Abraham’s Trust in God

By Michael J. Watts
In the Book of Genesis we are told that God called a man named
Abram to leave his roots and to go in faith to a land that God would give
him. God makes promises to Abram. Abram trusts the promises of God and
leaves his family and his homeland for Canaan. His trust in God—his faith
—is what Christians throughout the centuries have remembered as the most
important feature of his life, and that trust is what Christians have continued
to believe should be their own response to God.
In Genesis 12 we come to Abram’s “covenant” with God. It would be
a covenant based on “grace,” not human sufficiency. Abram, whose name is
later changed to Abraham, is presented in Genesis as the person who
believes, who trusts in, the promises of God, and who therefore makes a
leap of faith to enter into a covenant with God.
The Abraham cycle has connected God’s promises to a whole series of
“covenants,” or statements about relationship, between the LORD and
Abraham. In Genesis 12 and 15 God’s promises and God’s covenant are free
gifts. God makes promises to Abram in the very first scene (Genesis 12:2-3).
The sense of the promise in this passage is very broad:
(1) There is the promise of land;
(2) There is the promise that Abram and his wife Sarai (later to
be re-named Sarah) will have a child, whose descendants, will become a
great nation, implying great numbers and large territory, AND,
(3) There is the promise that other peoples will be subject to
these peoples’ fortunes: in Abram and in his descendants those other nations
will be blessed, or will bless themselves; they will seek for themselves
blessing as Abraham has been blessed.
The editor/compiler of these stories tantalizes the readers/hearers of these
stories with the suspense of waiting. Because Abram believes/trusts the
promise, he is able to endure the long wait for a child. He is already 75 years
old (Genesis 12:4) when his story opens, and we are later told (Genesis 17:17)
that his wife is only ten years younger. Furthermore in the prelude to the story
(Genesis 11:30) we are informed significantly that Sarai is barren.
In Genesis 12:1-3 Abram is called to leave his country (his general
location, in Haran, in northern Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq), and to
leave his kindred (his clan or tribe, who were probably among the people

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called Aramaeans, or Amorites, people who had moved into Mesopotamia
from the Arabian Desert), and to leave his father’s house. Abram, in
accepting the call of the LORD, was making a sharp break with the past,
and leaving without the blessing from his father. The only blessing Abram
was to receive was the one the LORD promised to give him. But note that,
at the beginning that the blessing is not clearly spelled out. The LORD
promises blessing, but it is
(1) of a land unknown, and
(2) of children from a barren wife.
Clearly the readers/hearers are meant to understand that such a
blessing is not a human possibility. Furthermore, unlike the human
ingenuity and social cooperation on which the Tower Builders in Genesis 11
had relied, the promises to Abram (and to Israel through him) are based
solely on the possibility of Divine “grace,” the unearned and unmerited
favor of God. Abram is here called to respond on the basis of nothing other
than his trust in the Divine promise.
Within the land of Canaan the LORD watches over Abram. And
when, during a side trip to Egypt the promise is jeopardized, the LORD
intervenes. Again, when Abram risks the land of promise by agreeing to let
his nephew Lot have first choice, the LORD protects—and Lot chooses the
area of the cities of the plain, near the Dead Sea, instead.
Time passes. Abram is now 85, and his wife is 75. They both begin to
doubt the promises. Sarai asks Abram to have children by her maid Hagar—
for according the Amorite and Hurrian culture from which they had come, a
child born of a woman’s personal maid could be credited to the woman
herself (Genesis 16:1-3). Hagar does conceive, but because of her haughty
attitude, Sarai drives her away. Hagar eventually returns to Abram’s
household to bear a son in Abram’s 86th year (Genesis 16:4-16). Her son
will be Ishmael, traditional ancestor of the Bedouin Arab peoples.
Eventually, in Chapter 21, we find Sarah craving pizza when it hasn’t
even been invented! After 25 years (!) of waiting Sarah conceives, and the
son Isaac is born to 100-year-old Abraham and 90-year-old Sarah, and
“laughter” comes into their house.
But one more event puts the promise in jeopardy. In chapter 22 the
tradition, in its finest moment, records Abraham’s great test—the “akedah,”
the offering and near-sacrifice of Isaac. It is almost impossible to make too
much of this story. It expresses the very heart of the Hebrew understanding

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of the nature of faith. Faith for Abraham here was not just the abstract
concept of a person’s intellectual assent to some doctrine about God. It was
a concrete action showing absolute personal trust in the Being and the
activity and the promises of God.
Abraham was here asked to give up the very substance of God’s
blessing—the very son through whom the blessing was to come. So faith here
was being asked to give up the very benefits of faith. Later in the Hebrew
Bible this becomes a major theme in the Book of Job—the question of whether
a person will continue to devote himself or herself to God if the benefits of
such devotion are withdrawn (cf. Job 1-2). Here, Abraham answers that
question affirmatively without belaboring it. Abraham remains faithful.
Notice further that “faith in God” in the circumstances presented here
cannot mean just the confidence that God will fulfill the promises in spite of the
surrender being demanded. Here God is demanding the surrender of the
promise itself! It is beside the point that the reader/hearer “knows” that God
will not, in the end, allow Abraham to go through with the sacrifice. The
reader/hearer must also assume that Abraham himself did not know this, and
yet he was still willing to give up the promise in radical obedience to God.
The crucial thing to remember in reading this remarkable story is that
we readers/hearers are meant to understand that, even as he raises the knife,
Abraham believes (trusts) that God is somehow going to fulfill the promise
that through Isaac the blessing will come (Genesis 21:12)! He was not
giving up his belief in that promise. So here faith is not just calm confidence
that everything will work out all right. It is also willingness to trust God and
to obey God, whatever the calling from God—to walk out to the edge of all
the light one has, and then, . . . to take . . . one . . . more . . . step . . .