"Abraham's Impression on Outsiders"
Genesis 21:22-34
August 3, 1997

Text Comment

v.25 Now, unlike his previous dealings with Abimilech in chapter 20, Abraham is candid and frank -- clearly occupying a position of strength.

v.33 Beersheba is at the southern tip of the Promised Land.

First appearances might suggest that we have before us in our text this morning, something of a minor detail. You might well get that impression if you read some of the studies of Genesis I have been reading in preparing this series of sermons. Some of them skip over this paragraph completely, hurrying straight from the separation of Isaac and Ishmael to the terrible test of Abraham that follows in chapter 22.

But we know that that is not so. And we know that not only because we know that everything in the Bible is important, "all Scripture is God-breathed and so useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness," but because Abraham's own behavior indicates that something very important had happened. His planting of a tree -- an act of commemoration certainly -- and his calling on the Name of the Lord after this treaty was concluded with Abimilech is a signal that Abraham understood that God had done something great and wonderful for him. You have similar behavior on Abraham's part, if you remember, after God brought him into the promised land in the first instance (12:8) and again after the Lord brought him back to the promised land after the troubles in Egypt (13:4).

This is the kind of point that is not missed by a certain school of interpreters of the Bible, a school that takes its inspiration first from the exegetical writings of John Calvin -- his commentaries on the books of the Bible especially -- and from the renewal of a Calvinistic understanding of Holy Scripture in Holland in the later years of the 19th and early years of the 20th century. They call themselves the "redemptive-historical" school of biblical interpretation and they mean by that that they come to a passage of Scripture primarily interested in discovering its place in the unfolding of the history of salvation that is the central subject of the Bible. Redemptive-historical interpretation developed, in some ways, as a protest to what had become far too common in the church -- both the liberal and the evangelical wings of the church -- namely a reduction of the Bible to a collection of lessons about life -- for the liberals, lessons about being good, and for the conservatives, lessons about trusting in the Lord and being good.

These men -- Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck leading the way for an entire generation of younger Dutch scholars after them -- protested that such a moralistic reading of the Bible missed its great point and sacrificed its great power. The Bible, they rightly pointed out, is not a book primarily about what we are supposed to do but about what God has done, it is first and foremost an account of the history of salvation, of the gracious work of God saving his people from their sins and calling them to himself, or, as they would put it, the history of God's covenant with his people, his making of that covenant, his preserving it in the teeth of his people's unfaithfulness, his fulfilling of its terms on their behalf through Jesus Christ, and his bringing to pass its blessings first in this world and then in the world to come.

These interpreters, for example S.G. DeGraaf in his great work on the interpretation of the historical narrative of the Bible, Promise and Deliverance, see this paragraph at the end of Genesis 21 as no minor detail at all. It is no mere appendix or footnote for them. It is another important step in the outworking of God's covenant with Abraham, another important confirmation of the faithfulness of God to that covenant he has made with this man and in him with his descendants.

Remember, Abraham was promised the land of Canaan, but he does not yet possess it, not an acre of that land yet belongs to him. And yet, here, not by direct revelation or the overt hand of God, but -- as it will usually be in the life of God's people -- by providential developments, through interaction with his neighbors, Abraham receives permanent rights to a well and to its water, the most precious natural resource in that promised land and without which no one could live there. Without access to water the promise to be able to stay in the land of Canaan was empty. Now Abraham has his first well in the promised land, his first permanent foothold in the land that God had promised to him and to his descendants. God is, step by step, making good on his promise and showing his faithfulness to Abraham.

That, I'm sure, is the primary purpose of this narrative, the place that it occupies in the larger account of God's covenant with Abraham and of God's covenant with his people -- another demonstration of the way in which God proves himself faithful to his Word, to his promises, and how that divine faithfulness works itself out, step by small step, in the personal history of God's people.

But, if there is a weakness with the redemptive-historical approach to the reading and understanding of the Bible, it is, in my judgment, that it too often misses what else is in such a paragraph as we have before us this morning. For fear of being moralistic, for fear of turning accounts of the great works of God into tidy lessons for human life, it misses the real interest the Bible is also always showing in the life of faith, and all the more in this part of the Bible where Abraham is not only the man for whom God works but the man who trusts in God and walks with God and teaches us how to do the same ourselves. I believe that every word, every phrase of Holy Scripture is important and useful for us, and so I believe Abimilech=s statement at the end of v. 22 is also God=s Word to us, his truth, and our training in righteousness.

You see, there is here not only something about what God has done for Abraham and something about God's making good on the promises he made in his covenant with Abraham, but there is something here about the way Abraham lived before God and, indeed, something about Abraham's faithfulness being the means by which God's faithfulness brought blessing to Abraham and to his family forever.

You see, this little piece of everyday history begins with Abimilech coming to Abraham to ask him to make a covenant with him. Why? Why did this pagan king -- the ruler of a substantial city, Gerar, and the owner of much land -- want to be sure that he was in a covenant of friendship with Abraham the nomad? Why did Abimilech feel that his own well-being depended upon Abraham being well-disposed to him?

Well, he tells us. He went to Abraham because he saw that God was with Abraham in all that he did. He knew that God was on Abraham's side and that, therefore, it would be highly unwise and very dangerous to be Abraham's enemy. Further, if God were with Abraham, perhaps he would look kindly on those who were Abraham's friends.

Now, how did Abimilech reach that conclusion, that God was with Abraham? He obviously was convinced that it was so or he would not have made such an effort to win Abraham's approval and friendship, even giving up rights to a well, something of great value in the desert. But we are not told how Abimilech knew that God was with Abraham. Perhaps it was a combination of things: Abraham's success in life -- his great wealth and prosperity: after all, he was a nomad, had been driven into Egypt because of a famine in Canaan and had come back much richer than he had left; he had singlehandedly defeated a consortium of kings who had plundered the cities of the plain and carried off Abraham's nephew among their other captives; what is more, in previous dealings with Abraham, in which Abraham's own conduct had been deplorable, God had intervened directly with Abimilech to protect his covenant with Abraham. Perhaps it was these things that led Abimilech to believe that God was with Abraham, perhaps it was something else altogether.

Frankly, I am glad that the Scripture does not say, for it makes the lesson general and more easily applicable to any and every Christian.

For, you see, this too is the teaching of this paragraph. Surely we are being taught about the faithfulness of God to his covenant and of the unfolding of that covenant in history, as the redemptive-historical men remind us, but Abraham, as the father of the faithful, as one of the Bible's chief examples of the life of faith, is also teaching us something about what is true of those who walk faithfully with God in this world.

It is said many other times in the Bible, of course. We have only a particularly striking illustration of this phenomenon here. In Proverbs 16:7, for example, we read: "When a man's ways are pleasing to the Lord, he makes even his enemies live at peace with him."

Now, you understand that this is true only in a general sense. There are many exceptions to be sure. Indeed, if that statement were always and everywhere true, there could never be a martyr. The Bible speaks candidly about the overt hostility of the world to the church and of the fact that those who would live godly lives in this world must expect to suffer persecution.

But, still, it remains generally true that real godliness, real Christlikeness, makes even unbelievers sit up and take notice, that there is that in a faithful life that is admirable and enviable even to the wicked. Part of that is because God blesses those who are faithful to him and others can see that blessing. That was certainly true in Abraham's case. But, part of that is also because the faithful life itself commends itself even to outsiders. This too was true of Abraham, true even though Abraham had failed to be faithful to God and God=s covenant with him before Abimilech=s very eyes in Chapter 20. We are not speaking of a perfect faithfulness, only real faithfulness.

That is why, for example, the Apostle Paul can require that candidates for church leadership, for elder and for deacon, be men who have a good reputation with outsiders. There is that in a faithful Christian life that commends itself to everyone: honesty, industry, kindness, generosity, humility, faithfulness, loyalty: all that makes up the majesty of character. This was true of Abraham, but it must as well be true for us.

Do your neighbors know that God is with you? There is the summons in this text for us! Do you live so as to commend your faith to your unsaved neighbors and workmates and, lest you think you do simply because you know that should be true of you and want that to be true of you, ask yourself the harder question: do your neighbors, workmates, unsaved family members themselves think this way of you: that God is with you, that whether or not they can credit your beliefs they cannot help but admire your character, your way of life, and cannot but envy the blessing that rests on your life?

This is such an important part of our self-examination as Christians. In the church we all give one another the benefit of the doubt, we all are required to forgive one another's sins, we all sympathize with the great difficulty of living a holy life with a sinful heart in a sinful world. But that can have the terrible effect of making us all complacent, all of us together content with lives that are far less than they ought to be, for obedience, for zeal, for love, for honesty, for loyalty, for faithfulness. And so God tells us that the world also will be the judge of our faithfulness to him, and that if we are living a truly consecrated life, the world, the unbelieving world, will bear its own witness to that fact.

Does that make you shudder? Does that make you think again? Is there such divine blessing in your life -- the reward of your faithfulness to God and your zeal for his Name -- that your unsaved acquaintances recognize it and envy it, even if they will not seek it from Christ themselves? Is there such a godliness about you, that even the unsaved folk you know cannot help but notice it and respect it and admire it?

No, I can hear the excuses rising in our minds as I speak. No, shout them down. You want to say, "but you don't know the people I work with; you don't know my neighbors? They have no regard for godliness and no desire for the blessing of God or even the ability to recognize it." Oh, yes they do. Abimilech was a Philistine -- a precursor of those wicked people that Israel would struggle with so hard and so long. He was a pagan king in a pagan world. And he saw in Abraham both the blessing of God and the life of real goodness. And in this too, Abraham is to be our example, our father in the faith.

Examine yourselves brothers and sisters, in this way too, in this way as often as in any other way. What do the unsaved think of my life and do they see the blessing that God says they will see if, as the Scripture says, the Lord honors those who honor him?

This is a calling, a summons to us all to live out our holiness in the world and before the world and not to be content until that holiness is a public fact among all our acquaintances. Our evangelism must begin here, with the reputation that renders our words meaningful, persuasive, and attractive. And that is what a truly faithful life imparts to a gospel witness, a wonderful power.

When folk see in your marriage what they long for in their own (I was given several instances of this very illustration on my vacation); when they see in your family life and in your children what they had hoped would be true of theirs; when they see in your business dealings a probity and a faithfulness and an honesty they know is right but have not seemed to be able to manage themselves for fear of loss; when they see in your treatment of others -- kind, patient, generous -- that approach they have wanted others to take with them and have wanted to take with others but have not often managed to do so; when they see the steadfastness and patience and grace with which you meet the sorrows and disappointments and trials of life -- I say these things lie so near the core

of all the most visceral longings and aspirations of those made in the image of a holy God that they cannot help but notice them and take them seriously when they see them in flesh and blood.

Every year I take along with me on my vacation the kind of books that I want to read but find hard to find time to read in the midst of all the other reading that my work requires. This summer one of those books was the biography of a 18th and 19th century Scottish pastor, written by his son. The subject of the biography was William Burns, the elder, the pastor of Kilsyth and father not only of the author of the book, but of the celebrated William Chalmers Burns, whose preaching brought revival to his father's parish and then to the church in Dundee where Robert McCheyne was the pastor, and later was the famous missionary to China. It is a wonderful story of piety, faithful ministry, and the visitation of God. It is, of course, devoted in large part to accounts of the revival that occurred in Kilsyth in the late 1830s.

One account of conversion struck me in particular because I was thinking about Genesis 21:22ff. at the same time. It concerned a man who had been a drunk and irreligious for most of his life. But, on account of the renewed interest in religion in the town, he had turned over a new leaf, had begun attending church, had given up drinking, had cleaned up his life, in other words. And Sunday after Sunday he came to church never dreaming that anything else was necessary than what he had already done; never dreaming that he had to become a new creature in Christ in order to be saved, or, if he heard that language, never dreaming that he had not already become so. That state of affairs continued in his life for some while until there came a Sunday for the ordination of elders in the church, one of which men to be ordained that Sunday morning was much younger than himself.

As he pondered that the thought struck him that there must be something very wrong with himself, that a man so much younger than he should be fit to carry that sacred office in the church and that he was clearly not of the same caliber of man. That young man had the character for that office, he had the gifts and the graces, and in a moment of supreme illumination, he realized that he did not; that he was not as that young man, his character was not as his character, that that young man was godly and Christlike and he was not. That made him miserable, despondent for some time until finally the Spirit of God spoke peace to his troubled conscience and he became a new creature in Christ.

Now, there is our summons -- so to live, so to live so faithfully, so consistently the life of Christ, so to live for love and purity and goodness and loyalty, that others might gather simply from looking at us that if that is Christianity, they must not be Christians, but if that is Christianity, then they want to be Christians.

My father used to say that one of his greatest assets as an army chaplain in Korea during that war was his chaplain's assistant, whose Christian life was a terrific recommendation for the gospel. Soldiers would tell my Dad, "Chaplain, I've never been religious myself, but whatever that Cliff Brewton has, I'd like a dose of that myself."

That is the idea. Whether it leads, as in this case in Genesis 21, simply to a worldly man's desire for friendship, or to a hearing for the gospel, our living cannot stop short -- cannot ever stop short -- of being an enacted demonstration to the world around us that God is with us -- that his blessing is upon us --as it will be if we are faithful to him-- and that he is working in us a character that nature cannot create!

Can we doubt this? Can we think that the new creation would be invisible? That the presence of God and the hand of God and the grace of God could not be seen by others when it is embodied in the life of his people? No, that could not be!

Don't rest, don't let me rest, until it becomes far more the occurrence than now it is that unbelievers come to you and to me and say, "I know that God is with you in everything you do."

[Home]