Half Truths

Genesis 20:1-13
Gregory Broderick | Sunday, July 03, 2022
Copyright © 2022, Gregory Broderick

Genesis 20 recounts Abraham’s journey to the Philistine territory of  Gerar.  And as he did in his trip down to Egypt in Genesis 12, Abraham decided to lie to the locals about who he is and who Sarah is.  “She is my sister,” he said.  The result, as before, is a mess.  Sarah is taken as the wife of Abimelech, the  local king.  The  promise of godly offspring is threatened through Abraham’s actions.  Sarah’s purity, virtue, and dignity are put at risk by no fault of hers, and Abraham comes out of the whole thing looking more than a little foolish.  God must ride to the rescue.  It is the same pattern as before.

The whole story makes the godly man Abraham look pretty bad, and even worse as we  recall that he did the same thing before.  So let us look  this morning at  Abraham’s sin, Abraham’s reasoning and bad witness, and God’s sovereignty.

Abraham’s Sin

Abraham lied.  He said, “She is my sister,” when she was his wife.  This is a lie.  You may be tempted to argue, as Abraham did, that she really was his sister: the daughter of his father by a different mother, as was apparently common or at least socially acceptable at the time.

But even if this statement is partially or technically true as far as it goes, it is still a lie.  Abraham told only a portion of the truth with the purpose to deceive the hearers.  He said one true but incomplete statement in order to conceal the true truth that they were man and wife.  And  make no mistake:  His purpose was to deceive them.   In verse 11 he explains that he said it because he thought, “They will kill me because of my wife.”  The idea is, “I have to convince them she is not my wife.”  In verse 13 he says to Sarah, “Show love to me by saying, ‘He is my brother.’”  The real statement Abraham was making is, “She is only my sister.”  Or we could say more starkly, “She is not my wife, so don’t kill me.”

As our children are taught at the Academy, a half truth is a whole lie.   We know this, of course, and so did Abraham.  I will give you an example.  The Bible says, “There is no God.”  That is a true statement.  You can find those words in the Bible.  It is totally true.  Look at Psalm 14:1 if you don’t believe me.  But the complete statement is, “The fool says in his  heart,  ‘There is no God.’”  The problem with these half truths is that they are deceptive and they are designed to deceive.

God hates lies and lying is a sin.  This is the core of the ninth commandment: “Do not bear false witness against your neighbor.”  We could translate that ninth commandment as, “Thou shalt not lie.”  That is essentially what the ninth commandment is telling us.  It is all over God’s word that he hates lies, falsehood, and deception.  Proverbs 6:17 says, “The Lord hates a lying tongue.”  Proverbs 12:22 says, “God detests lying lips.”  This is strong language.  Colossians 3:9–10 tells us, “Do not lie to each other.”  Revelation 21 says that all liars will be sent to the lake of fire.

The core of a lie is deceit.  Some people, of course, lie straight out.  Bill Clinton said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”  Another president recently said, “When I took office, there was no vaccine.”  Another said, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”  Now, I have picked all Democrats because those are the ones I remember, but Republicans lie too, and just as much.  These are false statements.  These are denials of reality.  But most lies are not so stark, at least among God’s people.  They come in a more indirect form, such as Abraham did here.  And we justify it to ourselves: “Oh, I am not technically lying.”  Whenever you use the word “technically,”  you can bet you are in some trouble.  God draws no such lawyerly distinctions.

God is truth.  In John 14:6 He says, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”  The Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of truth (John 16:13).  His word is truth (John 17:17).  All His words are true (Ps. 119:160).  So God is truth, and deceit in whatever form is the anti-truth.

Deceit and lies are the opposite of truth, and God hates deceit.  It is not merely these outright lies that he hates, but he hates deceit.  Psalm 101:7 says, “No one who practices deceit will dwell in my house.”  In other words, they will go to hell.  Romans 16:18 condemns those who “deceive the minds of naïve people” with smooth talk and flattery.  It is not the smooth talk and the flattery that are the problem in this verse; it is the deceit, the deceiving of people.  In listing the grave evils of murder, adultery, and greed in Mark 7, Jesus lists deceit right there among the things that defile us.  This should give us a view of how seriously God takes deceit.  Psalm 5 lists lies and deceit in parallel terms.  In other words, they are the same thing, and says that the Lord abhors deceitful men.  God hates all lies and all deceit because he is truth, and He is committed to truth.

The  devil loves lies and deceit because he is a liar and the father of lies.  He is committed to lies (John 8:44).  In Genesis 3, what is the lie he told?  “You will not surely die.”  That was a lie.  He told that lie to destroy Adam and  Eve.  They believed it, and they were destroyed.  He comes to steal, kill, and destroy, and his favorite tool in doing that is to lie, to deceive.  In Luke 4:6–7 the devil said to Jesus in the temptation in the desert, “I will give you all authority and splendor.  If you will just worship me, it will all be yours.”  This is a double lie.  Number one, he did not have all authority and splendor.  The Father did not give that to the devil.  He gave it later to Jesus Christ, but He did not give it to the devil.  So it was not the devil’s to give.  But the double part of that lie is that he is inviting Jesus to join him in the great lie that God is not God, that the devil is God.  You see, Satan is a liar and a great deceiver.

Outright lies are just a small part of Satan’s arsenal of deception.  Revelation 12:9 is translated in some cases to call the devil “the deceiver.”  The NIV takes a softer tone, as it often does, and says that he “leads the whole world astray.”  But deceit is what is really in view in Revelation 12.  The devil hates the truth and wars against the truth, and he deceives himself even.  He deceives himself thinking, “I can overthrow God.”  This is not a mission that is going to succeed.  But he deceives even himself into thinking that.  And then he seeks to deceive you and to deceive me as part of his quixotic mission so that you may join him in his misery.

Deceit, half truths, white lies, omissions where you have a duty to speak the truth, or  bald-faced lies—these are all the same thing.  They are all deceit.  They are all sin and evil in the eyes of God.  And they are all anti-truth.

There are a few rare exceptions.  We see them in the Bible in wartime scenarios and so on.  But I am not really going to deal with that because it is not the issue of our day.  The lie is on the throne in our day, and that is the issue of our day.  So we must speak the truth and be committed to truth.  Abraham’s first sin is that he lied.

Abraham’s second sin here is that he failed to trust God.  He gives his reasoning, such as it is, in verse 11:  “They will kill me because of my wife.”  This is a form of godless thinking.  God had promised Abraham offspring many, many times.  We have been studying the book  of Genesis.  We hear this promise over and over and over:

• Genesis 12:3: “I will make you into a great nation.”
• More specifically, Genesis 12:7: “To your offspring I will give this land.”
• Genesis 13:16: “I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth.”
• Genesis 15:4: “A son coming from your own body will be your heir.”
• Genesis 15:5: “Your offspring shall be as numerous as the stars in the sky.”
• Genesis 17:2: “I  will greatly increase your numbers.”
• Genesis 17:8: “I will be the God of your descendants.”
• Genesis 17:16: “I will give you a son by Sarah.”
• God confirmed it again in Genesis 17:19: “Your wife Sarah will bear you a son.”

Now, let’s put on our thinking caps.  Abraham’s wife Sarah has not yet borne him a son, so Abraham is, in a way, invincible and untouchable.  God has made a promise.  And not just one  promise (which would be good enough, coming from the word of God), but serial promises that Abraham and Sarah will have a son, the son of the promise.  That has not happened yet.  So, Abraham, you cannot die.  They cannot kill you.  Abraham must father a son through Sarah because God Almighty has decreed that it will happen, and the word of the Lord has great authority and cannot be frustrated or broken.  It must come to pass.  His will is always done.  His word is always fulfilled.  God cannot lie (Titus 1:2) and He does not change His mind (Num. 23:19).  He cannot fail (Ps. 33:11).  So God cannot lie, He is not going to change His mind, and He cannot fail.  It must come to pass.  It is guaranteed.  It is better than money in the bank.

Against this reality and these many promises, Abraham’s fear and lie make no sense. He believed God.  We know Abraham believed God.  Genesis 15:6 is the great compliment, it is the key verse in a sense, in all these early chapters of Genesis in the story of Abraham: “Abraham believed the Lord, and He credited to him as righteousness.”  So Abraham believed God, but he wavered.  And we waver too, like John the Baptist, who knew that Jesus was the Christ.  John the Baptist proclaimed Jesus as the Christ and yet, in a moment of weakness, in a moment of fear, he sent men to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?”  (Matt. 11:3).  Now, these men—Abraham and John the Baptist—are both saved, they are both extremely godly, and they are both examples to us of how we should live.  If we achieved half of what they achieved in Christ, we would be superstars.  They are examples on whom we should pattern our lives.  They are great and godly men.  But the thing of it is, they are still just men.  They are still sinners.  They are still imperfect.  They are still, like us, prone to moments of weakness and unbelief.

That seems to be the best read on what happened here.  In fear, Abraham forgets about God’s promises.  He forgets God’s power and God’s sovereignty.  So he, like Sarah in the “Hagar solution,” decides, “I have got to take matters into my own hands.”  But at the bottom of this is a lack of godly, biblical thinking.  At the bottom of this is a distrust of God—either distrusting His word, distrusting His power and ability, or distrusting His faithfulness.  Perhaps overtly or, more likely subtly, the fear overcomes you and you forget all that God has said and all that God has done for you in the past.  Either way, the result is the same:  Failing to trust in the Lord with all your heart, and instead taking matters into your own hands; or we could say, “leaning on my own understanding.”

Lest you be tempted to feel bad for poor Abraham—after all, he was in a foreign land and there were scary people around—lest you be tempted to cut him some slack, remember this:  God had personally appeared to Abraham several times.  God had promised Abraham an heir repeatedly and specifically.  God had delivered on His promises to Abraham every time before.  And Abraham’s lie was premeditated and calculated.  This was not a panicked utterance in the moment.  “Who is this with you, Abraham?”  “Uh, my sister.”  It is not that kind of thing.  We read it in the verse.  “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.”’”  So Abraham had thought this out ahead of time.  He planned it out ahead of time.  This  was not a mindless action.  And worse, as I said, Abraham had gone through almost this exact same exercise before (Gen. 12).  God showed in that exercise that Abraham had nothing to worry about, that God would protect Abraham and deliver Abraham even when he was in hostile territory.  Not that God should have to prove that His word is faithful and true, but God is merciful, and He has proven Himself faithful because we are slow to believe.

So there is no way around it for Abraham, who is one of our heroes.  This is a bad sin.  It is not only a lie, but it is a lie born of implicit or explicit distrust of God, even though he believes God.  It is similar in this way to Adam and Eve:  “Maybe God is holding us back.  The devil said we can know right from wrong and be like God.  Maybe God is not really good and for our good.”  No one who professes Christ thinks these things overtly, but that is the thinking behind our distrust of God.  Or the same as Sarah:  “Maybe God won’t deliver on that promised son.  Maybe God cannot deliver on that promised son.  I am getting pretty old.”

We do the same thing.  Abraham and Sarah are getting exposed here, but we do the same thing all the time.  We think implicitly, “Maybe God does not see my problem.  Maybe God does not know about my grief.  Maybe God does not care about my longstanding illness or my unfulfilled desire.”  When we say it out loud like that, it sounds ridiculous and faithless, and it is.  But the thinking behind our distrust of God is exactly that: “Maybe God is powerless to do something about my problem.  Maybe my lack of a baby or a husband or a wife or a house or my emotional problems or my job or whatever—maybe God is not working it all together for my good, as He claimed He would in Romans 8:28.”  This is a subtle thinking that creeps into us.

It is also a subtle accusation against God.  When we step back and look at it, God has given us everything we have and everything we need.  God has done all for us, even giving us life in Christ—God, who is perfectly good and perfectly holy.  So let us be very careful not to subtly and implicitly accuse God by our conduct, or to begin to distrust Him in our hearts and in our minds.  Let us instead trust in Him always, especially when we do not understand; especially when we fear; especially when we do not see the way forward.  We must preach to ourselves: “God has done it before; God will do it again.  God has promised in His word, and His word is always true.  Why are you downcast, O my soul?”

Trust God even more at the difficult time.  It is easy to think that we are trusting in God when we get the job and when we get married and when we have the baby and when we get the house and everything is going our way.  It is easy to think that we are trusting in God at that time.  We should examine ourselves at such times and ask, “Am I trusting in God or am I trusting in these things I have?”  But especially trust God in the difficult times.  And He will not only prove Himself trustworthy, but He will prove Himself even more trustworthy at those times.  It will stick with us in a deeper and more long-lasting way when we go through the valley of the shadow of death with God, and He delivers us into the sunshine and green pastures on the other side.

Trust God more at such times, like the Israelites at the Red Sea.  They were worried, and God delivered in a miraculous and unbelievable way for His glory.  Or in the virgin birth.  Mary said, “How can this be?”  It did not make any sense.  And God said, “I can do the impossible.”  Or our salvation through the death of Jesus Christ.  How can it make sense that God comes but then God loses?  He dies.  Well, He did not lose.  His death, His suffering the wrath on the  cross in our place, was the greatest victory ever won in the history of the world.  We are small-thinking, small-perspective people.  It is our nature as human beings.  But God can do great things, greater than we can even ask or imagine.

Let’s look at Abraham’s third sin.  Abraham’s third sin is that he failed to obey God in his role as a husband.  In Genesis 16, Abraham failed in his role  as a husband by abdicating his God-appointed role as the head.  He let Sarah boss him around, and he went into sin.  In this instance, he fails by not loving his wife as Christ loved the church.

First, Abraham leads Sarah into sin.  As her husband, he is to lead her in righteousness.  He is to wash her with water through the word (Eph. 5:26).  Instead, he asks her to lie for his sake.  He did it in Genesis 12 and he does it here in Genesis 20:13.  There is sort of a disdainful manipulation, when we read this.  He said, “This is how you can show your love  to me”—by sinning, by lying, by telling a half truth.  A Christian husband must never coerce, request, or tempt his wife to sin.  That is a grave disservice.  It is an abuse of your office as husband and head.  Abraham was treating Sarah  as some kind of an object or asset to be deployed rather than as God’s cherished gift to him to be protected.  He harms her reputation, although God intervenes and saves her reputation and vindicates her.  But he puts harm to her reputation by this action.  He treats her as two instead of  one.  He sends her as a sacrifice for his well-being, to protect himself.

The call of a Christian husband is the exact opposite:  You die, she lives.  He is to love her as Christ loved the church (Eph. 5:25).  Pastor Mathew has coined the phrase “Titanic love.”   They go in the lifeboats and live; you stay on the big ship and you die.  He is to sacrifice just as Christ did for the church.  He gave himself up to make her holy (Eph. 5:26).  He is to love her as his own body, feeding and caring for it.  They are to be one, not two.  But, instead, Abraham sent Sarah out at risk to protect himself.  In verse 11 he says, “They will kill me because of my wife.”  This is bad husbanding 101.

In our day, the risk of death or stolen wives seems pretty low.  But we can do the same thing by other means.  “My wife must work so that I can enjoy a certain lifestyle that I want without earning it.”  No, it is your job to provide (1 Tim. 5:8).  Now, maybe your wife works and maybe she doesn’t.  But if you send her out to work so that you can enjoy a lifestyle that you don’t want to earn, you are doing the same thing as Abraham.  Or you unreasonably curtail your family finances in a way that makes her life harder and your life better.  You drive the $60,000 pickup truck but won’t let your wife turn on the air-conditioning in the summer.  Or you dump the burden of headship onto her because you are too timid to do your job and be the head (1 Cor. 11:3; Eph. 5:22 and following).  You dump the burden of headship on to her by forcing her to make the decisions and live with the consequences and the responsibility.  It is your job to bear those burdens.  Or, like the TV sitcoms:  The fun dad and the bad-cop mom.  You come and do all the fun stuff with the kids.  You give them all the candy and let them watch TV.  Then it is mom’s job to crack the whip and make them eat their vegetables and do their homework.  It is the same thing.  You make her life harder and your life easier.  The kids love you and resent her.

So there is no escaping it.  Abraham sinned in this instance by executing  his job as a husband in a way that is contrary to God’s command.

But before we leave this topic, I want to make a few further observations.  First, Abraham’s sin against Sarah does not mean that he was a bad husband.  He was bad in this instance, but by all accounts, he was a good husband.  An excellent husband.  He led his family in righteousness—not perfectly, but the vast majority of the time.  He obeyed God, and he called her to obey God.  He called her up in faith most of the time.  Abraham led his household most of the time.  He prospered his household and cared for it.  He was imperfect, but imperfect and bad are not the same thing.

Notice also that Abraham’s sin in this instance did not remove his authority as the husband and the head.  Some wives will take a husband’s old sin and use it as a club to destroy the husband’s headship.  But this is not what we see here.  Instead, Abraham sinned, Abraham repented, and Abraham remained the head.  Isaac, that promised son, is born in Genesis 21.  Abraham sent Hagar and Ishmael away at God’s direction later on in Genesis 21.  God still came to Abraham and dealt with him as the head.  Abraham made treaties with foreign powers.  Abraham continued to be the head in the relationship with God (Gen. 22).  And Abraham loved and cared for Sarah until she died in Genesis 23, and he bought a tomb for her and buried her in the land promised by his God and her God.

First Peter 3 commends Sarah for obeying Abraham and calling him her master and exhorts other godly women to follow in her example.  So it is true that Abraham was a sinner, as all men  are sinners.  But if such an extraordinary and godly man as this could sin in lies and in unbelief and in poor husbanding, then so can we.  So can your husband.  And guess what?  He is still the head, even after he sins; even when he does not do it perfectly.

So my point here is not to tear Abraham down.  He is one of the greatest men who ever lived, along with Moses, David, Daniel, Paul, and Peter.  They were all sinners.  We are not even worthy to untie their sandals, we might say.  But we should take warning, and we should make sure that we do not fall.  Why are these Scriptures written down?  They are written down as a warning to us.  So we should take that warning, lest we fall.  And we should also rejoice that God is merciful.  You see, God forgave Abraham, despite his bad sin and repeated sin.  And He forgives us too, despite our bad sins and our repeated sins.  (GTB)  And He forgives us to the same degree as He forgave Abraham—completely, fully, cast into the depths of the sea, cast behind His back.  And He forgives us on the same basis as Abraham, on the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Let us put our faith in this Christ, the Christ of Abraham.  While he was looking forward to the Christ, we are looking backward to the Christ.  It is the same thing:  the Christ of Abraham.  Let us  put our faith in Him.  Let us receive forgiveness.  Then let us call others to the same glorious grace of forgiveness in Jesus Christ.  And having been so forgiven, let us forgive others “just as God in Christ forgave us” (Eph. 4:32).

Abraham’s Bad Reasoning and Bad Witness

1. Abraham’s Bad Reasoning

First, let us look at Abraham’s bad reasoning.  He gives the reason:  “There is no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me.”  His first bad reasoning is “They will kill  me.”  We discussed it already.  They cannot kill Abraham until God’s promise of offspring is fulfilled.

But there is another bad aspect of this reasoning.  In verse 11 Abraham begins, “I said to myself.”  That  is a warning sign that something bad is coming after that.  “I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.’” This appears to be a totally unfounded fear.  There was some fear of God in that place.  Abimelech heard and obeyed God when God appeared to him in a dream and said, “Return that man’s wife.”  Now, this does not mean Abimelech was born again.  I am not going to deal with that topic.  Maybe he was; maybe he wasn’t.  But he and his people behaved quite honorably in this situation.  He immediately obeyed God, as we see in verses 8  and 14.  He was warned in a dream, “You will be killed because of this woman you have taken into your house because she is a married woman,” and the next morning, when he gets up, he calls in his counselors and his advisors and says, “We have got to solve this problem.”  He obeys God immediately, which is reminiscent of what we will hear about Abraham in the future.  God came to him and said, “Sacrifice your only son Isaac,” and immediately, early the next morning, Abraham got up to do it (Gen. 22).

Abimelech submitted to God and appealed properly to God’s justice in verses 4 and 5.  And Abimelech gave livestock to cover any offense against Abraham (v. 14).  Now, I would be tempted not to do that.  I would be tempted to say, “This is your fault.  No livestock for you.”  Abimelech allowed them the run of the kingdom when they were done:  “The land is before you.  Go and live where you please.”  He also gave Sarah a thousand shekels of silver to vindicate her (v. 16).  This appears to be a particularly kind and honorable act, and it was apparently unsolicited by Abraham and not even commanded by God.  Yet Abimelech does it, and he even gives a mild rebuke to Abraham in verses 9 and 10.

As I said, this doesn’t mean Abimelech was born again.  Maybe he was; maybe he wasn’t.  But he seems to have been the noblest participant in this entire shambles of a story.

It is true that the unregenerate are totally depraved and without hope of salvation apart from Jesus Christ.  That is true.   But total depravity does not mean maximum depravity.  Even unbelievers are restrained by common grace.  Even unbelievers may behave in a proper, honorable, or even godly manner consistent with God’s commands.  There are many faithful marriages among unbelievers.  There are many unbelievers who provide for their families.  There are many unbelievers who have defended our country, who have acted as good citizens, who have engaged in heroic and selfless acts.  Think about the people on Flight 93 who took down a plane so that others could live.  Think about the firemen who ran into the building at Ground Zero.  Not all these people were believers, but they behaved in an honorable manner.

So it is true that we should be wary of the world.  We should be wary of its influence.  We should be worried about some of the things going on around us.  But this does not mean that we should have an irrational fear that runs away with us and leads us to sin, which is what seems to have happened to Abraham.  Think about the spies in the book of Joshua.  “The land will swallow us up!  There are Anakites and there are giants in the land!”  It was not true.  The land was not going to swallow them up.  It was a good land, as God promised.

You see, this also is a trick of the devil.  The devil wants us to be like the world.  That is his primary mission:  “I am going to make you like them,” in other words, “like me, the devil.”  But if he cannot achieve that, at least he will make us so afraid as to sin and not do what God is commanding us to do.  We must trust our God and deal in reality, not in runaway fear.

2. Abraham’s Bad Witness

Due to his fear, Abraham was a bad witness.  First, he lied.  God is truth, and yet God’s man, God’s prophet, lied.  This is a poor representation of God to those Gerarites.  What are they to think of this Jehovah God: that His people are liars?  Is that an accurate representation of our God?  No!

Second, Abraham distrusted God.  Why should the Gerarites trust in a God when even his own followers do not trust Him enough to protect them?  In verses 11 and 13, Abraham invokes God’s name.  In verse 13 he says, “When God called me to wander the land, I said to my wife, ‘Lie for me.’” That is a cutting down, that is a reducing of God in the sight of those Gerarites.  It is a poor reflection of God’s might, God’s power, God’s faithfulness, and God’s sovereignty.

The third bad witness is that Abraham insulted the Gerarites.  When they asked, “Why did you do this,” his answer in verse 11 boils down to saying, “Sorry, I had to lie because I thought you were murdering rapists.”  Now, that is the wrong foot to start on for evangelism.  Abraham could have been a good witness, attracting them to Christ.  But instead he comes off as fearful, insulting, unfairly judgmental, and more than a little bit weird.  “What kind of people must these followers of Jehovah be?  Where do they come from when they think everyone will murder you and take your wife? “

Let’s not make the same mistakes in our lives.  We do not need to fear the world.  We need to be wary and we need to be wise, but we don’t need to fear.  We should be as shrewd as serpents, but also as innocent as doves.  We must engage with the world and have a good reputation with outsiders that the life and light of Christ might shine forth and attract those that God foreknew and is calling.  Let us not shrink back from the world in fear.  Oh, the world can be a scary place and it is full of some scary people.  But not everyone is a murderer or a rapist or a thief.  Some of those people are God’s people that he has chosen and that he may be using you to call to Christ.  There are some decent people out there, morally speaking.  I have worked with some decent unbelievers.  So not everyone is a murderer and a thief.  There are some decent people, and I said there are some lost people out there too.  Don’t repel them by your judgmental attitude.  Don’t repel them with your out-of-control fear.  Instead, go and find them and share Christ with them and call them to Christ.

The Sovereignty of God

My final point is the sovereignty of God.  Abraham screwed this up, but God did not.  He kept Sarah pure and preserved the messianic line.  Notice verse 6.  Who is the actor, as you read these verses?  “I have kept you from sinning against me.  I did not let you touch her.”  Verse 18: “The Lord closed every womb in the king’s house.”  Verse 17: “God healed them so that they could have children once more.”  God is the primary mover in this entire narrative.  He is the almighty and all-powerful God, and He is absolutely able to take whatever measures are needed to make sure that His will is accomplished.

This is not an invitation to recklessness, to do what you want and God will clean up your mess.  That is not the call.  It is a call to be in awe—be in awe at the might and wisdom of God.  It is a call to inspiration.  If God can achieve mighty things for His glory in spite of our bumbling disobedience, then we know that He can and will protect us and prosper us and achieve mighty things through our obedience, which glorifies Him all the more.

God intervened to keep Sarah pure to preserve the line, and He spoke to an apparently pagan king, turning Abimelech’s will to His own.  And God was willing, as we see in verse 7, to go even farther.  He said He would even kill a king and his family and perhaps the entire kingdom, if necessary, to preserve His line.

Notice also that the Sovereign God is deadly serious about obedience to His word.  In verse 7, He makes it crystal clear what Abimelech must do:  “Return the man’s wife.”  But He also issues a dire warning coupled with that command.  Verse 7:  “If you do not return her, you may be sure that you and all yours will die.”  God is extremely merciful in forgiving sin and redeeming sinners, but He does not tolerate defiance and contumacy.

When you know for sure what the will of God is, but refuse to do it, you are defying God.  You are saying, like Pharaoh did, “Who is the Lord, that I should obey Him?”  And you will find out.  The Bible says, “Do not murder,” and you say, “Abortion on demand and without apology.”  If you do not repent, you will find out.  God says, “Do not steal,” or, “Do not commit adultery,” and if you do it anyway, you will find out.  Or maybe a little closer to home.  The Bible says, “Forgive your brother seven times seventy times.”  If you refuse this clear command of God, you will find out.  God says, “Forgive him, just as God in Christ forgave you.”  God says, “Forgive and forget.”  That is a clear command.  Don’t do something else.  You are defying the living God.  Don’t refuse outright, but don’t also refuse by delay.  “Oh, I will forgive her, but she is going to go through the wringer for a little while and suffer.”  Don’t refuse by negotiation: “I’ll forgive her mostly.”  Don’t refuse by saying, “I need a period of mourning before I can forgive my husband.”  You say you need grace to forgive?  He says he gives grace as you obey.

When the word of God is clear, we must do it right away.  Genesis 20:8 tells us that early the next morning, Abimelech went and did it.  In Genesis 22:3, Abraham and Isaac got up early the next morning.  That is a hard thing:  “Go and sacrifice your son, your only son, the son you love, your son Isaac.”  I might say, “I need a few days to come around to this.”  But that is not what Abraham said.  He got up early the next morning, he went, and he did it.

Otherwise, if you do not do it right away, you may be sure that you and all yours will die.  God has a way of doing it.  Perhaps He will strike you dead.  That is what He did to Ananias and Sapphira.  Perhaps He will send you wasting disease.  Perhaps He will strike your children.  Think about David’s baby, or Abimelech’s household, where they could not have children, or Pharaoh’s firstborn son, who was struck down.   Once we know the will of God, we are to do it, or we will find out who the Lord is.  Let’s not find out.  Let us instead obey God and glorify Him and be blessed.  Let us not defy God and be cursed.  And at least we should aim, as God’s people, to measure up to Abimelech, who obeyed right away.  Hear and obey the Lord.

My final application, returning to this idea of truth, is that we must speak the whole truth about God.  We must speak that God is a holy God, that we are sinners; that we deserve the infinite wrath of this holy God; and yet He is merciful in addition to His holiness.  He provides a way to be saved, and the only way to be saved is by faith alone in Christ alone.

Speak this truth first to yourself.  Confess with your mouth and believe in your heart, “Jesus is Lord.  Jesus is my Savior.”  Speak it first to yourself, but then speak it to others.  Bring this good news for all people to others.  Don’t tell half-truths about God.  There is a lot of that going around in the modern church world.  “I speak only about God’s love but not about God’s wrath.  I speak only about God’s forgiveness and mercy, but not about God’s judgment.”  It can be true in reverse too, by the way: “I speak only about God’s wrath but not about God’s mercy,” although that is not really the issue of our day.

Don’t tell half truths about God.  A half gospel is a whole lie, and it is no gospel at all.  Trust God enough to speak the truth.  We don’t have to lie in order to protect ourselves.  We have God as our shield and defender.  When we are with Him, He is with us.  He is working out all things for our good as His chosen, called, and sanctified people, guaranteed by the word of God.  So don’t lie.  Lying shows that you are a child of the devil.  Don’t do that.  Speak truth, live truth, and show that you are a child of the King—not the little king Abimelech, but the great King, the eternal God, the King of kings and Lord of lords.  Amen.