Scripture Notes: Driven by Fear (Genesis 12)

As famine spreads throughout the land of Canaan, where God had told Abram to go, Abram decides that he must leave and head for Egypt where there will be food. He is frightened, and while he obeyed God in going to Canaan, there is still a part of him that does not completely trust this Deity Who has spoken to him.  

As Abram and his company are about to enter into Egypt, he turns to his wife, Sarai, and tells her that she must say that she is his sister rather than his wife. Abram is scared that someone will take the beautiful Sarai from him and kill him in the process. So he comes up with a lie.

This might actually seem quite reasonable to us fallen human beings. We can sympathize with Abram and his fears as he enters into a new place filled with potentially hostile people that he does not know and does not trust. But he is forgetting something, and so are we. God has already promised Abram that He will make him a great nation and a great name, that He will give Abram many descendants, and that through Abram all the nations of the world will be blessed. God does not lie; He always keeps His promises. So He is definitely not going to allow Abram to be killed in a foreign land (whether or not Abram is supposed to go there to start with).

But Abram, apparently, could not or would not see that and believe it. So he comes up with his lie, and Pharaoh takes Sarai for his harem, thinking, naturally, that she is Abram’s sister. And God, in turn, dumps “great plagues” upon Pharaoh and his house. This is more of a message for Abram than for the bewildered Pharaoh, who figures out quickly enough that Sarai is Abram’s wife. God is showing Abram the suffering that comes from falsehood. Sarai has ended up in a harem, bringing down plagues upon the Egyptians, and all because Abram was too scared to tell the truth.

Pharaoh could probably have had Abram killed for such an offense, but he merely sends him away, another sign that God is protecting Abram. We might think that Abram would have learned a valuable lesson from this little incident, but actually, he does not...not yet. He continues to be driven by fear.