“1 Now Abraham moved on from there into the region of the Negev and lived between Kadesh and Shur. For a while he stayed in Gerar, 2 and there Abraham said of his wife Sarah, “She is my sister.” Then Abimelech king of Gerar sent for Sarah and took her.
3 But God came to Abimelech in a dream one night and said to him, “You are as good as dead because of the woman you have taken; she is a married woman.” 4 Now Abimelech had not gone near her, so he said, “Lord, will you destroy an innocent nation? 5 Did he not say to me, ‘She is my sister,’ and didn’t she also say, ‘He is my brother’? I have done this with a clear conscience and clean hands.”
6 Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know you did this with a clear conscience, and so I have kept you from sinning against me. That is why I did not let you touch her. 7 Now return the man’s wife, for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live. But if you do not return her, you may be sure that you and all yours will die.”
8 Early the next morning Abimelech summoned all his officials, and when he told them all that had happened, they were very much afraid. 9 Then Abimelech called Abraham in and said, “What have you done to us? How have I wronged you that you have brought such great guilt upon me and my kingdom? You have done things to me that should not be done.” 10 And Abimelech asked Abraham, “What was your reason for doing this?”
11 Abraham replied, “I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.’ 12 Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not of my mother; and she became my wife. 13 And when God had me wander from my father’s household, I said to her, ‘This is how you can show your love to me: Everywhere we go, say of me, “He is my brother.” ’ ”
14 Then Abimelech brought sheep and cattle and male and female slaves and gave them to Abraham, and he returned Sarah his wife to him. 15 And Abimelech said, “My land is before you; live wherever you like.”
16 To Sarah he said, “I am giving your brother a thousand shekels of silver. This is to cover the offense against you before all who are with you; you are completely vindicated.”
17 Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelech, his wife and his slave girls so they could have children again, 18 for the Lord had closed up every womb in Abimelech’s household because of Abraham’s wife Sarah.”
“I can’t believe I did it again. I keep doing the same sins over and over again. I’m sick of it. I imagine that God has to be sick of it. I imagine that God has to be sick of me.”
Have you ever found yourself thinking that? You know your own besetting sins. Maybe you lost your temper yet again. Maybe you got drunk yet again. Maybe you looked at porn yet again. You find yourself thinking that maybe you’ve finally gone beyond the grace of God. Maybe you’ve finally gone beyond His willingness to take you back.
This evening we see Abraham commit the same sin yet again. It is rather sordid. It is rather embarrassing. In this study, you will see that sin abounds. You will see that God’s promises abound all the more. That’s your hope if you’ve ever found yourself wondering if God will take you back yet again. Where sin abounds, the promises abound all the more. That is the claim of this sermon: sin abounds but the promises abound all the more.
We will study this in three points. First: God confronts the situation. Second: Abraham’s lame excuses. Third: the undeserved favor of God. In verses 1-7, we see God confront the situation. In verses 8-13, we see Abraham’s lame excuses. In verses 14-18, we see the undeserved favor of God.
First: God confronts the situation. For six chapters Abraham has been living near the trees of Mamre. Now he decides to move. Some scholars think he left because he was so disturbed by the what he saw with the destruction of Sodom. Some people are like that. They have to move because of what happened at the house next door or across the street. Abraham headed southeast and wound up in Gerar, which was Philistine territory.
Abraham was again living as a foreigner. It is very difficult to live as a foreigner. You are uniquely vulnerable. This was an especially true in the Ancient Near East because security in that time and place was all about kinship meaning that families took vengeance. If you messed with a man, you messed with his whole family. Abraham had no family. If you messed with Abraham, you had no reason to fear retribution.
Abraham had a beautiful wife. A beautiful wife was a mixed blessing in those days. Just ask Uriah. Bathsheba’s beauty was a mixed blessing. Uriah enjoyed it. It also got him killed. Sarah’s beauty was a mixed blessing for Abraham. He enjoyed it. He worried that it might also get him killed.
Sarah was ninety years old at this point but remember the promise—the promise controls everything when it comes to the Abraham stories. God promised Sarah that she would have a baby within the year. She was becoming fertile again. Just as a girl’s body changes so it stands to reason that Sarah’s body was changing. She was going to conceive, deliver, and nurse a baby. Ninety-year-old bodies and breasts can’t do that; Sarah’s could.
Abraham didn’t want to be killed and so he told everyone that Sarah was just his sister. Now no one would kill Abraham to take Sarah, but—and sin always works this way—Abraham’s lie introduced new troubles; “Abimelech king of Gerar sent for Sarah and took her.”
Abraham’s sin made him feel safe, but it landed his wife in a harem. Just a side comment here—if you as a husband ever make a decision that lands your wife in a harem, take that as an indication that you’ve made a mistake. This is not one of Abraham’s finer moments. This sin is only compounded by the fact that he has done it before when he and Sarah went down to Egypt. Repeated sins compound the problem. Imagine a husband cheats on his wife with a woman at work. He confesses it. They work through it. He switches jobs to get away from that woman. A year later he cheats on his wife again with a woman from his new job. That second conversation is going to look much different from the first. The sin has been compounded.
The compounded sin of Abraham had yet another wrinkle. When his sin landed Sarah in Pharaoh’s harem, he hadn’t yet cut a covenant with God. He hadn’t cut his own flesh as a sign of his faithfulness to God. When he sinned this way in Egypt he had only recently been worshipping the moon. Now he had a covenant. He walked with God, and yet he still sinned int the same way. Abraham had changed, but so much remained unchanged. This is good news for you if you’ve professed your faith and realized that sin hasn’t gone away. We are changed, but so much remains unchanged. None of us is beyond appalling sin. There are no moral supermen or superwomen in this sanctuary. None of us is all that far from holding our head in our hands saying, “I can’t believe I did it again.”
Abraham had done it again. God graciously confronted the situation, but interestingly not by way of Abraham. He went to Abimelech. This text regularly uses the word “Elohim” to refer to God rather than “Yahweh” as a reminder that this God of Abraham is the God of the whole world. The God at work in your life is the God at work in the whole world. He spoke to Abimelech in a dream, which was thought to be a common way for the gods to communicate in the Ancient Near East. He told Abimelech, “You are as good as dead because of the woman you have taken; she is a married woman.”
Throughout the Ancient Near East, adultery was universally considered to be worthy of death. This was a serious offense and Abimelech took it seriously. You see that by the way he protests his innocence. He didn’t know Sarah was married, and besides he hadn’t touched her. This is a God-fearing response, and God acknowledges it; verse 6, “I know you did this with a clear conscience, and so I have kept you from sinning against me. That is why I did not let you touch her.”
This is human responsibility and divine sovereignty working together as they always do. Abimelech did exactly what seemed best to him on every single day that Sarah was in his house, and it was totally God who kept Abimelech from sleeping with Sarah. God hadn’t turned Abimelech into a robot to keep him away from Sarah. Abimelech’s own choices were at work; God’s sovereignty was at work. That’s how it works, and Scripture gives us story after story to show us what it looks like in life.
God kept Abimelech from touching Sarah. He did that for Abimelech’s sake. He did it for Sarah’s sake. He did it for Abraham’s sake. He did it for the sake of the promise. He had promised that Sarah was going to have a baby within the year. The threat to the promise to this point has been Sarah’s closed womb. Now the threat to the promise comes in the form of another man. Sarah’s fertile and Abraham’s sin puts her in another man’s house. If Abimelech laid with Sarah it would always be an open question as to whether Sarah’s miracle baby was Abimelech’s or Abraham’s.
The promises of God enter some rather sordid situations throughout Scripture. They do so because that is how life goes. The promises of God worked through an Israelite strongman with a taste for prostitutes. That’s the story of Samson. The promises of God were at work when a king deposed his wife and took a young Jewish girl into his harem. That’s the story of Esther. The promises were at work in the midst of schemes and lies aimed at putting an innocent man to death; that’s the story of the trial of Jesus. The promises of God enter some rather sordid situations because where sin abounds, there the promises of God abound all the more.
This doesn’t mean that the promises excuse sin. Grace doesn’t excuse sin. You see that in God’s words to Abimelech in verse 7, “Now return the man’s wife, for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live. But if you do not return her, you may be sure that you and all yours will die.” God called Abimelech to repent even though he acted in ignorance. The promise was at work, and its working was an opportunity for repentance.
This was an act of kindness to Abimelech. It was also an act of kindness to Abraham. Abimelech had every right to be furious with Abraham, but God told Abimelech to honor Abraham because it would be Abraham who would pray for his forgiveness. Abraham sinned against Abimelech, but Abimelech would die unless Abraham prayed for him. As Walter Brueggemann put it, “the one who lied… is still the one preferred… the preeminence of Abraham here rests not on Abraham’s virtue, but on God’s promise.” Where sin abounds, God’s promise to Abraham abounded all the more. That’s how it works throughout Scripture because God operates on promises.
That’s good news for Abraham because his sin has only just begun. That’s our second point: Abraham’s lame excuses. The next morning Abimelech summoned his officials and told them what God had said. They were all terrified. Abimelech summoned Abraham before them all and asked, in verse 9, ‘“What have you done to us? How have I wronged you that you have brought such great guilt upon me and my kingdom? You have done things to me that should not be done.” And Abimelech asked Abraham, “What was your reason for doing this?”’
Abraham’s response was nothing like David’s in Psalm 51. This was lame; verse 11, ‘Abraham replied, “I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.’”’
Abraham started with assumptions; that’s verse 11, “There is surely no fear of God in this place.” Was he right? Take a look at Abimelech’s response to God in verse 4, “Lord, will you destroy an innocent nation?” Does that sound like the fear of God to you? Take a look at verse 8, “Early the next morning Abimelech summoned all his officials, and when he told them all that had happened, they were very much afraid.” Does that sound like the fear of God to you? Abraham had assumed. Perhaps he had assumed that every place was as godless as Sodom. He assumed wrongly and tried to excuse his sin by way of making assumptions about the sins of others.
Abraham moved from assumptions to evasion; verse 12, “Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not of my mother; and she became my wife.” Abraham evaded responsibility by arguing that he had really told the truth, or rather a half-truth. This is like a little girl telling her mother that she didn’t eat all the cookies when in fact she ate all of them but one and hid that one under her pillow for later.
Abraham had told a half-truth. Sarah was, in fact, his half-sister. They had the same father but different mothers. This wasn’t totally out of bounds everywhere in the Ancient Near East, but it was out of bounds for the people of God. Moses, who crafted this story, also handed down the word of the Lord saying that this sort of marriage was not allowed. What’s telling is that rather than hiding this embarrassing fact, Moses chose to highlight it. The Bible is unique in that. It doesn’t cover over unwelcome facts. It shows us where grace found Abraham and Sarah and where grace took Abraham and Sarah. The gospels show us where grace found any number of people and where grace took any number of people. The church shows us where grace finds us and where grace takes us.
Abraham moved from assumption to evasion and then from evasion to arguing from precedent; in other words he says, “this is how we’ve always done it”; verse 13, ‘when God had me wander from my father’s household, I said to her, “This is how you can show your love to me: everywhere we go, say of me, ‘He is my brother.’”’
Precedent doesn’t necessarily make something right. How many sins have been excused by saying that this is the way we’ve always done it? How much racism has been excused by saying that this is the way we’ve always done it? How much sexual harassment has been excused by saying that this is the way we’ve always done it? How much injustice has been committed because this is the way we’ve always done it? This is one of the reasons that Jesus was so emphatic to give the correct interpretation of the law. The Pharisees were exalting the precedent of past applications of God’s word above God’s word itself.
Abraham moved from assumptions to evasion to arguing from precedent, but he never, in this chapter, moved to real repentance. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t repent. We aren’t told what Abraham thought of his own sin two weeks later or two months later. We are told of his future obedience, but we aren’t told about how he dealt with his sin of this moment. What we see in this story is Abraham frozen in this moment, but we must remember that that wasn’t the whole story of Abraham, and that isn’t the whole story of you. Don’t take your worst moments of sin as the freeze frame of who you are. Don’t take other people’s worst moments as the freeze frame of who they are.
Despite Abraham’s lame excuses we see God’s undeserved favor at the end of this chapter; that’s our final point: the undeserved favor of God. Abimelech had every reason to be furious with Abraham, but God had told Abimelech that Abraham was His servant. God told Abimelech that he needed Abraham’s blessing. “Those who bless you, I will bless. Those who curse you, I will curse.” That’s verse 14, ‘Abimelech brought sheep and cattle and male and female slaves and gave them to Abraham, and he returned Sarah his wife to him. And Abimelech said, “My land is before you; live wherever you like.”’ Abraham gets Sarah back untouched. He winds up even richer than before. He has Abimelech’s blessing to live wherever he wants. Abraham has done nothing to deserve this. In fact, everything Abraham had done should have resulted in the opposite of this. This is undeserved favor.
The undeserved favor continues; verse 16, “To Sarah he said, “I am giving your brother a thousand shekels of silver. This is to cover the offense against you before all who are with you; you are completely vindicated.” Abimelech graciously accepted Abraham’s explanation that he and Sarah were half-brother and sister by calling Abraham Sarah’s brother. Abimelech gave Sarah a thousand shekels of silver, which his more than a day laborer would make in a lifetime as an apology for the misunderstanding and as a public sign that she was never touched while she was in his household. Abraham’s sin messed everything up. God’s undeserved favor put everything right.
The undeserved favor continues; rather than casting Abraham off for this repeated sin—which is what we fear when we mess up—God honored Abraham by using his prayers to restore Abimelech; verse 17, “Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelech, his wife and his slave girls so they could have children again, for the Lord had closed up every womb in Abimelech’s household because of Abraham’s wife Sarah.”
We are meant to see the irony of these closed wombs. The same word that was used to describe the closed wombs of the women of Abimelech’s household had been used to describe Sarah’s closed womb. The women of Abimelech’s household were having their wombs closed even as Sarah was having her womb opened. The only woman who could conceive in that harem was the woman who must not conceive in that harem. Sarah must conceive the child of promise with Abraham. This all hinges on Isaac.
Abraham’s sin abounded. It put unborn and unconceived Isaac in jeopardy. It put his wife’s virtue in jeopardy. It put his own position among these foreigners in jeopardy. That’s a mess. Abraham’s sin abounded. The promise abounded all the more. It restored Sarah’s virtue, increased Abraham’s wealth, and safeguarded the promise that this child to be born within the year would be the son of both Sarah and Abraham. Where sin abounded, there the promise abounded all the more.
You see this in Jesus. His life reveals abounding sin. I’m not talking about him sinning. I’m talking about everyone sinning in response to him. Watch how those closest to him misunderstand him and deny him. Watch how the people mistreat him. Watch how the leaders put him to death. That’s abounding sin. The good news is that where sin abounded, there the promise abounded all the more. That’s why even those who put Jesus to death heard the good news that the promise is for them and for their children and for all those who are far off. That why Jesus made Peter an apostle of grace rather casting him off as a reject who would spend eternity muttering, “I can’t believe I denied him not once, not twice, but three times.”
That’s why people like us who commit the same sins not once or twice or seven times, but seventy-seven times have hope. We have hope because where sin abounds, there the promise abounds all the more. Go back to God. He has promised that He will take you back. Where sin abounds, there the promise abounds all the more. That’s just part of the grace of the promise. Amen.