Thou hast done deeds unto me that ought not to be done.
Genesis 20:9
I took a class on the Bible with some ladies who were quite ignorant of it. I mean that they had not read it. They were "educated" by what they had heard in church and held convictions of how the great people of the Bible "ought to be".
How shocked they were to find the truth--the cast of the Bible contains real people! They have done the things that real people do, including lying and murder. I remember the blushing and twittering when they discovered the fallen human nature applied to the great ones just as it does to us today.
This misconception, of course, has arisen from the false plaster saint image we often receive from preachers and from literature. If I could think of one word to describe Biblical people, it would be "passionate", either for good or for bad.
Today it seems that Christians are noted for comparative lack of passion, as if lack of true emotion is a virtue. Jesus says just the opposite in Revelation, pertaining to Laodicea.
So, righteous Abraham lied to Abimelech, in a very strange passage of Genesis chapter twenty. He had to be rebuked and corrected by one outside the Covenant. It almost makes one believe that sometimes the church can be corrected in the same way.
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