a singular
flesh from them, a child. That's how the world was supposed
to be populated. One man, one woman joined together.
I say for life at that time, there was no expectation of death,
so it meant forever, but whatever. Children would arise from these
one man, one wife relationships. And what do we have here? God
promised Abraham a child. And you know, Abraham should
have been able to think to himself, you know, if God has promised
me a child, He's not going to promise it to me through a relationship
that He condemns. He has said it will be from my
own body. So it must be that it's going
to come through my wife Sarai. Because He would never call on
me to do that, which is essentially sinful. So unbelief lies at the
root of this. Sarah couldn't see the promise
being fulfilled. She's 75. She's not going to
have any kids. And Abraham's 85. Not much chance
of him siring any children. Maybe a little. She thought she'd
give it a shot. She says, here, you take Hagar,
and you have a child by her, and she says I'll raise up a
household through her. Because legally speaking, any
children that would have been born of this union would have
been considered Sarah's children, not Hagar's. Unbelief lie at the root of that.
And it was a gross immorality. She was not Abraham's wife. It says here in our translation,
and many translations handle it this way, it says that Sarah gave Hagar to her husband
to be his wife. But that word translated wife
is very simply the word for woman. Actually, both in Hebrew and
in Greek, The word for woman, and it was the word that Adam
spoke regarding his wife, excuse me, spoke regarding Eve, but
anyway, just the word meaning woman, and it covers woman in
all her relationships. That's why when the Lord spoke
to his mother, in one place it says, woman, what have I to do
with thee? And you know, you say, well,
that sounds awful harsh, calling his mother a woman. They just would
have used the word for woman to refer to their mother, to
their sister, to their wife, to their Aunt Sally or whatever. So what I'm saying here is it
did not mean that Abraham entered into a polygamous relationship
with Hagar and actually married this maidservant and just had
two wives. She was just a concubine. She
was just another woman. to bear children to him, and
God has never approved of that kind of thing, even though in
times past many of the godly have done it. She didn't consent
to it. Now you think of this, you know,
in our day there's a big thing about sexual assault and all that.
I doubt there was any violence involved or anything, but this
woman, you know, this woman, she had no choice in the matter.
She was a slave and it says, Sarah came to her, in a sense
took her and gave her to Abraham. This woman had no say in what
was going to happen. And that's not right. That's
not right. Hagar's ability to conceive,
as we read this story, we found out that it made her proud and
she began to hold Sarai in contempt. Now so far, you know, we've been
able to condemn Abraham and the things he did. And we've been
able to condemn Sarah and the things that she did. Hagar is
not innocent in this story either. Sarah can't get pregnant. Hagar
does get pregnant. And since it was by Abraham,
then obviously the problem with their inability to have children
lie with Sarah, not with Abraham. Abraham was able to sire children,
Sarah wasn't able to conceive. So, here's pregnant Hagar. She's a slave in a household,
but she sees herself now as superior to her mistress, and says begin
to look on her with contempt. And I would imagine she probably
wasn't doing what she was told, or smirks, that kind of thing.
And in return, Sarah hated her for it. Do you see how this thing's
just becoming a bigger and bigger mess? I mean, everything man puts his
hand to, man or woman, he makes a mess out of it. Sarah starts
hating. Abraham did not defend either
of the women against the other. He did not say to Hagar, don't
you disregard your mistress now. Don't you treat my wife with
contempt. He didn't stand up for his wife
when there was an argument between her and Sarah. And likewise,
he did not rebuke Sarah and say, Sarah, don't you turn around
and get mad at her. This is of the Lord. You're the one that
started this thing. You're the one that had the idea.
And you said you wanted her to have a child so that you could
raise up a household through that child. Now, don't you get
upset about it now? No. What did Abraham do? He did
what a lot of men do when they're confronted with conflicts like
this. You do whatever you think is
right. Like Pilate, he washed his hands of the matter. He just
said, Sarah, whatever makes you happy, just do it. I remember
one comedian saying, talking about men in the house, fathers. He said, fathers don't want justice. They want quiet in whatever it
takes. And that's what Abraham did.
He didn't do what was right, he did what was convenient. And
so Sarah began to mistreat Hagar to the degree that Hagar felt
compelled to run away. What a collection of human depravity,
foolishness, and unbelief are wrapped up in this scene of Hagar
there by the well, and the Lord meets her. You look on that scene,
and if that scene is all you saw, you wouldn't think anything
of it. What a mess of human error has
created this situation. Now, why did I make such a big
deal out of all of that? For two reasons. First of all,
to glorify our God in His ability to enter such a mess and make
something glorious out of it. To enter into this situation
of human unbelief, human injustice, human sin, human depravity, and
demonstrate His mercy to a woman who had no claim on it. And then secondly, to glorify
God for that first, secondly, to give to you and me a word
of comfort. when we look at the mess that
is our lives and wonder how God will ever bring any good out
of that. Do you ever suffer under this
bondage? And I spoke to some degree about
this in the Sunday school lesson this morning. Whatever conscience
we were raised with, we never get entirely free of it. And
I was told as a kid that salvation is a work of grace, that is,
getting to heaven type of salvation. It's a work of grace alone through
faith alone and all that. But afterwards, well, if you
don't do the right thing, no telling what will happen in your
life. Well, I know God disciplines His children, but discipline
is not a bad thing. But they acted as though if I stepped
out of line, it's going to cost me. It's going to cost me big,
and if I step out of line bad enough, God just might, and here's
their phrase, set me on the shelf. Alright, you just stay up there.
And ignore me the rest of my life. God's children. I don't care
how naughty they've been. I don't care, you know, we talk
about Well, so-and-so is a difficult child. I don't care how difficult
his children are. He never sends them to their
room. He never sends them away from the table. He may give them
a good whooping because they deserve it. But when he's done
with the whooping, he dries their eyes and pulls them to himself.
And he says, now son, now daughter, you remember this. This isn't
me hating you. This is me loving you. And you're
getting yourself in nothing but trouble, and I'm not going to
let that happen beyond a certain line. I love you too much for
that. Now go on. Get back to your life. There are always natural consequences
to what we do. You jump off the bridge. If the
bridge is high enough, you're likely going to die. I don't
care whether you're a believer or unbeliever. That's just the way it works.
You drive 90 miles an hour in a 30 mile an hour zone, the policeman
catches you, you're getting a ticket. God didn't send his son to save
you from tickets. You commit a crime, you might
go to jail. It'd be a sad thing if it happened. But I will tell you this, there
is not a mess you can create. Now listen carefully, child of
God, there's not a mess you can create that will separate you
from God. that will distance you from His
love. God is a God of grace. He glorifies
Himself in it. If He weren't, you and I would
not get our next breath. I know there are times we think
we are in a bigger mess than at other times, but brethren,
there is never a time that we are not creating messes. And
there is never a time when our God is not cleaning them up.
I remember the first time Brother Bruce Crabtree came, and I was
sitting right back there, well, next to Bonnie, and I think she's
been sitting in that pew almost since that pew was made. I was
sitting there listening to Brother Bruce, and he was talking about
when our Lord followed this man back to his house to deal with
a sick child, I believe it was. And he says, it's the only time
we find in Scripture that Christ followed a man. But he said,
why did Christ follow this man and why does Christ follow us?
And he had a lot of good ones, but I remember sitting there
and I was enjoying him so much. And he made this remark, he says,
and he follows behind us to clean up all the messes that we make.
And like I said, I got that conscience from my youth. I remember all
my mistakes. I remember them over and over
again. And I've got that kind of memory, I remember things
just like we live in them. I can't remember them just as
facts that happened. And for my conscience sake, the
Lord has had to clean up the same messes a whole lot of times. Oh, He cleans them up. So God is glorified in that He
comes into these messes and cleans them up. Draw, bring something
good out of them. Actually design them for the
very purpose of glorifying Himself in fixing them or bringing something
good out of them. And what a comfort that can be
to any of us whose hope is in Him. We're brought back again
to that scripture that Eric read, the Lord reigns, let the earth
be glad. And aren't you glad when you
stand in the middle of a big mess you've created? And say,
oh thank God, my God reigns. He can fix even this. And how different that is from
the prayer of the Pharisee who came before God. and said to
him, I thank you God, I'm not like other men, and he went through
all he did, but basically he was saying is, I don't make a
mess. Well, I'm not encouraging us
to make messes, but how unfortunate for that poor Pharisee that he
didn't think he created messes because that meant Christ was
never going to come and clean them up. It says here in this scripture, I can't find
the verse real quick right now. But it says, when the Lord saw
her misery. Saw her misery. It does not say
that God came to Hagar when He saw her doing all she could to
serve Him. It did not say the Lord came
to her when she was living out a good covenant life. She wasn't
even in the covenant. He did not come to her when she
called out to him. He came to her when he saw her
misery. There is some value in us understanding
the miserable situation we're in. But us seeing our misery
won't save us from our misery. It's when God sees our misery.
And that's why it's useless to pray like that Pharisee and try
to show God that we're not miserable. Do you want God's help? Do you
want the God of grace and mercy to take pity on you? Then don't
tell Him about how good you've got things going. Lay it all
out before Him about what a total mess you are. Do you see the
reason in that? Our prayers should never be a
reciting to God of all the wonderful... Lord, I've kept my vows. Lord,
did you see? I went to church. In fact, I
went to Sunday school and church. And I sang all the hymns as loud
as I knew how. And this week, I read some of
the Bible every day this week. And you know, I'm not like those
other church folks around me. The moment you say, I'm not like
those other church folks around me, you've proven you're exactly
like them. Exactly like them. No, we pray as did that publican
there at the wall of the temple. He said, God, be merciful to
me, a sinner. We cry out like Bartimaeus there,
the blind man, begging by the road. He says, Jesus, Son of
David, have mercy on me. He wasn't saying, Jesus, thou
Son of David, I'm looking the best I can. He's not saying I'm
hard of seeing. He's not saying the focus is
bad, but I can see some things if they're big enough. No, I'm
blind. I'm a beggar. I got nothing.
I can do nothing. Lord Jesus, have mercy on me. David said, Out of the depths
I cry unto you. Oh God, hear my prayer. And there never was a prayer
prayed out of the depths that God did not hear. Unfortunately,
there have been a lot of mountaintop prayers that never got any higher
than the mountaintop from which they were prayed. The Lord did to Hagar what He
does with a lot of people. The Lord asked her a question. You know, you say, well, I get
all the answers from Christ. Well, the truth is, you're more
likely to get questions. But of course, these questions
are designed to lead you to answers. Adam and Eve, sin in the garden. And they try to make some clothes
out of fig leaves and try to hide behind the bushes. And as
was evidently the custom, our Lord Jesus in His in whatever
form he took before he was born in Bethlehem, it says the voice
of the Lord God was walking in the garden. And evidently there
in the cool or the breeze of the evening, God would come and commune with
Adam and Eve. Boy, you talk about devotions,
that would have been something. But He comes and Adam and Eve
are hiding. And so, what does God do? God knows exactly where
they are. He knows what's going on because
He ordained that this go on. But He doesn't call out and say,
now look Adam and Eve, I know you're behind that bush over
there, now you may as well just come out. What does He do? He
says, Adam, where are you? Oh, what a probing question.
When God says where are you, you can be certain of one thing,
you aren't where you're supposed to be. Where are you, Adam? And Adam
had to stop and think, I'm in a big mess is where I am. I'm here hiding from the God
who made me. I'm here hiding from the one that I so joyfully
walked with just 24 hours ago. And if he was given enough wisdom
to think about it, he said, I'm hiding from a person you can't
hide from. How many times in the life of
the Lord Jesus Christ, people would come to Him testing Him
with questions, and He wouldn't give them answers, He gave them
questions. You know, sometimes the best
thing we can get from a good teacher is a good question, because
quite often we don't even know what the right question is. I
remember my philosophy professor saying he knew of one teacher
that, and this was in his college years. But he said, you'd ask
him a question. And his answer was almost, no,
that's not the question you should ask. Here's the question you
should ask. And tell him the question and then give him the
answer. And he said, and usually the professor was right. That's the question
that needed asking. And so here the Lord comes to Hagar here
in verse 8, and He says, Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have
you come from and where are you going? That would have made a
great folk song in the 60s. And of course, they would have
had some silliness to their answer. But think of what the Lord is
asking Hagar now. Where have you come from? Well, she came from an intolerable
situation. An intolerable situation that
she was shoved into it through no choice of her own, but there
she was. And she did nothing but make it worse by her own
hatred. She says, I'm running away from
my mistress Sarah. Notice this. She didn't know
where she was going. She didn't give an answer to
that part of the question. Where are you coming from? Where you
come from? She knew that answer. But she had no idea where she
was going. And many of us live our spiritual
lives that way. We know things are a mess. We
know we need help. but we have no idea where to
go. We know that we are sinners.
We maybe don't understand our sin to the degree that we should,
but we understand that we're sinners. The problem with most
religious people is not so much that they don't understand they've
done something wrong, they don't know where to go to get that
taken care of. Where have you come from and
where are you going? I'm running away from my mistress
Sarah, she answered. So the angel of the Lord told
her, And he said, you go back. He said, the way to your deliverance
is not forward, it's back. And you know, if God's going
to deal with us in grace and mercy, He's going to make us
confront, not to fix, simply to confront and confess the mess
we are. People try to run away from the
truth of what they are. And they're just running away,
they have no idea where to run. No, you can't run away from that. You just go back, deal with it.
You are what you are. He makes promises to her about
the son that she will give birth to. And you know something? God
had said to Abraham, made promises to him that his seed would prosper. And you know what? This is not
the seed through whom God will establish his covenant, but he
is the seed of Abraham. And God says, I will greatly
multiply him. His descendants will be like
the sand of the sea. Twelve kings will come out of
him. And it did. Ishmael became the father of
actually the Arab nations. What we now recognize as the
Arab nations. And though, so far as we know, Ishmael was not
a believer in God in the sense like his father Abraham was,
nonetheless, as the seed of Abraham, he was blessed with some of those
blessings of Abraham, and God gave him some territory. Not
the territory He gave Abraham, He gave him some territory. And
you know something? He's still there. Ishmael is
still there. And he's just like God described
him, verse 12, he will be a wild donkey of a man, his hand will
be against everyone, and everyone's hand against him. He will live
in hostility toward all his brothers. And you know that to be the case. That region over there has never
been at peace. Not with itself, not with anybody else. Nonetheless,
this Ishmael that she would give birth to, would become a great
nation. So she gave this name to the
Lord, verse 13, who spoke to her, you are the God who sees
me. For she said, I have now seen the one who sees me. That is a description of what it is like when God gives
the new birth to a person and they become a believer. They
see the God. who sees them. Now let's just
pick up a few points from this and we'll be done. First of all, the reality that God sees us. Now this woman was running away.
And she could run away from Abram and she could run away from Sarai.
No way in the world she could run away from God. David said,
whether shall I go from thy presence and whether shall I flee from
thy spirit. So if I go to the depths, you'll
find me there. If I go to the heights, you'll find me there.
It doesn't matter where I go. God knows where I am. He sees
me. Now, all by itself, that's a
terrifying truth. It should be. That should sober
us. That should scare us to think. God sees us. Do you remember in your childhood
days, and you are children, still are children, you can probably
remember it going on right now. If you want to get into mischief,
what do you do? You try to go somewhere mommy and daddy can't
see you. And that's what we all do. We look for a place of secrecy,
we look for a place of hiding if we want to do that which we
know we shouldn't do. And often we'll sort of get away
with it because the people in authority who would do something
to us about it, they don't see us. I mean, if there's a wall
between me and you, I can't see you, you can't see me. And so we think that we got away
with something. But there's nowhere you can go
that God can't see you. God knows everything about you. God knows stuff that you've forgotten.
Or God knows things that you've put out of mind. He has seen. He has seen you when you were
formed within the womb of your mother. He saw you when you came
forth, and He's seen you every moment since then. When you thought
you were hiding, when you thought you concealed what you are and
concealed what you're doing, the Lord God saw you as though
you were right out in broad daylight. The darkness is light to Him.
Do you honestly believe that when you come before the Lord,
you're going to be able to rattle off a few good things you think
you've done, and God's not going to be able to recall all the
wicked that you have carried out? Do you think that you've
been able somehow or another to hide your sins through religious
activity? God sees. It's written about judgment in
the book of Revelation that when God's judgment came upon the
people, it said, they called on the rocks and the hills to
fall on them and hide them from the wrath and from the Lamb. If you could have a mountain
fall down on you, the Lord would still know where you are and
see you. There's not a thing you've ever
done that God doesn't know. And if you come before Him, outside
of Christ, everything you've ever done is going to be laid
out. And God's going to say, what about this? And there's not going to be anything
you can say. There's not going to be any defense
you can give. She said, you, oh God, see me. I want you all to think about
that. All the time, God sees you. But for those whose trust is
in the Lord Jesus Christ, there's great comfort in these words. Because you see, God doesn't
just see us. as our lives transpire. Actually, this could be translated,
I see him after he sees me. God saw me before the world began. He knew me before the world began. And he saw me and pitied me before
the world began. Before I sinned a sin, He ordained
a Savior for my sin. Before I rebelled, He ordained
that His Spirit would subdue my rebellion. He saw my sin,
and rather than that causing Him to rise up in fury, if we
can speak of God in this terms, it caused a tear to come to His
eye. Have you ever had mercy on a
criminal? Have you ever looked at those
who do evil and your heart breaks for them? Because you know full
well, evil never returns good. No, most of us, we only have
an eye of mercy to those who suffer what we call, suffer innocently. We don't think of those 19 men
who flew airplanes into our buildings and killed so many of our people.
I don't know of anybody that says those poor men. Oh, what
a wretched existence they had that they thought that was a
good idea. That's not how we think, is it? That's how God
thinks towards His people. Do you realize that your sin
horrible as it is, did not provoke God to wrath. It provoked Him
to tears because He knew you were ruining yourself with it,
that you were destroying yourself. And He, therefore, set forth
mercy and said, I'm going to get Him. I'm going to save Him
from His sin. I'm going to grab him in all
his wickedness. I call him mine by election. I will call him
mine by the redemption through the blood of my son. And I will
send my spirit to grab him by the scruff of the neck and say,
that's far enough. You're mine. You're staying with me. And that
good work he began, he will continue. until He has made us like His
Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. I have seen Him who sees me. Everybody whom God sees from
eternity in mercy shall someday see Him. You know something? God did not
start looking on you with mercy when you believed Him. When you
saw Him, when you saw Christ Jesus in the glory, of His sacrifice
and the glory of His victory. He was already looking on you
and the only reason you saw Him is because He saw you and then
He revealed Himself to you. God saw Hagar long before He
met her there at the well. He saw her in Abram's household.
He saw her when she conceived that child. He saw her when she
got all proud about it. She saw her as she was being
mistreated by Sarai. She saw Him every step. He saw
her every step that she took to get to that well. But she
didn't see Him until He revealed Himself and said something. And
we don't see Him until through His Gospel. He says something
to us. And He says to us, where have
you been and where are you going? Well, let's go back. You're just
a sinner. You're just a sinner. But I've ordained good things
for you. And they all come to you through Christ Jesus. I have seen Him who sees me, and I saw Him after
He saw me. Now, it could also be translated
this way, and I'll finish up with this. The word could be
translated behind or at the rear of. Do you remember how when
Moses saw the glory of God, God said to Moses, No man can see
my face and live, so I'll put you in the split rock here, and
I'll put my hand over that split place in the rock, and I'll pass
by. And then once I've passed by, I'll remove my hand, and
you can see me from behind. But no man can see my face and
live. And maybe that's the way this woman saw God. I don't know
for sure. But I know this, we got something
better. For it says that in the gospel,
we see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And there's something better
yet to come. In the book of Revelation, when this world's history is
wrapped up, when our history is wrapped up, it makes this
promise. They shall see His face. Nobody on earth has seen God
in His glory, like those who have been objects of His mercy
and are now with Him. But our promise is not simply
that we shall see Him after He sees us. Our promise is not that
we shall see Him only after He has passed by in His glory and
we see Him from behind, a mere afterglow, as it were. We shall be made fit, says the
Scriptures, to be heirs with the saints in light, and we shall
see God's face and live. Heavenly Father, bless this word. I ask that something's been said
that will glorify Your Son, will glorify You. I pray something's
been said that will reach the hearts of us people. Lord, our
flesh objects so much to the preaching of your grace. Even
we who believe still struggle. We see in a glass darkly. Someday we'll see face to face.
But Lord, even in this glass into which we must look, this
mirror through which we can see things only dimly, Lord, we pray
that some of the dimness would pass and we'd see more clearly
than before. But we are glad that with whatever
level of sight we may have, we do see Him who sees us. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.