God is Faithful Even When We Are Not

Dear Judah and my future grandchildren,

The first 11 chapters of Genesis are God’s forward to the rest of the Bible.  In order to understand the rest of the Bible, and thus the world we live in, properly you need to understand what is going on in those first 11 chapters.  I hope in other entries to do just that.  However in this entry I want to start with Gen 12.  This is where the story of God’s redemptive plan through Abraham (Abram) begins.

The chapter begins with the promise God makes to Abram.  God tells Abram to go to a different country and that God will bless him.  God will make Abram a blessing to all the families of the earth.  This promise is fulfilled in Christ, who is the savior of anyone in the word who will trust him.

Note that what God asks Abram to do is not easy.  Abram has to leave the land he has always known to go somewhere foreign to him.  In spite of the difficulty Abram obeys.  When Abram is passing through the land that God had promised, God appears to Abram again to encourage and remind Abram that He will give that land to Abram’s offspring.  Abram’s response is to worship by building an altar.

After these acts of faithfulness by Abram, the author of Genesis (Moses) tells us of a story where Abram goes to Egypt.  In Egypt Abram is afraid of Pharaoh because Abram knows that Sarai, his wife, is a beautiful woman.  He is afraid that Pharaoh will murder him and take Sarai as Pharaoh’s wife.  So Abram tells Sarai to lie and say that she is his sister.  Sarai does this and Pharaoh takes Sarai as his wife.  God is angry and punishes Pharaoh’s house with a plague.  When Pharaoh finds out that Abram lied to him, he is upset with Abram, gives Abram back Sarai and sends Abram away.

Sarai was important to God’s plan.  It is through her that the line of the messiah will come.  Through her the line of the entire nation of Israel will come.  If she had become Pharaoh’s wife the whole plan would have fallen apart before it began.  So God rescued her.

What I want you to take away from this is that God was faithful to Abram even when Abram wasn’t faithful to Him.  God’s love for his children can’t be taken away no matter what.  God will always work His plan and that plan will always be for the good of his children.  Your job is just to keep believing Him, and when you can’t even do that, call on Him to help you.

Never forget that,

Grandpa