God's Faithfulness Despite Relapse

Mistakes

When my family go on holidays I tend to do most of the driving. Mostly because I actually enjoy driving, and I think Fiona generally finds it more relaxing not have to concentrate on the road so much.

Now if you’re like me and drive up the Pacific Hwy only on a fairly sporadic sort of basis, I’m sure you’ll notice like me that every time you go on the road more towns have been by-passed.

This has on occasion caused a few problems. You see, the road is quite familiar to me. And the familiarity, along with the mono-tone scene that seems to go along with all free-ways, you get into what’s essentially auto-pilot mode.

A few years back now I was driving the family up to Ballina full of confidence that I knew exactly where I was going.

My first mistake came when I was going through one of those new bypasses (I think it was the one near Kempsey). At the time, some diversions were in place, but because I was in auto-pilot and not paying as much attention as I should, instead of diverting to the road going north, I accidentally took the diversion that took me into Kempsey itself.

Thankfully, a quick u-turn and I was back on track.

But my pride as a good navigator was to take another hit, this time as we got to Ballina itself.

You see I remembered the highway going into Ballina, but there was a new bypass. I thought I knew which exit I wanted but unfortunately as Fiona asked “didn’t we want to take that exit” I could only look at it in my rear vision mirror.

On both occasions I couldn’t blame the fact that it wasn’t signposted - they were. The problem was that my attention slipped when it shouldn’t have.

When your attention slips and things are a bit different, you can end a long way off track.

In our Christian walk

The same thing happens on our Christian walk. Everything can become so routine, but then something new or unexpected pops up, and if you’re not being careful, you can mucks things up big time.

When we start out as new believers we are so used to the ways of the world that the different path that Jesus sets for us seems weird and so it is easy to stumble.

The early stumbles

I had an insight into just how weird the way of Jesus seems to others in my Scripture classes this week. The lesson was on turning the other cheek.

As we dug a little deeper into what the implication of this teaching was, they were horrified at what might happen if they didn’t get even.

Later stumbles

But when the Spirit takes a hold of us, our eyes are opened to a whole new way of thinking. A way of thinking were sin can be taken out of the picture.

And so we learn what it means to walk by faith. To put aside the things that so easily entangle.

Now I’m not suggesting that we come anywhere near a level of perfection, but with the help of the Holy Spirit we can make massive differences in our lives.

But here’s the thing, though we can become better at curbing our anger, our getting our greed under control, that journey called life will get to a speed hump. We move into new territory, and if we let our eyes stray for a moment, we so easily slip.

We get angry. We make selfish decisions. We crave to the temptations around us.

Even small things

Sometimes the things that knock us off can actually be relatively minor things.

For example, just this week, Fiona and I, being encouraged by what Carolyn Altman said last week, we made fresh commitments to making stronger boundaries around our morning quiet time.

Monday went well.

But would you believe it. Tuesday morning, Josie wakes at 5am coughing. And the next morning, same thing.

As you might be able to imagine, doing a quiet time is very difficult in such circumstances. Thankfully we were able to adjust, but you can see how something relatively minor like a child’s cough, can make a big difference.

Link with series

This morning we are continuing our series on Abraham and we’re getting to the pointy end where we’ll see how God’s promise to Abraham is going to resolve, despite the delays and setbacks.

Now at this point in Abraham’s life you would think that he should have it altogether now. You see, he’s nearing his hundredth birthday, and he has many mistakes to learn from.

We’ve looked at some of these mistakes earlier in the series. In the second week, we saw his fear leading him to Egypt in a scene that we will soon explore is quite reminiscent of today’s passage.

In the fourth week we also saw his doubts leading to making some very poor decisions.

But surely at this point in the story, Abraham, this great hero of the faith would be making good choices.

Unfortunately as I’ll explore, that is not the case. In fact he makes a very similar choice as he did when he went down to Egypt.

As I explore the passage, I want to try and answer the question: how should we respond to these stumbles when we should really know better?

Because, the reality is, we will stumble, just like Abraham does today and we need to be aware of what we should do and think when it happens.

Abraham’s poor decision

So let’s dive into the passage.

The passage shows how even in this late stage of Abraham’s life, he still has somewhat of a nomadic existence.

He has never really settled. Even after he turned 99 and has the promise of a descendant re-affirmed to him in very explicit terms, he still moves.

The first verse of chapter 20 briefly describes this for us, telling us that in these journeys, he spends some time in Gerar - a city big enough for it’s own king, and a city that will later become the lands known as the Philistines.

Now what you need to understand by way of background is that the political scene was quite fractured at this time.

Actually to be honest, I think you would have to say that this region has always had quite a turbulent political scene even up to today.

But at this time, there was no one power that had overall control of the region. Although that wasn’t by lack of trying, as we saw when we explored the battle in chapter 14. So instead, we see numerous little kingdom - you might almost call them city kingdoms.

Now if you can cast your minds back to those battles in chapter 14, I know it was a little complicated following who was who, but the bottom line was that Abraham had his own little private army that proved rather powerful.

And so, if you can imagine these little pockets of land, each with their own king or power structure, they’re all going to be concerned with their own protection.

They would also be well aware that Abraham and his growing entourage, are quite powerful.

This then can explain what is happening in verse 2. Now the bible in it’s usual style is very matter of fact about this. It just tells us that Abraham wants to hide the fact that he is married to Sarah, and then Abimelek, the king of Gerar, takes her.

That can seem odd, particularly when you realise that Sarah is nearing 90 years old, but if you think about it in political terms, it makes more sense.

You see, marriage is often a means of making political alliances.

When the powerful Abraham moves in, there is going to be tension between both parties. If you can make an alliance, then you can strengthen your position without having to go to battle. A marriage alliance would normally be made with a younger descendant, but as Abraham didn’t have any descendants, the arrangement is made with Sarah.

So this can explain a bit of what is going on, but look at the trap that Abraham found himself in.

You see, his whole journey has been about trusting God but it’s like he’s come into a new area and had a lapse of judgement. And his lapse of judgement threatens to have huge implications.

Let’s just think about this for a moment. You see, on one level it might not seem that big a deal. It’s simply a mis-representation of the truth.

But think about this in the wider context of what is going on. You see, God has just made it very clear that the descendant is to be an offspring between Abraham and Sarah, and the baby is to come within a year.

Well Abraham’s poor choice threatens to put Abimelek in the middle of this sexual union, thereby compromising the promised descendant.

Do you see what is happening? The evil one plants a small seed of fear in the mind of Abraham, and it threatens the divinely ordained plan of God.

God’s intervention

Well, remember, I wanted to explore how we should respond when we stumble, so first let’s look at what happens when Abraham stumbles.

Well, the beautiful thing is that it’s not what Abraham does when he stumbles, but rather what God does.

And in this account, God intervenes quite quickly.

In verse 3 the intervention comes in the form of a dream that God gives to Abimelek. God reveals to him that the woman he has just taken is a married woman.

Abimelek’s integrity

Interestingly, what we find in this passage is that Abimelek is revealed as a man of integrity. In fact, I think there is a sense in which the author of this passage is almost trying to highlight how Abimelek has the integrity that Abraham should have.

So, once Abimelek realises what he has done, he pleads his innocence to God, who hears his plea but tells him to restore the error.

Abimelek does this first thing in the morning. It tells us in verse 8 that he summons his officials - in other words, he’s essentially establishing a sort of court room, and the allows Abraham the opportunity to state his case for why he has allowed this situation to occur.

Abraham’s self-justification

Now this is where I believe we actually start to see a contrast between Abimelek’s character and Abraham. Abraham is meant to be the hero of our faith, and yet the foreign king is the one showing more integrity.

Abraham should have realised his mistake, but instead he just tries to justify himself.

Now what you’ll notice is that Abraham isn’t actually lying.

He states by telling him what his fear was. That is, that he would have been killed because of his wife.

He then tries to justify that what he said wasn’t actually a lie.

You see, what we learn is that Sarah was indeed his sister. That is, they both had the same father, but a different mother. That’s actually the first we heard that that was the case, but remember this marriage happened before God revealed to Moses that a brother should not marry his sister. And while we might recoil at the thought of such a marriage, this was a very different time.

But here’s the thing. While he might be technically correct in his assertion that she was his sister, it actually doesn’t bypass the fact that he was skewing the fact.

You see, you can be truthful, but still very misleading.

In this way, Abraham was being deliberately misleading about what he said - and in this regard, it was a lie.

God’s role

Thankfully, in all of this mess, we learnt back in verse 4 that Abimelek had not gone near Sarah, which is to say, there had been no sexual union between them.

Now we aren’t actually told exactly how the situation arose such that Abimelek and Sarah didn’t consummate their alliance, but there is a theory which I think joins the dots very well.

Now just to be clear, this is just a theory, so don’t place too much weight on this.

But it has been suggested that God caused Abimelek to become impotent.

Now as I said, it’s just a theory, but verse 18 says that all the women were kept from conceiving. Obviously that God could prevent them from conceiving by any number of means, but if Abimelek was impotent, then that would explain both why they were unable to conceive, and why you could know that in such a short period of time, and also why Abimelek was prevented from being with Sarah.

It was also make sense of why in verse 17 it says that after Abraham’s prayer, God healed Abimelek. It hadn’t otherwise mentioned that he was afflicted with anything else.

But, whatever the means, the bottom line was that God prevented Abimelek from having sexual relations, because it was very important that Sarah conceived a child from Abraham.

The treaty

Before I come back and consider what we can learn from this, I want to briefly just look at a time when Abimelek comes back into the picture at the end of chapter 21. I won’t spend a lot of time exploring this passage, other than to show what it could have looked like had Abraham trusted God and instead of telling lies that could lead to very bad situations, just interact with more integrity and see things resolve in a much better way.

What we see is Abimelek and one of his official making a treaty with Abraham. Once the treaty is in place, a problem arises, namely the seizing of a well, but this is able to be resolved through negotiation.

It ends with another treaty, and verse 34 implies that we get some long lasting peace.

You have to wonder after this little example, if only Abraham had not stumbled, could we have avoided the drama of chapter 20.

Application

So let me come back to my question: how should we respond when we stumble?

Don’t be too discouraged

Well, the answer we get from this passage is actually a multi-faceted answer. I’m going to give two seemingly contradictory ideas but rather than seeing them as contradictory, think of them as ideas to hold in tension.

The first thing I want to show is actually the comforting idea, that is, that the passage shows us that despite our relapses into sin, God always remain faithful.

In this way, we can know that even though we will let God down, he won’t let us down, and so we can just get back up and keep going.

You see, one of the tricks of the devil is to make us believe that we are not worthy.

We get angry. Greed gets the better of us. We look at things we shouldn’t look at.

We then become aware of this and it can push us into a downward spiral.

We’re not worthy of God’s love. Because we’re not worthy, we move away from God. As we move away from God we start to conform more and more with the world. And so we get further from God.

It’s a horrible mind set but I believe the evil one uses it to make us essentially self-destruct.

But this is where passages like this become so helpful. You see the Bible gives example after example of biblical characters, many of them the heros of the faith, who make a big mess of things, but God brings things back.

Nothing you can do can turn you from the love of God.

So the first lesson is that when you stumble and go off course, don’t be too discouraged. Know that God is always faithful and he will bring you back.

Keep watch

But while this passage can be of great comfort to us, it should also serve as a great warning for us.

You see, while God remained completely faithful, Abraham’s foolishness caused problems that could have been avoided.

When we look at what happened at the end of chapter 21 we see what could have been. We see that Abimelek was someone reasonable who could be negotiated with.

But should Abraham have known that Abimelek would have been reasonable to deal with? Well this is where having a close walk with the Lord is so important.

You see, it is not always easy to know what God wants us to do. But we do know that God wants us to live like Jesus showed us.

When we do, it is not a guarantee for an easy life - certainly we can live according to God’s way and we will face many trials - however, when we trust God and keep guard we can know the comfort God provides, even during the toughest of times.

When we relapse however, we struggle to see the comfort that comes from God.

And so, from this passage we can see the anguish that comes from when we slip up.

It shows the importance of clinging to the promises of God and living faithfully.

Conclusion

And so we can draw these two conclusions from this passage.

When we stumble - don’t allow it to get you too down, God remains faithful. But also, don’t be completely free of concern, because we are called to live a faithful life.

This essentially brings us to the tension that Paul draws out for us in the book of Romans when he holds tightly both to grace and also to live righteously.

You see, grace is demonstrated in this story of Abraham, showing that God protects Abraham, even when Abraham lets God down.

But like Paul makes clear, grace is not a licence to sin as much as we want. Even though we are forgiven, sin has real consequences.

What is inevitable, is that we will stumble. The journey is long, and we are fallible people.

But God can help us on this journey. When ever we stumble, we just get back on course with the help of God.

May this be both a great encouragement to us, but also a warning to live righteously.

Let’s pray...