God Has Unlimited Power – Abraham and Abimelech – Genesis Chapter 20
by Sabrina Dawkins
God’s power has no limits. Abraham has again told strangers whom he dwelt among that Sarah is his sister. In fact, she is the daughter of Abraham’s father but not his mother. She is also his wife, and Abraham kept this crucial information from King Abimelech. He did it because, as he said in Genesis chapter 12 when he and Sarai were near Egypt, Sarai is beautiful and the strangers in the land where they sojourned would kill him in order to have his wife. They wouldn’t kill him, however, if he said she was his sister. Upon hearing that Sarah was Abraham’s sister and not his wife, Abimelech took her. It’s not that Abraham was wrong in his predictions. In both Egypt and Gerar, where Abraham and Sarah sojourned, Sarah was taken into the house of the ruler when she was thought to be the sister of Abraham. But Abraham had greatly underestimated the power of God.
Abraham told Abimelech that he thought, “Surely the fear of God is not in this place” (Genesis 20:11). But God is all-powerful. Whether the people and ruler of Gerar feared God or not, he was capable of compelling them to do what he said. He plagued Pharaoh’s house and came to Abimelech in a dream to threaten him and all that belonged to him with death for taking another man’s wife. But God had prevented Abimelech from touching Sarah and therefore sinning because he knew that Abraham had told him that Sarah was his sister, not his wife. In the dream, God also told Abimelech that Abraham was a prophet and that if Abraham prayed for him, he would live.
Abimelech’s servants were terrified when he told them about his dream. And as a result of his talk with God in the dream, Abimelech gave Abraham sheep, oxen, servants, and 1,000 pieces of silver and told him that he and his wife could dwell wherever they wanted to in his land.
So Abraham prayed for Abimelech, and God healed him, his wife, and his female servants; he had closed their wombs because Sarah was taken into Abimelech’s house. In Genesis chapter 26 God also showed his power in making Abraham’s seed, Isaac, prosperous in the same land, Gerar, where he sojourned, and in the presence of Abimelech, whom Isaac had also made to believe his wife was his sister out of fear because she was beautiful. Isaac sowed in the land of Gerar and received a hundredfold, and the Philistines envied him because of his growing possessions, and Abimelech sent him away, seeing that he had become more powerful than the Philistines. But King Abimelech came to realize that God, too, was with Isaac and therefore created an oath with him so that Isaac would not harm him.