‘If I were you, I would have labeled me a lost cause.’ – Matthew West, from his song, ‘The God Who Stays’
I’ve been thinking about Abraham lately. Reading through his story in Genesis, I am struck, not only by his great faith, but by his more than occasional lack thereof.[1] I am struck by how the great father of nations, the one through whom God began salvation history in earnest, was at times capable of behaving like a first-class jerk.
That may sound shocking to Christian ears trained to handle Abraham with almost God-like reverence. But if so, it’s because we tend to forget the downsides in his story, or, if we remember them at all, come up with excuses for his despicable behavior. There’s the time when Abraham (then Abram) told his wife Sarah (then Sarai) to pose as his sister while sojourning in Egypt. Well, we say, Abram was afraid that Pharaoh would find her beautiful and kill him to take Sarah as his wife, so what choice did he have? Besides, she was in fact his half-sister (I know, yuck; things were different back then), so he wasn’t really lying. Never mind that Abraham should have trusted God to take care of both himself and wife, or that the plan he undertook resulted in her captivity for a time in the household of Pharoah, during which all sorts of terrible things might have happened. Sugar coat it as you will, the bottom line is that Abraham failed to trust God and threw his wife under the bus to save his own skin. And he didn’t just do it once; a bit later in his story he threw Sarah under the bus a second time in an encounter with King Abimelech of Gerar.
And that’s not even the worst of Abraham’s offenses. Although God promised that he would have children as numerous as the grains of dust on the earth, his doubt grew to the point of unfaithfulness. As the years ticked by, and his patience wore thin, he jumped at the chance offered by his wife to take matters into his own hands. ‘Honey,’ Sarah suggested, ‘why don’t you sleep with my servant Hagar and have a child with her?’ We can rationalize that this sort of surrogacy was common in Abraham’s day, but it was still wrong. For starters, it was wrong because he failed to wait on God. Then there’s his eagerness to sleep with a younger woman not his wife (Sarah didn’t have to ask twice). And finally, and this is downright horrific, there is the fact that Hagar may not have had much choice in the matter. She was a slave for crying out loud; she had no choice but to obey her master. Some today might consider what happened between them nothing less than rape. I don’t personally believe it was that bad; the relationship between Hagar and Abraham seems to have been at least somewhat consensual, but the power inequities in the situation should nonetheless trouble us deeply.
And then there is the fact that when trouble arose between Hagar and Sarah (and who didn’t see that coming?) Abraham sent Hagar and his son Ishmael away into the wilderness, where, but for the grace of God, they both would have died. And yeah, I know the Bible says God told him to do it. Still. If a man behaved in this fashion today, throwing his wife under the bus, impregnating his servant, then sending her along with his child into the wilderness, he would be labeled a monster, not an exalted father. In today’s culture, there is little doubt that Abraham would be ‘canceled.’
And yet, God didn’t cancel Abraham. He continued to work with him. He proceeded, in spite of it all, to weave the beginnings of the story of salvation through the broken pieces of his life.
Just what kind of story is this? What kind of God sticks by a guy as bad as Abraham?
In considering such questions, my mind wandered to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I know, just bear with me. If I asked you what that story is about, you might tell me it’s a horror tale, or a fable about scientific hubris. You would be right, of course, but the primary theme of that classic novel is parental irresponsibility. Dr. Frankenstein creates life, but when it doesn’t match his expectations for it, he abandons his creation utterly. Shelley was first and foremost writing a morality tale about parents who failed to stick by and love their children when they failed to meet parental expectations and dreams.
God is the opposite of Dr. Frankenstein. When God created the universe, making human beings, male and female, his crowning achievement, he had great plans for us. We were to serve as the stewards of creation, co-regents under his rule, serving, protecting, and reigning over the earth. We didn’t exactly live up to our calling. This was not, on the one hand, surprising; God, who exists in what C.S. Lewis termed ‘an eternal now,’ knew we would disappoint. But on the other, it seems to have shaken him, nonetheless. It grieved God’s heart to see his children fall short of the glory he intended for them. It grieved his heart even more as he witnessed the wickedness of humankind spiraling out of control, spreading over the face of the earth, contaminating every aspect of creation. Had God been like Dr. Frankenstein, dare I say, if he had been like any one of us, he would have abandoned his creation there and then. He would have thrown us on the rubbish heap and started over.
But so committed is God to his creation, to us, that he did not. He stuck by us. Even as we did terrible things. He was willing to get his hands dirty, to carry the shame of his creation’s sin, as he worked alongside of us, meeting us where we were, down in the muck and mire of our wickedness and selfishness. We would have run from ourselves. God, being God, stuck by us, even as we failed to meet his parental expectations and dreams.
So God worked with a man like Abraham, a man who would throw his wife under the bus, sleep with his slave, and send her away with his own son. God worked with him until he was transformed into something more akin to the image he was meant to bear. Then, when Abraham’s time passed, God continued to work with his descendants, who frankly did worse than Abraham, sinning in ways that would have caused Dr. Frankenstein to walk away a thousand times. God stuck by them too, shaping them into an instrument he could use, biding his time until, in the fullness thereof, he himself entered the world in the person of his Son, to bear our sin and show us how to live, hoping to transform us, each and every one of us, into something more akin to the image we are meant to bear.
And so it has remained even to this very day. When we fail to get things right, when we fall and fail and struggle like Abraham, God continues to stand by us. For he is Emmanuel. God with us. That is who he is, was, and always will be. He is, as Matthew West sings in the song noted in this post’s title and epigraph, ‘The God who stays. The God who runs in our direction when the whole world walks away.’[2]
Talk about a committed God.
There is a line in the Gospels that used to confuse me. Jesus, who obviously loves us unconditionally, cries out, ‘Oh unbelieving and perverse generation! How long must I stay with you! How long must I put up with you!’ (Matthew 17:17). It sounds so un-Jesus like. But it’s actually a cry from the very heart of God. God grieves our sin. It rends his heart. Today, no less than when God wept over Abraham’s conduct. But God, in the course of his work with Abraham, in the course of his work throughout salvation history, in the course of the Incarnation, and in the course of our lives, repeatedly answers his own question, ‘How long must I stay with you? How long must I put up with you?’
His answer is: forever. He really doesn’t have a choice. Because, you see, he is by his very nature the God who stays.
Under Christ’s Mercy,
Brent
[1] Abraham’s full story can be found in Genesis 12-25.
[2] If you get a chance, listen to West’s song. It captures wonderfully what I am trying to say here about the constancy and commitment of God. Click here for a link to the official video.