Sermon Tone Analysis
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If you have your Bible (and I hope you do), please turn with me to Genesis 16.
If you don’t have a Bible of your own, please let me know and I’ll give you a Bible you can keep.
If you are able and willing, please stand with me for the reading of God’s Holy Word.
May God add His blessing to the reading of His Holy Word!
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It had been 10 years already.
Ten long years.
Abram and Sarai had been living in Canaan for 10 stinking years and still had no child.
Abram and Sarai had no offspring even though the LORD had told them—promised them!—more offspring, more descendants than anyone could count.
“Oh yeah?
I can count them.
Zero!
No children.
None.
Zilch.
Nada.”
This is a thought that festers over the years.
Sarai knows God’s promise, but time and grief cause her to think that the LORD has kept her from having children.
And, in keeping with that, Sarai comes up with a fix for this problem.
She’s going to take matters into her own hands; obviously God isn’t going to come through, so it’s up to Sarai to figure it out.
I’m certain most of us have used a similar line of reasoning.
“Sarai is an interesting woman,” a friend commented to me after reading Genesis 16. “She gives her husband to another woman, or gives this other woman to her husband—I believe that’s adultery.”
That’s not the wrong assessment at all.
Sarai gave her husband to her maidservant so her husband could sleep with her.
This was, however, a culturally-accepted practice.
In some nineteenth century B.C. Assyrian materials, there is a provision.
If a wife did not produce children for her husband within two years, she herself could buy a slave woman.
After that slave woman had given birth to a child, the husband could sell her off wherever he wished (K.A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, 325).
I have to believe that Sarai knew her little plan was wrong, that it was displeasing to God, that it certainly wasn’t part of God’s plan for her and Abram.
If it was God’s plan, He would have told them to go this route.
Sarai knew this practice wasn’t God’s idea, but it was culturally-acceptable.
Elevating what’s culturally-acceptable over God’s Word and God’s Will isn’t just in vogue today; no, this is nothing new.
In every age, in every culture, sinful men and women (like me and you) naturally gravitate toward what is culturally-acceptable.
God’s people must resist the temptation to give in to what is culturally-acceptable.
In fact, in a world which is and has been ruled by another since the fall of Adam and Eve, if it’s acceptable to the culture, God’s Word will call it what it is: sin.
God’s people must be willing to call evil “evil” and to call sin “sin” regardless of who accepts, celebrates, or champions it.
God’s people must refrain from affirming anything contrary to God’s Word, culturally-acceptable or not.
What is acceptable in culture may be faithless in the purposes of God.
That certainly seems to be the case here with Sarai.
The author of Genesis, the one writing down this story under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is making his point without explicitly saying, “This is wrong!”
He tells us twice (vv. 1, 3) that Sarai is the wife of Abram, as if we could forget.
And then, in verse 3, refers to Abram as Sarai’s husband.
We know already know all of this, but this is the writer’s way of inserting some emotion and feeling into the story.
We’re meant to feel the weight of this here.
The proper relationship of husband and wife is being trampled—trampled by the wife’s plan and the husband’s failure to lead his wife and say, “No, we’re not doing that.”
The solution thought up by Sarai and agreed to by Abram is sad, all the way around.
I started thinking about how this is a reversal of sorts of what Abram did to Sarai in Genesis 12.
Upon entering Egypt, scared little Abram handed his wife over to Pharaoh and she was taken into Pharaoh’s household.
Now Sarai gives her husband to another woman.
Sinners in need of a Savior.
Abram and Sarai had moments of incredible faith followed by moments of unbelievable faithlessness and sin.
Faith and trust…self-reliance and distrust…faith and trust.
It’s a constant back-and-forth.
It’s almost chapter by chapter: faithful Abram, scared Abram, faithful Abram, foolish Abram, faithful Abram, plain ol’ stupid Abram.
And here we find ourselves.
Our mistakes and misadventures and misplaced faith might not rise to the level of Abram’s.
Then again, they might.
I don’t know the extent of your sinfulness…but I know you’ve sinned.
And deeply.
We are, along with Abram and Sarai, sinners in need of a Savior.
It began in the garden with Adam and Eve.
In fact, there’s an echo of Genesis 3 here in Genesis 16.
Look at verse 2 for a moment:
Abram agreed / listened to what Sarai said, listened to the voice of Sarai.
The only other place this phrasing occurs is in Genesis 3:17
Here, Genesis 16, Sarai takes Hagar and gives her to her husband, Abram.
Genesis 3: Eve takes the fruit of the tree and gives it to her husband, Adam.
There are shades of the original fall all over Genesis 16.
“Here again is the sad twistedness that blights and pervades all our relationships and circumstances.
How often we realize that we have not really moved far way from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
- Dale Ralph Davis
Sinners in need of a Savior.
We are those who have broken God’s Law.
A holy God with a holy standard will not be impressed with an unholy people.
True, we’re all made in His image, but we have all shunned His ways and His purposes in favor of our way and our plans/desires.
We have broken and transgressed the law of God.
In a word, we have sinned.
We are sinners.
I am a sinner.
And so are you.
Sinners in need of a Savior.
The LORD—good and gracious, merciful and kind—has fixed what we have broken (even in our attempt to fix it, a la Sarai offering Hagar).
Have you ever made something worse by trying to fix it?
I pretty much know what I’m doing on a computer; I can fix most things (or so I think).
What ends up happening about half the time is that I’ll spend a couple hours “fixing it” without quite fixing it.
And I still end up taking it to Nevada.
Instead of attempting a “fix” myself, I should just drop it off with Shane Balk to begin with; he actually knows what he’s doing.
LORD knows we can’t fix our sin problem.
And the wages of sin is death.
Only God can fix this.
And so, Jesus, the only Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, offered Himself in our place.
Jesus substituted and sacrificed Himself that we might be forgiven and made right with God.
The only proper response to our sin is repentance (this is what Jesus calls all sinners to do).
Repent!
Turn away from your sin and to run to Jesus, trusting Him in faith to save.
Only He can!
What Abram and Sarai should have done was turn from their sinful scheming and turn to the LORD—to the One who made them, knows them, hears them, and sees them.
That’s what they should have done, but they didn’t.
Abram does what Sarai, in essence, tells him to do.
Hagar, Sarai’s slave girl, and Abram, Sarai’s husband, sleep together.
And Hagar gets pregnant.
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