Blaming Others
We must avoid blaming others for our own mistakes.
Here's Gene Getz:
We jump right in here into this next verse, Genesis 16:5.
After her handmaid got pregnant and something happened.
"[Then] Sarai said to Abram..."
She had some second thoughts here by the way.
"...You are responsible for my suffering!
I put my slave in your arms and ever since
she saw that she was pregnant, she has looked
down on me.
May the LORD judge between me and you."
Sarah, whose idea was it in the first place?
Who was the one that came up with the suggestion?
Now she might come back and say: but it's in the marriage contract.
It doesn't matter.
You're the one according to the biblical text, who said: have a son through my handmaid.
Now she says: Abraham, YOU are the problem. Not me.
And I'm sure she had a lot of reasons for that but most of them were rationalizations.
And so consequently, there was a result of the sin in spite of the fact that they were
very ignorant of God's values. As we're awareof God's values.
But there's a fascinating proverb.
I was thinking about this because I've been working through Proverbs and editing the material
for the Bible project. And this proverb is really interesting.
"The earth trembles under three things;
it cannot bear up under four: a servant when
he becomes king..."
And that can lead to arrogance that's unbelievable.
You have an immature person who becomes a king, and is lifted up with pride, and you're
going to see a lot of stuff happen that's terrible.
"...a fool when he is stuffed with food..."
I mean, we could run with that one for a while.
"...an unloved woman when she marries..."
And there, that has all kinds of implications because
if she marries and she's not loved, there's going to be a lot of problems.
And a lot of resentment.
And a lot of hurt.
And we could expound on all of the ramifications of that statement.
But here is what happened in Abraham's situation:
"...[and] a serving girl when she ousts her lady."
And when she got pregnant, she made fun of Sarah.
She had arrogance.
She paraded herself.
She made herself feel like she was more superior to Sarah.
Which she wasn't.
She was a serving girl.
And so we see sin just penetrating this whole situation.
And it's not surprising because first of all, it's a violation of God's moral law that it happened.
The one man-one woman relationship that God had established in the garden of Eden.
And of course, Abraham is being called out of this pagan, polygamist kind of society.
And of course, he's basically ignorant of the things that we know about.
In fact, he was probably just a brand new believer. Because if you go back to Genesis 15
where God took him out under the stars and said: just as the stars, so your seed will be.
And Abraham, at that moment believed God and God counted it for righteousness (Gn 15:5-6).
So that was probably his point of conversion.
So if he was converted at this moment, after a number of--actually after years, coming
down into the land.
He finally gets the picture of what it means to believe God and to have a conversion experience.
He's a relatively new believer.
And so he's walking through this predicament in this particular situation.
Sarah (Sarai) turned bitter.
She got angry.
She vented her wrath on Hagar.
Then she slashed out at Abraham.
And there were a lot of problems in that tent, I want to tell you.
A lot of problems in that household.
And that's the result of sin.
It's the result of a mistake.
The important principle here is, who did she blame?
She did not blame herself.
She blamed Abraham.
Just like when God came in the garden and said: Adam, what happened?
And he said: it was the woman.
There you see Adam blaming Eve.
Eve, what happened?
It was Satan.
He made me do it.
So you see from that moment forward, there's always been a tendency to blame others for
our mistakes.
Anybody have a problem with that?
I mean, with blaming others for a mistake.
Not with the truth.
Experientially this certainly is our temptation.
Paul acknowledged our tendency to be deceptive.
You know, in the Old Testament we read,
"The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked.
Who can know it" (Jr 17:9).
Well, God can.
And the Word of God can penetrate that.
And so Paul speaks in his letter to the Corinthians, the second letter, chapter 4, verse 2:
"Instead, we have renounced shameful secret things ..."
As a new believer.
"...not walking in deceit..."
Even the deceit in our own hearts. Deceiving ourselves.
The worst kind of deceit is when we deceive ourselves and we don't even know we're doing it.
And that can happen.
"...not walking in deceit or distorting God's message, but in God's sight we commend ourselves
to every person's conscience by an open display of [what?] the truth."
The truth will set us free.
In our own hearts.
In our relationships with others.
And in a relationship with God.
So, question:
What are some of the most frequent ways we rationalize our behavior--even as believers--
and blame others for our own mistakes?
Well, if we could have a discussion on that, I think we could come up with a lot of points
on how we've seen that happen in our own lives.
I think we can go to two extremes here.
I think the natural tendency can be, as we see Adam and Eve doing it, is immediately
what hits us is: that couldn't be my fault.
I couldn't have made that mistake.
Someone else must have caused this.
There must be another reason why I even made the mistake.
Oh, I'll acknowledge it as a mistake, but it's somebody else's fault that I made the mistake.
Boy that's easy isn't it?
And one of the reasons for that is our insecurity.
We don't want to take responsibility for it.
It threatens us.
It threatens our self-image.
It threatens our perfection of ourselves.
And what we expect of ourselves.
It relates to what other people think of us because we want to be seen as not making mistakes.
By the way, most people see through that.
Because we all make mistakes.
And it becomes very obvious.
And so we must be very careful.
I do think it's possible to go to the other extreme.
And that is to take upon yourself too much responsibility and blame yourself immediately
without giving it an objective point of view.
And I think people with a pretty hypersensitive conscience sometimes do that.
And we have to be very, very careful with that.
I know in my own life, and I'm not sure which tendency I prefer. But I know one thing,
that if somebody accuses me of something, one of the first things I do is I take a real hard
look at myself and can't even think objectively about the fact that maybe I didn't make the mistake.
And so consequently, I think we have to be very cautious we don't go to either extreme.
We can easily take too much blame.
Put ourselves down. So we can't think objectively.
Or we can immediately blame others and not think objectively.
Again, it comes back to balance in our lives.
So, blaming others.
It happens.
And it shouldn't surprise us.
It happened in Abraham's situation.
And it certainly has been a tendency ever since.
To distort the truth.