By Ife J. Ibitayo
In my post “Almost But Not Yet”, I mentioned the faith of Abraham, the father of the Israelites. He left his family and homeland based on the word of a foreign god. The LORD promised that the son he didn’t have would inherit a land he didn’t know about! The apostle Paul speaks about the significance of Abraham’s faith in the book of Romans:
Something
“The scriptures say God told him, ‘have made you the father of many nations.’ This happened because Abraham believed in the God who brings the dead back to life and who creates new things out of nothing” (Romans 4:17).
First and foremost, Paul emphasized the nature of God. When someone makes a promise to us, whether it be season tickets to our favorite sports team or a job at an exciting startup, we stake the value of that promise on the character of that person. Are they a conman? Or are they trustworthy? Abraham rested his faith on the God of Adam: the Creator who formed valuable life out of worthless dirt (Genesis 2:7), the God who regularly makes something out of nothing.
Nothing
But the seeming flip side of faith is cold, hard reality. In Romans 4:19, apostle Paul said, “Abraham faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s womb was also dead.” One hundred-year-old men don’t father children, and ninety-year-old women don’t become pregnant. With similarly daunting truths that stand against the promises God has spoken to us, how can we square faith with reality?
Someone
Paul concluded that Abraham was “fully persuaded that God had power to do what He had promised” (Romans 4:21). Abraham understood the unlikeliness of God’s promise but knew that God is greater than likelihood, probability, and even possibility. The God he served was a miracle-working, promise-keeping God, and He still is today.
Conclusion
God’s promises anchor us in the heavenly realm of healings, miracles, and resurrection power when everything else in the world tries to steer us elsewhere. We can choose to cling on to our God for one more day—trusting that He’ll again make something out of nothing, or we can accept that nothing will remain nothing forever.
“Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise.”
(Hebrews 10:13)