# Against All Hope *Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations.* By [Reborn Jem](https://paragraph.com/@rebornjem) · 2026-08-04 faith, daily devotional, romans 4, abraham, christian living, hy vọng --- Romans 4:16-25 (NIV) -------------------- 16 Therefore, the promise comes by faith, so that it may be by grace and may be guaranteed to all Abraham's offspring — not only to those who are of the law but also to those who have the faith of Abraham. He is the father of us all. 17 As it is written: "I have made you a father of many nations." He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed — the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not. 18 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." 19 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. 20 Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, 21 being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. 22 This is why "it was credited to him as righteousness." 23 The words "it was credited to him" were written not for him alone, 24 but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness — for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. 25 He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification. Why It Had to Be Faith ---------------------- Chapter 3 ended with the door open and boasting shut out. Now Paul does something careful. He goes back two thousand years to Abraham and shows that this was never a new arrangement. It is how God has always worked. Verse 16 gives the reason, and it is worth reading slowly. "The promise comes by faith, so that it may be by grace and may be guaranteed." There is a chain there. Faith, so that grace. Grace, so that guaranteed. Each link holds up the next. Think about what the alternative would look like. If the promise ran on performance, it could never be guaranteed to anyone, because nobody's performance is guaranteed. You would wake up every morning not knowing whether you were still in. Your standing would move with your week. A good stretch and you feel secure; a bad stretch and you are not sure God is still for you. That is not a promise. That is a running assessment. Paul is saying faith is not just the humble way in. It is the only route that can produce certainty, because it rests on someone who does not change. Guaranteed is a strong word, and he chose it on purpose. The God Who Gives Life to the Dead ---------------------------------- Verse 17 tells us who Abraham was actually believing in. This matters more than we usually notice. "The God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not." Abraham's faith was not faith in a good outcome. It was not optimism about his own body or Sarah's. It was faith in a particular God, described in a particular way — one who works where there is nothing to work with. Notice the two descriptions. He gives life to the dead. He calls into being things that were not. Both are situations where nobody else can do anything at all. You cannot help a dead thing along. You cannot improve a thing that does not exist yet. That is the God Abraham was trusting. So the impossibility of his situation was not a problem for his faith. It was the exact category God had described himself in. We tend to invert this. We trust God most easily when there is still some path we can see, some way it could plausibly work out. Abraham was trusting a God whose specialty is the situations with no path at all. He Faced the Fact ----------------- Verse 19 is the line that changed how I read this passage. "He faced the fact that his body was as good as dead." Faith here is not pretending. Paul does not say Abraham refused to think about his age, or told himself he felt fine, or avoided doing the arithmetic. He faced it. He looked directly at his hundred-year-old body and at Sarah's womb and used the word dead about both. This is worth saying plainly, because a lot of what gets called faith is really just refusing to look. We think being spiritual means not admitting how bad the situation is, as if naming the problem out loud might make it come true, or might offend God. Abraham names it. And his faith is unaffected. That is possible only because his faith was never resting on the facts in the first place. If your confidence is built on the situation looking survivable, then you have to keep the bad numbers out of view to protect it. If your confidence is built on who made the promise, you can read the numbers honestly. They were never load-bearing. Faith is not the absence of a clear-eyed look at your circumstances. It is a clear-eyed look at your circumstances, and then a decision about where the weight goes. Against All Hope, In Hope ------------------------- The word hope appears twice in verse 18, and it means two different things. "Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed." The first hope is the ordinary kind — the reasonable expectation you form by looking at how things stand. By that measure Abraham had none. Everything visible said no. The second hope is different. It is not produced by the circumstances. It is produced by a promise. It came from outside him, from God speaking, and it stood in the room with all the discouraging facts and did not move. I think this is the sentence to carry. Against all hope, in hope. Both at once. He was not choosing between them or talking himself out of the first one. He was holding an honest assessment in one hand and a promise in the other, and letting the promise be the heavier of the two. Strengthened, Not Drained ------------------------- Verse 20 says something I would not have predicted. "He was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God." You would expect twenty-five years of waiting on an impossible promise to wear faith down. Waiting usually does. But Paul says Abraham came out stronger, and links it to giving glory to God — which is simply treating God as who he actually is rather than shrinking him to the size of the problem. Then verse 21 defines what his faith actually consisted of: being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. Not persuaded that it would be easy. Not persuaded that he understood the timing. Persuaded about God's power, and about God's promise, and that the two belonged together. I should say something honest here, because Genesis is right there and it does not read like a flawless record. Abraham laughed. He lied about Sarah twice. He and Sarah tried to arrange the promise themselves through Hagar, which caused real damage. So when Paul says he did not waver, he cannot mean that no doubt ever crossed the man's mind. He means the direction of Abraham's life. Over decades, through failures we can still read about, he kept coming back and taking God at his word. That is what got credited to him. Which is quietly good news for anyone who has wobbled this month and wondered whether that disqualifies them. Not for Him Alone ----------------- Then Paul turns the whole story toward us, and he is almost blunt about it in verse 23. "The words 'it was credited to him' were written not for him alone." This is not a profile of an unusually great man that we are meant to admire from a distance. Paul says the sentence in Genesis was written with us in view. The same word, credited, is coming to us on the same terms. And then look at how he describes us in verse 24. Not "us who try hard." Not "us who have strong faith." Us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. Do you see what he has done? He has given us the same God Abraham had. The one who gives life to the dead. Abraham believed that about a promise concerning a child. We believe it about an empty tomb. It is the identical faith, in the identical God, pointed at something that has now actually happened in daylight. The last verse is compact and worth its own moment. "He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification." Delivered over for our sins. Raised for our justification. The cross deals with what was against us. The resurrection is the proof that the dealing worked — that the payment was accepted, that the account is settled and God has said so publicly. Walk On ------- Somewhere in your life there is a set of facts you have been trying not to look at. A number, a diagnosis, a relationship, a stretch of years that has not gone the way you hoped, something in yourself that has not changed no matter how many times you have gone at it. Abraham's example is not that he found a way to feel positive about his facts. He looked straight at them and called them dead. Then he put his weight somewhere else. So maybe two things to carry today. First, stop protecting your faith by refusing to look. You can name the thing honestly. It was never holding you up anyway. Second, ask what your hope is actually resting on right now. If it is resting on the situation improving, it will rise and fall with the situation. If it is resting on the God who gives life to the dead, then the worst set of facts you are carrying is not a threat to it. It is just the sort of place he works. What have you been unwilling to face? And whose power are you actually counting on? All glory to God — forever and ever. Amen. 🤍 If this reflection spoke to you, consider subscribing to follow along my journey of faith, meditation, and rebuilding — one day at a time. Your support truly means more than you know. ❤️ --- *Originally published on [Reborn Jem](https://paragraph.com/@rebornjem/against-all-hope)*