Fully Persuaded
“Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’” — Romans 4:18 (NIV)
“Against all hope” is kind of a strange way to begin a story about hope. But that was essentially Abraham’s situation. God had promised that he would become the father of many nations, and there was one fairly significant problem with the plan: Abraham did not have a child…
When God first called Abraham, he was seventy-five years old (Genesis 12:4). God told him, “I will make you into a great nation” (Genesis 12:2, NIV). Then the years started passing.
God repeated the promise. He told Abraham that his offspring would be like the dust of the earth (Genesis 13:16). Later, He brought him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them. Then he said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be’” (Genesis 15:5, NIV). Again in Genesis 17, God promised, “I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you” (Genesis 17:6, NIV).
Twenty-five years after the original promise, Abraham was approaching one hundred years old. At that point, the problem had not become less impossible—It had become considerably more impossible.
Paul does not pretend otherwise. He tells us that Abraham “faced the fact that his body was as good as dead” and also acknowledged “the deadness of Sarah’s womb” (Romans 4:19, NIV).
I love the wording there: “faced the fact.” Biblical faith is not denial. Abraham did not look at his hundred-year-old body and decide that age was merely a state of mind (ain’t nothing but a number, baby). He did not ignore Sarah’s infertility or pretend the circumstances were encouraging. He looked directly at the evidence in front of him and understood exactly what it meant.
Humanly speaking, this was not going to happen. On both sides of the equation, Abraham was facing an absolute impossibility. On a human level, he was too old. Full stop. End of discussion. Case closed. To put it bluntly, Abraham was inneffective and Sarah was 45 years past menopause.
And yet, “against all hope, Abraham in hope believed” (Romans 4:18, NIV).
The difference was not that Abraham had access to a more optimistic interpretation of the circumstances. The difference was that Abraham had a promise from God.
That is important, because sometimes we confuse faith with believing very strongly that the thing we want will happen. But biblical faith is not confidence in a preferred outcome simply because we want it badly enough. Abraham was not inventing a future and asking God to cooperate with it.
God had spoken. Abraham’s faith rested on what God had promised.
Faith is not saying, Everything will work out exactly the way I want. Faith is trusting that everything God has actually promised is true, even when what we can currently see gives us very little evidence of it.
And Abraham’s faith was not perfectly smooth along the way—Genesis gives us enough of his story to know that. Abraham questioned how God's promise would be fulfilled (Genesis 15:2–3). He and Sarah tried to solve the problem themselves through Hagar (Genesis 16:1–4). When God later said Sarah would bear his son, Abraham “fell facedown; he laughed” (Genesis 17:17, NIV) (I probably would have to).
So Romans 4 is not describing a man who never had a question, never struggled and never experienced a moment of doubt. It describes a man who, through all of it, kept coming back to the promise of God.
Paul says that Abraham “did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God” (Romans 4:20, NIV).
That is very different from pretending the struggle was not there! Faith can have questions. Faith can look at a situation and admit, I have absolutely no idea how God is going to do this. Faith can acknowledge that what we see does not seem to line up with what God has said.
The question is where we go from there—We can stare at the impossibility until it becomes bigger in our minds than the God who made the promise, or we can do what Abraham did.
Paul tells us that Abraham was “fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised” (Romans 4:21, NIV).
Notice where his confidence rested. Not in Abraham’s ability to make the promise happen. Not in Sarah’s circumstances suddenly becoming promising. Not in Abraham understanding God's timetable or knowing exactly how God was going to accomplish what He had said.
His confidence rested in the character and power of God.
God had promised it. God had the power to do it.
And that is still the foundation of faith.
We actually have something Abraham did not yet have: we can look backward at the finished work of Jesus Christ. We know that Christ died and rose again. Our faith is grounded in something God has already done in history, and what He has already done gives us confidence in everything He has promised still to do.
Paul makes that connection in Romans 8:32:
“He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (NIV).
We look backward at the cross, and from there we look forward. God has already demonstrated His love. Christ has already paid for our sin. The tomb is already empty. And because of what God has already done, we can trust Him for what He says is still coming.
Paul says that because we have been justified by Christ’s blood, “how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him!” (Romans 5:9, NIV). We have been given eternal life, and Jesus promises, “I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day” (John 6:39, NIV). We know that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28, NIV), even when we cannot yet see what good He could possibly be doing.
Faith looks at what God has already done and trusts Him with what He has not yet done.
That does not mean every circumstance will change the way Abraham’s eventually did. We cannot take a specific promise God made to Abraham and turn it into a guarantee that every impossible situation in our lives will end exactly as we hope. Sometimes God changes the circumstance. Sometimes He carries us through it. Sometimes we will not understand what He was doing until eternity.
But none of that changes what God has promised.
And perhaps that is where faith becomes most visible: not when trusting God is easy because everything seems to be working, but when we have faced the facts, exhausted our own explanations, and still decide that God is more trustworthy than what we can presently see.
Abraham waited twenty-five years. He had questions along the way. He certainly did not execute the waiting perfectly. But underneath all of it remained this conviction: God was able to do what God had said.
“So shall your offspring be” (Genesis 15:5, NIV).
And eventually, Isaac was born.
So when you find yourself looking at circumstances that seem irreconcilable with what you know God has said, do not pretend the circumstances are different. Face the facts. Bring the questions to God. Admit what you cannot understand.
Then go back to what He has actually promised.
Remember what He has already done. Remember the cross. Remember the empty tomb. Let those settled realities become the ground beneath everything you cannot yet see, and ask God to strengthen your faith while you wait.
You do not have to know how He will accomplish everything He has promised—You only have to know who made the promise.
bytaylormcgee
