Tag: genesis

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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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7 Norms for the Family

In every time period, the subject of the family is likely to set off intense emotions. In our own day, the family has become an intense political issue. This is all aggravated by the breakdown in family structure and the terrible pain often caused by it.

How can we find our way out of it?

Finding our way out of the messes in which we find our families requires a clear sense of the goals, ideals, or norms that a family should pursue.

In the book of Genesis, we have a picture of the family prior to the rupture of family relationships. This is helpful for our families and for the proper understanding of the book of Genesis. As you read through Genesis 3–50, you find a lot of messed up families and questionable family situations (like multiple wives). How are we to evaluate them? I believe that Genesis 1–2 gives us the answer.

Let me suggest 7 norms for the well-functioning family based on Genesis 1:26–2:25.

  1. God is at the center of a well-functioning family. God made the family and blessed it (Gen. 1:26–28). Often families have trouble because they are only looking at one another and not seeing the God who is above them all. They seek from their families things only God can give. This creates frustration and struggle.
  2. Children are a blessing. Children today are often viewed negatively, but God gave the command to be fruitful and multiply. He wanted more people on earth. “Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him” (Psalm 127:3).

    3. Continue reading “7 Norms for the Family”

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