GENESIS 12 (Part 2)
Read Genesis 12:10-20
As soon as we read about God’s promise of land to Abram’s descendants, we see that Abram leaves that Promised Land. This is the first of several occasions on which we have a kind of tension in the Old Testament narrative. God has promised the land to his people but his people are outside that land. How will this be resolved? The greatest example of this is later in Genesis when we see the children of Israel enslaved in Egypt. How will the reach the Promised Land? The resolution comes always through the grace of God.
In this episode we see that Abram is forced to go to Egypt because of a famine in the land. Again, this is a recurring theme in the Old Testament. In those days famines occurred fairly regularly and the obvious source of relief was Egypt because it was nearly always a land of plenty thanks to the Nile.
But when Abram went to Egypt he foresaw a problem. He thought that his wife, Sarai, would be taken by the Egyptians because of her beauty and that he, as her husband, would be killed. So, he dreamt up a ruse. They would pass themselves off as brother and sister and then Abram would be safe. This is all well and good, but didn’t God promise Abram that he would have many descendants (v2)? This could not happen if the Egyptians killed him so why did Abram fear that he would be killed?
What this amounted to was a lack of faith on Abram’s part. Having trusted God and shown faith when God called him to leave his homeland and family, when it came to the crunch, Abram lost faith in God’s protection and came up with his own solution. This solution worked at first but the deception soon unravelled. Pharaoh treated Abram well because he had brought his beautiful ‘sister’ to him, but then Pharaoh and his household started to get ill. We are told that this was the Lord’s work and it was perhaps to expose Abram’s deceit. In ancient times, plagues and illnesses were thought to be the work of gods, so that was Pharaoh’s assumption. What had caused God to be angry? What had he done to deserve this? His investigations turned up the truth of the matter and he confronted Abram and exposed him as a liar.
Pharaoh sent Abram and Sarai away but they were allowed to keep the gifts that Pharaoh had given them: servants and livestock. We might have a bit of sympathy for Pharaoh in that he was deceived but perhaps he should have taken a bit more care when taking in strangers. The main thrust of the story, though, concerns the behaviour of Abram. Having met God and shown faith and trust in him, as soon as he was tested he was found wanting. He is held up as one of the great heroes of faith in Hebrews 11, but throughout the Bible we see that however good God’s servants are (Moses and David, for example) they are all flawed.