“Missing the Mark”

Sunday, April 03, 2022

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. (Genesis 12.1-4)

When Abram (hereafter “Abraham”) first received this call, he was already an old man.  This makes all the more impressive his willingness to uproot his life and household to travel—on foot, let's remember—to a new land he’d never seen.   But it also highlights the absurdity of another one of God’s promises: “I will make of you a great nation.”  The text tells us ahead of time why this is such a problem: “Now Sarai was barren; she had no child” (Ge 11.30).  So, how’s this going to work, exactly?

Abraham and Sarai (hereafter “Sarah”) surely recognized the implausibility of having any children at this stage in their life—Sarah was 65 at this time.  We would have understood if they’d used that as the excuse not to obey God’s instruction to “go.”  How often is this the thought process for people today?  But Abraham and Sarah didn’t disobey.  Instead, they went where they were told.  No big deal is made about their faith in God or his promises at this early stage, but the proof is in the pudding, and even though the things God told him were ridiculous, still they went.

This is repeated in stronger terms some years later when Abraham, getting even older and closer to death, received another vision from God, including a more explicit promise: “your very own son shall be your heir” (Ge 15.4).  In case Abraham and Sarah had begun to think their descendants would be metaphorically descended from them and not actually related genetically, God has made it quite clear.  And although Sarah was now approaching the age of 75, nevertheless Abraham “believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness” (Ge 15.6). 

But while God made the promise clearer, you may notice that there’s still some ambiguity in it, as there will always be if we scrutinize thoroughly enough.  God said that Abraham’s very own son would be his heir, but he didn’t actually mention Sarah by name in connection with this promised child.  So, after ten years of waiting in faith, what did Abraham and Sarah end up doing?  They brought in Sarah’s servant Hagar to act as a concubine.  Oh, dear.

Was this right?  It’s important to take into account that it was a very different time and different circumstances, as well as the fact that God remained fairly quiet on the topic of polygamy between Eden and Jesus, tolerating it under the Law of Moses and giving only subtle hints to Abraham that he didn’t like it (Ge 17.18-19).  With all that said, no.  It wasn’t right.  By all appearances, Abraham and Sarah had lived a lifetime of monogamy, without children and apparently content to accept that fact, prior to being told offspring were on the way in what they must have assumed were their twilight years.  Why the sudden push for children, to the point of committing a destructively immoral act?  Let’s examine Sarah’s reasoning:

“Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” (Genesis 16.2)

Oh, dear.  Were they so presumptuous as to try to help God?  In a way, yes; but that’s not a completely fair assessment.

Consider this: given that God had promised them offspring, what would have happened if Abraham and Sarah had remained celibate from that day forward?  God can do what he wants, of course, but he also expects his followers to cooperate with him!  The end would have been the same as if they had flatly refused to go where God directed and deliberately rejected his rules, and yet no one would accuse them of trying to help God by human means, on the basis that they engaged in marital relations, as if that undermined their trust in God’s promise.

But in this case Abraham and Sarah misunderstood the type of cooperation God expected.  We might say that they missed the mark.  That’s actually the etymology—the literal and original meaning—of the biblical words for sin.  חָטָא-ḥāṭā’ is the Hebrew catchall for “sin” in the Old Testament, and ἁμαρτάνω-hamartanō fulfills the same purpose in the Greek New Testament.  Both are most easily understood as archery terms, in which some arrows will go where the archer wants, and others miss the mark.  When described like this, sin seems almost unimportant—no one can hit the bullseye with every shot, so what’s the big deal?

Well, if you’re hunting food for your family, and you miss the mark, it’s a problem.  If you’re defending your city and you miss the mark, it’s an even bigger problem.  Still worse, regardless of context, when you miss the mark and instead hit something or someone else, it’s a problem!  Whether the sin was fully deliberate or not, there are consequences.  In the case of Abraham and Sarah’s adulterous plan, they had a good aim: a son born in accordance with God’s promise.  But they made a mistake, and missed the target, and the repercussions are with us to this day.  Hitting the mark takes knowledge, understanding, focus, deliberation, and practice.  Let’s do our best to stop missing it.

Jeremy Nettles

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