What Can Hagar Teach Us About God's Love?
My husband and I ended up having a conversation about the Trinity of God and how we as His people do not understand the intricacies of that trinity and therefore suffer in our understanding of who God really is. Let me take you back to John 17 when Jesus is praying to God about His soon return to eternity. Verse 5 reads, "Now, Father, bring me into the glory we shared before the world began."
Look at that again, it says before the world began. But where was Jesus in the beginning? Let's skip over to John 1, same book, different chapter, and remind ourselves of the first 5 verses that say:
In the beginning the Word already existed.
The Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
2 He existed in the beginning with God.
3 God created everything through him,
and nothing was created except through him.
4 The Word gave life to everything that was created,
and his life brought light to everyone.
5 The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness can never extinguish it.
Jesus was the very Word God spoke in the beginning. Now let's pivot to the focus of this Bible study- Genesis, the retelling of the beginning. We have been studying everything that has happened since the world began, yet in our human nature and linear- thinking habits, we may not truly understand the very God we are studying. We tend to think of God as the Father and He is the main player in the Old Testament, and then He sent His son Jesus Christ, who is the main player in the New Testament. After Jesus dies and is resurrected, He then sends the Holy Spirit to dwell within us and it is He that is our modern day reference to God.
We couldn't be more wrong. God, YHWH Himself, is the Trinity and He manifests in whichever way He chooses to relate to His Creation. That is why we start to see so many names of God communicated in the Bible (if we were to read it in the actual Hebrew). We start with Elohim and then Yehova Elohim, then El Elyon (God Most High), and now El Roi (the God who sees me) because as YHWH interacts with His Creation, we as humans begin to understand the complexity of the Trinity more and more.
Even Hagar, a servant of God's chosen man, encounters God in Genesis 16, yet another complexity of this triune identity presents itself because He appears as an angel of the LORD but also speaks as the LORD to Hagar. Hagar even knows that this angel of the LORD is the LORD because after her encounter is over, her life changes from that point forward. Verse 13 reads, "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?”
THAT SHOULD MAKE YOU WANT TO SHOUT! 🙌🏽
How is it that Hagar, a slave servant, can have a life altering encounter with the LORD, her master's God and yet we cannot understand the triune nature of God? How is it that we have categorized God so much to where He cannot show up as an angel, a messenger? It is because we have limited the existence of the Trinity to human logic and we refuse to see the divine moments He manifests Himself. If Jesus was with the Father from the beginning, how do we know that the very angel that appears to Hagar and later Abraham, Jacob, and others is not Jesus Christ? Look at the authority the angel speaks with and pay attention to the encounters that happen as we continue to study Genesis. You have the opportunity, just like Hagar, to understand the true triune nature of God. He is the God who sees you as well and that's enough to make me want to cry😭 because it shows me just how much He loves us and wants to see us.
As you reread the account of Hagar and God's conversation in Genesis 16, consider the significance of being seen by El- Roi.
