Transcript
Ben Fallon: Last week we posed Paul a question from Genesis 9 about Noah and his drunken nakedness. Today's question comes a few chapters later in Genesis 20.
"Is Abram sinning for lying to Abimelech and saying that Sarai was his sister? Shouldn't he have trusted God to protect him and Sarah, or was his deceit justified because he was protecting himself and his wife from evil?"
Paul Tripp: So, because I want everybody who is watching or listening to these answers to get the story, I want to read the passage that it came from:
Now, there was a famine of the land and Abraham went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land. And when he was about to enter Egypt, he said to Sarai, his wife, "I know that you are a woman, beautiful and appearance, and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, 'this is his wife,' then they will kill me, but they will let you live. 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."
When Abraham 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.
And for her sake, he dealt well with Abraham and he had sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male servants, female servants, female donkeys, and camels. But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abraham's wife.
So Pharaoh called Abraham 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? 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. Genesis 12:10-20.
To answer the question, you have to go back again further in the context. This is Genesis 12:1-3:
Now, the LORD said to Abraham, "Go from your country, and your kindred, and your father's house to the land I will show you, and I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and I will make your name great so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you, I will curse. And in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed."
God had made a covenant with Abraham that He would bless him and his descendants and that He would curse anyone who cursed Abram. Because of his wife's beauty, Abram was afraid that Pharaoh would desire her, kill him, and forcibly take her as his own. So Abraham plots with Sarai to deceive Pharaoh into thinking that she was Abraham's sister.
Now as the story is told in Scripture, and this is often the way that history is written in Scripture, there are no moral judgments made in the passage about motives and behavior. And this is why it's important to understand that Scripture interprets Scripture.
Sometimes it is the context that helps us to understand a historical passage, and other times it's commands and principles that help us to interpret a story. Abram's sin was not just that he lied, but that he did not trust God to be faithful to the promises he had made. It was rooted in doubt of God's character. Because God had clearly said, "Look, I'm going to take care of you, I'm going to protect you, and cursed be the man who curses you."
Abraham failed to believe that God would do what he promised, and in so doing, he doubted the presence, power, and promises of God. The Bible says that whatever is not a faith is sin.
Now, I want to say something here about how to handle history. Not everything that's historically accurate is ethically normative, so we don't get our ethics from history, we get them from the commands, wisdom, passages, and principles of Scripture. So yes, Abraham lied and it turned out okay. We don't have anywhere in Scripture where God commands us to lie. We just don't.
And so you get your understanding of God's moral boundaries from His commands, from His directives, from His wisdom, from the truths that He says are the principles that should guide us. You don't get them from history. Because Solomon had multiple wives, doesn't mean I can have multiple wives. And so that's just a faulty way of establishing your moral boundaries.
But what's encouraged about the story, is although Abraham was unfaithful, God remained faithful, and He did exactly what He promised to do. He put a curse on Pharaoh and his house, and sent plagues there, and because of that both Sarai and Abraham were able to escape.
I love 2 Timothy 2:13 that says, "If we are faithless, He remains faithful for He cannot deny Himself."
Do you know what that is called? That's called grace. Even in our faithlessness, God doesn't abandon His promises. He does what He has promised to do. This story is really the story of the entire biblical narrative: god's unfaithful people and His perfect faithfulness.
And God's perfect faithfulness, again, culminates in the fulfilling of his promise to send Jesus to be the final sacrifice for His unfaithful people. The final command in scripture, the ultimate command is: "Be holy as I am holy."
That's the one I want to attain to in my life. I don't think I'm ever going to be holy enough to bend the truth without some kind of twisted motive. You don't get your morals from history. You get them from the moral commands in Scripture, and be thankful that God has established these beautiful moral boundaries for us. They're loving and, therefore, are good.
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