Sarai got into big trouble by agreeing to lie about who she was, and now she is a captive of the Pharaoh but God has special plans for her life so He does something pretty amazing to save her. We will also be talking about the importance of ethics in the Bible and in our real lives.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel. (Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible modified a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context).
When Abram entered Egypt (to escape the famine in Canaan), the Egyptians saw that Sarai was very beautiful. Pharaoh’s officials saw her and told Pharaoh how amazing she was, and so Sarai was taken away to Pharaoh’s household! (Thinking that she was unmarried and that Abram was her brother) Pharoah treated Abram well because of her, and he gave Abram flocks and herds, male and female donkeys, male and female slaves, and camels. But the Lord struck Pharaoh and his household with terrible plagues because of Abram’s wife, Sarai. So, Pharaoh sent for Abram and said, “What have you done to me? Why didn’t you tell me she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She’s my sister,’ so that I took her as my wife? Now, here is your wife. Take her and get out of Egypt!” Then Pharaoh gave his men orders about him (so they would let him leave), and they sent him away with his wife and everything he came to Egypt with as well as everything that Pharaoh had given him. (Gen 12:14-20)
This was a scary time for Sarai, Abram’s wife. Let’s just think of what all this was like for her. Last week, we saw that Abram had asked her to pretend like she was not his wife, but just his sister. Abram was terrified that when they saw her that they would want to marry her so bad that they would just kill him and take her. He had this idea (that turned out to be true) that if they wanted her for a wife that badly that they would be able to take her anyway, so there was no need for him to die and plus, they would pay him a big bride price for her. That’s how things worked during the time of Abram. If a man wanted a particular woman for a wife, or if his parents wanted her for a daughter in law, then they would talk to her father and come up with an amount of money and/or land and animals that they were willing to pay for her. And they would make an agreement. Her father or brother or uncle, depending on who was taking care of her, would get money and there would be a covenant between the families—a legal agreement between themselves and their gods—and then they would get married. I know, it is a lot different than what we do now, right? Well, not entirely. The covenant they would make between the families was 100% as legal as getting a marriage license today. And if her husband divorced her and sent her away, he had to send her away with a lot of money. Someone who was poor couldn’t usually afford to get divorced!
As they entered Egypt, Sarai must have been pretty scared and would have tried not to be seen. But when they entered the borders of the land and they met Pharaoh’s officers, the people who ran things for him, they must have caught sight of her and they obviously thought that she was incredibly beautiful and, according to Abram, unmarried. I guess that word got out pretty quick and when you are the king of the most powerful nation in the world, you can have whoever you want for a wife and when there is a beautiful unmarried woman walking around out there and everyone is talking about her, that is exactly who Pharaoh is going to want to add to his wives. In the ancient world, kings would have more than one wife for a lot of reasons. Most wives gave them alliances with other countries, which means that they wouldn’t attack each other because the king of a smaller country would give his daughter to the more powerful king and they would become relatives. But sometimes, like Solomon and Ahasuerus, they just wanted all the beautiful women for themselves. And they could have hundreds of wives. And think about how many kids they would have!!! They wouldn’t even know all of their kids! But for them, it was all about being powerful and having a lot of stuff and making everyone really impressed and jealous.
But Sarai would have been worried. She really was Abram’s wife and had been for almost all of her life. But she couldn’t have any babies. And she probably couldn’t speak Egyptian either since she was originally from Ur. The officers probably would have just taken her so that Pharaoh could see her and she probably figured that this was the last time that she would ever see her family. Pharaoh must have been very impressed with how beautiful she was because he paid a lot of money for her—although you know that they didn’t usually do things with money in those days. Instead, what he gave Abram was better than money. The Bible says that Pharaoh gave him flocks (which means sheep and goats) and herds (which means cows and bulls), donkeys (which were very useful for riding and carrying things), slaves, and camels (which was like giving someone a whole bunch of fancy cars). And, if God didn’t love Sarai very much and if He didn’t have amazing plans for her, she might have been in Egypt forever. But you know what? We’re going to see that God does love women just as much as He loves men—even though the men didn’t believe that was true in the ancient world. And God has no plans to leave Sarai in the household of Pharaoh.
What Sarai is going through is just terrible, but God isn’t being treated very well either. God made Abram a lot of amazing promises and Abram trusted God enough to leave his family and his land and to follow wherever God lead him—but somehow Abram thinks that the Egyptians are more powerful than God. He is acting like the Egyptians can kill him if they want to and that God can’t do anything about it. But we all know something that Abram doesn’t—that all the kings and soldiers and gods of Egypt are nothing compared to our God. They can’t lay a finger on Abram if God wants to keep him alive. But Abram doesn’t know God well enough yet to trust Him with his life. Abram doesn’t trust God enough to deal with the famine or with his fear of dying. Now, does God send a lightning bolt and kill Abram? Nope. God is very patient and understanding because He knows that we are pretty much messed up and that we have to learn to love and trust Him, and that it isn’t just something we can snap our fingers and do. Abram had grown up with gods all his life who couldn’t be trusted at all and it is going to take a long time for God to show Abram how entirely different He is. Next week, we’ll talk about how this could have all been different if Abram had trusted God more and how we should pray when we are scared.
I know all this can be frustrating and make us really mad, because back then they were really irritating about how they thought about women, and how they had slaves and all that—but we have to think about the fact that God saw all this going on and knew He had to do something to change it. God wouldn’t have bothered if He liked the way that Abram did things. There were things about Abram that He liked and other things that He didn’t like, but He knew that He was going to have to change one man before He could start changing the world. So, you know what? It’s okay if there are things about Abram that we do and don’t like. We have to remember that he grew up in a terrible place at a terrible time and what was normal to him is really messed up to us. We can love Abram anyway, and respect how faithful he was to God, overall, and how he changed and even more than that, we can be amazed at how faithful God was to Abram and how understanding He must be. And how God rescues Abram and Sarai over and over again when they make the mistake of not trusting Him. This is one of those times.
Now, we don’t have any details, but at some point after Pharaoh took Sarai and he paid Abram for her, God sent plagues on Pharaoh and all his household! Do you know what a plague is? In Exodus, God sent ten plagues on Egypt when Pharaoh was holding the children of Israel as slaves—awful things like houses full of frogs, and painful sores on their bodies, and a river full of blood—all to let Pharaoh know that his puny gods couldn’t protect him and that God was serious about Pharaoh letting all his slaves go. And the plagues hurt everyone because they were all benefiting from the Israelites being enslaved. Egypt was becoming more and more powerful because of slavery. And so, when God liberated the slaves, everyone had to know how wrong it was. And everyone needed to know that our God is a god who rescues people. That’s what the book of Exodus is all about—and that’s what Jesus is all about too!
So, all of a sudden there is outright chaos in the palace of Pharaoh. And that’s what plagues were always about in the Bible. When things go crazy and there is nothing we can do to fix them, that’s called chaos. Pharaoh couldn’t make things better, and neither could his priests nor his gods. Everything was going haywire and Pharaoh had to figure out why. And evidently, whatever he did, worked. Somehow, Pharaoh figured out that Sarai wasn’t just Abram’s sister after all—she was his wife! And Pharaoh sent for Abram and called him to the palace. And he yelled at Abram. I am sure he was very angry. Pharaoh wasn’t used to being lied to—usually, no one dared because they thought he was a living god. It was very disrespectful and insulting. Of all people, a foreigner and a shepherd who made a living herding animals (they didn’t like shepherds in Egypt)—tricked him and had even been rewarded with sheep and goats and cows and camels and even with slaves. Pharaoh looked very foolish in front of everyone.
He yelled, “What have you done to me? Why didn’t you tell me she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She’s my sister,’ so that I took her as my wife? Now, here is your wife. Take her and get out of Egypt!” And you know what? Abram doesn’t say anything to Pharaoh. Maybe Abram realized that he had no excuse for what he did. Maybe he was just relieved that Pharaoh wasn’t going to strike him dead. Maybe he was laughing to himself that because God protected him, he was escaping with his wife and with everything he had plus all that Pharaoh had given him. He was an incredibly rich man now. But what the Bible is really telling us is that, right now, Pharaoh (an idol worshiper) is more righteous than Abram is. Yes, he took Sarai but in those days a king would have seen nothing wrong with that. He made sure that she wasn’t already married, which was good. He gave Abram a lot of money for her, so in his own eyes he hadn’t stolen her or treated Abram unfairly. He was following the rules of the ancient world and was acting honorably. Really, from his point of view, he did everything right. He was honest. He didn’t steal her. And when he figured out that he had accidentally done wrong, he gave her back and let Abram keep everything he had given him. God punished Pharaoh, but only so that he would release Sarai. Pharaoh knew he had done something wrong and so he figured out what it was and fixed it. This Pharaoh is nothing like the ones that we will meet in Exodus!
So, Abram and Sarai left Egypt with everything they had been given by Pharaoh. And Pharaoh told his officers to make sure that they left. Pharaoh was smart enough to know that if his household got into that much trouble for just taking her as his wife, that way worse would definitely happen to him if he killed them. Pharaoh comes out of this looking a lot better than Abram, and that’s on purpose. Sometimes, Abram is a hero and a good example to us but not this time!
We might ask ourselves, why didn’t Abram just tell the truth? Well, if you have gone through my Honor and Shame curriculum, you know the answer to that. In a culture like Abram lived in, people had two sets of rules for when to tell the truth and when to lie. But remember, there were no Ten Commandments yet. God is still just taking baby steps with Abram. In an honor/shame culture, where people are more concerned with their reputations and their status than behaving themselves and acting virtuously, they believed that only people in their family deserved to be told the truth and that it was honorable and clever and okay to lie to everyone else and to trick them. The Bible tells us that this isn’t ever okay, that we need to be honest because we shame God when people figure out that they can’t trust us. Abram lied because he was scared of dying and because he knew that things would go really well with him if someone else wanted to marry Sarai. So, he didn’t see anything wrong with lying to an Egyptian just so long as good things happened for him as a result. Things were a lot different before Jesus, never forget that. Wouldn’t it be just terrible knowing that you couldn’t trust anyone? Ugh.
But this brings up an important question that people have been asking forever. Is it ever okay to lie or is it always wrong? And that’s a question that can seem really easy until we start asking the hard questions. There are going to be situations where it is always wrong to lie—like when we have done something wrong and just don’t want to get into trouble. Cheating on a test is another form of lying and that’s wrong too. When we lie so that we won’t have to face the consequences of our bad actions or so that someone else will suffer instead or to trick someone so that we will get good things that we haven’t earned, that’s always wrong. Almost all of the lies we tell are totally wrong. But what about the Christians during World War II who hid Jewish people from the Nazis who wanted to torture and kill them? Would it have been okay for them, when the Nazis came to their door and asked if there were any Jews there, for the Christians to tell the truth and to let them die? That’s a much harder question to answer. Asking those kinds of questions is what ethics is all about. The study of ethics is about how we figure out what is good and what is bad in a specific situation. Ethics is about being wise instead of being foolish. A wise person knows when they have to act in such a way as to protect someone who is innocent from someone who is evil. But they also know that protecting someone who is guilty is wrong.
Life isn’t easy, it’s very complicated. I think we would all feel very differently about what Abram had done if he had lied to protect her and not himself. But whenever we lie to protect ourselves, in such a way that it hurts someone else, we kinda have to ask ourselves why we think we are more important than the person who is getting hurt to keep us safe, right? That’s hard when we are really scared, but part of learning to love other people is about their lives being important to us and even more important than our own lives. There are people out there who don’t see anything wrong with someone else going to jail for a crime they didn’t even commit, rather than being punished for their crimes. They let that happen because they don’t love others as themselves—they love themselves so much that they don’t care what happens to anyone else. But God tells us in Lev 19:18 that we must love our neighbors as ourselves and Jesus says that our neighbors are everyone!
Because of this, a lie that will hurt someone who is innocent, in any way, is always going to be wrong. We can’t let other people suffer for the bad things that we do. And I know people say, “It’s no big deal,” but it is always a big deal when we get in trouble for something that someone else does so that means it is always a big deal when someone else gets in trouble for something that we or someone we like has done. That’s what loving your neighbor as yourself means—if anything would be horrible for you if it happened, then you can’t do it to someone else. I don’t think Abram would have liked to trade places with Sarai and to be taken by a king and have no choice in the matter! Also, no one would want to be lied to like what happened to Pharaoh. You wouldn’t want a stranger to lie to you just because they assume you can’t be trusted. But that is what Abram did—he decided that Pharaoh would do the wrong thing and he didn’t even give him the chance to do what is right. Plus, he didn’t give God the chance to protect him either. It is important for us to be truthful people. People should be able to trust us because if we say we follow and love God but we are always tricking people to protect ourselves and hurting others, then they will think terrible things about God. Jesus said that our yesses should mean yes and our noes should mean no. If honest people can’t trust us, then that’s a huge problem.
So, right now is a really low point for Abram. He looks really bad. Sarai is probably really angry at him. And he has shown that he has a weak spot—he doesn’t trust God enough to know that all those promises mean that God won’t let him die until He has kept them. But God did come through and He protected Sarai. Throughout his life, Abram will come to understand that God will protect him, Sarai, and his children as well. Many years from now, Abram will prove that he finally trusts God completely. But not today. Today he is still really scared, and when Abram is scared, he makes some really bad choices. We do too, right? We aren’t so different. And throughout the whole Bible, we will see times when prophets and priests and kings make very bad choices because they don’t really believe what God has said to them. But because God has made promises, He rescues them. That’s who He is, He is a God who rescues people. In fact, He has been trying to rescue the world since Adam and Eve got booted from the Garden. We don’t even know how often He has rescued us—and especially from our own mistakes.
Of course, Jesus is God’s ultimate rescue plan for us. And we can think of ourselves as being like Sarai, trapped in Pharaoh’s palace when we didn’t even want to be there because someone else didn’t trust God. And that’s everyone’s problem since Adam and Eve trusted the Serpent instead of God. They didn’t just get kicked out of the Garden, we were all kicked out of the Garden because if things had remained perfect, we would all be there! But we were taken captive by sin and by death, locked up and unable to escape. Instead of eating from the Tree of Life and living forever and never being hurt by anyone, we will die someday, and people will hurt us and we will hurt other people. And God could have left us like that. He could have left Sarai with Pharaoh too and gotten a new wife for Abram who could have babies. But He is a rescuer who loved Sarai and who loves us. He didn’t want us locked away in a palace of evil. He wanted us to be free. Abram is actually the first step in that direction because this is where God’s plan to save humans really begins.
Did you know that the Bible compares God to a husband and compares all of us to His wife? It doesn’t mean that He is actually our husband and we are actually His wives but it does give us a picture of how serious He is about saving us—just like He saved Sarai. Twice. But that’s a story for another day. In the Bible, a prophet named Hosea was told to marry a woman who was very sinful, and Hosea was told to be very good to her and loyal to her even though she did a lot of bad stuff to him. You see, God wanted us to look at Hosea’s relationship with his wife, as messed up as she was, and how good he was to her so that we would understand that God is absolutely that loving and patient with us. In the end, Hosea’s wife had gotten into such terrible trouble that she had to be rescued. And Hosea did rescue her, even though she didn’t deserve it. Our own Hosea is named Jesus, of course, and He never stops trying to rescue us no matter what we do. He can’t force us to love Him or to trust Him, but He is always there ready to rescue us when we finally do. You see, all Jesus wants, just like Hosea, is for us to give Him our allegiance—our absolute loyalty. He doesn’t just want us to believe that He is real because that doesn’t mean anything. What is most important is that we believe that He is who He says He is, the Son of God, and that when they killed Him, He was innocent, and that He rose from the dead because there was absolutely no sin in Him so that nasty Satan wasn’t able to keep Him dead. Because of that, He deserves our allegiance, our loyalty. He deserves to be treated like our very real King and He deserves to have us believe everything that He ever said and did, and to follow Him and to imitate His life so that we can become just like Him and stop being like that tricky serpent who was a liar.
Just as God wanted loyalty and trust from Abram and was willing to wait patiently for it, even when Abram really messed up a lot, that’s the same thing Jesus wants. He wants us to trust God entirely, and to trust Him as well because God sent Him to rescue us. When we trust Him, we begin to change more and more to be like Him and less like that Serpent. It’s a very wonderful thing.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to really think about what happens to other people when you lie, and what happens to you when other people lie. And how important it is that we trust God enough to tell the truth about the bad things we have done.