Abram Doubts God's Faithfulness

This week (July 3) we were treated to the unbelievable spectacle of a plane flying over Europe without a pilot. It all started in Poland. A Soviet pilot climbed into his MiG-23 for a training flight. At some point during the flight, something went wrong. The pilot, thinking that the plane was doomed, bailed out. But the plane kept flying. It flew west, over East Germany, and West Germany. US Air Force fighters scrambled to intercept this unknown intruder. Can you imagine their shock when they pulled alongside the MiG and found that the pilot had bailed out?

They hesitated to shoot the empty plane down, for fear of where the debris would land. So they let it fly on. It flew into Belgian airspace, and was headed for France when its fuel ran out. The plane crashed near the Belgian border, killing one man on the ground.

Were it not for the tragic ending, this would be a comedy of errors. How embarrassing for a pilot to bail out of a plane that was willing to fly on normally!

This story illustrates the Bible passage we’re going to study today. God called a man named Abram to take a journey to an unknown land. Abram got in the cockpit and took off in obedience to God’s call. But at the very first sign of trouble, he bailed out. Today’s message is about what happened when he did.

God had called Abram to go from his home in Ur to the land of Canaan, a land that Abram had never seen, and probably never even heard of. It was a strange land, filled with strangers, 500 miles from his home. God had called Abram to live there as a pilgrim, a sojourner, even though he promised to give this land to Abram’s offspring to be their home. So Abram pitched his tent in the Promised Land. He built an altar to the Lord there. And everyone lived happily ever after… right?

Wrong. In Genesis 12:10, we read the words

Now there was famine in the land.

Now why would God do a thing like that? Here is Abram, he’s made it to the Promised Land (although it took him awhile to get there!). He’s obedient to the Lord. He’s living right where God wants him to live. He’s even built an altar to the Lord and is worshiping Him and being a testimony to his Canaanite neighbors. You would expect God to bless him, wouldn’t you? You’d expect God to reward him for his obedience. But instead, God sends a famine. The crops don’t grow. The trees don’t bear fruit. The cattle and sheep and goats start dying left and right. And Abram and Sarai, Lot and their families start getting hungry.

And Abram starts wondering “Why am I living here anyway? Why did God call me to this forsaken place, where my children are hungry and my animals are dying? Why isn’t God blessing me? I’m a good guy!”

Have you ever asked questions like that? I’m sure you have. You have tried to follow the Lord. You have sought to honor Him with your life and your possessions. But things just aren’t working out right. The dice keep coming up snake-eyes. You get laid off. You lose your friends. Your kids fail school. Maybe you even begin to have marriage problems. And you say “What’s the use? Why follow the Lord? It doesn’t seem to be doing me any good.”

These were the kind of questions that Abram was wrestling with. And pretty soon he began making some very important decisions based on the answers he came up with. He had heard about Egypt. That fertile land to the south - the land of the great river, the Nile. A land with an advanced and mighty civilization. A land where the pyramids were already 500 years old by the time of Abram. And most importantly, a land where there was food.

Egypt’s agriculture was based on the flooding of the Nile every year. The crops didn’t depend on rainfall. Egypt is a very dry place. But every year, as regular as clockwork, the Nile floods in response to the spring rains in the interior of the continent of Africa. The Nile is like the drain pipe of that massive area. And when the Nile floods, the crops grow. And when the crops grow, there’s plenty of food for everybody. That’s why the Egyptians had the time to build those mighty buildings like the pyramids. Because they didn’t have to worry as much as other people did about where their next meal was coming from. And to Abram, whose stomach was growling, Egypt began to sound pretty good. So he decided to go there.

Abram doubted God’s provision for him in the place where God had called him. A famine turned Abram’s faith to fear. The thing that God wanted to use to deepen Abram’s faith, Abram used as an excuse to bail out on God. He turned to his own devices. Abram sought relief from all his difficulties, rather than profit by the trial.

When you determine to follow the Lord, don’t expect everything to be clear sailing. There will be trials. When the Apostle Paul followed God’s call into Macedonia, he soon found himself in jail in Philippi. But God provided for him there in a miraculous way.

God sends us trials to deepen our faith. He does this to show us His faithfulness to us and His provision for us. This is what he wanted to do for Abram. Who knows but that this famine in Canaan might have been God’s way of clearing the land of inhabitants so that Abram could have inherited it?

But Abram doubted God’s provision. And his doubt led to distance. He moved away from the place God wanted him. He moved to Egypt. He took matters into his own hands. He sought to supply his own needs. Egypt, in Scripture, often represents the human answer to life’s questions. It represents the “arm of flesh”, our own ability to provide for ourselves, instead of relying on God. And there’s always an Egypt waiting nearby for the believer who is going through trials. Satan always makes sure that there is a ready answer to all our problems waiting in the wings. It is an answer which depends on our own strength, not God’s. And when we choose that answer, instead of waiting on God for His answer, we become distant from God. There is a verse in Isaiah 31 which says…

Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, who rely on horses, who trust in the multitude of their chariots and in the great strength of their horsemen, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel, or seek help from the Lord.

The hymnwriter George Duffield put his pen on it when he wrote

“Stand up, stand up for Jesus, stand in his strength alone. The arm of flesh will fail you - ye dare not trust your own.”

Abram doubted God. His doubt led to distance. And it soon led to deceit.

We read in Genesis that Abram’s wife Sarai was very beautiful. Ladies, you might be interested in knowing that, when this was written, Sarai was 65 years old. No, she had not been using Mary Kaye cosmetics all her life. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls, called the Genesis Apocryphon, goes to great lengths to describe how beautiful Sarai was at this age. Her beauty is extolled in the NT in 1 Peter 3.

What do you make of this? How could a woman of 65 be that beautiful? Well, I believe that it has to do with something that we call the Patriarchal Provision. After the flood, we understand that the lifespan of people in general came down to be similar to what it is today - about 75 years. But the patriarchs - those men who followed God ,and their families - were an exception to this trend. Abraham lived to the age of 175. Sarai died at the age of 127. Isaac was 180. Jacob lived to 130. Joseph 110. Moses lived to 120. These patriarchal lifespans seem to have caused the process of aging to slow down. In other words, the patriarchs did not start getting feeble and old when they were 70. They didn’t just have a lot more years to live as senior citizens. Their aging was stretched out over their long lifespan. They continued to be vigorously active when they were well into their hundreds. That’s when Moses was climbing mountains and leading the children of Israel through the wilderness. And he wasn’t in a wheelchair when he did it! So a patriarch at 100 was more like one of us at 35. And if this is true also of Sarai, who lived to 127, then at 65, she would have been in the prime of her beauty.

Now that was what was bothering Abram. He was afraid that the Egyptians would see her and want her and kill him when they found out that he was her husband. So he decided to lie, and tell them he was her brother instead. And then, according to the laws of Middle Eastern culture, he would be well treated because of her.

You see how far Abram has come already? He stopped following God because he doubted. His doubt led to distance. And his distance leads to deceit. You may be interested in knowing that this story about Sarai being his sister is technically true. We read later on in Genesis 20:12, that Sarai was actually Abram’s half sister. She was the daughter of his father Terah, but not of his mother. She was his half sister. In that ancient culture we have discovered that marriage to one’s half sister was looked upon with special favor, and it was regarded to be an especially honorable marriage. It was certainly not unusual.

The best lies have within them a grain of truth. Abram tried, I’m sure, to convince himself that he wasn’t lying. But the motive behind what he did was to deceive the Egyptians and to protect himself.

Do you see how one sin led to another? Abram sinned by doubting God’s provision and leaving the Promised Land. That sin led him to commit another sin - a sin of deception, of bearing false witness.

Notice how Abram’s whole perspective and outlook on life has changed? Sarai’s beauty had been a great gift of God in his life. But now that he had stopped following God, he came to look upon God’s blessing as a curse. His wife’s beauty was something that could get him killed. And it seems that surviving was the only thing on Abram’s mind now. In his single minded desire to provide for his own needs - his own food, his own security, his own happiness, he had shut everyone else out, including God. He had even shut out his own wife. He was willing to throw her over to the Egyptians as long as he himself didn’t get hurt.

When we stop loving God, we stop loving each other. Because when we stop loving God, we only have room to love ourselves. Self becomes God. And everything good in our lives we sooner or later sacrifice at the altar of self. Self is a very hard and cruel god to worship.

Abram’s doubt led to distance. His distance led to deceit. And his deceit led to disaster. We read some tragic words in Gen.12:14-16…

When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that she was a very beautiful woman. And when Pharaoh’s officials saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and she was taken into his palace. He treated Abram well for her sake, and Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, menservants and maidservants, and camels.

Abram lost his wife to Pharaoh. She became part of his harem, a piece of human property, with no hope of seeing the outside of the palace again. No hope of seeing her husband. No hope of breathing the fresh air of freedom.

Abram, for his part, was doing quite well, at least in human terms. Abram got more sheep, and more cattle, more donkeys, and camels, and servants. He was a roaring success. He was the Pharaoh’s friend. And that is the way things often go for the wayward believer. He does quite well, in human terms. But what’s going on in his heart?

I doubt that Abram was getting much sleep at night. As he lay there alone in his empty bed, he must have thought about his wife. He must have thought about what he had done to her through his own selfishness. He must have contemplated the emptiness of his life. The sheep, the goats, the cattle, the camels, and the servants, couldn’t make up for the fact that he had betrayed the woman who had trusted him with her life, and had let down the God who had called him. How do you think his relatives and his servants would feel about him? They knew the truth. Do you think Abram had many friends in Egypt? In material terms, Abram had everything in Egypt - everything except a wife, and an altar to his God. So he really had nothing. Like his grandson would do many years later, Abram threw away his inheritance for a mess of pottage.

But Abram’s disaster was not a personal and private disaster. It never is when a believer stops following God. When a child of God strays from the will of God, he becomes a danger to everyone who crosses his path. Jonah, the prophet who ran away from God, almost got a whole boatload of innocent people killed because of his disobedience.

Pharaoh’s household suffered because of what Abram had done. The Lord inflicted diseases on them in order to bring Abram to his senses. We are not told how Pharaoh found out about Abram’s lie. But find out he did, and he summoned Abram and cried out to him

Can you picture this? Abram, our spiritual father, a man of faith, a saint of saints, standing in silent embarrassment and dismay before the anguished questions of a pagan king. “What have you done to me?” He must have felt like a fool. Sin makes fools of us all. This is where the arm of flesh leads us. It leads us to become fools. It leads us to a ruined testimony. How do you think Abram could have witnessed to the Egyptians? Could he have told them of God’s goodness and love when he himself stood exposed and naked in his deceit? Could he have told them of God’s power and provision when he himself had taken refuge in Egypt and been made rich by the gifts of an idol-worshiping king? Abram should have been a channel of blessing for the Egyptians, but instead he became to them a curse. A child of God who stops following God becomes odious in the sight of everyone on both sides of the spiritual fence - his friends, his family, even his so-called friends in the world. Sooner or later, they disown him. They regard him with contempt.

Abram’s doubt led to distance. His distance led to deceit. His deceit led to disaster. And his disaster led to deportation.

I suppose that Abram was fortunate to escape Egypt with his life. The Pharaoh could have had him executed for lying to him. But instead we read in v.20 that Abram was evicted from Egypt, with his wife and everything that he had. I imagine that the walk back to Canaan was the longest walk that Abram had ever made. Regret was his hiking partner every step of the way. I am not sure that his reunion with Sarai was all that joyful, either. She must have felt used and unclean because of what her husband had done to save his own neck. I wonder whether this episode contributed to the cynicism and bitterness that we see in Sarai later in her life?

When a child of God strays from the will of God, you can be sure of one thing: God will deal with him. Sooner or later, God will deal with him. Perhaps the believer who turns his back on God will try to hide out in the world. Sooner or later, God will have him deported! Like the Prodigal Son, he will be driven back to where he belongs in the family, chastened and humbled by his foolishness. God’s deportation may take an even more drastic course. With Annanias and Sapphira in Acts 5, deportation meant that God took their lives from them. Same with the sinning believers in Corinth that we read about in 1 Corinthians 11. God took them home. They were useless to Him here on earth. Their testimony was so far damaged as to be irreparable.

Abram returned to Bethel. There, we read in Gen.13:4, he called on the name of the Lord. Bethel was where he was when this whole mess began. He was back where he started. Thank God that He allows us to get back where we started. When we doubt Him, when we sin, when we get ourselves into the most unbelievable messes, God is willing to give us a new start. He takes us back where we started. But we go back there different people. We go back in repentance or not at all. And we go back having learned some painful lessons about ourselves. We go back to where we started bearing the scars of sin. God doesn’t erase those. When we sin there are lasting consequences.

But I think we will see in the coming chapters of Genesis, that Abram learned some things that would help him make the right choice next time around. He wasn’t perfect. There were still failures to come in his life. But he called again on the name of the Lord - something he hadn’t done since he had gone to Egypt. And he placed himself under God’s gracious hand once more. He was back to being a follower of God’s call.

Where are you in relation to God’s call, today?