The Name She Gave God

A pregnant woman is walking into a desert on purpose. She has no water and no destination. She is running from the house where she lived, and nobody from that house comes after her.

This is Genesis 16. Genesis is the first book of the Bible, and it follows one family God made promises to. The husband is Abram, later renamed Abraham; God told him his descendants would outnumber the stars. His wife Sarai has had no children, and ten years have passed.

This chapter follows neither of them. It follows Sarai's Egyptian servant, Hagar (Genesis 16:1) — a foreigner in this family, and "servant" here means slave: owned, with no say over where she lives or what happens to her body.

Sarai stops waiting and makes a plan: give Hagar to Abram, let Hagar have the baby, count the child as her own (Genesis 16:2). Nobody asks Hagar.

It goes wrong at once. Hagar gets pregnant and starts looking down on the woman who cannot (Genesis 16:4) — she is not the innocent one here. Sarai complains, and Abram steps out of it: "do to her as you please" (Genesis 16:6). Sarai then treats her so harshly that a pregnant slave decides the desert is safer.

1. God went after the person nobody was chasing

Nobody sends a search party. In that house she counted as property, not a person. Someone comes anyway.

The angel of the LORD found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur.

Genesis 16:7

"The angel of the LORD" means God's own messenger, and this is the first time the Bible uses that phrase. Notice the word "found." You only find what you were looking for. Shur lay south, toward Egypt. She was heading home, and would have died of thirst getting there.

Centuries later a man named Ezekiel said the same thing. He was a prophet, someone whose job was to speak for God, and he said it to people whose leaders had abandoned them.

Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out.

Ezekiel 34:11

The searching is God's own job, and he is not handing it over. He does not wait to be found; he goes out and looks.

Jesus — the Jewish teacher Christians believe is God's own Son — turned it into a question.

What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it?

Luke 15:4

He asked that of religious teachers disgusted that he ate with people they thought beneath them. A sensible owner guards the ninety-nine. God goes after the one, and "until he finds it" sets no time limit.

2. He said her name, then asked where she was going

Count how often Abram or Sarai says "Hagar" in the first six verses. Not once. Sarai says "my servant." Abram says "your servant." To the people who own her, she is a job title.

And he said, "Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?" She said, "I am fleeing from my mistress Sarai."

Genesis 16:8

The messenger uses her name first and her position second. He asks two questions; she answers one. She knows what she is running from and says nothing about where she is going, because there is no answer.

Names matter here.

Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.

Isaiah 43:1

"Redeemed" means bought back, the way you buy back something taken. Isaiah, another prophet, said this to a beaten nation carried off by an empire and counted as nobody. In a crowd of prisoners, God knows which one is which.

Generations later, Hagar's own country, Egypt, would hold Abram's descendants as slaves — the same story with the sides swapped.

I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings.

Exodus 3:7

Taskmasters here means the slave-drivers. Seen, heard, know: the last is the heavy one. He is not reading a report about their pain, he says he knows it. He had already done that for one Egyptian woman under a Hebrew tent.

Now the hard part.

Return to your mistress and submit to her.

Genesis 16:9

He sends her back. There is no way to make that comfortable and it would be dishonest to try. But notice what the text does not do: it never calls Sarai's treatment right, and it never says the trouble is over. What changes is that she goes back carrying a promise spoken straight to her — "I will surely multiply your offspring" (Genesis 16:10). In Genesis that promise goes to the men: Abram, Isaac, Jacob. Here it is said to a pregnant slave.

3. She answered by giving God a name

So she called the name of the LORD who spoke to her, "You are a God of seeing," for she said, "Truly here I have seen him who looks after me."

Genesis 16:13

The Hebrew is two short words: El Roi. El means God. Roi comes from the ordinary word for seeing. Together: the God who sees me. Not God who is powerful or far away — God who looked at me.

Other people in the Bible name things after what God did for them. Abraham named a place "The LORD will provide" (Genesis 22:14). Gideon named an altar "The LORD is peace" (Judges 6:24). Those are places and objects. Here the one being named is God, and the person naming him is a foreign slave who has not spoken a word before this. God matches her in the name he gives her son: Ishmael means God hears, because the LORD had listened to her suffering (Genesis 16:11).

What she found out is stated plainly elsewhere.

The LORD looks down from heaven; he sees all the children of man.

Psalm 33:13

Seeing is what God does, over the whole earth, all the time. Hagar was not an exception; she found out what was already true.

Now the uncomfortable side.

No creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

Hebrews 4:13

That letter was written to people thinking about quietly walking away from their faith, and the line is a warning. "Give account" means being asked to explain yourself. The same eyes that found a woman by a spring see the thing you would not want read out. Hagar had treated Sarai with contempt: God saw her wronged, and saw her doing wrong. Being seen is only good news if the one looking means to help you.

4. She named him the God who sees, and later she could not see

The chapter ends on a well.

Therefore the well was called Beer-lahai-roi.

Genesis 16:14

The name is usually understood as "the well of the Living One who sees me." Her story stayed on the map, in the name of a waterhole.

Years later the boy is nearly grown and Hagar is in a desert again, sent away for good with bread and one water-skin, a bag made from animal hide. The water runs out. She puts her son under a bush and sits a long way off, because she cannot watch him die (Genesis 21:16). God's messenger uses her name again — "What troubles you, Hagar?... God has heard the voice of the boy where he is" (Genesis 21:17).

Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water.

Genesis 21:19

Read that slowly. It does not say God made a well. It says he opened her eyes and the well was there — in that place the whole time she sat waiting for her son to die. The woman who named God "the one who sees me" could not see what would save her child.

It happens again centuries later. An enemy army has surrounded the town where the prophet Elisha is staying, and his assistant panics.

O LORD, please open his eyes that he may see. So the LORD opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw... the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.

2 Kings 6:17

Elisha does not pray for reinforcements. He prays about eyes. The help was already on the hill; the problem was the servant's sight, not the enemy's size.

Paul, who wrote many of the Bible's letters, prayed that for a whole church.

having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you

Ephesians 1:18

He is writing to Christians who already believe. "The eyes of your hearts" means the way they see, not the eyes in their heads. He does not ask God for something new to give them. He asks God to let them see what they have.

What to do with this

Answer the second question. Hagar could say what she was running from, not where she was going. Write both down this week. If the second line stays blank, leave it blank rather than filling it with something tidy, and say exactly that to God.

Use someone's name. In that camp Hagar was "my servant" to everyone except God. Pick one person you only deal with by their role: the cleaner at your school, the man at the till, the new person nobody sits with. Ask their name this week and use it next time.

Ask to see before you ask for more. Before you ask God to change your situation, ask him to show you what is already there. Write down three: the friend who keeps messaging, the meal someone cooked, the money that arrived. The well in Genesis 21 was not new. Her eyes were.

Hagar walked into that desert as somebody's property, with nowhere to go. She walked out carrying a promise and a name for God nobody had used before. Paul told one church that what matters most is not knowing God but being known by him (Galatians 4:9). She found that out first, by a spring, on a road she never finished.