I’ve been thinking a lot about Abraham lately. Abraham is rightly considered a giant in faith, but when I read the story of his journey, I find that there were times, especially in the early years after God called him, when Abraham’s faith seemed to go missing. When he began his journey he was not consistent; he needed to grow. In other words, when Abraham started out he was a lot like me.
Before God changed his name, Abraham was named Abram, and the twelfth chapter of Genesis records God’s call and promise to him:
The LORD had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:1-3).
Abram obeyed. He packed his bags and traveled south from Harran, where he’d been living, along with his wife Sarai (the future Sarah) and his nephew Lot. He traveled to the land God showed him and then walked through it from north to south. This is exactly the right beginning; God commanded and Abram obeyed. But then what happened?
Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe (Genesis 12:10).
This, suddenly, doesn’t sound much like faith. God had promised to give him the land of Canaan, but Abram apparently didn’t believe that God would continue to provide when the food got scarce. He had obeyed, but it seems he had done so without genuine trust. And also, it seems, without much prayer. Genesis tells us that while Abram was walking through the land, he built an altar to call on God at a spot between the towns of Bethel and Ai (Genesis 12:8). When the test came, however, it doesn’t appear that he thought to pray for either help or guidance.
In other words, although Abram obeyed God’s command to leave Harran and follow him to Canaan, once he got to Canaan, Abram did not trust God to accomplish the very purpose for which he had led him there. Abram saw that the situation had changed, but he failed to ask God whether his instructions had also changed. He simply followed his own judgment instead.
This is an important lesson, and one that can be too easily skipped over, with the result that I, too, sometimes act the same way. I try to do the things I believe God has called me to do in my own understanding and my own strength, instead of trusting in God’s provision. Just like Abram did.
But then things got much worse:
As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know what a beautiful woman you are. When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me but will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you” (Genesis 12:11-13).
Because Abram did not seek God’s will before going to Egypt, he had no assurance that God would protect him there. He believed, therefore, that he had to take matters into his own hands, even at the cost of his wife’s honor. And Sarai was indeed taken into Pharaoh’s harem until God compelled Pharaoh to let her go. You can read the whole, sordid story in Genesis 12:14-20.
As I said at the beginning, Abraham will later be commended for his faith. What we see in this story, however is something quite different: obedience without faith. We see Abram obey – he left his home and his family and went where God sent him – but without trusting God to protect and provide for him.
But the really interesting, and somewhat disturbing, point I see is this story is that Abram’s plan seems, at least superficially, to have worked. Abram was treated well by Pharaoh, and he gained a considerable amount of wealth. But the cost was that he turned his wife, the woman who would be the mother of the great nation God had promised, into a prostitute. Instead of acting like Sarai’s husband, he became her pimp.
Now, I said that Abram obeyed God, and I meant it. But to understand how I can say that, we need to step outside of our own time and culture. In particular, we need to set aside most of what we know about God; not because it’s wrong, but because most of what we understand now had not been revealed to Abram.
If you ask nearly anybody in America what God is like, they’ll tell you that he is all powerful, all knowing, and all good, that he exists everywhere, and that he wants people to live in a way that is morally good. Even those who don’t believe in God know this much about the God they don’t believe in. We understand these things because we live in a culture that has been profoundly influenced by Christianity for the past 2,000 years. But the world Abram lived in was very different.
We have to remember that Abram had never read any part of the Bible. It hadn’t been written yet. All he knew of God was what had been revealed to him directly. But he had grown up immersed in the pagan cultures of the ancient Near East. And in that world, there were thought to be many gods, none of whom was either all-knowing or all-powerful. Those pagan gods were believed to have their own territories, and didn’t pay much attention to things happening elsewhere. And although people did have an idea of right and wrong (even if it didn’t fully match our ideas), this was a human matter, and not something the gods cared all that much about. That’s why I don’t think we can call Abram’s behavior in Egypt disobedient when he told Sarai to lie about their relationship, even though it was wrong. He would have known it was immoral, but he could not have known that God condemned immoral behavior. This is a tricky concept, so read that last sentence again if you need to. What Abram did was wrong, and he knew it was wrong, but that’s not the same as knowingly disobeying God. Just as a modern atheist might know that stealing is wrong without believing that God has commanded people not to steal, so Abram did not recognize that the moral law he was violating had come from God. It was not until the time of Moses, hundreds of years later, that this part of God’s nature was revealed.
Nevertheless, Abram clearly sinned by dishonoring his wife. Rather than protect her, he gave her up to Pharaoh with a lie. And in so doing, he showed that he did not trust God to either provide for him or to protect him. There’s no question that Abram was in the wrong here. And yet, even though he did not have the faith to trust either God’s provision or his protection, Abram had not disobeyed anything God had told him to do. In particular, he had obeyed God’s command to leave Harran and go “to the land I will show you” (Genesis 12:1).
And there’s something else I notice in this account, another clue to Abram’s thinking. We’re told in Scripture that he built an altar and prayed to God while he was walking for the first time through the land God showed him (Genesis 12:8), and then again after leaving Egypt (Genesis 13:3-4). However, there’s no indication that Abram ever prayed while he was in Egypt. That’s significant, because the pagan gods of the ancient Near East were often thought to have territories. Scripture shows Abram behaving as if that’s his belief as well. He only prays when he’s in God’s land; he has no faith that God will protect him when he’s in Egypt.
But God was watching out for Abram in Egypt, even when Abram was not aware of it. Not only did God protect Abram, he brought him out much wealthier than he had gone in. Abram might or might not have recognized the hand of God in this – it happened by providence, not miracle. But I think that when Moses wrote Genesis, he expected his readers, and us, to understand what had really happened. Protection and provision, the two things Abram did not trust God to do, God did.
Abram’s obedience was, as I said, obedience without faith. It was religion as transaction. Rather than seeking relationship, Abram was simply following the rules, even if the rules he understood were not the same ones that we understand today. He would eventually come to believe that God really was going do what he had promised (Genesis 15:6), but he had not arrived there yet. And yet, God protected and provided for Abram. He showed his faithfulness in taking care of a man who, at that point, clearly did not trust him. Many centuries later, Paul would rightly point to Abraham as a model of the righteousness that comes by faith (Romans 4:1-25). But what we see in Genesis is that Abraham’s faith was a response to God’s prior faithfulness. Even before he believed, God was faithful. For us as well, faith is not a way for us to take the initiative to obtain a blessing from God, it is our response to God taking the initiative to bless us when we have done nothing to deserve it.
So the sequence we see is, first, God took the initiative: he called Abram to follow him a new land, and promised both to bless him and to make him a blessing to others. Abram didn’t understand very much, but what he understood, he obeyed. And where he lacked faith, God was nevertheless faithful. Abram’s faith, the faith that is an example to us, developed as he saw the faithfulness of God.
And there’s a lesson for us here too, about the relationship between faith and obedience. If you’re like me, it’s far too easy to think, “if only I had stronger faith, I would have no trouble obeying what I believe God is calling me to do.” But in this example, we see that obedience came first. Faith came later, as Abram walked with God and learned that he is faithful. If Abram had not obeyed, if he had stayed in Harran, God would still have been faithful (2 Timothy 2:13), but Abram would not have been in a position to see it.
Now, I have been calling this obedience without faith, but that’s not entirely accurate. To obey at all, Abram had to have some faith. His actions, however, show that his faith at the beginning was neither consistent nor especially strong. But if the famine proved that his faith was weak, the very weakness, that he displayed when he went to Egypt was the means God used to show himself faithful.
God didn’t put this story in the Bible for no reason; it’s an example to us, and an encouragement. The way for me to build my faith is to obey whatever God is telling me to do, even if I only know a tiny bit. Abram didn’t know everything God wanted, but he obeyed the one thing he knew God had commanded. And as he obeyed, and as he gradually saw more clearly who God really is, his faith grew. Our obedience will not change God’s faithfulness. That remains, whether we obey him or not. But obedience puts us in the right place to see God’s faithfulness, to benefit from it, and to learn to trust him.
Ephesians 2:10 says:
For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
If you start seeking to know what God has created you to do, don’t be surprised if he only lets you see one step. That’s actually pretty common. Take that step. Obey what you know, even if you don’t know very much. And let God show you his faithfulness.