The Abrahamic Saga

Meditations on Genesis 12 and 13.

Abram deceived the Egyptians by telling them that Sarai was his sister. Sarai agreed, falling into the same sin of deception. So was Lot.

The lie continued on until they were found out. Pharaoh sharply rebuked Abram for this deception. Any person worth his salt would be humiliated with such rebuke. How is it that the heathen king had more sense than the believer?

Let this be an object lesson for all of us not to put our trust in the ways of this world. This is how sinners try to get out of sticky situations. They use deception and half truths to save their necks. Abram thought that would work for him. How wrong he was.

The redeeming part of the story was how the grace of God intervened even after the commission of the sin of deception. God, in His mercy, used the situation to eject Abram out of Egypt. Had the Lord not done this, he might have been tempted to stay there and forget the promise of God for his life. Like Peter in the Mountain of Transfiguration or the first Christians in the book of Acts before the dispersion, we humans have this propensity to forget our call whenever we start to feel comfortable with our blessings. Thankfully, God always intervenes.

The writer of the book of Hebrews wrote that Abram moved from place to place, pitching his tent from one place to another, because he was looking for a city whose architect and builder is God. Having been ordered to get out of Egypt, Abram was on the move. This time, the famine was over and he was far richer than when he first began the journey.

So the Abrahamic saga continues. In the outset, Abram’s financial situation was stable. We can now call him blessed, as promised in Genesis 12:1-3. To anyone who is looking at his life from a worldly perspective, he already got the highest height of prosperity. His nephew Lot had to separate from him because the land could not support both of their livestocks.

But God was just getting started. Up until this point, Abram didn’t have a son. Like a play director at the back of the stage, God was still preparing him for a promise that would literally blow him away, a promise that would continue for thousands of generations. But first, Abram had to go to war and learn theology from a mysterious priest-king.

The plot thickens.