Today Our Daily Bread Gen 20

Genesis 20: 1 - 18
1 Now Abraham moved south to the Negev and settled for a while between Kadesh - "holy" and Shur- "a wall "at a place called Gerar. "a lodging place" a Philistine town south of Gaza, modern 'Umm' 2 Abraham told people there that his wife, Sarah, was his sister. So King Abimelech sent for her and had her brought to him at his palace. 3 But one night God came to Abimelech in a dream and told him, "You are a dead man, for that woman you took is married." 4 But Abimelech had not slept with her yet, so he said, "Lord, will you kill an innocent man? 5 Abraham told me, 'She is my sister,' and she herself said, 'Yes, he is my brother.' I acted in complete innocence!" 6 "Yes, I know you are innocent," God replied. "That is why I kept you from sinning against me; I did not let you touch her. 7 Now return her to her husband, and he will pray for you, for he is a prophet. Then you will live. But if you don't return her to him, you can be sure that you and your entire household will die." 8 Abimelech got up early the next morning and hastily called a meeting of all his servants. When he told them what had happened, great fear swept through the crowd. 9 Then Abimelech called for Abraham. "What is this you have done to us?" he demanded. "What have I done to you that deserves treatment like this, making me and my kingdom guilty of this great sin? This kind of thing should not be done! 10 Why have you done this to us?" 11 "Well," Abraham said, "I figured this to be a godless place. I thought, 'They will want my wife and will kill me to get her.' 12 Besides, she is my sister – we both have the same father, though different mothers – and I married her. 13 When God sent me to travel far from my father's home, I told her, 'Wherever we go, have the kindness to say that you are my sister.'" 14 Then Abimelech took sheep and oxen and servants – both men and women – and gave them to Abraham, and he returned his wife, Sarah, to him. 15 "Look over my kingdom, and choose a place where you would like to live," Abimelech told him. 16 Then he turned to Sarah. "Look," he said, "I am giving your 'brother' a thousand pieces of silver F64 to compensate for any embarrassment I may have caused you. This will settle any claim against me in this matter." 17 Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelech, his wife, and the other women of the household, so they could have children. 18 For the LORD had stricken all the women with infertility as a warning to Abimelech for having taken Abraham's wife.
FOOTNOTES:F64: Hebrew 1,000 shekels of silver, about 25 pounds or 11.4 kilograms in weight.
Holy Bible, New Living Translation,copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.,
~ Lena’s Comments ~
South & Negev are the same, it seems in their definitions it is relating them to people and earth, the peoples of all the earth. Maybe his journey in life (as ours is) was to reach the people of all the earth (through doing the portion God has given you). He was at this point where maybe he found himself in "a place" in a mindset, in a place he would need to get out of mentally, spiritually, and of course, physically. The place was somewhere between "holy" and a "wall". He seemed to be "stuck there" in a sense. Notice Gerar meaning ,"Ummmm" Ever feel that way?
It also seemed he was in a crunch and wanted out, but wasn’t realizing the way out of it. Desperate, he was grasping at failed attempts to do so. One such attempt is being illustrated here.
I find it extremely interesting here that God spoke with Abimelech, and Abimelech called Him Lord (Capitol "L"). Also the way God spoke with him, and he with God is surprising to me. It seems they knew one another. It was funny to me, because the only one we hear of speaking with God this way, was Abraham himself. Maybe, as with many of us, Abraham though he was alone in his walk with God, yet in another place in the earth there was a king who was in communion or at least open to communication with respect to God.
Also the way Abimelech spoke with Abraham was notable in that he refers to morals of faith, and he almost acted as though they had at least potential for a common way of thinking. Such as, One who truly knows God would not wish harm, or set others up for harm, even his enemies. Especially when his understood mission and ministry on earth is to win people/lands over to the Lordship of the Master of the Universe. This was setting these people up as God’s enemies rather than winning them over as God’s friends!
Abraham said he assumed this was a godless place! So? What does that mean to us? If we are sent to a godless place, (like your place of employment etc…) why would we assume that the people there would be God’s enemies or need or want to stay that way? Isn’t that the reason God would send us there? To change their god-less-ness, by a God-ly influence? vs 13 says -
"When God sent me to travel far from my father's home…" All of us, before Christ had a father, satan- the god of this world, the father of lies…[Joh 8:44 You're from your father, the Devil, and all you want to do is please him. He was a killer from the very start. He couldn't stand the truth because there wasn't a shred of truth in him. When the Liar speaks, he makes it up out of his lying nature and fills the world with lies.] …we served him and his ways until deciding to serve God and His ways, until we left satan’s "home" by turning our lives in a different direction towards our realized and created purpose. Then we also have got to realize that God has sent us on an eternal rescue mission. He wants us to come out from where we’ve been at- serving our old father and his ways, serving ourselves, and completely intertwined in our old behaviors and activities, which have had no real eternal purpose at all, into a god-less place to bring influence for God-ly change. An eternal change of "fathers" and "places" is what God has commissioned us to make in the land.
He wants to send us out, far away from that place, to be able to concentrate and focus in on who is out there to rescue. Abraham’s religious thinking was actually blinding him from seeing who was out there, and truly the eternal potential of WHO was out there – new influencers and life changers. Religion looks at what is, calls it at it sees it, and judges it with no change made or expected at all. Our Father’s heart sees something or someone and the potential inside of them, calls for the the purpose and potential, nutures it, and sticks with it, till change appears, never giving up because its motivation is of an eternal nature, stemmed from Love.