Trusting in God - Genesis 13

Bible Study Lesson for July 22

In last week’s study, we explored the two important questions for the early stages of Abram’s life in covenant with God:

1) Will Abram trust God?

2) Will God keep the promise?

When Abram went to Egypt to seek refuge from the famine in Canaan, he failed to trust God to protect him. He used his wife as a bargaining chip with Pharaoh. God surprised us, though, by keeping the promise anyway. God protected Sarai even when Abram would not, and brought Abram home from Egypt with more wealth than he had when he left Canaan in the first place.

These questions will be important to keep in mind in coming chapters, but especially in the story we read today. Indeed, they are the most important questions for any life of faith. Abram’s relationship with God will prove to be both a model for our faith and a dynamic and changing relationship. There is a reality to Abram’s story, a sense that we are leaving behind the legendary one dimensional figures of the early genealogies and instead encountering the real life of faith. In one story Abram will let God down and in the next story he will show extraordinary faithfulness. The stories that interest me, however, are the less dramatic stories where Abram shows us what everyday faith looks like.

V. 1-4 Abram Returns to Canaan

Abram leaves Egypt and begins traveling through the Negeb, which is the dry, southern portion of Canaan-Israel. This is the area that we talked about last week that averages 1-2 inches of rainfall annually. The dryness of the Negeb forced Abram to spend his life as a nomad herdsman among the sparse settlements in the region. The Negeb was unsuitable for agriculture, but wandering herds could eke out a living there. 

Abram travels on, with his many possessions, to Bethel, where he had build an altar in Gen. 12:8. Just as in Gen. 12:8, Abram offers sacrifices on the altar and invokes the name of the Lord. We have here almost a new beginning for Abram. Having experienced God’s extraordinary grace and providence in Egypt, he returns to the place where he last “got it right” in order to recommit his life to God. This invites us to ask the question: will Abram get it right this time? Will Abram trust God to keep the promise?

I am reminded of a story about a church that had annual Revival services in the Spring of the year. Every year, a man from the town who everybody knew would come to the Revival services and some time around the fourth night he would begin weeping as the evangelist shared the invitation. While the hymn played, he would come down the aisle and throw himself on the altar, shouting, “Lord fill me! Fill me!” And everyone there would shout hallelujah at his rededication. He would faithfully attend church for a month or two and then begin missing services and no one would see him until the next year’s Revival. Then he would come back and repeat the process. So finally one Revival, one of the deacons had had enough. When the man went down the aisle and began to shout “Fill me! Fill me!,” the deacon walked down the aisle behind him, put his hand on the man’s shoulder, looked to the sky and said, “Don’t do it, Lord; he leaks!” 

The question for Abram is the question for all of our rededications: will it stick this time? Are things really going to be different? It’s going to take a problem to test Abram and see if things will really be different this time. Because Abram lives in the same world we do, it doesn’t take long for a problem to come along.

V. 5-7 Conflict

The source of trouble this time isn’t Abram’s fears. It isn’t actually even a hardship really. Instead, it is that the blessing is too great. Abram and Lot have been traveling together since leaving Haran, but now they have too many livestock and people with them to share the land. Perhaps it was hard for their herders to keep track of whose animals were whose. Maybe Abram’s animals drank all the water in the watering holes before Lot’s animals had a chance. It could have been that Lot’s herders set their tents in the best places at night while Abram’s herders were still trying to find the right placed for the animals to bed down. At any rate, “there was strife between the herders of Abram’s livestock and the herders of Lot’s livestock.” How are the the two men going to settle this family dispute?

V. 8-13 Abram’s Plan

Just like in the last story, it falls to Abram to solve the problem. In the story of Abram’s journey to Egypt, we saw Abram’s tendency to trick others. So we might expect Abram to try to manipulate Lot into giving him what he wants, but instead we see Abram behave in what seems to be a totally innocent way. (For more trickery, we will have to wait for another uncle-nephew conflict later in Genesis: Jacob and Laban’s famous struggles).

Abram gives Lot the choice of the land. Lot looks at the land and apparently sees much to like in the plain of the Jordan. He compares this land to the garden of Eden and the land of Egypt, because of how well watered it is. This leaves Abram with most of the land of Canaan as his place to graze his herds and seek his own welfare. The subtle comparison of the plain of the Jordan to Egypt implies that Abram’s Canaan was different. As we have discussed above, rainfall in the southern portions of Canaan was scarce and seasonal, and Abram would have to rely on what rain came in order to make ends meet. But this is the type of land to which God calls the chosen people. In Deuteronomy, God makes it plain:

For the land that you are about to enter to occupy is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you sow your seed and irrigate by foot like a vegetable garden. But the land that you are crossing over to occupy is a land of hills and valleys, watered by rain from the sky, a land that the Lord your God looks after. The eyes of the Lord your God are always on it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. If you will only heed his every commandment that I am commanding you today—loving the Lord your God, and serving him with all your heart and with all your soul— then he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, and you will gather in your grain, your wine, and your oil; and he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you will eat your fill. (Deuteronomy 11:11-15)

Even after the short time that Abram and Lot had spent in Egypt, they would have seen the difference between the dry Negeb and the irrigated land of Egypt. In Egypt, ready access to water meant that people could settle down and stay in one place. It also meant the only limit to how much you could produce was how hard you were willing to work. In the Negeb and much of Canaan, there were natural limits on what the land could produce. Irrigation was not much of an option and you could work as hard as you wanted, but at some point you ran out of water. Life for Abram and his descendants was to be limited by Providence. He would have to learn to rely on God.

Verse 13 serves as a note to prepare us for what comes later. The wickedness of the people of Sodom prepares us for danger that will come to Lot and the destructive judgment that God will mete out on the wicked cities of the plain.

V. 14-18 Promise Renewed

After Lot leaves, God responds to Abram’s faithfulness in trusting God to take care of him. By allowing Lot to have the first choice of land, Abram demonstrated his reliance on God instead of himself. God reiterates to Abram that he will inherit the land on which he is standing (see 12:7). Here God gets more specific: everything Abram sees will be the possession of his descendants, who will be as plentiful as the “dust of the earth.” Abram and his family will come to love this land.

It should be noted that God does not justify the renewal of the promise by anything good in Abram himself. We have already seen that God will honor the commitment to bless Abram whether or not Abram keeps up his end of the bargain. God does not say, “since you came back and sacrificed at the altar near Bethel again, I will keep my word.” Instead, God just promises again to keep the promise. Abram responds to this grace by building another altar to God at Hebron. This is always the way we should understand religious acts: as a response to God’s grace, not as a way to earn God’s grace.

Conclusion:

In Genesis 13, we have a story about Abram’s reliance on God. Unlike in the previous story, Abram doesn’t scramble to protect himself or his interests. Instead, he faithfully allows God to provide for him, even though Lot gets the best piece of land. We find that Abram is learning to trust God and that God will continue to bless Abram.

As I implied earlier, Abram’s story will have a lot of ups and downs. He will be faithful at times and at other times he will fall short. We shouldn’t assume that just because Abram had rededicated himself to God, he will be on the straight and narrow from here on out. Indeed, in a remarkably similar story, Abram will repeat his sins from chapter 12. He will also seek to find his own way to fulfill God’s promises instead of waiting on God to provide. The old children’s song says “Father Abraham had many sons, many sons had father Abraham.” My college president used to say, “Father Abraham had many sons because father Abraham had many sins.” Like the man at the revival, Abram leaks. But that’s precisely why God keeps filling him.

Ultimately we do not rely on our own faithfulness for salvation; we can only rely on the faithfulness of God. It is as true in the Old Testament as it is in the New Testament as it is for us today because this God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.