Transcript
What Does the Lord Require? Faith
First Baptist Richmond, March 16, 2025
The Second Sunday in Lent
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
He brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” And he believed the LORD, and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness.
When God called Abraham he promised him two things: a place to call his own and a family of his own. Those two things were important to him. He was seventy-five years old at the time, still living in his father’s house with a wife who couldn’t have children. To have a home of his own, and maybe a baby boy to bounce on his knee? Well, that sounded like heaven to him; he would have followed God anywhere.
God led him up and around the Fertile Crescent and down to the land of Canaan. I think Abraham may have been a bit surprised to find people already living in the land God was going to give him, Canaanites, who weren’t about to give it up. Abraham stopped at a place called Shechem to reconsider his call but the Lord reassured him by saying, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So, Abraham built an altar to the Lord, perhaps to remind him of his promise, and then moved on to the south.
He ended up in Egypt, because there was a famine in the land of Canaan, but when he came back he still didn’t have a place to call his own or a family of his own. He climbed the hill to the place where he had built an altar earlier and the Lord said, “Raise your eyes now, and look from the place where you are,
northward and southward and eastward and westward; for all the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth; so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted.”i
Abraham believed what the Lord told him. He pitched his tents under the Oaks of Mamre, near a place called Hebron. And then he waited for the Lord to fulfill his promise. But he waited, and waited, and waited, and he must have thought, “You know, I’m not getting any younger. It’s not like my chances of producing offspring are getting better.” He tried to keep those thoughts to himself but in his prayers he kept reminding God of his promise: that one day he would have a place of his own and a family of his own. And then one day God showed up in a vision.
He said, “Do not be afraid, Abraham, for I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” But he must have caught Abraham on a bad day, because Abraham (who is remembered for his great faith) was experiencing some serious doubt. He said, “O Lord God what will you give me, for I continue childless and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus.” And then, just to be clear, he said, “You have given me no offspring, so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.” But the Lord said, “No, this man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue will be your heir.” And that’s when Abraham began to doubt that God understood where babies come from.
Because it requires a certain amount of youthful vigor to have a baby. I sometimes say that God gives children to young people because you have to be young to keep up with them. But God doesn’t give children to old people, not usually. They’re not only too old to keep up with them they’re too old to produce
them. The baby-making equipment has broken down. In his comments on this passage in Romans 4 Paul suggests that Abraham’s body was as good as dead, reproduction-wise, because he was nearly a hundred years old, and as for Sarah, well, her womb was dry as a chip. It didn’t make sense to think that these two could have a child. But God said to Abraham, “Come with me.”
And let me interrupt this story long enough to talk about the difference between doubt and faith, because some Christians seem to believe that doubt is a sin. They say you should believe without ever doubting, and that if you ever do you should pray like that man in the Gospels who said, “I believe, help my unbelief!” But there are others who seem to believe that doubt is a natural part of faith, and sometimes the very thing that takes your faith to a deeper level.
Part of this depends on your understanding of the word faith. I’ve told you before about the four Latin words for faith: one of them is assensus which means giving your intellectual assent to a theological proposition. So, if you believe that God created the heavens and the earth, that’s assensus. If you believe that Jesus died on the cross to save you from your sins, that’s assensus. But another Latin word for faith is fiducia, and it means “radical trust.” It’s like learning to float in a swimming pool and believing that the water can hold you up. It really doesn’t matter if give your intellectual assent to the principle of buoyancy; it only matters that you can float.
I believe that Abraham had that kind of faith in God: the kind of radical trust that lifted him up even when doubt was dragging him down. In this story, for example, he seems to feel free to ask God questions because he knows God, he trusts God, they have a relationship. So even when he doubts that he and Sarah can have a child he is willing to hear God’s side of the argument. And when God
says, “Come with me; I want to show you something,” Abraham goes.
God took him outside, under the night sky, and asked him to look up. What Abraham saw was a sky so full of stars they were almost blinding. Millions of them, billions of them, sparkling like diamonds under a spotlight. God said, “You see all those stars? So shall your descendants be.” And although it didn’t make sense, Abraham believed God. He trusted him. It may have been something about the confidence in his voice but when God said that Abraham and Sarah were going to have a child Abraham believed him, and the Lord saw it, and “reckoned it to him as righteousness.”
Again, in Romans 4 and elsewhere, the Apostle Paul makes much of that moment. He claims that the Lord justified Abraham—that is, made him right—because of his faith. And Paul says, “This was before he or any of his offspring had been circumcised! It was before Moses had come down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments! So, it’s not being circumcised that makes you right with God, and it’s not keeping the Law of Moses—it’s faith! It’s trusting the grace of God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That’s what saves you! And Abraham is our example: he had plenty of reasons to doubt that he and Sarah could have a baby, but he believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”
That would be a good place to end the story, but it goes on from there. Impressed by Abraham’s ability to believe the unbelievable God says, “I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.” But Abraham, who has come to believe that he is going to father a child, still has some questions about how he’s going to acquire this land. He’s basically a squatter, camping out on someone else’s land and hoping that no one kicks him
off. But this relationship of radical trust gives him the freedom to ask. He says, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” And the Lord says, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.”
Walter Brueggemann, who is perhaps the world’s foremost Old Testament scholar, says that even he doesn’t know what’s going on in this part of the story. He writes, “Verses 9-11 and 17 present a curious ritual act that is probably very old.” Abraham brings these animals before the Lord, cuts them in two, and lays each half over against the other. And when birds of prey come down on the carcasses, Abraham shoos them away. The Bible says, “As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abraham, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying, ‘To your descendants I will give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates.’”ii
Brueggemann writes, “While the specific details of the action are obscure, the act suggests a solemn and weighty binding of two parties to each other. Perhaps this is some kind of blood oath, to visibly reinforce the promise.”iii Whatever it is, the author of Genesis suggests that it is how God made his covenant with Abraham—he moved from a spoken promise to a specific ritual. And if you will, it’s not that much different from what we do when a boy asks a girl to marry him and she says yes—that’s the spoken promise—but then there’s the wedding that follows—a specific ritual where the people gather, and the minister presides, and there, in the presence of God, the bride and groom make their solemn promises to each other and seal them with a sacred pledge.
And again, if you will, it’s not that much different from what we do when someone says that she’s ready to follow Jesus—that’s the spoken promise—but then there’s the baptism that follows—a specific ritual where she wades out into the water and the minister asks her to profess her faith. She says, “Jesus is Lord!” and then he dips her under the water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and she comes up to a whole new life. But every once in a while someone will come to me who was baptized at an early age and say, “Dr. Somerville, I think I need to get baptized again.” And when I ask why she says, “Because I was so young when I got baptized the first time. I didn’t really know what I was doing.”
And here’s my guess: my guess is that when she was five years old believing in God was easy. He made the world in six days? No problem. He made the sun stand still in the sky? No problem. A man spent three days in the belly of a whale? No problem. But then she got a little older, learned a little science, and it got to be a problem. Her childhood faith—the kind where you give your intellectual assent to a theological proposition—got a little shaky. “Maybe if I got baptized again,” she thinks. “Maybe that would settle these doubts.” But as I’ve said, that kind of faith, assensus, is only one of the four Latin words for faith. There is also fiducia, “radical trust,” and that’s the kind Abraham had. Abraham knew God. He trusted him. He trusted him enough to ask his most difficult questions and God wasn’t afraid to answer them.
So when someone comes to me and says, “Dr. Somerville, I think I need to get baptized again,” I usually say no. I say, “Look, you decided to follow Jesus all those years ago. You followed him through the waters of baptism. You followed him as he began his own journey of faith. You don’t need to stop now and go back
to the river. Jesus is still walking. You don’t want to lose sight of him. Just stop long enough to pile up a little stack of stones by the side of the road, just a reminder that here, at the age of fifteen, you began to wonder if you were losing your faith, but also a reminder that here, at the age of fifteen, you realized that faith is bigger than giving your intellectual assent to a set of theological propositions; it is also about trusting Jesus enough to follow him no matter where he goes, and here, at the age of fifteen, you decided to keep following. If you live long enough you will be able to look back over the course of your life and see a little stack of stones wherever your faith went deeper, but if you keep going back to the river you’ll never make any progress.”
I think about those disciples. They had dropped everything to follow Jesus and in the beginning it must have been exhilarating. They got to hear him teach and preach. They got to watch him help and heal. Huge crowds were following him and they were in the middle of everything. At the height of it Jesus asked them what people were saying about him and they said, “Some say you are John the Baptist come back to life. Some say you are Elijah or one of the other ancient prophets.” “But what about you,” Jesus asked. “Who do you say that I am?” Peter said, “You are the Messiah!” and he was right. But then Jesus began to tell them what it meant to be the Messiah: it didn’t mean conquering and ruling; it meant suffering and dying. Peter said, “God forbid it, Lord! This shall never happen to you!” And Jesus said, “Get behind me, Satan! You are not thinking the things of God; you are thinking the things of men.”
And then Jesus turned and started walking, and the disciples started following. That’s what disciples do. But I imagine that Peter had to do some hard thinking as he walked. Did he want to keep following someone who had just called
him “Satan”? Could he? He must have eaten his supper in silence that night, tossed and turned on the hard ground for hours. But the next morning, when Jesus got up, rolled up his bedroll, and slung it over his shoulder, he looked at Peter and said, “Peter, do you trust me?” Peter said, “Lord, you know that I trust you.” “Then follow me,” Jesus said, and Peter did. He didn’t have it all figured out yet. And in the days to come his faith would be challenged even more. But he had decided to follow Jesus, and for him there could be no turning back.
—Jim Somerville © 2025
