12th October - Martin Mowat

Abraham, friend of God, father of faith 3 – 12/10/25 – Martin Mowat

Readings Genesis 12:9-20 & John 8:2-11

The very first verse of the New Testament says This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham …

Jesus, the Messiah, played a unique role in God’s redemptive plan for the human race. As we established last week, Jesus was a real person and the gospel accounts of his ministry are absolutely not fabricated fairy stories. They are verified in the writings of the recognised historians of the time, people like Josephus.

As Prof. John Lennox says, “contrary to popular belief, faith is to be understood as evidence-based trust and not the superficial credulity that so many atheists and sceptics erroneously imagine it to be. … It offers us, therefore, credible and profound answers to the great world view questions of humanity.

Do you remember where we’d got to? Abraham had been summonsed by God, and promised that he would father a great nation, and that through that nation God would be able to bless the whole world. He set off from Haran, which was logistically a fairly momentous thing for him to have done, but, with the benefit of hindsight, it was even more momentous because it effectively changed the history of mankind.

He walked with his family and his entourage some 426 miles, arrived in a place called Shechem, where God appeared to him again and promised him the land where he was. The very first thing he did, therefore, was to build an alter to the Lord, who had appeared to him. 

But as we just heard in our first reading, there was a famine there, a severe one, and he had to move further south because he had a lot of mouths to feed.  Strange that God didn’t intervene with the famine, but he didn’t, so there we go! 

Stranger still, MUCH stranger still, to our ears at least, is what happened when he got to Egypt.  How could a righteous man like Abraham, you must be asking yourself, lower himself to deception in claiming that Sarah wasn’t his wife, but his sister? 

God had promised Abraham a prosperous future, and that future clearly depended on his survival. So, imagining a threat to him because of his wife’s beaty, he decided, for better or for worse, to put his own self-preservation, well-being and material wealth above honesty, truth and the integrity of his marriage. And he did so, even though the prospect of fathering a great nation depended on that marriage. 

Yes, he does appear to have consulted her first, but did he really give her any choice in the matter?

Do you know, there are some parts of the Bible which seem to us distasteful, unpleasant or unnecessary, but God in his wisdom ordained for them all to be there. So, there must be something we can learn from this, if we just look for it. 

A very similar thing happened 25 years later, in chapter 20, and we’ll get to that second incident in due course. For the moment let’s concentrate on what’s going on here, in chapter 12.  As we know, they’ve recently arrived in Canaan but there’s a famine, and in order for them all to survive they have to find food and water, so they try Egypt where they become what the Bible calls “sojourners”, and what we call “refugees” or “immigrants”. Such people are seldom welcomed with open arms, in fact quite the reverse because they’re seen to be depriving the real residents of their limited resources. We see that in our own news every day. 

They depended, therefore on Pharaoh’s goodwill to allow them to stay for as long as the Canaanite famine lasted. 

But even so, they’re already on the back foot, on the defensive, and Abraham is in fear of his life. He knows, either from experience, or perhaps because God has warned him, that when the Egyptians see Sarah, and I quote, they will say, "This is his wife." Then they will kill me but will let you live. Say you are my sister, which was true – she was his half sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.'  And in all fairness, maybe it wasn’t just Abraham’s life that was in jeopardy, but those of his family and entourage too. 

We are often quick to judge, to find fault, to tell others what they should and shouldn’t be doing, even though we don't know what's it's really like to be in their situation. 

The truth is that life is messy, life is complicated. 

Fortunately, though, God knows and God cares. Abraham's action doesn't seem to be either honourable or faith-filled. It was the act of a man desperate to survive. But we are not his judge, God is.

Back to the story then. Pharaoh and his household got sick. In his inquiry to understand why, Pharaoh discovered that he’d taken Abraham's wife as one of his own and was being punished for it. Understandably he was very angry and blamed Abraham for not telling him the essential truth -- that Sarah was his wife. 

When Pharaoh worked out that he was being judged by God for taking Sarah, amazingly he didn't punish either Abraham or Sarah, but instead gave them sheep, cattle, donkeys, slaves, and camels and sent them out of Egypt to fend for themselves back in what was probably still a land in famine.

Yes, the famine may still have been present, but Abraham and Sarah were alive, together again, and free. They survived and ended up even richer than before.  What’s more, Pharaoh, an idolater, had personally experienced God’s judgement.

As I said, this will happen again later and it’s easy for us to judge such events by modern standards. It’s also easy to assume that Biblical characters should behave impeccably, but they were human beings too. We’re none of us perfect.  What’s more, the culture was different then, and when Abraham married his half-sister, it was probably a culturally normal thing to do, and in any case, he hadn’t yet heard God’s call on his life, at that point in time.

In our second lesson we heard the story of Jesus and the woman who had been in an adulterous relationship. She was about to receive the punishment that, however cruel and gruesome, was culturally “normal” in Israel 2000 years ago. 

But Jesus had a different perspective.  He knew that forgiveness could bring redemption and change.  Sadly, we don’t know what happened to that woman after Jesus had sent her off saying “neither do I condemn you, go now and leave your life of sin”. We don’t know what Jesus wrote on the ground with his finger, but we do know that he forgave her, and that we too receive undeserved forgiveness for our mistakes. 

Abraham made a huge mistake by neglecting his marriage vows, for all sorts of good and bad reasons, but that didn’t stop God forgiving him, and Abraham from becoming both a “friend of God” and the “father of faith”.