Who Was Abraham? Father of Faith Story

Abraham is the first person in the Bible God calls his friend, and the only Old Testament figure the New Testament returns to in three separate books to make its central arguments about faith. We meet him at seventy-five, told to leave everything he knows on a promise. We follow him through a famine, a Hagar he should not have taken, a son he had to wait twenty-five years for, and a knife he had to raise over that son on a mountain. We leave him at a hundred and seventy-five, buried by his two oldest sons. If you are reading this because you are waiting on a promise of your own, the story is older than the wait you are in. So is the God of it.

Where to find Abraham in the Bible

Abraham's life occupies fourteen chapters of Genesis, from Genesis 11:27 through Genesis 25:11. The story begins in Ur of the Chaldeans, an old Mesopotamian city in what is now southern Iraq, and ends at the cave of Machpelah near Hebron. Abram (his original name) walks across the ancient Near East, down into Egypt, back up into Canaan, and into the deepest covenantal moments in the Old Testament.

If you are reading the Abraham narrative for the first time, the easiest way in is four chapters in order: Genesis 12 (the call), Genesis 15 (the covenant), Genesis 17 (the renaming), and Genesis 22 (the test). Those four chapters carry the spine of the story.

The New Testament returns to Abraham in three places. Romans 4 reads him as the pattern of justification by faith. Galatians 3 reads him as the recipient of a promise that was always pointing to Christ. Hebrews 11:8-19 reads him as the model of faith that obeys before it sees.

The call out of Ur (Genesis 12)

The call comes when Abram is seventy-five. He is living in Haran, having moved north from Ur with his father Terah. His wife Sarai is barren. He has settled, by every reasonable measure, into the last quiet decade of an ordinary life. And then God speaks.

The Lord had said to Abram, "Go from your country, your people and your father's household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you."
— Genesis 12:1-3

Four promises are inside those three verses. Land. A great nation. Blessing on Abram personally. Blessing on every family on earth through him. The whole Bible after this point is, in one form or another, the story of those four promises being kept.

Notice what God does not say. He does not name the land. He does not say how Abram will become a great nation when his wife cannot have children. He does not say when. He says go on a promise with no map, no calendar, and a math problem at the center.

Abram goes. Hebrews summarizes it in a sentence.

By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going.
— Hebrews 11:8

If you are facing a moment where you have to act before God has shown you the whole picture, Abraham is your company. He leaves country, people, and father's household on a sentence. He does not know where he is going. He goes anyway.

When the man of faith fails (Genesis 12:10-20)

The very next thing the text does, having just shown you Abram's faith, is show you Abram's fear. A famine drives him down into Egypt. And the man God just called to bless the nations cooks up a plan that involves trading his wife to save his own skin.

As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, "I know what a beautiful woman you are. When the Egyptians see you, they will say, 'This is his wife.' Then they will kill me but will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you."
— Genesis 12:11-13

Sarai is taken into Pharaoh's house. Abram receives sheep, cattle, donkeys, and servants in exchange. God afflicts Pharaoh's household with diseases. Pharaoh figures out what has happened and throws Abram out. The man God called to be a blessing has just put the mother of the promise into the bed of a foreign king to save himself. The text does not soften it. He does the same thing in chapter twenty with Abimelech, the same lie, the same fear.

If you have been told that the heroes of the Bible were better than you, Genesis 12 is your release from that lie. The promise rested on God's faithfulness, not on Abram's.

The promise and the covenant (Genesis 15)

Some years pass. The land has been promised. The descendants have not arrived. Sarai is still barren. In the middle of this long silence, God comes to him at night.

He took him outside and said, "Look up at the sky and count the stars, if indeed you can count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your offspring be." Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.
— Genesis 15:5-6

That last sentence is the one Paul will spend an entire chapter unpacking in Romans 4. Not Abram's perfection. Not Abram's record. His faith. The Hebrew word for credited is an accounting term, the sort of word you would write in a ledger.

The chapter does not end there. God tells Abram to bring a heifer, a goat, a ram, a dove, and a pigeon. Abram cuts the animals in half and arranges the halves in two rows. At nightfall, a deep sleep falls on him, and a smoking firepot and a blazing torch pass between the pieces.

To pass between cut halves of an animal in the ancient Near East was to say: if I break this covenant, may I become like these animals. Two parties would usually walk through together. In Genesis 15, only God walks. The covenant rests on him.

Tim Keller, in Counterfeit Gods, returned to this scene to make one point: the God who made a covenant with Abraham walked through the pieces alone because he was the only one who could keep it. On a cross, centuries later, he became the one who took the curse he had sworn to take if the covenant ever broke. Genesis 15 is the gospel in shadow.

Hagar, Ishmael, and the human shortcut (Genesis 16)

Ten years go by. Still no son. Sarai is old enough now that her body is not the obstacle, it is the verdict. In Genesis 16 she does what people do when a promise is taking too long. She tries to help God along.

Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; so she said to Abram, "The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her." Abram agreed to what Sarai said.
— Genesis 16:1-2

Sarai gives her slave to Abram. Abram agrees. Hagar conceives. And from that point on, the household is a war. Sarai despises the pregnant Hagar. Hagar despises Sarai. Hagar runs into the desert, where the angel of the Lord meets her by a spring and gives her the name of her son. She names the God who has spoken to her El Roi, the God who sees me. She is the first person in Scripture to give God a name.

Ishmael is born. Abram is eighty-six. For the next thirteen years, Abram raises Ishmael as his son. He has, by every appearance, an heir. The promise has been delivered.

It has not. Genesis 17 will reopen the question. When God's timing feels late, the temptation to take the promise into your own hands is enormous. The cost of doing it lands on other people, and it lands for generations. Hagar and Ishmael are not small footnotes. They will become a whole people. The shortcut is never small.

The covenant of circumcision and the renaming (Genesis 17)

Abram is ninety-nine when God appears again. Thirteen silent years since Ishmael. Twenty-four years since the original call. The first words out of God's mouth are not a rebuke for Hagar. They are a re-statement of the promise.

"As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations. No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations."
— Genesis 17:4-5

The name changes. Abram means exalted father. Abraham means father of a multitude. Every time anyone says his name now, they are speaking the promise out loud over a man who still has only one son.

Sarai's name is changed too, to Sarah, princess. God promises she herself, at ninety, will bear a son. Abraham falls on his face and laughs. He asks God to bless Ishmael instead. God says no. The covenant will run through Sarah's line, not the shortcut.

Then God gives the sign of the covenant: circumcision. Every male in the household, eight days old and up. Abraham circumcises every man in his household that same day, including himself. At ninety-nine.

Three visitors at Mamre, and Abraham pleading for Sodom (Genesis 18)

Some weeks later, Abraham is sitting at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day, by the great trees of Mamre. Three men appear. The text shifts from the three men to the Lord, and Abraham is suddenly hosting God under a tree with a calf and curds and bread.

The first announcement is for Sarah. By this time next year, she will have a son. Sarah, listening from inside the tent, laughs to herself. After I am worn out and my lord is old, will I now have this pleasure? The Lord answers her laughter with a question.

"Is anything too hard for the Lord? I will return to you at the appointed time next year, and Sarah will have a son."
— Genesis 18:14

That is the central question of Abraham's life and of yours. Is anything too hard for the Lord? Sarah's body says yes. Her ninety years say yes. God hands the question back as an invitation to a different verdict than the one her body has given.

The visitors then turn toward Sodom, and the chapter takes its second turn. The Lord tells Abraham what he is about to do, and Abraham argues with God on behalf of a city he has every reason to want destroyed. He begins at fifty righteous. He bargains down. Forty-five. Forty. Thirty. Twenty. Ten.

"Far be it from you to do such a thing, to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?"
— Genesis 18:25

The patriarch who was willing to trade his wife for safety in Egypt is now standing in front of God refusing to walk away from a doomed city. The same man, twenty-five years later, is a different man. The promise has been doing slow work on him.

The lesson in chapter 18 is not that Abraham wins the argument. The lesson is that the friend of God is allowed to bring his hardest questions to God, including questions about whether God is going to do the right thing. The text considers this part of what friendship with God looks like.

The long-promised son (Genesis 21)

Genesis 21 opens with two of the most under-quoted verses in the Old Testament.

Now the Lord was gracious to Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised. Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the very time God had promised him.
— Genesis 21:1-2

Twenty-five years after the original call. Sarah is ninety. Abraham is a hundred. The boy is named Isaac, which means he laughs. Sarah names him after the laughter she could not contain when the visitors told her what was coming.

If you are in a long wait, do not skip those two verses. The text could have said and Isaac was born. It chooses instead to say, twice in slightly different words, that the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised, at the very time he had promised. The waiting was long. It was not infinite.

The chapter also closes the Hagar story. Sarah, watching Ishmael mock Isaac at the weaning party, demands that Hagar and her son be sent away. God tells Abraham to do as Sarah asks, but promises Hagar a nation through Ishmael. Hagar leaves with bread and a skin of water. When the water runs out, she sets her son under a bush and walks far enough away that she will not have to watch him die. God hears the boy. The angel meets her again. A well is opened. Ishmael lives.

The promise to Abraham runs through Isaac, but the God of the promise does not forget the woman in the wilderness with the empty water skin.

The binding of Isaac (Genesis 22)

Some years later, when Isaac is old enough to carry firewood up a mountain, the test comes. The opening does something almost cruel in its restraint.

Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!" "Here I am," he replied. Then God said, "Take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you."
— Genesis 22:1-2

The text piles on the relationship words on purpose. Your son. Your only son. Whom you love. Isaac. Four ways of saying the one thing you cannot lose. And then sacrifice him on a mountain that, like the original call, will only be shown to Abraham along the way.

Abraham gets up early the next morning. He saddles his donkey, cuts the wood, takes two servants and Isaac, and walks for three days. He tells the servants to wait, and that we will come back. He puts the wood on Isaac's back. He carries the fire and the knife in his own hand. The two of them walk on together. And then Isaac speaks the question that breaks open the whole chapter.

Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, "Father?" "Yes, my son?" Abraham replied. "The fire and wood are here," Isaac said, "but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?" Abraham answered, "God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." And the two of them went on together.
— Genesis 22:7-8

God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son, is one of the load-bearing sentences in the Old Testament. It is spoken by a father walking his son toward what looks like the son's death. And it is spoken on a mountain in the region of Moriah, which 2 Chronicles 3:1 identifies with the mountain in Jerusalem where the temple is later built. The same mountain range, in the broadest sense, where another Father will one day walk a Son toward a cross.

Abraham builds the altar. He arranges the wood. He binds Isaac. He reaches out his hand and takes the knife. The angel of the Lord calls out from heaven. Do not lay a hand on the boy. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.

Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide. And to this day it is said, "On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided."
— Genesis 22:13-14

The ram is provided. Isaac comes down the mountain. The promise survives the test. But the chapter has put two figures in front of the reader, the father with the knife and the son carrying the wood up the hill, and carved the pattern of the gospel into the Old Testament so deeply that nothing later will be able to read Genesis 22 without seeing it.

If you have been asked by God to lay down something you do not know how you can lose, Abraham is your company. The God who provides on the mountain is the same God who will, in the fullness of time, walk up that mountain himself with his own Son, and not be stayed. Spurgeon, preaching on Genesis 22, kept returning to one observation: Abraham received Isaac back, but God did not receive his Son back the same way. The Father went further than Abraham was asked to go.

Sarah dies, Isaac marries, Abraham dies (Genesis 23 to 25)

The rest of Abraham's life is told quickly. Sarah dies at a hundred and twenty-seven. Abraham, weeping at the loss, buys the cave of Machpelah from the Hittites for four hundred shekels of silver. It is the first piece of the promised land any of his family actually owns.

He sends his senior servant back to his homeland to find a wife for Isaac. Rebekah comes out to a well with her jar on her shoulder, says I will go before she has met the man she is marrying, and is brought into Sarah's tent. Isaac loves her and is comforted after his mother's death.

Abraham then takes another wife, Keturah, and has six more sons by her. He sends those sons off with gifts, keeping Isaac as the heir of the promise. Then the chapter closes.

Abraham lived a hundred and seventy-five years. Then Abraham breathed his last and died at a good old age, an old man and full of years; and he was gathered to his people. His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah near Mamre, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite.
— Genesis 25:7-9

The man who once banished one of these two sons to the wilderness is buried by both of them. Isaac and Ishmael buried him. The two brothers, the son of promise and the son of the shortcut, stand together at their father's grave. Whatever happened in the years between the wilderness and Machpelah, the text does not tell us. It just tells us they were both there.

That is the end of Abraham's life on the page. The rest of the Bible spends the next sixty-five books telling you what came of him.

What Abraham's life is doing in yours

Abraham's life is for you as a pattern of what God does over a long stretch of time with a real human being.

The promise survives the man. Abraham fails twice the same way, lying about Sarah to save his own skin. He takes a shortcut with Hagar. He laughs at God's promise out loud. None of this kills the promise. God's faithfulness, not Abraham's record, carries the story. If you have been disqualifying yourself, Genesis disagrees.
The wait does not mean the no. Twenty-five years between the call and Isaac. At the very time God had promised him (Genesis 21:2). The wait was the calendar, not a delay in it.
The shortcut costs more than you think. Hagar and Ishmael are not a footnote. They become a whole people. The shortcut Abraham took at eighty-six is still doing damage at ninety-nine.
The friend of God brings the hard questions to God. Genesis 18 lets Abraham argue with God about Sodom. If you have been told that real faith does not ask hard questions, the patriarch in Genesis 18 disagrees.
The test is real and the provision is real. Abraham raises the knife. He means to bring it down. The ram in the thicket is also real. The provision comes at the last possible moment. But it comes. And the place is named The Lord Will Provide, because the testimony of Genesis 22 was meant to outlive Abraham.

If your life looks like the failure of the promise, the God who provides on the mountain is the God who has not finished. We have a longer piece on whether God is real for readers whose wait has gone past the point where they can still hold the question quietly.

How Abraham points to Christ

The New Testament returns to Abraham for two reasons: how anyone is right with God, and who the promise was finally for. Both threads run to the same place.

Paul, writing to a church arguing about Jewish law and Gentile believers, reaches back to Genesis 15:6 and builds an entire doctrine on it.

"Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness."
— Romans 4:3

Abraham was credited as righteous in Genesis 15, before he was circumcised in Genesis 17, before any law was given. The way Abraham was made right with God is the way anyone is made right with God. Not by earning it. By faith.

Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, "So shall your offspring be." Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead, since he was about a hundred years old, and that Sarah's womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised.
— Romans 4:18-21

Then the second question. To whom was the promise finally made? Paul answers in Galatians 3 with a piece of close reading that turns on a single grammatical detail.

The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. Scripture does not say "and to seeds," meaning many people, but "and to your seed," meaning one person, who is Christ.
— Galatians 3:16

The promise was always pointing forward to a single descendant through whom worldwide blessing would arrive. The whole genealogy of the Old Testament, from Isaac to Jacob to Judah to David to the list of names at the start of Matthew, was running toward Jesus. Then Paul lands the consequence.

If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.
— Galatians 3:29

The covenant that began with one childless man in a tent outside Ur is not a private family heirloom anymore. It runs to you. If you are in Christ, the promise made to Abraham is one of the things Christ has given you.

Then there is Genesis 22 itself. Hebrews returns to it in chapter 11.

By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had embraced the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned." Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death.
— Hebrews 11:17-19

The chapter is treated as a death and resurrection in shadow. The father offers his one and only son. The son carries the wood up the mountain. The father raises the knife. God provides the substitute. The son comes down alive.

John Piper, preaching on Genesis 22, has often returned to the same observation Spurgeon made before him. The mountain where the angel stayed Abraham's hand was in the region of Moriah. The mountain where, centuries later, a Father did not stay his own hand was just outside Jerusalem, on the same ridge. Abraham was a father who almost had to give up his son. God is a Father who did. Abraham heard the angel say do not. God did not. He said it is finished.

The lamb in the thicket was a stand-in for the moment the Lamb himself would be the one on the wood. Bible Project's video on Abraham makes the point patiently: the Old Testament was already telling the story. Abraham's life is the first verse of the song the cross finishes.

+Where in the Bible is the story of Abraham?

Abraham's story runs from Genesis 11:27 through Genesis 25:11, roughly fourteen chapters covering about a hundred years of one man's life. The New Testament returns to him in three main places: Romans 4 (Paul's argument that Abraham was justified by faith, not by works), Galatians 3 (Paul's argument that the promise was always pointing to Christ), and Hebrews 11:8-19 (Abraham as the pattern of forward-looking faith). If you only have time to read one stretch of the Old Testament about him, read Genesis 12, 15, 17, and 22 in order.

+How many wives did Abraham have?

Three, in this order. Sarah (originally Sarai) was his lifelong wife, and Scripture clearly treats her as his only wife in the covenantal sense. Hagar, Sarah's Egyptian slave, was given to him by Sarah as a surrogate to produce an heir, and Genesis 16 calls her his wife in that arrangement. After Sarah died, Abraham married Keturah, with whom he had six more sons (Genesis 25:1-2). The line of promise runs through Sarah's son Isaac alone.

+What four things did God promise Abraham?

Land, descendants, blessing, and blessing to the nations. Genesis 12:1-3 is where the four parts are first laid out. God tells Abram to leave his country for a land God will show him (land), promises to make him into a great nation (descendants), promises to bless him and make his name great (blessing), and promises that all peoples on earth will be blessed through him (blessing to the nations). The whole rest of the Bible, in one way or another, is the story of those four promises being kept.

+Why is Abraham called the father of faith?

Because of one verse and one moment. The verse is Genesis 15:6, where God takes Abram outside, shows him the stars, and promises that his offspring will be that many. Abram believes God. The text then says, plainly, that God credited it to him as righteousness. The moment is Genesis 22, where God asks for Isaac back, and Abraham obeys, trusting that God can keep the promise even through death. Paul builds his entire argument for justification by faith on this verse in Romans 4. Abraham is the father of faith because his faith is what God counted.

+How does Abraham point to Jesus?

Two ways the New Testament draws the line. First, in Galatians 3, Paul argues that the promise God made to Abraham was always pointing to a single offspring, Christ, through whom the blessing would reach the nations. Second, the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22 prefigures the gospel pattern of a father offering a son. Abraham raises the knife. God provides a ram. On the same mountain range, centuries later, a Father will not stay the hand and will provide the Lamb. Abraham trusted that God could even raise the dead, and Hebrews 11:19 says he received Isaac back in a manner of speaking. The pattern is older than the cross. It was already there in Abraham's life.

Further study

If you want one short book on Abraham, Iain Duguid's Living in the Grip of Relentless Grace (P&R, 2002) walks through Genesis 12 to 25 in roughly 150 pages and is unusually honest about the failures of the patriarch as well as the patience of God. For the New Testament side of his story, John Piper's Future Grace spends a whole section on Romans 4 and Abraham's pattern of believing the promise. Tim Keller's chapter on Abraham and Isaac in Counterfeit Gods is the best single-chapter pastoral treatment of Genesis 22 in print.

On this site, you might keep reading with Joseph, whose providence story runs parallel to Abraham's promise story across the second half of Genesis. Moses carries the covenant Abraham received forward into a nation. David is the king in the line that Abraham was promised. If your interest is the gospel pattern, the prodigal son is the New Testament version of a father running toward a son. If your interest is the question of trust when God seems silent, Is God Real? sits with the larger version of what Sarah had to answer at ninety: is anything too hard for the Lord?