For those who believe in free will, Genesis 20:6 presents an interesting problem. Abraham was traveling in Gerar. He feared one of the inhabitants might kill him, so he could take his wife Sarah, to be his own. To spare his life Abraham lied to Abimelech, king of Gerar, saying Sarah was his sister. Abimelech took Sarah to be his wife, but he did not have sexual relations with her. In a dream, the Lord told Abimelech the truth about Sarah, and that He had prevented Abimelech from having sexual relations with her.
How is it that God prevented Abimelech from having sexual relations with Sarah? Was Abimelech denied freedom of his will? Walter Schultz, a philosopher from Northwestern College, proposed an answer to these questions in the latest volume of Philosophia Christi (Vol. 10, 2008) that I found both interesting and plausible.
Humans are free rational agents, meaning they have the freedom to choose among options apart from external constraint. They also have intentions, and initiate acts that serve to fulfill those intentions. Intentions can be either proximal, or distal. A distal intention is future-directed (e.g. an intention to vote in the next election), while a proximal intention is directed at the here-and-now (e.g. an intention to raise my arm). There is an imperceptible, but real temporal gap between an agent’s exercising of his mental power to choose X (proximal intention), and the actual execution of that choice. Furthermore, time is required both to form the intention, and to act on that intention to fulfill it.
Schultz proposes that God was able to prevent Abimelech from sinning without depriving him of his free will by intervening during the formation of his freely chosen proximal intention, interrupting the conditions necessary for Abimelech to complete his proximal intention, thereby averting the otherwise certain outcome. On this view, God intervenes after the human agent has freely chosen X, but before the effect. From the human perspective, we would consider this a case of akrasia, or weakness of will, similar to the person who says, “I always wanted to travel to Europe, but never seemed to get around to it.” The person intends to do X, but find themselves unable to do so for reasons they do not fully understand. So Abimelech freely chose to have sexual relations with Sarah, but God interrupted the completion of his proximal intention, thus aborting its effect.
What do you think about Schultz’s theory?
Thinking to Believe 
August 3, 2008 at 12:45 pm
The king had every intention but didn’t get around to it that day. We aren’t told why except that God prevented it from happening. Maybe the king had to work late, didn’t feel good, had some type of purification policy like the Bablyonian king who took Esther, or something else came up to keep the king preoccupied.
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August 3, 2008 at 1:12 pm
God changes people’s thoughts and causes them to sin or to refrain from sinner, such as when he hardened Pharaoh’s heart.
I don’t think that this proposed solution doesn’t anything to fix Gen 20:6. God prevented him from sinning, either in action or in thought. The specifics don’t really matter.
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August 12, 2008 at 10:06 am
It happens to us everyday. We choose to do right or wrong based on facts, opinions, or circumstances presented to us. God chose to give the king the facts about Sarah. It is possible he chose to refrain due to conviction, fear or morality.
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August 12, 2008 at 10:48 am
Why should Abim have feared anything, or had moral conviction. It was his wife as far as he knew. But God said He prevented Abim from sinning. To say He “prevented” him from doing so highly suggests that Abim would have had sex with Sarah had God not intervened. So if Abim’s will was to have sex with his new bride, how did God prevent it? Your explanation is that it was of Abim’s own accord, but that contradicts the text. It was God’s intervention. If Abim had to do the choosing, he would have chosen to bed Sarah.
Jason
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August 22, 2008 at 10:15 am
Gen 20:26
God didn’t prevent by force anyone from sin. He revealed that which was sin. He does this everyday through the mouth of the preacher, through his Word, and Rhema Word. God extended caution and warning of things that Abimilech would be knowledgable. Would it truly have been sin for Abimilech to sleep with Sarah without knowing she was another man’s wife? He did so with pure ignorance. Another interesting question. I believe in OT Abi would be condemned. But NT isn’t as much the action (sleep with another man’s wife) as the heart of the action (sometimes related, but not always).
The real person prevented from sinning, in my opinion, was Abraham. That’s where the philosophical debate should occur. Abraham’s lie almost cost him the chastity of his bride.
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August 22, 2008 at 10:43 am
J. Wilder,
On Schultz’s theory, there was no force, depending on how one defines force. I would characterize what happened more as “providence,” “frustration,” or possibly “suggestion.”
The text does not say God used a preacher to warn Abi. God was the first and only person to warn him. And when He did, He made it clear that He prevented Abi from sinning in the past, which implies Abi would have done so without God’s intervention (the question is how He did this). That goes against your idea that it wouldn’t have been sin because it was done in ignorance. It would have been sin. In fact, that is why God was so concerned to stop it (coupled with the fact that He knew Abi wouldn’t have done so if he knew the truth). In the OT we find sacrifices for sins of ignorance, so being ignorant is no excuse for sin. Sin is still sin.
While the NT does talk about the heart of the action, I would not say the NT “isn’t as much [about] the action…as the heart of the action.” That makes it sound like the NT downplays the action. It doesn’t. The action remains just as wrong in the NT as it does in the OT. What is different is the heightened and shared emphasis on the heart. For example, when Jesus said that to look on a woman to lust after her is to commit adultery in one’s heart, he was not saying it’s worse to lust than it is to commit adultery. His point was that if you are lusting, don’t think you are blameless. The problem is not only with the physical act, but the mental act as well.
Jason
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May 11, 2016 at 10:27 pm
May I suggest that text itself says that Abimelech was sick, this would be probably the reason why God says that he also prevented him to sin.
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November 24, 2019 at 7:48 pm
Do you think it’s possible that God approved a sickness upon Abimelec which precluded his having sexual relations with Sarah for a time?
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