GENESIS 12
The world was in a mess, and nothing seemed to help. So God decided to have a chat with a man named Abram, who lived in a town called Ur.
God said, “Hey, Abram, I’m going to make you into a great nation.”
“What’s a nation?” Abram may have asked.
There weren’t any of those around yet. God may have explained that a nation is like a really, really big family.
“Oh, okay, uh, there’s just this one thing. I don’t have any kids, and my wife is passed the, uh, well, let’s just say that window’s closed. Is that going to be a problem?”
God made a crazy promise to a random nobody who lived in the middle of nowhere that his barren wife would give him at least one child and that through his child, a great nation would come and would bless the entire world. God had no reason to choose Abram (whose name was later changed to “Abraham”). There was nothing about him that would commend him to God or indicate that he was a good choice to be patriarch of the most famous people group in human history. But God chose him anyway.
And if you think about it, Abraham had no good reason to obey God. There was no history, no documented evidence that this disembodied voice, speaking from heaven or behind a bush or wherever it came from, was anything other than last night’s mutton talking back. The promise was so outrageous, so unreasonable, we would understand if Abram had said, “Yeah, right,” and gone on his merry way. But Abram chose to believe anyway.
We have to wonder how exactly Abram explained all this to his wife Sarai (later called “Sarah”). Did Abram go home and try to conceive a child that night? After all, it wasn’t an immaculate conception! How would he explain his suddenly amorous behaviour? See, there was this voice that said we were going to have a child, so I figured we could maybe, well, you know ___.
But there would be no child conceived that night. Days turned to weeks turned to months turned to years turned to decades. Twenty-five long years went by as the already old couple grew ancient. The temptation was always there to give up. Maybe the old fool had imagined it after all. Equally strong was the temptation to take matters into their own hands (so to speak). Maybe the promise didn’t include Sarah but was only for Abraham. Maybe if he found another woman.
But Abraham kept believing. He kept trusting. When God said go, he went. And one day, miracle of miracles, the seed did not land on a barren wasteland as it had all the other times before. It found fertility. There were tears of joy and tears of relief and tears of “I can’t believe it finally happened.” And all three members of the family had to wear diapers!
One random man in the middle of nowhere had enough faith to just keep going and going and going until God came through on His promise. A baby boy was born, and they named him “Laughter.”
Prayer
God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, You rule the universe but chose to become intimately immersed in human history on planet Earth. You have gradually unfolded the mysteries of Your sovereign plan in the developing stories of Scripture, and You see ends that are impossible for any of Your creatures to fathom. While we are on this earth, we walk by faith and not by sight, knowing that the only worthy object of our faith is Your unchanging character and Your sure promises. As I read Your Word, I see with greater clarity that faith in Your promises runs contrary to appearances, because You call me to hope in the unseen and the not yet. Yet You have given me the holy invitation to risk everything I have and am on the invisible promises that will not be fulfilled in this life but in the new realm You are preparing for Your people.
In Jesus’s name, Amen
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