The story of Abraham in Genesis 12-25 is filled with many profound
truths upon which our faith is built. Indeed, I want to say that this portion
of Scripture is the "Gospel according to
Abraham”. Think about that for a moment. What is the Gospel? It is the Word of God’s covenant love made
personally known to an undeserving sinner. That is how the gospel of God came
to Abraham. God, in His free, sovereign love chose to manifest Himself to
Abraham, an undeserving pagan from Ur, telling Him that he would become the
father of many people in the world. These, like Abraham, would be endowed with
the gospel gift of faith to believe in the One Living and True God of the
Universe.
However, as we read the story of Abram’s faith and walk with
God, we begin to notice very soon that this loving call to belong to God does
not come without some severe challenges. Behind us we have 11 chapters of
Genesis. Beginning with Chapters 1 and 2 – the good creation of the world, follows the fall of man in Genesis 3. Here we find the beginning of our many
challenges. Before the fall, man had
only one challenge, “You may eat of every
tree in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall
not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” [Gen. 2:17]
A flood of problems follows after the fall.
Life has become, as we would say, “complicated”. Life following the fall is filled
with trials. Even believers are not
spared from the effects of the fall and from trials. We shall learn that Abram
and his offspring, men and women of faith are kept by grace alone and helped by
Almighty God through their various trials.
So then, we have the story of Abraham before us. Last time we
considered the call of Abram. At that time we had noted that Abram had not been
looking for God! God was looking for Abram. Furthermore, Abram did not dream his own
dreams for the future. He did not write his own job description.
God’s mission
became his mission: “Go from your country
and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make
of you a great nation…” [12:1,2]
A great promise! But it will all happen in the context of
many trials for Abram. The first trial
was the fact that Sarai his wife could not have children [11:30]. The next trial was that he would have to leave his country,
his familiar surroundings and his family to go to a foreign and distant land. Following this there would be the great rigors
associated with trekking 1500 kilometres to the place of promise in Canaan.
Canaan would be occupied by a hostile, evil people upon whom a Divine curse had
been made in Genesis 9:25. But there would still be more! God is testing
the man whom He has called. He is testing him at the very core of his being,
namely with regard to His promises made to Abraham:
(i)
In
terms the promise made with regard to his offspring, the obstacle is a
barren wife.
(ii) In
terms of the promised land the obstacle is that
he has hardly arrived when he
has to leave for Egypt, because of the severe famine. In fact, we shall learn
that he is never really able to settle down in the land of Canaan. Hebrews 11 reminds us that Abram died without
the promises of God being fulfilled to him with regard to the physical land of
Canaan.
(iii)
In
terms of the promise that he would be a blessing to the nations, he saw very
little of it. He received the promise by faith, and with hindsight we know that
God did honour his faith in generations to come.
In every promise made to Abram, God tests him. We need to
grasp the significance of this. The God
who calls us into His loving covenant tests our faith through many trials.
Jesus said that we must enter the kingdom of God through many sufferings. Our trials are not designed to make us fail,
but to purify us and to show us that, in the end, we stand by grace alone and
not by our own goodness and efforts. We learn that it is not our ability to successfully
pass every trial that makes us
acceptable to God. Rather, we learn that the gracious hand of God continues to lead us, enabling us to persevere with Him through the many complexities of life, despite our many our failures.
I have known this for many years, but oh, how little I still understand
this!
We learn that in the midst of
Abram’s failings, God persevered with Abram, and we know that Abram did persevere
to the end. We need to know this, because God tests and matures us in exactly
the same way today, and that sets the stage for the incident that we see here.
Abram has to learn what we all need to learn with such great
difficulty - to trust God and to put no confidence in the flesh. He and
we must learn that we
cannot have children of promise, we
cannot possess this land, we cannot be
a blessing to the world without the help of God. He has to learn to live by
trusting in God alone.
V.10 A Famine leads Abraham into Temptation
"Now there was
famine in the land. So Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there for the famine
was severe in the land." Here comes a trial of
faith. Did God bring Abram here, only to let him and his people of
the promise die of hunger? Surely not! There is something greater behind this, and
the greater plan was this testing and strengthening Abram’s faith. Faith is
both a free gift of God and at the same time it is something that needs to be developed in
each true believer. Very often we learn only through our mistakes and our
failures. The decision to go to Egypt
was a mistake! Remember that God had
called him out of Ur and then out of Haran to start a new community, by taking
possession of the land of cursed Canaan. He was to leave his country, his
people and his father’s household
and become the father of a new way of living and thinking under the
direction of YAHWEH.
His promised land
was Canaan and not Egypt. Now you may ask, “but
what do you do when there is a famine in the land?” Is that not what Jacob did?
Did he not settle in Egypt at the time of another famine in order to survive.
Isn’t that a responsible action (Gen. 47)?
Well,
maybe at face value, but it appears that God intended to show Abraham the
nature of His faithfulness IN and THROUGH the drought in Canaan. I also remind
you that Jacob’s going to Egypt did not prove to be an ultimate blessing to the
nation. We have to be very careful in
being tempted to escape short term problems, for they often produce more
problems than they solve. God is committed to His people in their hardships. He
is committed to providing for them their daily bread, as He did when He led His
people out of Egypt back to Canaan in the day of Moses. You will remember that
daily miracles were the order of the day as God’s many people moved through
waterless and barren deserts. Would God
not provide through the drought? Would He not hear prayer for daily bread?
Would the rain not finally come and end the drought, as has happened here in
Namibia at this time, in response to the pleas of many of our people?
It seems that Abram did not trust God in this trial. And in so doing he almost lost his wife and
his life! He did not gather Sarai and
Lot and all the people with him saying, “Now
we must pray for God’s daily provision until He finally sends the rains and end
this terrible drought and famine?” Instead,
Abram looked to Egypt, the bread-basket of that region at this time. Egypt remained
a great temptation for the people
of God at all times.
Isaiah the prophet in Isaiah
30:1-3 had to remind the people of his day: “Woe to the obstinate children, declares the LORD, ‘to those who carry
out plans that are not mine, forming an alliance, but not by my Spirit, heaping
sin upon sin; who go down to Egypt without consulting me; who look for help
to Pharaoh’s protection, to Egypt’s shade for refuge. But Pharaoh’s
protection will be to your shame, Egypt’s shade will bring you disgrace”.
The tendency to want to solve our problems by taking shortcuts is ever with us. We find ourselves often in the same predicament
as did Abram. The Gospel of Jesus has found us in our pagan places. We have
heard the call of Jesus to follow Him, and that is where faith is challenged.
Jesus calls us to love Him more than we love this world. He calls us to live as
citizens of heaven. He calls us to live in faithfulness, obedience, perseverance to him
despite our trials. He intends to grow us through these. Is that not what James
has in mind in Chapter 1:2-4?
But we are so very tempted to take shortcuts
in our life with Christ. We seek solutions that sound so very reasonable, but
which if you think about it, encumber us and enslave us rather than truly help
us. Abram is trying to find his own way
out of a dilemma. He is
trusting the Lord, but a man has to live, doesn’t he? Can you see how quickly our faith can be undone?
And so, Abram, went to Egypt, and as he went away from the famine in Canaan,
his worries started to increase in Egypt!
That wasn’t supposed to happen, right?
But, knowing something about the culture of
the Egyptians (and the heart of man in general) and their fancy for pretty women, what would the Egyptians do
with his beautiful wife? And so he starts planning and scheming to evade a new
problem [vv. 11-13].
And, sure enough, it happens! [vv 14-16]
His plan to survive is
back-firing.
His life is now in greater danger in Egypt than it was back in the
famine of Canaan. Sarai, who he
deceitfully presented as his
sister, is now in the hands of another man. And in her place
he received sheep, oxen, male and female donkeys, male and female servants and
camels” (v.16). He has lost Sarai
and gained animals. But in reality he has lost the most important
person in relation to the fulfilment of the covenant blessing. He literally
had no future without Sarai. Without her, the wife of his covenant, there could be no
future blessing.
How can this poor
decision be reversed?
How can God make Abram into a great nation now? How is the Messianic line going to develop? How
will Jesus, the Messiah, born of the line of David, in the ancestry of
Abraham come?
Answer: God intervenes! If God did not constantly intervene in our
lives, picking us up when we fall, bringing us back when we go astray, patiently bearing with our unbelief,
forgiving our sins and restoring our souls – then what helpless, hopeless men
and women we would be?
BUT THE LORD… v.17 Thank God for the great But's of the Bible! God, through painful plagues revealed to Pharaoh that Sarai was in fact Abram’s wife,
and what Pharaoh was doing here stood in the way of God’s great plan. I remind you that God did say to Abram, as he was about
to leave the city of Ur, “I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonours you I
will curse…” (v.3).
These were not empty
words. God’s promise stood. And so
Pharaoh and Abram learned a very big lesson that day. Pharaoh had the wisdom not to strive with God , and we learn that Abram is no hero. He is a weak man, BUT he is a chosen son of God , and that
fact makes the big difference.
And so, the thing that
needs to happen, happens.
Chapter 13:1
reads, “So Abram went up from Egypt… into
the Negeb “… back into Canaan, the land of promise, where he belonged. The incident has a happy ending, yes, but it
is obtained by the humiliation of Abram and the discovery of the weakness of
his unbelieving heart.
This part of Abram’s life is not recorded to encourage
you to think that you
may sin so that grace may abound.
It is written to remind us that we all have hearts like Abram, hearts that seek
shortcuts, hearts which doubt the
goodness and faithfulness of God.
This is written to remind us that God loves His people and that He extends grace to us, despite
ourselves.
God is determined to
save His people, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against them. Our unbelief will not stop the advance of
God’s kingdom. And it is all ultimately rooted in the depths of His covenant
love for us.
And that love was made known to us supremely in Jesus Christ
who laid down His life for ALL our sin! Amen.
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