Now this is the ‘Father of Faith,’ man!  You see if this guy can get on a Fundamentalist Church board!  He says to Sarai, “Honey, whatever they do to you you’ll survive and probably be just as pretty when they’re done, but if they find out I’m your husband dead is dead.  So I tell you what, if you see one of those guys eyeballing you and they ask if you’re married to me you say, ‘Nope, nope, no, no, nope!  That’s my brother.’  And I’ll say ‘Take her—she’s my sister.’  I’ll be there to pick up the pieces when they’re done with you, honey, and if they kill me who’s gonna rescue you when they’re done?”  I can just hear the rationalization.  This is the ‘Father of Faith.’  This ain’t some accidental lie in the pressure of the moment.  This is premeditated, well thought-out, connived, devious, damnable lying behavior that turned the stomach of the heathen king when he ultimately found out about it.

They went down to Egypt and you read the chapter, before the one we’re focusing on, when I get there it says they treated Abram real good because of his sister.  Their eyes fell on Sarai, not yet named Sarah, and it was love at first sight.  And a way to make sure that he had all the things going his way, he just heaped treasures on Abram.  You give to God right like Abel did, and you get killed.  You lie, and you get rich.  At another sermon I might take you with Habakkuk to the watchtower in the Old Testament minor prophets where he puzzled over that problem.  But Abram got filthy rich for lying.  See, I’ve tried these many years to not peddle Christianity under false pretenses with a magazine that says if you serve God, everything’s right and if you don’t get right, everything’s gonna go wrong.  I’ve seen too many scoundrels getting good things done to pick the 10 or 12 out of 400,000 that the caricatured formula works with and feature them in my magazine. 

          This real world doesn’t always appreciate goodness.  Clever liar with a pretty sister that’s really his wife, who ain’t his sister, can go places in this world.  But in this case, even the heathen had more character than Abram.  He found out, and he said “What would have happened if I had carried this courting all the way and married her and then found out she was your wife?”  He kicked him out, but he left rich.  He left rich—full of cattle and servants, gold and much goods.  And the Bible says—and we’re coming to my text—he came back to the place of the altar, which quite simply means a place where you die a little to yourself and offer more of yourself to God in recognizing His rights, and the place of the tent, which characterized him as willing to hang his body and move wherever God led him to go.  And when he came back to that place, lo and behold the failure to go all the way with his commitment at the outset, which is a point I’m making redundantly today, rose to haunt him. 

Lot was still with him—his nephew.  And Lot’s herdsmen and Abram’s herdsmen got into a fight over their respective greedy claims in the limited sparse grass for their stock in that Bethel area.  Abram showed some character—maybe he’d learned something in Egypt that it didn’t work, what he’d done there, but he says “Let there be no strife between us; we be brethren” and said “Here Lot, the whole land’s in front of us.  You pick the place you wanna go, and I’ll stay out of it.”  Scripture says Lot looked and saw the well-watered plains of Jordan and the Jordan rift flowing down to Sodom and Gomorrah and he said, “I’ll take that.”  Reminds me of the two brothers picking cats and one of them grabbed the choice Siamese cat and the other alley cat was sitting there he says “Now you choose.”  Lot took the best. 

Now get the picture.  They’ve returned from failure in Egypt.  He now has lost the best part of this land to the greedy nephew he