Holy Lit

Week 2: Historical Narrative
Pastor Rick Henderson              June 7-8, 2025

We just wrapped up graduation season. Because our son graduated from high school, Heather and I feel like we graduated. Our kids are in the adult world. I get that parenting isn’t over. I love the new role I get to play. I’m no longer an authority over my son. In this new role, we are friends and hunting buddies. I’m a cheerleader, rooting like crazy for him. I get to be on his wisdom team. I hope you have a wisdom team. We never age out of needing a wisdom team.

My job is to share whatever measure of wisdom I may have. It’s no longer my job to make decisions for him. That’s his job. When our kids step into the adult world, this is what Heather and I tell them. This is your life. It’s not our life. You get to decide what you want to do with it. We get to decide what we want to fund. I may not be commander-in-chief anymore. I am funder-in-chief.

If he came to me and said he wanted to start a weed farm. That’s his decision to make, but my funding isn’t 420-friendly. (BTW, that’s not his plan.). Heather and I are happy and eager to help fund all the next steps that contribute to their well-being and a good future. As their dad, I worked hard their entire lives to point them to Jesus. I’m praying for this every day, especially now that they’re in the adult world, that they will build their lives on Jesus.

Every single one of us, we are building something with our lives. And we’re building our lives on something.

MATTHEW 7:24-27 “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”

Last week, we made this observation. Life is unstable. We all get that. There’s still more to see. What I want to share next is a reality check that, sadly, too many people learn too late in life.

GOOD conditions make WEAK foundations appear STRONG.

Here’s a life hack. Look around for people who have been through adversity and hardship. You want to learn from the folks who stood strong during and after hardship without losing their character, without losing their way. Wise people are highly intentional. They evaluate and choose a foundation for their lives before storms hit. You are far too valuable; what you’re building with your life is much too important to entrust to an unreliable foundation.

This series is all about taking seriously what we have in these pages. We want to uncomplicate our relationship with the Bible, energize our engagement with it, and expand our ability to understand it. Today, we’re diving into how to read historical narrative, the storytelling parts of the Bible.

Grab a Bible and find this passage.

GENESIS 16

This so easy to find. It’s the first book. Once you find it, hold it open. The Bible is divided into two major sections. The Old Testament is everything that happened before Jesus was born. The New Testament is everything from Jesus’ birth forward. It’s totally understandable if someone asked this question. If we want to build our lives on the words of Jesus, why start in the Old Testament? Why read the Old Testament at all?

RECAP: The POINT of the Bible is to POINT to Jesus.

The words of Jesus don’t just start in the gospels. He is the eternal God, and the Bible is all about him; these are all his words because he is the God of the Bible. He is the eternal God who stepped into the human story, and he gave us this grand unified story so that we would know him and the life that he gives

Maybe you remember us using this image last summer in the Sunday School for Grown Ups series. We’re supposed to read the Old Testament like a photo mosaic. It’s a bunch of little stories that are telling one big story, and that one big story is revealing Jesus to us. It is pointing us to Jesus. You know what else it does? It reveals us. Here’s something the Apostle wrote that gives us additional insight into why we read the Old Testament, how to read it, and how to respond to it.

1 CORINTHIANS 10:11-12 These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the culmination of the ages has come. So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!

Culmination of the ages means that we live in the point of history after Jesus has come. We read the entire Bible as pointing to Jesus. He is the lens through which we read it. And as we read about all kinds of people, we’re supposed to learn from their examples, evaluate ourselves, and ask this question. What am I building on? Do I have a foundation that will enable me to stand strong and firm no matter what comes my way? Let’s read Genesis 16.

GENESIS 16:1-16 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children.

Her name will eventually be changed to Sarah, which means princess. And his name will be changed to Abraham, which means father of many. They are more commonly known by what their names will be changed to. So, please don’t be confused if I slip into saying Sarah and Abraham. It’s a force of habit.

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.” Abram agreed to what Sarai said. So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. He slept with Hagar, and she conceived. When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.” “Your slave is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her. The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. And he said, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?” “I’m running away from my mistress Sarai,” she answered. Then the angel of the Lord told her, “Go back to your mistress and submit to her.” The angel added, “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.” The angel of the Lord also said to her: “You are now pregnant and you will give birth to a son. You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery. He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.” She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.” That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered. So Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne. Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael.

This feels gross. This feels like an episode out of The Handmaid’s Tale. This doesn’t feel like words to build our lives on. All the feels that we feel are not a reason to reject this. Just the opposite. Those feelings should motivate us to read this seriously. What did the human author, and what does God, the ultimate author who breathed out this narrative and who breathed into this narrative, what do they want us to see? What do they want us to understand? Remember our series thesis.

SERIES THESIS: There’s a BACKSTORY to the story.

It doesn’t help us to read this chapter in isolation. We must read it with all of Genesis in view. And that’s going to require picking up on patterns and themes. Believe it or not, this short chapter is bursting with patterns and themes. It’s not enough to know the words on the page. How this is structured speaks just as loudly to us. For the next few minutes, we’re going to do our best to survey some of the patterns and themes so that we can draw out the riches that our here for us.

GENESIS 16:1-2 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.” Abram agreed to what Sarai said.

This is chapter 16. What happened in chapter 15? God promised Abraham that he would father a nation. That promise came with some pretty cool supernatural theatrics. And verse one of the next chapter begins with the fact that his wife hasn’t provided children. Astute and careful readers of Genesis are supposed link back to Genesis 3. This is immediately after the man and woman disobeyed God. He is now telling them the consequences that come from their choices. This is known as the Fall.

GENESIS 3:16 To the woman he said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children.

What we read as childbearing in English is the Hebrew word, heron. It means conception. In every other use, it’s only translated as conception. It’s not simply that the act of delivery is painful. The pathway to conception and eventually having a child is marked by pain, shame, and disappointment. The pain is not physical alone. That’s not even primary. Emotional and relational anguish are sprinkled over the forthcoming pages of the Old Testament and even into the New Testament related to the subject of motherhood. If you are familiar with Scripture, you’re probably thinking right now about all the women in these stories who struggled to get pregnant or who had trauma and pain related to circumstances leading to their pregnancy.

The pain and difficulty related to getting pregnant and not getting pregnant isn’t just for ancient history or traditional cultures, is it? Even in modern, western, enlightened, technologically savvy cultures like ours, we experience it. We feel it personally. We fight culture wars over it. It’s a complex and messy reality in every culture.

What Sarah was feeling was far bigger than the unfulfilled personal longing to be a mom. That’s heavy enough. She felt the staggering weight of cultural and cosmic shame. In the ANE this was grounds to be replaced as a wife. People believed this was a punishment from the gods for indecent behavior.

So, she did what seems exploitative to us but was common in her day. She conceived a plan to get her slave to conceive for her. Believe it or not, in the ANE there was case law that spelled how to do this. Shocker: the law that existed advantaged the wealthier person with marginal protections for the for the enslaved woman. Let’s look again because we are given insight into her motive.

GENESIS 16:1-2 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.” Abram agreed to what Sarai said.

It’s not wrong to translate this is as, “perhaps I can build a family through her.” That is certainly included. And yet, the reality of what Sarah said transcends that. This reads in Hebrew as, “perhaps I can be built up by means of her.” This is not simply about Sarah finding a way to build a family. This is more fundamentally about Sarah trying to build up her identity, to build up her significance and worth. This is also a pattern that began in Genesis 2.

GENESIS 2:21-22 So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

I don’t want to disturb anyone. The Hebrew text does not say rib. What it says is that God built the woman from the side of the man. This word, made, is the exact same word that Sarah used when she said, “perhaps I can be built up by means of her.” When God created, everything was good. After the Fall, the pattern of building continues to playout, except it’s people building for themselves on a foundation other than what God said. Every time people build for themselves on a foundation other than trusting God, everything unravels into disorder and chaos.

The patterns and repetition of phrasing throughout Genesis are written so that we see Sarah anguishing in the reality of the Fall and descending deeper into it by trusting in her own wisdom and the best thinking her culture provided.

GENESIS 16:1-2 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.” Abram agreed to what Sarai said.

Why does Sarah have an enslaved woman from Egypt? The astute and careful reader is supposed to link back to Genesis 12. Due to a food shortage, Abraham and Sarah went to Egypt. But Abraham was afraid because his wife was beautiful. He feared that when the men of Egypt saw her, they would kill him and take his wife. So, he told her to lie and say she was his siter.

Sure enough, she gets lots of attention. Thinking she was his sister because Abraham was a lying coward, Pharoah added Sarah to his harem. God stepped in and supernaturally worked to correct the situation. Abraham and Sarah must leave the country. It’s at this time that scholars believe that Hagar joined the entourage.

Sarah knew what it was like to be exploited by her husband and men in power. And that did nothing to soften her heart to another vulnerable woman. Do you know what Hagar’s name means?

Hagar = the IMMIGRANT

She was depersonalized. She was devalued. And Sarah continued the cycle of exploitation and injustice.

This is a pause to look around and look inward moment. Why is it that sharing power, redistributing power, changing who has power—why is it that shifts in power never solve exploitation and injustice? I’m all for power being shifted, shared, and redistributed. That’s why we have elections. That’s why we should remove people from positions of power when they abuse their power. We should be people who seek to empower those who have been oppressed or disadvantaged. But why is that doing that never solves the problem of exploitation and injustice?

The solution is NOT getting power in the right hands, even though I want trustworthy people to have power. The solution is not getting power in the right hands. The solution is getting under the right authority and building on the right foundation. A big reason that American evangelicalism has such a bonkers relationship with politics is that too many church folks have lusted after power and celebrated power instead of submitting to and trusting in the right authority. Power is a pathetic foundation upon which to build hope.

Genesis 16 is a gross and pathetic story that exemplifies for us what happens when people build their hope on their power.

GENESIS 16:3-4 So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. He slept with Hagar, and she conceived. When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress.

Do you recognize this pattern? It links back to Genesis 3.

GENESIS 3:6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

Sarah repeated the sin of Eve. Abraham repeated the sin of Adam. Their sin was that they trusted in themselves, in their own best thinking, and in their own power—all while disregarding the God who favored them and promised to bless them.

GENESIS 16:4-5 When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m shocked. Who could have predicted this going sideways? What could go wrong with the husband sleeping with a much younger woman, that woman getting a promotion on the socio-economic ladder by getting pregnant, and a rivalry erupting between the younger woman and the older wife?

Last week you heard me say that the Bible is not a morality book and it’s a not systematic theology book. Instead of condemning the evils of polygamy in a single statement, instead of condemning in a single statement any attempt to expand marriage beyond one man and one woman for life—it’s condemned through story. Every account of polygamy, side chicks, concubines, whatever, they are all tragic stories that unravel into chaos.

Ironically, though not surprising, Sarah blames Abraham. That’s another pattern repeated from the Fall. The man blamed the woman. The woman blamed the serpent. Now, Sarah blames Abraham. His response is that she should use her power to get Hagar in line. Sarah takes that as a blank check to doll out harsh treatment of Hagar. And when Hagar hit her breaking point, she ran away. And who could blame her?

In some ways she jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. She was in the middle of nowhere with no means to take care of herself. And the angel of the Lord showed up. Do you know who that is? That’s God showing up in that moment. Even though no one knew him by that name yet, that is Jesus.

He is the only in the narrative who asks her a question. He is the only who listens to her. He does send her back. He sends her back with a promise and purpose. He sends her back with a new foundation to stand on. The promise and the purpose was about her baby. It was a boy and she was to name him Ishmael. Even though she was enslaved, he would grow up to be free and strong.

Calling him a wild donkey of a man in that culture meant that he would be untamed by any person. He would live free, and he wouldn’t be bullied and pushed around by those who came against him. This is how Hagar responded.

GENESIS 16:13-16 She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.” That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered. So Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne. Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael.

Did you know that she is the first person in the Bible to give God a name? A woman who Abraham and Sarah dishonored is forever honored in the pages of Scripture. Do you know what Ishmael’s name means?

Ishmael = God HEARS

Every time that Abraham said his name, every time Sarah heard his name spoken, every time that anyone said his name it was a sermon. God hears. Nothing escapes his notice. God sees and God hears. And even when you can’t see you can trust in the one who sees.

There is much more to the story. I hope you read it. And as you, remember that the point isn’t to figure who the good guys are and follow their examples. No. The point is to learn from their examples and then ask ourselves, what foundation am I building on?

What’s going on in your life right that isn’t quite right, and you want to be made right? What is something good that you long for and if you get honest with yourself you’re tempted to trust in your own power and what you can make happen for yourself?

• What’s the foundation you’re building on in your hopes for financial security?
• What’s the foundation you’re building on in your hopes for building a career?
• What’s the foundation you’re building on in your hopes for finding a spouse?
• What’s the foundation you’re building on in your hopes for getting your marriage back on track?
• What’s the foundation you’re building on in your hopes for good for your kids?
• What’s the foundation you’re building on in your hopes for retirement?
• What’s the foundation you’re building on in your hopes for getting and holding onto significance, security, and satisfaction in life?

Will you let this story point you to Jesus. With all that you want to build, will you build on him and on his word?