📖 Bible Characters — Unit 3: Abraham — Father of the Faithful, Friend of God

The great story of salvation does not begin with a nation, a temple, or a king. It begins with one man, called by God out of a pagan city. Abram — later named Abraham — lived in Ur of the Chaldeans, a place of moon-worship and idols, when the living God spoke to him and said, "Get out of your country... to a land that I will show you." From that single act of faith came a people, a Book, and at last a Redeemer. The New Testament calls him "the father of all those who believe" and "the friend of God." His life sets before us the question every believer must answer: what does it mean to walk with God by faith?

Subject: Abraham — the father of the faithful, the friend of God.

Proposition: Faith is proved as it is tested, and the God who calls keeps His promise.

We will trace five movements in the life of Abraham.

I. Chosen

Abraham did not seek God; God sought him. Grace always speaks first. The Lord called him to leave everything familiar — his country, his relatives, and his father's house — and step out toward a land he had never seen.

Notice the breadth of the promise. It was not for one family or one nation only; the blessing would reach all the families of the earth. From the very first word spoken to Abraham, God had the whole world — and the coming Christ — in view. Abraham's part was simply to believe and to go, and he went, not knowing where he was going. Along the way he built altars to the LORD at Shechem and Bethel, marking the land with worship before he ever owned a foot of it.

His faith, however, was not yet perfect. When famine struck, Abraham went down to Egypt and, fearing for his life, told a half-truth about Sarah his wife. Even at the start we see a man who believed God and yet stumbled — a comfort to every believer who has done the same. God protected him, brought him back, and held him to the promise.

II. Tested

The promise was given, but the son was not yet born — and the years dragged on. Faith is rarely tested in a single moment; more often it is tested in the long, slow waiting. One night God took Abraham outside and told him to look up. "Look now toward heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them... So shall your descendants be." And in the heart of that waiting comes one of the greatest verses in all of Scripture:

Here is the doctrine of justification by faith, centuries before Paul wrote it down. Abraham was counted righteous not because of works he had done, not because he was circumcised, not because he kept a law — but because he believed God. His faith laid hold of the promise, and God credited that faith as righteousness. Paul makes the point unmistakable in Romans 4: this righteousness was reckoned to Abraham while he was still uncircumcised, so that he might be the father of all who believe, whether they keep the law or not.

That same night God did something astonishing. He told Abraham to bring animals and divide them, and then, as a smoking oven and a burning torch, God Himself passed between the pieces. Cutting animals and passing between the pieces was a known way of ratifying a covenant in the ancient world — a comparable practice appears later in Jeremiah 34:18 — functioning as a kind of self-curse: "may I become like these slain animals if I break this covenant." The exact details of who normally walked through in such ceremonies are not fully certain from the evidence we have, but what Genesis tells us plainly is this: Abraham did not pass through. God alone did. It was a covenant of pure grace, bound by God's own faithfulness and not by Abraham's performance.

Even so, Abraham's faith was not flawless. As the wait stretched on, he and Sarah grew impatient and tried to help God keep His own promise. Abraham took Hagar, and Ishmael was born — a detour that shows a man reaching for the promise by his own strength. Yet God did not cast him off. The Lord held to His word, and faith — not perfection — remained the channel of blessing.

III. The Promised Son

When Abraham was ninety-nine, God appeared again and confirmed the covenant, this time changing his name. No longer Abram, "exalted father," but Abraham, "father of a multitude." God revealed Himself as El Shaddai, God Almighty, and gave the sign of circumcision as the mark of the covenant in the flesh of every household.

Then the LORD visited Abraham at the oaks of Mamre, appearing with two companions, and renewed the promise that Sarah would bear a son within the year. Sarah, listening at the tent door, laughed — for she was long past the age of childbearing. And the Lord answered with a question that stands over every impossible situation:

In time the son was born and named Isaac, which means "he laughs" — for what had once seemed a cruel joke became the laughter of joy. God keeps His promises, but He keeps them in His own time, and often only when every human possibility has run out, so that the glory belongs to Him alone.

Before Isaac was born, Abraham showed how near to God's heart he had come. When the LORD announced judgment on Sodom, Abraham stood before Him and pleaded for the city, asking, "Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?" He bargained the number down — from fifty righteous, to forty-five, to thirty, to twenty, to ten — not for himself, but for others. This is the boldness of a friend, and it is the privilege the title "friend of God" describes: a man who can stand in God's presence and intercede.

IV. Proven

Then came the hardest test a father could face. God said, "Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love... and offer him there as a burnt offering." For three days Abraham walked toward Mount Moriah carrying the wood and the fire. Yet his faith did not waver; he told his servants, "We will come back to you" — believing, as Hebrews tells us, that God was able to raise Isaac even from the dead. And when Isaac asked where the lamb was, the old man answered in faith:

At the last moment the Angel of the LORD stopped his hand, and a ram caught in a thicket was offered in Isaac's place. Abraham called the place "The-LORD-Will-Provide." James tells us that here Abraham's faith was "made perfect" — that is, brought to its full maturity — by his obedience. Faith and works were not rivals; his faith was working together with his works. And Moriah is a window onto Calvary, where the Father "did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all." What God did not finally require of Abraham, He Himself supplied for us in the gift of His Son.

V. The Friend of God

At the end of it all, Abraham is given a title granted to no one else in quite the same way. Three times the Scriptures call him the friend of God — once on the lips of God Himself in Isaiah, once in the prayer of Jehoshaphat, and once here in James:

Justified by faith (Genesis 15:6) and proved by obedience (James 2), Abraham became the friend of God. And the gospel itself was preached to him beforehand: "In you all the nations shall be blessed" (Galatians 3:8) — a promise fulfilled in Jesus Christ, the Seed of Abraham. The whole letter to the Galatians turns on this point: those who are of faith are the true sons of Abraham, and the inheritance comes by promise, not by law.

Hebrews adds one more note about his faith: Abraham lived as a stranger in the land of promise, dwelling in tents, "for he waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God." He believed not only for a piece of land, but for a heavenly home.

Abraham was not great because he never wavered, but because he believed God, and that faith laid hold of the promise and, when tested, obeyed. The same God calls you. You enter the family of Abraham not by birth, not by works, but by faith in the promised Seed.