The God Who Gives Life to the Dead

Second Sunday after Pentecost, Year A — Romans 4:13–25

Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations” [Romans 4:18].

There is a temptation, when reading Romans 4, to make it a meditation on the heroism of Abraham’s faith — on what it looks like to believe hard enough, long enough, in the face of sufficient discouragement. At first blush, Paul seems to invite that reading. He lingers over the obstacles: the body that is as good as dead, the barren womb, the absurdity of descendants as numerous as the stars. And Abraham, we are told, did not weaken. He grew strong. He gave glory to God.

But that reading puts the weight in the wrong place.

Paul’s interest is not finally in the quality of Abraham’s believing. It is in the character of the God Abraham believed. The Romans passage turns, quietly but decisively, on a phrase tucked into verse 17 — a phrase that functions less as description than as definition: the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” Everything Paul says about Abraham’s faith depends on who Abraham was trusting when he trusted.

To get there, Paul first has to clear some ground. The promise made to Abraham — that he would inherit the world, that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars — could not have come through the law. The law had not yet been given. More than that: if the inheritance runs through law, it runs through human performance, and human performance is an unreliable foundation for a divine promise. Where there is law, Paul says, there is transgression — and transgression is precisely what collapses the promise rather than fulfilling it. So the promise had to rest on something other than human capacity to comply. It rested on grace. It rested on faith. And that means it remains open — not to one nation, not to those who can produce the right credentials, but to all who share Abraham’s posture toward the God who made the promise in the first place.

What Paul describes in the verses that follow is not a man who talked himself into confidence. Abraham looked squarely at the evidence. Paul is careful to say so: he “considered his own body, which was already dead” [4:19]. My commentaries point out that the Greek is starker than most translations suggest. Paul does not say Abraham’s body was declining, or aging, or less vigorous than it once was. Instead, Paul uses the language of death. The body is dead. Sarah’s womb is dead. The situation is not difficult. It is impossible.

And Abraham trusted anyway.

This is the posture Paul is after — not the absence of doubt, not the suppression of what the eyes can plainly see, but the decision to go on trusting in the face of what cannot be resolved. The writer/preacher Frederick Buechner, reflecting on this same story, put it this way: “Faith is laughter at the promise of a child called Laughter.” The name Isaac means laughter — and both Abraham and Sarah laughed when the promise was made, that complicated laugh that lives somewhere between disbelief and desperate hope. Paul reads that laughter not as failure but as the very texture of faith: the “this cannot be true — and yet?” that keeps moving toward the promise anyway.

Verse 18 names it with a phrase that deserves more than familiarity has given it: hoping against hope. The Greek sets hope against hope — par’ elpida ep’ elpidi — hope that has no empirical foundation set alongside hope that refuses to dissolve. Abraham had no evidence. What he had was a word. A promise spoken by a God he had learned, over long years, to trust. He lived, as one might say, inside an unfinished sentence — the sentence God had spoken over his life, whose ending he could not yet see.

That is what Paul means by faith. Not certainty. Not the absence of contradiction. A continuing orientation toward the God who makes promises — and who, Paul insists, is the kind of God who can be trusted with impossibility.

I knew a man like that once. He was a widower, a faithful member of the congregation I served years ago. In the time when his wife was alive, the two of them had planted bulbs together every autumn — a ritual that belonged to both of them, rooted in decades of shared life. After she died, he continued it alone.

I watched him once, kneeling stiffly in the cold, pressing something dry and unimpressive into the dark ground. His hands were arthritic. The work was not easy. And he knew perfectly well what was coming — the mud, the frost, the long months in which nothing visible would follow. He had lived enough winters to harbor no illusions about them.

Yet every autumn he knelt and planted. Not because the evidence was immediate. Not because spring felt guaranteed in any sentimental sense. But because he had learned, over the long course of a life, to trust rhythms he could not presently see. He was putting something into dark ground and waiting for a God he trusted to do what he had always done.

He died some years ago. The garden outlasted him. I have thought about him often since, and never more than when I read Paul’s description of Abraham pressing forward into a promise he could not yet see fulfilled — hoping against hope, considering the deadness and planting anyway.

Paul does not leave the story with Abraham. The final verses of the passage make the turn explicit: what was written about Abraham “was written not for his sake alone, but for ours also” [4:23-24]. The God who gave life to Abraham’s dead body and to Sarah’s barren womb is the same God who raised Jesus from the dead. In a real sense, the resurrection is not a new demonstration of divine power — it is the same power, the same character, the same God who has always worked precisely where the human situation has run out of road.

Here, there is a wondrous level of asymmetry. Abraham trusted forward into a promise that had not yet been fulfilled — living inside an unfinished sentence, with no evidence but the word of the God who spoke it. We trust backward into something that has already happened. The empty tomb is behind us, not ahead. And yet the posture Paul describes is the same: an orientation toward a God who gives life to the dead and calls things into existence before they appear, trusted not because the evidence compels it but because the God who makes promises has shown, decisively and finally, that he keeps them.

That is the faith Paul is describing. Not the heroic achievement of certainty in the face of doubt. Not the suppression of what the eyes can plainly see. A continuing trust — the kind that kneels in cold ground and presses something dry and unimpressive into the dark, not because spring is guaranteed in any sentimental sense, but because the God who has always brought life from death has given us no reason to believe he has stopped.

The bones of the promise are still there. And the God who gives life to the dead is still speaking.