Hope for the Hopeless

Do you remember Hagar, from the book of Genesis?

Hagar was a slave girl of Abraham’s wife Sarah. As the years passed and their promised child still didn’t arrive, the couple started getting nervous about God’s timetable, and Sarah started scheming: Hagar would sleep with Abraham and conceive an heir for the octogenarian. Her plan worked too well: Hagar, when she realized she was pregnant, “no longer respected” her barren mistress (16:4). Sarah, in response, “dealt harshly” with her (16:6), causing the young woman to run away.

Now Hagar, a slave girl forced to bear her master’s child, is wandering alone in the desert, with no idea where to find shelter or provisions and no place to make a home for her son. It’s hard to imagine a more desperate, hopeless situation for a young girl to find herself in.

And that’s when it happened. “The angel of the Lord found Hagar beside a spring of water in the wilderness, along the road to Shur.” (Gen 16:7) When she must have thought all was lost, Hagar was found. I love that it tells you exactly where she was when that angel appeared: beside the spring along the road to Shur. I can just imagine Hagar telling the story, ‘I was on the road to Shur, and I got to the spring—you know the place—and that’s when I heard this voice…’

The angel assured her that she could return home and told her,

“You will give birth to a son. You are to name him Ishmael (which means ‘God hears’), for the Lord has heard your cry of distress…”

Thereafter, Hagar used another name to refer to the Lord, who had spoken to her. She said, “You are the God who sees me.” She also said, “Have I truly seen the One who sees me?” (16:11, 13)

In Hebrew, “the God who sees me” (verse 13) is a name: El-roi. That’s who the Lord was to Hagar. The God who found her, heard her cry, and saw her.

Hagar’s story is an example of something we see a lot in scripture: how God arrives just at the moment when you feel most lost and alone, when things seem most hopeless, right when you’re tempted to despair. There and then is when you hear the voice of God.

A vulnerable girl roaming, parched and pregnant, through the desert.

Slaves wailing as their Egyptian masters murder their newborns.

A fisherman out of his boat and out of his depth, flailing in the waves, crying out for a Savior.

A body tattered with nail, spear, and thorn holes lying in a pitch-black tomb, the entrance stonewalled shut.

And that’s when God shows up.

That’s because, no matter how dark and desperate your circumstances are, God is El-roi. The Lord sees you and hears you. And, because God is El-roi, the God who sees, there is always hope.

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