Most of us have experienced the gap between a hope and its fulfilment. That stretch of time where you believed something was coming, where you prayed, waited, and trusted — and then waited some more. It can be exhausting. It can be faith-shaking. And if we’re honest, it can make us wonder whether we’re simply not the kind of person who gets to experience that level of trust in God.
The story of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis speaks directly into that experience. And it does so not by presenting them as spiritual superheroes, but as deeply human, flawed, and often frightened people who nonetheless discovered something profound: God can be trusted.
A Promise to an Unlikely Couple
When God first speaks to Abram in Genesis 12, he issues both an instruction and a series of promises. The instruction is simple but staggering: leave everything. Your country, your people, your family security. Go to a land I will show you.
There’s no map. No timeline. No guarantee beyond the word of a God Abram barely knew. And yet — he goes.
The promises God makes alongside this instruction are equally audacious. He will make Abram into a great nation. He will bless him. And through him, all peoples on earth will be blessed.
Here’s what makes this so remarkable: at the time God speaks these words, Abram and his wife Sarai are landless and childless. Genesis 11 tells us plainly that Sarai was unable to conceive. To become a great nation, you need descendants. To have descendants, you need children. And to have children, you need what Abram and Sarai simply did not have.
Yet God speaks as though this future is already settled. It’s a reminder that God has the freedom and the power to work his will in what looks, from the outside, like a completely hopeless situation.
Faith and Fear Can Coexist
Abram’s faith is real — but so are his fears. Shortly after his remarkable act of obedience, a famine forces the couple to move to Egypt. And there, afraid for his own safety, Abram hatches a plan to pass Sarai off as his sister. He was willing to put her at risk to protect himself.
This is not Abraham at his finest. But it’s Abraham as he really was — a man of genuine faith who was also capable of spectacular failures of nerve. The Bible doesn’t sanitise its heroes, and that’s actually good news for the rest of us.
Later, we find him before God again, voicing something many of us have felt but perhaps haven’t dared say out loud. In Genesis 15, with years of waiting behind him and still no child, Abram essentially says: "You have given me no children. Someone else will inherit everything I have. This doesn’t match up with what you promised."
It’s raw. It’s honest. It’s the cry of someone fed up with disappointment. And God doesn’t rebuke him for it.
The Night God Walked Alone
What follows in Genesis 15 is one of the most extraordinary moments in all of scripture, though it’s easy to miss if you’re not familiar with ancient Near Eastern customs.
God instructs Abram to bring specific animals — a heifer, a goat, a ram, a dove, and a young pigeon. Abram cuts them in two and lays the halves opposite each other, creating a passage between them. Any observer at the time would have recognised this immediately: it was a covenant ceremony. A binding oath of the most serious kind.
The way it worked was this: both parties to the covenant would walk between the rows of divided animals, pledging by that act — if I break this promise, may what happened to these animals happen to me. It wasn’t just reputation on the line. It was life itself.
But something unexpected happens. God causes Abram to fall into a deep, heavy sleep. And then, as the sun sets, only God passes between the pieces — represented by a smoking firepot and a blazing torch, symbols of his presence throughout scripture.
Abram does nothing. He contributes nothing to this covenant. God walks through alone.
The meaning is staggering. God is saying: this promise rests entirely on me. My faithfulness. My commitment. Not yours. He already knows Abram’s weaknesses — the lies, the fears, the failures. And he binds himself to him anyway.
Still Taking Control
You might think that after an encounter like that, Abram would never waver again. But in the very next chapter, after ten years of continued waiting, Sarai reaches her limit. If God isn’t going to act, maybe he needs some help. So she offers her maidservant Hagar to Abram, and Hagar conceives a son — Ishmael.
It’s an understandable response to an agonising wait. But it’s not God’s plan. And the result is conflict, pain, and lasting suffering.
This pattern — trust, fear, doubt, control, back to trust — runs through Abraham’s story. It probably runs through ours too. The temptation to take matters into our own hands when God doesn’t appear to be working to our schedule is very human. And very familiar.
Twenty-Five Years Later
Eventually, in God’s own perfect timing, Sarah gives birth to Isaac. Twenty-five years after the original promise. The celebration, the relief, the overwhelming gratitude of that moment is almost unimaginable.
And it’s here we see what all those years produced in Abraham. The man who once feared for his safety in Egypt, who lied to protect himself, who tried to manufacture God’s promises through Hagar — this same man is eventually found on Mount Moriah, ready to offer up the very son he waited a quarter of a century for. He had learned, slowly and painfully, to trust the one who is faithful.
The Foundation of Our Hope
There’s a verse in Genesis 15 that theologians have called one of the most significant in all of scripture: "Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness."
Abraham receives no new information. Nothing changes in his circumstances. But he looks up at the stars and he believes. And in that moment, he is declared righteous — not because of anything he has done or will do, but purely because he believed.
As one theologian puts it: "The same God who gives the promise is the same God who makes it believable."
This is the foundation of our hope. Not the strength of our faith, but the faithfulness of God. Some of us carry the quiet fear that we’ve missed our chance — that our failures have somehow disqualified us from the promises of God. But the covenant ceremony of Genesis 15 tells a different story. God commits himself to us knowing us fully. He walks through alone. His faithfulness is not contingent on ours.
Between Promise and Fulfilment
Many of us live in the same space Abraham did — between the promise and its fulfilment. Perhaps something was spoken over your life years ago and the wait has grown heavy. Perhaps you’re trusting God for healing, for restoration, for a situation that looks humanly impossible.
The story of Abraham and Sarah doesn’t promise that the wait will be short. But it does promise that the one who made the promise is also the one who keeps it. He is the same God who spoke then and who speaks now. The same God who walked through that covenant ceremony alone. The same God who, ultimately, gave himself entirely for us in Christ.
Whatever you’re carrying today, this story is an invitation to look up — just as Abraham looked up at the stars — and to believe that the Promise Maker has not forgotten you.
