At the basis of his character was a mighty faith-“Abraham believed God.” In that faith he left his native land, and travelled to one which was promised, but not clearly indicated. In that faith he felt able to let Lot choose the best he could for himself; because he was sure that none could do better for himself than God was prepared to do for the one who trusted Him. In that faith he waited through long years, sure that God would give him the promised child. In that faith he lived a nomad life, dwelling in tents, and making no attempt to return to the settled country from which he had come out. Indeed, his soul was consumed with the passionate expectancy of the city of God. In that faith he was prepared to offer Isaac. In that faith he buried Sarah. In that faith he died.
1. Abraham's faith was faith in the unseen. He had faith in an unseen future because he had faith in an unseen God. One property of faith is that it gives to things which are future and as yet only hoped for all the reality of actual present existence. Future things may be said to have no existence for those who do not believe in them. They are not taken into account. Men do not shape their conduct with any reference to them. But when a man believes in certain events that are to be, this faith of his lends to these future things the reality, the “substance,” which things actually existing in the present have. They have the same weight with him, the same influence upon his conduct.
Men may despise faith in the unseen as an idle dream. They may tell us to husband our material resources, to advance our scientific knowledge, to elaborate our political and social arrangements, and to banish all such unrealities from our thoughts. But assuredly the belief in a Divine prompting has ever been the most potent, most beneficent, most enduring influence in the history of mankind. Look outside the pale of sacred history. Take as examples the two greatest of the Greeks-the greatest in the world of thought, and the greatest in the world of action. What was it that singled out Socrates among all the philosophers and moralists of Greece, and invested his character with a moral sublimity unapproached by the rest? What else but his belief that he too was prompted by a Divine spirit, a supernatural voice, deterring, advising, inspiring, stimulating, to which he rendered implicit obedience, and for which he was content cheerfully to face even death itself? What was it that rescued Alexander from the herd of vulgar conquerors and tyrants, despite all his faults, that gave its permanence to his work and influence, and made it a true prœparatio evangelica? What, I ask again, but his belief that he was sent from heaven to break down the partition wall between Greek and Barbarian, and to fuse them into one common polity, under one common rule?1 [Note: Bishop Lightfoot.]
2. But again, Abraham's faith was faith in God's promises.
(1) Take one of these promises. Abraham had returned from his victory over the kings, and the loneliness of his household, with none but his slaves to inherit his property, may well have made him feel bitterly that God had given him everything except the blessing he most longed for. And then it was that the word of Jehovah came to him in a vision, saying, “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.” Hereupon Abraham is encouraged to speak out what is in his mind, and he says, “What wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless; and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir?” Then God promised him an heir born of his own stock, and showed him that magnificent sight, the depth of the Eastern sky, with stars whose number and brightness we in the dull West can hardly conceive; and said unto him, “So shall thy seed be.” The host of heaven, which so many Eastern tribes have been led to worship for their glory and brightness as the divinest thing they knew, was to Abraham only the sacramental pledge, the outward and visible sign, of the covenant of Jehovah with his servant. “And he believed in the Lord; and he counted it to him for righteousness.”
(2) Take another promise. He was called to sacrifice his son, and he determined to do so; but this son was given by promise, and was given expressly as the root of a great nation; this promise Abraham continued to believe, even at the time when he was preparing to obey the command; he did not doubt that this very Isaac, who was going “like a lamb to the slaughter,” even if slaughtered, would still be the means of fulfilling the Divine assurances. He knew God to be faithful; he knew He could not lie; he believed, therefore, that He would furnish some means, whatever they might be, of harmonizing the contradictory duties to which he was called. The patriarch might possibly hope that God would interfere to prevent the completion of the fatal act, or to interrupt the progress of the preparatory proceedings. Perhaps, however, his mind dwelt most strongly upon the idea of Isaac being actually offered and actually restored to life. This seems obviously the meaning of the Apostle. “He that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, That in Isaac shall thy seed be called; accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead.” The struggle in the mind of the patriarch would be between his general knowledge of this power on the part of God, and his expectation of its exercise in this particular case. It is intimated that, whatever might be at first the suggestions of affection or weakness, this expectation rose superior to them all. He continued to feel firmly persuaded that the promises he had received would be fulfilled; that they would be fulfilled in and by Isaac; and that He who had directed the mysterious act which he was about to accomplish would make its performance consistent with a confidence in His previous prediction. This is emphatically “against hope, believing in hope”; trusting to eternal truth, in spite of apparent physical impossibilities.
It is from this point of view that one comes to see the force and reasonableness of that profound and memorable word: Abraham “believed in the Lord; and he counted it to him for righteousness.” The simple, childlike trust which, even in uncircumcision, Abraham was enabled to repose in the promises of God's favour did what only a perfect “righteousness” of his own could have done under the original compact with unfallen Adam. That is to say, it brought him back, sinner as he was, into a position of friendship and favour with God; and it gave him a claim upon such Divine help and benediction as it must be the supreme reward of all “righteousness” to attain. Personal righteousness, in the sense of such a faultless obedience to Divine law as might have deserved the friendship or the blessing of the righteous Judge, Abraham of course had none, any more than any of us. But what he could not win from justice by his righteousness, that the grace of Jehovah granted to his trustfulness. For so soon as the man trusted Jehovah's word of friendly promise he became a party to a covenant of reconciliation, and obtained a title to its blessings. By making him a party to such a contract of friendship, his faith made Abraham a “friend” of God, and God the God of Abraham. He became a reconciled ally of his once offended Lord. Thus the beneficent and merciful One above, and the sinful but repentant one beneath, came together in an unequal yet most fruitful compact.
He was most diligent in providing the Divine Life in his soul with its necessary condition of activity and growth by maintaining a fellowship with God as close and as constant, I believe, as was ever maintained by man. His spirit was continually steeped in the heavenly dews of prayer. For prayer he was always ready. My father prayed continually because God was to him so great and vivid a reality-the Reality of realities. But prayer-such is always its beneficent reflex action-helped to make God to him a greater and more vivid reality still. The more he prayed, the more real to his perception did God become. To him, God was not a hundredth part as much a luminous postulate of the reason as a vital experience of the heart-his atmosphere, his sunlight, his very breath, his very life. I venture to think it difficult, if not impossible, that God should ever be more real to man or woman than He was to him. Doubtless there were fluctuations in the degree in which he realized the Divine presence. Like the sea, the soul has its tides-the ebbs and flows of spiritual feeling. Yet the impression left on the minds of those nearest to him was that his God-consciousness was always at the full.1 [Note: H. Varley, Henry Varley's Life-Story (1913), 240.]
3. Abraham's faith was the more conspicuous that he had to wait so long before the promises were fulfilled. It is instructive, for example, to observe how long that matter of obtaining an heir for Abraham occupies the stage of sacred history and in how many aspects it is shown. The stage is rapidly cleared of whatever else might naturally have invited attention, and interest is concentrated on the heir that is to be. The risks run by the appointed mother, the doubts of the father, the surrender now of the mother's rights-all this is trivial if it concerned only one household, important only when it is viewed as significant for the race. It was thus that men were taught to brood thoughtfully upon the future and to believe that, though Divine blessing and salvation would spring from earth, man was to co-operate with God, to recognize himself as capable of uniting with God in the highest of all purposes. At the same time, this long and continually deferred expectation of Abraham was the simple means adopted by God to convince men once for all that the promised seed is not of nature but of grace, that it is God who sends all effectual and determining blessing, and that we must learn to adapt ourselves to His ways and wait upon Him.
The recently published Letters of Marcus Dods are suggestive of many things; but there is one thing worth special mention. It was his bitter experience to endure more than five years' waiting between his being licensed by the Presbytery and getting a church. In one of these letters he likens himself to the cripple at the Pool of Bethesda who, when the Angel gave healing virtue to the water, was unable because of his handicap to avail himself of his opportunity. But, says Dods significantly, “One thing I did not do, I did not throw mud at the Angel.” In other words, he did not gird at circumstances, nor fling gibes at the omissions of Providence. With every fibre of his brain and will did he dig into the ores of knowledge, saying to himself: “A church I may never get, but if I do, I will be ready for the church.” And when waiting had done its work, Providence opened up to him the mighty purpose for which he had been girded. The God who kept Marcus Dods waiting those trying years was the God who made him “chief among the brethren.”1 [Note: A. Shepherd, Bible Studies in Living Subjects, 60.]
It is often a greater trial to a man's spirit to wait than to work. How often are we placed in circumstances which no action of our own is likely to improve-in which it is clearly prudent to take no step, to do nothing, to say nothing; but to wait and see what the opposite party will do or say. Restless from temperament or some other cause, people go and do something when it would be infinitely better that they had sat quietly at home and done nothing. How frequently are clever people the victims of this over-activity! All cultivated persons are aware of the importance of work, but few have considered how much wisdom there often is in waiting. Among salutary maxims here is one men need most to lay to heart, but to remain passive does not belong to every one's character. Of all the lessons that humanity has to learn in life's school, the hardest is to learn to wait.2 [Note: H. W. Smith, The Life Worth Living, 318.]
4. Not only had he to wait, but when the fulfilment came it was far other than Abraham expected. For God's promises never are fulfilled in the sense in which they seem to have been given. Life is a deception; its anticipations, which are God's promises to the imagination, are never realized; they who know life best, and have trusted God most to fill it with blessings, are ever the first to say that life is a series of disappointments. And in the spirit of this text we have to say that it is a wise and merciful arrangement which ordains it thus.
(1) What does Abraham find? He finds that, though face to face with the inheritance, the promise by no means puts him in possession of it, that he has to begin and gain it, quite as if no promise of it had been made to him; that he has to buy it, to fight for it, to take pledges of it by leaving his dead in it. He finds that he must use his own efforts, and his own sense of what is right and necessary, and his own judgment; and he has to restrain himself, and wait and hope for a success which he has not yet attained. And, further, he finds that he cannot settle down in one place, and work from there in order to acquire the whole, as if he had made a sure conquest, at least, of one spot of it. He cannot call any part of it certainly his own; he has to wander from place to place, sometimes harassed by the burning heat, although generally under the grateful shadow of the oaks of Mamre. He sometimes even loses all hold of it whatsoever, and, finding no sustenance in it, is driven out of it by sheer hunger, and forced to look even in Egypt for the means of keeping himself alive; discovering that though the promise was, “a land flowing with milk and honey,” there might be such a mighty famine that life could not be maintained against it.
Is not that a picture of the life of many believing men? They enter upon the promised heritage, but find themselves unable to conquer it. What characterizes their experience is restlessness, instability, no settled abode, no sure footing-flitting from one spot of the promised heritage to another, finding the heritage exceeding broad, yet finding themselves without power to enter into the possession of it-finding, to their disappointment, that where they hoped the promise of God would do all for them, it seems to do nothing; and so they must put forth every effort of their own, must buy, and fight, and endure, and see their best endeavours but feebly rewarded, and the day of their hopes ever deferred. They wonder that God does so little for them, does in fact nothing for them distinctly and apart from their own endeavour, except it be that somehow He sustains in them the hope that He will yet do much for them. And under this hope they are able to put forth strong efforts of their own; and when these are not crowned with success, they are able to wait.
(2) But there is no sign of despondency in the case of Abraham. The disappointment and delay cleared his view of what the heritage was. Probably he set out with no very clearly defined idea of what he was to receive. He had not got possession even of that which he was led to expect. But he had attained to the feeling that possession of it would not satisfy him. The little possession of it that he had raised a larger object of desire before his mind. But the first defeat of his hopes cleared his mind of clouds; and there stood out before him the object of his desire, no longer dim, but well defined. “He looked for the city which hath foundations, whose planner and builder is God.” That which he longed for bodied itself out to him as a city-a city with foundations-a city planned and built by God. It was no more a place merely, nor a land merely-it was a city of God, a stable, eternal dwelling-place, no mere tent, pitched and struck many times a day. It had foundations; it was the rest of the people of God.
Let us keep before us this city that hath foundations, whose builder is God-that well-ordered, active, just, human, godly life; let us strive to reach such a city, such a social, friendly, human life, and life with God. We may not succeed; but we shall find pursuing this object greater blessedness than attaining any other. We shall no more be mindful of the country whence we came out. There will be ever growing up in our hearts the ideal of the city where God is, where men are, wherein dwelleth righteousness. And if, like Abraham, we have to die in faith, without receiving the promises, it will be but a step till faith gives place to sight, and all God's promises become Yea and Amen in Christ Jesus.
As regards death, which so haunted his soul, Tolstoy showed real insight when he declared that men often fear it chiefly because they have never yet found true and adequate life. John Stuart Mill wisely remarked, it is hard to die without having ever truly lived. As Robertson of Brighton said, none of the promises of God are fulfilled in this life. The utterly wasted faculties of some of the very noblest characters seem to demand a future life with quite special eloquence and imperiousness. Over the graves of many grand and heroic failures, over the graves of many glorious spiritual abortions, discerning human pity cries aloud to the far-off Creator with perplexed sorrow and immeasurable suggestiveness. “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” God's apparent failures are often far more prophetically suggestive than His successes. The noblest of the sons of God are often the most “sore let and hindered” during their earthly careers. They are specially out of harmony with their mundane environment. Unsuited for earthly success, they declare plainly that they seek a better country, that is, a heavenly.1 [Note: A. H. Craufurd, The Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy, 39.]
