Many people incorrectly attribute this famous saying – “God helps him who helps himself” – to the Bible. Genesis gives us a great story to shed light on why it isn’t a biblical teaching.
It’s not that God doesn’t mean for us to help ourselves. Take the case of Abraham – as I claimed last week – God’s first example of “mentoring.”
Instead of “setting everything up” for Abram, (his name before God changes it), as the Lord did with the Man and the Woman in the Garden of Eden (so that their life would be easy), God actually asks a lot of Abram. Abram has to pick up and move his whole household and basically fend for himself in a land where he has no relatives but the nephew, Lot, he brought with him.
In the first ten years after the move, Abram faces famine (Genesis 12:10-20), negotiates land rights with Lot (Genesis 13:1-13), and then has to rescue Lot from local kings (Genesis 14:12-16). God smoothes things over with Pharaoh when Abram lies that his wife Sarai is only his sister (Genesis 12:17-20), but we don’t yet see Abram expecting God to help him with his life’s ongoing problems.
God persists in making promises about the land and descendants (Genesis 12:1-3; 12:7; 13:14-17; 15:1), but eventually Abram has to register a complaint: “God, Master, what use are your gifts as long as I’m childless and Eliezer of Damascus is going to inherit everything?” (Genesis 15:2). But God reassures him, “A son from your body will be your heir” (Genesis 15:4). At his point, Genesis declares that Abram believed God (Genesis 15:6).
But did Sarai? Or did Sarai merely convert what Abram told her that God had said about the child coming from his own body, into terms she that she could act on? Suddenly we see Sarai offering Hagar, her maidservant, to her husband thinking, “Maybe I can get a family from her” (Genesis 16:2).
Between Abram and Sarai there’s a lot of self-help going on. Much of it is the sort of effort God wants us to make. But there is a fine line between the work that is ours and God’s. As we’ll shortly see, when Abram and Sarai cross that line in an attempt to make God’s promises happen, they end up making their lives more difficult. Stay tuned to see a good distinction between what God expects us to do for ourselves and what we need to trust the Lord to deliver.
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