The Danger of Trying to Play God

The name Philips Brooks may not be familiar to you. He lived a hundred years ago. He was the rector of the Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston and a great preacher. He was a brilliant man, entering Harvard University at the age of 16 and graduating at 20. Among other accomplishments, Brooks wrote the Christmas carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem”.

Although Brooks was known for his poise and composure in the pulpit, his close friends knew that there was another side to him. He could, like all of us, be frustrated, irritable, and impatient. One day, a friend entered his study, only to find Philips Brooks pacing around like a caged lion. The friend asked “What is the trouble, Dr. Brooks?” To which the great preacher answered, “The trouble, my friend, is that I am in a hurry, but apparently God isn’t.”

There are many times in our lives when we are in a hurry but God isn’t. We want answers to our problems and we want them now. We grow impatient at God’s apparent lack of interest in our situation, and so we cast about for our own solutions. Times like these are times of great spiritual danger, because we tend to try to put ourselves in the place of God, and play God.

We come today to a chapter in the life of Abram where he faced this same experience. Abram had received a marvellous promise from God that he would be the father of a great nation. But ten years had passed and he hadn’t even had his first son yet. What’s more, his wife had gotten beyond the point where it was possible for her to have children. Abram figured that God must mean that his inheritance would be passed on to one of the servants in his household - a common custom in those days. But in chapter 15, God reiterated the promise that Abram would have a son of his own.

So here was Abram. On the one hand, he had a nebulous, intangible promise from God. On the other hand he had the reality that nothing had happened for ten years. Furthermore, every day that passed seemed to take him a step further away from ever seeing that promise fulfilled.

Have you ever called a company and been put on hold? You wait and you wait. The minutes tick by. You have to listen to irritating music with occasional messages interspersed to the effect that if you’ll just keep holding, the next available representative will answer your call. After about ten minutes of this, you come to the conclusion that the next available representative is on a luxury cruise to Tahiti and can’t be reached. But the great unspoken fear that you have lurking in the back of your mind is that, after all that waiting, you will suddenly hear a click followed by a dial tone. Has this ever happened to you?

This was what Abram was feeling. It was like every time he called heaven to find out when this promise would be delivered, God put him on hold. He just couldn’t get through! And he got pretty sick of listening to a divine dial-tone. So in chapter 16, he and his wife decided to take matters into their own hands. They decided to play God and get this promise delivered their own way.

There is always a human answer close at hand for the person who decides to give up waiting on God. In chapter 12, Abram, when faced with a famine in the Promised Land, doubted God’s provision and went to Egypt - the land of plenty. Egypt was right next door. Remember the trouble he got into there? Now, in chapter 16, Sarai, in her barrenness, turns to an Egyptian handmaiden as a solution. She’s right there under Sarai’s nose. Right in Abram’s own household. She’s young, she’s strong, she can bear children.

But Egypt is a symbol in the Bible of human strength, of human impatience, of man’s answers to life’s problems. And Egypt is always right next door for the person who gives up waiting on God.

Notice what Sarai says to Abram in v.2.

The Lord has kept me from having children.

Was that true or false? Well, it was true. If children are an heritage from the Lord, as the Bible says, the Lord hadn’t given Sarai any. This was a true statement that Sarai made. But it wasn’t true for the reasons Sarai supposed. She thought of her barrenness as a punishment from God. She thought that she didn’t have children because God had cursed her, that He must hate her, that He had no use for her. It was a true statement but it had a false premise.

God had kept Sarai childless all those years in order to give her a child miraculously. The silence of God was but a prelude to the blessing of God. In the same way, just prior to the coming of the Messiah, we have four hundred years of silence. Four hundred years when God didn’t speak to us. Why? Because he was preparing to bless us with the greatest gift in all of history. The silence of God was but a prelude to the blessing of God.

When we think that God has abandoned us, it may be that God is preparing to bless us. When you are faced with a brick wall, or with a door that is not just closed, but slammed in your face, did you ever stop to consider that God might be preparing to bless you? There is an old Italian proverb that says “God never shuts a door but that He opens a window.” And to the believer who determines to wait on God when facing a shut door, a window into heaven is opened. That person gains a whole new perspective and appreciation for what God is doing.

That is why the prophet could say

They that wait upon the Lord will renew their strength…

That is why the Psalmist tells us

Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.

But Sarai did not want to wait anymore. She and her husband had waited for ten long years and nothing had happened. Now it was time to do something. So she said to her husband…

Go, sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her.

Notice the pronoun she uses…perhaps I can build a family through her. Ten years of silence had proven to her that God wasn’t going to build her a family, so she would have to do it herself. Sarai was proposing that she and Abram turn to a common custom of those days. When a woman was childless, she could bring one of her servant girls to her husband and give her to him as his second wife. If the servant girl bore children, those children could be legally considered to be the adopted children of the first wife.

Sarai was going to try to fulfill God’s promise for Him, on the assumption that it wasn’t going to happen otherwise. She had concluded that God had abandoned them, so she decided to play God herself. She was going to “cover” for God in this situation.

Whenever we turn to our human resources to do something for ourselves that only God should be doing for us, we are playing God.

Charles Blair is a man who knows this only too well. Pastor Blair was the pastor of the largest church in the state of Colorado - Calvary Temple in Denver. The church grew phenomenally over a 20 year period. As the church began to need bigger and bigger facilities, and as they got into more and more ambitious projects, the need for money became acute. In the late 60’s, the church went into the sale of bonds to meet their financial obligations, but they only went deeper and deeper into debt. By 1974, the Calvary Temple was in chapter 11 receivership, and in 1976, Pastor Blair was convicted for the fraudulent sale of securities. He was fined and given probation in order to keep pastoring his church and thereby repaying investors.

Blair wrote a book about the experience. It’s called “The Man Who Could Do No Wrong”. In it he confesses that, although he was trying to build a church to the glory of God, he was using the methods of the world. “When they didn’t work, I simply applied more of them. I believed we were serving God, and He was therefore bound to rescue us.”

Whenever we turn to our human resources to do something for ourselves that only God should be doing for us, we are playing God. It is better to wait on God “unblessed” than to run ahead of God and try to obtain the blessing yourself.

Have you ever wondered why Abram agreed to Sarai’s plan? Here is a man of faith who caves in at his wife’s suggestion to take matters into his own hands. I believe that there are a number of possible reasons to explain Abram’s failure here in ch. 16.

1. He himself was wavering in his belief in God’s promise.

2. Perhaps he was feeling guilty over what he had done to Sarai in Egypt.

3. The influence of a wife upon her husband in spiritual matters.

e.g. - Eve upon Adam; Job’s wife upon Job (Satan killed everyone but his wife)

But in going ahead and doing what they did, Abram and Sarai broke the one-flesh relationship of marriage. In spite of the fact that what they did was culturally acceptable, it wasn’t spiritually acceptable. It violated God’s principles for marriage given in Genesis 2. They were doing something that God didn’t want them to do in order to try to get something that they knew God wanted them to have.

But this is not how God works. God does not violate his own will in order to provide blessing for his people. This happened because they were trying to seize God’s blessing in their own strength. And this is always what happens whenever man is in a hurry but God isn’t.

It happened again with Jacob. God had promised that Jacob would inherit the blessing as the firstborn. But instead of waiting on God to provide it, Jacob and his mother cooked up a deceptive plan to seize the blessing themselves. The result was that Jacob conned his brother, lied to his father, and lived in terror with a guilty conscience for years because of what he did.

It happened again with Moses. God had promised that He would deliver his people from the hands of the Egyptians. He said it would take 400 years. But Moses, as a young man, decided to intervene in God’s timetable. When only 360 of the 400 years of bondage had passed, Moses killed an Egyptian and presented himself to Israel as their deliverer. He would lead the revolution against the Egyptians. But they wouldn’t have him as their leader. And the Egyptians wanted his head. So he fled into the wilderness and lived there for forty years, where God taught him how to be a real leader.

Man’s impatience with God never brings blessing, it only brings heartache. The results of what Abram and Sarai did are still being felt today. Hagar bore a son, Ishmael, who became the father of the Arab nations. Today the Arabs have set their face against their brothers, the Jews, who are the offspring of Isaac. And this 4000 year old family problem has become a global problem which threatens the security of the whole world.

It brought heartache for Abram and Sarai and Hagar as well. In v. 4 we read

When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress.

Why? Because Hagar felt that she was now more important than Sarai. She was going to be the mother of the promised son. Sarai was totally unnecessary and unimportant. Man’s ways bring division and strife.

And look at how Sarai reacts.

Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my servant in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.”

Sin always looks for somebody else to blame. The same thing happened in the Garden of Eden. God came to Adam and said “Adam what have you done?” And Adam passed the buck. He said “It was the wife that you gave me that made me do it.” And when God confronted Eve, she said “It was the serpent that you made that caused me to do this thing.” Sin will always try to shift the blame.

This plan that was supposed to bring blessing into their lives put a wedge between husband and wife. If Sarai’s reaction was bad, Abram’s response to his wife’s accusation was not his finest hour, either. He responded by basically abrogating his responsibility as the leader of his wife and his household. Men are often prone to do that. When there’s a problem, we men are quite happy to ignore it and hope it will go away, or slough it off on our wives and hope that they’ll do something about it.

Well, Sarai did something about it alright. She mistreated Hagar to the point that Hagar fled. Remember that this is the same girl who, a few months previously, was the answer to Sarai’s problem. Sin causes us to manipulate and use people to our advantage without any concern for their well-being.

Verses 7 to 16 of this chapter tell us how the Angel of the Lord found Hagar in the wilderness. The Angel of the Lord appears numerous times in the OT and a number of things lead us to conclude that the Angel of the Lord was actually Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity. Keep in mind that the word “angel” means messenger. Jesus was in fact a messenger from God the Father. In each place where the Angel of the Lord appears, He speaks in the first person as God Himself. Look at verse 10:

The angel added, “I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count.”

These are the words of God Himself. Another factor to take into account is that the people who met the Angel of the Lord were convinced that they had had an encounter with God. Look at verse 13

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.”

Other people to whom the Angel of the Lord appears in the OT include Moses at the burning bush, Joshua, Gideon, and the parents of Samson. In several of these instances, the people fall on their faces before the Angel of the Lord and worship him, and the Angel of the Lord accepts that worship. Now we know from other places in Scripture that mere angels refuse to accept the worship of men. It is not proper for them to be worshiped. Only God is to be worshiped. This leads us to conclude that the Angel of the Lord is Jesus Christ, revealing Himself in pre-incarnate form.

The significant point, however, is in when and where God met Hagar. He met her after sin had done its awful work in her life. She was hurting, and alone, and on the run. And that’s when God met her. And she was in the wilderness - far from the security of home and friends and family. And it was when she was going through this barren, desolate experience that God met her. He met her at a spring in the desert.

God delights to meet us in the wilderness experiences of our lives. You may be in the wilderness right now. There is a spring in the desert where you can know the presence of God in a new and refreshing way. God can take the wreckage that sin has caused in your life and bring hope out of it, just as He did for Hagar. She received promises from God while she was there in the desert - promises that showed that God cared about her and her family. Promises that showed that God was not finished with her - that he had a plan for her life. For Hagar, the wilderness became a place of new beginnings. It became the place where she realized that God saw her. She said “I have now seen the One who sees me.”

Do you believe that God sees you today? Do you believe that He has His hand on your life? Are you willing to wait for Him?

Lamentations 3:24-26 I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.