In Chapter 15 we were told that Abram believed the Lord's promise of a son. As Chapter 16 opens it is ten years later and the promised son has not yet appeared. Abram and Sarai decide to take the matter of the promised son into their own hands instead of waiting any longer.
Getting ahead of the Lord is always a mistake. It doesn't matter if He's already promised us the thing we want; we need to let Him work it out in the right way and at the right time. We shouldn't move forward until He tells us to move forward. Believe me, I've made this mistake several times in my life, to my own regret. As we walk with the Lord through this life, we have to learn to do what the children of Israel did while the Lord led them through the wilderness: we must stop when He says stop and we must move when He says move. When we don't abide by this principle, we are going to learn a hard lesson.
Abram and Sarai haven't learned this hard lesson yet, but they're going to in time. Not only that, but the mistake they make in Chapter 16 is partly an ongoing result of a mistake Abram made in Chapter 12. You'll recall that during a famine in Canaan, he lacked the faith to stay put in the land to which the Lord had called him, but went down to Egypt where food was easier to obtain. While there, he made yet another mistake by lying and saying the beautiful Sarai was his sister and not his wife. He did this because he was afraid someone would kill him to take her away from him, so we see that he didn't trust the Lord to protect him. Pharaoh took notice of the beauty of Sarai and had her placed with his harem until such time as he could get around to making her one of his wives. Because Pharaoh intended to make Sarai his wife, he lavished Abram with gifts. He paid Abram, whom he thought was Sarai's older brother and the head of the household, a "bride price". This doesn't mean he was purchasing Sarai as if she were property, although women in Sarai's day had little to no say in the matters of marriage, but he was giving Abram gifts to make up for the loss of Sarai in Abram's household. The primary female of the household would have performed much valuable work, and in return for her hand in marriage Pharaoh gave gifts (including Egyptian slaves) to Abram to make up for the inconvenience of losing Sarai's services in the home. One of these Egyptians was a woman named Hagar who became Sarai's personal maid after Pharaoh found out Sarai was Abram's wife and threw them all out of Egypt.
If Abram hadn't disobeyed the Lord in the first place by going down to Egypt, he wouldn't have lied about the identity of Sarai, and he wouldn't have ended up with gifts from Pharaoh, and he wouldn't now own a slave whom Sarah plans to use as a surrogate mother. "Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; so she said to Abram, 'The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.'" (Genesis 16:1-2a) Infertile couples in modern times who can afford it will sometimes use a surrogate mother. This is done without any sexual contact occurring between the married man and the surrogate. The joining of sperm and egg is done by a medical professional in a petri dish or test tube or something of that nature, and then the fertilized egg is implanted in the womb of the surrogate. But it couldn't be done this way in Sarai's time, so a custom existed in which a married woman could allow a slave she owned to sleep with her husband and conceive a child. That child would then become the legal heir of the married couple. Sarai has given up on having a child of her own flesh and blood, so she intends to become the adoptive mother of a child conceived between her husband and her slave.
In the days before medical science taught us that men can be infertile as well as women, infertility was assumed to always be the woman's problem. It was believed that all men were virile and fertile, so if no children were born to a couple, the woman was declared to be barren. In Sarai's case this was actually true, for we will find Abram being able to father a child with Hagar. But how did Sarai know she was the infertile person in the marriage? Did she just assume it because it was customary to assume it? Or had she always suffered from some sort of "female trouble" that led her to conclude that something in her anatomy didn't work the way it should? We don't know, but in ancient times there was a huge stigma attached to infertility. A woman who could not give her husband a child was pitied and looked down upon. She was treated as if she weren't a real woman at all. Imagine the toll this must have taken on Sarai's feelings of self-worth. Imagine going to the market and having to interact with pregnant women, with women who had multiple children tagging along behind them, and with women proudly showing off new grandbabies. Women in our own day, who struggle with infertility year after year, find these situations difficult. But for Sarai it must have been even worse, for she'd have had to deal with the pitying stares and the whispers of fertile women who either feel sorry for her, look down on her, or suspect there must be terrible sin in her heart if the Lord has prevented her from becoming a mother.
It was considered a shame to be barren in Sarai's time, and she's dealt with this year until she's past the age of menopause, and now she's given up on becoming a mother by natural means. The years of disappointment and disgrace have taken a heavy toll on her. She's reached the point of desperately offering her personal maid to be the secondary wife of her husband just so she can at last call herself a mother. She can bear the shame no longer. She feels like she can't take one more pitying stare or one more whisper behind her back. She is a virtuous woman but knows some people think she's a sinner and that her infertility is the punishment of the Lord. She wants to be the woman proudly holding a child by the hand in the marketplace. She wants it so badly that she's willing to do anything in order to be a mother---even if that means giving her husband a second wife. This is the low point to which the expectations of her culture and the years of disappointment have brought her.
Does she lack faith in the Lord? Yes, I think she does, but I can't help feeling sorry for her. She's a victim of her culture, of her time in history, and of her medical inability to produce the one thing she wants above all others. I can see why she makes the request she makes of her husband, and although it's not a request I can imagine making of my own husband, I understand what brought her to this point. Whatever amount of faith she has in the Lord, it is not strong enough to stand up to the pressure she's under, and she breaks. Could she and should she have stood strong and waited on the Lord? Yes, but haven't we all become impatient while waiting on the Lord? Haven't we all messed up because we wanted something so badly that we didn't wait for the Lord? If you haven't, odds are that if you live long enough, you'll get ahead of Him somewhere along the line. It's a human failing and we are all humans.
I can understand Sarai's reasoning better than I can understand Abram's, but tomorrow we are going to talk about what may have caused Abram to agree to Sarai's request.
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