The God Who Sees Women At the Well
When I first began writing Bethan’s Identity, I struggled to decide what to call God in the fantasy series. Many books use the name Elyon, and that is what I had originally intended to do.
But one afternoon, sitting in a Panera Bread with a dear friend, we were discussing Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis for our monthly book club. As we talked, I explained my plot and the struggle I was having.
“Why don’t you call Him Yah-Roi?” she asked.
I promptly wrote the name down on a napkin and shoved it into my purse.
Yah-Roi.
The combination of YHWH and El-Roi, Hagar’s name for God in the wilderness.
It stuck.
Because the series truly is about the God who sees individuals where they are and loves them too much to abandon them there.
Bethan is a woman broken, discarded, and abused by authority. Yet it is in the midst of her deepest pain that Yah-Roi meets her.
Hagar — The God Who Sees (Genesis 16)
The pattern for Bethan’s life draws heavily from the woman who first named God El-Roi.
Hagar.
The Egyptian maiden who had no standing, no voice, and no protection.
She was separate from Abraham’s people—a slave, a woman, a concubine. Used and discarded by the very household that carried God’s covenant.
Yet it was to this woman that God first sent a theophany.
The Angel of the Lord—the pre-incarnate Christ—appears to her and makes a promise. Interestingly, He finds her beside a spring of water in the wilderness (Genesis 16:7).
God Himself finds her and calls her not by her function, but by her name.
He promises that she will bear a son and that he will become a great nation. This promise does not contradict the covenant made with Abraham, yet the similarity is striking.
Before Israel.
Before the Law.
God reveals Himself personally to an Egyptian handmaiden in the desert.
He tells her to return to Sarai. The obedience and trust in God this must have required from Hagar is incredible. Yet she does it. She returns to her mistress despite the mistreatment and submits.
But before she does, she gives God a name.
El-Roi — the God who sees.
Hagar did not have to trust that Sarai would treat her better. Instead, she chose to trust the God who met her at the spring.
Hagar Again — The God Who Opens Eyes (Genesis 21)
Hagar seems to disappear from the scriptural record for the next fourteen years. Then Sarah sees Ishmael mocking her son Isaac and demands that Abraham send them away.
Abraham is reluctant to do so, yet God speaks to him, reassuring him that Hagar and Ishmael will both be taken care of.
Abraham sends them away with provisions, but eventually Hagar and the boy run out of water. Ishmael becomes so dehydrated that Hagar places him under a bush.
Unable to bear watching her son die, the mother walks away and weeps.
Then the Angel of the Lord calls to her from heaven and once again speaks to her:
“What aileth thee, Hagar? Fear not; for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is.”
God speaks from heaven to tell Hagar that He not only sees her—He hears her son as well.
And then Scripture tells us that God opened her eyes so she could see the well.
The Bible is clear: she went and filled the bottle, gave the boy water, and he lived.
Because he grew, and God was with him.
The Samaritan Woman — Living Water (John 4)
Millennia later, Jesus tells His disciples that He must go through Samaria.
While there, He sits beside Jacob’s well, and a woman approaches.
The timing suggests she is an outcast even among her own people, much less by Jewish standards.
Samaritan.
Female.
An adulteress.
Yet Jesus does not address her by any of those labels.
Instead, He sees her.
And at that well, God the Son once again stops to meet someone with no standing and essentially tells her:
“I know your life, and I am offering you living water because I see you.”
He does not turn away because she is broken, rejected, or an outcast. The character of God had not changed since the day He met Hagar in the wilderness.
Because the name El-Roi is not ultimately about Hagar.
It is about the God who saw one person as worth the time of a personal encounter.
The world saw Hagar as a slave.
The world saw the Samaritan woman as a sinner.
But the God of the Bible saw both women as worth stopping beside a well for.
And He is the same God today, still inviting the lost, the weary, and the broken to come to the well and drink the living water.
Jesus stood and cried out, saying,
“If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water
If the themes of redemption, faith, and the cost of walking the narrow road resonate with you, you may enjoy my novel Bethan’s Identity, the first book in the Songs of Redemption series. Coming March 31.