And Hagar bore Abram a son; and Abram called the name of his son whom Hagar bore, Ishmael.
Genesis 16 opens with a plan to help God's promise along, and it closes with a baby boy. The plan worked — so why do the commentators read this birth as a warning?
Abram had God's promise of a son, but no son. Instead of waiting for God's time, he took Sarai's advice.
At Sarah's urging, Abram tried to get ahead of God's will and to bring about the promise before its time. So we have the covenant of the law pictured in Hagar, the source of distress and unrest. God, however, still takes care of the child born in the natural way. The application of this as a figure is clear from Galatians 4. The pride of man under the law is marked in Hagar's spirit, yet her son cannot be heir. The haste of man, who will not wait for God's time and will not wait on Him as to the means of fulfilment, is full of moral warning to us. It is always the source of unrest and sorrow. Hagar, too, was an Egyptian — a reminder of Abram's lack of faith. Law and flesh, and indeed sin, always go together.
Sarai's plan had been to build her own family through her servant. The verse gives her no such credit.
Verse 15 records the birth of Ishmael. It calls him Abram's son, not Sarai's.
Abram gives the name, but the name is not about Abram. It looks back to God's answer for the mother, and forward with a warning about the child.
The name of the son, Ishmael, was to mark that God heard Hagar in her affliction. It pointed to her, not to him. He was to be a "wild man" (ESV: "a wild donkey of a man"); the word really means a wild donkey. In the light of Galatians 4 this matters, since "the son of the slave was born according to the flesh." Romans 8:7 tells us that the mind set on the flesh "is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot." Man after the flesh has lawlessness stamped on him, and the wild donkey is a fitting picture of him.
The plan produced a son. That is the trap: it appeared to work.
But we can read even more into this. Ishmael was not the child of Hagar only, but of Abraham also. The man of faith had taken the bondservant to his heart, and Ishmael was the fruit of it. Though Abraham's seed, Ishmael is cast out. Is it not easy to see here that even the man of faith, if he uses law as a way to produce fruit, will find that the law is the "power of sin", not of holiness? The wild donkey nature will show itself in the fruit which God cannot own, instead of the fruit He has promised!
Scripture itself interprets this birth. The letter to the Galatians takes Abraham's two sons as a picture of two natures at war.
In Galatians, just as the apostle uses Isaac to set forth all that we are as born of the Spirit, so he uses Ishmael to set forth our old man — all that we are as born after the flesh. He shows, too, that the man who is after the flesh is entirely opposed to the man who is after the Spirit. "Just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now" (Gal. 4:28-31).
Scripture dates this birth, and then dates God's next word to Abram. The gap between the numbers tells its own story.
Abram was eighty-six years old when Ishmael was born. The next chapter tells us that Abram was ninety-nine years old when the Lord spoke to him again. So for thirteen years Abram's life seems to have been barren of communications from the Lord. What a harvest of the flesh.
The silence was not the end. God spoke again, and He gave a new name for Himself.
When Abram was 99 years old, another great revelation reached him, and God established a further covenant, as we find in Genesis 17. Here for the first time we get "Almighty God" (El-Shaddai) — the God who can raise the dead, and to whom nothing is impossible. God Almighty was the name that belonged to the unconditional covenant made with Abram. That covenant depended altogether upon God, and His almighty power guaranteed its final fulfilment.
- Haste — Abram would not wait for God's time. Impatience with the promise is always a source of unrest and sorrow.
- Flesh — the child was real fruit, but the fruit of human effort. Even a man of faith who works this way gets what God will not own.
- Name — Ishmael means God heard. The name marks His care for Hagar in her affliction, not a promise to her son.
- Silence — then thirteen years pass with no recorded word from God. That is the harvest of the flesh.
- Almighty — God speaks again as El-Shaddai. He rests the covenant on His own power, and only that power could ever fulfil it.
And Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram.
Genesis 16 ends like a legal record — a name, a birth, and a number. That number fixes Abram's age at the birth of Ishmael, and the next chapter gives another age before God speaks again.
In the chapter before, Abram believed God. This one closes with a son he arranged for himself. Commentators put the failure not in doubting the promise, but in the wait for it.
The poor heart naturally prefers anything to waiting. It will turn to any device — any scheme — any resource, rather than stay in that place. It is one thing to believe a promise at first. It is quite another thing to wait quietly for it to be fulfilled… Abraham shows faith in Genesis 15, and yet he fails in patience in Genesis 16.
Sarai looked for a way round the delay. She found it in another person.
Had Sarah said, "Nature has failed me, but God is my resource," how different it would have been! This would have been her proper ground, for nature really had failed her. But it was nature in one shape, and so she wished to try nature in another. She had not learned to look away from nature in every shape. In the judgement of God, and of faith, nature in Hagar was no better than nature in Sarah.
Set this verse beside the opening of the next chapter and count the years between.
Abram was eighty-six years old when Ishmael was born. The next chapter tells us that Abram was ninety-nine years old when the Lord spoke to him again. So for thirteen years Abram's life seems to have been barren of communications from the Lord. What a harvest of the flesh.
Those years are not just quiet. The record skips them — a long stretch of a great man's life left uncounted.
Nearly fourteen years had passed since the birth of Ishmael, this son of the slave woman: this effort of man's own energy to carry out the thoughts of God. He was born in Abraham's house and grew up there for twice seven years. For a while everything looked promising. But for those fourteen years Abraham had walked a path he chose himself. His history passes over these years as a blank — completely unrecognised. And oh, how many histories of God's saints will turn out to be a blank one day!
God had a reason for waiting. Writers tie the silence to the moment when Abram's own strength had nothing left to offer.
In the letter to the Hebrews we read of Abraham that "when he had patiently waited, he obtained the promise" (Hebrews 6:12-15). The story of Hagar and Ishmael has shown that under pressure he failed in patience… For thirteen years he patiently endured… God waits until all hope of obtaining the blessing by the efforts of the flesh is over.
Commentators read Ishmael as more than a person. He stands for a way of getting what God had promised.
We have had the seed promised in a general way; and now Abram wants to get it according to his own will in the flesh, and he takes Hagar (chapter 16). Ishmael is "he that is born after the flesh," which is really of the law, an attempt to get the heir on legal ground and take the promises. It was an attempt to get the heir by the flesh, and it all came to misery and confusion.
The son is born and the years are counted. Abram will spend them learning what his shortcut cost him.
An Ishmael was Abram's measure, an Isaac was God's. In the meantime Abraham must learn what the fruit of his impatience is. He learns it through quarrels, strife and sorrow. In the end he must do what was very "grievous in his sight" — send away his son. So our inventions only postpone our real blessings, because we have to see the end of them.
- Promise. Abram truly believed God in the previous chapter; nothing here cancels that. The failure was in the waiting, not in the believing.
- Impatience. Sarai swapped one human resource for another. She never looked away from both to God.
- Ishmael. The child of that shortcut stands for the man born of the flesh. Trying to secure God's promise on human ground ends in confusion.
- Silence. The two ages, here and in the next chapter, frame thirteen years with no word from God. The record leaves that stretch of a great life blank.
- Set time. God spoke again only when every hope from human effort was gone. Our own inventions do not speed the promise up. They delay it.