Abraham: My bad!

Good morning. We're going to be moving into the passage that Wayne introduced to us here. But we have a question here. Why is this account here in the book of Genesis? Why is it there in the Bible? In one way, you could drop this whole chapter out of the book of Genesis and nothing would be disrupted in terms of the logic and the information provided and everything else. The whole chapter could drop out and everything that God promised would still come about. Everything that is told in the rest of Genesis would still make some sense. But it's still there. It's there and why?

Well, the chapter is there not to give us some sort of critical part of the story, without which nothing would make sense. The chapter is there to teach us some things. Well, what do you know? It's there to teach us some things that God has for us to learn, and for that reason, not because it's critical to the various sequence of steps in the life of Abraham. And so I would invite you to join with me as we step through this passage here. And let's learn these lessons together, shall we?

You have on page one of your handout this chart of Abraham's ages. We've been using this as we've moved through recent chapters and will continue to do so. One of the things we're going to see next week is when Abraham is 100 years old, that is when Isaac is born.

This chapter here, Genesis 20, is in the year right before this. And it goes along with that, Genesis 18, 19, and 20. So those three chapters are all in close succession. Genesis 18 is the event where Abraham sees three strangers, invites them to come and have lunch as his guests.

And in chapter 19, we see then the warning to Lot. You need to get out. The judgment upon Sodom and Gomorrah and the other cities of the plain. And Lot's escape with his wife and daughters, with ultimately the loss of his wife. And then the events we see here in chapter 20.

These are all in close succession. And it's interesting how, as we go through the book of Genesis, there'll be events like this in close succession, whereas just prior to this, there was about a ten-year gap where nothing was set. So it's interesting, the Lord doesn't just take even objective history, but brings out those things that are important for us to know. Not always because, as we'll see here, because they're a necessary part for us to understand in how God makes things unfold, but because, as in this case, there are lessons to be learned. There are truths to be drawn out and to be demonstrated.

Now, here's a map of the area around Israel and the surrounding region. And you see the Sea of Galilee there at the top, the smaller body of water. A number of you have been to Lake Tahoe, ever seen Lake Tahoe? The Sea of Galilee is about the same shape as Lake Tahoe and about two-thirds the size. But Lake Tahoe is about 6,000 plus feet up and above sea level. Sea of Galilee is about 700 feet below sea level, okay? Now, Dead Sea is... It's actually a sea that's disappearing, extremely salty. It may even get much smaller even during our lifetime.

The Arabs call it the Sea of Lot because of the events that took place that we read about in Chapter 19. Now, there's also these places that are mentioned in the account that Wayne read for us. And one of these is this area called Shur. And do you know when you're in Shur? Do you know how to find out when you're in Shur? You tell by people's accents. You ask the people, you say, am I in Shur? And they say, yeah, Shur.

And then over here, there's the Negev, right? Nancy, what are you laughing about? Anyway, all right. The Negev just means south, okay? The Negev just means south, and so that you can also tell by the accent. You ask people there, am I in the Negev? You're in the Negev, right? All right. All right. The places that are mentioned here, one is Gerar, which is the key location for this event. Kadesh is the other city that's mentioned briefly.

And then Hebron, which is not mentioned in this chapter, is where Abraham moved away from. Now, the one thing that's interesting is this chapter does not tell us why Abraham moved away from Hebron. I have a guess, and it's just that. that when he saw all that smoke and everything coming up out of Sodom and Gomorrah, the idea of getting away probably appealed to him. And especially since there was a lot of sulfur, burning sulfur, and that probably stank. So that's just a guess.

All right. Enough of my weird accents. There's a supplement that's been made available, I believe on the cabinet to the right as you exit the room here. And that's a map of some of these locations. You can't see the detail here, but with that in front of you, you'd be able to look at where some of these places are and study it for yourself. Now, got to look at Abraham has a problem here that he had before. He has this problem again.

As we look through this account in Genesis, right after the Lord had promised to Abraham, right after He had promised to Abraham, I will bless you, I will make you a great nation, He made these promises, then Abraham goes down to Egypt and he cooks up this story, Sarah is just my sister. He figures that will keep him out of trouble. Well, what happens here, he isn't going actually into Egypt, but closer to it, and he ends up with the same fearful response. What is it? Sarah is my sister. Now, there is some truth to it, but it's a half-truth, because Sarah is his half-sister, right?

And so he can make this claim, and he figures somehow that's going to save his life. So this is the story he comes up with. As we find out later on in this account, it's actually a strategy that he developed when he left Haran and came into the Promised Land, and he's sticking to it. That's his story.

Abraham's problem wasn't just that he was fearful, although that was a problem. It wasn't just that he was a compulsive liar, although that was indeed a problem. Abraham had actually a bigger problem that was the cause of those two problems and that's that he didn't trust the Lord in them. He didn't trust the Lord in the circumstances that he was in. That was the real problem.

Now isn't it interesting how one problem leads to another and leads to another? Very interesting. What we find here with Abraham, his failure to trust the Lord, his failure to see that, look, the Lord has made these promises. I can depend upon them. It is amazing, astounding, that he would have no difficulty leaving his family, leaving his family home, and going all this great distance and trusting the Lord for that. But when it comes to, oh, they'll kill me because of my wife, Then he's got to come up with something. It's really puzzling.

Perhaps you have noticed that certain circumstances in our lives, we may be able to trust the Lord for this and this and this, but certain circumstances in our lives may be what causes us to say, oh, I've got to come up with my own strategy for that. Because this circumstance, I just, I can't, I don't know, I can't trust the Lord for that. That was Abraham's problem. Now, this is the first of five biblical abimeleks. Now, say that ten times fast. Biblical abimeleks. No, never mind. This is the first of five here in Genesis 20.

It may have been a title, but more likely just simply a name. A name that was common. It has a couple of possible meanings. Either my father is king or royal father. And so here's this guy who likely has this name, royal father, or my father is king, named Abimelech. This Abimelech here in Genesis 20 was the king of this city. Now there were, as we have already seen in biblical times, and it's actually carried on even into Europe and other parts of the world in more recent centuries, People, there would be a king over a large city in the surrounding area, not necessarily a large nation. And we saw that with Sodom. Sodom had a king. Gomorrah had a king. And that's the case here with Gerar. So here is Abimelech, king of this kind of city-state. And this is the site of ancient Gerar, okay?

Nothing too great to look at now. Let me show you a prettier view of the other side of the hill. There, that's a little bit better. It has very little left in this city now, but it was at the time a fairly significant place, halfway between Beersheba and the coast.

So here in this city, Abimelech has gotten himself well established. We'll see him again in the next chapter. Abimelech, even after what he does at the end of this chapter, he still wants to make sure things are quite settled with Abraham and he's not getting in any more trouble. And we'll see why he does that shortly here. Now, here comes the problem. Verse 2.

Abimelech sent for, as was anticipated, and took Sarah likely into his harem. And in a harem situation, it would be, you'd collect a number of ladies in the harem and wouldn't necessarily even have any ceremony, wouldn't necessarily get around to any of them for quite a while. So he just drew Sarah into the harem and initially that was it. So far as Abimelech knew, by his own culture and by what he knew to be the facts, or at least what he thought were the facts, he wasn't doing anything wrong.

But the Lord knew quite well that there was something very wrong with what had gone on. And the Lord was going to get to the bottom of it. God was going to take an action to assure that his one-way promises to Abraham were fulfilled. God made promises to Abraham that he was not going to have countered. And so the Lord was going to take action. The Lord made his promises and he wasn't going to let anybody's action, any human action, make his promises somehow fail. That what could have been a serious problem was avoided altogether. Think about this.

Abraham had been told, and it may have been even days or weeks before this, Abraham had been told that within a year your wife will have a son by you. And so he'd been given this information directly from the Lord as the Lord's revelation. And it may well be that Sarah at this point was now fertile, miraculously so, but fertile. Imagine the consequences if the child was not Abraham's but Abimelech's.

This could have been bad. So the Lord said that is not going to happen. So, we have a question here. Is it safe for God to talk with strangers? So, we've got to think about that. Is it safe for God to talk to strangers? Well, what God's going to do is He's going to use a dream.

Now, you've had dreams. I know you have. Some of you have even told me about them. Be careful. Dreams are amazing because they can either be real foggy and vague or sometimes they can be very specific and seem real even to the point where it's hard to get them out of your head.

I had an experience like that one time. I woke up one morning, as I usually do in the morning, and Nancy was just glaring at me. It was really bad. I had not had that experience very often. So Nancy was glaring at me and she continued to glare at me. And I didn't know what was wrong. Finally it surfaced. I had apparently let her know in the night that I had another family living in the same town. And I said, Nancy, when would I have time?

And the reason for that is why? Because dreams can seem very real. What the Lord did here with Abimelech is to give him You'll forgive Nancy for that, won't you? What the Lord did was to give Abimelech a dream that would come across as very, very real. We don't know the nature of it, whether it was some foggy thing or what he saw. He may have seen something just like a bright light. What he heard, however, was crystal clear and recorded for us in Scripture and even what he said in response. You've had dreams like that where you said something?

Very soon after he had taken Sarah in, Abimelech had a dream, this deliberate revelation by God, in which God told Abimelech the truth. See, Abimelech had gone on this idea that, oh, this Sarah that I just took in, that's Abraham's sister. Well, God was going to surface the truth here.

And Abimelech responded to what God said, and certainly that was a good thing. But God told Abimelech what to do. The first thing God did is say, here's your problem. And now he's going to say, here's what you've got to do to fix it. And he warned him so that Abimelech would not suffer the consequences of having intimacy with Sarah.

God spoke to him. The answer to the question, is it safe for God to talk with strangers? God spoke to him for his own safety and for Abraham's safety and for the safety of God's promises. Now, so first God spoke to Abimelech, here an unbeliever, by anything that we know.

Here is this unbeliever hearing God speak. Now this is weird because you have in this account a switch from the usual. Why do I mean that? It is that Abraham was the one who was the believer, right? Abimelech is the unbeliever. And here's Abraham acting like an unbeliever, and here is Abimelech, and boy, let me tell you, he is about to be made a believer. At least in what God's telling him here.

Let's go on here and get the details. One of the things to remember is that dreams were taken very seriously, more seriously than Nancy took her dream about me. But dreams were taken very seriously in ancient times, but also it's clear that God has used dreams during biblical times to reveal things that were important. We're going to see before the book of Genesis is out that Joseph will be involved in interpreting a dream. And so that would be one example. We could point at more. During the time of our Lord's birth, dreams were used more than once in order for God to influence events and people. So dreams are something that God has indeed used.

But in our own day, why doesn't the Lord just speak through dreams like He did here? It's because He has spoken to us in His Son, Jesus Christ, a special revelation. Jesus Christ, the living Word, and He has spoken to us through the written Word. Now we have, as the book of Jude puts it, the little one-chapter book, we have the truth that was once for all delivered to the saints. So the Lord does not need to speak through dreams as He did that night with Abimelech. Now, let's talk about Sarah, the dream girl. God told Abimelech that he was a dead man. Now, we have expressions like that. Obviously, Abimelech was not a dead man. But we have expressions like that. Somebody will make a threatening statement, you know, you're a dead man, or something like that, or you're as good as dead.

But what God was saying is the certainty of this, unless Abimelech did what was necessary to remedy the situation. since Sarah was Abraham's wife, not just his sister, as he falsely claimed. Isn't it interesting that Abraham, the believer, came with the untruth, and the Lord came along and straightened it out with the unbeliever? That's a real turnabout.

Sarah herself had confirmed, because she went along with Abraham's story, that she was his brother. Abimelech claimed and God confirmed that Abimelech had acted with what he understood to be the truth and in accordance with his culture. He had taken Sarah in as a part of this harem that was consistent with his culture. Abimelech had acted in keeping with that with integrity. Now, so here's what God told Abimelech.

God Himself said that I have kept you from sinning against Sarah. Isn't that interesting? It may have looked like just circumstances, but I have kept you from sinning against Sarah. The Lord revealed that. God told Abimelech to restore Sarah to her husband, who is a prophet. And by the way, this is the only place in the book of Genesis that that word prophet is used. Real interesting. so that he will pray for you now this is amazing stuff restore the wife to this man who lied to you and the wife that lied to you but this man's a prophet and he'll pray for you we'll get to that I know that's puzzling but it will work out God told him that if he did not if Abimelech did not restore Sarah to Abraham, that he would die and all his people would die. His entire kingdom, himself included, would be wiped out. These are serious consequences.

So, Abimelech says, oh, it's just a dream, right? Not so much. Not so much. What does Abimelech do? I rose early that day. I think I would too if I was in his shoes. As a matter of fact, getting back to sleep might have been a little bit difficult, right?

So here is the BIMOAC. And he gathers together his servants. Now you're thinking servants, that seems kind of low-level. In the book of Genesis, even later on in the account with Pharaoh, Pharaoh's high court counselors were also called servants. So this is a kind of a cultural pattern. Servants does not always refer to a low-level person, but those in the high court that are offering counsel and advice.

He gets basically his cabinet together. in order for them all to kind of hear what this dream was. And, of course, what they do is they say, well, let's declare war, right? Not so much. Imagine, all right, if you're going to declare war against God. All right. What are we going to do? Who are we going to shoot? Who are we going to throw rocks at?

There isn't anything you can do. And that's why they were just severely frightened. Everybody was just scared. You get the counselors together, and first Abimelech was scared, and now they're all scared. Everybody's scared. There's nothing you can do.

God gave them a choice. God gave them one choice. You restore Sarah to her husband. That's your choice. And so that's the choice that they took. Abimelech called Abraham in and said, hey, we've got a problem. You told me that this gal was just your sister, and that's not the case. And I think it was probably amazing to Abraham to have Abimelech say, God told me that that's not your sister. That must have been astounding.

Abraham, and it's interesting, several verses are taken up with this, Abraham made excuses in great detail. He elaborated on his excuses. His justifications are given a fair amount of text here. He went, I've got this reason, and I've got that reason, and I've got this other reason, and of course it all makes perfect sense why I lied to you.

But nothing was really changed by his excuses, and Abimelech wasn't going to change what he did either. Abimelech was the one, in this case, who does the right thing. Abimelech gave, and this doesn't appear to have been required, but I think Abimelech was saying, I don't want to do anything that's risky here, given the message I had from God. So he gave sheep and oxen and male and female servants to Abraham. Right?

Take your wife, take these things, take some more stuff. Just please, you know, get me out of this problem. He gave his wife Sarah back to him, just as the Lord had asked. And that's not all. He told Abraham that he could settle wherever he pleased. I'm not sure why he did that. That was actually rather generous. You would think he'd wanted to get them away, but that's what he did. And he told Sarah that he had given a thousand pieces of silver to her brother. I'm not sure whether he was winking. I'm not sure whether he's being sarcastic.

But very interesting how the biblical account comes across. But here's the wild part. Then Abraham prayed for Abimelech. You know, this is something real interesting. Abraham had just pure, plain and simple caused this whole problem. He was the one that caused this whole problem. He had lied as a part of apparently a pattern. He had lied to Abimelech. And now the Lord is using him. What kind of sense does this make? Is this confusing?

I think one of the things that we can look at with this is that in our own lives, if we have a time when we are sinning or we are depending on ourselves, depending upon the sin nature to direct us, the Lord can indeed restore us to a place of usefulness. And I think this is a key truth that comes out of this passage. By God's grace, by God's mercy, He can take us from a place where we've been in the wrong, a place where we've been depending on ourselves and our own strategies, and restore us to usefulness. And that's exactly what it does here.

The Lord used Abraham, and actually it's exactly what Abimelech was told, this guy's a prophet, he'll pray for you. Isn't it interesting to have this man who was, at least up to this point, an unbeliever, come and tell Abraham, now look, you've lied to me, and to correct Abraham, and then to have Abimelech say, and now you're supposed to pray for me. Very interesting for the Lord to use this circumstance with an unbeliever to restore Abraham back to a place of usefulness, back to a place of fellowship with the Lord. This is a culture certainly where having an heir and having a family lineage was really important. It's borne out by the fact that both Abraham and Abimelech had built into their names a word meaning father. So this was no small matter that Abraham prayed and the ability to bear children among all the people of Abimelech's household was restored.

Now what can we glean out of this passage? What can we, after looking through this, what can we draw away from it that is truth for us to take home here? Abraham was a believer, but it appeared that he had a settled strategy here. This verse 13 in this passage is where he said, this is what I decided to do. Here's how I'm going to handle this situation.

And basically he was going to lie every time he came along to the situation where he felt threatened. He was not trusting God's promises in this area, even though God had repeatedly shown himself faithful and even repeated the promises. He was not trusting God's promises and God's character in this area. And we too can fall into a similar rut. We too can get stuck in this realm of depending on earthly resources, depending on earthly strategies and circumstances.

Learning to depend upon the Lord in the midst of these circumstances is simply a matter of spiritual growth. It's one of the things that's interesting. A lot of the things that we find ourselves bound up with, how do we deal with those? It's really a matter of growing out of them. Growing out of them. We have the opportunity to do that, to get out of the rut of self-dependence. We have the opportunity to learn that we can trust the Lord in these areas and walk in fellowship with Him.

This, she is my sister approach, happened three times in Genesis. We've read about one in Genesis 12 and one here in chapter 20. It's going to happen once more, about a half dozen chapters ahead of us here, with Abraham's son Isaac. There is another supplement that's available on the cabinet to the right that compares these three events where Abraham twice and Isaac once claimed, oh, this is my sister.

And you can feel free to take advantage of that. It may have even happened more times than is recorded. It may have been a repetitive thing that we only see a few evidences of in the book of Genesis. What does it take to get it in the head? What does it take?

As believers, we have the opportunity to learn from these things and not do as Abraham did where you just keep repeating it, but also to pass the truth along. Pass it along to our kids, pass it along to others who we love. I can remember various times when our kids were growing up in the household when I would say, boy, you know, I learned something here and maybe it was something I learned the hard way. But I would pass it along to my kids and even say if they were the ones who were shorted or offended, I'm sorry. But how valuable to pass it along.

As we read through various Bible accounts, and this is one of them, As we read through various Bible accounts, one of the great tragedies that's repeated again and again is that the spiritual lessons learned are not passed along as they should have been. Here's Abraham. He doesn't seem to learn the lesson and his son Isaac does the same thing. Here's Samuel, a prophet for the Lord, but his sons are a spiritual mess.

Passing along. These truths, learning them and passing them along to those we love and care about is a critical opportunity that we just can't pass up. We can pass them along graciously to those that we care about and love. Like Abraham, we can count upon the blessings.

That's one thing. Abraham, if he had counted upon the Lord's promises, upon all the ways that the Lord said he was going to bless him, there was no reason that he had to come up with this story. Abraham could count upon God fulfilling his promises and blessing in the future. We're in a different position.

Yes, we're told to count our blessings, but we are called to count blessings that we already have. Abraham failed here with Abimelech because he didn't count upon the blessings that were promised in the future. We have the opportunity to count upon the blessings that we already have and to trust the Lord because of the blessings that we have. We have blessings that are not conditional, but they're untouchable in the heavenlies.

A pivotal truth. We have Christ in us. We who believe are in Christ. These are key and pivotal truths. These are blessings that we can count upon. We can learn about and understand. And they're real now. They're not something just to be waited for in the future. They're real now.

Ephesians 1.3 puts it, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us, past tense, it's a done deal, with every spiritual blessing, where? In the heavenly places. Untouchable, irreversible in the heavenlies. Now, here's something else.

God told Abimelech, here's what will happen if you do not restore Sarah. Do you think that God was just waiting? Just, oh boy, I can't wait to carry out these judgments against Abimelech. That's not God's intent, is it? That's not what God was really wanting to do.

He was simply wanting to make quite certain, quite certain, that Sarah was restored to Abraham. God is gracious and merciful. God looks for opportunities to express the grace and mercy here. God was merciful to Abraham. Did not Abraham do things that deserve terrible consequences? The Lord withheld the consequences that Abraham deserved. Even beyond that, Abraham, after this misstep on his part, was blessed with even more things and more opportunity. Abimelech says you can go anywhere here.

God's mercy and grace for us as believers are to be the motivators. The things that motivate us. Not guilt. God's mercy and grace are to be the motivators. Anybody enjoy being motivated by guilt? Is that really attractive to anybody? It is not God's intent that a believer be motivated by guilt at all. Period. His grace and mercy are to be the motivators in our lives.

Have you ever had a close call? Here's a picture of a close call and you kind of see the path of this truck. Now I'm going to show you the rest of the story. This truck had a close call here. I could think of other close calls. I think of some of the close calls I've had and it still makes me shudder. Certainly, you've had various kinds of close calls in life. In one sense, this might have looked like it was a close call.

Like, uh-oh, God's promise is in trouble. From a human standpoint, it might look that way. But from God's standpoint, it was never a threat. God had made the promise to Abraham, and He was absolutely going to fulfill it. From a human standpoint, it's a close call. But from God's standpoint, His promise was absolutely safe. It was going to happen. Period. God's promise is good. No exceptions. Let's pray.

Lord, as we look at this passage, as we look at the truth here, we thank you for your faithfulness to your character, to your promises. Even when we have been faithless, you are ever faithful. And we thank you for your graciousness, for your mercy shown in this circumstance. And Lord, we count upon that this very morning. And we count upon the ways in which we've been blessed, every single one of them, in the heavenly places. In Jesus' name, Amen.