Abraham & God's Covenant

Leave your country

Long ago, in a city called Haran, God spoke to a man named Abram. God asked him to leave everything he knew: his country, his relatives, even his father's household, and go to a land God would show him. In exchange, God made him a promise almost too big to believe.

Abram was already seventy-five years old, and he and his wife Sarai had no children. Still, he packed up his household and set out for a land he had never seen, simply because God had asked him to go.

As many as the stars

Years passed, and Abram still had no son. One night, God took him outside his tent and told him to look up at the sky.

Abram couldn't count the stars, and he couldn't see how the promise would come true either. But he believed God anyway. That trust, even without proof, is what made Abram right with God.

A son named laughter

Twenty-five long years after God's first promise, when Abraham (God had given him a new name by then) was one hundred years old and Sarah was ninety, they finally had a son. They named him Isaac, which means “he laughs,” because that's exactly how impossible and joyful it felt.

God provides

Some time later, God tested Abraham in the hardest way imaginable, asking him to trust God with the very son he had waited a lifetime for. Abraham obeyed, step by step, trusting that God would somehow provide a way, even though he couldn't yet see how.

And God did provide. At just the right moment, God stopped Abraham and provided a ram instead, exactly when it was needed most.

Abraham became known as the father of God's people, and his family, through Isaac, then Jacob, then all twelve tribes, grew into the great nation God had promised him under the stars.