Considering the fact that Abimelech has kidnapped Sarah, it’s shocking to us that when he tells God how innocent he is, God agrees. But God is most certainly not giving Abimelech a pass and makes a terrifying threat that Abimelech had better do what is right—or else.
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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.
This chapter is a bit more complicated than others and so even though I rarely do this, we’re going to start again at the beginning of the chapter because this is so crazy that we have to hear the whole thing to believe it. Last week, we talked about Abraham’s big lie, Abimelech’s kidnapping of Sarah, and God visiting Abimelech that night in a dream to warn him to give her back, or else. This week, we’re going to see what God has to say about King Abimelech’s shocking claim that he is an innocent man because he had no idea there was anything wrong with what he did. Because, you know, in his world there is nothing wrong with kidnapping but it is a bad thing to take someone else’s wife. When I was younger, they had TV shows where people with crazy family drama would come on and talk about it and they would even sometimes get into fights on stage. But even those shows couldn’t manage a crazy situation like this.
From his camp in Hebron, Abraham traveled south to the region of the Negev and settled between Kadesh and Shur 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 said, ‘He’s my brother.’ I did this with a clear conscienceand cleanhands. I am totally innocent, here.” Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know that you didn’t see anything wrong with what you were doing. I have also kept you from sinning against me so you couldn’t touch her. Now give Sarah back to her husband, because he’s a prophet, and then he will pray for you and you won’t die. But if you don’t give her back, you need to know that you will die, you and everyone in your family.” Early the next morning, Abimelech got up, called all his servants together, and personally told them everything God had said, and the men were terrified. Then Abimelech called Abraham in and said to him, “What have you done to us? What did I ever do to you that you have brought such enormous guilt on me and on my kingdom? You have done things to me that should never be done.” Abimelech also asked Abraham, “What made you do this?”
Dang, guys, we have a bunch of guilty people who have created a great big mess. According to Abimelech, Abraham and Sarah both lied to him. According to Abimelech, kidnapping a single woman is okay and the only reason he was wrong is because he got tricked. I know it’s a serious problem and Sarah was definitely scared and all that but when I read this, I just have to laugh. And so, God gives him a warning that he and his people are all gonna die because of what he decided to do based on the information he was given at the time. Abimelech says. “Lord, I had no idea I was doing anything wrong. Not at all. I was totally clueless.” And now God has to reply to this insanity that I bet He never wanted to be part of in the first place and maybe He was even hoping that Abraham wouldn’t ever do this again after losing his wife twenty-four years earlier and being banned from coming back to Egypt ever again. And being banned from Egypt in those days was like being banned from the supermarket because that’s where the food was when anything bad happened. If there was another famine and there was nothing to eat in Canaan, Abraham and his household were stuck. Why? Because people don’t like to be tricked. It makes them angry because they feel dumb for trusting someone who shouldn’t have been lying to them. It’s so embarrassing! Have you ever been tricked by someone? I have, and when I was a kid I tricked someone once and felt really bad about it afterward.
But now this is a mess that only God can clean up. And He needs to start off by answering Abimelech, who is saying he is totally innocent. I can just see God rolling His eyes. “Yes, I know you didn’t think what you were doing was wrong.” Notice that God only responds to Abimelech saying that his conscience was clear and not to his hands being clean. That’s important as God is just stating the obvious—Abimelech doesn’t think he did anything wrong but his hands are most certainly not clean. Kidnapping is not okay, even if Abimelech thinks it is. Abimelech is such a terrible sinner that even terrible crimes seem okay to him, but God knows that and is going easy on him. Kinda. I mean, God did threaten to kill him but only if Abimelech doesn’t give her back. Someone like Abimelech isn’t going to just be reasonable just because God asks nicely. Instead of being all indignant because he thinks Sarah should belong to him, he is doing whatever he can to prove to God that he is innocent and he is the victim here. And he is, kinda, because he was tricked but that trick just gave him a reason to do what he already wanted to do. A lot of people do bad things by accident but there are also a lot of people who are just looking for a good reason to be bad. As we go through the Bible, the Philistines are always looking for ways to be bad to their neighbors.
God doesn’t just stop there though, He has to let Abimelech know how serious He is about getting Sarah back. Remember that in Genesis 18, God told Abraham that in another year, Sarah would have a baby. Now, she can’t do that if she is stuck married to Abimelech. For God’s promise to happen the way He said it would happen, He needs Abraham and Sarah together and married. That means no matter what, Sarah wasn’t going to end up with anyone else and Abraham wasn’t going to get killed. They made the mistake of believing that God needs help keeping His promises but a lot of things could have happened. God could have made it so that nobody noticed Sarah. He could have made everyone scared of Abraham. He could have the men who came to get Sarah break out in open sores or turned them to salt or made them speak other languages. God had a lot of options here. What God did was to make Abimelech and everyone among his people sick—to keep Abimelech away from Sarah even though she was in their city. Sarah was safe because nobody felt well enough to give her any problems. And I guess nobody made the connection between being sick and Sarah being with them because God had to point it out—“I was the one who kept you away from her so that you wouldn’t sin against me. Now give her back to her husband, pronto.”
Then God drops a bombshell—Abraham is a prophet. And that would have scared the snot out of Abimelech because prophets aren’t just a Bible thing. All the nations had prophets who would speak for their gods and people were scared about what they might say and making a prophet angry could really make the gods angry and angry gods are dangerous gods. At least that’s what they believed and so it didn’t matter if it was true or not. In the ancient world, prophets were people who could speak to God and receive messages in return. A prophet was like an ambassador between kingdoms. Say the King wanted to talk to his god or goddess—like the Philistine grain god Dagan—or wanted their opinion on something like would there be enough rain this year to grow a good harvest, is it the will of their god to go to war with another nation and will they win, or if things are going badly, they wanted to know what they had to do to make their gods happy again. They would call a prophet, who could also be a priest, and they would ask them for help with trying to figure out what was going on. They didn’t believe that the gods were interested in speaking to normal people and when they got mad, they didn’t think they’d speak to the king either.
Think of it this way, they believed that some people were born with satellite dishes that allowed them to hear what was going on in the world of the gods. Wait, do you guys know what a satellite dish is? Do they even still have them now that there is streaming and all that? Okay, a satellite dish is how we used to get signals from far away—not only from our planet but from outer space too. Or at least we are trying to get signals from outer space. They are something between a plate and a bowl and they’re like a ginormous ear. That’s how they work but in the ancient times, they had specific people who could hear from the gods when no one else could. Or at least they said they could hear! If they got it right, they could get rewarded, or if they said something that the king liked, but if they were wrong or made the king angry, they could end up dead. God is calling Abraham a prophet not because he gets messages to give to other people, but because God allows him to have conversations. Like when God told Abraham that he would inherit the Land of Canaan and Abraham said, “What good does that do me when I don’t have any kids?” Or when God told Abraham the first time that Sarah was going to have a son, Abraham was allowed to complain about wanting Ishmael to be his heir instead because he loved him. And the biggest example was when Abraham was allowed to bargain with God to try to save the people of Sodom from being destroyed. That wasn’t a normal thing in those days and really it still isn’t. I mean, Abraham was hearing from God in some very unique ways that most people can’t relate to. Abraham knew the future because God kept telling him the future.
Abraham knew that God would give his children the Land of Canaan. He knew he would have a son someday. He knew that Sarah would have a son someday. He knew that Sodom would be destroyed before it actually happened. That’s the kind of things that prophets got told. Prophets were people who heard from God—not usually about the future even though that’s mostly what Abraham was told. Usually they were giving messages to the people about what God wanted them to know. In the Hebrew Bible, the most common message was, “Stop sinning or something terrible will happen. Return to God and obey Him and love Him and He will forgive you for everything you have done.” When they did predict the future, it usually went something like this, “If you don’t stop worshiping other gods, I am going to let another nation come in and stomp on you because I will stop protecting you. You’re going to find out what it is like to live in another nation without me.” The people who were wise listened and the people who were evil, greedy, foolish, or rebellious didn’t. But not everyone who said they were prophets actually were. Some of them were just people who made money telling powerful people whatever they wanted to hear. Even in the Bible, we see false prophets talking to the kings of the northern kingdom of Israel when the king isn’t willing to listen to God’s true prophet. He even said that he hates God’s true prophet because he never says anything good. The other prophets were telling the king to do whatever he wanted to do. I wouldn’t be surprised if Abimelech thought his gods wanted him to take Sarah!
When Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dream correctly, Pharoah decides that he is a prophet and a priest too and put him in charge of everything in Egypt. What about Balaam? Balaam is weird because he is kind of a skunk and doesn’t worship our God but could hear Him anyway and had to do whatever He said—even though he wanted to go and get rich by cursing the children of Israel in the wilderness. Balaam was a talented prophet but also a bad dude at the same time. Lots of the books of the Bible contain things that were said by the famous prophets but also by prophets that we don’t know the names of. Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others have whole books named after them. But all of that started with Abraham, who is the first person called a prophet in the entire Bible. Abraham had a unique relationship with God that no one else ever had and he was very different from the later prophets once they were their own nation but since Abraham was the beginning of God’s plan to make Jesus happen, it makes sense that he would be a prophet too.
So, Abimelech has been told that Abraham isn’t a normal guy but the go-to prophet for this God who is threatening to kill him in a dream. That means that by hurting Abraham, Abimelech is attacking God. That’s a huge no-no. And not only does Abimelech have to give Sarah back, but he also needs to make Abraham happy enough to pray for him so that everyone who is sick can get better. That has to be the worst part of all this—not only was he tricked by this foreign Abraham guy, but he needs prayer from him. That wouldn’t make me very happy. I think about the people who have tricked me and if God told me that I needed to go back to them and get them to pray for me I don’t know what I would do—but usually when we are tricked, we don’t end up kidnapping anyone so it is hard for me to relate to any of this. Abimelech got tricked but he is a kidnapper and a thief and a bad guy even if he doesn’t understand it. Abimelech thinks he only did wrong because he was lied to but we know the truth. Abimelech was wrong because he was WRONG. Period. There’s a big difference sometimes between what we think of ourselves and what we are doing, and what is true about ourselves and what we are doing. God has had to set me straight so many times when I believed that I was being loving and kind when I was really just being a mean jerk.
So, Abimelech gets up early the next morning and calls all his servants together and told them what happened. He told them everything and boy were they scared. I mean, none of them had been feeling right and now they know why—there was a god angry at them and that God was on the side of this outsider from another place. And Abimelech, their king
, had stolen his wife and some of them had actually gone to get her. They were all in big trouble. Every single one of them knew that stealing someone else’s wife was like the worst thing ever. Nobody thought that was okay. They were worried and probably a bit angry too. Why did this person trick them? What had they ever done to him? Would he pray for them or would he just walk off and eave them sick or would he just refuse to pray and let them all die and take their stuff and live in their city? Abraham had so much power over their lives right now that it wasn’t even funny. They needed to hope that the man who lied to them would have mercy on them. I dunno, would you trust Abraham to do the right thing if you were one of the Philistines?
So, Abimelech sent people to go get Abraham and Abraham came into the city. Abimelech was scared but he was also very angry and he wanted some answers. Kings aren’t used to being tricked and lied to, that’s what kings got to do to other people and no one could do anything to stop them. In fact, kings often believed that they were sons of gods and goddesses and that everyone else had to mind their matters around them, or else. All of this would have been shocking to Abimelech, who probably didn’t think he could be fooled so easily. It made him look weak and foolish to his people, who were now suffering because of his mistake. And because of kidnapping, you know, let’s not forget about that. We can just imagine what happened next, as Abraham walks up to Abimelech and Abimelech yells at him, “What on earth did you do? What have we ever done to you that you would trick us into doing something so awful? Your god considers us all to be guilty of a terrible crime that never would have happened if you had just been honest with us. But nooo…you had to tell everyone that she was just your sister and to make matters worse, she told everyone that you were her brother. What you have done to me is totally unacceptable and never should have happened. Why did you do it???” Okay, I added a bit for context but that pretty much sums up the problem from Abimelech’s point of view where he sees himself as a total victim and Abraham as some sort of cruel trickster wanting all of his people dead.
Next week we will talk about Abraham’s response and the mystery of whether or not he is actually telling the truth or lying more to cover up his tracks. If you’ve gone through my book Honor and Shame in the Bible then you know that ancient people didn’t think that lying to people outside your family was really wrong or bad but I will explain that next week too for anyone who doesn’t understand.
So, Abraham made it easier for Abimelech to do the wrong thing by lying to him—but what does Jesus do? Jesus gets people to do the wrong thing by telling them the truth. And that’s what we should want because the truth gives people the chance to do what is right—if they get tricked into doing what is right then they really didn’t have any choice at all and when they find out they were lied to they might start thinking that good is bad and bad is good. But if we give them the truth, then they have an opportunity to be good for the right reasons. When Jesus came to Jerusalem for His last Passover, he got into a lot of arguments with the leaders of Israel about this and that thing. But their questions weren’t all honest. Some people were trying to trick him into making this or that group of people angry with him—the Romans, the people who supported wicked King Herod, the Pharisees, the chief priests, the scribes, or just the regular people who followed Him. They wanted Jesus to say the “wrong” thing in the “wrong” way and so they kept trying to trap him in a no-win situation. A no-win situation is when you can’t win no matter what you do because no matter what you do, you’ll be in trouble with somebody. Either the Pharisees are gonna be mad at you or the Romans, for example. When Jesus was asked whether or not it was okay to pay taxes to the Roman Emperor with coins that called him the son of god, if he said no then the people would be happy but the Romans might arrest Him, and if he said yes then the Romans would be happy but the people who were poor and hungry would be angry. It was a trick question and Jesus knew it. A trick question is something people ask when they want to hurt you or embarrass you. It’s a bad thing to do. But Jesus wasn’t fooled and He changed the subject instead by telling them that they shouldn’t have coins in their pockets saying that Caesar was the son of God while they were at the Temple. Oops. That didn’t go well for them!
When they arrested Jesus and were asking Him questions, Jesus did two things. Sometimes He was quiet when people were lying about Him, and when they asked Him questions about who He was, He was honest with them. The chief priests wanted Jesus dead, and so Jesus didn’t try to defend Himself from the lies they were telling to try and find a reason why they could ask the Romans to kill Him. And when they asked Him questions that He could answer about things that were true, He told them the truth and that made them even angrier than the lies people were telling about Him. The chief priests who were in charge of the Temple were determined to have Him killed and they were going to do it one way or another—whether Jesus lied or told the truth—and so why would He lie? Why should He tell lies to try to save Himself? They were sinners but He didn’t want to be a sinner too. Sometimes it is easy to forget that Jesus was watching while Abraham told those lies to Abimelech. I bet He was disappointed that Abraham didn’t trust God enough to just be honest and to let Abimelech just try to do whatever he wanted to do. He might have left them alone, or he might have tried to take Sarah or he might have tried to kill Abraham but Abraham had no reason to worry because God had promised them a new baby in another year. They literally couldn’t be killed. They had no reason to lie or to trick Abimelech. And now Abimelech and his people are angry at Abraham and sick and terrified. And Sarah got kidnapped.
Abraham compromised. He didn’t trust God. He tricked a bad man and it didn’t do him any good at all. Abraham should have trusted God enough to tell the truth. In chapter 21, we’ll find out what happens when we lie to people and they end up not trusting us at all. Abraham wasn’t trying to protect Sarah with his lies, just himself. And there are lies we tell to protect other people that aren’t about not trusting God or trying to trick someone into doing something bad. There have always been Christians who lied to evil people so that innocent people would be protected. They were risking their own lives so that other people could live. That wasn’t what Abraham was doing here. Abraham was assuming that every other man he met on his travels was evil and that he needed to lie about who Sarah was. This wasn’t like hiding people from Hitler or helping them to escape slavery.
I love you. I am praying for you. Lying is serious business. Even if it doesn’t get us into trouble right away, it can really hurt others.