Faith Between the Encounters

“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.”
—Hebrews 11:8, ESV

A hundred years can pass in a few pages.

Abraham was seventy-five when he left Haran and one hundred seventy-five when he died. We can read the account of those years in a single sitting. Yet Abraham had to live every day of them.

He had to wake up, tend to his household, settle disputes, travel, grow older, and wait. What we encounter as the next paragraph may have come to him years later.

Consider the distance between the end of Genesis 16 and the beginning of Genesis 17. Abraham was eighty-six when Ishmael was born. When the Lord next appeared in the narrative, Abraham was ninety-nine.

Thirteen years lie between those statements.

Scripture does not tell us that God said nothing during those years. It does not give us a complete record of Abraham’s prayers or his fellowship with God. We must leave room for what the account does not disclose. But it does make us pause. The events seem close together on the page; the years were long in the living.

And what kind of world did Abraham inhabit while he waited?

He lived largely among people who worshipped other gods. His own family had come from that background. Genesis describes no congregation that gathered around him each week, no established sanctuary where he regularly received instruction, and no community life resembling the church fellowship many of us know.

There were people who acknowledged God. Melchizedek blessed him in the name of God Most High. Abimelech recognized God’s presence in his life. Abraham was not entirely without witnesses to God’s reality. Nevertheless, he lived as a stranger in the land God had promised him.

Along the way, he built altars.

At Shechem. Between Bethel and Ai. At Hebron.

These were places where Abraham acknowledged the God who had called him. After his troubled journey into Egypt, he returned to the altar near Bethel and called upon the Lord again.

There is something deeply moving about that return.

Abraham had been afraid in Egypt. He had concealed his marriage to Sarah to protect himself. Later, he would repeat that deception before Abimelech. He also accepted Sarah’s plan to have a child through Hagar, a decision that brought suffering into their household.

The Bible allows us to see these failures. The man remembered for faith was capable of fear, impatience, and painful errors of judgment.

Yet the story continues with Abraham turning toward God.

He listened. He questioned. He prayed. He obeyed. And through the years, he continued to live with a promise he could not bring to fulfillment himself.

Twenty-five years passed between his departure from Haran and Isaac’s birth.

Twenty-five years of growing older while waiting for a child.

Then, after the child came, Abraham faced the terrible test of Genesis 22. The son he loved—the son through whom God had promised descendants—was the very son he was commanded to offer. Hebrews tells us that Abraham considered God able even to raise the dead (Hebrews 11:19).

His confidence rested in God’s ability to keep his word, even when Abraham could not see how.

This helps us understand why he is called the father of all who believe. His life demonstrates a faith that endured across years, through uncertainty, and beyond his own failures. God’s faithfulness gave him reason to continue.

We, too, live much of our lives between the moments we readily recognize as significant.

A prayer remains unanswered. A responsibility continues. A sorrow does not quickly lift. We open our Bibles, care for those entrusted to us, and take another step without knowing what the next season will bring.

Abraham’s promises were particular to his calling. We cannot turn them into a guarantee that every outcome we desire will eventually arrive. But the God whose character Abraham learned to trust is the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ. We have reason to trust his faithfulness even when our circumstances remain unresolved.

Perhaps that is one of the gifts of reading Abraham’s story slowly.

We begin to notice the years between the encounters. We remember that the man walking through them did not possess the completed account we hold in our hands. He knew what God had said. He did not yet know all that God would do.

And still he went forward.

Faith between the encounters is lived one ordinary day at a time, trusting that God remains faithful beyond what we can presently see.

Father, when waiting is difficult and the way ahead is unclear, help us remember your faithfulness. Forgive us when fear directs our choices. Teach us to return to you, to trust what you have spoken, and to walk with you through the ordinary days. Amen.