Self-Protective Strategies. Genesis 12:10
1)
There are two
kinds of pressures in life: adversity is the inevitable outside daily pressure
of life that attacks and seeks to penetrate the soul; stress is what happens
inside the soul. God takes us from the instant of salvation through a series of
tests in order to reveal the flaws and failures of our own carnal, sinful
creatureliness, and we have to learn to be dependent upon God and His
provision. We have to learn to utilize the ten problem-solving devices so that
we can grow from spiritual infancy to spiritual maturity. So adversity is the
outside pressure; stress is the inside pressure of the soul caused by reaction
to the external pressures of adversity. When the believer who is negative to
Bible doctrine allows adversity to penetrate his thinking he has succumbed to
the arrogance skills.
2)
We have to
remember that adversity or outside pressure has two categories. There is
suffering from the law of volitional responsibility or divine discipline.
Galatians 6:7, “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man
soweth, that shall he also reap.” In other words, there is a certain amount of
suffering we go through and we have to ask the question: Is this my own doing
or is this just the result of living in a fallen world? Because we live in a
fallen world we will encounter a certain amount of adversity that is not
related to our own volition. This second type of suffering is that which is not
related to our own volition. It is suffering that is the result of living in
the cosmic system, suffering that God allows to come into our lives and is
classified as suffering for blessing. Suffering for blessing is designed to
accelerate spiritual growth. When we go through suffering for discipline we can
convert it into suffering for blessing when we confess our sins, get back in
fellowship, and then start applying the ten problem-solving devices to that
particular adversity. Abraham is going to go through both classifications. He
starts off in suffering for blessing. That is why the famine occurs. God is
going to teach Abraham certain things about himself. Principle: Whenever we go
through adversity the bottom line of the test is to learn to trust the
character of God. It always has something to do with the character of God and
learning to recognize that God is in control, learning that we must be
dependent upon Him, learning that He is trustworthy in His righteousness,
learning that He is fair in His justice, learning that He is more powerful than
our circumstances in His omnipotence, learning that He is never surprised by
any problem or heartache or difficulty that we face in His omniscience. As we
learn these, our ability to trust Him strengthens and increases. This
accelerates spiritual growth.
3)
Adversity is
what the outside circumstances of life do to you; stress is what you do to
yourself. Stress is always the result of our own volition. We react to that
stress in some way where we are calling upon our own resources, our own
ability, and our own intellect to solve the problem in contrast to dependence
upon God. So we just bring the stress upon ourselves. Every time we try to
solve the problem on our own we have already made a negative decision toward
Bible doctrine, and the sin nature is in control. Once the sin nature is in
control then we are in trouble.
4)
Adversity is
inevitable. Job says that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. We
can’t avoid it. Stress is optional and the result of our own negative volition
to doctrine. James 1:2 is a key verse for understanding this. “Count it all
joy, my brethren, when you encounter …” The word there for ‘encounter’ is the
idea of falling into it. It just happens. For Abraham it is a famine.
Genesis 12:10,
“And there was a famine in the land: and Abram went down into Egypt
to sojourn there; for the famine was severe in the land.” The word ‘severe’ in
the Hebrew is the word kabod, the
same word that in some passages is translated ‘glory’ for the glory of God. The
literal meaning of the word is something that is heavy or weighty. So when we
talk about the glory of God it is that the presence of God is a serious weighty
matter. It is used only a couple of time in the Old Testament to describe a
famine. So we have a serious or severe famine, one of the worst in the ancient
world. So as Abraham hits this adversity he has to make a decision. It was not
an instantaneous decision but one he had to come to over time.
Abraham’s situation: He is living
2000 B.C in the land of Canaan.
This was a land that had a pantheon of deities oriented around the fertility
cult. The key god in the Canaanite pantheon was Baal, the storm god. There were
other female deities such as Astarte who was the goddess of fertility. All of
this revolves around the agricultural cycle and how to get more produce out of
the ground. Abraham doesn’t have as much of a frame of reference for a God like
we know in the Scripture. He is learning about this God. The gods that he has
been familiar with and has seen in the religious pantheons of Babylon
and Canaan were gods that were gods [e.g. weather
gods] that frequently failed. Abraham is in that kind of a situation. He looks
around at the famine, which gets worse and worse. He has a human viewpoint
frame of reference of deities that can’t really solve weather problems, and so
what is the solution? Well God really can’t help me, so I must come up with a
solution myself. His problem was too great for God! This is what happens when
we hit that adversity and it is a decision point. Any time we have a decision
to make about how to apply doctrine it is a test. It may be a minor test; it
may be a big test. Every time we have to make a decision on handling a problem
it is a test of doctrine. That is what James is talking about in James 1:2-4.
We are able to count it all joy because we know that the testing of our faith
produces endurance. Faith there is PISTIS [pisitj], and it has the idea of a passive sense, of what we
believe. It is a testing of what we believe. If we are growing and applying
doctrine we take the divine viewpoint route and trust the Lord, and ultimately
everything builds off the faith-rest drill and we are using one of the ten
problem-solving devices.
We often take the no-trust route,
the no-faith-rest-drill route—we are going to handle it on our own. We
have all sorts of ways of trying to rationalize our own handling of the
problem. This is the human viewpoint strategy and we develop hundreds of these strategies
to deal with the problems of life. Ultimately they are designed to protect
us—self-protective strategies, because ultimately they are designed to
somehow give us a strategy or methodology to make life work, to find peace,
stability, harmony, success and happiness apart from dependence upon God. And
what we see happening whenever we hit any of these tests is that the test is a
personal threat to my stability, to my peace, to my happiness, to basically my
ability to control life in a world that is out of control so that I can have a
measure of peace and happiness and stability. It goes right back to our sin
nature. This is one of the most important things to understand.
We believe that no matter what the
problem is in life, no matter what the difficulty is, the solution is always
found in the Word of God. We need to learn how to solve our own problems
through doctrine, and to do that we have to have a framework for understanding
human behavior. When it comes to counseling we need men and women who come to
the table with a biblical understanding of human behavior. That starts with
understanding the sin nature. That is usually something that is not given a
whole lot of understanding in human viewpoint models of behavior, because they
don’t have a biblically developed doctrine of hamartiology.
At the core of the sin nature we put
two categories of sin: fear and arrogance. This is at the very core of
motivation for much behavior. Think back to Genesis chapter three. There was
the fall, the sin. Eve eats the fruit first and coyly introduces this wonderful
delicious fruit to Adam. Adam looks at Eve and the fruit and decides that he is
going to follow her in the sin, so he falls. Then God comes to walk in the
garden, and the first thing we read about Adam and the woman was that they were
afraid. Why are they afraid? For a number of reasons. They are afraid because
they are going to get caught. They had disobeyed God and are going to be
exposed. But they are afraid because at a fundamental level they have lost
everything. When they realized that they were naked they tried to cover it up.
They tried to solve the problem through their own human viewpoint strategy.
That is what is meant by a self-protective strategy. They thought they could
solve the problem through their own efforts—human good. But it is
motivated by fear and it is motivated by arrogance. Arrogance is the idea that
man is going to operate autonomously from God and that he can solve his
problems without being completely and totally dependent upon God. So the basic
core of the sin nature is fear and arrogance. Then, of course, we operate on
the arrogance skills. We are self-absorbed from day one, and as we develop
self-absorption we move to self-indulgence—we want to fulfill everything
that we are absorbed with, we want to indulge all of our wants, all of our
whims. The biggest problem a parent has is to teach a baby that they can’t have
what they want when they want it the way they want it. That is why the role as
a parent is to teach discipline to children, to teach good manners. That is one
of the reasons we have etiquette, because we are all basically selfish and if
we are going to get along together as human beings, and if we are going to
function together in society, we have to have some code of conduct that brings
some measure of control to that self-oriented sin nature. So arrogance moves
from self-absorption to self-indulgence, and then self-justification. We are
all masters of self-justification. It all flows out of the sin nature, that from
the very time we were infants we started developing habits of handling
problems, and they are so much a part of our nature that we think that is just
who we are. That is how we justify them: Well, that’s the way I am; that’s the
way my parents were. Then we move from self-justification to self-deception:
That’s really not a problem, that’s how my mother taught me.
What we see is an interesting
pattern here with Abraham. Abraham has a certain trend in his sin nature that
means he is going to handle pressure by lying, by deception, and buy getting
somebody else to take the heat. That is what he does with Sarah, basically. As
he goes down to Egypt to solve the problem he is going to leave the land where
God told him to go and in the process he is putting the seed in jeopardy. So
one we make that decision to go negative and try to solve the problem ourselves
what happens is one bad decision develops into another bad decision and they
start to snowball.
Genesis 12:11-13, “And it came to
pass, when he was come near to enter into Egypt, that he said unto Sarai his
wife, Behold now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon: therefore it
shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see thee, that they shall say,
This is his wife: and they will kill me, but they will save thee alive. Say, I
pray thee, thou art my sister: that it may be well with me for thy sake; and my
soul shall live because of thee.” Saying Sarah was his sister was a half-truth.
He is oblivious to the fact that he is going to put her into a vulnerable
situation that could create danger and problems for her. He is just concerned
for himself—self-absorption and self-deception. He is oblivious as to
what the consequences might be for others. He also does this later on with the
Philistine leader. Not only does he do it, but what we also discover is that
Isaac does it as well—Genesis 26:7. Self-deception then leads to
self-deification. This is the whole process in Romans chapter one. We are
ultimately deifying ourselves: we are the ultimate source of values, not God.
We are going to determine what is right and wrong. Abraham begins to
rationalize his own behavior but his strategy is wrong for a number of reasons.
It is wrong because it is a violation of God’s directive will. God specifically
directed him to go to the land. He didn’t say to go through the land and go to
Egypt. So he is violating specific, revealed directions from God. It is also
wrong because he is only concerned about his own hide and it puts his wife in
jeopardy and the promised seed in jeopardy. He is wrong because he is looking
to his wife to be the source of his blessing, protection, and stability rather
than God.
Principle: When we get out of
fellowship we start failing in our personal responsibilities. Eventually we will
start looking to others to handle them for us or we will start blaming others
for our failures.
Then what happens is that our
arrogance operates through our lust patterns. We have two areas of strength in
the in nature: an area of weakness which produces personal sins, and then we do
all kinds of good things and that is what trips us up. We develop these
strategies to make life work apart from God and we wrap it up in human good. We
come up with all kinds of justification for our behavior and how we react under
adversity because from the time we were a toddler we behaved that way, and we
don’t even want to admit to ourselves that we are doing it because if it is a
violation of God’s Word then at a very core level of our personality we have to
change, i.e. repentance, then sanctification. The aim of the spiritual life is
to learn to handle problems, not the way that makes us most comfortable but by
using God’s problem-solving devices so that we can grow and advance
spiritually. So we are either operating on sin or human good. And this tends to
lead to one of two trends: either a trend towards asceticism or legalism, which
is moral degeneracy, or towards licentiousness, lasciviousness or
antinomianism, which leads to immoral degeneracy. But we have to understand the
sin nature and what is at its very core is fear and arrogance and the idea that
somehow I can make life work apart from God.
These are the self-protective
strategies. They involve emotional sins—anger, anxiety; they involve
overt sins—trying to control people, manipulate them, micro-manage them,
make sure they do things just the way you want them to, to bring some level of
stability there. Then we use sins of the tongue to destroy people.
Abraham’s strategy was to lie and to
use deception. The result is that he is discovered because God isn’t going to
let this happen. God is protecting the seed, protecting the promise. Genesis 12:17,
“And the LORD plagued Pharaoh and his house with great plagues
because of Sarai Abram's wife.” Finally, Pharaoh confronts Abraham and this is
where Abraham goes through suffering as a result of his own bad decision. The
interesting thing here is that Abraham is also blessed at the same time. “And
he [Pharaoh] entreated Abram well for her sake: and he had sheep, and oxen, and
he asses, and menservants, and maidservants, and she asses, and camels.” His
personal wealth increased. Can we hear Abraham’s reasoning here? This is
working out pretty good; God is really blessing me! This is how we justify our
arrogance. We look at the positive things that have happened and use them to
reinterpret the entire scenario so that we don’t have to face our own sin and
our own failures. But God ultimately is not going to let us get away with it,
which is what happened to Abraham. Pharaoh kicks him out of Egypt.
So he has lost respect, lost an opportunity to be a blessing to the Gentiles in
Egypt, and he has been a complete failure.
Nevertheless he has learned from his failure and he advances and goes forward
in the spiritual life. And that is the same thing with us. If we are still
alive God still has a plan for our life. We can learn from our failures as much
as our successes. For most of us we can learn more from our failures if we have
true teachability than we do from our successes, because we realize how much we
have blown it and how greatly we were blessed by the grace of God. God blesses
Abraham in the midst of his failure, not because of his failure but because of
God’s plan.