Today was a decent day, but unfortunately it ended with a second Lobo loss this week.  If you are a UNM Lobo hoops fan, this week has been pretty enlightening and disheartening, as we have seen where our men’s team stands related to the other top conference contenders.  Lobo basketball is still the biggest show in the state, and so losing to SDSU at home on Wednesday, and then to UNLV tonight away highlights that this team is not a team of destiny.  The ruse is over; the magic show has ended.  This team is another good UNM team, but our hopes for a great team this year have been tempered dramatically this week.  If you are not a Lobo hoops fan, you pretty much skipped reading over this paragraph anyways and are ready for other goodies.  Well, for us New Mexicans, the Lobos are all we got.  Except for the Aggies fans.  But they belong to a lower caste here in the state.

I appreciated being able to lay low today.  Reading in Genesis this morning (staying on track in the pursuit of reading the Bible in a year), I covered the life of Isaac and some of Jacob’s as well, and there were a few items that stood out from the text this time around.

Abraham, the man of great faith, heralded by God for his trust, scored a beautiful woman for a wife, Sarah. Now, what does this manly man who won this lovely woman’s heart do when he goes and lives in Gerar, a Philistine city?  He is afraid that he will be hurt or killed because his wife is beautiful, and his life as her husband might get in the way of some powerful man who might want to take her- so how does he man up to protect his wife and their marriage?  He tells everyone they meet in this foreign place that Sarah is his sister.  Wow. Impressive.  The last time I read about courage and chivalry, I don’t remember reading that that behavior is particularly endearing to your spouse.

Well, fast forward some 80 or 90 years, and Isaac, Abraham’s son, has also found himself married to another looker.  Isaac and his posse live in Canaan, but a famine hits the land, and God appears to Isaac and tells him, “You gotta move.  Get out of here- but don’t go to Egypt.  Go to Gerar.”  Same place his Dad wandered through.  Ruled by the same king who ruled the place when his dad was there.  Well, Isaac thinks, “Oh- my wife is extremely attractive.  And the men at that place may want her.  Say- I’ll tell them I am her brother.”   Isaac faces the same dilema as his father, and he faces it with the same insecurities and the same lame solution as his father.  He tells the same lie as his father.  To the same people his father lied to.

In both cases, God speaks to King Abimelech, lord of Gerar and ruler of the Philistines, and points out to him, that great pagan, that there is a man in his kingdom who is passing off his wife as his sister. Twice, Abimelech, the great pagan, hears God, thinks about what He has said, and fears that wrong treatment of that women by his citizens could bring calamity to his country.  In both cases, Abilmelech, the great pagan king, has enough respect for Yahweh that he identifies the deceiver and commands his people to not mess around at all with his wife.  And oddly enough, to end both tales, both Abraham and Isaac end up compensated by Abimelech for any trauma they might have received for being the unwitting promoters of lies about their love lives, and both men leave Gerar much wealthier than when they had entered it.

This is one of those stories in the Bible I stop and shake my head at.  I don’t shake my head at it because it was a bad story. I don’t see it as a story that undermines God’s authority or the veracity of the Word. This story is one of those stories that is too good to be true, though, and as such, it highlights some glaring weaknesses in Abraham and his son.  Weaknesses passed from Abraham to his son.  His son, through whose line the People of God would come.  Both Abraham, recipient of God’s favor and a covenant that he would father a great nation, and Isaac, father of Jacob,  compromised their identities and integrities as husbands and men because they feared that they would be hurt because their wives were lovely.  Abraham and Isaac both failed their wives dramatically.

I find comfort  in the knowledge that the paragon of faith himself, Abraham, esteemed by God as a friend, blundered so significantly as a man and as a husband.  God still regards and redeems the normal Joe who can be woefully insufficient in seasons of his life, defective and deficient as a male and a mate.

There is some humor in this story, to see that poor Abimelech had to deal with the same deceit on two occasions, promulgated independently by father and then son.  The humor lies in Abimelech being the stooge in this tale, the gullible king whose kingdom is the asylum for such tomfoolery.  In the text, Abimelech is the painted as a paranoid potentate who, moved by twilight terrors, trembles at the revelations of a foreign god.  However, viewed in a serious vein, this king hears and heeds the voice of Yahweh, acting on His intimate instructions, with a clear concern about His authority and possible interference in Abimelech’s rule.  Abimelech, the great pagan king, twice hears God and responds to Him, acting to regard and respect this foreign God’s interests.  How ironic that, in this story, the example of faith is not the Bible’s father of faith, Abraham, or his son, who in their fears told lies to protect first their own lives.  The example of faith in this story is Abimelech, the great Philistine pagan king. God contacts, and cares about, the pagan king and his countrymen.  And Abimelech regards and responds to the guidance of God.

That’s why I love the Bible.  God has sown messages and wisdom about His ways and His will behind and between the words on each of its pages.  He uses foolish things to confound the wise of the world, and ironies and insufficiencies to let us know that He understands we are all broken, and yet even in our weaknesses, He is there.  He sees what we are fully like inside.  And yet, because He is who He is, he extends His grace to us like a river, inviting us to wash in it day by day, and in it to find more of ourselves as we give more of ourselves to Him.  He delights in making fools- fools with faith, though- well, faithful, and fathers- of families and nations.