Lent 2 (2/28/10) “Abraham Believed God”
Genesis 15.1-12, 17-18
It’s “one of the foremost passages of all Scripture,” wrote Martin Luther. John Calvin, not always exactly on the same page as Luther, spoke of the “rich and hidden doctrine which this passage contains.” The modern scholar Walter Brueggemann called it “a revolutionary moment in the history of faith.” Long before Brueggemann or Calvin or Luther, both St. Paul and St. James cited and interpreted the same passage. They were all referring to a single verse tucked away in the middle of our Old Testament lesson today: “And Abraham believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”
To understand why this is so important, let’s quickly review Abraham’s story. He is introduced in Chapter 12 of Genesis. In these earlier stories, he is called Abram, and his wife Sarai; but for simplicity’s sake, let’s just call them Abraham and Sarah. By the time we get to chapter 15, we already know a good bit about them. Some of it is attractive: Abraham has left his homeland and wandered off on a long journey, simply because God instructed him to do so. Some of it is not so attractive: Abraham has told Sarah to lie about her relationship to him, to claim she is his sister, in order to protect himself from Pharaoh, who, he fears, may kill him and take the beautiful Sarah for his own. Some of it is just mysterious, even incomprehensible, such as Abraham’s strange encounter with an incredible personage called Melchizedek.
And now, in this 15th chapter, the word of the Lord came to Abraham in a vision. “Do not be afraid. I am your shield.” Abraham raises the concern that sits heavy on his heart—that he has no children. He is led outside into the dark night: “Look toward heaven and count the stars,” says God, “if you are even able to count them. So shall your descendants be.” And Abraham believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.
Now the significance of this verse can be summarized easily: It teaches us in simple terms what faith means. Indeed, it is the first time in the Bible that this word appears—not in our translation, because we have no verb in English that corresponds exactly to the noun “faith.” But in Hebrew, it is that word “believe” that means to “have faith.” “Abraham had faith in the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”
So what is faith? You’ve heard me say many times over the years that faith is theological talk for “trust.” To have faith in God is simply to trust. But here, in this ancient story, we can unpack it further. Let’s make five observations.
First, Abraham’s faith rests on a promise. That’s not as obvious or as insignificant as it seems! So much of what passes for faith in human affairs rests on evidence. I have faith that when I turn the ignition key, my car will start—and why? Because it almost always has in the past. I trust that the sun will come up tomorrow—and why? Both because it always has in the past, and because I know at least a little bit about how the universe works, based on centuries of careful scientific observation by others. The evidence convinces me to trust.
But Abraham’s trust in this story is not in the evidence or in his own experience; it is in the promise of God. Faith, Alexander Maclaren wrote, grasps a Person, not a doctrine. Faith isn’t dependent on how much you know, how much you understand; it simply relies on a Person whom you trust—and that Person is God.
Second, faith has to do with the future. So often, I think, we tie faith too much to the past. We think that faith means believing intellectually that God did thus and so, that this or that event described in the Bible is “true.” Now don’t misunderstand me—those things that God has done in the past are important, and they are told to us for our instruction. But for us, as for Abraham, faith is really more about the future. It is not so much about believing what is past, but trusting what is ahead—trusting that which we cannot yet see or understand.
Third, faith means trusting what seems impossible. Perhaps the biggest temptation that human beings face is that of needing to make rational and logical sense of the world. God has given us brains, and we love to use them—but sometimes we begin to believe that our brains can actually comprehend everything. We are like “doubting Thomas”—unless we can see and touch and understand, we will not believe.
But of course, in the Biblical meaning of the term, we believe, we trust, precisely when we give up demanding to understand. Brueggemann puts it this way: Abraham “has abandoned a reading of reality which is measured by what he can see and touch and manage.” That’s what faith means: it means trusting the reality of God, even when it seems more than what we can see and touch and manage. As one of our hymns puts it: Your wondrous ways are not confined within the limits of my mind.
Fourth, the realm of faith is something vast and sublime. It is no accident that God takes Abraham out under the starlit night. We city dwellers have perhaps lost something of the meaning of this; with all the human-made lights that pollute the night sky, we might even be able to count the stars, at least on some nights. But if you’ve been out in the wilderness, far from civilization, and pondered the stars, then you have a sense of what this means for Abraham. To say that his descendants will be like the stars is to make a promise so vast, so incredible, that the human mind cannot even begin to understand it.
And yet Abraham believed. Abraham trusted. Some years ago the songwriting duo Avery and Marsh wrote a little song that always comes to my mind when I read this text:
These same stars I’m looking at
Looked down on Abraham
As he looked up into the night
And counted all the stars in sight,
Rejoicing in the splendor of God’s plan.
The splendor of God’s plan! When we trust in God, when we enter the realm of faith, we are in a place of splendor indeed—a place of incomparable vastness and beauty.
And then fifth, true faith is always very personal. It is trust, not just in God’s purpose and plan for the universe, but in God’s purpose for me, and God’s promise to me. For Abraham, the promise has to do with countless future generations—and yet it has even more to do with him. It will involve his becoming a father, Sarah’s bearing a child.
I always like to point out that Luther’s catechism, in explaining the first article of the creed, says I believe that God created ME—and all that exists. For Luther, that “ME” comes first—not out of egotism or selfishness, but just because the wonder, the spectacular wonder of faith is that God would create me, God would choose me, God would call me, God would save me. The rest of God’s creation, the rest of God’s plan for the universe—it’s a wonderful, miraculous thing, too big for my feeble mind. But that God could create and love me and make promises to me—that is the real miracle. That is what faith grasps.
So the passage tells us some very important things about faith. And yet the most important thing of all is the one we have not yet mentioned. Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. To be righteous, as you’ve heard many times, is simply to be in a right relationship God. That right relationship is defined by faith, by trusting God.
This means that it is not about works. Abraham, I said earlier, has done some good things in his life, some pious and faithful things; he’s also done some shady things. At this particular point in the story, he is, Luther says, “in the midst of sins, doubt and fears, and exceeding troubled in spirit.” Truth be told, the rest of his life is going to be a mixed bag as well. Sometimes he will show great integrity. Sometimes he will treat people shabbily—including his own first son, Ishmael, and Ishmael’s mother Hagar. Sometimes he will still sin, sometimes he will still doubt, sometimes he will be afraid.
God, of course, knows all of this. And still he “reckons him righteous”—he accepts Abraham, loves him, rejoices in him. It isn’t on the basis of anything Abraham has accomplished, or will accomplish; it isn’t on the basis of Abraham’s piety or morality or perfection. It is simply because Abraham trusts God, because Abraham, in Paul’s words, was “fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.”
And, Paul says, this was written “not for Abraham’s sake alone, but for ours also.” It was written so that we might understand: What God asks of us is to trust him!—to stop fighting him, and to stop acting like petulant two-year-olds who scream “I can do it myself!” We can’t do it ourselves, any more than Abraham could. But we can trust God. We can let him protect and shelter us. He is anxious to shelter us, hide us in the secrecy of his dwelling, set us high upon a rock. He longs to gather us as a hen gathers her brood under her wings—if we are willing. He says to us, as he said to Abraham: “Count the stars! That is how vast and how endless is my promise to you! Let me shelter you! Let me embrace you! Believe it—you are mine!”
Pastor Richard Johnson
Peace Lutheran Church
Grass Valley, California