Genesis 20-21
We don’t read very far into the Bible before we find it isn’t like any other book. Do you know why? Well, one says, Because it is God’s book, and says another, It is because it tells about our badness. Yes, both answers are correct. Some of you perhaps have read a good many story books, and books written to tell -about a man or a woman’s life. Some of these books are good as far as they go, but all that I have ever read tell just about nothing of the badness of the person they want to tell us most about; the books tell how wise, how good, and kind and courteous and brave, and all that the man or woman or boy or girl was that is the principal character in the book, and nothing at all, or just the very least the author thought he needed to put in, about the selfishness and other mean things that are in everyone’s heart.
God tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If He chooses to tell us about Abraham, so ready to listen to His word, and to leave home and country for an unknown land and there to be a man as we might say, without a country, for he lived in a tent all his life and didn’t buy any land or settle down, and we think and . rightly too, what a wonderful man Abraham was, then we find a chapter like that one in which we read about his going down to Egypt and telling a lie about his wife,—do you remember?—the twelfth, it was. And today we read another story about Abraham that shows us like that one, that when he didn’t keep near to God he got into trouble. Just like ourselves that is, —you and I, if we love Jesus because God first loved us and sent Him to die in our stead,—you and I, I say, we hardly hope to climb as high up the ladder of faith as Abraham did, do we? but we certainly make just as bad mistakes as he when we get our thoughts away from God, and forget it is He we have to please and not ourselves.
I think there’s more than one reason for God telling us both sides . of Abraham’s character. If we read only of his believing God, and doing what He told him, we might say too, God only takes good people to heaven, as I myself have heard some children say in Sunday school. But God loves had people, sinners, the Bible calls them, and He loves them still when they show some of their old bad ways after they are saved. But does He love the bad tempers, the lies even, and the other mean things? Indeed He does not, and in one way or another He makes us sorry for them, I mean, of course, if we are really saved. Are you?
Abraham we last read of in chapter nineteen, verses 27 to 29. Now we find him going away toward the south again. Perhaps he felt rather proud about God’s visiting him the day before Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed and he may have been comparing himself with Lot, and thinking “I’m the one that does what God says; I’m safe!” I don’t know, but I think he wasn’t praying with all his heart to God when he went down to Gerar, because the first thing we find out is, Abraham’s gone and told that old lie about his wife again! God’s people don’t have to tell lies! When they are in trouble, even if it is their own fault, He will always help, and we don’t have to do or say more that’s wrong to get out of our troubles.
The king of that place thought if Sarah was not married, he would like to have her for his wife, but God stopped him and spoke to him in a dream at night in such a way that the king and all his servants were very much afraid. But wasn’t it too bad that Abirnelech should be able to speak to Abraham as he did at the end of the ninth verse? And Abraham too, in the thirteenth verse let out the secret that when they had left their home where they used to worship idols, he and Sarah had agreed that they should tell people they were brother and sister when they were really husband and wife, because he was afraid somebody would kill him to get Sarah for a wife. That wasn’t trusting God, was it? It surely wasn’t, but God didn’t give Abraham up for all that. He gives nobody up, who comes to Him by faith and says in his heart “I’m just bad, I deserve to go to hell, 0 let the Lord Jesus be my own Saviour.”
Now we’ll go on to the twenty-first chapter. “And the Lord visited Sarah as He had said, and the Lord did unto Sarah as He had spoken, at the set time of which God had spoken to him”. So at last the little boy baby, Isaac, came to live at Abraham’s and Sarah’s home. How happy they must have been and so much the more because they had had to wait so long for him. Older folks than you, perhaps (only I don’t know how old you are), have found many a time that God answers prayers, God does what He says He will, and not just in Bible stories, but in our own lives right now, today. A Christian man said to me one day a few years ago when he was feeling sad and lonely, and thought. God wasn’t caring about him very much: “Do you think God answers prayers?” And because I have had so many, many answers to my own prayers, I answered just as quickly as I could “Ask me instead if God ever doesn’t answer prayer!” I just love to read those words at the beginning of chapter 21: “And the Lord visited Sarah as He had said, and the Lord did unto Sarah as He had spoken”. Our bad ways and cold hearts may make- Him slower than He wants to be to give us answers to our prayers, but depend upon it, if we take our cares to Him and ask to be taken care of, to be given what is good for us, He will answer us, and we shall know without His saying a word, that God has answered us.
But when Isaac came, Ishmael had to go. Sarah rightly said that the son of the bondwoman could not be heir along with her son. Abraham found it very hard to say to Hagar that she had to go, but God told him Sarah was right, for “in. Isaac shall thy seed be called.” So early the very next morning as I suppose it was, after God spoke to him, Abraham gave a lot of bread and water to Hagar and she went away with her boy and wandered in the wilderness to the south. By and bye the water was all gone, and Ishmael was dying from thirst, and Hagar put him in the little shade that a bush gave and went quite a distance away from him and sat down and cried very sadly. Poor Hagar! sent away from the place that had been home so long, with no husband to care for and protect her and the fourteen-year old boy, lost in the wilderness and apparently no one cared! But as the angel of the Lord had found the mother before (chapter 16:7) when she was hopeless and helpless in the wilderness not very far from this place she was now in, so now we read that “God heard the voice of the lad” (verse 17). Isn’t that encouraging to us? Notice it doesn’t say ‘He heard the sound of the mother’s crying, though of course He did, but that boy Ishmael,— I wonder if he was praying to God as he lay there apparently soon to die? There came a time while the Lord Jesus was on earth when mothers brought their children, and little ones too, to Him, and the disciples roughly said to them, O take your children away; Jesus hasn’t any time for any but grown folks, but the Lord not only rebuked his disciples but said, “of such” (little children, and grown folks who would trust Him like them) “is the kingdom of heaven” and took them up in His arms and blessed them.
So the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven and told her “Fear not, for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is.” And God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water and got the water her boy needed so badly. “And God was with him” the twentieth verse says. He must have learned at home about God, don’t you think? I do; Ishmael I think had trusted God for salvation.
The next thing we read is that King Abimelech of Gerar, about whom we read in the twentieth chapter, came over to see Abraham from the land of the Philistines with Phichol, the general of his army. But not to complain this time! No, it was to ask Abraham to promise not to do him harm, that Abimelech came to God’s servant, because he saw, as verse 22 tells us he said, that God was with Abraham in all that he did. That’s what comes of those that are saved earnestly trying to please God.
Messages of God’s Love 4/24/1921