God has already solved our problems before we ask him. God has already determined what he will do. Years ago I was speaking to a group of men who were Bible believers, evangelicals, in the Church of England, and the discussion turned this: ‘If in the Church of England they ordain women priests, we will not survive that. If they take away the Thirty-nine Articles, we will leave. If they do this, that, or the other we cannot remain. But in the meantime until they do something radical like that, this is the best fishing boats from which to win the community for the parish to the Lord.’ And in vain one said, ‘Yes, but what's the teaching of Scripture about Bible believing people not being mixed with the liberals, Catholics, modernists, and all the rest of it?’ Well they said, ‘You've got to be in the best place, and we believe that to be in the church gives us wonderful opportunities.’ Abram said, ‘I believe that my life must be preserved because the promised Messiah will come through me. Therefore I have got to tell lies to preserve my life, and I have got to bring about my own deliverance!’ How we think sometimes! We trust God and yet we don't trust God. We believe him, and yet we fear and make our own human solutions to problems. So that's the lesson here. Abram had a double reproof. Before his eyes the plague came down upon Pharaoh's household, and he realised, ‘God was ready to deliver me all the time.’ Pharaoh says, ‘I would never have taken your wife if I had known that she was your wife.’ God had already prepared Pharoah’s heart and then Pharaoh himself reproves Abram. He is reproved by God; he is reproved by the world, and he is conducted out under an armed guard like a common criminal. So the people of God and their message is discredited, because they take the solution into their own hands.
We have not had an unmistakable voice of God. We have not had an appearance of God, but we have had things which are very powerful in our lives. We have had, the illumination of the Holy Spirit, the call of God to our hearts. We have had the new birth and the great change of our nature, and great renewals within us. We have had answered prayer. We have all the history of the Gospels and the word of truth; we have fellowship one with another. We have so many evidences with which to trust God. As Abram had those unmistakable appearances so we have unmistakable tokens of God's promise and power and goodness. Trust him. That is surely the message of chapter 12.