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"At the same time: Righteous
and a Sinner" Text Comment
Egypt was a typical refuge in times of famine because the Nile provided a much more reliable supply of food.
It is possible that Abram wasn't completely willing to hazard his wife's honor for the safety of his own skin. He might have been counting on the fact that, as Sarai's brother, he could fend off suitors by promising her in marriage without ever actually having to make good. It is a small point: As Pharaoh's rebuke and Abraham's silence will make clear, he did expose her to great risk and did so in order to protect his own skin. Another problem is the fact that Sarai was, by this time, sixty-five years of age. Could she have been that tempting to the Egyptians at her age? But, the suggestion of the biblical data seems to be that, by a special dispensation, God lengthened the years of the patriarchs and did so, not simply by keeping them from death when they were old, but by spreading out the process of aging throughout the entire period of their lives. This explains their remarkable vigor at later ages. Thus Sarai was no ordinary 65 but was a woman, at that age, who looked like a woman might who was much younger. Besides, I've seen some very beautiful sixty-five year old women!
I made the point, in a previous sermon on the sin of Noah and of Ham following the flood, that every time God enters into covenant with man, every time a new stage is reached in God's covenant with his people, that covenant is betrayed from the people's side. As soon as God made his covenant with Noah and in Noah with the world, Noah and his son betrayed that covenant. Now, no sooner had God made his covenant with Abram than Abram was throwing the entire covenant into jeopardy by his behavior. And you see how he was doing that. God had promised him the land of Canaan as his possession and that of his offspring, and soon after Abram was in Egypt, the Hebrew of v. 10 suggesting that he was there as an immigrant, as an outsider but one who plans to stay for a long time. That is startling enough so soon after our hearing God promise the land of Canaan to him and his seed and so soon after we have grown accustomed to thinking of Abram as a pilgrim. But, there is more: immediately we find him in danger of losing his wife, even his own life, and forfeiting any hope of offspring who might someday inherit the land of Canaan. God had promised him a seed, even though he and his wife were older and childless, and now, through his own cowardice, his wife belonged to another man, a powerful King. Where then was his offspring to come from, now that his wife was in an Egyptian harem? And, as always, when the covenant is thus betrayed on man's side, God intervened to restore it and to prove that this covenant would endure not because of man's faithfulness, but because of his own faithfulness to his Word and to his chosen people. But, we can look at the same history from the subjective side. And for the first time we see what we are going to see throughout the Bible. And, were we not so familiar with this reality, we would perhaps be more startled by what we read in these verses. After all, it is not obvious at all that a man who had responded to God's call with such prompt obedience, had so willingly sacrificed the comforts of hearth and home to take a long and dangerous journey to a far country, that a man whose faith in God and in God's word was so sturdy and so clear, and who seemed to be not at all in doubt that what God had promised him would come to pass, I say it is not obvious that such a man of faith would so soon be found playing the part of a coward, forgetting all about God, trusting him not at all to protect his life or to fulfill his promise. It is not obvious that a man who had already traveled so far and had faced down so many obstacles by faith would collapse before the mere suspicion that his life might be in danger. God had said, "I will make of you a great nation" and Abram had believed it! And, now, Abram is saying to himself "The Egyptians will kill me." How are we to explain this? What are we to make of a man who is a perfect hero of faith one minute and a sniveling coward who seems not to know that God exists the next? What are we to make of a man whose faith overcomes the world one day and collapses before the world the next. Well, whatever we are to make of it, it is a fact of life throughout the rest of biblical history. Every believing man or woman we will meet is going to demonstrate this spiritual schizophrenia, this mixture of faith and unbelief, courage and cowardice, obedience and flagrant disobedience. Abram, as we said last week, is going to serve in the Bible as a prototypical Christian, and in this too. Just as he is at one moment heroic in his trust in God and at another a disgrace to the covenant God has made with him, so God's people are going to be alternately a credit and a disgrace to the covenant God has made with them. We will see this is Isaac, in Jacob, in Moses, in David, in Hezekiah and Josiah who were the very best and most faithful kings of Judah, and we will see it in Peter and in Paul. Yes, in Paul the Apostle. What a lion of a man, what a hero of the covenant, what a champion of the gospel and the Christian life Paul was. What an exemplar of everything that is beautiful and noble and pure and true in Christianity he was! He who can part from country and from kin, Who ever suffered more or gave more or loved more or accomplished more for the sake of Jesus Christ and his gospel and the salvation of the world than did Paul. And, yet, Paul himself tells us in letters written in his own blood, that all his Christian life through, through all of those years of days and nights in various Roman prisons, through all the scourgings and beatings, through all the scorn and humiliation, through all the victorious preaching and planting of new churches from Antioch to Spain, he was sick at heart about his own soul and his own life.
And Abraham could have said the very same thing and no doubt did say it as he was making his shameful way home from Egypt, every look from his wife, every sight of her cutting his conscience to the quick. All of this is so familiar to us who have been Christians for any length of time, is it not? This honesty that we find in the Bible about believers in God, this striking juxtaposition of Abram's heroism and Abram's cowardice, his faith and his doubt, his obedience and his betrayal. We are not surprised by it, because, often as we have found this in Holy Scripture, still more often have we found it in ourselves. We cannot believe sometimes that we are the same person: the one who prays and believes and speaks and obeys as only a Christian will and then one whose attitudes and inner thoughts and whose speech and whose behavior, toward God and toward others, seem to bear no mark, no evidence of faith whatsoever. We find sometimes that we live as only the truest Christian will and other times -- too often -- as no Christian ever should, as only heathens will. When Sheldon Vanauken was coming to faith, the great story he tells so beautifully in his book, A Severe Mercy, he noticed, as many have noticed before him, that the Christians he knew were, at one and the same time, the best and the worst recommendations of Christianity. But, what is more, the same Christian, depending upon the day, the hour, the moment, can be the best or the worst recommendation for Christianity. Which David will you choose: the David who trusts God to give him victory over Goliath, the David leaping and dancing before the ark of the covenant, the David who loves Jonathan, his rival, with an almost perfect love and later shows such kindness to Jonathan's house, the David who refuses to take matters into his own hands when he has the opportunity, twice, to kill Saul who is so unjustly attempting to murder him -- is that the David you will choose; or, the David who steals another man's wife, who murders her husband, and who neglects his own children so terribly as to bring disaster upon his house and upon the nation of Israel? Which Peter will you have: the one who, at the great catch of fish, falls down at the Lord's feet and cries, "Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" or the Peter who, the night before the crucifixion, a pure, unadulterated coward, three times denies that he ever knew Jesus of Nazareth, and curses to sell the denial Or which Thomas Cranmer, the one who signed a recantation of all he believed and lived for and fought for because Bloody Mary threatened to burn him if he didn't, or the Thomas Cranmer who, when sent to the stake anyway, stuck the hand that had signed the recantation first in the fire! Oh, no, one could never carry away from the Bible the idea that Christians, because of their new heart from God and their faith in Christ, would always live as God would have them live. Nor could you ever learn that from the finest Christians who have ever lived in the world. No, on the contrary, the Christian of strongest faith sees more clearly than anyone how much there is in his life that is totally inconsistent with, totally incompatible with his own Christianity. Now, there are a great many applications that might be made from this fact, this fact of Scriptural teaching and this fact of Christian experience. We can take from Abram's fall, the first and most obvious application -- the very one we have been considering as a congregation during the recent session visitation, viz. that our salvation depends upon God and his faithfulness and his work and not at all upon us. It was God who got Abram out of the mess he had created for himself in Egypt and without God Abram would have died there, a rich widower, who had let the promise of the ages slip through his fingers. Or we can take from this fact, illustrated so powerfully in Abram's behavior in Egypt, the necessity of a Christian's constant watchfulness over his or her own heart. We must live wide awake to our own susceptibility to fall, to betray, to doubt. Or, we could call ourselves to arms. If this is the fact of life, this doublemindedness of spiritual commitment and life, how much more then must we strive and must we labor to put our sins to death and to put on Christ for our living every day. What Abram shows us is that no one is going to live a consecrated Christian life by accident, that God meant what he said when he described the life of faith as a fight, a struggle, a wrestling match, and a race. We have obstacles, enemies, and the greatest one is still our own selves, and so we must fight tooth and nail if we would live faithful lives in this world, if we would amidst our failures, have triumphs and successes too in serving Christ and honoring him. But, I want to apply Abram's fall in another way this morning. This too is the meaning of this history. Perhaps it is its truest and most important meaning. I want not so much to warn you or humble you as to console you. He might just as well have been speaking about Genesis 12:10-20, as about Romans 7:14-25, when Alexander Whyte said, of Paul's confession of his still so great sinfulness and spiritual failure:
For what does any Christian, who knows full well what faith requires of him and what God deserves of him and what his own happiness and his own welfare demand of him, think when he sees how often he does what no Christian should ever do and how often he fails to do what any Christian, however young, however inexperienced, however immature, should always do, I say what does he think but, "can I be a Christian at all when I do such things and fail to do so much else?" And then Abram appears and then Paul to tell him that they wondered the very same thing and for the very same reason! They were disgusted with their lives and amazed at what failures they could be when, at other times, their faith caused them to live high above the ground. And not just the biblical figures. But every holy man or woman who has ever lived in the world. I could regale you for hours with their confessions of sin and failure and with their heartfelt expressions of confusion that they who loved the Lord so truly could still betray him so terribly and so often in ways both petty and profound. Or I could give you illustrations from a thousand lives, from every time and period of church history, of exactly that spiritual schizophrenia we find in Abram in Gen. 12. Take Luther at the very end of his life, for example. The great Reformer, who --at constant risk of his own life-- took on unbelieving Christendom in the name of the Lord Christ and restored the gospel to the church. To the end of his life he was Abraham and he was Paul and he was you and I, if we are Christians at all. To the end of his life he was serving the Lord in his own mighty and unique way: writing, lecturing, counseling, preaching on behalf of the Bible and the gospel of free grace. But, alongside that, the peevishness and the temper. In the closing days of his life he worked himself literally into such a temper over the fact that the girls in Wittenberg were wearing low-cut dresses that he left home promising never to return. His doctor brought him back. But then came a request from another town that he come to mediate a dispute and reconcile some offended brothers. Luther was really too sick to go, but he went, reconciled the men and died on the way home. [Bainton, p. 383] Luther used to describe the Christian as "simul justus et peccator" at one and the same time, righteous and a sinner. He was speaking of the fact that though we continue to sin, we are perfectly righteous in Christ through our justification by his blood. But, he also meant, that while we live in this world as Christians we are, at one and the same time, men and women of faith and men and women whose faith often fails. And what does God think of all of this? Here Christopher Love, the great Puritan preacher. Listen carefully and take it to heart, brothers and sisters. It is the lesson of Abram and of every Christian life. "Look not so much on your sins, but look upon your grace also, though weak. Weak Christians look more on their sins than on their graces; yet God looks on their graces and overlooks their sins and infirmities. The Holy [Spirit] said, "[You] have heard of the patience of Job". He might also have said, "[You] have heard of the impatience of Job"; but God reckons his people not by what is bad in them, but by what is good in them. Mention is made of what...was well done...and what was amiss, is buried in silence, or, at least, is not recorded against [him] and charged upon [him]... O it is good to serve such a Master, who is ready to reward the good we do, and is ready to forgive and pass by what is amiss. Therefore, you who have but little grace, yet remember that God will have his eye on that little grace. He will not quench the smoking flax nor bread the bruised reed." [Sermons, vol. 3, on "growing in grace."] Or, to put it in terms of our text, Abraham is, through the rest of the Bible, called the father of the faithful and the friend of God; he is never once called the coward of Egypt! |
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