Loyal Love and a Half-Truth

Years ago, back when I was editor of the Suffolk News-Herald, long after I’d become a follower of Jesus, I told my publisher a lie.

Well, maybe it wasn’t EXACTLY a lie. Perhaps you can tell me.

As I was putting this sermon together, I tried in vain to remember the details of the situation. But perhaps the details aren’t important. Here, then, are the broad strokes of what happened.

We’d been working on a special section in the newsroom, and I was giving him an update on our progress. He asked me some question about where things stood, and I remember that this question — whatever it was — was the VERY question I’d dreaded having to answer.

I’d hoped and maybe even prayed that it wouldn’t come up, but now he’d asked, and this dreaded question hung there in the air, awaiting my response. And I knew that if I told him the whole truth, I’d be in for a tongue-lashing.

Now, sometimes I can be a smart guy, and sometimes I can be just a little too smart for my own good.

So, I quickly realized that, based on the way he’d asked the question, I could answer it in a technical way that wouldn’t involve an outright lie. In doing so, I could avoid telling the WHOLE truth by answering the question I knew he actually wanted me to answer.

Telling him PART of the truth would keep me out of trouble. And I could leave his office proud of my ability to game the system without actually lying.

And so, that’s just what I did. He was satisfied with my answer, and the meeting progressed, and I soon returned to my office without incurring my publisher’s wrath. Fine, right?

But everything WASN’T fine.

It didn’t take long for the Holy Spirit to begin convicting me of what I’d done. And the longer I sat there, trying to ignore this tug at my heart, the more miserable I became.

I wanted to be a man known for his integrity. I wanted to think of MYSELF as a man of integrity. And I felt sure that I’d failed to be like Jesus in that conversation.

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I dragged myself back to the publisher’s office.

“I need to tell you something,” I said. “I didn’t lie to you just now, but I also didn’t tell you the truth.” And then, I confessed that I’d misled him by telling him only part of the truth about that project. I told him we were behind on it, and I promised to get us back on track.

To my publisher’s credit, he was gracious to me about the half-truth, although he was still pretty upset that we were behind schedule on our project.

So, let me ask you: Did I lie to my publisher? If you’re having trouble, let me help you out: YES! Which is why the Holy Spirit brought me under such severe conviction.

In discussing the 9th Commandment – “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” — John Calvin wrote this: “We must practice truth without deceit toward one another.”

Surely, I intended to deceive my publisher to avoid the consequences of being behind on that special project.

And the commandment isn’t only against lying ABOUT your neighbor. The point of it is that we’re to be people of integrity, people who don’t spout falsehoods or even half-truths that will cause injury to others.

Today as we continue our series, “Sin, According to the Experts,” we’re going to look at Abraham, the Patriarch of Israel.

He was a man of great faith, as we’ve seen briefly in previous messages and in great detail during our Wednesday night Zoom Bible studies. But he was also a sinner.

Today, we’ll see that Abraham sinned in much the same way that I did with my publisher. We’ll briefly talk about the short- and long-term results of that sin.

We’ll contrast Abraham’s character with the character of the God who’d made him in His image, to be LIKE Him. And, finally, we’ll see how the righteous Jesus became for us what we so often fail to be.

We’re going to start in Genesis, chapter 20 this morning, and it’s a long passage, so let me give you an overview of what’s happening before we look at a particular couple of verses.

Remember that in Genesis, chapter 12, God had called the childless Abraham to leave his family and go to — let’s call it an undisclosed location.

Go to this land that I’ll show you, God said, and I’ll make you a great nation and make your name great make you a blessing to all the families of the earth.

So, Abraham and his wife, Sarah, took off. And over the course of time, God spoke to him at other times and gave more detail about His promises.

He said that old Abraham and barren Sarah would have a son, through whom these promises would take place. But by chapter 20 of the Book of Genesis, this son has yet to be born.

Now, Abraham had trusted God back in chapter 12, which means that he’d trusted that God keeps His promises. And that should have made him feel somewhat invincible.

If God was going to give Abraham a son, and it hadn’t yet happened, and God always keeps His promises, then how could Abraham die childless?

But then, we get to chapter 20, and Abraham has settled into the land where God led him, Canaan, the Promised Land. But there was a powerful king there at the time, called Abimelech, the king of Gerar.

Abraham feared for his life as a foreigner in this land — maybe he hadn’t worked out by this time that he was protected by God, at least until he’d had a son by Sarah.

And for some reason, he’d gotten it into his head that if the king knew the beautiful Sarah was his wife, then he’d be in danger.

So, he told Abimelech that she was his sister. Which was a half truth. She was indeed, his half-sister, the daughter of his father by another mother. But, just as I did with my publisher, Abraham concealed the whole truth to protect himself.

So, Abimelech takes Sarah into his harem, probably as a symbol of unity between his kingdom and this now-wealthy foreigner in their midst.

But remember that God’s promise had been to give Abraham AND Sarah a child. If she’d been called to carry out her duties as part of Abimelech’s harem and then had a son, there’d always be a question of who was the father.

And Maury Povich wasn’t around then to wave around the DNA test results and shout, “YOU are the father!”

So, God visits Abimelech in a dream and tells him to send Sarah back to Abraham without touching her or face the direst of consequences.

Which is exactly what he did. And when he saw Abraham at the handover, he said, “Dude, what in the WORLD were you thinking? Why did you do this evil thing? Why did you lie to me?” Or words to that effect.

Abraham responds that he was in fear for his life and then tries to excuse himself by explaining that he was TECHNICALLY not telling a lie. Which is where we’ll pick up the account, in verse 12.

Genesis 20:12–13 NASB95

12 “Besides, she actually is my sister, the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother, and she became my wife; 13 and it came about, when God caused me to wander from my father’s house, that I said to her, ‘This is the kindness which you will show to me: everywhere we go, say of me, “He is my brother.” ’ ”

Now, clearly Abraham isn’t going to win the Husband of the Year award, and we’ve already established that this half-truth showed his faith in God to keep His promises was still pretty weak.

And don’t miss the fact that this was a habit for him and Sarah. WHEREVER they went, this was what they told people. In fact, a very similar situation had taken place when they’d gone to Egypt, back at the end of chapter 12.

So, Abraham was a SERIAL liar.

And there were consequences for this. In chapter 21, we see Abimelech and the commander of his army meeting with Abraham. And clearly, the whole incident with Sarah has left a bad taste in the king’s mouth. Look at verse 22:

Genesis 21:22–23 NASB95

22 Now it came about at that time that Abimelech and Phicol, the commander of his army, spoke to Abraham, saying, “God is with you in all that you do; 23 now therefore, swear to me here by God that you will not deal falsely with me or with my offspring or with my posterity, but according to the kindness that I have shown to you, you shall show to me and to the land in which you have sojourned.”

If you’ve ever been lied to — and who hasn’t? — you know that it becomes very hard to trust the person who lied to you. And dealing with a serial liar — a pathological liar, a compulsive liar, an expert liar — is a continual and tiresome exercise in taking things with a grain of salt.

So here, we have poor Abimelech pleading with Abraham to deal with him and his descendants in integrity. Of course, like most people caught in lies, Abraham says, “I’ll never do it again.”

But then in chapter 26, we see that his son, Isaac, who’d been born to Sarah, as God had promised, and who was now grown and married to Rebekah, was following in his father’s footsteps.

Look at verse 6:

Genesis 26:6–7 NASB95

6 So Isaac lived in Gerar. 7 When the men of the place asked about his wife, he said, “She is my sister,” for he was afraid to say, “my wife,” thinking, “the men of the place might kill me on account of Rebekah, for she is beautiful.”

Where do you think Isaac learned this tactic?

Listen, your kids — and lots of other people — are watching you, and they’re learning from you. The last thing we should ever want is for them to learn SIN from us! How much better if they — and, in Abraham’s case, Isaac — would learn from us to trust in God!

And if you go forward in history from there, what you see is that there was always conflict between Abraham’s descendants and those of Abimelech, who were the Philistines of Israel’s history. Perhaps they long remembered the deceitful way Abraham and Isaac had treated them.

As I keep telling you, your sins — even the secret ones — have consequences far beyond what you realize.

But there’s a word in Abraham’s explanation of his treachery that caught my eye, and I want to talk about it for a few minutes. The word is “kindness.”

“This is the kindness which you will show to me,” he’d said to Sarah.

The Hebrew word translated as “kindness” there is hesed. It appears about 245 times in the Old Testament, and it has a rich set of meanings, along with various translations.

Among other things, it can mean kindness or loyalty or faithfulness or devotion or protection or mercy or favor.

The NASB tends to translate it as lovingkindness. Other translations, I think, come closer to its essence by translating it as “loyal love” or “steadfast love.”

And in the vast majority of places where this word appears, the text is talking about GOD’S hesed, God’s loyal love.

There’s one Old Testament passage, in particular, where God literally puts his hesed on display. We find it in Exodus, chapter 34.

In that chapter, God commands Moses to cut two new tablets of stone to replace the ones with the 10 Commandments, which he’d destroyed when he came down from Mt. Sinai with them and found the Israelites worshiping a golden calf.

So, Moses goes back up the mountain in chapter 34, carrying with him the new stone tablets on which God will etch, once again, the 10 Commandments. We’ll pick up in verse 5 of this chapter.

Exodus 34:5–7 NASB95

5 The Lord descended in the cloud and stood there with him as he called upon the name of the Lord. 6 Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; 7 who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.”

What an experience this must have been for Moses! God had come down onto the mountain in a cloud. He was standing there with Moses.

And then He passed by Moses and showed him His glory. He revealed Himself to Moses, both in what He showed Moses and what He said to him about Himself.

And both times you see the word “lovingkindness” there, the Hebrew word behind it is hesed. He abounds with hesed and truth, and he keeps his hesed, his loyal love, for thousands; it’s limitless.

And lest we get caught up in the last part of the verse, let’s understand that the point is the CONTRAST in how God treats people.

For the righteous — in other words, for those who place their faith in Him — His loyal love extends, effectively, to limitless generations, whereas His punishment for sin is far more limited.

In this wonderful list of some of God’s attributes — the only place in Scripture where He gives such a list — “lovingkindness and truth” appear right in the middle.

God ABOUNDS in loyal love. God ABOUNDS in truth.

What a contrast to Abraham, who asked that Sarah show her loyal love to him by going along with his lies that were motivated by a lack of faith in God.

And the truth is that Abraham isn’t so different from any of us. Maybe lying isn’t your thing. But I can assure you that we ALL have a thing. Maybe it’s selfishness. Maybe it’s greed. Maybe it’s lust. Or coveting. Or anger. Or hatred. Or gluttony. Or unforgiveness.

The Apostle John wrote:

1 John 1:8 NASB95

8 If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.

The truth is that we are ALL sinners. We’re ALL experts at sin in some form or another. Abraham was a liar. Moses had problem with anger.

We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We’ve failed to reflect His perfect righteousness, His perfect holiness, His perfect love, his compassion, His grace, His loyal love, His patience.

And our sins have separated us from God. They’ve cut us off from the fellowship with Him that He made us for. And no amount of righteous deeds on our part can bring us BACK into fellowship with Him.

Only HE could do that. And the way He did it was to send us His unique and eternal Son, Jesus Christ, whom John called the Word of God in the introduction to his Gospel. Listen to how He describes Jesus in John 1:14:

John 1:14 NASB95

14 And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.

“Full of grace and truth.” Now, grace isn’t exactly the same concept as hesed, but it conveys much the same idea.

Biblically, we can think of grace as God stooping down IN LOYAL LOVE to bless those who deserve cursing. And so, Jesus is full of that quality of grace.

He’s also full of the quality of truth. Indeed, He says in John 14:6 that He IS truth. He is the embodiment of truth. He is, in fact, the image of the invisible God. All of God’s attributes are shared equally by Jesus. He is God in the flesh of a human man.

He became a man — born of Mary, the young virgin — to show us the very character of God. God had revealed Himself, in part, to Moses. But in Jesus, we have the fullest revelation of God yet.

He is righteous and just and merciful and kind and compassionate and patient. And in His grace — in the fullness of His hesed, His loyal love for mankind — He gave Himself as a sacrifice at the cross.

He took upon Himself the sins of all mankind, and their just punishment, so that all who turn to Him in faith can be saved. So that we can have eternal fellowship with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — exactly the thing that each of us was made for.

Living a life without sin, He did for us what we could not do. And dying for us on the cross, He paid the debt for our sins that we could not pay. He became like US so we could, through faith in Him, become like HIM.

So we could have HIS righteousness. So we could LIVE in His righteousness, even though we’re still sinners.

I don’t know what your thing is, but I’m going to pray in a moment that the Holy Spirit will reveal it to you, just as He did for me that day in my office in the newsroom. And I’m going to pray that He calls you to repentance, just as He did for me that day.

Feel free to come down to the steps here and make them an altar where you can leave your sins in repentance.

And if you’ve never turned to Jesus in faith, then I pray that you’ll take this opportunity to do so. Come forward, confess that you’re a sinner desperate for a savior, trust in the life and finished work of Jesus for your salvation, and give your life to Him in faith that He will keep His promise to save you.

Let me talk to you about how the Truth can set you free from sin and condemnation. Let me tell you more about how God’s loyal love for you can cleanse you of all unrighteousness. Let me introduce you to GRACE.

Now, today is Lord’s Supper Sunday. This is an important observance for individual followers of Jesus.

But it’s is also important to the fellowship of the church. It brings us together in a unique way and reminds us that we belong to one another in Christ Jesus.

It reminds us of the loyal love He has for us and the loyal love we’re called to have for one another.

Jesus commanded us to observe the Lord’s Supper as an act of obedience to Him. It’s a way of proclaiming that we who follow Him in faith belong to Him, and a way of reminding us what He did for us.

The Lord’s Supper reminds us that our hope for salvation rests only and completely on the sacrifice He made for us and in our place at the cross. It reminds us that our life is in Him.

And the fact that we share bread from one loaf reminds us that we are, together, the one body of Christ. It reminds us that we’re called to unity of faith, unity of purpose, and unity of love.

It reminds us that, just as He gave up the glory He had in heaven, we who’ve followed Jesus in faith are called to give up any claims we might think we have to our own lives as we follow Him.

Finally, it reminds us that, as we’ve been given the testimony of the Holy Spirit within us, we’re to share OUR testimony of salvation by grace through faith.

We’re not to be lukewarm Christians, but people who are on fire for the Lord. People desperate to SEE His righteousness upon the earth and committed to LIVING His righteousness while we wait.

If you’re a baptized believer walking in obedience to Christ, I’d like to invite you to join us today as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

Now, this sacred meal dates all the way back to when Jesus shared it with His disciples at the Last Supper on the night before He was crucified.

The conditions during the Last Supper were different than the conditions we have here today. But the significance was the same as it is today.

Jesus told His disciples that the bread represented His body, which would be broken for our transgressions.

Let us pray.

Matthew 26:26 NASB95

26 While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is My body.”

As Jesus suffered and died on that cross, his blood poured out with His life. This was always God’s plan to reconcile mankind to Himself.

“In [Jesus] we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us.”

Let us pray.

Matthew 26:27–28 NASB95

27 And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you; 28 for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins.

Take and drink.

“Now, as often as we eat this bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”

Maranatha! Lord, come!

Here at Liberty Spring, we have a tradition following our commemoration of the Lord’s Supper.

Please gather around in a circle, and let us sing together “Blest Be the Tie that Binds.”