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"The Dismal Part Of
Christianity, Or Is It?" Text Comment v.1 "From there" in context means "from Mamre" 18:1. v.2 The reason this verse can be so cryptic is because we already
know all about this from a previous incident, both what Abraham did and why and what the
King did and why (12:11-16). A few years back the Rev. Billy Graham got into some hot water as a result of a reporter's question, "Did God hear the prayers of Jews?" Dr. Graham, as I recall, gave an answer that, understandably, sought to avoid the inevitable misunderstanding and misrepresentation by those looking for a controversial soundbite and who either would not or could not appreciate an answer that required some sympathetic understanding of Christian theology. Inevitably, he was accused of being anti-Semitic, for the bottom line was that God doesn't hear the prayers of Jews -- of course Dr. Graham meant Jews insofar as they are not Christians -- in the same way he hears the prayers of his people. God, he said, of course hears the prayers of all who call upon him for salvation, Jews and Gentiles alike, but he distinguishes between the prayers of his children and those who call upon him without living faith. American reporters notwithstanding, that is clear enough and one has only to read the Bible superficially to know that God often says plainly that he will not and does not hear -- that is, hear in order to answer -- the prayers of those who do not come to him in Jesus' name, do not pray according to his will, do not pray with right motives, do not pray with full intention to submit their lives to his rule, do not pray in love and trust of God their heavenly father, who do not come confessing their sins in hopes of forgiveness through the blood of Christ, and so on. But, it gets worse. So sharp is the distinction that God makes between his own people and those who are not his people, that he will hear the prayer of one of his own children who has been very bad when he would not hear the prayer of an unbeliever who has been, contrarily, very good! Is this not the striking irony here in v. 7? We would be inclined to think that someone, if not Abimilech then someone else, should pray for Abraham, wretched as his conduct was in this affair, but still it is Abraham who must pray for the man God himself acknowledges has been largely innocent in the matter and whose conduct throughout seems honorable and almost devout. In other words, Abraham's disgusting behavior did not alter the fact that he was God's child and a man of true faith and Abimilech's honorable behavior did not make him a man of God. There can certainly be no doubt about how great a disappointment Abraham is in this episode. He doesn't manage to acquit himself well as a man of faith even once in the entire affair. That he plays the coward is bad enough. But that he plays the coward after the Lord has already rebuked him and shamed him for his cowardice when he pulled exactly the same stunt in Egypt, that he plays the coward before one king after having defeated four kings single-handedly (as we read in Genesis 14), when he plays the coward after God has shown himself so faithful to Abraham through so many years, when he plays the coward after seeing with his own eyes the terrible wrath of a holy God as it was visited upon Sodom and the other cities of the valley, this is hard to take! And not just the coward. And not just the unfaithful and selfish husband, disappointing as that is. But, we find Abraham virtually blaming God for his troubles -- or his supposed troubles -- in v. 13: "When God had me wander," as if he is saying, "If it hadn't been for God, I wouldn't be in this mess." This is very nearly blasphemy. And then, on top of all that, there is the complete failure of faith. Why, it had only been shortly before this that God, in 18:10, had promised Abraham that he would have a son within the year. But it is as if God had never said a word, as if God's word and promise mattered nothing. Then, to make matters worse, Abraham's disappointing weakness and selfishness is set in contrast to Abimilech's generally honorable conduct: while Abraham is indifferent to the honor of his wife, Abimilech is concerned for her reputation; while Abraham shows no concern for his nation, the promised descendants of God's covenant with him, Abimilech takes notice of the danger posed by these circumstances to his people and nation. While Abraham showed little reverence for the words God had spoken to him, Abimilech can't act on God's warning fast enough! What is the outcome of these contrasting behaviors? Abimilech needs Abraham to pray for him and Abraham gets not only a great deal of money from Abimilech but his pick of the king's real estate! Where is the justice in that, you may ask! Well, there is no justice. But, again, grace makes a distinction between men that has nothing to do with their merits or deserts. We have already pointed out, in connection with previous incidents in Abraham's life when he did not live as becomes a follower of Christ, that what is being demonstrated in such personal history is not divine fairness, but divine grace. Here, once more, is God intervening yet again to protect his covenant, to preserve his promise, to bless his unworthy servant, and to keep alive the seed from which the Savior of the world would someday come. That is what is unmistakably clear and emphatic in this passage. It is God once again who is the hero. As he tells Abimilech in v. 6, he kept the king from a sexual relationship with Sarah -- how, we are not told. He came to Abimilech to tell him what Abraham had no plans to disclose. It is very interesting, I think, that God never talks to Abraham about any of this. He talks to Abimilech and Abimilech talks to Abraham. Perhaps that is a form of rebuke. In any case, it is no thanks to Abraham that Sarah remains pure and untouched, that Isaac can be born within the year as a son of Abraham, and that God's covenant with Abraham continues inviolate. God did that; God took care of that. Had it been left to Abraham, all would have been lost -- Sarah, Isaac, the covenant, and Jesus Christ himself as Abraham's seed. This episode is sandwiched between chapter 18, the final and most definitive promise of a son to be born to Abraham and Sarah, and chapter 21, the account of Isaac's birth. Chapter 20 puts an exclamation point to that development. God has done it: he made the promise and then he saw to its fulfillment. So it is with salvation. Whether we think of it in terms of its conception in eternity past, its execution in the history of the world and especially the history of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, or in terms of the application of that salvation to a particular man or woman in his or her own time and place, "salvation is of the Lord" -- the election of sinners, their redemption by the blood of Christ, the faith by which they believe in him and receive the forgiveness of their sins, the perseverance by which they continue in the faith and love of Christ, it is all his gift and his work. "Salvation is of the Lord" and the only thing we contribute to it is the sin from which we must be saved. That is clear and wonderfully important and, I don't doubt, that is the main lesson of this passage before us. Soli Deo Gloria! And, if that is true, how true it must be that there is no other way to live the Christian life than always and for everything to acknowledge this and live by this fact, to be depending upon the Lord, looking to him, counting on him to provide, to help, to strengthen, to protect, and to preserve. The lesson of Genesis 20 is comprehended in the beautiful prayer, the sixth century prayer of Gregory the First, Gregory the Great, which came into the Book of Common Prayer as the Collect for the Second Sunday in Lent:
But another question begs an answer: why has God so ordered the life of faith that its practitioners do so miserably? Why must we see this disappointing weakness, infidelity, spiritual cowardice in Abraham the father of the faithful, no less, and in all other believers in the Bible, and, still more and much more, in ourselves, Christians though most of us are? It is not, after all, obvious that it would not be better were it otherwise. God is surely able to sanctify us wholly or at least to a far greater degree than he has chosen to sanctify us, at the same time he justifies us. He is going to make us utterly perfect, without any sin at all in a single moment at the return of our Lord or at our first sight of him in heaven. Why does he then not do that as soon as we become Christians? After all, is it not obvious that were he to do that we Christians would make a much more powerful argument for the gospel? Wouldn't it be wonderful if all Christians all or most of the time loved their enemies with genuine affection and faithfulness, loved their husbands and wives and enjoyed such a marriage as the world dreams of having but rarely finds, if Christians found such happiness in the love of God and the service of man that worldly things rested so lightly upon them that they were always being generous to a fault toward the poor and needy, if Christians had such a sturdy faith that they all faced death with a cheerful unconcern in the prospect of their entrance into heaven, if Christians resisted the allurements of the flesh so steadfastly that their universal reputation was for honesty, purity, integrity, kindness, and contentment. I say, wouldn't it be wonderful if the world were forced to acknowledge, however unwilling it might remain to confess Jesus the Lord, that his followers certainly adorned and exemplified his teaching and that the most difficult thing about being an unbeliever was just the fact of the goodness of the Christians themselves. Instead, we have long had a situation in the world in which, if Christians were often a wonderful recommendation for the gospel, just as often, if not more so, they were a powerful argument against it. Why then did God permit a salvation that, though immediately perfect in respect to forgiveness, remained in this world so imperfect, so halting, so inconsistent in respect to behavior and the holiness and goodness of the lives that Christians live in the world? Why does the Lord not destroy our sin when he regenerates us? What can His reason be for leaving so much sin to dwell in even his best saints until the day of their death? He could wipe our heart and lives clean of sin with one word. Why, then, does he not speak the word? Well, fact is, the godly have wondered that and pondered over that question from the very beginning, obvious and pressing as that question is to any true believer who wants to be holy, pure, and full of love for God and man and is distressed to find that he or she is far from that so much of the time, or, who has discovered as all Christians do early on in their life of faith, that, as Augustine put it, "In this life our righteousness consists more in the remission of sins than in perfection of virtues." [City of God, XIX, 27] And, of course, they have had reason to think carefully about what God's purposes might be. For, since the Lord hates sin and teaches his people to hate it, and since he loves his children, the fact that he has not seen fit in his perfect wisdom to eradicate our sin while we live in this world must mean that he has very good reasons for this, reasons that reflect on his own glory and on our eternal happiness. The older, wiser preachers used to suggest five reasons why God permits sin to remain so active and powerful in the life of his children while they live in this world.
That is, you don't learn the height and the depth and the breadth of the love of God for you from the sins you committed before you were a Christian and God's love for you in defiance of those early sins. No, it is the sins you have committed and continue to commit even today, sins that you commit in full knowledge of God's love, in defiance of his goodness to you, against all the light that he has shown upon your life, in full awareness of the fact that Jesus Christ, who loved you and gave himself for you, teaches you to say "No!" to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age. Paul did not learn how great God's love and Christ's love for him was from the fact that he had persecuted the church before he was a Christian. That terrible sin taught that lesson, of course, but not nearly so well as those years of days and nights of sin that he committed after the Damascus Road. Those were the sins that showed him how great a Savior and a salvation he had got in Jesus Christ. So he tells us himself in Romans 7 and 8. No, you were a sinner alright at your regeneration, otherwise you would not have been regenerated, born again. But you were not then, not yet the chief of sinners. If Paul had called himself the chief of sinners already in Damascus waiting for Simeon to come to him, he would not have known what he was talking about; it would have been so much bluster. No, he called himself the chief of sinners at the end of his long and fruitful Christian life, because that life had taught him what sin was, how immense his own sin was, and, therefore, how immeasurably great the love, the mercy, and the patience of God. You hear God say to his children that anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and the longer you live as a Christian the more brothers you have hated. You hear him say that he who lusts after a woman has committed adultery in his heart and the longer you live in this world, you know full well, the greater the adulterer you become. And on and on concerning every part of the Christian life. And now, at last, you know, you finally know, you know full well -- at the end of your life -- , as Abraham knew it after he left Abimilech with his face red and his eyes downcast. My father-in-law was raised in a family of eight children that was bankrupted by the Depression. Times were hard and even food was sometimes scarce; dessert was a special treat. Once his mother prepared ten desserts, one for each member of the family, but he snuck one of them before dinner, so now there were nine. His punishment for stealing was to be required to eat his mother's dessert when dessert was served at the end of the meal. He ate his second while she had none. This is what God did to Abraham and, man of faith that he was, he never saw one of those slaves or that silver or that land that Abimilech gave him without his face turning red and his heart filling with shame. And he knew, as now many of you know, that it would be more tolerable for so many of those ungodly, unbelieving, impure, cruel, and dishonest men and women of Sodom than for you in the last judgment, were it not for indescribably great divine mercy and redemption and pardon. And finally you have come up to that love and that gratitude that ought literally to fill up our hearts to overflowing. The Love I owe for sin forgiven, |
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