Genesis 16:5 – And Sarai said to Abram, “May the wrong done to me be on you! I gave my servant to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt. May the Lord judge between you and me!”
The book of Genesis is incredible because it’s part of the Bible, which means it’s perfect and God-inspired, but it’s about a ton of imperfect people and flawed families from which we can learn what not to do, and maybe feel good about our own families for a moment.
Don’t raise your hand, but most likely all of us have dark secrets either personally or within our extended families that we would never want brought to life. These are the people, memories, circumstances, and events we just shove to the back of our proverbial closets and never talk about.
I once heard a story of a man who died and his son arrived at his deathbed, surprised to see a small group of weeping women were also there, people he had never met or seen in his life. He asked them, “How did you know my dad?” and was bewildered and dumbfounded by their answer when they replied, “He was our dad too.”
Apparently, this guy somehow had two completely separate families with separate kids who never met each other until this final day of his life. He had buried the existence of each family in a closet as it pertained to the other children for his entire life. It’s incredible he was able to keep this secret for so long.
These are the types of stories that Genesis brings to light – the ones we’d rather forget and would never write about ourselves in our tell-all book. That’s how you know God wrote it – he exposes our sins and failures to hopefully help people in the future. These stories also show us that even those who are recorded in the only perfect book need a lot of help, inviting us to bring to light our own dark secrets so He can ultimately heal them.
Note the numerous times the word “I” or “me” is used in the story of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 16. How does this reveal their selfishness, which leads to sin?
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