Word of Encouragement (02/15/2022)

Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelech, and also healed his wife and female slaves so that they bore children. For the LORD had closed all the wombs of the house of Abimelech because of Sarah, Abraham's wife. (Gen. 20:17-18)

You know what happened. Oops, Abraham did it again! What happened in Egypt happened again in Gerar. When he got to Gerar, he feared that the people there would kill him on account of his wife, Sarah (20:11). So, he asked Sarah again to identify herself as Abraham’s brother. When King Abimelech took her, God appeared in his dream, threatening to kill him for taking another man’s wife. Abimelech pleaded with Him to spare him, recounting how he was deceived by both Abraham and Sarah, God relented, commanding him to return Sarah to Abraham and to ask Abraham to pray for him. Abimelech did what he was told, giving Abraham many sheep and oxen and servants in addition. And Abraham prayed for him as he was told and God granted children to the household of Abimelech.

It is hard to see Abraham in a positive light. What he does seems hardly honorable. Is it a thing to do as a husband to ask his wife to lie about their relationship so he could save his life while his wife was taken away by another man to be violated? He had his reasons, of course. Later when Abimelech rebuked him for lying to him, Abraham replied that what he told him was not entirely a lie, for Sarah was indeed his stepsister. This is the kind of half-truths we tell to get out of sticky situations, but we know how wrong it is. Sarah might have been his stepsister but now that she was married to him, he could no longer call her a sister.

Abraham gave another reason: “I [lied] because I thought, ‘There is no fear of God at all in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife’” (20:11). It might have been true that there was no fear of God in Gerar and in the household of Abimelech the king. But just because there was no fear of God in Gerar didn’t mean that God wasn’t there, did it? Did Abraham learn this when he was in Egypt and the same thing happened? Certainly, there was no fear of YHWH in Egypt but God put the fear of God into Pharaoh’s soul and the souls of the Egyptians, didn’t He? Was Abraham’s vision so full of his physical surroundings that he could not see the presence and power of his almighty God? When that happens, we think and live like practical atheists, don’t we?

Yet, it is in this episode that God called Abraham “a prophet” (20:7) and commanded Abimelech to pray for him! How ironic! If anything, Abimelech seemed more “righteous” than Abraham. He was no saint, of course. We don’t know why he took Sarah and added her to his harem of women. We know that she was beautiful, but she might have been in her nineties by this time! Maybe he had a strange fetish for old women, who knows? When it came to taking Sarah, he was innocent, as God consented. What about Abraham? He lied. He lied because he failed to see God. He failed to see God because he thought he was in a godless situation. Yet, God called him a prophet? Isn’t a prophet someone who speaks forth God’s word truthfully, someone whose vision is filled with the reality of God?

This irony shows that we are what we are by the grace of God, not by our merit or good works. God called Abraham a prophet when he lied out of his earthly-minded vision—not something you expect from a prophet. But God did so to make it plain what He would make of this lying, cowardly man by His grace, thereby demonstrating the power of His grace. It was also a challenge to Abraham to be what God called him to be. We see the beginning of it already: Abraham prayed for Abimelech according to God’s command and his prayer removed the curse of barrenness from the women of Abimelech’s household!

Isn’t this a wonderful picture of what God does in our salvation? He declares us righteous at the beginning of our spiritual journey when we are full of sin. But He does not leave us there. Through sanctification, He makes us what He declared us to be more and more until we are perfected on the last day by glorification. Let us not dwell on our past and all our failures. Let us trust in what God declared us to be—pardoned, righteous, destined for glory! And let us think and live according to the new identity God has given to us!

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