Impatient?  How do you feel when you join the supermarket queue that looks the shortest turns out to be the slowest?  When the other person just keeps on talking, giving you no chance to interrupt?  When that car journey that was supposed to take 3 hrs turns into a 5-hr nightmare after you decide to try a short-cut?

Of course, there are other more serious occasions when our patience is tested.  How the time drags while we’re waiting for exam results, or for the outcome of a scan, or trying to start a family?

God has promised Abram that his descendants would become a great nation, and as numerous as the stars of the sky.  But Sarai his wife has remained stubbornly childless, to her great shame and distress.

Sarai has run out of patience.  She decides to take matters into her own hands.  “Take my slave-girl, Hagar, as a second wife.  Perhaps I can build a family through her.”

Abram, v2, ‘listened to the voice of Sarai’.  One of a number of echoes of Gen 3 in this episode.

Hagar, Sarai’s lowly Egyptian slave-girl, has no say in the matter.  Abram sleeps with her, and she becomes pregnant.

Predictably, sparks fly between Hagar and Sarai. ‘Hagar looked with contempt on her mistress, v4…Sarai dealt harshly with her, v6’.  Hagar flees, back towards Egypt.  She might have disappeared from the pages of history, but for a remarkable encounter.

No human being cares about Hagar, or even knows where she is.  But the Lord knows and cares.  His angel finds her and speaks to her.

A command, v9: “Return to your mistress, and submit to her.”

A promise: v10: “I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude.”

A name, v11.  ‘Ishmael’ (‘God hears’), “for the LORD has given heed to your affliction.”

A prediction, v12.  “He shall be a wild ass of a man”, free but untameable.

Hagar is astonished, v13.  ‘She named the LORD who spoke to her, “You are El-roi” (God of seeing); for she said, “Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?”

So Hagar returns, and duly gives birth to Ishmael.  Abram seems to have accepted the child as his son and heir.  However, fourteen years later Sarah would finally give birth to a son of her own, and the nation would grow through him, through Isaac, not through Ishmael.  For Ishmael was not the longed-for child of promise; Isaac was.

This episode represents a human misstep along the way to the fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham.  In her impatience, Sarai tried to force God’s hand.  In his passivity, Abram went along with it.

Implications

(a) We have to live with the consequences of our decisions.  Some actions can be reversed.  But others cannot.

There was a very human consequence in the living, breathing form of Ishmael.

And that birth has consequences right up to the present day.  Many Arabs – and Mohammed himself – trace their ancestry to Ishmael.  You don’t need me to spell out what is happening in the Middle East between the descendants of Ishmael and the descendants of Isaac.

(b) There is always a way forward.  Sarai and Abram had stepped outside of God’s plan for their lives.  Was there now no way back?

To put it bluntly: was Ishmael then a ‘mistake’?  No: this very passage demonstrates God’s love and concern for him and his mother.  And God had promised to Abraham: ‘In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’  God’s purpose is for the descendants of Ishamel to be blessed by the descendants of Abraham.  The NT version of this is heard in Jesus’ commission to ‘Go and make disciples of all nations’.

‘God can make a straight line with a crooked stick’.

(c) God’s time is always the best time.  Unlike Abram and Sarai (and we ourselves) Jesus himself was aware of his Father’s perfect timing: “My hour has not yet come…Father, the hour has come” (Jn 17:1).

Paul, in Gal 4:4 declares that at just the right time God sent his son to redeem us and adopt us as his sons.

There is one great promise left.  Jesus will return.  This time, not as a baby in a manger, not as a lamb led to the slaughter, not as a man despised and rejected by men, but as King of kings and Lord of lords.  He will return, to put all wrongs to right, to wipe away every tear, to satisfy every holy longing, to usher in the new heavens and the new earth, where righteousness is at home.

2 Pet 3.  Why is it taking so long?

This is precisely the taunt of the scoffers, v4: “Where is the promise of his coming?”

But they haven’t reckoned with the fact, v8 ‘that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.’

No, v9 – ‘The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.’

Then Peter goes on to ask, in the light of this ‘what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God?’ (v11f)

2 Pet 3:11ff  ‘Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish.’

Waiting and hastening.  Waiting and striving.  Patient, but not passive, as we seek to serve the Lord together in the days, weeks, months or years that are left to us until we rest in Jesus and finally are gathered with him and all his people in the promised new heavens and the new earth, where righteousness is at home.