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 Abimelech should be able to speak to Abraham as he did at the end of the verse 9? And Abraham too, in verse 13 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.”