The Sin of Abraham, Isaac, and Us

It seems I am about a week late to the outrage over Trump’s announcement to end DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows undocumented immigrants who arrived as children to defer deportation for two years and stay in the United States to work or pursue secondary education. While much of the outrage on social media has quieted to the occasional glowing ember, I think the DACA situation points to a larger anti-immigrant sentiment undergirding much of the political landscape in the United States today.

At the same time, I’ve been reading through the book of Genesis, following the life of the patriarch Abraham. Abraham was truly a man of faith, leaving pretty much everything to follow God, believing God’s promise (most of the time). But he was also a man with many faults, who made many mistakes. The one most people remember is the time he takes God’s promise to provide him a son into his own hands and has Ishmael with his wife’s handmaid, Hagar. The other mistake is when he takes Lot along, even though God tells him to leave his country and his kindred (which would have included Lot) to go to the land God would show him. But we’re not talking about those two. There’s one more major blunder that Abraham commits, but it’s rarely discussed. But it’s one that has huge implications for America today.

In Genesis 12, not long after God calls him, Abram finds himself sojourning in the land of Egypt, where he grows suspicious of the people there, and says this to his wife Sarai:

“I know that you are a woman beautiful in appearance, and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me, but they will let you live. Say you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared for your sake.” (Genesis 12:11b-13)

And just as Abram suspects, the Egyptians do find her to be very beautiful, Sarai goes along with the lie (which is technically a half-lie, since Abram and Sarai are related, as we see in Gen 20:11). Pharaoh takes Sarai into his house, and God brings plagues upon Pharaoh’s house on account of Sarai. Because of his unfounded mistrust of the Egyptians, Abram lies to them, risks the chastity of his wife, and brings harm upon the Egyptians who don’t even know what they’ve done wrong. The Egyptians figure out the truth, Pharaoh confronts Abram, and Abram and Sarai are sent out of Egypt.

But he doesn’t learn from that mistake. Instead, Abraham (i.e. after God reaffirms his covenant to make him a father of many nations and changes his name from Abram) pulls the exact same “my-wife-is-my-sister” thing in Genesis 20 on Abimelech the king of Gerar, who sends for and takes Sarah. This time, God mercifully comes in a dream and informs Abimelech of the true identity of the woman he has taken in, and the deadly consequences of going any further with her. In the morning, Abimelech calls Abraham and asks astoundedly, “What have you done to us? And how have I sinned against you, that you have brought on me and my kingdom a great sin? You have done to me things that ought not to be done” (Genesis 20:9). Abraham again doubts God’s promise to protect him, to bless those who bless him and curse those who curse him, and out of this doubt and fear, wrongs Abimelech, almost causing him to sin.

As I continued to read in Genesis, Isaac is born, Abraham finds him a wife, Abraham dies a peaceful death and all of the lying and “wife-or-sister” shenanigans are over. Or so I thought. But in Genesis 26, Isaac, the son of Abraham, runs into Abimelech—yes, the same Abimelech that his father dealt with—and surrenders again to fear, choosing to lie, saying Rebekah is sister and not his wife. Again, Abimelech finds out and confronts Isaac, telling him of the harm that could have come upon his people if one of them had slept with Rebekah. So no longer is this just Abraham’s problem, but a generational kind of sin passed down from father to son, a suspicion that leads them to deceive and wrong people of other cultures who have done them no wrong.

Perhaps this is why God gives this command to the descendants of Abraham and Isaac, the Israelite people:

“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.” (Leviticus 19:33-34)

After all, their forefathers had a bad track record of interacting with other peoples, mistrusting, misinforming, and mistreating them. But what does this mean for us?

What I see in today’s political landscape is a deep distrust of immigrants, passed down from generation to generation. We fear that they will take our jobs, take our money, take our resources, and take our lives, just as Abraham and Isaac did. And out of our fear, we enact oppressive policies, believe nationalistic ideologies, and further injustice. I see this in our hostility towards immigrants from Mexico and in our rejection of refugees from war-torn Muslim nations. Clearly, this “Christian nation” has forgotten the Bible and its reminders to believers, we who were once “foreigners and strangers” (Eph. 2:19, NIV) alienated from God, to welcome those who are not like us. We’ve forgotten compassion on those who have been oppressed and are searching for a better life. We oppress them further instead. What would it look like for us to let go of our fear, and to trust God for our safety? What would it look like for us to do no wrong to those who seek to sojourn in America, and what’s more, to welcome them as God welcomes us into His family?

More Than A Tragic Flaw

Oedipus Rex, a 1957 rendition with creepy masks

Flashback to high school lit:  Oedipus Rex.  The classic and woeful tragedy of the guy who, by some cruel twist of fate, ends up killing his father, marrying his mother, and gouging out his eyes after he realizes all that he has done.  This Greek tragedy follows the tradition of the hamartia, the tragic flaw.

Turns out, this is also the word that the Bible—at least the Greek portion of it—uses for sin.  According to Blue Letter Bible, the word hamartia is used for sin as a noun, hamartanō is used for sin as a verb, and hamartēma is a noun used for single sins or evil deeds.

But I think the mistake we often make is subconsciously confusing the concept of the tragic flaw from Greek tragedy with what the Bible says about sin.   On one level tragic flaw is a mistake, an error, made by chance or the cruelty of fate—for Oedipus, this was…y’know…killing his father and marrying his mother.  But on another level, the tragic flaw is a character flaw—the pride that caused Oedipus to kill strangers after an argument on the road or the pride that blinded him to the truth.

And I think we apply the same kind of thinking to sin:  If only he didn’t have that affair, if only she didn’t keep wrecking her life with drugs…maybe they could have been good, decent, Christian people.  If only I wasn’t such a potty mouth, if only I didn’t cheat on that test, if only I wasn’t secretly addicted to porn…maybe then God would love me.

But sin is so much more than a tragic flaw.  It goes far deeper.  The Bible tells us that it’s not just one thing separating us from God.  It’s not just one mistake or one character flaw, or even a handful of them.

In his excellent sermon on work, Tim Keller explains that the concept of total depravity is not that we’re as bad as we could be, but it’s that every part of us is tainted by sin.  By all means, it shows up differently in each of us—some have had the privilege of growing up in loving homes or church families, while others have had nowhere else to turn but to sin.  But whether we turn to the “respectable” sins of pride, judgmentalism, and gossip or the more societally condemned sins of alcoholism, theft, and murder, we are all alike under sin.  And more than the bad things I do, the Bible tells me that even my best thought or word or deed is still ruined by sin and displeasing to God, as Isaiah 64:6 declares, “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.” Or, as I like to say, “I can’t even do good right.”  Romans 3:23 puts it most succinctly:  “For all have  sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (emphasis mine).  Sin is what makes all of us fall short of God’s perfect standard.

And so we see that we are not just flawed people with one or two things that need to be patched up, but totally irreparable people who need to be made completely new.  And it’s not just one piece of me that needs to be replaced, but all of me.  And this is precisely the work that Jesus does on the cross.  He takes my unsalvageable life, completely soaked in sin and replaces it with the life that He has lived perfectly, not one thought or deed or word or motive even a millimeter off—He was the flawless lamb.  And this is the work that the Holy Spirit is doing in the lives of those who have placed their trust in Jesus: while outwardly they are wasting away, inwardly they are being renewed, day by day.  Sanctification.  Being made into the righteous people that we could not become on our own.

I think this understanding of sin and of the gospel has two huge implications for the believer:

First, in our own lives, seeing sin in its entirety surprisingly frees us from legalism.  It’s the freedom to stop trying to fix ourselves.  When I understand that my guilty standing before God is not just on account of one or two sins that I keep running to, I stop my white-knuckled attempts to prevent myself from sinning.  For in my own life, I find that even after I overcome one sin, I find ten more staring me in the face.  Paul too, finds this law at work in Romans 7:21, that “Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me.”  That’s not to say I should pay no mind to sin and do whatever I please because avoiding sin is some hopeless cause.  The believer does avoid sin, but their entire motivation for doing so has changed.  It is no longer to earn the favor of God—they have that through Christ—but they avoid sin out of obedience to a loving Father who is growing them into people who are holy as He is holy.

And this understanding of the extent of sin changes how we see and approach others.  It humbles us, to say “There, but by the grace of God, go I.”  The quote is traditionally attributed to John Bradford, who, upon seeing a criminal heading to execution, is reminded that it is not his own inherent goodness that kept him from such a fate, but purely the grace of God that keeps him from sin.  And so instead of looking down on people for not being as good as us and trying to fix them by forcing upon them our legalistic rules and regulations, we realize that we are all alike under sin and no human effort can fix our deep problem of sin.  And so we offer them the only hope there is—Christ.  Christ Jesus who alone has the power to remove our condemnation and make us holy.