Bible Text: Genesis 20 | Pastor: Eric Danielson | Series: Abraham

There are times when we go through darkness, gloom and depression and it feels like there’s no hope, joy, or purpose in life. Is there hope? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? Where can we find it?

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Seasons of Shadow
Genesis 20

This morning we continue to look at Abraham’s life and I want to talk about what I’ll call “seasons of shadow.” I’m talking about those times in our lives where the darkness and gloom sets in and our outlook on life is like a dark shadow and leaves us feeling down, depressed, disoriented, and hopeless. These can be experienced in many ways – it can be as simple as having a down day where you wake up on the wrong side of the bed and for whatever reason feel depressed. Or it could be the week after you get back from vacation and you’re really bummed for a few days. It could be something much more serious like postpartum depression, seasonal depression, or clinical depression that lasts a long time, or post-traumatic stress that haunts you for years.

I went through a season of shadow in my junior year of college – about 9 months of a kind of depression where it just felt like a dark cloud was over my head. I felt purposeless, hopeless, and disoriented. There was a gnawing emptiness in my soul that kept coming back day after day and it was miserable. I desperately wanted to run from it, but I couldn’t. We all go through seasons of shadow to varying degrees and these can be very troubling times and very difficult in our spiritual lives as well. We feel doubt and fear and hopelessness and very distant from God. Our motivation and zeal to live for the Lord just isn’t there and we don’t really care about anything.

This morning I want to shine a glimmer of light and hope into that darkness by what we see in Abraham’s life. We are going to be looking at Genesis 20 today and it’s a chapter that I was planning to skip because as we read it you may notice it sounds awfully familiar to something we already looked at several weeks ago in Genesis 12. It’s almost a repeat of a story. I already said everything I wanted to say in Genesis 12, so what more can I say about Genesis 20? But as I dug into it deeper this week I realized this story is completely different – not on the outside, but because of what I think is going on inside of Abraham. So let’s read through this story and begin to dig in.

Read Genesis 20.
From there Abraham journeyed toward the territory of the Negeb and lived between Kadesh and Shur; and he sojourned in Gerar. 2 And Abraham said of Sarah his wife, “She is my sister.” And Abimelech king of Gerar sent and took Sarah. 3 But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night and said to him, “Behold, you are a dead man because of the woman whom you have taken, for she is a man’s wife.” 4 Now Abimelech had not approached her. So he said, “Lord, will you kill an innocent people? 5 Did he not himself say to me, ‘She is my sister’? And she herself said, ‘He is my brother.’ In the integrity of my heart and the innocence of my hands I have done this.” 6 Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know that you have done this in the integrity of your heart, and it was I who kept you from sinning against me. Therefore I did not let you touch her. 7 Now then, return the man’s wife, for he is a prophet, so that he will pray for you, and you shall live. But if you do not return her, know that you shall surely die, you and all who are yours.”
8 So Abimelech rose early in the morning and called all his servants and told them all these things. And the men were very much afraid. 9 Then Abimelech called Abraham and said to him, “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.” 10 And Abimelech said to Abraham, “What did you see, that you did this thing?” 11 Abraham said, “I did it because I thought, ‘There is no fear of God at all in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.’ 12 Besides, she is indeed my sister, the daughter of my father though not the daughter of my mother, and she became my wife. 13 And when God caused me to wander from my father’s house, I said to her, ‘This is the kindness you must do me: at every place to which we come, say of me, “He is my brother.”’”
14 Then Abimelech took sheep and oxen, and male servants and female servants, and gave them to Abraham, and returned Sarah his wife to him. 15 And Abimelech said, “Behold, my land is before you; dwell where it pleases you.” 16 To Sarah he said, “Behold, I have given your brother a thousand pieces of silver. It is a sign of your innocence in the eyes of all who are with you, and before everyone you are vindicated.” 17 Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelech, and also healed his wife and female slaves so that they bore children. 18 For the LORD had closed all the wombs of the house of Abimelech because of Sarah, Abraham’s wife.

Sound familiar? If you were here several weeks ago it sounds almost exactly like what happened in Genesis 12 when Abraham and Sarah went to Egypt, only this time it wasn’t Pharaoh or Egypt, it was Abimelech and Gerar. If you look at the details in this story, you see that Abraham moved from the Oaks of Mamre, near Hebron (see map), where he had been living for the past 20 years and traveled south toward the Negeb desert. He wandered between the wilderness of Shur toward Egypt and the city of Kadesh-barnea and eventually ended up near the city of Gerar. I learned from Gill’s Exposition of the Bible that Gerar was one of the 5 lordships of the Philistines and Abimelech was one of the Philistine Kings.

In Gerar Abraham ran into the same problem he did 20 years earlier in Egypt – the king had a harem of beautiful women and Sarah, in spite of being 90 years old, was still beautiful and Abimelech wanted her. Abraham knew the Philistines would kill him because of Sarah, so they told Abimelech she was his sister. So Abraham was spared and she was taken into Abimelech’s house, and that night God actually visited him in a dream and basically told him, “If you touch her, you’re dead – you, and your whole family.” So the next day he brought her back to Abraham and confronted him for putting his whole family in danger. And then he gave Abraham a whole bunch of livestock, servants, money and land. So Abraham came out of a very dangerous situation with amazing prosperity.

It’s a cool story, but again, it’s basically the same thing that happened in Genesis 12. But that’s actually what began to bother me and bring some questions to my mind. The first time this happened, Abraham was forced to go to Egypt because there was a famine in Canaan. So he had to choose between dying at home, or going to Egypt to face Pharaoh. So he chose to go to Egypt and told Pharaoh that Sarah was his sister – it was a matter of survival. But this time it doesn’t say anything about famine. So why would Abraham leave his home of 20 years and put himself and Sarah in another very dangerous situation?

And why after everything that he had seen and been through with God – all the visions, the miraculous rescue from Egypt, the defeat of the Mesopotamian kings, the making of the covenant – why after all these things didn’t Abraham trust God to protect him and his family? I could understand why he deceived Pharaoh 20 years earlier, but this time it doesn’t make sense. He had to know God would protect him and Sarah because they both had to be alive if they were going to have a son like God promised. So this just seems like a major lack of faith.

This whole chapter really didn’t make any sense to me and things seemed uncharacteristic for Abraham. But then I began to think about what happened to Abraham right before this. We read about it in Genesis 19:24-28.

Read Genesis 19:24-28
Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD out of heaven. 25 And he overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. 26 But Lot’s wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt. 27 And Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the LORD. 28 And he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the valley, and he looked and, behold, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace.

It’s easy to read about what Abraham saw and skip right over it without giving it a lot of thought, but I think to understand the way he acted in Genesis 20, we have to look into it a little deeper. It says that on the morning that the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham went out early to the place where he had stood before the Lord the day before. That was the conversation where he kept asking God to spare the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah if there were righteous people in them. The location of that conversation would have been on the hills to the west of the valley that Sodom and Gomorrah were in, so from there Abraham had a front row seat to the catastrophic devastation that took place. (see map)

I read a fascinating article from biblearcheology.org that describes what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah and the valley based on what’s said in the original Hebrew as well as archeological and geological discoveries in that region. (Link to article) First I want to look at some of the words used. Genesis 19:24 says that God rained down sulfur and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah from heaven. The word for “sulfur” means “sulfurous oil,” so the material that fell on Sodom and Gomorrah was some kind of burning oil. That’s disturbing. Genesis 20:25 says that God “overthrew” those cities and at first I took this as if it was saying “God destroyed them,” but I now think it was much more than that.

Geologist Fredereck Clapp visited that region in 1929 and 1934, and he found that both cities lie exactly on a fault line and earthquakes are common in that area. In 1980 geologist Jack Donahue of the University of Pittsburgh found that at the time of destruction there was a massive earthquake along that fault line that caused an uplift at Sodom of 92 feet and an uplift at Gomorrah of 164 feet. So those cities that once were at the same level as the valley, literally exploded upward because of a violent earthquake. The earthquake was so violent that the river that used to flow south out of the Dead Sea and provide irrigation to the valley, actually changed directions so that it flowed north. After that day the Sea no longer had an outlet and the water became putrid because of all the minerals, which is why we now know it as the Dead Sea. It wasn’t always the Dead Sea, and that region wasn’t always as desolate as it is today – it used to be a fertile land, rich in agriculture. But everything changed after that terrible day.

The geologists also discovered bitumen in the valley, which is like the tar used to make our roadways, and petroleum, natural gas and sulfur. So when the earthquake happened, it was so violent that they believe it shot burning oil out of the ground hundreds of feet into the air that then rained down upon the cities and all their inhabitants. Horrific destruction.

Genesis 20:28 says that “the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace.” The Hebrew word is not the word used for smoke from an ordinary fire, but a thick black smoke from sacrifices and it was being forced upwards like air being forced out of a pottery kiln through an exit flue. You probably saw video this week of the fire that happened at the refinery in Superior – thick, black smoke billowing into the air – imagine that only on a much larger scale.

Archeologists Walter Rast and Thomas Schaub did excavations of the two sites believed to be Sodom and Gomorrah in 1973-74. Sodom was the bigger of the two cities with a population of 600-1,200 and was located on the Lisan peninsula of the Dead Sea. The city had an area of about 10 acres surrounded by a wall 23 feet thick made of stones and mud bricks. Gomorrah was a few miles to the south and had a wall 13 feet thick.

The evidence at both cities revealed they came to a fiery end. At Sodom, the main gate was destroyed by fire as indicated by charcoal, broken and fallen bricks, and areas of ash. And it was apparent that the sanctuary collapsed after burning. In Gomorrah, the entire site was covered with a layer of ash about 18 inches thick. Every room in the houses was filled with ash and burned debris. They found two skeletons lying in ashy debris, buried under collapsed stones from a tower along the east wall. There were even three cemeteries near one of the cities and the structures in them were also destroyed by fire.

From his vantage point Abraham saw the carnage and devastation below him as the earth shook violently and burning oil rained down upon those cities and the valley and all the inhabitants. If you were watching, you couldn’t help but think about the horror those people endured in their dying moments as men, women and children burned to death. It would deeply affect you. Abraham saw this devastation with his very own eyes. And it was after that, that he did what we read about in Genesis 20. It all happened within just a few weeks of the destruction of the cities.

I talked to a friend of mine who has struggled with post traumatic stress for a long time. After the trauma he went through he described losing awareness of his surroundings and feeling like he was back in the traumatic situation. He also struggled with anxiousness, sleeplessness and terrible nightmares. He said it changed who he used to be and has to face it every day. At one point he was so overcome by confusion and his own emotions that he felt as though he was walking in darkness. And though he never lost faith that there was a God and that his love was boundless, he lost track of where God was and where he was. This drove him off course from his walk with the Lord at that time and even though he knew God was with him, he just couldn’t see clearly because of what was happening. This is an incredibly strong man of faith.

I think Abraham probably experienced similar things after his traumatic experience and when I look at Genesis 20 with that perspective, it starts to make a lot more sense to me. Why did he leave his home of 20 years? I think it’s because he just couldn’t stay there anymore after what he saw. Life would never be the same and he had to get out of there. So he left. He didn’t seem to have a destination in mind because he just wandered around for a few weeks until he eventually ended up in Gerar. Why didn’t he trust the Lord to protect him and Sarah from Abimelech? I think it’s because his head was in a fog and God felt very far away. So he reverted back to an old, deceptive plan for survival.

But the thing I want us to see this morning is that throughout the time that Abraham was in this season of shadow, the Lord never abandoned him – ever. He may have felt very far away from God, but God was never far away from him. God protected him and Sarah in his time of weakness – not allowing an evil Philistine king to lay even one hand on them. And even more than that, God poured out abundant prosperity and blessing on him during that time – a powerful demonstration of his mercy and grace. He even used him in ministry – to pray for Abimelech.

When we go through seasons of shadow we need to know that God is with us even as he was with Abraham. He will carry us through. He will never leave us or forsake us. And when the time is right, he will bring us back to our feet again and restore us and use us for his purposes and glory.

When I was going through my season of shadow in college, I kept looking for that light at the end of the tunnel – something to give me hope. And I know that some of you are looking for that same thing today. I hope the Lord has given that to you this morning from what you’ve seen of him – his faithfulness, compassion, and love – even in times of shadow.

Link to featured article on www.biblearchaeology.org