People of the Bible

Abraham

The patriarchs and matriarchs · Around 2000 BC (traditional) · Appears in Genesis 11 to 25 · Also known as Abram

Abraham, first called Abram, is the father of the faithful, the man God called out of Ur and promised to make into a great nation through whom all families of the earth would be blessed. He believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness, and Jews, Christians, and Muslims all trace their heritage to him.

And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness.Genesis 15:6 (KJV)

The call to leave everything

Abram lived in Ur of the Chaldees, a city of the ancient world, and then in Haran, an ordinary man from a family that served other gods, when the word of the LORD came to him. God said, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee, and bound to that command a sevenfold promise: to make of him a great nation, to bless him, to make his name great, and, most sweeping of all, that in him all families of the earth would be blessed. It was a staggering word to a childless man of seventy-five.

By faith Abram went out, not knowing where he was going, and came into the land of Canaan, living as a stranger in the country God had promised to give him. There God appeared to him again and again, renewing the promise, until one night he brought Abram outside and told him to look toward heaven and number the stars, if he could, and said, So shall thy seed be. And Abram believed in the LORD, and he counted it to him for righteousness, a sentence Paul would later make the cornerstone of the gospel of grace.

The long wait and the covenant

The promise of a son was easy to speak but hard to wait for, and Abram and his wife Sarai were old and childless. Weary of waiting, they took matters into their own hands: Sarai gave her servant Hagar to Abram, and Ishmael was born, a decision that brought lasting sorrow. But God's promise did not bend to human shortcuts. When Abram was ninety-nine, God appeared again, changed his name to Abraham, father of many nations, and Sarai's to Sarah, and gave circumcision as the sign of the covenant cut between them.

God drew near to Abraham as to a friend. When judgment loomed over Sodom and Gomorrah, God did not hide his purpose from him, and Abraham stood before the LORD and interceded for the cities, pleading down from fifty righteous to ten, learning that the Judge of all the earth would do right. Through it all Abraham built altars, called on the name of the LORD, and lived by promises he could not yet see fulfilled, a pilgrim looking for a city whose builder and maker is God.

The son of promise and the test on Moriah

At last the long-awaited son, Isaac, was born to Abraham and Sarah in their old age, the child of laughter and of promise, and the household that had waited a lifetime rejoiced. Then came the hardest test in all of Scripture. God said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and offer him for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains in the land of Moriah, the very son on whom every promise depended.

Abraham rose early in the morning and obeyed. For three days he traveled with a breaking heart, and when Isaac asked where the lamb was, Abraham answered, My son, God will provide himself a lamb. He built the altar, bound his son, and stretched out his hand to take the knife, and at that final moment the angel of the LORD called out of heaven and stopped him, and Abraham saw a ram caught in a thicket and offered it in Isaac's place. He named the place Jehovahjireh, The LORD will provide, and God renewed his oath to bless him and, through his seed, all the nations of the earth. Abraham lived to a great age, buried Sarah in the one plot of promised land he owned, secured a wife for Isaac, and died full of years, gathered to his people.

His character and struggle

Abraham is remembered above all for a faith that obeyed before it understood and held on to God's word across decades of waiting. Yet Scripture does not hide his failures, and they make his faith more, not less, believable. Twice, out of fear, he passed Sarah off as his sister to save his own skin, endangering the very promise he carried. Once, tired of waiting, he took Hagar rather than trust God's timing, and reaped years of family grief.

He was a man of real faith and real frailty, whose greatness lay not in being flawless but in believing God and, in the end, holding nothing back. His life is a long schooling in trust, from the first blind step out of Haran to the raised knife on Moriah, each test deeper than the last, until the friend of God could give up even the son of the promise because he was persuaded that God was able to raise him from the dead.

Melchizedek and the God Most High

One striking episode stands apart in Abraham's story. When his nephew Lot was carried off by a coalition of raiding kings, Abraham armed the trained men of his household, pursued them, and rescued Lot and all the captives and their goods. Returning from the battle, he was met by a mysterious figure, Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of the most high God, who brought out bread and wine and blessed him, saying, Blessed be Abram of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth. And Abraham gave him a tenth of everything.

It was a small scene with a long shadow. Melchizedek was a priest with no recorded beginning or end, greater than Abraham, who received the patriarch's tithe and blessing. The book of Hebrews returns to him again and again, for he was a picture of a priesthood higher and older than that of Aaron, a king of righteousness and king of peace. And when the king of Sodom offered Abraham the spoils, he refused to take so much as a thread, that no one might say he had made Abram rich, for his heart was set on God as his reward and not on gain.

Where Abraham points to Christ

Jesus said, Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it, and was glad. The promise that all nations would be blessed through Abraham's seed is fulfilled, Paul writes, not in many descendants but in one seed, which is Christ, so that everyone who believes, of every nation, becomes a child of Abraham by faith. The gospel, Paul says, was preached to Abraham beforehand in that ancient promise of blessing for all the earth.

And the scene on Mount Moriah is among the clearest foreshadowings in the Bible. A father giving up his only beloved son, the son carrying the wood of his own sacrifice up the hill, a substitute provided in his place, all point across the centuries to another hill nearby, where God did not spare his own Son but delivered him up for us all. Abraham said God would provide himself a lamb, and on the very mountains of Moriah, in the fullness of time, he did, for John the Baptist would one day point to Jesus and cry, Behold the Lamb of God.

A note on the sources: everything above is drawn from the biblical text itself. Where a detail comes from later tradition rather than Scripture, it is named as tradition. Dates for the earliest figures are traditional and approximate, and Scripture does not always give them. The aim is to tell each life honestly, and to let it do what the whole Bible does, point to Jesus Christ the Lord.

Related: Sarah · Isaac · All the people of the Bible