What My Dad Should Not Have Taught Me

Now, at first glance there are a couple of obvious lessons to be learned here

When you abandon your morality to accommodate the culture, you may be shamed to learn they have more conscience than you

This is often true. The reformation doctrine of total depravity has been pushed to such an extreme that it denies the image of God that lives in all people. The natural human tendency to sin does not eradicate the knowledge of good and evil that was gained in eating of the conscience tree. That knowledge is incomplete and skewed, there is no doubt, but if we think that people don’t know right from wrong, simply because they are not Christians, we are being stupid and Abimelek proves it. Our moral sense, gained by our relationship with God, can and should be exercised even when it is difficult or dangerous.

Tell the truth, even if it costs your life – the moral consequences outweigh the mortal consequences

It was to his great humiliation to learn that the moral implications of the honor and sexual safety of Isaac’s wife meant more to a foreign king than it meant to her husband.

To tell a lie erodes the trust that people have for you. It makes you vulnerable to being disregarded when strength is needed. Isaac should have been more concerned about his integrity than he was about his life.

Protect the women God has placed in your life

This is most obviously true of our daughters and wives, but I believe it extends to mothers, sisters and every other woman who can lay a family claim to you. Men, generally, God made you physically bigger than women and He made you bigger for a reason. It is not an unpeaceful thing to say that we should at all times, like Jesus, place our own bodies as sacrifice to preserve and protect the women God has entrusted to us from violence and from violation. This is both a question of morality and of courage.

We should be ashamed and feel less a man if we can, with a clear conscience allow the women in our families to endure physical hardship when it is in our power to stop it. That may be terribly chauvinistic and old fashioned, but I believe it is true.

Isaac should have been more concerned about his wife than he was about his life.

In the bigger picture

This story is told within a larger context. This is the third time the story is told in Genesis. The first two times it is told of Abraham, once with Abimelek and once with Pharaoh.

The sad truth is that Isaac did not come up with this scheme on his own. He learned it from his father. Admittedly, for Abraham, the evasion was a half-truth, his wife Sarah was his half-sister. But it is the nature of the truth that once it is broken in half, if it is not immediately repaired, like other broken things, it will be thrown out. Isaac did this. He was Rebekah’s second cousin, not even close to siblings. But that did not stop him from using the same lie as his father.

How could this happen?

How could the mistakes of Abraham be passed to his son? It is simple. Men, how do we regard the sins of our past. Are they objects of regret or do we find evidence of our wit and strength in them. In other words