Now is it not interesting that the Canaanites were still there, and the Land of Promise was subject to famine, and as we see later on, warfare.
Let us look at this in a larger sense to you and me. This earth is our inheritance, but it is possessed by others. It is ours because Christ confirmed the promise, and we are in Christ. It is ours but it is possessed by others. And indeed, we may be persecuted in our own possession. It is torn by warfare, it is raped and torn by greedy men stripping it of its wealth, it is subject to devastating acts of nature, and we live unsettled lives on our own inheritance.
Now we might have hoped whenever we were converted that by obedience we would be freed from such living, but such is not the path for the heirs of God. Abraham might have thought the same thing, “Boy, I better get out of this land where they are after my hide, and I’m being persecuted.” But it was not that way. He got into his own possession and he was always on the move. There was warfare and there was famine. Though he became wealthy, he never led a settled life.
Now I'm going to throw one in here. This was the second time that it happened! Look back at Genesis 12:10-20 and the same thing happened between Abraham and Pharaoh fifteen or twenty years before. How long was God's forbearance now? Fifteen or twenty years.
But He had given Abraham time to repent of this sin, but he never did it. Eventually I'm sure that he did, but here we have a fifteen or twenty-year period of time where God tested him on the same problem in order to help him grow in character. I thought that was kind of interesting.
Eventually, in this chapter, Abraham gets to Egypt. In verse 10 we have the motivating reason for going there, there was a famine.
