When God spoke, and a person answered
God and Hagar
A pregnant slave woman, mistreated and running away into the wilderness, becomes the first person in Scripture to give God a name. Beside a spring of water, the God who sees finds the one no one else was looking for.
“And he said, Hagar, Sarai’s maid, whence camest thou? and whither wilt thou go? And she said, I flee from the face of my mistress Sarai.”Genesis 16:8
The conversation
The conversation. Hagar, Sarai's Egyptian handmaid, flees from her harsh mistress into the desert. "And the angel of the LORD found her by a fountain of water in the wilderness." He speaks first, and He knows her name and her place: "Hagar, Sarai's maid, whence camest thou? and whither wilt thou go?" She answers honestly, "I flee from the face of my mistress Sarai." The angel tells her to return and submit, but wraps the hard command in an enormous promise: "I will multiply thy seed exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude." He tells her she is with child and shall bear a son and call his name Ishmael, "because the LORD hath heard thy affliction." Then Hagar does something remarkable: "she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me: for she said, Have I not also here looked after him that seeth me?" The well is named Beerlahairoi, the well of the Living One who sees me. A runaway foreign slave, alone and afflicted, is the one to whom God reveals Himself as the God who sees.
What God was doing
What God was doing. God was seeking the overlooked. No one in Abraham's household went after Hagar, but God did, finding her by a desert spring. He was seeing her affliction; the son's very name, Ishmael, means God hears, and God had heard the misery of a woman with no power and no advocate. He was comforting her with a future she could not have imagined, a multiplied seed and a named child. He was also correcting and calling, sending her back to a hard place but not without His promise and His presence. This reveals a God whose eyes are on the afflicted, the foreign, the enslaved, the ones society counts least. He does not only speak to patriarchs and prophets; He stops at a well for a weeping servant. The name Hagar gives Him, "Thou God seest me," is the confession of everyone who has ever felt invisible and then discovered they were seen all along.
How it leads to Christ
How it leads to Christ. Many Christians read "the angel of the LORD" here as an appearance of God Himself, since Hagar names the speaker "the LORD that spake unto her" and says she has seen God and lived. If so, this may be an early, veiled coming of the Son before He took flesh, the same one who would one day be found by wells, speaking to outsiders. At Sychar Jesus sat wearied by a well and revealed Himself to a Samaritan woman whom others despised (John 4), asking her questions and offering living water, just as the God of the well of the Living One sought Hagar. The Word who "was made flesh" (John 1:14) is the God who has always sought the afflicted and the unseen. He who spoke of old still speaks in the Son (Heb 1:2), and His eye is still on the least.
Questions people ask
Who is "the angel of the LORD" who spoke to Hagar?
The text shifts between calling him the angel of the LORD and the LORD Himself, and Hagar says she has seen God. Many Christians understand this as a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ, though Scripture presents it reverently and we should hold it humbly.
What does the name Hagar gave God mean?
She called Him "Thou God seest me," and named the well Beerlahairoi, meaning the well of the Living One who sees me. It is the first time in the Bible a person gives God a name, and it declares that God notices the afflicted.
Why did God send Hagar back to a mistress who mistreated her?
God did not abandon her to it; He gave her a promise, a named son, and the assurance that He had heard her affliction. Scripture shows God meeting her in her hard circumstances with His presence and a future, not leaving her comfortless.