I am the Villain
Am I the only one who struggled to like Sarah in the Bible? For a long time, I didn't think she was a good person! When you look at her timeline in Genesis, she does things that are genuinely hard to stomach:
Genesis 12:1-5 (Uprooted & Called to Move): Sarai is introduced as beautiful but barren. God calls her husband, Abram, to leave Ur and wander into an unknown land. She packs up her entire life to live in tents as a nomad.
Genesis 12:10-20 (Trafficked in Egypt): A severe famine strikes, forcing them into Egypt. Fearing the locals will kill him to take her, Abram lies and claims Sarai is his sister. She is taken directly into Pharaoh’s harem. God steps in, striking Pharaoh’s house with plagues to secure her release.
Genesis 16:1–6 (The Orchestration & Abuse): After ten years of waiting in Canaan, Sarah takes matters into her own hands, forcing her Egyptian slave, Hagar, to sleep with Abraham. When Hagar gets pregnant, Sarah becomes bitter, treats her so harshly ("abused her" or "dealt harshly with her" depending on the translation), and drives Hagar into the desert.
Genesis 17:15-21 (A New Name & Hard Promise): God formally renews His covenant with Abram (changing his name to Abraham) and explicitly renames her Sarah(meaning "Princess"). God promises that she will personally give birth to a king of nations by the following year.
Genesis 18:9–15 (The Laugh of Doubt): When God directly tells Abraham that Sarah will have a son in a year's time, Sarah listens from the tent door and laughs to herself because she is 90 years old. When confronted by God, she lies out of fear and says, "I did not laugh.”
Genesis 20:1-18 (Trafficked a Second Time): In an unbelievable repeat of history, Abraham moves his family to Gerar and again claims Sarah is his sister. King Abimelek takes her into his harem. God blocks the king from touching her, warns him in a dream, and restores Sarah to her husband.
Genesis 21:1-7 (Isaac is Born): In an unbelievable repeat of history, Abraham moves his family to Gerar and again claims that Sarah is his sister. King Abimelek takes her into his harem. God blocks the king from touching her, warns him in a dream, and restores Sarah to her husband.
Genesis 21: 8-14( The Exile): During a feast celebrating Isaac being weaned, Sarah catches Ishmael (now a teenager) mocking her son. Driven by fierce maternal protection and lingering malice, she demands that Abraham permanently banish Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness.
Genesis 23:1-4 & 19 (Sarah Dies): Sarah passes away in Hebron. Grief-stricken, Abraham buys the Cave of Machpelah to bury her. She is the only woman in the Bible whose specific lifespan, death, and burial site are recorded in such meticulous detail.
I can empathize with her trauma. But my hold-up has always been Hagar. Sarah takes her own slave, forces her into a situation to bear a child on Sarah's terms, and then—when it blows up in her face—she abuses that girl so harshly that Hagar flees into the desert. Years later, even after God gives Sarah her own miracle baby, she drives Hagar and the teenager Ishmael out into the wilderness again.
Sarah was jealous, mean, and manipulative. But the reason I used to despise Sarah so much is that, in the darkest corners of my own heart, I am Sarah.
It is an incredibly heavy thing to realize that my pain hasn’t just made me a victim—it has made me a villain to someone else. It is easy for me to admit that I have anxiety. It’s easy to say, "I got loud because I was scared." But if I am being brutally honest, there are times when my unresolved pain didn't just make me "loud"—it made me bitter. It made me lash out. Like Sarah, I have experienced times in my life where I felt unprotected, unseen, or left to wait in silence. And instead of healing that hurt, I turned it outward. I have orchestrated situations to protect myself, gotten angry when they blew up, and ended up driving away the very people I wanted close. I have been the person who was so consumed by my own chaos that I couldn't see how harshly I was treating the people standing right next to me. The Bible records Sarah’s lifespan, her death, and her burial in meticulous detail. She is a massive deal in scripture. And I think the reason God includes her messy, sometimes tragic life so clearly is to show us a hard truth: God’s people are not perfect characters. They are real, hurting human beings who are capable of doing terrible things when they let bitterness take the wheel. So what do we do when we realize we've become the Sarah in the story? What does God do with people like us who stir up drama, lash out, and break relationships?
He doesn't erase us from the story. He stays. He keeps His promises, even through the wreckage of our behavior, and He forces us to look into the mirror of our actions so that we might finally stop controlling and finally start healing.