Genesis 16: Don't Try to Help God

Waiting can feel like wasted time until you realize what it reveals about you. Today we sit in Genesis 16, where Abram and Sarai face the tension every believer knows: God has spoken, the promise is real, but the clock in your head keeps getting louder. Out of that pressure, they reach for a culturally acceptable workaround through Hagar, and what seems like a quick solution turns into relational chaos, blame, and deep pain for everyone involved. 

We unpack why “helping God” is often just another name for trying to control the outcome. Along the way, we talk honestly about impatience, partial obedience, and how rushing God’s timing can create problems you didn’t need to carry. Then the story pivots to one of the most tender moments in Genesis: God meets Hagar in the wilderness, hears her distress, and shows Himself as the Lord who sees. If you’ve ever felt overlooked, stuck in consequences you didn’t choose, or exhausted from waiting, this chapter speaks directly to you. 

The main takeaway is simple but life-changing: God’s delay is not God’s denial. We also explore the nuance that sometimes God is waiting on our faithful next step, which is why wise Christian community matters when you’re making big decisions. If this helped you, subscribe for the daily Bible breakdown, share the episode with a friend who’s in a waiting season, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

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Scripture quotations taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation (NLT).
Copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation.
Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hey everyone and welcome to the Bible Breakdown Podcast. In this podcast, we will be breaking down the Bible one chapter a day. Whether you are a new believer or have been following Christ for a while, we believe that you will learn something new and fresh every single day. So thank you for joining us and let's get into breaking down the Bible together.

Genesis Context And God’s Promise

Sarai And Abram’s Surrogate Plan

Conflict Explodes And Hagar Flees

God Meets Hagar In The Wilderness

The Lesson On God’s Timing

Prayer And Closing Promise

SPEAKER_01 0:23

Well, hello everybody. Welcome back to the Bible Breakdown Podcast with your host, Pastor Brandon. Today, Genesis chapter 16. And today's title is Don't Try to Help God. Don't try to help God. And you may be the one person in all of history who has ever or who has never tried to help God at all. But if you're not that one person, then this is a wonderful lesson for all of us that we can learn from because folks be trying to help God and it just never works out. So we're going to get into all that in just a moment. This is one of those soap soap opera kind of deals where it's just going to get crazier and crazier. And Abraham's got some explaining to do. We're going to get to all that in a moment. But while we're getting that ready, get your Bibles out, get ready to go. Make sure you also take a moment to like, share, and subscribe to the YouTube channel and the podcast. Make sure you leave us a five-star review on the podcast, on Spotify, Apple, wherever you are. And make sure you're also going to the Bible breakdown discussion on Facebook. There's an amazing group of people doing a wonderful job. The more we dig, the more we find. And you can find all of that at the Biblebreakdown.com. Well, if you've been with us for the past couple of weeks now, we have been walking through this idea of just taking a step-by-step walk through the book of Genesis. And we've been very careful to make sure we're putting our heads back in the place that the book of Genesis was originally written to. Now it was written for all of us, for all time, God revealing himself through his word, but it was written to the recently liberated Jewish people who have been spending over four or had spent over 400 years in Egyptian bondage, in this polytheistic society where, you know, all these different things are going on, and God is rewriting everything. He's he's saying, no, all of that is wrong. Let me tell you what the truth is. You know, there's a difference between gaslighting and writing out the truth. You know, gaslighting is trying to convince you of a different past that didn't actually happen, right? Writing out the truth is God is saying what you have been believing the whole time is a lie. I'm laying down the truth. And that's what he is doing, is he is laying down all of creation. He lay laid down what happened with the flood, all of that. And now he is laying down the beginning of God working through a particular family to bring hope to the world. And that's the family of Abram. And if you've been with us, you know, God told him to leave the nation or the nation of Ur, go into this other area. He you know, he said, okay, but I'm also taking my brother uh nephew, which he wasn't supposed to do. Things happened, whatever. But God kept keeps telling him, I'm gonna bless you. Through you, there is gonna be this amazing nation. And there's a catch though, and the catch was he hadn't actually had any kids yet. And he's trying to figure out, okay, well, God tells me I'm gonna have a uh a family, I'm gonna have my own children, but I don't have any of those children. So what happens when we decide that God needs a little bit of help? We're gonna get into that and we're gonna see how horrible this is. And you may or may not be able to identify with the exact situation, probably not for most of us, but you can probably identify with what it looks like when God gives you a promise, doesn't happen when you think it ought to, and so you start thinking, well, maybe that's God's way of telling me he needs a little help. Well, let's see what happens when we do that. You ready? Here we go. Genesis 16, verse 1 says this. Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had not been able to bear children for him, but she had an Egyptian servant named Hagar. So Sarai said to Abram, The Lord has prevented me from having children. Go and sleep with my servant. Perhaps I can have children through her. And Abram agreed with Sarai's proposal. Now pause. Now, this would be something kind of like someone having a surrogate the way they do now, with the one difference being it doesn't sound like Hagar have much of a choice. So in a way, you go, okay, I I get that, but that's also not good at all at the same time because surrogacy nowadays, you you you talk to people about it. Now she got you know voluntold she was going to do this, right? Verse 3. So Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar the Egyptian servant and gave her to Abram as a wife. This happened ten years after Abram had settled in the land of Canaan. So Abram had sexual relations with Hagar and she became pregnant. But when Hagar knew she was pregnant, she began to mistreat her mistress, Sarai, with contempt. Then Sarai went to Abram. This is all your fault. I put my servant into your arms, but now she's pregnant, and she's treating me with contempt. The Lord will show who's wrong, you or me. So that doesn't need to be told, by the way. Pause. We we we look at, you know, Sirai being really mean to Hagar. Let's also make sure two things are true at the same time. Hagar also not being nice in this. All right, verse 6. Abram replied, Look, she is your servant, so deal with her as you see fit. Then Sarai treated Hagar so harshly that she finally ran away. So that means everybody's doing this wrong. Okay, Abraham did Abram didn't take responsibility. Sarai, you was you know, shouldn't have even had Hagar in that position. Hagar is not just just no one's winning in this, all right? The Bible's not saying this was a good idea. Verse 7. The angel of the Lord found Hagar beside the spring of water in the wilderness along the road to Shur. The angel said to her, Hagar, Sarai's servant, where have you come from, and where are you going? I'm running away from my mistress Sarai, she replied. The angel of the Lord said to her, Return to your mistress and submit to her authority. Then he added, I will give you more descendants than you can count. So the angel also said to her, And you are now pregnant and will give birth to a son, and you are to name him Ishmael, which means God hears. For the Lord has heard your cry of distress. The son of yours will be a wild man, as untamed as a wild donkey. He will raise his fist against everyone, and everyone will be against him. Yes, he will live in open hostility against all his relatives. Thereafter, Hagar used another name to refer to the Lord, who has spoken to her. She said, You are the God who sees me. And she also said, I have truly seen the one who sees. Have I truly seen the one who sees me? So that so that well let me say it again. So that well was named, uh the well where she get water, that that well was named Ber Lahai Roy, which means the well of the living one who sees me. It can still be found between Kadash and Bared. So Hagar gave Abram a son, and Abram named him Ishmael. Abram was eighty-six years old when Ishmael was born. So, you want to talk about chaos. What happened was, and I know I paused a lot, so let me kind of recap the story for you, but I was stumbling over it today too, because I got so many thoughts in my head. Because also, for for what it's worth, uh the Islamic people, the Muslims, they say they come from Ishmael's descendants, by the way. So it's just there's a whole lot in this story that that happened. But what happened was, is God had told Abram, I am not going to bless you by you giving all of your possessions and everything to another servant or to a nephew. I am going to give you a son, even though Abram and Sarai were beyond the normal age of giving, you know, having children. And so the Bible said God believed Abram. Or Abram believed God, rather, that this is going to happen. But as time continued to go on, time continued to happen. You know, we're we're talking maybe 10 years after the fact, they still had a child. And so Sarai and Abram are looking around, going, okay, well, God hasn't done this, so maybe, I mean, and let's give them the benefit of the doubt. They're not sit here, you know, saying God doesn't know what he's doing. Maybe they're saying, well, the reason why God hasn't done anything yet is he's waiting on us. That's that's what it is. He's waiting on us to take a next step. Well, in that case, what next step can we take? Well, according to historical records and this kind of stuff, this is not the first time this ever happened. This was considered something that you could do. If you couldn't have children, then you could take, you know, a surrogate, whether you know someone that agreed to it or they didn't have a choice, and you could have a child through them. This is not the first time this had ever happened in history. And so they are thinking of what they would have considered in their culture a viable other option to have this heir. This is not what God told them. God said that he was going to give Abram a son, but then they decide to kind of sidestep God to do it their way. And once again, let's give them the benefit of the doubt. They're not trying to go against what God says, they're just trying to step outside of God's timing. And when they do that, everything goes crazy. Everything just gets messed up and it just absolutely just continues to go downhill from there. And so, what lesson can we learn from this? What's the principle? God's delay is not God's denial. Let me say that again for all the people in the back, including the person talking to you right now. God's delay is not God's denial. If God has promised you something in his word, just because it doesn't happen in our timing doesn't mean it's not going to happen. As a matter of fact, there's probably a really good reason why God hasn't done it that way. Now, we don't know in this story why exactly God had not done it yet. Maybe it had to do with God once again, you know, getting Abram to a place where he could trust God more. But we what we do see is when we run ahead of God's timing, that is not a good idea. And I understand that there's nuance to this. Because there are times when God is waiting on us. You know, because God has told us, because many times I've talked to people who, you know, they will say, well, God's not being faithful, you know, X, Y, and Z. And when you start talking about it, you start saying, okay, well, what are you doing and not doing right now in the meantime? And you realize they're not being faithful to God. They're not taking the next steps that God has already told them to take, but they're thinking God's not faithful, and it's really they're not being faithful. So there's there's there's nuance here, which is why we have to have brothers and sisters in Christ around us that we can every once in a while look up and go, hey, how am I doing? Do you see anything in my life? I got a real good feeling that if Abram and Sarai had been in life group and they went to life group one night and said, Hey, we're we're thinking about you know doing this custom that a lot of people do, and you know, and so well they did God put that on your heart? No, no, God told us that that we were gonna have children, but you know, it hadn't happened yet. So I'm wondering if maybe it was supposed to be another way. You know, maybe someone in the life group could have said, hey, well, you know, in the right circumstance, but the right thing, that other option might be an option. But if God told you to wait, you know, maybe you ought to wait. And so that's why we have to have people around us to remind us sometimes that God's delay is not always God's denial. And so if we get impatient and we try to run ahead of God, we may end up with an Ishmael who in the moment is gonna be awesome because Abraham's gonna have a child, but all it does is create confusion and discord and disarray and bigger problems down the road. It's better to be delayed by God than have a lot of problems that you didn't have to have. That's something for us to all think about. Let's pray together right now. God, thank you so much for today. Thank you, God, that you are with us in this complicated thing called life. And Lord, sometimes we get so excited about what you're doing, we get so excited about the promises that you've given us that we run ahead. And we want to, we want to help you. Lord, I believe that for many of us, most of us, 99% of us, it's it's not with any anything negative or bad, it's just excitement. It's just wanting to see what you have promised us come to pass. I pray you'll help us to remember that the one who promised is the one who is faithful. And that you will have your way in your time. Give us, Lord, the courage to be patient and to wait on you until you reveal what it is you're doing. We thank you for that, God, in Jesus' name. Amen. And amen. Well, God's word says in Genesis 1, verse 1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And since that verse is true, any other thing that God does is possible. I love you. I'll see you tomorrow for Genesis chapter 17.