Nothing strengthens us so much as isolation and transplantation. What do I mean by that? Well, let a person be thrown upon their own resources and like McGyver and he or she will be forced to develop ingenuity and powers that would never have developed and of which there would have been no trace under the ease of home.
This is also true of faith. So long as we are quietly at rest amid favorable and undisturbed surroundings, faith sleeps as an undeveloped sinew within us. But when we are pushed out from all these comfortable surroundings with nothing but God to look to, then faith grows suddenly into a monarch oak. As long as the bird lingers by the nest it will not experience the joys of flight. As long as the trembling boy clings to the bank or toes the bottom, he will never know the delights of swimming.
Abram would never have become Abraham, the father of the faithful, the mighty exemplar of faith, if he had always lived in the comforts of Ur. No, he had to journey into the unknown and march off the map so that faith could rise up in all its glorious proportions in his soul.
It may not be necessary for you and me to withdraw from home and friends, but we will have to withdraw our dependence upon all earthly props and supports if we are ever to learn what it is to trust simply and absolutely on the eternal God. It seems, in the life of most Christians that there arise occasions when God benevolently takes away what is precious, even necessary to us, so that we might more fully recognize Him as our most precious possession.
Job knew that God both “gives and takes away.” He might take away our business, possessions, friends, our influence, our spouse or parent or child, our health—all in an effort to help you find Him to be more precious than it all. He is most precious of all. This is the conclusion Asaph came to in Psalm 73. Looking around at all the good things in life that the wicked were enjoying, he became envious. But ultimately he “understood their final destiny” (Psa. 73:17, NIV) and came to realize that the nearness of God was his highest good (Psa. 73:28). Here’s what he says in vv. 25-26, some of my favorite verses in all of Scripture:
25 Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. 26 My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
But we don’t often come to this place of valuing God above all things until we have faced the loss of some of life’s good gifts. Abram left the comforts of Ur, left most of his family behind and all of his friends. Whatever “job” he had there was a thing of the past. After 75 years of comfort and ease, now Abram was marching out with nothing but the promises of God—promises for a future destiny with many sons. As yet he had none.
Developing faith in Abram was important. Both obedience and faith are vital, but for different reasons. Jerry Bridges, in his book Trusting God, says: “It is just as important to trust God as it is to obey Him. When we disobey God we defy His authority and despise His holiness. But when we fail to trust God we doubt His sovereignty and question His goodness. In both cases we cast aspersions upon His majesty and His character. God views our distrust of Him as seriously as He views our disobedience” (Trusting God, p. 18).
So God made Abram into a man of faith. He wasn’t that always. He became a man of faith by taking away “all earthly props and supports so that Abraham might learn to trust completely in God alone.” (F. B. Meyer)
There is an old poem by that prolific author Anonymous that goes.
When God wants to drill a man,
And thrill a man,
And skill a man
When God wants to mold a man
To play the noblest part;
When He yearns with all His heart
To create so great and bold a man
That all the world shall be amazed,
Watch His methods, watch His ways!
How He ruthlessly perfects
Whom He royally elects!
How He hammers him and hurts him,
And with mighty blows converts him
Into trial shapes of clay which
Only God understands;
While his tortured heart is crying
And he lifts beseeching hands!
How He bends but never breaks
When his good He undertakes;
How He uses whom He chooses,
And which every purpose fuses him;
By every act induces him
To try His splendor out-
God knows what He’s about.
This is what God did with Abram and what he will do with you and me to help us become men and women of faith.
Abram’s faith and obedience, remember, were based on God’s grace. It was God’s grace that produced such faith in Abram, just as he does in our lives. It is a faith that by grace displays itself through obedience and endurance.
“The root and the sap of the Christian life are hidden; but the fruits of this life must be manifest before the world.” (Donald Bloesch)
What does this faith look like?
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve seen that it is a faith that obeys. So surrendered to the word of God that he didn’t pause to make sure everything made sense for his future. When a sinner is transformed by God’s grace and given eternal life as a free gift when a person believes, it is now his heart’s disposition to be devoted to Jesus Christ, to give his complete allegiance, which means following his orders.
That great old hymn by Charles Wesley says it well: “Long my imprisoned spirit lay fast bound in sin and nature’s night; Thine eye diffused a quickening ray, I woke, the dungeon flamed with light; My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth and followed Thee.”
When faith is the product of grace, it doesn’t misuse its freedom to live for oneself, but rather it obeys its new, benevolent master, Jesus Christ.
We also noticed that faith produced by grace endures, year after year after year, even through a whole life of not receiving what was promised. Verse 9 showed us that Abram still lived like a wandering camper even though this land had been promised to him. The land promise wasn’t even fulfilled in the lives of his son or grandson, not even in Joseph’s life, not for 500 years!
So why didn’t Abram just wash his hands of this thing and pack up the camper and go back to Ur? The reason is that the land prefigured something else, something greater, it was the “land of promise.” Abram looked forward to something he considered more sure than the very ground he trod upon.
And that points to the third thing we learned in v. 10 about Abram’s faith, faith produced by God’s grace, is that it is forward looking, it looks heavenward. That aspect will be developed in even more detail in vv. 13-16. Abram’s faith was not just tied to the geography inhabited by the Canaanites, but to all the benefits of eternity in the heavenly city. This was the secret to Abram’s “long obedience in the same direction” in the words of Eugene Peterson.
Genuine, biblical faith is forward looking. It anticipates the fulfillment of God’s promise. Luther says “faith is the wedding ring by which we have pledged ourselves to Christ.” It is more what we would call an engagement ring, something given in anticipation and surety of the best that is yet to come!
Now, in vv. 11-12, we find that genuine faith is a faith that relies—that stakes its confidence on the character of God revealed in the promises of God.
Having explained how Abraham’s faith worked in relation to the promise of the land, the writer now begins to explain Abraham’s faith and the obtaining of a promised son:
11 By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised. 12 Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.
Some other translations along with the ESV make Sarah and her faith the subject of verse 11—for example, the RSV: “By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive. . . .” But this is implausible because the phrase “received power to conceive” literally is “power for the deposition of seed/sperm” (dynamin eis katabolen spermatos), a patently male function. Thus, Abraham has to be the subject of the sentence.
Most believe the misunderstanding is due to a wrong accent mark in the Greek that incorrectly renders “Sarah herself” as a nominative and not as dative. The corrective dative translation gives the right sense: “By faith he [Abraham] also, together with Sarah, received power to beget a child when he was past age, since he counted him faithful who had promised.”
The NIV reads, “By faith, Abraham, even though he was past age – and Sarah herself was barren – was enabled to become a father because he considered him faithful who had made the promise.”
This view also alleviates another problem, namely, that in the account in Genesis 18, Sarah is rebuked for her unbelief rather than commended for her faith. When the Lord confronts her, she denies, rather than confesses, her unbelief. Probably, in spite of her initial doubt, she eventually came to believe God’s promise as Abraham did. But if Abraham is the subject of 11:11, then the emphasis is on his faith, not on Sarah’s faith.
The point is, it was biologically impossible for Abraham, as well as Sarah, to be able to conceive a child at this time. Abraham was 75 years old when God first promised him a son. Eleven years later, Abram tries through self-effort, to gain a son for himself through Hagar, but God told him that this was not the son of promise. And then finally, 13 years later, at age 99, God says, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife shall have a son” (Gen. 18:10).
The impotence of Abraham was not the only issue. Sarai had always been barren. Menopause had come and gone. Sarah herself says, “I am worn out, and my lord is old” (Genesis 18:12). These were two major problems!
Abram had been expressing some faith way back when he was 75 because he did believe God’s promise for a son even though he knew Sarah was barren. But now that Abraham was almost a hundred years old and Sarah almost ninety, the promise seemed totally out of reach.
Sometimes God stacks the odds, just like when he trimmed Gideon’s army down from 32,000 to 300, making it even more impossible to face the mighty Midianite army. Why did God do that? So that the Israelites could not boast that their might had defeated the Midianites (Judges 7:2). And think of the time when Jesus and His disciples received word that Lazarus was sick and dying. Instead of rushing to his side Jesus waited…and Lazarus died. In fact, when Jesus arrived in Bethany, Lazarus had been in the grave four days. Jewish folklore held that a person dead four days was REALLY DEAD! But Jesus used this to show His miraculous power and raised Lazarus from the dead.
The assertion that he was “as good as dead” (perfect passive participle) in verse 12 is exactly the same in the Greek as in Romans 4:19, where Paul said that Abraham “considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb.”
But God had made promises to Abram. In Genesis 15:5 God told Abram:
5 And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”
And notice Abram’s response: “And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6).
In Genesis 22, after God tested Abram’s faith by asking him to sacrifice that one and only Son, that promised one that he loved so much, God said, “I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies,” (Gen. 22:17).
Later that promise was fulfilled, but not in Abram’s lifetime. So, what sustained his faith as he saw each year clip by? 5-10-15-20-25 years. With each passing year the possibilities were dissipating.
What sustained Abram’s faith? Not just the fact that there was a promise, but faith in the One who made that promise. Abram knew God well enough to know that he was trustworthy, that He was faithful. Notice how verse 11 says that Abram “considered him faithful who had promised.”
You and I can always trust God to keep his promises.
Charles Spurgeon, a preacher in England back in the late 1800’s, had this great insight. “If God had meant to run back from any promise, he would surely have run back from the promise to give his only begotten Son; but having fulfilled that, what promise is there he will ever break?”
Thus, Romans 8:31-32 reads: “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” In other words, if God has already done for us the thing that would have been the hardest for Him to do—sacrificing His own Son for sinners—then we can believe that He will fulfill all His promises and plans for us.
Sure, Abram was a man just like you and me, prone to doubting. It took time for his faith to grow strong (Romans 4:20). That promise of a son was first incredible, but over time it became “impossible.” However, when Abram refocused the eyes of his heart upon the God who had made that promise, all difficulties disappeared.
The word “considered” indicates that Abram came to this conclusion after much thought and careful search. It wasn’t a leap in the dark. According to Paul in Romans 4 Abraham “faced the facts.” He considered the obstacles that were in the way. And his conclusion didn’t arise based upon any external circumstances or in his own ability to figure out how things might work out. As Jerry Bridges explains: “God’s plan and His ways of working out His plan are frequently beyond our ability to fathom and understand. We must learn to trust when we don’t understand” (Trusting God, p. 20). It was still a mystery to Abram but after weighing all the evidence—both the biological impossibility AND what he knew about God, he trusted God that He would and could do it.
Abram weighed the human impossibility of becoming a father against the divine impossibility of God ever being able to break his word and decided that since God is God, nothing is impossible. In other words, he believed that God “exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb. 11:6b).
Grace Still Amazes 