I am going to paraphrase for you what he said to Sarah. He says, “The gift is a covering to the eyes with regard to all who are with you.” In other words, it was a payment, it was an expiatory gift, an atoning gift. Now all of you are familiar with a term Yom Kippur. Yom is the Hebrew word for “day.” Kippur is “atonement,” but that is not what the word kippur means, it does not mean atonement. Kippur means, “to cover.” The Day of Atonement is a day of covering.
You might, if someday you are studying in Genesis 6, where it says Noah pitched the ark. Well, what it says in Hebrew is, Noah "kippured" the ark. It means he covered it with pitch so that it would not leak. He covered the wood with asphalt-like material so that it would be waterproof.
That is what atonement is. Atonement is a covering that hides something so that it no longer looks the way it previously did. It is like a paint job, where we say, that a coat of paint will hide a multitude of sins. You take an old beat-up wall, and you put some nice paint on it, and suddenly the old beat up wall looks pretty acceptable and agreeable. That is what an expiatory gift does. It covers the dirty, foul deed and makes it look good so that nobody can see the dirty, foul deed.
That is what Abimelech did here. He said in effect, “Sarah, you rotten scum, you lied to me just like your brother, your husband Abraham did. You have shamed everybody as a result of what you did, but I am going to cover it up. I’m going to give a gift to cover up the foul deed that you and Abraham did.” What an embarrassing situation for Abraham and Sarah to be in.
He said this gift is a covering to the eyes with regards to all who are with me. It is a payment, an atoning gift, because in you the whole family is disgraced. So, you see, it is a covering, a gift, and nobody sees the disgrace. That is the symbolism that it gives.
Well, God had brought a plague on Abimelech’s house because of this, some sort of a disease that rendered it impossible for them to bear children. There is one other interesting sideline here that is so interesting in regards to prayer.
And then down in Genesis 20:17, after Abimelech followed through with what God told him to do, he then goes to Abraham and asks him to pray. It is that word “pray” that gives you an insight to prayer and what it is. The word there in Hebrew is pal-wal. It means literally, to judge.
There is no doubt that Abraham talked to God, but Abraham also judged. Now what did he do? What he did was evaluate the circumstance, and he interceded for Abimelech before God. God heard Abraham’s prayer on Abimelech’s behalf. What he did probably is say, “Now, look God. Abimelech was just acting as any normal human being would have acted in this case, anybody in his circumstance. He was just following the customs of the time, and I think under the circumstances that the plague that You have put upon them is sufficient, and I think that it ought to be lifted because Sarah and I brought him into this by our lie.” See he judged the situation and he recommended to God a sentence or decision that he felt should be handed down.
Let's read Genesis 20. I want everybody to see how God worked with His servants. This is the episode of Abraham lying to Abimelech. Abraham journeys to the south, and he dwells between Kadesh and Shur, and he lived for a while in Gerar. There was a king in Gerar named Abimelech. What happened here is that Abraham said that Sarah was his sister. Now this was a half-truth. She was indeed his sister. They were half-brother, half-sister. They had the same father, but not the same mother, so he told a half-truth. He didn't tell Abimelech that she was his wife. He left out some very important information, and the reason for it was that he was trying to save his own skin. "They'll kill me if they find out this is my wife." How long did God forbear with Abraham? With converted Abraham? You might think, "Oh, I read this in fifteen seconds." No. Verse 17 takes place after everything was all cleared up between him and Abimelech.
How long did it take them to notice that all the women in Abimelech's house were barren? I don't know. At least a couple months. And this is the "father of the faithful" that we're talking about. God didn't strike him down for his lie. He gave Abraham a chance to repent, a chance to confess both to God and Abimelech what the truth was, ...but he never did it. And so finally God stepped in and gave Abimelech a dream and told him that he was keeping His prophet's wife, and he'd better give her back.
Now notice God's forbearance. Not only did He do this over a while, whatever time it was, but He kept Abimelech from defiling Sarah. He also kept Abimelech from killing Abraham for lying to the king. And you know, He worked everything out. It could have been an awful situation. It could have been that Isaac was never born, because Isaac isn't born until the next chapter. Also He was showing His forbearance with Sarah, because she was in on it. Call her "the mother of the faithful." She's mentioned there in Hebrews 11.
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.
