God's Promises and Our Sin
Transcript
My name is Spencer. I'm one of the pastors here with Mill City Church. We are in Genesis 20 today, which is on page 9 in the blue Bibles that are around you. If you don't have a Bible at home to read, please take that Bible. That is our gift to you. But we'll be in Genesis 20 today.
This is our last week in Genesis for the fall. We're going to take a break. Every year we do a gift series after Thanksgiving, and we will jump into that. In the new year we will come back to Genesis. But this is our last week.
We have been journeying through Abraham and leading up to the promised son, the promised son of Isaac. And today we get another chapter of Abraham's failures. We get to see him fall on his face yet again. Abraham, he feels a little bit like character Gabriel from The Walking Dead. Gabriel is a priest. And you know when Hollywood gets a chance to portray Christians and priests, it's going to really go well.
And he shows up in the fifth season, and immediately something's off. And you quickly learn that he's a coward. That he's a fearful man. That when the apocalypse happened and zombies started to take over, he locked out his church members who came for refuge and safety at his church, and they all died because he was fearful. And you think that there's going to be some character development. It happens a little bit.
There are times where he starts to grow and being a little bit courageous. He starts to grow as a character. But then there are times where he falls again. And he's fearful. And he turns on the people that he's with. He's just this character whose influx is moving between fear and courage.
Finally, I feel like right now he's hitting his stride, which is about the time that usually characters in the show die off. But he's finally starting to hit his stride. And we're kind of there with Abraham. His life is fear and then it's courage. But we're not there to his shining moment.
When we pick up in the new year, we're going to see Abraham's moment where he gets to trust the Lord and his word. But today we get to look at another chapter of his failures because Abraham is a man that is driven by fear. That in the face of God's promises, the face of this unveiling covenant that is happening, he is driven by fear. So that's what we're going to walk through today and sing this in this story. And I know that some of you heard, oh, we're going to talk about fear. Cool.
I don't have fears. Listen, just because you're always packing, just because you maybe can bench 300 or you know some moves, doesn't mean that we all don't have fears. Because the reality is that we do. We have, some of us have fear of man. Some of us have fear of financial uncertainty. Some of us have fear of failures.
And in those moments, there is fear within us that shapes the decisions, that shapes our outward actions. And in that, we get to relate to Abraham. He's a character that we absolutely can relate to. And what we're going to see in this story and what we see throughout the Bible is that God accomplishes his purposes by giving generous grace to those who are driven by fear. That God accomplishes his purposes by giving us generous amounts of grace, those of us that are driven by fear. So we're going to walk through this.
We're going to see this. I'm going to pray. And then we'll be in verse 1. God, I am so thankful that you've given us stories like this. God, I pray that you would help us see the gospel in it, that you would help us see that you are better and that you are worthy of our fear and nothing else is. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, verse 1. From there, Abraham journeyed toward the territory of the Negev and lived between Kadesh and Shur and he sojourned in Gerar. Which, by the way, I will continue to point this out. I just love how the Bible does history. I think it's giving you specifics of the territory of the Negev, somewhere between Kadesh and Shur and he's sojourning in the Gerar. All right, so let's give some context.
We bounced around a little bit in this part of Genesis. I'm going to give some context for the timeline here. In Genesis 18, God comes to Abraham and Sarah and says, you are going to have Isaac. He is going to come. He will be here in a year. So that's Genesis 18.
Quickly after that, in Genesis 19, we have Sodom and Gomorrah. God brings destruction on those cities. And then after that is when they move to this territory. Now, in 21, which we're not going to get to today, that is when Isaac is conceived. Which means, if you do the math, this is about a three-month stretch that we just went through before Isaac is getting ready to be conceived and before the nine months later he is going to come. So that's where we're at a little bit in this timeline.
And it picks up with from there. Now, we don't really know why they moved from there. The text doesn't give us that. It's possible that living next to two cities that just got destroyed wasn't that great. But we really don't know.
It just tells us that they moved and they moved into a region that they are strangers. That they're not known. That they're sojourners and they're strangers. And we don't have time to get into Genesis 21, which should give us another part of this story. But there's an important detail about this territory that we need to know that comes from that chapter.
And that is that this people, these are the Philistines. And if you know a little bit about the Old Testament, that should trigger something in your brain. Because the Philistines and the Israelites have a really, really rough history. They're consistently at odds and at war. If you've heard the story of David and Goliath, Goliath was a Philistine. So it is possible that this is the first meeting between Abraham, who is the father of the Israelites, and the Philistines.
And this doesn't go well today. And it's possible that from this is where the tension starts to grow. All right, picking up in verse 2. And Abraham said of Sarah his wife, She is my sister. And Abimelech, king of Gerar, sent and took Sarah. Now if you remember Genesis 12 and what happened there, this is the moment of a collective facepalm.
It's like Groundhog Day. If Bill Murray was pimping out Anna McDowell for safety. It's like, what? This is happening again. He's 100. And this is still happening.
Back in Genesis 12, he goes before Pharaoh and says, This is my sister. And then she's brought into the household of Pharaoh. It's like, are we, collective wisdom says, You're 100. She's 90. Why don't you just roll up into the region of the gap and say, no, no, no. We don't have to do this.
No, let's make cookies. We'll be the cool old people that knit sweaters for dogs. Like, we'll be invited. We'll be neighbors. Why do you need to run this again? And if you step back and look at the context of this, God in eternity past shows Abraham, whose life is filled with fearfulness like this.
And that should be an encouragement for us. Because if you're in the zone where you're thinking, Man, there's no way God can use me because of my past. Maybe there is sexual sin in your past. Maybe there is a streak of violence in your past. Maybe you've got something, some stuff currently going on in your life. And you're thinking, There's no way that God can use me because of my anxieties, because of my fears, because of my anger.
All of that. And if we take a step back and realize, God chooses people that are broken. He can use anybody. He uses Abraham in spite of his fears. We get that example from this. So jumping back into the story, what is strange about this is that it works again.
She's 90. She has to be the most stunning looking 90-year-old woman in history because it works, and Abimelech brings her in to his household. All right, verse 3. But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night and said to him, Behold, you're a dead man, because of the woman whom you have taken, for she is a man's wife. Now Abimelech had not approached her.
All right, pause. This probably is the first recorded you're a dead man threat we have on record. And it's because he has taken, who's about to learn, is Abraham's wife. And what's important here is what the text tells us. It adds an important caveat. He had not approached her.
Nothing sexual has happened here. And it's important for this to be noted because the text is telling us, No, it is about time for Isaac to be conceived. Abimelech is not the father. No, Abraham is. So once the text makes that clear, Abimelech goes into his defense.
Pick it up. He says, Lord, will you kill an innocent people? Now that word people is intentional. It didn't say, will you kill an innocent man? It didn't say, will you kill an innocent person? This is a people.
The Hebrew word for nation is the same word that is used here for people. Because Abimelech, he knows what's up. He gets it. I mean, this is, he has probably heard of the destruction that has happened in Sodom and Gomorrah. He is fearful and is a right response. He's not like the kings of Sodom and the kings of Gomorrah.
He is fearful of the Lord. And he continues his defense. He said, Did he not himself say to me, She is my sister. And she herself said, He is my brother. In the integrity of my heart and the innocence of my hands, I have done this. So he is pleading his case before the Lord.
I was deceived. She was in on it. I did not know this. I have not touched her. And he's doing this because he knows that judgment is on the line here. And that ignorance and not knowing what is happening here is not going to be an excuse for him.
He appeals to his heart and to his intentions. And then in verse 6, it continues. It says, Then God said to him in the dream, Yes, I know that you have done this in the integrity of your heart. And it was I who kept you from sinning against me. Therefore, I did not let you touch her. There are two things from this verse that show God's sovereignty, how he rules and he reigns that is important for us to see.
And the first one is that God sees the heart. He sees the heart, which is your innermost self. It's your affections. It's your motivations. It's your desires. It's where all of your actions stem from.
He sees the heart of Abimelech. He sees the heart of Abraham. He looks through and sees the heart. And that is important for us to know. We need to own that. That God can see our hearts.
If we have outward actions that don't match our inner self, there's a problem. If you are currently angry with another believer and there's bitterness that's welling up within you, but your go-to is to smile and not act like everything is okay. Maybe you're fearful of confrontation. Maybe you're fearful of making it awkward. God sees through that. He sees the heart.
Maybe you're the kind of person that here on a Sunday or in your group, you look, talk, act one way. But when you get around people that don't love Jesus, that don't follow Him, you look and act completely different. The reality is that God, He sees the heart. You cannot hide your heart from God. He knows the motives behind every single action. God is sovereign in how He sees our hearts.
He's also sovereign in this verse in how He keeps us from sin. That's the second thing that we see here. It says, It was I who kept you from sinning against me. Tim Keller is a pastor in New York. He has this quote. We've used it before.
He says, You are far more sinful than you could ever possibly imagine, but you're far more cherished than you could ever possibly dream. That has vast implications for a lot of different things. But that first part, you are far more sinful than you could ever possibly imagine, is a reality that left to our own devices, left to our own self, we are far more jacked up than we could ever possibly understand. So when you have lustful thoughts, you think, There's no way that I could ever commit adultery. But that quickly rolls over.
It takes a little more thoughts, a little more action, and then eventually, that's where you land. It's how quickly, for anger goes from, Oh, I'm just a little bit angry to violence. It rolls over very quickly. It's how malice turns into rampant gossip, into slander. It rolls over very quickly, and we think, and we see, especially when we see other people that fall. We see other people that fall into sin.
It's easy for us to pass judgment and say, I would never do that, but the reality is, is that God keeps us from sinning. Circumstantially, He can prevent you from it, but we see, Jude 24 says, Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to present you blameless before the presence of His glory with great joy. Tell me, who is it that prevents us from sinning? Who is it that presents us righteous before the Lord? For those of us who are in Christ, the Holy Spirit in us, intercedes for us, keeps us from sinning, keeps us, hear this, from being the worst possible version of ourselves. So God is sovereign in how He keeps us from sinning, and how He keeps us from letting our fears that rule in our heart, let that result into all kinds of rampant sin.
God accomplishes His purposes by giving generous grace to those of us that are driven by fear. So the Lord, He keeps Abimelech from sinning further, and then He tells him what to do next. Verse 7. He says, Now then, return the man's wife, for he is a prophet, so that he will pray for you, and you shall live. But if you do not return her, know that you shall surely die, you and all who are yours.
Alright, so what we see out the gate from this verse is that Abraham is a prophet. This is the first time in the Bible that we see anyone is called a prophet. And this prophet, from what we can see in his storyline, he is not exemplary at all. He is driven by fear. There's this old saying that God uses crooked sticks to make straight lines. We don't really know who said that.
This has been attributed to a few different people. But how true is that? That God uses crooked sticks. He uses the broken to accomplish his purposes. So Abraham is a prophet, and he says to Abimelech, he says, if you don't return her, you're done.
You and all of your household, all of the nation, all of you. Now we don't have time to look at this, but the very last part of this chapter, judgment has already happened because of this. God has closed up all of the wombs in the house of Abimelech. All the women are barren. Judgment is weighing on Abimelech, and they do not take this lightly. It picks up in verse 8.
It says, So Abimelech rose early in the morning and called all his servants and told them all these things. Hear this. And the men were very much afraid. But unlike Sodom, unlike Gomorrah, this place fears the God of Abraham. They take this warning very seriously. In verse 9 it says, Then Abimelech called Abraham and said to him, What have you done to us?
And how have I sinned against you that you have brought on me in my kingdom a great sin? You have done to me things that ought not be done. And Abimelech said to Abraham, What did you see that you did this thing? Abraham said, I did it because I thought there is no fear of God at all in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife. I feel like Abimelech would have been understandable had he been a little more aggressive in his approach. Because the reality is that Abraham's actions has put him, his wives, his kids, his nation in jeopardy.
And he comes to him, he says, What have you done? Why have you done this? Abraham says, I did it because I thought there was no fear of God in this place, and I thought you would kill me because of my wife. Now aside from the fact that Abraham was dead wrong, there is fear of God in this place. It's evidenced by their response. He put that whole nation at risk at the age of 100 because he was fearful.
After decades of getting to see how God has been beside Abraham, we have evidence. You go back to Genesis 14 as we walk through that he supported, he was behind Abraham in the wars that defended Lot. We go to Genesis 15 when he looks at Abraham and he picks up his head and he says, Look at the stars. You see the stars? That's how numerous your descendants will be. He does the ceremony that we got to walk through where Abraham splits the animals and God walks through the center.
What's being said there is may I be burst apart. The God of the universe, may I be burst apart if this promise doesn't come true. Abraham is given example after example, evidence after evidence to not be afraid to trust God. And he's fearful. And then we get a little bit of the back story of what all went into this and how far this deception goes back. He says, Besides, she is indeed my sister.
Alright. The daughter of my father, though not the daughter of my mother. I said, That makes it better. And she became my wife. And when God caused me to wander from my father's house, I said to her, this is the kindness you must do to me. At every place which we come, say of me, he is my brother.
Now, I don't have time to get into why it was somewhat permissible here for intermarriage to happen, for him to marry his sister. And yet, when the law is handed down in Exodus, it's explicitly forbidden. We did cover that early in our Genesis sermons over why that was permissible. You can go back and listen to that. But, aside from that, Abraham, we get some more background on how he cowardly passes off his wife as his sister. Part of it is, is it's a half-truth.
He says, Well, she's kind of my sister. By my dad's side. Now, I wasn't really being deceitful. I wasn't really lying. And some of you, man, some of you hear that and you're like, Well, technically, he wasn't lying. She is his sister.
Well played, Abraham. You did it right. It's technically not lying. No. It is absolutely lying. It is absolutely deceitful.
I can be a little more blunt with this because the worst version of myself does this. Before I was a Christian, like that was my MO. That's how I got out of trouble. My mom would say, Are you, you going over to your friends? Is there going to be drinking? Yeah.
There's going to be a few guys. There's going to be some beers. But there's not going to be any driving. It's going to be chill. It's going to be okay. And the reality was, the full truth was, that there's going to be a lot of people.
There's going to be a lot more drinks. There's going to be a lot more drugs. It was a half truth that I could give out to get out of trouble. And I've seen this, y'all. I've seen this already welling up in my daughter. She's three and I'll see her and I'll say, Ellie, did you just take your brother's toy?
And she goes, No, no, no, no. I gave him a toy. See, I gave him a toy. And I just, I said, No, no, no. First of all, I saw all of this. You took your brother's toy.
You made it look better because you gave her a toy in replacement. But that, she's already picking up on the sinful nature that I've passed down to her. That half truths are, that she can deal in half truths. And what she's going to have to learn and what I had to learn upon becoming a Christian and being changed by Jesus is that we as Christians don't get to dabble in half truths. Half truths are not truths at all. They are deceitful.
They are lies. The people of God who've been claimed and redeemed by Jesus don't get to tell half truths. Abraham's scheme was just that. It was a scheme. It was a lie masquerading as a half-baked truth. So if you love and follow Jesus, you don't get to deal in half truths.
And he's been doing this for a while. We see the history here. It says, When God caused me to wander from my father's house, I said to her, This is the kindness you must do to me. At every place to which we come, say of me, He is my brother. Which means they've been running this place since they left their homeland. This is how long this has been going on.
And again, take a step back. Look at this. God, in eternity past, chose to bring redemption through Abraham. In spite of his failures, in spite of his fears, God gives generous amounts of grace to those of us that are driven by fear. So we get this powerful picture in Abraham of God's grace towards us, and we also get a picture of repentance from Abimelech.
Verse 14. It says, Then Abimelech took sheep and oxen and male servants and female servants and gave them to Abraham and returned Sarah, his wife, to him. And Abimelech said, Behold, my land is before you. Dwell wherever it pleases you. To Sarah he said, Behold, I have given your brother a thousand pieces of silver. It is a sign of your innocence in the eyes of all who are with you and before everyone you are vindicated.
Then Abraham prayed to God and God healed Abimelech and also healed his wife and his 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. So Abimelech's actions here are evidence of a contrite heart. That God has, that he is, he is repentant. He gives oxen, he gives silver, he shows hospitality here. Saying that this land, you can dwell in this land.
You are, you are welcome here. Take this, settle here. And all is well at the end of this story between Abraham and Abimelech. So outside of just this being another example of God's radical grace of how he has shown so much grace towards Abraham, how does this story fit into the greater picture of the Bible? Two ways. First, God's rescue plan here is preserved.
Abimelech threatened the rescue plan. He threatened the line of redemption that was going to come through Abraham. That Abraham and Sarah were promised that they were going to have a son and through him redemption would come and that plan was threatened which is why God's response to Abimelech is so severe. Because the reality is is that without the seed coming through Abraham and Sarah there is no redemption for sinners anywhere. That includes the line of Abimelech. That future Philistines down the line will have the opportunity to hear the gospel because God's redemption through Abraham and Sarah.
Second, this is the first time that we see explicitly a prophet who makes intercession in the Bible. Intercession in the Bible is when someone Acts as a mediator between God and man and there's two main pictures that we see that happen throughout the Old Testament. For this, we see prophets and priests that act as intercessors between God and man. Priests interceded at the temple. Their job was to be at the temple to make sacrifices on behalf of the people that it might turn away God's wrath for sins. They interceded on behalf of the people at the temple in the presence of the Lord.
Prophets were raised up. Prophets were raised up that they might preach repentance. They might preach and call Israel to turn back from sin and call them into fellowship with God. Those are the two main roles of intercessors that we see in the Old Testament. Notice that Abimelech has to go to Abraham to have him pray for him that he might be forgiven, that his nation might be spared. And if you think about this, Abimelech goes to the man who deceived him to have him intercede between God and them.
Abraham, like the rest of the prophets that are going to follow, Abraham is not perfect. He is fallen. He is a poor type of the one prophet who is to come. He is a poor example of the prophet in Jesus that is coming. So praise God that we have a better prophet in Christ who came preaching a message of the kingdom, preaching a message of repentance, serving the least of these, who came bearing the message of the gospel and standing, hear this, courageously in the face of death, courageously in the face of people who were threatening him.
He stood his ground and was taken to the cross to take our sins on him. Praise God we have a better intercessor, a better high priest who took our sins with him on the cross, the final sacrifice for our sins that we might have a high priest who stands before us in the heavens. As the book of Hebrews talks about as our intercessor, it says, Hebrews 4, for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in the time of need.
That Jesus perfectly fulfills the role of intercessor. He is able also, hear this, he is able to sympathize with us. That in every respect he was tempted and tried, which means he was tempted in the same way that Abraham was to tell half-truths, to be deceitful. He was tempted like Abraham to be fearful, to fear others and not fear the Lord. All of us are tempted to chase after idols, to chase after things, to let fear rule in us that it might shape us to make decisions in ways that are contrary to what God has for us. And Jesus can empathize with all of those temptations because he was tempted and tried and did not sin.
That is the God that we get to pray to. That is our high priest. That is the one who made intercession for us. All of the prophets like Abraham failed. Jesus did it perfectly. So that's how that fits into the greater story of the Bible.
Now coming back to Abraham, if I'm honest, it is frustrating as we walk through his story. It's frustrating because I'm like, seriously, after all that God has done, after all the promises he has made, you, this unique relationship that you have with the God of the universe, you still are fearful at the age of 100 after decades of hearing this promise unfold. And when I get that judgmental posture in my own heart, man, we need to look in the mirror because God makes promises to us all the time. We have promises throughout the Bible that call us to trust him. I think of Matthew 6 is a passage in the Sermon on the Mount where God is addressing our fear of God providing.
How many of us are fearful of seeing bills paid, fearful of how we're going to make budget, fearful of how we're going to plan for retirement, fearful for how God is going to provide for daily bread and Jesus, he sees that. He says, look at the birds of the air. They neither reap nor sow nor gather in barns and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? How quickly are we driven to anxiety and fear of our finances when God has given us a promise? You are more valuable than all of creation.
I am going to take care of your needs. How many of us are fearful and when that happens we are driven into old sinful patterns. When we get scared, when we get worried, our go-to is to be driven back into who we used to be. That's our old patterns. Whether it's drinking, whether it's running, whether it's escapism, you fill in the blank. What we have in Romans, Paul says, for you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry, Abba, Father.
Meaning, we don't have a spirit of fearfulness in us. We have the Holy Spirit living and reigning inside of us. We don't have to let fear drive us into old patterns. We can trust in what God is doing. We can trust in His promises. He will work in us.
And I'll give you one more. For those of us that fear man and what man can do to us. Whether that's you fearing others and you being so concerned about their opinion of you. Maybe that's you. You are fearful to share the gospel with somebody because of how they might respond. We let other people and our fear of them drive us to do actions or to not do actions like sharing the gospel.
And Jesus in Matthew 10 says, And do not fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear Him who can destroy both body and soul in hell. And the picture that we have here is that those fears are so temporary. They are so temporary. We are eternal. If we believe in Jesus, if we have trusted in Him, He has claimed us.
What could anybody possibly do to us? We are eternally His. We have no reason to fear. We can trust in His promises. This is the Lord who came from heaven who sought us and redeemed us that we might not fear anyone else, that we might only fear and worship Him forever. God accomplishes His purposes by giving radical, generous amounts of grace to those of us that are driven by fear.
And we can relate to Abraham and y'all, that is good news because God has given us grace.