The Life
Abraham is the great-grandfather of biblical faith. He lived around 2000 B.C. in Ur of the Chaldeans — a wealthy, sophisticated city in what is now southern Iraq. He was originally named Abram. The Lord changed his name to Abraham, which means “father of a multitude.” His story takes up most of the second half of the book of Genesis. The Lord called him out of Ur with one of the great verses of Scripture: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee.” Abraham obeyed. He left. He walked across the ancient Near East with his wife Sarah, his nephew Lot, and his household, going to a land he had never seen, on the word of a God he could not see, holding onto a promise that he would have descendants as numerous as the stars even though he and Sarah were childless. He waited twenty-five years for the promised son Isaac to be born. He passed every test the Lord set before him. The Lord called him “friend.” Every Jew, every Muslim, and every Christian on earth claims him as their father in faith. The Lord Jesus Christ is called, in the very first verse of the New Testament, “the Son of David, the Son of Abraham.”
Abraham was 75 years old when the Lord called him. He was already settled. He was wealthy. He had a household, herds, servants, an established life in the city of Haran where his family had moved from Ur. He had no children, but he was past the age of expecting them. Then the Lord spoke to him: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee.” That last phrase is the heart of the whole episode. He was not told where the land was. He was not given a map. He was not given a destination. He was told to start walking, and the Lord would show him along the way. Abraham obeyed. He took Sarah, his nephew Lot, all the souls of his household, all his possessions, and set out for an unknown land. The Epistle to the Hebrews puts it perfectly: “By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went” (Hebrews 11:8). He walked for hundreds of miles across the ancient Near East. The Lord brought him at last to Canaan. There the Lord appeared to him at Shechem and said: “Unto thy seed will I give this land.” That was the foundation of everything that followed.
Abraham was sitting at the door of his tent in the heat of the day, by the great oaks of Mamre near Hebron. He looked up and saw three men standing before him. He did not know who they were. But he understood somehow that they were not ordinary travelers. He ran to meet them. He bowed himself to the ground. He spoke to them as if speaking to one person, calling them My Lord. He begged them to stay, to wash their feet, to rest under the tree, to take a little bread. He hurried into the tent and told Sarah to make cakes from the finest flour. He ran to the herd and chose a calf, tender and good, and gave it to a young man to dress. He set it all before the three visitors and stood by them under the tree as they ate. They asked him: where is Sarah your wife? He said: she is in the tent. The Lord said: I will certainly return to you in the spring, and Sarah your wife shall have a son. Sarah was listening from inside the tent. She laughed within herself, because she was old. The Lord knew. He said to Abraham: why did Sarah laugh, saying, shall I really bear a child, since I am old? Is anything too hard for the Lord? Saint Andrei Rublev’s famous icon of the Holy Trinity, the most beloved icon in the entire Orthodox tradition, depicts those three figures sitting at Abraham’s table at Mamre. The Orthodox Church has always understood that what Abraham saw was the prefiguration of the Trinity itself.
When Isaac was a young man, the Lord tested Abraham one last time. He said: take your son, your only son, whom you love — Isaac — and offer him as a burnt offering on a mountain in the land of Moriah which I will show you. The command was beyond comprehension. Isaac was the promised son, the one for whom Abraham had waited twenty-five years, the one through whom all the covenant promises were to be fulfilled. To sacrifice him made no sense theologically, morally, or emotionally. But Abraham obeyed. He rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, took two young men with him and Isaac his son, and split wood for the burnt offering. They traveled three days. On the third day Abraham saw the place from afar. He told the young men: stay here with the donkey. The boy and I will go yonder and worship and come again to you. He laid the wood upon Isaac his son. He took the fire in his hand and the knife. They went both of them together. Isaac said: my father, behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? Abraham answered: my son, God will provide Himself a lamb. They came to the place. Abraham built the altar. He laid the wood. He bound Isaac and laid him on the altar. He stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. The angel of the Lord called from heaven: Abraham, Abraham, lay not your hand upon the lad, neither do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God. Abraham looked, and behold, behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns. He took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering instead of his son. He called the place Jehovah-jireh: the Lord will provide.
Abraham lived 175 years. The Bible describes his death with remarkable peace: “Then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, an old man, and full of years; and was gathered to his people” (Genesis 25:8). His sons Isaac and Ishmael came together to bury him. They buried him in the cave of Machpelah at Hebron, in the field that Abraham had purchased from Ephron the Hittite many years before — the same cave where he had buried Sarah. It was the only piece of the Promised Land that the patriarchal family ever owned during its earthly pilgrimage. Abraham had walked across that land for a hundred years as a sojourner, owning no part of it, never seeing his descendants take possession of it, but trusting in the divine promise that one day they would. He went to his rest holding onto that promise. The cave at Machpelah is still venerated. Isaac and Rebecca were buried there after him. Jacob and Leah were buried there after them. The whole patriarchal line lies together in the small piece of land that Abraham had bought as a burial place for his wife. He had begun his pilgrimage in obedience to a promise. He completed it in faithful expectation of the same promise. The Lord called him friend, and the Lord kept His word.
Genesis 15:6 contains six of the most consequential words in the entire Bible: “And he believed in the LORD; and He counted it to him for righteousness.” Abraham had no Law to keep. The Mosaic Covenant was still 500 years away. He had no Temple. He had no priesthood. He had nothing but a promise from God and the willingness to believe it. He believed. And the Lord counted it as righteousness. Centuries later the Apostle Paul made this verse the foundation of his entire theology of how human beings are saved. In Romans 4 and Galatians 3 Paul argues: if Abraham was justified by faith before the Law was given, then the Lord has always been justifying people by faith. The Law could not save him because the Law did not yet exist when he was saved. He was justified by faith alone. The Apostle’s argument is structural: Abraham’s faith is the type of every authentic Christian faith, and his being counted as righteous is the type of every authentic Christian justification. To be a Christian is to share in the faith of Abraham. To be saved is to receive the same gift Abraham received: the divine reckoning of righteousness on the basis of trust in the divine promise. The whole Reformation tried to claim Abraham. The Orthodox tradition has held him from the beginning as the supreme exemplar of the faith that justifies.
Six words, six thousand years, six billion descendants in faith. This single verse from the middle of Genesis is the seed from which the whole biblical doctrine of salvation unfolds. Abraham believed. The Lord counted it as righteousness. There was no Law to obey, no Temple, no priest, no sacrament. There was only a promise made by God and a man who believed it. The Apostle Paul made this the foundation of the entire Christian doctrine of how God saves human beings. The Reformation made it the rallying cry of an entire ecclesiastical movement. The Orthodox Church reads it every year on the Sunday of the Forefathers. It remains, after four millennia, the simplest and deepest summary of what biblical faith actually is. To believe God when there is no visible reason to do so. To trust the divine promise across decades of apparent non-fulfillment. To act on the basis of the word that has been given, even when the path is unclear and the destination unknown. That is the faith of Abraham. That is the faith that justifies. That is the faith into which every Christian is called.
The promise the Lord made to Abraham was not just for Abraham’s family. It was a promise for the whole human race. “In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” That is the verse that opens the Old Testament covenant outward to the entire world. The seed of Abraham is not merely the Jewish people, although the Jewish people are descended from him in the flesh. The seed of Abraham, in the supreme sense, is the Lord Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul makes the connection explicit in Galatians 3:16: “He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.” The Lord Jesus Christ is the supreme Seed of Abraham, the One in whom the divine promise to bless all nations is fulfilled. Through faith in Christ, every nation on earth has been brought into the blessing that was promised to Abraham four thousand years ago. The pattern is breathtaking. A childless old man heard a promise on the plains of Mesopotamia. He believed it. Two thousand years later the Son of David, the Son of Abraham, was born in Bethlehem. Two thousand years after that, every nation on earth has heard the Gospel and millions in every nation have entered into the blessing promised to Abraham. The promise has come true.
Abraham is not merely a figure of the past. The Lord Jesus Christ Himself, when arguing with the Sadducees about the resurrection, said: “But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:31-32). Abraham is alive. He is in the Kingdom. He is interceding. In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the Lord depicts the poor man being carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom. Abraham himself speaks in the parable, conversing with the rich man across the great gulf. The Orthodox tradition has understood Abraham as actively present in the heavenly liturgy, interceding for those who share his faith. He has not become inactive. He has become more active. The patriarch who interceded for Sodom in Genesis 18, pleading with the Lord to spare the city if even ten righteous could be found, continues that intercessory ministry from the eternal Kingdom on behalf of every soul that calls upon his name and shares his faith. To venerate Abraham is to recognize that he is alive, present, and praying. To love Abraham is to enter into the same communion of faith that he has shared with the Lord across four thousand years of unbroken patriarchal witness.
Abraham matters to every Orthodox Christian for many reasons. He is the supreme example of the kind of faith that the Lord requires: faith that obeys when it cannot see, that trusts when it cannot understand, that holds onto the divine promise across decades of apparent non-fulfillment. He is the friend of God, called by name, given the divine promise, brought into a covenant that has continued unbroken for four thousand years. He is the father of every Christian, in the sense that the Apostle Paul articulated: every believer who shares his faith is his descendant, regardless of ethnic origin. He is the patriarch through whose line the Lord Jesus Christ was eventually born of the Virgin Mary. He is the iconographic foundation of the Holy Trinity in the Orthodox tradition, through the visitation at the Oak of Mamre that Saint Andrei Rublev depicted in the most beloved icon of the Russian Church. He is the supreme example of the willing father who is prepared to offer his only son in obedience to the divine command, prefiguring the willing offering of the eternal Father who gave His only-begotten Son for the salvation of the world. He is also the friend of every Christian who has ever felt called to a path that did not make sense, that required leaving familiar things behind, that demanded trust in a promise that had not yet been fulfilled. He is interceding for us still. The Lord has been keeping His promise to him for four thousand years. The Lord is keeping His promise to us as well.