Introduction

Today we’re starting a new sermon series called Epic Meltdown. Over the coming weeks, I want to look at the darker side of the lives of biblical heroes. Why? Because it reminds us that even when we mess up, God stays faithful, and also that our imperfections show God’s power.

Also, just a quick note: During his life, Abram’s name changes to Abraham, and his wife Sarai becomes Sarah. To avoid confusion, I’ll use their later names, except where I’m directly quoting scripture.

Today, Abraham is respected in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, but when God first called him, he wasn’t a towering figure of faith. He was just an ordinary person. He was a pagan from Babylonia, whose family had settled in Haran, in what is now southeastern Turkey. God called Abraham to leave his nation and his father’s household and go to a new place, which turned out to be Canaan, the land that would later become Israel.

His story starts with God’s promise in Genesis 12:1-3:

¹ The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. 

² “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. ³
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, NIV).

For many young people today, leaving home for an unknown place can sound like an adventure. But for Abraham, it was a life-or-death risk. In the ancient world, your family and relatives were your main source of safety. Without them, you were at risk of being mistreated.

But God promised Abraham that he would become a great nation, which meant he would have a son. None of the pagan gods Abraham had known had given him that hope, so he trusted this unknown god enough to take the risk, hoping for the reward. But Abraham’s trust in God wasn’t perfect.

So I want to look at what happened when Abraham began to doubt that God would keep his promises. Even though God was gracious to him, the story shows that Abraham’s mistakes had real consequences for his family.

I. Fleeing a Famine

While Abraham’s story starts promisingly—He follows God’s call to move to Canaan—Soon after he arrives, his faith is further tested by a famine. Abraham has to decide what to do next, and his choice sets off a series of events he never expected.

¹⁰ 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. ¹¹ As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know what a beautiful woman you are. ¹² When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me but will let you live. ¹³ Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.” 

¹⁴ When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that Sarai was a very beautiful woman. ¹⁵ And when Pharaoh’s officials saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and she was taken into his palace. ¹⁶ He treated Abram well for her sake, and Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, male and female servants, and camels. 

¹⁷ But the Lord inflicted serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household because of Abram’s wife Sarai. ¹⁸ So Pharaoh summoned Abram. “What have you done to me?” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me she was your wife? ¹⁹ Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her to be my wife? Now then, here is your wife. Take her and go!” ²⁰ Then Pharaoh gave orders about Abram to his men, and they sent him on his way, with his wife and everything he had (Genesis 12:10–20, NIV).

God told Abraham to go to Canaan, but he said nothing about seeking refuge in Egypt. It seems that Abraham didn’t have enough faith to believe God could provide for him during the famine.

His instructions to Sarah as they entered Egypt also reveal a lack of trust. He sees mortal danger in his situation, but he doesn’t see trusting God as the solution. So, he takes matters into his own hands.

Abraham also let Sarah down in a big way. In his culture, as the head of the household, he was supposed to protect those under his care, even if it meant risking his own safety. Instead, he put Sarah in an impossible position to save himself. This story makes Abraham look bad to us, but in a patriarchal culture, his actions would have seemed inexcusable.

By claiming to be Sarah’s brother—a deliberately misleading half-truth—Abraham put himself in a position to profit from his lie. He treated Sarah like property, trading her for livestock and slaves and, in his own imagination, for personal safety. Imagine how awkward that must have been when Abraham and Sarah were reunited.

This story happens right after God promised to make Abraham into a great nation. At the core of Abraham’s actions is a lack of trust in God’s ability (or willingness) to fulfill his promises. God’s promise included protecting Abraham and helping him become a father, but Abraham didn’t trust God enough to let God handle it. Instead, he tried to control things himself.

God still protects and even blesses Abraham in this situation, but there are still consequences. It’s hard to imagine this helped his marriage. During all of this, Abraham also acquires a slave woman from Egypt named Hagar. Who will become a point of friction between them later on. This brings us to Abraham’s second major mistake.

II. Scheming for a Son

A. Sarah’s Plan

I’m talking, of course, about the incident where Abraham took Hagar as a concubine.

¹ Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; ² so she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.” 

Abram agreed to what Sarai said. ³ So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. ⁴ He slept with Hagar, and she conceived. 

When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. ⁵ Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.” 

⁶ “Your slave is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her (Genesis 16:1–6, NIV).

The idea of Sarah giving her slave to Abraham to have children is hard for us to understand today. What wife would suggest something like that? To make sense of it, we need to look at the cultural background.

Children were an essential part of the social safety net in Abraham’s time. When you got too old to support yourself, there were no pensions or government-funded healthcare. The expectation was that your kids, especially your sons, would look after you.

And it’s not just Abraham whose future was at risk if no son was born. He had an extensive network of relatives (like Lot) and slaves whose futures were uncertain. Since he lacked an heir, he planned to adopt Eliezer of Damascus, one of his slaves, as a son. It would be Eliezer’s job to look after Abraham in his old age and take over the household after Abraham died.

This isn’t an ideal solution. Eliezer might take the money (or herds) and run after Abraham passes away. He certainly won’t have bonds of family loyalty to the household that a son would have.

The couple’s childlessness was especially hard on Sarah. Because women weren’t empowered to pursue success and recognition outside the home, they found self-worth in raising children. so childlessness left them without a sense of accomplishment to buoy their self-esteem. Because childless wives couldn’t fulfill the expectations of their culture, they felt deep shame.

Sarah’s idea was for Abraham to take Hagar, her slave, as a concubine. As the legal wife, Sarah could lay claim to any children produced by that relationship.

B. The Plan Goes Awry

In theory, it seemed like a neat and tidy solution to the problem (at least for that cultural context). But in execution, it proved more fraught than Sarah had imagined.

Hagar’s anger at Sarah is understandable: Sarah plans to take her baby. Rather than passively accepting her lot, as she was expected to do, Hagar seems to have weaponized Sarah’s insecurities. “Only one of us can have babies. Guess who that is?”

Because this arrangement was a somewhat common practice, there are expectations about how it should work: Abraham would be expected to protect Hagar and her child in the event that his legal wife becomes jealous. But rather than sticking up for Hagar, Abraham puts her in Sarah’s hands. Sarah mistreats her until she finally runs away. The angel of God finds Hagar and persuades her to return, promising that her son will have a significant future. She returns and submits to Sarah, but the problem resurfaces after Isaac is born to Sarah. Then Ismael and Hagar are cast out, and once again, Abraham fails in his responsibility to protect.

All of this drama could have been avoided. If Abraham had trusted God, he wouldn’t have gone to Egypt or ended up with Hagar. Even after that mistake, he could have learned to trust God’s promise to give him a son. When Sarah suggested he take Hagar, he could have refused and waited for God’s timing. Because he didn’t, his family was deeply hurt.

The favouritism among Abraham’s sons affected later generations too. Isaac and Rebecca had favourites, which caused a big divide between Jacob and Esau. Jacob also played favourites, leading to conflict between Joseph and his brothers. If Abraham had trusted God’s promises, he might have saved his family from a lot of pain down the road.

III. Bailing on Belief (Application)

As we think about what these stories mean for us, we have to admit that the particulars aren’t very relevant. I doubt any of us will pretend our spouse is our sibling. And if you ever think about taking a slave as a concubine…I don’t know what to say. But even though our situations are different, we can relate to the temptations behind these stories.

There are two main problems here. First, Abraham’s lack of trust in God led him to make choices that hurt others in order to get what God had already promised. Second, even after God proved himself, Abraham was slow to learn from it.

A. Not Trusting God’s Promises

God’s promise to Abraham had a single condition: if you go, I will make you a great nation. Once Abraham had done his part by going to the land of Canaan, he should have trusted God to do his part. But it seems that when the famine hit, Abraham worried that God might not be able to make good on his end of the bargain.

Abraham was confronted with a choice: Do I trust God to keep his word, or do I take action to protect myself in case God isn’t able to do it for me? God had asked Abraham to take a leap of faith by coming to the land. But when Abraham passed the test, God acted to stretch Abraham’s faith further, a necessary step for his faith to continue to grow.

God isn’t trying to make Abraham squirm. He’s doing what good teachers always do: pushing their students beyond their comfort zone. Once the students have mastered a skill, a good teacher will increase the difficulty. That’s how someone transitions from basic arithmetic to calculus. Abraham passed the first test, so to keep him learning, God increased the difficulty. “You’ve trusted me so far. Can you trust me when the stakes are higher?”

We can celebrate the faith Abraham showed when he left his home in Ur and travelled to Canaan, while recognizing that he still had much to learn about trusting God? Like Abraham, we have been given promises by God and God is always calling us into a deeper experience of those promises. God invites us to leave behind the place we know (in our case, the world), and to make the journey to the promised land (the kingdom of God).

But, as with Abraham, this is just the first step on a lifelong journey of faith. When we are faithful, and God ups the ante, how do we understand the heightened pressure? Do we buckle, thinking our problems are too great for God, Or Do we give thanks to God for leading us into a deeper dependence on him? When the pressure in our lives increases, can we continue to trust God’s promises? For example:

• Jesus tells us that when we seek God’s kingdom above all, he will faithfully provide for our material needs (Mt.6:31-33). Do we take him at his word, or do we take ethical shortcuts to secure the things we think we need?
• Paul invites us to trust that God can bring to completion the good work he has begun in our lives (Phil. 1:6). So do we hope to grow into transformed people, or do we settle for a life of spiritual immaturity?

It’s easy to talk about these ideas in theory, but it’s much harder when we face them in real life. When I was twenty-three, I found myself working as a temp at a factory in the months before I planned to move to Hungary to be a missionary. After I had been there for 3 months, I was eligible to get hired by the factory, which would mean an $8/hr pay bump. The extra money would represent a nice chunk of cash in my bank account before I moved overseas.

But I knew that if they hired me, I have to quit just six weeks later Would neglecting to tell them that in advance compromise my integrity? The night before I had my scheduled job interview I was reading a devotional about the problems Jacob caused when he tried to make God’s promises happen on his own (like grandfather, like grandson). His attempts to grasp what God had promised strained his relationships.

I had to ask myself, did I trust God enough that I could be honest, or was it worth misleading my employer to make an extra $2000?

In the end, I chose to tell my supervisor the truth. He thought it was great that I was going to be a missionary, but he couldn’t hire me full-time for just six weeks. So it cost me some money. But it wasn’t really about the money—it was about the promise. Could I trust God to take care of me when my income depended on others’ generosity? Or would I treat my employer in a way I wouldn’t want to be treated, to grasp what God had promised to give me anyway? Trusting God may involve painful sacrifices, but in the end it leads to real life and peace.

Imagine how Abraham’s life might have turned out if he had stayed in Canaan or at least asked God what to do when the famine struck. Based on Sarah’s insecurity in later stories, I think Abraham’s actions left her feeling neglected and hurt. There’s that old truism, “Happy wife, happy life.” We don’t know exactly what Sarah was like, but she comes across as harsh in the story, but maybe that’s a response to Abraham’s betrayal. Even if the text doesn’t say it in so many words, it’s likely their marriage was damaged by Abraham’s choices.

B. Not Learning From Experience

Now, we shouldn’t be too hard on Abraham. He was new to following God, and he didn’t have forebears in the faith who could vouch for God’s dependability. Even though God is faithful, Abraham didn’t have enough experience to know that yet. So it makes sense that he made mistakes. Did he learn from them the next time? Yeah, not so much.

In Genesis chapter 20, Abraham goes to live for a time in Gerar, a Philistine town. And because it worked out so well last time, he decides to break out the “tell ‘em we’re siblings” routine again. I wonder why Sarah didn’t say, “Abe, honey, I’m ninety years old. I’m not so sure that at my age, my looks will drive them mad with desire.” But the ruler, Abimelek, (who apparently has a thing for mature ladies) takes her into his harem. This time, God appears to him and tells him what’s going on, and once again, Sarah is promptly returned.

The stories are so similar that many scholars think they’re two accounts of the same event, but I think the point is that even when God shows himself faithful, Abraham is slow to learn the lesson. Just like we sometimes are.

When God shows us his faithfulness, we must choose to take that lesson to heart. Maybe in the past, you worried that taking a lower-paying job would mean financial trouble, but God provided for you. Or maybe you were afraid to step into a new ministry, but God gave you the strength you needed. Throughout the Old Testament, God reminds the Israelites of his past faithfulness, saying things like, “I am the Lord, your God who brought you out up out of slavery in Egypt…” Celebrations like Passover, Pentecost, Easter, Christmas, and Communion are all meant to help us remember how God has been faithful. When we look back on what God has done, it helps us trust him for the future.

But Abraham’s story reminds us that if we don’t celebrate what God has done, we might keep making the same mistakes. God stays faithful even when we forget, but as Abraham’s example shows us, failure leaves us dealing with the consequences of our own making And because he loves us, God wants to see us avoid them.

Conclusion

What’s really remarkable about Abraham’s story isn’t how much he got right, but that God refused to give up on him. Abraham lied. He endangered his wife. He tried to do for himself what only God could. And he repeated his mistakes. Yet God stayed committed to him, calling him into deeper trust. And eventually he ‘got it.’ The man who had fled Canaan, fearing a famine, would later freely place his beloved son Isaac into God’s hands because he had learned that God could be trusted.

Abraham didn’t become a great man by never failing. He became great because, over the years, he learned that God’s faithfulness was greater than his fear. So his example can be an encouragement to those of us still in that learning phase.

Some of us are facing our own famines. It might be financial uncertainty, a health concern, a strained relationship, or not knowing what comes next. In times like that, we’re naturally tempted to ask, “How can I protect myself?” But maybe it would be better to start by asking, “What has God promised me, and what would it look like to trust him today?” Faith doesn’t require us to believe everything will turn out the way we want. Instead, it’s when I acknowledge that even when things go in a direction I don’t want, God remains faithful.

So before you make that next decision, before you compromise your integrity, before you sacrifice your relationships to protect yourself, stop and ask yourself: “Am I acting out of trust, or out of fear?” Because every day we’re given the same choice as Abraham. Will we try to build our future with our own schemes, or will we give it to God, who keeps his promises?

It isn’t easy, but there’s good news. Even though we often fail the test, Jesus has succeeded. Jesus chose to trust the Father, even when that meant dying on a cross. He gave himself entirely to the Father’s will, and through his faithfulness, God’s promise to bless all nations through Abraham was finally fulfilled. So our hope isn’t in the strength of our faith, but in the faithfulness of our God.

And let’s remember that while genuine trust starts inside, it always expresses itself in action. So let’s resolve to act. Maybe taking one small, practical step of trust is all you can manage this week; that’s OK. We shouldn’t despise humble beginnings. They’re a necessary first step of a long journey of walking with God.

And though the journey lasts a lifetime, when it’s complete, we’ll find that our hope was well founded. Because the good work that God started in us will finally come to completion on the day of Christ Jesus.