Wednesday, March 4

Abram threw himself down on his face, and God spoke with him and said, “I make this covenant, and I make it with you: you shall be the father of a host of nations.” Genesis 17:3-5

For [Abraham] is the father of us all, as Scripture says: “I have appointed you to be father of many nations.” This promise, then, was valid before God, the God in whom he put his faith, the God who makes the dead live and summons things that are not yet in existence as if they already were. Romans 4: 17-18


What does it take to believe in God’s promises? Sometimes it feels like a real stretch to me. It’s hard to envision the kind of leap of faith that God was asking Abram to make. In today’s passage from Genesis, God tells Abram to basically forget everything that he knows about his own reality and the shape of his life. The future’s going to be different from what Abram anticipated. Based on the covenant that God promises, Abram and his wife Sarai find themselves given completely new identities. God rewrites the story, assigns them new names, and changes the plot of their lives. Now this elderly, childless couple is going to have a son and become the foundation for “a host of nations.” It certainly sounds overwhelming and hard to accept.

I know that there have been points in my life when I have felt myself stumped, unable to imagine the circumstances that will serve as a bridge to get me from the present “here” to the future “there.” It seems impossible to envision what it would take to find the path to the future, let alone see the individual steps that it will require to travel that path. But as Paul writes in the verses from Romans, God is not only with us on the path, God is way ahead of us. As Paul puts it, this is our God who “summons things that are not yet in existence as if they already were.” What a faith that is, to take God’s implausible promises at face value and not to quibble over the path from here to there but, like Abraham to accept God’s unexpected future as a present reality.


God, strengthen me in faith this Lenten season. May I find myself inspired by the continuity of your covenant and equipped to place my trust in the promises that will uphold me on the path into the future. Amen.

Chris Bensch, Clerk of Session