Genesis 12:10-20 - When Fear Dominates Faith

There are times when Scripture speaks to everyone generally. And there also times when Scripture speaks one thing to men and another thing to women.

Our job in receiving God's instruction through His Word is to grapple with and absorb the items God speaks to us far more than we absorb what God is plainly saying to others.

Men: the Word indicates that your sin affects not only you but everyone under your authority, which includes your wife and children, and anyone else under your authority. And your sin won't just get passed down to them, it expands and gets worse as it goes.

Women: the Scriptures are clear, even (especially) in the New Testament, that your submission to your husbands is the greatest possible expression of your beauty. And not only that, but potentially even a powerful evangelistic tool toward an unbelieving husband.

For all of us: it's far nobler to suffer for being godly in faith, for doing the right thing, for doing the difficult thing, than to throw someone else to the wolves out of fear in order to protect our own selves.

Thankfully, Jesus Christ became the perfectly obedient covenant partner that Abraham and all the others never were, so that we could share in God's faithfulness to His own promises, because He secured the fulfillment of all God's promises by His own righteous life and His substitutionary death on the Cross, as the true seed of the woman who would crush the head of the seed of the serpent.