The God Who Sees
Have you ever felt like God just doesn’t see you or care to see you? Oftentimes we may think that God doesn’t see us or let alone care to see us when we are experiencing chaos. Statements like, “God, don’t you see what I’m going through?” or “God doesn’t care about me because he hasn’t looked my way”, may spiral into the forefront of our minds. But when those thoughts come to mind, know that those lies come from the devil. Therefore, we must rebuke it with the Truth of God’s Word. And that Truth is God sees you. I want us to rest in the fact that God sees us by taking a look into a few special women in the Bible who experienced a hard journey (to say the least), and through their hard journey God saw them and used them for a grand purpose.
…and to Juad were born Perez and Zerah by Tamar; and to Perez was born Hezron; and to Hezron, Ram; and to Ram was born Amminadab; and to Amminadab, Nahshon; and to Nahshon, Salmon; and to Salmon was born Boaz by Rahab; and to Boaz was born Obed by Ruth; and to Obed, Jesse; and to Jesse was born David the king. And to David was born Solomon by her who had been the wife of Uriah. - Matthew 1:3-6
Matthew’s genealogy shows us the irrefutable love who many considered “the least” in the Kingdom of God. Which at the time of the culture and some may say even ours today, were the women and children. These five women are exceptional examples of God seeing and blessing them with His saving grace.
The first woman we read at the beginning of the genealogy is Tamar who was the Canaanite daughter-in-law of Judah. God had taken the lives of her husband, Er, and his next oldest brother, Onan, who was given to Tamar as well. Judah sent Tamar away to stay with her father and promised his youngest son to Tamar when he was old enough to be wedded, but Judah failed to keep that promise. In the tradition of the culture at that time, this meant Tamar would have no heir to receive an inheritance for her livelihood. In distraught of her situation, Tamar disguised herself as a prostitute and tricked Judah into sleeping with her. The result of this was in Tamar’s favor as she bore twin sons—giving her a right to an inheritance with the line of Judah. This narrative is just a summary but can be found in detail in Genesis 38. At a glance it sounds awful…and well, it is. There is deceit, sexual immorality, and just a mess of brokenness. However, we read from the genealogy in Matthew 1, Tamar and one of her twin sons, Perez, joined in the Messianic line to bring Christ despite the sin involved. Though Tamar sinned and was not an Israelite, God used her to progress the line of the Messiah through Judah.
Rahab was a prostitute who was not of Israel descent. She and her family were presiding in the ancient city of Jericho that Joshua (the Israelite leader at the time) was seeking to overtake. You might recognize her narrative as being the woman who protected the two spies Joshua sent to survey the city. In Joshua 2 and 6 narratives, Rahab lied to the messengers of the King of Jericho to protect the spies because she believed the God of Israel was the true God. She heard of the God of Israel splitting the Red Sea, bringing them out of Egypt, and doing many miraculous things to preserve the Israelites. Due to Rahab’s fear of God and her kind act toward the spies, God spared her life and the lives of her family who remained in her house when Jericho was destroyed. Despite the life Rahab had before the destruction of Jericho, God saw her the chaos she was in and created something good out of it. Rahab became the great great grandmother of King David, by becoming the wife of Salmon and the mother of the Boaz.
Ruth, just like Tamar and Rahab, was not an Israelite but a Moabite. Ruth was a godly, loving, and sensitive woman who accepted the Lord as her own God regardless of her origin of culture and nationality. Her people, the pagan Moabites, were the product of the incestuous relations between Lot and her two unmarried daughters that tricked Lot into getting drunk enough to sleep with them to preserve their family line after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. From this, Lot’s oldest daughter had a son named Moab, in which Moab was the father of a people who became one of Israel’s most formidable enemies. The Moabites practiced sexual immorality as a part of their worship to their gods and sacrificed humans—namely infants—to their gods in order for their requests to be heard. Though Ruth was a former pagan, with command from God to his people to not marry into another nation, God’s mercy and grace lavished on Ruth. When both Naomi’s sons passed away, Naomi was left alone, and in having compassion for her mother-in-law, Ruth returned to Bethlehem with her. There, Ruth found work on Boaz’s land where she and Boaz fell in love. This love turned into marriage and as a result, Ruth has her own book in the Bible and is widely known as the mother Patriarch of the line of the Messiah by being the grandmother of King David.
The fourth woman mentioned in Matthew 1 was Bathsheba. She is not identified by name in Matthew’s genealogy but is mentioned as the wife of David and former wife of Uriah the Hittite. In 2 Samuel you can read the narrative of how David saw the beauty of Bathsheba and committed adultery with her. Wanting her as his wife and knowing she became pregnant, he sent Bathseba’s husband, Uriah, to the battlefront to be killed. In the grievances of these sins, God’s mercy continued to push through in order to bring about the Messiah. It was through Bathsheba and David, that Solomon – the wisest King in all the land, the successor of David’s throne, was born. By God’s grace Bathsheba was included as part of the Messianic line. In the face of the continual chaos, I believe we should be able to paint a picture by now that God used women with a past filled with grief and sin for a holy purpose.
The genealogy of Jesus Christ, as read in Matthew 1, is a beautiful testimony of how God sees women despite their circumstances. We are met with His mercy and grace no matter how much chaos we carry or encounter. This ultimately displays how the God who became flesh, Jesus, is the friend of sinners who, “did not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:13). If God, in the past, called sinners to be a part of His redemption plan, we should not be worried if our chaos is too great for Him. God’s love for us goes too deep for any chaos to overcome Him—He is the God who took chaos and created order into being with just four words.
The last woman we’ll be digging into is someone who is a witness of God’s seeing, Hagar. In Genesis 12, Abram knows that his wife Sarai is a beautiful woman. So, he asks Sarai to pretend to be his sister so when they go to Egypt and see how beautiful she is, they will spare his life as well. For if he is known to be the husband, they would kill Abram to take Sarai. The narrative continues with Abram handing off Sarai in exchange for “being treated well” and to spare his life. Sarai is coerced to go be with another man other than her husband. Skip to Genesis 16, Sarai repeats this same pattern of abuse with her servant Hagar by coercing her servant to sleep with Abram. She gives Hagar up to Abram so Hagar could conceive a son for them. In this abuse, Hagar becomes the object of continued abuse by a jealous Sarai and flees from them.
This segment here…God does something very special. He goes to Hagar and sees a woman who is in the deepest of her chaos. Genesis 16:7-13,
7 The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. 8 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.” 9 The angel of the Lord said to her, “Return to your mistress and submit to her.” 10 The angel of the Lord also said to her, “I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude.” 11 And the angel of the Lord said to her,
“Behold, you are pregnant
and shall bear a son.
You shall call his name Ishmael,
because the Lord has listened to your affliction.
12 He shall be a wild donkey of a man,
his hand against everyone
and everyone's hand against him,
and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.”
13 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.”
God sees you. Think about this, out of every single Old Testament Bible narrative, very few people were able to see God in flesh; and, if they did see God in flesh, they were of the men of God of the people of God. But here, we read “for she said, ‘Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.’” God chose to comfort Hagar by allowing himself to be seen by her–a woman who was a lowly pagan servant experiencing dark chaos.
He cares for us even though we may not feel it in the middle of our chaos. God’s love and care for us isn’t a feeling, it is an objective fact that we can see through the way we continue to be held and remain sane in such a broken world. His mercy and grace are a blessing received every morning when we see the smile on our child’s face, taste clean water in our mouth, breathe fresh air, and receive a meal for the day.
Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathseba, and Hagar…we can relate to their life circumstances and the chaos they met in some way. In their story, God used it as a part of a greater purpose. When we are in chaos, remember this, God has been faithful through many generations so why would He fail now? He won’t. So, we will rebuke any whispers of the devil’s lies that come to us saying God does not care to see us in our worst.
Genesis 16:13, 13 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.
CY