The altars are barely built. Abram has just left Haran on the strength of a promise with no map, and has walked the length of Canaan calling on the LORD's name. Then a famine hits, and the next thing we read is a plan built on fear: 13"Say you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared for your sake." Twice in one sentence, the point is his own welfare. The man who has just heard God promise to bless the whole earth through him is negotiating to protect himself, at his wife's expense, the moment the ground gets hard.
The plan works, in the narrowest sense. Sarai is taken into Pharaoh's household, and Abram grows rich by it: 16"sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male servants, female servants, female donkeys, and camels." Genesis lets the wealth pile up in silence and never calls it wisdom, the same silence Abram keeps while another man's household absorbs the consequences of his fear.
Then the LORD intervenes: 17"the LORD afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai." And the confrontation that follows is hard to read closely. It is Pharaoh, an outsider with no covenant, no promise, and no altar, who asks the question that ought to have come from someone nearer to Abram: 18"What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife?" The pagan king sounds like the one who respects marriage. Abram, carrying God's blessing to the nations, has brought trouble to the one household that took him in.
Abram's response, as far as the text tells us, is silence. He is sent away 20"with his wife and all that he had," escorted out of Egypt by the man he deceived. If the story stopped there, it would be a hard word about how badly fear can twist a person soon after faith. The subject is God's action. Sarai's safety and the future of the promised line rested on what God did. He acted directly, without waiting for Abram to repent, because the promise never rested on Abram's reliability.
The episode would have sounded strangely familiar to Abram's descendants: famine driving God's people down into Egypt, a threat to their safety there, plagues striking the land because of them, and finally a Pharaoh sending them out enriched. The pattern set here in miniature became the pattern of their whole nation generations later, proof, before Exodus was ever written, that God could carry his people into Egypt and out again whether or not the man at the center had done anything to deserve it.
Ask where you built an altar one day and protected yourself the next. The question Pharaoh asked is a fair one, and the God who acted for Abram is the one who acts for you.
Prayer
Father, we know what it is to build an altar one day and negotiate out of fear the next. Forgive us for letting someone else absorb what we should have carried ourselves. Thank you that your promises never depended on our reliability. Be as faithful to us as you were to Abram, in spite of him. In Jesus' name, amen.