What can we learn about God's character from this quick hitting, historical narrative? Most of Genesis is like this, and it's not very similar to modern writing. However, this is what God has preserved for us and it gives us all the details we really need. Everything we need to understand God's redemption of man and His nature. That's why we are reading this. So what do you see here about God? First, God started with only a glimpse of the His plan. The covenant from chapter 15 sounded amazing, but the only problem was Abram and Sarai had no children. God had a plan. God knew the details. He just determined Abram did not need to know it all fully. And you know what? God still works that same way with us. He may give us a glimpse and let us know what we need to know, but there's always questions. All those questions are never completely answered. We can look back in hindsight at Abraham's life and see where God was leading and what God was doing, but Abraham didn't know. He had to trust. What we can also see here is that when man tries to intervene apart from God's leading it never solves anything. When we get our own ideas (like ch. 16: 2-4 "Abram just take Hagar our servant and have a baby with her.") it only complicates things.
One other thing is see about the nature of God is his mercy. In ch. 18 God's mercy was so strong and so long-suffering that he waited until there were less than 10 righteous to judge Sodom. For more thoughts on this take a look at this video from the 1 minute Apologist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvV3l_dVvFc&feature=player_embedded
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