BETTER TOGETHER
ABRAHAM AND SARAH
DR. JIM DIXON
HEBREWS 11:8
February 20, 2011
There was a marriage in Ur of the Chaldees, near the Euphrates River, about 4,000 years ago. It was the wedding of Abraham and Sarah. Sarah was called Sarai at that point in time, and Abraham was called Abram. God gave them new names. The name Sarah comes from the Hebrew word Sar, and it means king or prince. The feminine form means princess or queen. Seventy years after her wedding, God named her Sarah—princess, or queen. The name Abraham means exalted father; the etymology is less certain. God foreknew, indeed God promised, Abraham would be the father of a great nation and that from him would come many peoples.
Abraham is the father of the Jews. He is also the father of the Arabs, in a sense, the father of monotheism, as from Abraham came those who we call Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Abraham and Sarah. In God’s sight their wedding was a royal wedding. They would become a matriarch and patriarch. Matriarch comes from “mater,” “mother,” and “archon,” “prince or ruler”—mother ruler. Patriarch comes from “pater,” “father,” and “archon,” “ruler”—father ruler. This was the plan of God for them, a royal wedding.
If you are Christians and you are married, your marriage, in the sight of God, is a royal marriage; your wedding was a royal wedding. It is the plan of God that Christians marry Christians. The Bible acknowledges the reality that that is not always the case, and the Bible gives us counsel when there is an unequal yoke. The perfect will of God is that Christians marry Christians. This is because those who believe in Jesus Christ have been brought into the family of God, adopted as sons and daughters of God. It is the will of God that an adopted son of God marry an adopted daughter of God and that they become coheirs—“sugkleronomos” is the biblical word—of the grace of life and destined to reign and rule with Christ forever. This is a Biblical view of marriage. We look at marriage today and at Abraham and Sarah and I have two teachings.
First of all, it is better together when we trust the promises and purposes of God. That is the question that God would ask you today: Do you and your wife or you and your husband trust the promises and purposes of God? No matter what you are going through, no matter how hard the times, no matter what your finances are like, no matter what your health is like, no matter how your parenting is going, do you trust the promises and purposes of God? A lot is at stake.
Some of you have heard of Phillips Brooks. Phillips Brooks was an Anglican priest, an Anglican pastor at the Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia during the Civil War. Actually during the Civil War he had become a chaplain for the Union Army and served in that capacity, and it destroyed him. It just devastated Phillips Brooks, this man that loved Christ. It just broke his heart to see the pain of war. He grew tired of ministering to young men who were dying, grew tired of doing funeral services, grew tired of trying to encourage a young man who had just lost an arm or a leg or two arms and two legs. He grew tired of corresponding with parents and telling them their son had died. He grew tired of talking to wives, telling them they would never see their husband again in this world. It broke his heart.
So, when the Civil War was over, he returned to Holy Trinity in Philadelphia and he was emotionally broken. The leaders at the church said, “Phillips, we know you are really hurting, and war is hard. You are not ready to reengage the ministry at the church so quickly, you need to get away. We want to give you a sabbatical.” So he took a sabbatical. He thought to himself, “Where will I go?” He decided to go to Jerusalem. This was a major trip in the nineteenth century, a long journey. He thought, “I want to go to the city of peace, Yeru Shalom. I want to find peace of God; I need to go there.” So, he made that great journey.
He arrived in Jerusalem shortly before Christmas. On Christmas Eve, he made the two-hour ride on horseback from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. There he went into the Church of the Nativity on Christmas Eve. He went to a four-hour worship service that Christmas Eve at the Church of the Nativity. We are such wusses today, a four-hour worship service! It was during that service he felt the touch of Christ and he wrote that beautiful Christmas hymn O Little Town of Bethlehem.
A lot has happened, and you and I both know there is not a lot of peace in Bethlehem today. In fact, most tour groups will not go to Bethlehem anymore because the conflict and tension is so great. The land is disputed. There is conflict between Jew and Arab, between Jew and Palestinian, and the city of Jerusalem, it is not really the city of peace. It has seen little peace in 4,000 years. The Temple Mount is in dispute between Jew and Arab. The city of Jerusalem itself, the old city, is quartered off, divided, and the tensions are great. What caused all of this? It all goes back to the wedding, the wedding of Abraham and Sarah, the wedding in Ur of the Chaldees.
We don’t know what that wedding was like. That was 4,000 years ago; Judaism hadn’t even been birthed yet. We don’t know the rites and rituals of the time. We know they were married at Ur of the Chaldees in the ancient kingdom of Sumer; they were married near the Euphrates River. Archeologists have unearthed Ur of the Chaldees, and they found a giant Ziggurat. They believe it may be the Tower of Babel, but they do not know. They do know and they have discovered and found evidence that around the time of Abraham, there was a mass exodus because the Euphrates changed its course. The city was no longer on the water shortly after the marriage of Abraham and Sarah. Tons of people made that move out of Ur, amongst them Abraham and Sarah.
They journeyed north and they journeyed west and they came to Haran. They were uprooted early in their marriage; it must have been a time of stress. They came to Haran, and there in Haran they had the vision of God and this changed the course of history. In the vision of God, which was really the birth of monotheism, God revealed himself as the one true God. He called Abraham to go the place, the land that he was to receive as an inheritance. He promised him he would become the father of many peoples, that his descendants would be as many as the stars in the heavens and grains of sand on the seashore and that through him all the nations of the earth would be blessed. That was a veiled reference to the Messiah who would come from the line of Abraham and bless the earth, Jesus Christ.
Abraham set forth, a man of faith. Sarah set forth, a woman of faith. Together they set forth, by the will of God to do the purposes of God. Going to a land they had never been to, and trusting the plan and purposes of God, they came to the region of Canaan, and God prospered them and they became rich and wealthy with vast herds and many sheep and many servants and truly became a patriarch and a matriarch, a mother and father ruler. Their territory was so vast, and the territory of their nephew, Lot, was so vast. And they began to get in each other’s way. So, Abraham said to Lot in Genesis 13, “Listen, let’s divvy this up. There is plenty of room for both of us. You chose half of the land and I will take the other half. You can go first and take whichever half you want.”
Lot took the Jordan Valley. That was the good stuff. He chose the best. So, Abraham’s nephew chose the Jordan Valley and the waters that flow from Mount Hermon down through Galilee and continue south. Those waters were laden with freshwater fish, which produce good eating. The waters of the Jordan made the land fertile and brought life on either side of the river. In the time of Abraham and Lot, there was no Dead Sea, that was just rich, fertile valley and the five cities of the plains were there, including Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot chose all of that. Abraham did not mind. Abraham said, “Okay, you took the east, I will take the west.”
Abraham believed the promises and purposes of God. Yet, I have got to think that when Abraham came home that night, that Sarah had a few questions. “You will never believe what I gave Lot today; I gave him the Jordan Valley.” That had to produce a little tension. I am sure Sarah’s original name, Sarai, which probably means contentious, began to be evidenced. It is said that in the first year of marriage the guy speaks and the woman listens. In the second year of marriage the woman speaks and the man listens. In the third year of marriage, they both speak, and the neighbors listen. I am sure something like that happened in the aftermath of all this. Their faith was not perfect; their trust was not perfect. They really did begin to doubt the promises and purposes of God. Boy, when that happens in a marriage, problems come.
The promises were all contingent on Sarah being fertile and giving birth. How could they become the parents of nations, how could they bless the earth if she was barren? She was barren, so they began to doubt the plan of God and went ahead of God and did something they should not do. Sarah decided that she would ask Hagar, their Egyptian slave, to serve as a surrogate wife and to have sex with Abraham that they might have a child.
This was normal in their culture; I hope you understand. This was not something radical or considered evil. It was normal in their culture. We have found ancient tablets, Sumerian, from the period of Sumer, and also tablets from the Canaanite region, some of which date back to 1850 B.C., near the time of Abraham. We have found law codes and marriage codes and they all make it very clear that it was normal for a married couple, if the woman was barren, because in that culture and in that time, the purpose of marriage was not companionship—we discussed companionship last week and certainly God desires companionship in marriage. In that culture, the primary purpose of marriage was procreation, offspring, to have kids. It was not companionship.
In that culture, if you were barren, it was a very serious thing. You were allowed, even encouraged, to pick a woman amongst your female servants to serve and have her produce the child and to be one who would provide the offspring. The offspring from the servant would belong to the wife. Hagar, the Egyptian servant, would not be the mother; even though the child was born to Hagar, by the law code, the child would belong to Sarah. And Hagar, while she would not be the mother, would be protected then by the family. And the law code required, the marriage code required, that she be kept by the family and included in the clan and provided for always. What Sarah did was normal. Sarah and Abraham agreed to this. You see, even though it was normal in the culture, something was wrong spiritually. There was a lack of trust in God and the promises of God, in the power of God. In the purposes of God there was a lack of trust. So, they did what was wrong.
Ishmael was born. The Bible tells us in Genesis that from the moment Ishmael was born, from the moment he was conceived, Hagar began to hold Sarah in contempt. This is in violation of the ancient marriage codes, that it was required that the servant who would produce the child would honor the wife and view her with respect. That didn’t happen. Hagar viewed Sarah with contempt. Ultimately, when Isaac was born, by the power of God, and God made Sarah fertile and Isaac came as the second son, Abraham and Sarah removed Hagar and Ishmael from the family, which was also in violation of the marriage code. Lots of stuff is going wrong because they did not trust the promises and purposes of God. So, you see Isaac and Ishmael growing up in contention and in conflict. In a sense, it continues today, 4,000 years later.
From Ishmael came the Arab race. The Arab believes this, the Jews believe this, and science teaches this. From Isaac, the Jewish race. The promises of God are clear because God is merciful. Even though Abraham and Sarah messed things up, God in his mercy made promises. In Genesis 16:10 and Genesis 17:20 and in Genesis 21:13, the promises of God are to Hagar and to Ishmael that he would bless them and their descendants. So you see the Arab people, 300 million descendants of Ishmael on the earth today. There are 21 Arab nations in the Arab league, 5,000,000 square miles of the earth’s surface belong to the Arabs. In addition to the 21 nations, there are many other nations where the Arab race is plentiful, all of this from Ishmael. Some of those 5,000,000 square miles that belongs to the Arab race is parched and desert, some of it is green and fertile, some of it is laden and rich with oil, but God has blessed them.
You look at Isaac, the child of the covenant, the child of the promise, and from Isaac came the Jewish people. From Isaac came the Old and New Covenant, the Old and the New Testament. From Isaac came Moses and from Isaac came Jesus and the grace of the Gospel and the blessings of the earth. The Jews have suffered and they have been persecuted, and there was the holocaust and their numbers are few, thirteen million Jews on the earth. There are six million Jewish people in the United States of America, another six million in the reborn state of Israel, and then one million more scattered amongst the nations, thirteen million in total. Eight thousand square miles, one Jewish nation, not 5,000,000 square miles, and it is barely hanging on. There are those who threaten its existence. There are those who would eradicate the Jewish people from the earth. A lot of it goes back to that marriage at Ur of the Chaldees and the birth of Ishmael and Isaac. The conflict continues and I tell you it will lead to Armageddon and the consummation of the age. We raise our children in this world and in the midst of this tension and it is because Abraham and Sarah did not trust the purposes and promises of God.
Now, God wants us to know, in our marriages, if we don’t trust his purposes and promises, no matter how hard the times, no matter what we are going through, no matter how bleak it looks, if we don’t trust his purposes and promises, it is going to cause problems. It is going to cause problems in our home, it is going to cause problems for our children, it is going to cause problems for our children’s children. We have the promise of God, Romans 8:28, “All things work together for good. God works all things together for good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose.” Do you believe that? In everything that you are going through right now and everything you ever will go through, God is in it, working for good. Do you believe that? Because that is his promise, that is his purpose, to work for good in every single situation of life, no matter what you are going through. If you are his, he is promising that he is working for good. We don’t know what the good is; you have to trust that. Part of the good might be your transformation, my transformation. Part of the good might be that God is going to use that situation to make us more like his son, more Christ-like.
I read this last week about a guy named Jean Vanier. Jean Vanier was a Christian minister who heads a Christian ministry; two years ago, Jean Vanier wrote a book called Living Gently in a Violent World. That is a great title. Two years ago, he published the book. In the book, Jean Vanier talks about a friend of his who lives in France. He is an affluent French business man who lives in Paris. He is married and a believer, but a guy who has been consumed by his career, a little bit like what Mike and Martha-Lynn were talking about in their testimony as Mike had that segment in his life where career and self were first. That is how this friend of Jean’s was in France. This corporate guy, who was affluent, was very focused on his upward mobility.
Then his wife developed Alzheimer’s and she began to slide. She began to lose her mental faculties and abilities, and he loved her. As she got worse and worse, he decided he could not institutionalize her. He decided he would take care of her. He began to take care of her, he began to feed her, he began to clothe her, he began to wash her, and he did everything for her.
Jean Vanier went to Paris to see his friend and to see this couple in the midst of this hard time. As he looked at them, he marveled at how God had changed his friend, how his friend who was this corporate big shot had become more human, how he had learned to love, how his whole heart had been broken. His heart had been changed and he had become a way better person by loving his wife, by caring for his wife.
Jean left and came back to the states. His friend wrote him sometime later that his wife woke up in the night and she had a moment of clarity. She came out of the fog for the first time in months and months and months; she had a moment of clarity. She looked at him in the middle of the night and she said, “Dearest, thank you, thank you, thank you for caring for me and loving me like this.” Then she went back into the fog and he cried and he wept.
I am not saying that it is wrong to institutionalize someone who has Alzheimer’s; I know that sometimes that is good and necessary. I am just saying that God is always at work for good. God is always at work and sometimes the good is changing us, transforming us. Heaven awaits and we are bound for heaven and all the promises of God. If you believe that, no one will be able to snuff out your joy, no one will be able to snuff out your sense of purpose, not on this earth, as we are bound for heaven.
I love the Gary Thomas book Sacred Marriage, and Mike Anderson is going to be teaching a class on Sacred Marriage, and you can sign up out in the lobby today. One of the things that I love about this book by Gary Thomas is he just points out that marriage is not primarily about happiness, but holiness. Really, it is as we are transformed in this classroom called marriage, and we learn to love that we find happiness. This is the will of God and the plan of God; it is how he set the whole thing up.
I have one final teaching, and that is we are better together when we have the mercy and grace of God. Isn’t that true? We need the mercy and grace of God. We are better together when we trust the promises and plans of God, but we still need his mercy, we still need his grace. We are flawed, and we are fallen. Abraham and Sarah were heroes of the faith as identified in Hebrews 11, but bozos on the bus, clowns in the caravan. They really were. So flawed, they are just messed up like the rest of us.
If you read Genesis 12 and Genesis 20—we don’t have much time, but I would encourage you to go home and read Genesis 12 and Genesis 20 and read about the crazy stuff that Abraham and Sarah did. Crazy stuff. In those two chapters you read about how Sarah is beautiful, she is very beautiful. She is so beautiful that Abraham is kind of afraid for his own safety as he journeys into these foreign lands. Abraham is thinking, “Gee, somebody might bump me off to get her because she is so beautiful.” So, Abraham, being kind of a wuss at this point said, “Sarah, you are awfully beautiful and some guy is going to want you so much that they might kill me. So would you tell everybody I am just your brother?” This is the plan. So, you read in Genesis 20 that they did it again and again and again. Only two of the times are recorded, but the implication is that they did this everywhere they went, just kind of wussing out. They agreed to this, and it was half true. They shared the same father, we are told in Genesis 20, although they had different mothers, but really it was a half lie because they were married.
So, they go down into the land of Egypt and they perpetrate this half-truth. The people notice that Sarah is beautiful and the word spreads and it comes to the Pharaoh. “There is this beautiful foreigner and she just arrived.” The Pharaoh says, “I think I would like to have her in my harem, I would like to have her in my house. She has a brother you say? Let’s woo him a little bit, I will give him stuff.” So, Pharaoh gives Abraham animals and increases his wealth and takes his wife, takes Sarah, into his house.
God comes in amazing grace. God comes with amazing mercy. Sarah and Abraham are so messed up and doing a dumb thing, but God will not let Pharaoh have her. God brings plague upon Pharaoh’s house and upon the Pharaoh himself. The word comes to Pharaoh that, “Hey, this is happening to you because this woman is actually Abraham’s wife.” So, the Pharaoh returns Sarah to Abraham. “Why did you not tell me? Why did you lie to me? Why did you cause me to do this?” God protects Sarah, God protects Abraham and God provides for them. Then God heals Pharaoh and his house. Mercy. Grace.
Then you see Abimelech in Genesis 20, King of Gerar, which was between Gaza and Beersheba, and the King of Gerar heard of Sarah as Abraham and Sarah approached. They were doing the brother-sister deal again. The king took Sarah into his house and the king gave Abraham sheep and oxen and land and 1,000 pieces of silver. God intervenes again. Mercy. Grace. God intervenes and speaks to King Abimelech in a dream, in a vision, and warns him, “You do not take this woman into your house and you do not take her as your wife. She is married to my prophet. If you take her, you die. Just to warn you I am bringing disease upon you and upon your wives and upon your servants and all your female servants I have made barren until you return her to Abraham.” The king relented and repented and said to Abraham, “Why did you perpetrate this deception on me? Why did you do this to me? Take her back and chose any part of the land that you want; it is yours. Your God has said to me that you as a prophet would pray for me that my house would be healed.”
Abraham prayed and God healed Abimelech and his wife and the servants and the whole house. Grace. God blessed Abraham and Sarah: grace, protection, provision, amazing grace. I know you have got to be thinking, “I would like a little of that.” I know Barb and I need grace because we are fallen and because we need to trust the promises and purposes of God. We are not always so trusting. We need grace. Because we are messed up, we need grace. Life is better together when you have grace and mercy. I love grace.
I was at a Colorado Christian board meeting last week, and I am privileged to serve on that board, and I love that university. I serve, as well, on a student affairs committee with Dr. Jim McCormick who is one of the vice presidents there and a great guy. In our Student Affairs Committee, it was revealed that six students had been expelled from Colorado Christian University, at least temporarily expelled, because of marijuana use. It wasn’t strictly for marijuana use, but they had lied about it and falsified urine samples. They are on athletic teams. So, they had been removed. I said, “I understand, and I believe in accountability, but I love grace.”
I shared with them about how when I was at Westmont College, I needed grace. I hung out with seven other guys. The eight of us were just good buddies. We were in athletics together; we met each other on sports teams and began to do everything together. Only two of us were Christians, and six were not believers. Westmont had a lot of lifestyle codes and I know the eight of us, if you put us all together, violated all of them. There came this point in time they voted on whether or not to expel us as a group. It wasn’t even an individual thing, they just voted on us as a group. We came within one vote of getting kicked out of Westmont College. Dr. Robert Gundry, who was head of the New Testament department at Westmont, who has become a good friend of mine, told me he was the deciding vote that kept us in. That is grace. That is mercy. I said, “What would have happened in my life?” How it all would have changed if I hadn’t received that grace and that mercy. I love grace and I love mercy.
Barb is God’s grace to me. I was so messed up with girls I could hardly date. By the time I was a junior in college, my seven buddies were all married. In my junior year! So, I went into a dating frenzy. I started dating twice a weekend and draining the national treasury. Really and truly, it was a mess up. I felt like a total failure. By the time I graduated from Westmont and got my teaching certificate and was doing some graduate work, I just felt like a loser. I was walking on the beach on a winter, rainy day in Santa Barbara, just alone. I broke down and I started crying and I started praying. I said, “Lord, I am willing to be single the rest of my life. I can live without a girl, but I can’t live without you. I will go where you want me to go. I will do what you want me to do.” It was out of that day on the beach that he called me to ministry and sent me to seminary.
In seminary, I didn’t date. When I met Barb, it was just God’s gift. I was going to visit some friends and I dropped by their place and there was a birthday party going on, and it was Barb’s birthday. I met her that day and we fell in love. Every day is a gift, and every day is grace. I love her because she is beautiful and intelligent, but I love her spunk. Sometimes she is hard as steel and that makes her tenderness all the more marvelous. Sometimes I will just wake up in the middle of the night and I will just hold her as I listen to her breathe and I say, “Thank God.” I know that this is God’s grace. I know that I am so overwhelmed by the ministry and what it requires and I am overwhelmed by my call as a pastor. I couldn’t take it if I had to work at my marriage. I think this is God’s gift to me. I have always wanted to go home. I always look forward to seeing Barb. I have always enjoyed our time together because it is God’s gift.
I think it is a little bit hard to preach on a subject like this because I think the things you have to work at in life, you can teach best in those areas where you have worked hard. This has been God’s gift to me, my marriage. I don’t know what is going on in your life, in terms of whether it is hard at work or whether it is hard at home, and I don’t know what kind of grace you are getting, or what kind of mercy you are getting, but I wish you grace and I wish you mercy. I know that we all desperately need it.
I know that, as Mike and Martha-Lynn shared, when you repent you begin to experience his grace and his mercy. I know that if there is anything in your life that you need to repent of, God is full of grace and mercy, if you would do that. He would bless you for that. I also know that you need to look at the purposes of God, and join in. You need to get involved with the purposes of God because his grace and his mercy flow to those who are involved in serving his purposes on earth. Look for his purposes and seek to get involved. I wish you his grace.
I want to close with a story. Some years ago, I was driving my car down in Cherry Creek. I was fairly new to Colorado and I wasn’t very familiar with the Cherry Creek area. Suddenly I was pulled over by a police officer. A cop pulled me over, you see the flashing red lights, you know the feeling, it is just kind of a shock to the system. “Oh no!” I pull over and the cop comes up to the driver’s side of the car. I rolled down my window; this was back when you rolled down your window. He said, “Do you know what I am pulling you over for?” I don’t know why they ask that question, but they seem to always ask that question. “You know why I pulled you over, don’t you?” I didn’t.
I said, “Was I going too fast?” Because that is always a possibility. He said, “No, I pulled you over because you ran right through that stop sign like you didn’t even know it was there. You just went through it. Horrible stuff could have happened.” I said, “Sorry.” He said, “I am going to have to write you up.” He said, “Let me see your license.” So, I gave him my license and he said, “This is a California license. He said are you just visiting?” I said, “No, I live here.” He said, “For how long?” I said, “Well, two years.” He said, “I am going to have to write you up for not having a valid license as well.”
So, he begins to write me up and then he says to me, “What do you do?” I said, “I am a pastor.” He said, “You mean like in a church, a church pastor, a minister?” I said, “Yes, I am a Christian pastor.” He just smiled and said, “You know, if you are a pastor, you’ve got enough trouble.” He took the ticket and just tore it in two. Now, wouldn’t you like to hear God say to you, “You have enough trouble?” Wouldn’t you love to hear Christ say, whatever you are going through, “You know you have got enough trouble,” and just tear the trouble up? I think we need some of that and I wish that for you. I want you to know that we have a God like that. We see it in the story of Abraham and Sarah, and we see it in our lives. We want to trust his promises and purposes, but we also want to seek his grace by getting involved in his purposes and by repenting of any hidden sins. We want life to be better together. Let’s look to the Lord with a word of prayer.