Image Bearers in a Broken World
We bear, innately, the image of the Trinity. We carry it in our bones, our souls, our spirits. This is what we bring to a broken and fallen world. Ourselves. And the intrinsic ability to re-present the Seer and Hearer and Knower of humanity because He also lives within us. It seems right, therefore, that from our collective body should also spring a culture whose deepest impulses are to see and hear and know His creation. As we discover the person of God, as we look into the mirror of the Word, we realize and bloom into more and more of the One whose image we bear. As we are individually transformed into His image on a daily basis, this culture of heaven can become our collective culture, if we’ll let it. We can allow Jehovah Roi—the God Who Sees—to live through us, to meet the needs of a hurting world.
Culture in Abram and Sarai’s day pressed and molded humanity in the same way it does today. Fresh off the press from the Fall, humanity carried its form well. Things were not as they had been created. They were, in fact, deteriorating at an alarming rate. Most of us have little idea what the culture of Genesis espoused. Polygamy was casual, women were second-class citizens (at best), and pragmatism was at an all-time high. Humanity attempted to save itself by any method possible, while the Creator held a full-time job simply keeping His creation alive. Women were given in arranged marriages and expected to bear children to their husbands. Specifically, they were to bear sons. Those sons became heirs to the father’s estate as well as trophies of his life. If a wife didn’t bear children, there would be whispers and shame. To salvage their future, a woman’s husband might take another wife as a concubine. And the children borne by the concubine? They would belong to the original couple.
This is the culture into which Hagar was born. She was a slave of Abram and Sarai. When God’s promise of heirs to Abram seemed to be hindered by Sarai’s barrenness, culture suggested an alternative. Hagar could be taken by Abram to carry his child, and in the end that child would belong to Abram and Sarai. Hagar had no choice. She was a belonging. She had been displaced from her homeland and family, had no rights, no autonomy, and no way out. When the child was born, Abram and Sarai could do whatever they pleased with that child. They didn’t even have to keep him. Hagar didn’t even have rights to the child she would bear.
As you could expect, the impending delivery caused friction between Hagar and Sarai. In fact, the breakdown was so severe that Hagar ran away, pregnant and alone, into the wilderness. We can scarcely imagine a level of trepidation so severe that a pregnant mother would go on a suicide mission. But Hagar had been broken. As she ran in terror, no human followed her… not one image-bearer was present in her darkness.
But God from heaven was watching, and He was listening. After all, He knew Hagar. He had created her, lovingly and with a purpose. Genesis 16:7 says that “the Angel of the Lord found Hagar.” And when He found Hagar, He called her by name. He told her that He had heard her cry. No part of culture saw Hagar as a person. No one heard or showed compassion for her state. But God saw, and God heard, and God gave her dignity. Almost certainly for the first time, Hagar felt known. The visitation was so transformative for her that, with little knowledge of this God, she gave Him a name: Jehovah Roi—the God Who Sees Me. She didn’t know this God, but she encountered Him. She experienced His love as she was seen.
You’re sitting at your table right now, or maybe on your couch. You live within a culture that, although it looks different, still mars the original image in which its constituents were created. And you, recreated in the very image of Jehovah Roi, have the ability to see and hear. Innate in your reborn nature is the impetus to see and to hear the cry of the oppressed and to find her. She may be next door. She may be in the next cubicle. She may be in the other room or on the other side of the world. But she needs to be heard and seen and known. May this part of our Creator live large in us so that it expands in the culture of our outpost. May we all bear the image of Jehovah Roi well, as we hear and see and know. And then, may we do.