God had made just the best promises to Abram: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:2-3). And when he made it to the land of Canaan, God said, “To your offspring I will give this land” (12:7). That all sounded pretty good, and Abram believed it. Until he didn’t.

It turns out that even when you have received great promises like this, there could still be a famine in the land, and it will affect you just as much as everyone else. “So Abram went down to Egypt to reside there as an alien, for the famine was severe” (12:10). But when they came to the border of Egypt, Abram was afraid that the Egyptians would want Sarai, and would kill him in order to get her; so he instructed her to say that she was his sister, instead of his wife (12:13).

Abram was sure the Egyptians would think that he was the kind of man who would fight to protect his wife: he would never give her up willingly, so they’d have to kill him. But he was not actually that staunch. He would indeed give her up willingly, to protect his own life. And he did. He even made a nice profit on the deal, getting lots of livestock and slaves in exchange for Sarai (12:16).

Abram trading away Sarai this way certainly makes me squeamish. Should we just let it pass, figuring it shows a canny appreciation on Abram’s part of the realpolitik of Egyptian culture? Maybe so. Yet it shows that Abram was not quite confident that God’s promises would come true. If God was going to fulfill the promise to give the land to Abram’s descendants, then God was going to have to keep Abram alive long enough to have some descendants. But trusting in that would have required more trust than Abram seems to have had.

* * * * *

We trust in you, O Lord, and we hold firm to our integrity and our principles: until things start to look sticky, and then we are quick to suppose that this must be an exception where we ought to bend the rules in our own favor. Grant us the courage to trust in you and do what is right, even when the circumstances are difficult.