Let me describe a movie to you and see if you can guess it.
A small town girl, upset with her family, finally gets away. But then all she wants is to go home, and will pay any price to do it. She kills one person, steals from her body, takes a long journey while making friends with some strange people, all to get to and obey the orders of some egotistical maniac. She breaks into someones home and kills them too, in order to get what she thinks she needs.
Sound familiar? Wanna have a guess? Go ahead, I'll wait. It's the Wizard of Oz. Isn't that what that story is about? Depending on how you view it, I guess it is. But we often try to make a story about something it isn't in order to suit our needs, or make ourselves feel better.
We do it often with the bible too. We want to make the story about good people doing good things and being rewarded by a good God. But we saw in Genesis 15 that we are justified by our faith, and not our works. Genesis 16 reminds us that this is the central message of the Bible, and that we can't make the Bible about something else. Abram and Sarai in this passage do not act in a way that honors God, but still God gives them grace.
Genesis 16 reminds us that we must listen to the voice of God over the other voices in our world, even those closest to us.
And it reminds us that God's promise comes in God's way in God's time.
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