The Dog Returns: God Graciously Uses Us Abimelech obeys. In verses 14 through 16 Abimelech listens to God and gives Sarah back to Abraham. Some might say that he didn’t have a choice unless he wanted his family line to die off since God had rendered all of the women in his harem infertile. But Abimelech not only returns Sarah but gives him sheep and oxen and servants, just like the Pharaoh had done many years prior to this. On top of that, he gives Abraham a thousand pieces of silver to vouch for his never touching Sarah. That way, no one could doubt that he was innocent. Perhaps he wanted to make sure that God remembered his promise.b. Abraham obeys. In the end, with Sarah restored to her rightful position, Abraham prays for Abimelech, just as God had said he would. And just as he said, God healed all the women of Abimelech’s household. It is amazing to think that God uses the prayer of Abraham to bring about good for Abimelech. James Boice said this in light of what God did, “I am especially impressed by the way God showed His grace to Abraham. God did so when He spoke to Abimelech. Moreover, in all the references to Abraham that we have in the remainder of the Bible, never once does God bring up this incident as if to highlight Abraham’s failure, not in Romans, not in Galatians, not in Hebrews 11. In that last passage, Abraham is praised with a faith which he showed in four situations in leaving Ur for an unknown promised land and staying in the land in spite of great deprivation and danger, believing that God could give him a son when he and Sarah were past the age of childbearing and being willing to offer up Isaac, counting that God could raise him from the dead. Not once in all that great survey of Abraham’s progress in the life of faith, does God refer to his past sin as if to shame him by the remembrance of it. It was forgiven and gone. It was forgotten.”