Audio fixed!!! Sorry about that–I accidentally uploaded the parent teaching.
You’re not going to believe this but we’re going to have a replay of Genesis 12 where Abraham lies to Pharaoh about Sarah his wife and gets her into more trouble. How is this time the same? How is it different? And how is God going to get her out of it this time? And who is Abimelech, and who are the mysterious Philistines?
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s 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, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
We’re finally up to Genesis 20 in our Bible studies and this chapter is wedged between the story of Lot in Sodom and the birth of Isaac—finally! Just to review, back in Genesis 18, God and His angels visited Abraham at his camp in Hebron where they told him that his eighty-nine year old wife, Sarah, would be a mom in just one more year. What the heck? Were they serious? Sarah sure laughed her head off when she heard about it. But laughing or no laughing, God’s promises are God’s promises and He does whatever He says He will do. As we will see in chapter 21, Sarah absolutely will be the mom of a bouncing baby boy even if she can’t really bounce around very much anymore. With a promise like this, that Abraham and Sarah will be the parents of the promised Isaac (named by God Himself back in Genesis 17), you would think that they’d both be feeling like no one in the world can do anything to hurt them or stand in the way of baby Isaac finally being born—but if you think that you’d be very wrong. You see, Abraham is still very scared of at least one thing in the world and his fear of that thing is bigger than his trust in God. Even after all of these years, and leaving Ur and then Haran and then winning that battle against the five kings and God rescuing Sarah from the mighty Pharaoh of Egypt and speaking face to face with God disguised as a human—Abraham doesn’t trust God to save him from men who might want to kill him and take away his wife. Personally, I would have been more scared to fight the four kings and their fighting men. Especially if I was like eighty years old. What on earth am I talking about? Let’s read today’s verses and find out:
From there (where? Hebron where he camped with Mamre and his brothers) Abraham traveled to the region of the Negev and settled between Kadesh and Shur (which is on the border of Canaan and Egypt). While he was staying in Gerar, Abraham was telling everyone that his wife Sarah was actually just his sister. So, King Abimelech of Gerar had Sarah brought to him. But God came to Abimelech in a dream at night and said to him, “You’re about to die because of the woman you have taken, because she’s married.” Now Abimelech hadn’t so much as laid a finger on her, so he said, “Lord, would you destroy a nation even though it is innocent? Didn’t that man himself say to me, ‘She’s my sister’? And she herself said, ‘He’s my brother.’ I did this with a clear conscience and cleanhands.”
Oh man, Abraham, what have you done? And this isn’t even the first time because you also did this when you were in Egypt and Sarah ended up married to Pharaoh and still would be if God hadn’t rescued her! It’s not hard to imagine Moses telling this story in the wilderness to the children of Israel and they would be saying, “RU Serious???” What about God’s promises for all those years and especially since he literally just got visited by God and two angels right before he moved south. And why on earth did Abraham move south right after the destruction of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim? Last we saw of Abraham, he was watching the black smoke rising into the sky out in the direction of the cities on the plain. He had asked God over and over again to spare the people, just so long as there were good people living there. Abraham even got God to agree that he wouldn’t hurt the cities if even just ten good people were found in the entire city of Sodom. But even with Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family, there still weren’t ten people who deserved to live. Sodom was a terribly wicked city where the men were hurting any strangers who visited their city. Later in the Bible, God specifically tells His people to be kind and good to strangers and foreigners and everyone else who would be easy to hurt. But those were exactly the kinds of people that the men of Sodom would be cruel to. Imagine a city where there aren’t even ten good people! What a horrible place that would be. I can’t even imagine. And when the angels didn’t even find ten people, God knew that those cities had to be destroyed so that travelers would be safe again. When Abraham saw the smoke, he knew that the situation was even worse than he had imagined. No wonder God stopped him at ten!
Sometime over the course of the next few months, Abraham and Sarah and all of their people and critters left that place and went as far south as they could go without being in Egypt again. And if you remember from the end of Genesis 12, they aren’t ever allowed to go back after lying to Pharaoh about Sarah being married. Instead, Abraham had Sarah say that she was just his sister. And now, it’s happening all over again as though Abraham hadn’t learned anything the first time—and not only hasn’t he learned but we’ll be finding out that they always do this wherever they go for at least the last 24 years. How does Abraham think Sarah will have his son if she gets taken by another man?? When they camp out in Gerar, a land ruled over by a group of Philistines, Abraham did it all again and told everyone that Sarah was just his sister and King Abimelech heard about her and just up and took her. But this time, we don’t see Abraham getting paid anything for her or getting married or anything like that. Sarah is just flat out kidnapped this time. King Abimelech isn’t as classy a guy as that Pharaoh. He just sees something he wants and he takes it—and I am going to tell you a big secret that the Bible won’t tell us until the end of chapter 21. These people are the dreaded Philistines who will be Israel’s enemies for over a thousand years, at least until the Babylonians destroy their nation about six hundred years before Jesus is born. They do have a reputation of being bullies who take whatever they want whenever they want and they are even going to steal the Ark of the Covenant in the future. That’s not going to go well for them though…I will tell you that story someday because it is totally hilarious.
So, this is our first look at the Philistines and it isn’t exactly positive. We’ll see them again in Judges and I Samuel and the prophets too. And right now, their king has taken Sarah away. But why did he take her? Well, because he wanted to marry her but why would he want to marry a eighty-nine year old woman? Well, Abraham was a very rich man and the Philistines in Gerar were very far from home. From archaeology—from digging up the cities they once lived in thousands of years ago—we know that they were originally from south of Greece where there is an island called Crete. But because they were from an island, it meant that they were alone if something bad happened to them and they needed as many allies (friends) as they could get. Maybe the king of Gerar thought that Abraham would be honored that he was taking Abraham’s sister as a wife even though she was very old. Maybe he thought that an old woman would be thrilled to have him for a husband instead of being single. Maybe he believed that Abraham didn’t need to be asked for permission and paid a bride price. But Abimelech was wrong even by ancient standards where women were often treated pretty badly. Remember, this was the world that God decided to change—not a world that God approves of or wants us to live in. When you read these stories, it is important not to believe that God liked any of this because He didn’t. But God had to start somewhere and it really wasn’t until the time of Jesus’ disciples that God was able to start making the really big changes. God wants us to be like Jesus and not like anyone else in the Bible.
And He sure doesn’t want us kidnapping anyone whether or not they are married, and so Abimelech is in for a rude awakening! Just imagine him, asleep on his bed, and he hasn’t been feeling very good lately and neither have his other wives. In fact, we’ll find out next week that no one among the Philistines has been feeling all that good. We don’t know if he had his bed or just a bedroll because very few people had beds back then. Thet didn’t have separate rooms for everyone or any privacy and mostly everyone just got out their bedrolls and put them down in the same room at night. And no mattresses, just woven mats that they could store away or travel around with easily. The mats really just protected them from the hard ground. And so, he is relaxing after a hard day of being a Philistine leader and no sooner than he drifts off to sleep, BOOM, God came to him and said, “YOU ARE A DEAD MAN!” And then God explained why—“that woman you took is married!” It goes without saying that Abimelech was terrified but even more than that because Abimelech has committed one of the worst sins of the ancient world—stealing another man’s wife. Now, they didn’t have a problem with killing a man and then kidnapping his widow and marrying her. That was evidently okay to all these guys and as we know, Abraham has always been super terrified of that happening. But if you took a married woman you were committing like the worst crime ever against her husband. No one thought that was okay—it was like an honor code even among dishonorable guys. I mean, as soon as one guy gets away with stealing other guys’ wives, no one can be trusted anymore and their whole community would fall apart. Abimelech has been tricked and now he is in big trouble and not just with God but with everyone. There is no way he can keep Sarah, and he is going to be humiliated (really embarrassed) when he has to give her back but right now he has one thing on his mind—convincing God of what a great guy he really is. And this is an important life lesson—even bad guys believe they are good guys most of the time. Abimelech has kidnapped Sarah but he still thinks he didn’t do anything wrong. Dude is seriously deluded. Or maybe not because what we think of as wrong or right is always going to be influenced by what the folks around us think is good or bad. And that can change drastically from country to country and from time to time.
Life in my own country has changed so much since I was born. When I was born, a woman couldn’t get a loan from the bank to start a business or a credit card without her husband’s approval. When my grandmother was born, it was still not a crime to abuse your wife or your husband. When my great-great grandmother was born, they believed that owning slaves was perfectly alright because it wasn’t against the law. When my ancestors arrived in this country from Ireland, before the Revolutionary War, it was legal to kill Native Americans. But times change—sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. Things that we know are bad now are against the law and some things that used to be against the law aren’t anymore. Sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes it’s a bad thing. When Abimelech was alive, he was a king and kings got to do whatever they wanted and no one could stop them. Killing a man and taking his beautiful wife was perfectly alright as long as he was a foreigner from somewhere else. But taking another man’s wife while he was alive was something that the Canaanites and all their neighbors thought was evil. So, as far as Abimelech was concerned, he hadn’t done anything wrong at all. That was how Abimelech’s gods behaved and so that’s what he thought was okay. People who had power took what they wanted from people without power. God talks a lot in the Bible about how much He hates that but this Abimelech guy, he has no reason to know any better and so God is being very merciful by giving him a warning. And probably also because He isn’t particularly happy about Abraham still not trusting Him and providing Abimelech with the excuse he evidently wanted to kidnap Sarah. Which is why Abimelech’s response to God is kinda hilarious when we read it now because if he pulled something like this in modern times he’d be locked up for at least fifteen years.
Abimelech says, “Now wait a minute, they both told me they were just brother and sister. No one said anything about them being husband and wife. I took her but I had no idea I was doing anything wrong. Will you really punish me and my people?” It’s crazy how people think, right? Abimelech was obviously used to getting whatever it was he wanted by just taking it—even people like Sarah. He saw nothing wrong with that at all, but he did know that taking someone else’s wife was wrong. Do you remember Lot in Sodom and how all the men saw absolutely nothing wrong with taking his guests and torturing them for information? And when Lot told them that it would be wrong for them to do it, they were totally shocked and told him that he was an outsider who had no right to judge them at all. It’s hard for us to even begin to imagine a world with so few laws that just randomly hurting, killing, and kidnapping people is okay just as long as the other person is weaker than you are. These people seriously need Jesus! There was a time when Jesus was looking at a group of people who were following him around and he was sad because he said that they were like sheep without a shepherd. Do you know what that means? Jesus said that because they were feeling hopeless and stressed out. Their lives were bad because they were sick, hungry, and were ruled over by people who could do absolutely anything they wanted against them and there was nothing they could do about it. But not only that, as if that wasn’t bad enough, but the highest priests in the land were very evil men who were cooperating with the same people who were hurting them—the Roman government! What are you supposed to do when there is no one to protect you or show you what is right and wrong? Those were the people that Jesus was sad about and He told His disciples to pray that there would be a lot more people to come and help them.
And those people were Jews like Jesus. They had the Hebrew Bible and good Bible teachers, so they knew what was right and what was wrong but because of how they were being treated and robbed and even taken as slaves, they were losing hope that things would ever get any better unless the Messiah came to their rescue. They were all hoping that Jesus was that Messiah, God’s anointed king. But Jesus knew that He was coming to save them from sin and death and not from their human enemies so He was sad to see them hurting so much. Now, if the people who know God’s word and laws felt so hopeless, what are we to imagine about the Philistines or the people of Sodom or the rest of the Canaanites? They not only didn’t have anything from God’s word (because Moses wasn’t alive yet) but they didn’t even know about our God either, They had their own rules, ones that they made up to help themselves and to hurt others and sometimes they even had wise laws along with some really bad ones, but they were even more like sheep without a shepherd to protect them than the Jews who lived at the same time as Jesus. Abimelech was a villain, okay? A bad guy. But he had no idea. He thought he was a great guy. God knew that and God also knew that Abimelech had been tricked. Abraham knew better but Abimelech was just doing what Philistine rulers had always done. As crazy as it sounds, Abimelech really did kidnap Sarah with a clear conscience and clean hands, which means he really believed he was doing the right thing. Next week, we’ll see what God has to say about that.
And you know what? There are lots of places in the Bible where people are doing rotten things and they talk about how innocent they are. You know what the Bible is? It’s the most honest book ever written. Even though the people in it lie and do terrible things, no one tried to hide it. And most of the people in the Bible who do terrible things are the kings of Judah and Israel. That’s why God kicked the people out of the Holy Land for seventy years. Sometimes, when people have a lot of power over others, it messes them up. King Saul was a decent and shy kind of guy before he became king but once he was king, he began doing terrible things like disobeying God, murdering innocent people and becoming so jealous of his son in law that he hunted him for many years, just trying to kill him. David was a simple shepherd before he became king, and he was brave and trusted God. David was even a great king at first until he had so much power that even his closest friends couldn’t trust him, and God told him that the sword would never leave his house—which means that all the kings who came after him would be plagued by sin and violence. David’s sons did terrible things too and even Solomon became just terrible—taking hundreds of wives who worshipped other gods and he even built them temples to worship in. And he made his own people work as slaves building all those temples. Don’t even get me started on Rehoboam and Manasseh and the kings of the northern kingdom of Israel after the kingdom split in two. There were a few good kings but mostly, the Bible is a story about how human kings aren’t very good at being like God. But why does the Bible tell that story?
Because God wanted us to look for something better than David or Solomon or Hezekiah and not only that, but we are supposed to look for something better than human priests like Moses and Aaron too. No human is perfect, and the Bible shows us that power can really change people. It doesn’t mean that absolutely everyone who has a lot of control over other people and things is outright evil but it does mean that the things they do wrong can hurt people a whole lot more than just the ordinary man or woman who lives down the street from you. In Genesis 1, God told humans (male and female) to rule over the earth but didn’t tell them to rule over other people. The truth is that God is the only one who can ever be totally trusted because it takes a very very good and loving person not to do terrible things when they know they can get away with it. The kings of the ancient Near Eastern world—men like Pharaoh, Abimelech, Nebuchadnezzar, the Roman Emperors and others like Esther’s enemy Haman—had so much power that no one except God could tell them no and when He did, they didn’t always listen. Sometimes He sent prophets to warn them and sometimes He didn’t protect them from enemy armies, but even with the worst of them, God was always willing to listen to them if they were really sorry about what they were doing—like the wicked people of Ninevah and even King Manasseh who was so wicked that he even burned up his own son and put idols in God’s Temple. When they were sorry and cried out to God, He heard them and forgave them.
But all those stories—what they tell us is that it is a mistake to put our faith in humans to rule over us wisely or even kindly. We should want that and we should try to make sure that the people who are in our government aren’t the sorts of people who commit terrible sins against other people, and it is important to have a government with people making sure that everything in the country is working the way it needs to work. But it can be easy to ignore the terrible things that powerful men and women do just because they are good at doing some things. The Bible shows us many men and women who did great and also terrible things, and all that was written down to show us that only God’s true King, the Messiah, Jesus can be totally trusted to rule over us lovingly, fairly, and kindly. We don’t have to worry about King Jesus being cruel because when He had the chance while they were killing Him, He forgave them instead. King Jesus never lies. King Jesus wouldn’t ever hurt people who are suffering and weak. We can trust King Jesus to never steal from us or to hurt innocent people. King Jesus sees all of us as God’s precious children and so that means He guards us and does everything He can to bring us to God. King Jesus sends us His Holy Spirit to teach us about how to be like Him, and commands His angels to watch over us. King Jesus doesn’t go out killing people just to get them to do what He wants, and He doesn’t trick them into believing things that aren’t true or doing what is bad. Of course, the sad thing is that when we have been hurt by the people who are supposed to protect us it is very easy to make the mistake of thinking that they are like Jesus or that Jesus is okay with the bad things they are doing. When we think about that, we have to remember the bad things that leaders in the Bible did and that God was patient with them and tried to get them to do what was right instead. Because we can trust God to be patient and kind even with bad leaders because He wants them to be good leaders, we know we can trust Him when we do bad things too and that He wants us to turn around and do what is right.
When we do bad things, sometimes it is because we don’t know any better (like Abimelech) or because we are angry (like Moses) or scared (like Abraham) or greedy (like Lot) or covetous (like David). But King Jesus knows what is good and what is bad and always chooses what is good. When King Jesus gets angry, He never forgets the importance of showing mercy and kindness and never uses His power to get even. When King Jesus was scared, He prayed to His Father instead of running away or fighting back. King Jesus isn’t greedy because everything has been given to Him so He doesn’t need to take anything that doesn’t belong to Him. And King Jesus isn’t ever jealous of anyone else. King Jesus isn’t like any other king who has ever lived or will ever live. That’s why we can make Him the boss of us and not have to worry about what He will do. We never need to make any excuses for King Jesus.
I love you. I am praying for you. I remember twenty-five years ago when I told Jesus that I wanted Him to be my King. Not that I just wanted Him in my heart but to be my King forever and ever. I have never been sorry I did that.