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Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 4: How God Redeems Relationships

Genesis 16 presents us with a family mess. It starts with anxiety, leads into pride, and ends in injustice. By verse 6, the family seems at the breaking point. Abraham abandons Hagar. Sarah treats Hagar harshly. Hagar runs away with Abraham’s child in her womb. The family now consists of a separted but complicated web of relationships. Can things turn around? If so, how?

God Meets Hagar
The answer? God shows up. But He showed up in an unlikely way. If we were to ask at the beginning of the story, “to whom would God appear to get them to turn things around?”, who would it be? Probably Abraham. Maybe Sarah. But here’s the surprise of the story. God showed up for the first time in the story, and He talked to . . . Hagar.

God asked Hagar, “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” Let’s not miss the importance of this. As we noted in my past articles on this past (read part 1 on anxiety here, part 2 on pride here, and part 3 on injustice here), the anxiety of a slave is over the fact that they are unseen. Hagar seemed to be seen by Abraham, but then Abraham abandoned her to unjust abuse by Sarah. It seemed like she was unseen again. The Angel of the Lord, whom I believe is Jesus in a pre-incarnate form, the 2nd person of the Trinity, met her by the well and took an interest in her like He would in an unlikely woman at a wall a thousand plus years later (see John 4).

Hagar was honest with the angel. She said that she was running from her mistress Sarah.

Then, the angel of the Lord gave her a command, “Return to your mistress and submit to her” (Gen. 16:9).

By the end of the story, Hagar was encouraged and willing to go back.

What Motivates Hagar to Return
Why encouraged Hagar to go back to a tough situation? Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 4: How God Redeems Relationships”

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Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 3: Anxiety & Injustice

[This is the 3rd of a 4 part series. You can read the 1st part focusing on anxiety here and the 2nd part focusing on pride here]

Pride, Anxiety, and Injustice in Relationships
Why is it so hard to dislodge injustice? Why is it that families and communities can allow the worst sort of situations to go on and on? You see this happen all the time. They won’t make even the slightest change to make a bad situation better. Why do they stay in these bad relationships and make little effort to change them?

Why? Because it is scary. Injustice is rooted in an attempt to solve the basic problems of life: loneliness, insecurity, provision, and meaning. When you fight against injustice, you are battling with people’s anxiety over these basic issues. This makes these problems much more intractable.

This does not mean that we should not fight against injustice. It just means that we will fight against it better if we understand that it is rooted in anxiety over the basic problems of life.

A great example of this tragic interplay of injustice can be seen in American race relations. The treatment of African-Americans by whites in this nation has been reprehensible. However, the system of slavery was designed to solve the basic problems of labor, and it was the basis of the position of the wealthy elites of Southern society. Over this position, they had much anxiety. If they let slavery go, where would that leave them? Understand. I am not excusing it. I am just saying that there was a fear in letting that go that made it harder to apply the basic principles of Western and Christian teaching to this issue. As Booker T. Washington noted, “Having once got its tentacles fastened on to the economic and social life of the Republic, it was no easy matter for the country to relieve itself of the institution.” This is the way injustice becomes a fixture in human life.

That’s why it was so necessary for Martin Luther King, Jr. and others to work to force whites to give up their privileges in the South and elsewhere. He recognized that because of the anxiety of giving up privileges, the white community would not give up their privileges without being compelled to.

On a smaller scale, why do people stay in such bad relationships? Why do they not confront such bad behavior? Because the alternative is often being alone, and that is quite scary. The current relationship solves to some degree our anxieties over loneliness and security, and it is hard to face those issues more directly without the anxiety reducer of even a bad relationship.

In our third installment of our study on the relationship of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, I want us to consider what injustices their anxiety and pride led them to. I will show how each of their behaviors was unjust but also try to show how that injustice was rooted in their own significant challenges. The injustice calls for condemnation, and the anxiety calls for sympathy. It is a complex response to a complex problem.

The goal is to enable us to better confront injustice in ourselves and others. When we can confront our own unjust behavior by confronting our underlying anxieties. That’s what God does when He confronts this issue, as we shall see in the next article.

Hagar
We noted in the last article that Hagar’s anxiety was that of a slave: she is unseen. However, what every human longs for is to be seen and to be seen as significant. A slave is not seen that way. A slave is just part of the scenery. That’s the misery that every slave would experience every day of their lives.

Then, something happened. Hagar was chosen to bear the child of Master Abraham. She conceived, and she became a major player in the house. She let this go to her head. The result was that she looked down on her Mistress, Sarah. “And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress” (Gen. 16:4). This wasn’t something she kept to herself. Sarah noticed and brought it up to Abraham.

What was the injustice here? It was a lack of respect. Ironically, she did not see Sarah as valuable. Maybe Hagar was just doing to Sarah what Sarah had done to her, but this would not justify this behavior. Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 3: Anxiety & Injustice”

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Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 2: Pride as Response to Anxiety

[Note: this is a four part series based on the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, looking at the way sin affects our relationships in the family and how the presence of God can bring redemption to them. You can read the first part, looking at anxiety here]

Life is full of problems that we can’t solve. We can’t solve what people will do or how they might treat us. We can’t ensure that people will think well of us. We can’t ensure that we will have enough. We can’t ensure that we will know everything or see everything we need to. We can’t ensure that we will be able to get done all things we need to get done.

All these issues become a basis for anxiety. I call anxiety an awareness of the gap between our ability to see problems and our inability to do anything about them.

What do we do when we have this awareness? We can exalt ourselves thinking we can get a handle on all these problems; or we can accept our limits, work where we can, and trust God with the rest.

In the last article, we considered how anxiety becomes the occasion for sin. In this article, I want to consider the shape and form of sin, which is pride. Our pride is where we take that which is good and significant about us and make it much bigger than it is. The result of this is the common dissolutions, destructions, addictions, and injustices of life. There is really no limit to pride or the temtpation to pride. No matter how much we solve, there are still new problems. Greater heights; greater falls.

In the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, we have three anxious people who also believe that they can solve their own problems. They take good things about themselves and make them much bigger than they are. This is the tragedy of the story and the sin of the story. Let’s look at Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham in turn to see how pride is a response to anxiety.

Hagar’s Pride
The pride of Hagar is rather obvious. “And [Abraham] went in to Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress” (Gen. 16:4). Hagar conceived the first child of Master Abraham, and she let it go to her head. She does what we often do when we have success. She looked down on others.

Let’s look at her pride a little more closely. When I was in Louisiana at the Evergreen Plantation, the tour guide gave us an explanation of how those eating dinner would keep cool. A slave boy would wave a giant fan during the supper. I thought that would be strange to have someone standing right next to you like that, but then I realized something. They would not see the slave. He would just be part of the scenery. He would be virtually invisible. That’s how slaves are: unseen. They are just part of the machinery of the household. Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 2: Pride as Response to Anxiety”

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Anxiety, Pride, Relationships, and Redemption: A Tale of Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar

According to the Christian faith, the fundamental human problem is not lack of material resources, unjust government, or lack of education. It is the disruption of the relationship between God and human beings. Out of this disruption, flow all of the addictions, injustices, and abuses of human life.

The Bible gives this fundamental problem a name. It calls it sin. Sin is the conditions and actions of being out of accord with what we ought to be and what we ought to do. It is first and foremost about a wrong relationship with God, but it disrupts human relationships as well.

Sin is worthy of condemnation, but when we look at it more closely, we often feel sympathy for those in sin. Why is this? Because sin is complex, not simple.

An insight I received from the study of American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was that sin is rooted in anxiety. He said, anxiety arises out of our ability to see the world and its threats to our well-being combined with our inability to do much about them. This is not sin in itself, but it becomes the occasion for sin.

A quick perusal of the sins of the Bible will show you that this is the case. Sin arises out of people’s anxious response to threats. Cain has anxiety about his standing with God, and so he kills Abel. Joseph’s brothers have anxiety over their relationship with their father, and so they sell their favored brother into slavery. Pharaoh has anxiety over the growth of the children of Israel and so enslaves them. The people of Israel have anxiety over Pharaoh, provision, and status and so complain against the Lord. And on and on it goes.

There are two responses to the threats of this world. We can trust the Lord, or we can try to come up with our own solution. This latter response is pride. This pride that we can solve our own problems and are bigger than we are leads to disruption and dissolution.

In this series, I am going to look at one example of this. We will see how sin grows out of anxiety. The prideful response to anxiety leads to choices and actions that disrupt the family. But the good news is that God does not leave Sarah, Abraham, or Hagar in sin. He makes Himself known, and this brings a healing element into the relationship.

Sarah’s Anxiety
“She had borne him no children.” Some people do not want children, but for those who do, how painful it is to go through this experience! Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, Relationships, and Redemption: A Tale of Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar”

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Joyful Fellowship with God Through the Christmas Message

If you think about Christmas time, you think of getting together with your friends and enjoying laughter, conversation, and affection. But it would seem that you can’t do that with God, so how do you have joyful fellowship with God? It’s nice to know that Jesus came down to earth to fellowship with some people, but isn’t the whole point of Christmas to connect God and humans together in fellowship? What does that look like when Jesus isn’t physically present with us?

The shepherds of Christmas experienced an interaction with God that we might like to have. If we could experience His glory and light and an audible voice, we might feel like we were having joyful fellowship with Him. But there is a problem. It didn’t last. It didn’t happen every night. How, then, would the shepherds continue to have joyful fellowship with God once the heavenly light had faded? If we can answer that question, then we also can know how we can experience joyful fellowship with God through the Christmas message.

So, let’s consider this question by considering from Luke 2:8–20 the revelation from God, the recipients of the revelation, and the response to the revelation. My hope is that this will lead you to joyful fellowship with God through the Christmas message.

The Revelation
There are four aspects of the revelation or message that the shepherds received. The first was the amazing light that came with the heavenly revelation. In a world without electric lights, the angels lighting up the night sky must have been truly astonishing.

The second aspect was the appearance of the angels. At first, a single angel appeared that gave them a message. Then, a choir of angels appeared singing the songs of heaven in praise of God. Continue reading “Joyful Fellowship with God Through the Christmas Message”

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