Be Still And Know

Hebrews 11:12 And so a whole nation came from this one man who was as good as dead—a nation with so many people that, like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, there is no way to count them. The writer to the Hebrews described Abraham as being “as good as dead”. That’s not flattering, but he was describing a 99-year-old man who was married to Sarah – a woman decades past child-bearing years. The whole situation looked hopeless. But God had promised that Sarah would have a baby from whom a mighty nation would be born. In human terms this was laughable nonsense. But God was at work, and so something which was humanly impossible was exactly what happened. Isaac was born and the nation came into being with descendants as uncountable as the stars in the sky or the grains of sand on the seashore. We are continually tempted to domesticate God. We try to make him fit into the world that we understand and make him like us. Long ago Voltaire, the French philosopher, expressed this powerfully when he s