When we left him last week, he had stepped out in great faith and was on the move, going at the behest of God to a place known only to God. He had marched what must have seemed like 3 million steps. What courageous faith! What derring-do! He built two separate altars, one at Shechem and one at Bethel:
• “Staking his claim” to the reality of God’s promise of land
• Signifying his worship of God, however incomplete his knowledge of God might have been at the time
We marvel at his faith and his willingness to follow God regardless of where it might lead, and we left him riding the wave of his faith, midway through Genesis 12 marching boldly where he’d never gone before!
At the end of chapter 12, though, we find this very same warrior of faith being marched out of town shamefully under armed guard (v. 20). How did Abram get from the heights of belief to the depths of ignominy? After taking 3 million steps forward, he took 2 steps back.
Spiritual irony: sometimes, it is on the heels of a spiritual triumph that we experience a spiritual trial—which leads to our defeat! Beth Moore says in her book, When Godly People Do Ungodly Things, that we are most vulnerable after a spiritual high because that is when we least expect to fall. The fall is highest from the spiritual mountaintop; it is when we’re there that we’re of most use to God and most danger to Satan.
We find that a challenge of considerable significance comes into the life of Abram and his family.
Famine –
• Drought was not uncommon in Palestine, its fragile ecology based upon winter and spring rains, and absent these, trouble can brew in the form of famine.
• Food scarce in Canaan, and the local pagans would have felt little compunction to share any with the wayfaring family of Abram.
• “Thanks, God...I do what you say, worship you, and you give me a famine?”
Trying circumstances offer us an opportunity to grow in our faith—or a chance to fall away – Sometimes we think, if we’re not careful, that living the Christian life should be without trying circumstance if we are living in harmony with God’s will; if you listen carefully, you might pick up that kind of teaching on popular Christian media. On the contrary, living in God’s will might create for you some problems that you wouldn’t otherwise have.
Abram’s response was to go to Egypt – One commentator suggested that the Bible usually uses Egypt as a symbol of the place to avoid (though God used Egypt as the place where His people were saved!), and thus we can read into Abram’s descent into Egypt a mind stubbornly determined to seek out his own solution to the problem without consulting God’s help. Well, while it’s a stretch to read into “Egypt” a place that at this point in Abram’s journey was verboten, nonetheless we don’t find Abram calling upon God prior to making his decision to go there. And we don’t hear God speaking to him, telling him that this is God’s provision for him and his family during the famine. Is Abram abandoning faith in his fear of famine?
Egypt served as both a marketplace and a source of food; it was not unusual for a traveling entourage to journey there. Employment there would also be a draw to outsiders driven by war or famine there to refuge. So it was natural to think of going to Egypt; it in fact was likely the common-sense approach to the problem!
But there was a problem in Egypt, and the problem was Pharaoh. Would have been customary for a national leader like Pharaoh to feel the prerogative to take whatever woman he chose to be a part of his harem. Abram, being her husband, might well have been, then, a target of Pharaoh’s wrath—what would stand in Pharaoh’s way of simply killing this stranger and taking Sarai to wife?
Sarai is a bit of an innocent character here in Genesis 12; she is the victim, if you will, of the conspiring of a chicken-hearted husband and an admiring Pharaoh. Hey, ladies, take heart as you age: at age 65, she was a pretty hot babe!
If, on the other hand, Pharaoh were to find that Abram were her brother, there’d be little reason for him to consider murder, if indeed he found Sarai to be desirable, and crafty Abram knew this, and so he devised a plan, a plan which contained a kernel of truth, in fact! If Sarai would pass herself off as his sister—and indeed, she was his half-sister—then Abram’s neck would likely be spared.
Godly people can do ungodly things when they take their eyes off God and stop walking by faith. No one is above the possibility of failing, and failing miserably. Abram, who had begun so well with God, now in a moment of cowardice fails miserably. Let’s look at
• The anatomy of a failure
How did this man of great faith fall so far? First, he was
• Motivated by fear
Fear is a bad motive. When we act in fear instead of faith, little good comes of it. We even see this happening on a secular stage, if you will; Congress makes bad laws when motivated by fear.
• We cannot act in fear and in faith at the same time. When we fear, we must bring God into the equation of our thoughts and actions, or we will make a bad choice.
• Fear is a great enemy of faith. Proverbs 3:5-6 “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct your paths.” When we act in faith, we listen to the Father, but when we act in fear, we listen to ourselves, and lean to our own understanding. Sometimes, we can fail with even the best of intentions; we can try to “help God out” (“how can I become the father of a great nation if I starve to death here in this wilderness?). Paul chastised the Galatians because those who had begun by faith were trying to continue their walk with God based upon human effort and understanding.
First, he was motivated by fear. Second, we see that he
• Trusted in self, not God
Didn’t consult God, apparently, before making the decision to go to Egypt. As we said last week, Abram is commended to us as an example of faith precisely because he is a flesh-and-blood human being like we are. We err when we imagine him to be super-human, above possibility of falling; the Bible doesn’t paint its characters that way. In fact, it’s rare that we find any major Bible character described in the Word without reference to at least one flaw; Daniel perhaps comes closest to this, aside from the sinless Christ, of course.
• In the life of faith, the obvious choice often is not the right choice
Didn’t well-watered, center of civilization Egypt seem like the normal place to go in such a time as famine? Sure...just like the obvious choice would have been for Abram, instead of acting upon God’s Word and God’s promise, would have chosen the normal, natural, obvious choice by staying put in Ur, or in Haran. But in the incredible journey of faith that God calls us to walk, we engage in some counterintuitive actions.
In a few minutes, you will be called upon, just like we do every Sunday, to engage in a countercultural action: to give up a sum of your money willfully, freely, sacrificially, and cheerfully, as an act of worship to God. Those who walk by sight, who do not understand that God calls us to walk by faith, who’ve never ventured out on the journey of faith, will balk at the idea of giving. Those who are merely playing a Christian game, not intent on pleasing God, will take a pass. Those whose faith is small or nonexistent will take the obvious choice: let the plate pass week after week without giving. This is a symptom of trusting in oneself rather than trusting in God, and the fact of the matter is that we give, not just because the church needs it, or because those without Christ is Haiti and Uzbekistan and China need it, but because we need to give as an act of radical rebellion against a world that says to us, “make the obvious choice: eat, drink, and be merry; if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist”. But in the life of faith, the obvious choice is often not the right choice!
Motivated by fear; trusted in self, not God; third, he
• Acted without integrity
Integrity, according to Webster, is “the quality or state of being complete or undivided”. The person who is walking in perfect integrity is not saying one thing and doing another, not pretending to be one person and being a different one, not professing to follow Christ as Lord and then living in such a way as to compromise that profession.
Abram, whom the Bible commends as a great man of faith, and who indeed, as we saw last week, stepped out and followed God not knowing where it was God was leading him, took two steps back right here, when he compromised his integrity.
Schemed to avoid his own harm by using a half-truth (we know that this is a half-truth, that she is his half-sister, because the guy used this same plot again, as we read in Genesis 20).
• But a half-truth equals a whole lie, and God isn’t honored by our shading the truth or dealing less than honestly.
• I’m afraid that some Christians do this all the time
• One example: Piracy of music, video – do we justify that? It’s theft. Just because you can get away with it doesn’t make it right. It’s a breach of integrity, no matter how we might try to justify it.
• Punishment from God
“The Lord disciplines those He loves, and He punishes those He accepts as His children” (Hebrews 12:6). This is normal and natural; if my child is out of line, my love for my child motivates me to discipline him back into submission to authority and to doing what is right. That’s Parenting 101, and it goes for God as well: God disciplines His children when we go astray, using a variety of means, for the purpose of teaching us to do right.
Notice that in this case, it isn’t Abram who is punished here, at least not directly. The plagues from God were sent upon the household of Pharaoh. Now, let’s not call Pharaoh an “innocent party”; he certainly was innocent in that he took Sarai into his harem believing her to be Abram’s sister, but the very fact that he could so freely seize her like so much property, with the intent of making her one of his many mistresses, if you will, is not an act of innocence. Still, though the text does not say this explicitly, we have to wonder what kind of torment his sin must have been putting Abram through:
• He received gifts from Pharaoh, all kinds of livestock and servants, both men and women – could he possibly have enjoyed the gifts, knowing that his wife was in Pharaoh’s harem, subject to Pharaoh’s sexual appetites and whims?
• And when he began to see the suffering of others, did he know that he was to blame? Was he seized by a deep sense of guilt? Our sins can have a great effect on those around us more than what we realize. Abram had no clue God would plague Pharaoh. Truth is, sometimes, other people suffer more for our sin than do we.
• Abram learned something about God here that we would do well to remind ourselves of: God is not mocked. What a man sows, he will reap. God does not take sin lightly, even for the child of God, even for the one who is following God on the incredible journey of faith.
• Shame results
This shame took the form of
• This “great man of God” being lectured on ethics and integrity by a pagan ruler. That’s not an unusual means God uses to accomplish His purposes; sometimes, in the Old Testament, we read of God using pagan nations in order to discipline His wayward people, Israel. In this case, imagine the shame that Abram must have felt!
• Being run out of town on a rail. Abram’s deceitfulness was exposed to the plain view of his entire household, as well as the pagan Egyptians. This was not his most shining moment!
But the question then comes, because we all find ourselves in this situation from time to time, what do we do with failure? So let’s look at
• The remedy for failure
We have to go to chapter 13 in order to find this: back to Bethel! We find Abram, in verse 4, going back to the place where he had built the altar, and thus back to the place of worshiping the Lord. When I fail the test, the remedy is to
• confess my sin, because God, my loving Father, is faithful, and just, to forgive it, and to clean me up from the inside out;
• make it right with those whom I might have offended; Jesus said that if we realize that there is a relationship out of joint, even if we are right in the middle of doing something “religious”, we drop what weare doing, and go make it right with the person who is out of fellowship with me;
• be filled with the Spirit; this involves a conscious yielding of myself to the control of the Holy Spirit, relying upon the Spirit in the time of trial to help me to overcome the temptation, because “to obey is better than to sacrifice”, God told sinning King Saul. Though Abram was right to go to the altar he had built, and to worship the Lord again there, better yet if he had never sinned which necessitated his repentance.
• The grace of God despite failure
Grace never excuses sin, nor gives us a license to practice it. That said, the grace of God is so big and so amazing that despite my failure and sin, God doesn’t give up on me. The rest of the story of Abram, though there remain some real failures yet in his future, indicates God’s persistent grace, His directing, forgiving love, His determination to finish in Abram’s life the good work He has begun. And if you are His child, the same is true for you, irrespective of your failure. And God extends that grace to you for the sake of Jesus, the One Who died in your place, the One Who took the punishment for your failures and sins.
The great Bible teacher Warren Weirsbe said that, “a faith that can’t be tested can’t be trusted.” Into every walk of faith, tests and trials will come. They may be the “biggies”: death of a loved one, diagnosis of a serious disease, dysfunctional relationships; they may be of a more mundane/routine variety: whether or not to fudge on the time card or the test; whether to tell the truth or to tell a half-truth, like Abram did, in order to create a false impression; whether or not to retaliate when someone mistreats you. Your faith will be tested. When that happens, how will you respond?
Without a Net in Your Life
1. When a challenging circumstance comes into your life, is your first instinct to trust God, or to fear? If it’s fear, what do you do with that?
2. Do you find yourself excusing half-truths, deception, failures of integrity?
3. What do you do when you sin?
4. Do you ever doubt God’s grace, that He will forgive when we confess our sins to Him (I John 1:9)? How does the story of Abram’s failure—and of God’s subsequent blessing of him anyway— remind you that God’s grace is sufficient for all your sin?
