Abraham Did What?

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Don Filcek, Beginning with God: A Walk Through the Book of Genesis; Genesis 12:10-20 Abraham Did What?

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Welcome to the podcast of Recast Church in Madawan, Michigan, where you can grow in faith, community, and service.
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This is a message from the series Beginning with God, Walking Through the Book of Genesis by Pastor of Teaching and Vision, Don Filsek.
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If you'd like to learn more about Recast or access our sermon archive, please visit us at recastchurch .com.
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Here's Pastor Don. This morning we're going to dive into what has the potential from our cultural perspective to be a pretty bizarre story in the
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Book of Genesis. We're going to see Abram go down to Egypt in the midst of a famine and lie about his wife being his sister, and then
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Pharaoh is going to take his wife in to be his wife, and it gets kind of confusing. It's like, what in the world is going on here?
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So we need to understand some of that from a cultural standpoint. I would guess that unless, and some of you may have been sat through some preachers who are preaching through the
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Book of Genesis, so you've heard a sermon on this, but I would guess that if I was just picking a passage to preach on, this might not be the one that I would just select.
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And so that's one of the benefits of going through a book of the Bible and studying it chapter by chapter and section by section, is that we hit some of these golden nuggets of strangeness that we might not normally pick up under normal circumstances.
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And it is right here in the pages of Scripture. It has a message for us about the character of God, as well as something to say about our own character.
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And I'm just curious, have you ever had that happen where when you're reading Scripture, and it's like you're reading it, and it's like, that is interpreting me.
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Like I'm reading it, and it makes sense of me, and it's kind of like, I see myself in the text, and I can see myself behaving like this person is behaving, or whatever.
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Have you encountered that? And then there's other times where you read it, and it's like you get this vision of God, and you see who
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He is. And hopefully those two come together routinely for you in Bible reading.
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Scripture really does paint a picture of understanding of who we are accurately.
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Not who the world tells you you are, not who Oprah tells you you are, not even who you say you think you are yourself, but ultimately who
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God thinks you are, and His understanding of you. How many of you think that's valuable? You know, what God thinks of us? But then equally, to understand who
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God is, and you're not going to really find that anywhere other than the pages of Scripture. And so we see that in our text.
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Last week, we saw God take initiative and strike up an agreement with a person. We've been marching through the book of Genesis, and it was a turning point in the history of God and humanity, where He selected an individual named
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Abram from among all the peoples of the earth, and asked him to leave his home and his people to set out on a journey.
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Now, we talked about that last week, and what a big step of faith that was. God didn't even tell Abram where he was going.
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He said, pick up your family and leave. And I kind of joked last week about, you know, like, I guess I'll just get on 94 and drive until you tell me to stop, or I don't know.
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What does that look like? I don't really even know how he did that, but that's what he did. And moved his family out of his country and from his place where he had established life.
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And God promised that if Abram would follow Him by faith, then
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God made some promises. He said, there's four things that I'm going to give you. We talked about those. He said, I promise to make you into a great nation.
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I promise to protect you from those who would seek to dishonor you. So those who dishonor you, I will curse.
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And those who bless you, I will bless, he said to Abram. He made a promise to bless all the nations through him.
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We know ultimately that's fulfilled in Jesus Christ. And that's obviously a major part of the Abrahamic covenant, is that all the nations would be blessed through somebody, one of his offspring.
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And lastly, God promised to give him the land of Canaan. Once he finally arrived in that area, God said, look around you.
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This is yours. So last week, there was the potential to leave with a pretty good feeling. Like Abram, an example of faith, right?
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He steps out and he does what God told him to. In verse four, it said, so Abram went as the Lord had told him.
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He obeyed last week. And then my encouragement to you was to seek God's guidance and direction for your life of what your next step of faith might be.
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And hopefully, you actually were able to think of that over this past week and maybe even write something down that was your next step of faith.
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What is God guiding and directing and moving you towards? Maybe it was to give up a certain sin that God was convicting you of that needs to be pushed out of your life, or maybe there was some step of faith in regard to a career change or something that he was obviously directing in.
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So we ended with Abram trusting God, taking this huge step, moving his family, a kind of upbeat message.
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And so things turn a little bit in this text. So we're still in chapter 12, but what we see this week might make us think that we've started talking about a different Abram.
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Last week, we talked about an Abram that was full of faith and that was willing to step out and trust in God and take a big step.
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So we saw trust and faith, but this week we see faithlessness and distrust on Abram's part in the promise of God.
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As we read and contrast the Abram of last week and the Abram of this week,
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I encourage you to think of cutting him some slack in a sense. Now, certainly I'm not going to cut him a lot of slack in the sense that what he does is sin here, but I want us to turn a little bit and look at ourselves and say, have you experienced something of what it looks like to be at a spiritual high point where you're connected with God and you're walking in faith and that you can turn on a dime and express faithlessness in God and distrust in him instantly?
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Have you experienced that in your life, those high points, those high moments? I dare say that probably for many of us, that can happen from Sunday to Monday.
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Think about that. I mean, you gather together with God's people, we get a chance to sing songs, hear from his word. I know it is for me, maybe it is just me, but for me,
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Sunday is a high point. I love this and I love gathering together with you and talking with you, seeing how your week's gone and being encouraged, hearing from God's word and I'm hearing from it even as I'm speaking and so it's convicting to me.
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And then what happens Monday morning, right? Or maybe we only have to go to Sunday afternoon, if we're honest, but I mean, we can step away from high points of our walk and turn on a dime and that's what we see
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Abram doing. It's not that we're talking about two different Abrams, we're talking about one Abram that acts just like us, who can be expressing significant faith, stepping out and surrendering things for God and the next minute he's going to do something just kind of stupid, really boneheaded and he's going to do that for us and show us.
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You see, how many of you know, your mistakes, are you glad that they're not in scripture? I mean, do you really want to have lived in Bible time so that God could be using you as an example and writing about you in the text so that centuries down the road they could be reading about your stupid mistakes?
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Abram took the hit for us so that we can see a reflection of ourselves. Genesis 12, verses 10 through 20, if you open there, please, and you can turn to page 8 in the
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Bible in the seat back in front of you. And if you don't own a copy of the Bible, please take that one with you. We do want everybody to have a copy of the
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Word of God. Follow along as I read Genesis 12, verses 10 through 20. Now there was a famine in the land, so Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land.
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When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to Sarai, his wife, I know that you are a woman beautiful in appearance.
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And when the Egyptians see you, they will say, this is his wife. Then they will kill me, and they will let you live.
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Say you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared for your sake.
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When Abram entered Egypt, the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful. And when the princes of Pharaoh saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house.
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And for her sake, he dealt well with Abram, and he had sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male servants, female servants, female donkeys, and camels.
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But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram's wife. So Pharaoh called
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Abram and said, What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say she is my sister, so that I took her for my wife?
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Now then, here is your wife, take her and go. And Pharaoh gave men orders concerning him, and they sent him away with his wife and all that he had.
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Let's pray. Father, we look at this text, and there's a lot of cultural mystery, fog in this text of what is actually going on, and it seems pretty cold and callous in one way for Abram to respond to his wife this way.
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And Father, sometimes our mind just turns to those really radical things that happen in the text, and we miss the main point and the overarching theme that Abram is acting faithless in the text, and you are proving yourself faithful to continue to preserve his life despite his own stupid decisions to embarrass a tyrant over the known world at the time.
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And Father, you are the hand that protects him. You are the one who keeps promises.
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And Father, as we have an opportunity to worship you this morning, I ask that you would help us to worship you out of recognition of who you are, the great promise keeper, the one who has said it and it will be accomplished, the one who has promised us things like salvation in your
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Son, Jesus Christ, and that all who are in him will be saved. And Father, I ask that you would help us to understand that in our hearts and to sing songs and to worship you out of that, that this would not be just some sense of Christian karaoke where the words are on the screen and we sing along, but ultimately it would be our hearts engaged and delighted in you as the
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God who is faithful even in the midst of our faithlessness. I praise you for that in the name of your
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Son, Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen. Highly exalted in the name of Jesus Christ.
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I pray that that's reality in our lives as we move forward and even as we hear this message this morning. Make sure you have
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Genesis chapter 12 verses 10 through 20 open in front of you. Again, that's on page 8 if you got here late or you just lost your place.
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And remember that, I know we just took a break, but you can get more coffee or doughnuts and then restrooms are back here if you need those at any time during this walk through this awkward passage here.
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So, I'd like us to start by putting ourselves in Abram's shoes. I think a lot of times we can tend to observe the people of Scripture as kind of flat without emotion.
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We have a tendency to look at these ancient documents and these ancient stories and kind of go, well, okay, they just kind of did what they did and they were like kind of robots.
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But, I mean, have you ever tried to put yourself in Abram's shoes of what he's experienced in life? I think that there's some value in understanding that.
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Think about it in this context. Okay, so this guy is just minding his own business and God speaks to him. I don't know what that conversation looked like.
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I don't know if it was like a voice from heaven, that audible thing, or if it was a still small voice inside his heart as he was out tending the sheep or whatever.
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But God spoke to him and told him to uproot his family and to move. He obeyed
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God, and then God appeared to him once after he arrived in the area of Canaan, told him that he was going to give
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Abram this land. How many of you, by this point, if you're Abram, you're kind of just kind of freaked out like what in the world is going on with my life?
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Like what is happening? I heard this voice. I'm trying to follow this.
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I mean, it was obvious that by his response that he believed it was God speaking to him. And so he's doing all these things and God is making promises to him.
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And then he moves to this land. God says, I'll give it all to you. But Abram continues to move. And it's important.
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I say God promised to give Abram the land. Actually, God promised to give his descendants the land, his offspring.
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So there was an understanding in Abram that God is giving him this land, but it's not necessarily for right now. Down through my line, they are going to possess this land of Canaan.
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So Abram continues to move around in a quest for pasture land for his flocks, at least that's what I assume is the case. And last week we left him in southwestern
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Israel. I think there's a reason why he's moving around for pasture land, because we see right here in verse 10 that there was a famine in the land.
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How many of you know famines don't just happen like all of a sudden, like everything just dries up like instantly. But it takes a little bit of time for that process to happen.
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And so it's likely that as God is giving him the land, it's kind of drying up. And he is down in this area of southwestern
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Israel, as we left him last week in the text, an area called the Negev or the Negev, depends on your translation, down near Egypt as it is.
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We find out about this famine in the land. What did God just do to this land? What did
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God just say to Abram regarding this land in our passage last week?
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I just kind of said it. He gave it to him, didn't he? Did he give this land? He said, I'm going to give this to your offspring.
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And yet what's the first thing that happens to the land? There's a famine. Is there a little bit of irony in this?
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This is like the transmission going out on your brand new car. You're still paying payments on it and the transmission is blown.
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You get the new computer in the mail and the motherboard is completely scrapped on it. That actually happened to me a couple of weeks ago.
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So that kind of thing. Or you drop your brand new cell phone in the toilet. Anybody have that happen to you?
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I would guess that's happened to a handful of us. So you're kind of like, what is happening here? God promises,
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I'm going to give you a land, and then the land turns out to be broke right away. But to be fair,
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God promised the land to Abram's descendants, and Abram didn't have the means to take this land at this point anyways.
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The Canaanites, as told us last week, are in the land. But there is an irony in this severe famine. So Abram does what all people in the
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Middle East. What do you do if you live in the Middle East in ancient times and there's a famine that hits the land? Where do you go? What do you do? Everybody goes to the same place,
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Egypt. You go to Egypt. Okay. A couple of people would have survived in that context. Okay. You go to Egypt.
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There's a reason. There's this little known river that runs right through the middle of Egypt. Anybody have any guesses what the name of that river is?
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The Nile. The longest river on the face of the planet is the Nile River. The biggest in length.
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And it runs all the way down into the heart of Africa so that things have to be really bad down in the jungles of Africa for it to dry up.
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Okay. So it's not affected by the arid conditions and the droughts and the common famines of the Middle East.
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And so it's a logical place to go for water, for food, for irrigation, and that's a good thing.
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So for the Nile to dry up would have to have problems going on down, way down, hundreds of miles, thousands of miles away from where the
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Nile is in Egypt. So they go there. Many people would go there and we see a kind of a history, a recurring theme of people going to Egypt for protection all the way up to the point where do
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Joseph and Mary take baby Jesus to protect him from the king of the area? They go to Egypt.
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There's a theme of going there for protection throughout Scripture. So Abram goes to sojourn there.
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He's planning to be there indefinitely. There's no end date in mind for him when he goes there. I have often thought of the word sojourn as a temporary word and it's not necessarily.
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It means to dwell or to live in. It's a pretty generic word actually. So Abram takes his wife, his stuff, his servants, all of his people, and they move to Egypt.
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His motive in moving to Egypt is not a mystery. Abram wants to survive and to have food and water for his family and for his livestock.
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I don't think Abram's move to Egypt is particularly sinful or untrusting. God didn't promise to give him the land immediately so he's not disobeying anything directly from God.
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It seems likely that God might even be using that move to preserve Abram in Egypt. I just want to point out it's possible to be overly critical of Abram and to think that he's taking too much into his own hands by avoiding this famine, but faith doesn't always look like just sitting in the desert waiting and praying for water.
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Sometimes you need to be moving and he's moving here. So I don't fault Abram for moving to Egypt during this famine.
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That's not his primary sin in the text, but there is going to be sin in the text. What comes next gets downright dicey and strange in verses 11, 12, and 13.
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Now verses 11, there's some cultural tension in this, but verse 11 at least translates to us in a pretty direct way.
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Abram sits down with his wife, Sarah, and establishes that she's a hadi. You look at it at verse 11, it actually says that.
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When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to Sarah, his wife, baby girl, you got it going on.
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You see it right there? Is that what your translation reads? No, okay. But it's something to that effect.
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That's kind of the gist of what he's saying to her. Linda and I have these kinds of conversations routinely in our household.
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So girl, you're a hadi, that kind of stuff. So far so good, right? Verse 11, is verse 11 a good conversation?
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Good conversation happening in the household of Abram? Yes or no? Yes. Yes, this is a good conversation.
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Men, yes, this is a good conversation to have with your wives, okay? Wives, you enjoy a conversation like that?
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Okay. Three of you? The rest of you don't, okay. Three of you enjoy that.
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I think verse 11, good discussion, guys, okay? If you're going to open your mouth and use one of your 250 words that you say in, you know, ugh, hadi, that's okay, okay?
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I mean, if you're going to use a couple of those words, use them in a good way towards your wife. But just like so many men, the conversation, he just doesn't, okay, he gets running and then he's not going to stop there.
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And the reality is, if you have a girl that is a hadi, then it's easy for fear to set in, right?
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I mean, I know. And so, like, I don't want some dude hitting on my wife, okay?
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I mean, let's put some rubber on the tread of this tire here for a second. I don't want someone hitting on my wife.
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That's not going to turn out well. That's not going to go really super good. So Abram, you know, in my context, in my situation,
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I mean, there might be some fear of losing my wife in something like that, right? I mean, there might be some legitimate fear for some of us kind of going, well, what if somebody hits on my wife and it doesn't go well and, ugh, that's not cool.
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But Abram's fear is something a little bit different than that, isn't it? Because we move on in the text and it's like, verse 11, he says,
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I know that you're a woman beautiful in appearance, and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, this is his wife, then they will, what?
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What's he afraid is going to happen? They're going to kill me and take my wife. So his fear is not losing his wife as much as losing his life.
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Ah, that rhymed. So yeah, he's afraid he's going to lose his life, and that's pretty significant.
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Now, I take for granted that this is not purely an irrational fear. It sounds like it from one notion, from one standpoint, and I'm reading it,
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I'm kind of putting it in our context and going, if I tell my wife, you know what, Linda, we're not going out to eat tonight, or ever, because I'm afraid somebody's going to think you're really attractive and kill me for you.
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Okay, does that sound, I mean, is there maybe a hint of irrationality in that notion? Would you guys agree with me?
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Like, maybe they've got to set up a meeting for me to meet with somebody and talk with them to get a little help for myself, if that's kind of the way that I think society runs and the way that things are going to go for me.
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So are you seeing what I'm saying, that culturally we have a little bit of a hurdle to understand, a little bit of fog. Sometimes there's a difference between our culture, where we live, and the culture where they lived in biblical times, that we have to bridge the gap, we have to clear the fog away to understand what's going on in that time.
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I don't think Abram is just, like, we're getting a little dose of his psychosis, or that he's just paranoid, or something like that.
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There's something about the culture there that we're looking at that makes it clear, Abram's going to go to significant extremes to try to keep from being killed for his wife.
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Now, one of the things, the text tells us that she's extremely attractive, so that's an element in this that you can't dismiss.
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She's extremely attractive, and that adds to his fear, but then there's also the sense in which we have to understand that culture was just that bad.
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Culture was that denigrated that they might take advantage of him and actually kill him for his wife, so that was apparently not that far off the radar.
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The potential was there for that to occur, and not only that, but we also need to understand culturally that certainly he has some help, he has some servants, we saw that earlier in the text, that he had some servants and people traveling with him.
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Don't get in your mind that it's just him and Sarai wandering around out in the desert, but equally, he doesn't have the extended structure that families and clans had for each other at that time.
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He's been told to leave his clan behind in Haran by God, and so now he's come out from underneath a structure of protection in his culture, and he's moving to Egypt where he probably doesn't know the language super great, all of those kinds of things.
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There's a lot of room to be taken advantage of in a foreign country, isn't there? If you don't know the language, you don't know the culture, you don't understand how things are going.
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So, all of that, does he have a legitimate fear? Yeah, he's legitimately afraid that this might happen.
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But, so he's going to come up with this, and there's a fear there, but what should we do with our fear?
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When we see that fear well up in us, where should we turn when fear occurs?
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Where does Abram turn when fear occurs? He's going to turn to a plan.
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He's going to come up with, I got this one. After just meeting God, and God making some significant promises to him, he's going to look and say, you know what,
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God, I trusted you just last week, earlier in this chapter, I just trusted you, but you know what, watch what
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I can do. I'll take care of this. How often do we act like that? We just came from a text that talked about Abram being promised that he would become a great nation.
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How many of you think he needs to stay alive a little longer for him to become a great nation? He doesn't even have any offspring yet, so that would be kind of a clue that God's going to keep him alive.
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He's going to be a blessing to all people, probably going to do that by being alive and having offspring. He has even been offered divine protection.
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The one who blesses you, I will bless. The one who curses you, I will curse. How many of you think that he probably has received ample information from God to trust him with his future?
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Has he? He even demonstrated a level of trust in that, and now he's going to go off on his own and come up with a plan in verse 13.
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It's a harebrained plan. It's a strange plan, but it also isn't maybe as strange as what we think when we read it at face value.
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How many of you think this sounds like a horrible plan at face value? At face value, without understanding the cultural context, it's like, what's he going to say?
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He says to his wife, say you're my sister. Okay, you lost me somewhere in there.
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Say you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared for your sake.
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So they're going to go down to Egypt. They're right on the edge of Egypt. They're getting ready to go in, and he's like, just tell everybody that we meet. We're going to act like brother and sister while we're there.
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Everything is going to go fine. What? What is, what's going on here? It's a little bit strange. The plot is simply this.
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When they arrive in Egypt, they will act like brother and sister so that he will be treated well by the Egyptians, who all want to get in good with Abram because of his beautiful sister.
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Now, the other thing that we find out that gets a little bit strange, we don't see it in our text, but I think it's valuable for us to pull this in because we're going to see this type of event happen three times in the book of Genesis.
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Two times, Abram's going to do this. So what we see here is not like a learning experience for Abram.
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He's going to do this again when they're coming into another land. The king Abimelech is going to do the same thing.
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He's going to find Sarah attractive, take her in. And then his son Isaac is going to do the same thing with his wife.
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Where do you think he learned that? So he's going to learn that from dad, and he's going to try to pull off the same plan.
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So in that context, if you're taking notes, you can write down this reference. Genesis 20 verse 12 is another part where this is happening again.
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And Sarai is there in the text called the daughter of his father, but not the daughter of his mother.
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And there in that later context, Abram uses this half -truth as justification for his lie. He says, well, technically she is my half -sister.
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Okay? Technically she is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother.
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And so he basically says, well, it's kind of true. And how many of you know you can tell a half -truth and at the same time be telling a whole deception?
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You can be telling a half -truth and at the same time be telling a lie because you're intentionally deceiving somebody.
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And that's the heart of lying, is intentional deceit. Right? That's the heart of a lie, is intentionally intending to divert somebody to a different direction.
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And primarily, most lying is for personal gain, right? Diverting somebody for our own gain or for our own benefit.
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And we're going to find, well, certainly lying is always wrong. Half -truths are wrong. And in this context, this little plot is going to dramatically backfire on him.
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But let's go back for just a second. Did I just indicate that Abram married his half -sister? Anybody kind of like going, whoa.
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Well, wait a minute. It's possible that what we see in the text is just exactly that at face value.
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And so there's a technical word for that. When somebody marries their half -sister, technically speaking, the word is gross.
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Okay? So, I mean, if you look that up, that might be in the definition of gross.
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Probably not. But, yeah. A very common tradition, though. So that might be the case.
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This might just be flat -out incest. That might be what's going on here. But there's also a very common tradition in the ancient
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Middle East that many commentaries have pointed to. There's texts. There's tablets with inscriptions on them that indicate that this was a common practice where the father of the groom would adopt the woman his son was going to marry and bring her into the family before they got married in order to secure the dowry in the way that the dowries would work.
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He would come out financially. It would be financially advantageous for the family to have her in the family to receive the dowry that it all gets lumped in together.
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And then equally, she would be raised up in standing, no longer just the wife of so -and -so, but now the daughter of the head of the entire household, which was a higher status than daughter -in -law.
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Does that make sense? And so in that culture, it was common for a father to adopt the woman that his son was going to marry.
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Now, I like to think that that might be the case of what's happened here. The text doesn't tell us that in depth.
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I like to think so, but that might just be wishful thinking, and this might be that we've got to deal with incest here.
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I don't know. Anybody else with me that they like to think that that's the case? Just maybe there's an adoption that happened?
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Thanks. I'm not the only one. But more about the specifics of this plot.
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It calls into question, I think, a very simple and basic question, but again, putting yourself in the shoes of Abram, a real guy making real decisions, and it calls into question a little bit, did
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Abram love Sarai? Did he love his wife? Is anybody at face value kind of looking at this situation and going, did he just use her as a tool to save his own skin?
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Isn't that what this looks like? He's willing to jeopardize her integrity.
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He's willing to jeopardize her or maybe even potentially lose her for the sake of saving his own skin. That's what it appears like at face value.
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So did he love her? Was she just a tool to him? Well, two things here I think help to flavor our understanding of this interaction between Sarai and Abram.
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First, it's unfortunate that there's this in the translation. I like the English Standard Version. I don't think it's perfect in every way.
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And I think that eventually they'll probably change this. But in verse 13 where it says, say you are my sister, it would be thoroughly appropriate in Hebrew for us to translate it over into English and put the word please in there.
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This is a gentle request. This is not a command. I'm the head of this household and you're going to lie for me. This is a please.
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Please spare me. Please save me. This is what I want you to do if you would be willing to.
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There's a request in this. Do you see how there's a little bit of a difference in understanding that interaction where he's commanding her in verse 13?
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Say you are my sister versus please say you are my sister. We don't know what motivated her, but we do know this, as this event unfolds, it clearly implies
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Sarai's agreement to these arrangements. She's going to go along with this plot. Do you see that?
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You get that understanding as you read through it? She's going to go along with it. What motivated her?
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That's probably a lot of nuance in there. There's probably a lot going on in her heart in regard to this and how this is going to unfold.
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But the second thing, I'm not trying to let Abram off the hook. I think what Abram does here is boneheaded and kind of like you just got done interacting with God, you just got done placing your trust in him, and now you're going to go out and do things yourself, just like many of us, just like the way that we roll.
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But there's some things that help us understand the culture. The second thing that we need to understand is I think he was genuinely fearful for the outcome of the situation as a foreigner in a strange land with a super attractive wife.
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And so if he could pass her off, now this is important, if he could pass her off as his sister, then all potential suitors would have to come through him, and he would be in charge of the direction of any negotiations.
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There's no father involved in this anymore. Her father is not on the scene. This is the way that it would go in arranged marriages in ancient culture.
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The first line, go to the father and make an arrangement with him. The second line, if she has no father in the picture, then it's go to the oldest brother.
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He's obviously a brother that's there with his sister, I think in terms of this lie that they're telling.
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And so now he basically is in the driver's seat of any negotiations. Nobody's going to be able to marry her.
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Nobody, except the one man who can marry her without permission is going to. But in his mind, in his plot, in his plan, he's completely in control of this.
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He can't conceive of a way that he's going to have to give her away. Are you getting what I'm saying? Does that change it a little bit in your understanding of how
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Abram could do this to his wife? He's actually working to try to protect her in one sense.
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He's actually saying, we could have our cake and eat it too when we get to Egypt. I won't have to be threatened with my life.
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And at the same time, I can protect you from any potential suitors. They got to come through me first and I'll just, I'll dilly -dally until the famine's over and we can get back to safety.
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Are you getting how that plot unfolds in his mind? He is thinking he is perfectly in control of the situation.
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Has that ever happened to you? You ever felt like you've got a lock tight, water tight, there's no way that anything could get inside this plan.
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I got it figured out. Snap. And it's gone. In a heartbeat.
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That's exactly what's going on. I do not believe for a second that Abram had every intention of losing his hadi in this.
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Okay? I don't think that that's his intention at all. I think he has every intention of being able to maintain this situation and it's going to get out of hand.
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But everything goes smooth when they first get there. Verse 14, when Abram entered Egypt, the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful.
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She certainly draws attention. Abram wasn't merely biased about the attractiveness of his wife.
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The Egyptians verified her beauty. But then in verse 15, that's when things get out of control.
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Quick, fast, and in a hurry. The Egyptians reported to Pharaoh, the ruler of all of Egypt.
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By the way, this isn't the same Pharaoh. Pharaoh is a title, not a personal name or anything like that. So Pharaoh is a title that means big house in Egyptian.
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That's actually what it means. Not brick house. But I am assuming he was mighty, mighty. But let's throw that in there.
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No, I'm not going to sing it. But he's the big house, okay? And so they extolled her beauty to him.
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He stands for her to be brought to his house, which probably was a big house. But generally speaking, rulers of the ancient world didn't need to ask permission for things.
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There is the expectation that there's no negotiation. There's probably one person in all of Egypt that could have taken her without coming through the brother for the dowry price and making arrangements and all this stuff.
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Who is that person? Pharaoh. So, oh, I didn't. I mean, Abram's like, oh,
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I didn't even think of that. Ah. So, you know, tyrants and rulers and kings in ancient times, they generally didn't ask permission.
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Send for her, bring her to me. That's the way that this goes down. I mean, think about this.
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They didn't ask permission, but they generally tended to reward handsomely. You know, so this dowry is going to be huge.
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The expectation would be that Abram would be delighted to have his sister married to Pharaoh, no questions asked.
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I mean, think in terms of Pharaoh. He's like, this is this dude's, I'll make it worth his while if he'll let me marry his sister.
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He's like up and up. He's above board on this. He's like, I'll reward you handsomely for your sister.
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That's great. And this is, you know, he'd be rewarded with a dowry beyond compare.
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His sister would become one of the many in the royal harem she would be extravagantly cared for the rest of her life. He wouldn't need to care or worry about whether or not she was under, you know, going through famine or drought or whatever.
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She's in one of the most protected positions in the ancient world at this time. She's famine proof now.
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She's in the royal harem. She's going to be cared for. She's going to always have something to eat and drink, and she's going to be treated better than, you know, 99 % of the people on the face of the planet at this time because she is now becoming married to Pharaoh, the ruler of Egypt.
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Are you seeing how Pharaoh just thinks this is a win -win situation? You know, this is all right.
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But my question to you is how quickly do our little plots and plans turn out of our control? That's not to say that we cannot plan, but remember that Abram is working a sinful plan here.
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He's working a sinful plot that's based upon a lie, and ultimately he is distrusting
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God in his plan, isn't he? So does that mean that we should throw all planning out the window based on this text?
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You know, plans are all evil and plans are all bad. No, not necessarily. But if our trust is in our plans and not in God, then
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I would say you can measure that by how often you become frustrated as unforeseen things take our plans off track.
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Think about your plans. I'm talking good plans, not plans to do evil or, you know, plots to do unrighteousness, but I'm talking about a good plan.
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You know, maybe you have a 10 -year plan, maybe you have a 5 -year plan, maybe you know where you want to be in a year, you want to take your business to the next level, you want to do this, you want to, you know, move to a new position, move into a new house, whatever.
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How do you respond when that plan is knocked off track? If we acknowledge
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God and seek to honor Him, doing what is acceptable, follow Him by faith, even while setting our plans in place, then we will accept the shifts in our plans and the surprises in our plans as the hand of God guiding us.
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Do you see how if we hold our plans loosely in our hands, sure, we can make some plans, but give those up to God and say,
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I'm going to hold on to this loosely and let you guide and direct in the process. Then when things get knocked off course, we go,
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God, thank you for guiding me in this. Thank you for moving me on in this area or this area. Do you see what I'm saying? But if we think that we are in control and we put all of our plans here and hold on to them tightly, and as things unravel, we go, oh, curse you.
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This is horrible. My life is falling apart and all of that. Are you seeing how there's a difference in holding your plans? Go ahead and plan, but plan loosely.
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Are you getting what I'm saying? Trusting and leaning in God for the direction of your life.
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The dowry rolls in, in verse 16, and it is substantial.
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There are indications that Abram was doing pretty well before this journey to Egypt, and yet Abram could begin to be called filthy rich after this episode in his life.
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Servants, animals, the biggest highlight, everybody, all the archaeologists go batty over verse 16.
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They get so excited and enthusiastic about the last word in the verse. What's the last word in the verse?
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Camels. Camels. That's exciting, right? Well, what we understand is that camels were just starting to be domesticated around this time in human history.
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They weren't domesticated prior to this, and so this is one of the earliest mentions that we have in any dated writing that tells us that people used camels.
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So, I mean, you can see why archaeologists and people who get into that kind of stuff are super excited because here we see the indication.
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This is cutting -edge transportation technology. Okay, this is like saying that, to put this in modern terms, this is like saying that Pharaoh gave
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Abram a couple of Tesla S series. Does any of you know what a Tesla car is?
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Have you seen one of those? This is like all electric, high performance, you know, 0 to 60 in 6 .5,
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125 miles per hour, 150 mile range on this car, and it's 100 % electric, no gas, no emissions, zero.
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Okay, so, I mean, does that sound kind of cutting -edge technology for today? That's like saying that Pharaoh gave him a couple of those.
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Any of you would like one of those? Pretty cool. Okay, a couple of you know what I'm talking about enough to go, that would be pretty sweet.
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And then a few of you are like, give me one of them. What are we even talking about again? So, cutting -edge transportation technology, the camel.
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Okay, he'd probably go out cruising town on his camel, you know, showing off the super sweet state of the art.
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What did you say? Two humps, not just one. That's right. That thing got a
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Hemi? Yeah, whatever. I just said something about a car engine.
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I don't even know anything about them. But the God who made the promise to Abram to make him into a great nation, the
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God who promised to protect him makes good on that promise by protecting him even from his own stupid plot and plan.
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Even though he has tried to save himself in this situation, he has forgotten the promise of God, ignored it, shunned it, and said,
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I got this one on my own. God still comes in and saves the day. Abram has caused this strange situation by lying.
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Would you agree with me on that? He's at fault. He's acted on his own without trust that God would deliver him in Egypt.
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And his plan has gone south, but God is going to take Abram's mess and turn it around.
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So he afflicts the household of Pharaoh with some type of sickness. The word plague here is related to physical ailment and should not be thought of as primarily darkness, frogs, gnats, the death of the firstborn, or those kinds of things, although I think there's something in the word that's meant to encourage us to think back to or think ahead to what's going to happen in Egypt.
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But this is physical ailment that's going on here. The author is not concerned with letting us know how
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Pharaoh made the connection. Have you ever wondered that? In ancient times, everybody assumed that something happened because one of the gods was angry about something.
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So how does Pharaoh come to the realization that, hey, my family's sick. I guess this must be
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Abram's wife. That would be your logical connection? Probably not so much, but somehow the author isn't concerned with how he makes that connection, but he does.
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He's able to make that connection. How many of you think it seems a little bit unfair that God punishes
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Pharaoh and his household in this? Just a little bit at least, maybe a couple of you? What's he done wrong?
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He negotiated with a dude for the bride price for his sister, paid it, and has taken her into his household.
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That's pretty routine in ancient culture. But I just want to point out to you that oftentimes when we feel bad for somebody like that, we assume that they have clean hands.
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We assume that they're innocent. How many of you know Pharaoh's heart? You know him pretty well? You guys tight?
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You and Pharaoh are just like, yeah, we hang out a lot. I could see his heart, man. He's just a compassionate dude.
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Probably not so much. How many of you think that probably he's done some things that are worthy of discipline, worthy of punishment?
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How many of you realize that anything that we have coming at us, anything that hits us in life, we probably deserve it pretty outright.
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Do you agree with me on that? I mean, in honesty, in honesty. So I don't want you to feel too bad for Pharaoh.
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He's not an innocent guy with clean hands. But Pharaoh is, I think, reasonably incredulous in this situation.
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What we have here is Pharaoh, the pagan guy who worships
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Ra, the sun god, and Set, and Nut, and all of these Egyptian gods and goddesses, and he's worshiping them, and he's going to call
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Abram to task for his behavior. Why did you lie to me?
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He's demonstrating more character than the person of God. And I think we need to be careful.
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We need to take that on for ourselves in recognizing how do we respond to the world around us? What about at the workplace?
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Have you ever been in a position or a situation where there is room for an unbeliever to correct your stand on something?
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Probably all of us have at some point. And what I mean by that is not then therefore act more righteous than you are.
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I mean be honest with those around you that are unbelievers. I'm not perfect. There is one who is perfect.
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I'd love to introduce you to him. I'm not that. I'm trying to follow that one who has died to declare me righteous.
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I'm not righteous. I will fail you, and I will make mistakes, and I will mess up, and I will sin. But I'm struggling, and I'm striving, and I'm trying to bring honor and glory to my
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Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who is perfect, who is my only hope. My hope doesn't rest here.
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My hope rests in him for salvation. Would you like to meet him? There's a difference, isn't there?
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And so Pharaoh is actually calling the father of all monotheistic faiths to task here.
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You told me she was your sister. Dude, why didn't you just say she was your wife?
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This is kind of a funny thing, a little bit of a role reversal in the text. A pagan guy calling the man of faith to task, and rightfully so.
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Now there's a lot of speculation over whether or not Sarah, Sarai, was technically married to Pharaoh. But if the marriage had been consummated, it's quite likely that the entire story would end differently.
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I just want to point out that one thing in context, I was kind of even just last night doing some double checks on this to make sure that I'm right.
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And one guy was commenting that later on the same scenario is going to happen with Abimelech, and it makes it abundantly clear in that text that God preserved her in that time from adultery, from consummating the marriage with Abimelech.
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And so it just kind of makes sense. Okay, if down the road he's going to save her then, kind of makes sense that he's done so here now?
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It does, although it's not explicit in the text. But there's further evidence for this. The authors of scripture are never shy to utilize sexual terminology.
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As a matter of fact, we're more shy of it in English than they are in Hebrew, and we actually water down and dumb down the terminology that they use in Hebrew often.
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So that the Song of Songs reads like it's rated R in Hebrew, and in English we've kind of made it, or maybe it's even worse, so maybe we've made it rated
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R and they go NC17 on it. Okay? I mean, you had to go past your bar mitzvah before you were allowed to read the
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Song of Solomon. Okay? You had to reach a certain age before they'd even let that happen. So are you getting what
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I'm saying? So they dumb things down. And what I want to point out is that there's no absence of words in Hebrew available for saying that this was consummated between Pharaoh and Sarai, and none of those words occur in this text.
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I do believe that God preserved her and kept her from being compromised by adultery in this situation.
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Some have even indicated that maybe something to do with the disease of his household would have both clued him in to her being the problem of his illness, and that the illness would have affected that as well.
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So some have said maybe there's both in there. I don't know. But whatever it is, there's a lot of indications in the text that I see that preserves
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Sarai. I'm not just trying to save her integrity, but I am just trying to say what I think is probably most likely from the text itself.
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The conclusion to this crazy text is that in verse 20, Abram and Sarai and all that they had were given the boot from Egypt.
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Now how many of you think, put this in context, angry tyrant who you've embarrassed, what do you expect the outcome to be?
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Death, right? That just seems to kind of make sense. Why in the world does Abram walk out of here with the entire dowry in hand, it says all that he had he left with, he walks away with the entire dowry.
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If you were Pharaoh, would you at least ask for the dowry back? Probably, at least.
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Why do you think he didn't? Because he's encountered the power of God, right?
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I mean, he at least had some understanding of Abram's God is powerful. He's given me ailment.
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He's given me disease. I'm not going to touch it. Just go. They escort him to the edge of the property and say, you know what,
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Egypt, you're out. Okay, they deport him and his family. And there's a little bit of irony because Abram walks out more blessed than when he got there.
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So it's not Abram's plan that saved the day, right? Is it his plan that saved the day?
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No. But it's the amazing God who stands by his promises, even to bail out his chosen one right out of the gate.
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Right out of the gate, what's Abram acting like? I'll do it myself, God. God just promised him a bunch of things.
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I got this. I'll take care of it. Anybody besides me think this is somewhat of an obscure and strange text?
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A little bit strange? And so the application to this is when you're traveling out of country, don't try to pass off your wife as your sister.
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Okay? Everybody good on that one? You're going to be okay? Okay. So let's close in prayer.
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No. You know me better than that. Really, there's a couple significant lessons that I learned in this bizarre situation.
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Ironically, Abram walks away blessed by the event. There's no, in the text, there's really no endorsement of what
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Abram has done here. It's not like you should mimic him so that you become blessed. I think it's very fair to say that you're not supposed to be going around telling half -truths to preserve your own skin.
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Would you guys agree with that? That's probably good advice. But maybe a better point from the text is that God takes our silly little attempts and can bless them despite us.
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And so Abram walks away with better blessings, even though he makes a dumb and ultimately sinful decision.
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So as far as applying it, here's the first application. Don't give yourself too much credit.
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And there's two different ways I think we can give ourselves too much credit. The one is thinking that you can destroy the plans of God through your stupid decisions.
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Right? It's dependent on me, and if I don't come through with this, then God's plan is going to be thwarted in my life and in the lives of others.
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So we give ourselves too much credit by being down on ourselves. Does that make sense? It sounds like it's on its head, right, in one way.
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But we can say, oh, you know, I haven't done this, I haven't done that, so God can't bless my kids or my kids are going to turn out.
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How do you know that you're dependent on God to raise your kids? I mean, we've got to do the best that we can, right?
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But when it really comes down to it, my prayer is that my kids are raised up beyond the level of what I'm able to train them at because they will just repeat my mistakes, which are plenty.
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I don't pray that they follow my example, I pray that they follow His example. Does that make sense? Who am I trusting to raise my kids?
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God. Am I doing the best that I can? Yes. Is that a fallen attempt? Yes. I think we all can kind of understand that.
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So giving ourselves too much credit by thinking, oh, I've destroyed everything. No, you really can't destroy the promises of God.
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Praise Him that you can't destroy the promises of God. You're not going to send those away.
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You're not going to destroy what God wants to accomplish. He'll get it done. But the flip side of that, you cannot make the blessings of God happen on your timeline.
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You cannot usher in His plan by your plan. You can't make it happen. Okay, God, I'll bring this to pass, and we're going to see
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Him try that. We're going to see Abram. It's going to take Abram a while to get past that one. We're going to see him with Hagar, that whole situation where he's going to try to make a child of the promise on his own schedule and in his own way, and that's not going to be it, right?
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So he doesn't quite get this. We're going to be talking about that. That's going to be a pretty common application moving forward.
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So how do we live then if we can destroy the plans of God or we have to make the plans of God happen?
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If it's neither one of those, well, how do we walk in the middle? I would tell you this. Love God, walk with Him in what is right, trust in Him in all things, and walk forward in the trust that He is a
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God who accomplishes His purpose even in the midst of our everyday messes.
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How many of you have everyday messes? I think all of us do. Lean not on your own understanding.
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Anybody ever heard that phrase, lean not on your own understanding? Does that mean we throw understanding out the window?
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Empty your mind, and then you'll be going God's way. No, but it's an issue of leaning.
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It's an issue of where your trust is. If I'm leaning on something and it goes whoop, well, then what happens? I fall, right?
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And so if I'm leaning on my own understanding, then I'm making my own plans central. I'm holding too tightly to my plans, to my understanding, the way that I think things ought to go.
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Don't lean on your own understanding, but trust in Him. And that's the way we walk forward.
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Ask yourself, how much of my weight is on God, and how much of my weight is on my own plan, and my own agenda, my own way of doing things?
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The reality is if God was dependent on us to get things done for His kingdom, there would really be no hope.
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There really wouldn't. He uses the simple things of the world. He uses the simple things of the world, the weak things of the world, to push
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His kingdom forward. So the first application, don't give yourself too much credit, and you can figure out where you fall on that spectrum, and I think we probably all fall on one side or the other, depending.
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But the second one is a follow -up application that ties in closely, and it has to do with our attitude in that. I would never suggest to you that your decisions don't matter, but I would suggest to you that stressing out is pointless and fruitless.
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And some of you are just wracked with stress, and you are anxious all the time, and you are worried about whether you're making the right decisions, or whether things are going right, or whether you've found the perfect will of God, or whether you're dating the right person, or whether or not you're going to the right, you're working at the right place, or you bought the right car, or you got the right shoes, or you're eating the right lunch, or so many areas of stress that can weigh down on us.
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My encouragement to you is honor God with your life. Walk with Him according to the things we know He desires, and leave those results up to Him.
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Will you mess up? Certainly. Will we get some things wrong? Daily.
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Is there grace to turn our stupidity into blessing? Ample grace.
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Ample grace to turn our futile, sin -filled, sin -cursed human attempts into glory.
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That's what our God can do. And work His promise through a man like Abram, who right out of the gate shows himself faithless.
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Right after showing himself to be a giant of the faith, steps right down into trying to do it himself.
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And so lastly is the obvious view of a God who keeps His promises. It's Him that I want you to see in this text.
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What does God do? He carries His promise forward. What we have here is the image of a man who meets with God, has a life -altering encounter on Sunday, and then on Monday forgets everything that happened and goes off to work in his own strength and pride, trying to do it himself.
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There's an echo in this text of something so fundamental to the Christian life that we can easily miss it. Even in the
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Old Testament, God is gracious and forgiving. We see that. This little account shows us how little we have to contribute to our own salvation.
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It is the choice of God, of Abram. And it also shows us how little we have to do with God keeping
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His promise to us. I would dare say that there's probably some of us in this room who believe that we were saved by grace, and you're like, it's the cross and Jesus saved me.
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But now you are living your life in a way that assumes that you need to keep God faithful to His promise.
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It's up to me now. It's up to me to convince Him to keep His promise to me. And I've got to do and do and do and make sure that I've crossed all my
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T's and dotted all my I's or else He won't be faithful to His promise. If you're in with Christ, He is faithful to His promise.
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He will bring you to completion, to complete forgiveness. He will completely restore you to Him.
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God does what God does in the text. He shows His character. What kind of things does God do? He remains faithful.
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That's our God. He remains faithful. Abram plays our part in the text, struggling and striving to live for God in a confusing world, losing his way from time to time, taking his eyes off God from time to time, but still kept, held, and protected in the arms of God, who is faithful to Himself.
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And He has promised to Himself to present us before Him holy and blameless and above reproach.
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That's His promise to those who are in Christ. Does that sound like an awesome promise? And He keeps
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His promises. I'm not trying to give you an excuse to do whatever you want, but grace is open to that kind of abuse.
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If you hear a gospel that's not open to a misunderstanding that you could potentially live however you want, then you probably missed the grace, how radical the grace is of God.
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But it's always got to be seasoned with an understanding that if you come to the realization that Jesus bled and died and He suffered for you and He took your sins on you, then how do you want to live?
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If you know that, if you have experienced that kind of love, then now our relationship to Him flows out of a life of gratitude and love and delight and joy, and it becomes a delight and a joy when we obey
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Him. It becomes a discouragement and a disappointment when we don't. But it's out of delight and joy.
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It's not out of fear that we obey Jesus. It's out of love, delight, and joy.
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As we come to communion, we remember the foundation of our forgiveness, the carrying on of this promise all the way down to us.
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This is the foundation of forgiveness. The cross is the image of our disobedience and our rebellion. It's the image of our sin.
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And yet, equally, the cross is the image of the extent of the love of God towards humanity in Jesus Christ.
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He died to heal the broken relationship between us and God. And God kept up His end of the promise to the point of blessing all nations through the descendant of Abram.
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And therefore, Jesus is the ultimate proof that God kept His promises to Abram.
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He is faithful. And so if you've acknowledged Jesus as King and have asked Him to save you, then please join together in remembering
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Jesus Christ, crucified for our sins but raised again victorious over sin and death.
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Let's pray. Father, as we walk through this text, it seems kind of strange in Abram acting kind of foolish and doing some strange things and sinning and telling half -truths and what appears to be giving his wife over to Pharaoh and just all the strangeness.
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What we ultimately walk away from is an understanding of Your promise and Your blessing and how You are faithful even.
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I confess I would have scrapped the whole thing. Who I am in my heart and in my sinfulness,
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I would have found somebody else. I would have ditched Abram and gone somewhere else. And yet, You remained faithful even out of the gate when he demonstrated his faithlessness to You.
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You remained faithful, and I praise You for that, for the character to actually see in the text that You are a
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God who stays with Your promise. And Father, You carried Your promise all the way to the point of ultimate sacrifice, of Jesus on the cross, of His death, burial, and resurrection on our behalf, that He is the substitute.
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I praise You for this time to remember. I pray that this never becomes routine, that as we have a chance this morning to take the cracker and remember the body of Jesus broken for us, we have a chance to drink the juice that reminds us of His blood shed for us, that we would genuinely step before the cross of Jesus Christ and we would see in our mind's eye
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His sacrifice and His suffering for us, but equally we would recognize His great love, that it would not just be a big bash -us -fest, but ultimately it would be a delight and a joy in our hearts that You would do that for us, that we don't deserve it, certainly, but You sent
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Your Son Jesus to be the punishment for us, to take the punishment and to bear that. And Father, that also
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You raised Him again three days later victorious and vindicated Him. Father, I pray that You would help us to do business with our sin and to recognize steps of faith even now that we need to take as a result of Your Spirit dealing with our hearts.