When Faith Seems Unreasonable
There is a particular kind of faith that looks, from the outside, like sheer foolishness. It is the faith that keeps believing when the circumstances have long since stopped cooperating. It is the faith that obeys when the command makes no practical sense, that waits when waiting seems pointless, and that gives up what it cannot afford to lose. To the watching world, this kind of faith appears reckless, naive, even a little embarrassing.
But what if that apparently unreasonable faith is actually the most logical response possible — not in spite of who God is, but because of it?
That is the question Hebrews 11 presses us to answer.
The Uncertainty of Obedience
The story of Abraham begins with an abrupt and demanding call. Genesis 12 records God telling a 75-year-old man to pack up his family, leave everything familiar, and travel to a land he had never seen. No detailed itinerary. No timeline. No blueprint. Just a promise and a direction.
What makes this obedience remarkable is not merely the inconvenience of it. Abraham and Sarah would spend roughly a hundred years living in tents on land that had been promised to them but that they would never fully possess in their lifetimes. A century of impermanence. A century of waiting.
So how did Abraham endure it? Hebrews 11:10 offers the answer: he was looking forward to a city with foundations, whose designer and builder is God. His hope was never primarily anchored to the land of Canaan. It was anchored to something eternal, an unshakable kingdom that God himself was constructing. When your eyes are fixed on that kind of horizon, a hundred years of tent living becomes, in the grand sweep of eternity, a brief moment.
Faith obeys even without all the details because it knows where home really is.
The Impossibility of the Promise
Uncertainty is one thing. Biological impossibility is something else entirely.
When God told Abraham that Sarah would conceive a child, she was ninety years old. Her initial response, recorded in Genesis 18:12, was laughter — the kind that escapes before you can stop it, the laughter of someone who has just heard the most absurd thing imaginable.
And yet that laugh of disbelief was eventually transformed into a laugh of pure joy. Her son Isaac's very name means "she laughs" — a permanent reminder that God had done the undoable.
Here is the theological hinge on which Sarah's faith turned: she considered him faithful who had promised. Her confidence was not in the plausibility of the outcome. It was in the character of the God who spoke. This is the same God who called the universe into existence out of nothing, who later called Lazarus out of a sealed tomb, who calls each of us out of spiritual death into life. When you know that God, the impossible stops being a barrier to faith. It becomes the very arena where his faithfulness is most clearly displayed.
Nothing is impossible for the God who speaks life from nothing.
The Identity of the Pilgrim
Hebrews 11:13-16 pauses to make a striking observation about all of these patriarchs: they died without receiving the fullness of what was promised. They greeted the promises from a distance, like waving to a ship on the horizon they would never board in this lifetime.
Why could they live with that? Because they understood something profound about their own identity. They considered themselves strangers and exiles on the earth. Their citizenship was not in Ur, not in Canaan, not in Egypt. They desired a better country — a heavenly one.
The apostle Paul echoes this in Philippians 3:20, where he declares that our citizenship is in heaven. This is not escapism. It is a reorientation of priorities that changes everything. When you know your true home is elsewhere, the hardships of this present life lose some of their crushing weight. The rises and falls of earthly fortune still matter — we feel them, we live through them — but they no longer have the final word.
No earthly comfort, no matter how good, can fill the space in the human heart that was made for God's presence. The hole we feel is a longing for home.
The Cost of Radical Obedience
Then comes the hardest test of all.
In Genesis 22, God asked Abraham to offer Isaac — the son he had waited twenty-five years for, the son through whom every single promise of God was meant to be fulfilled — as a sacrifice on Mount Moriah. Three days of walking. Three days of looking his beloved son in the face, knowing what lay ahead.
How does a man put one foot in front of the other in a moment like that?
Hebrews 11:19 tells us: Abraham reasoned that God was able to raise Isaac from the dead. He did not have proof. He did not have a guarantee of the outcome. But he knew two things with absolute certainty. First, God had promised that through Isaac his descendants would be named — and God does not lie. Second, God had already brought life from what was as good as dead. He had done it before. He could do it again.
So Abraham raised the knife — and God stayed his hand, providing a ram caught in the thicket. Isaac was, figuratively speaking, received back from the dead.
And centuries later, on a hill called Calvary, the deeper meaning of that story was revealed. Another beloved son carried wood up a hill for his own sacrifice. But this time, there was no ram waiting in the thicket. Jesus Christ was the Lamb of God, the one who came to take our place, to bear our sin, to be the offering we could never provide for ourselves.
The cross is the ultimate proof of God's faithfulness. Romans 8:32 asks the question that answers itself: he who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all — how will he not also graciously give us all things?
The Reason for Unreasonable Faith
Faith can be genuinely hard. Waiting for promises that seem perpetually out of reach is hard. Living as a stranger in a world that feels increasingly hostile is hard. Obeying when the cost seems too high is hard.
But we have a reason for faith that goes beyond feelings and circumstances. We have a God who has proven himself faithful at every turn, and most definitively at the cross and the empty tomb. The resurrection is the final word on his power to bring life from death.
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph all greeted the promise from afar. We look back to Calvary and forward to that eternal city — the one whose foundations were laid not by human hands, but by God himself. And what awaits us there is better, by immeasurable degrees, than anything this world can offer.
That is the reason unreasonable faith is, in the end, the most reasonable thing we can do.
There is a particular kind of faith that looks, from the outside, like sheer foolishness. It is the faith that keeps believing when the circumstances have long since stopped cooperating. It is the faith that obeys when the command makes no practical sense, that waits when waiting seems pointless, and that gives up what it cannot afford to lose. To the watching world, this kind of faith appears reckless, naive, even a little embarrassing.
But what if that apparently unreasonable faith is actually the most logical response possible — not in spite of who God is, but because of it?
That is the question Hebrews 11 presses us to answer.
The Uncertainty of Obedience
The story of Abraham begins with an abrupt and demanding call. Genesis 12 records God telling a 75-year-old man to pack up his family, leave everything familiar, and travel to a land he had never seen. No detailed itinerary. No timeline. No blueprint. Just a promise and a direction.
What makes this obedience remarkable is not merely the inconvenience of it. Abraham and Sarah would spend roughly a hundred years living in tents on land that had been promised to them but that they would never fully possess in their lifetimes. A century of impermanence. A century of waiting.
So how did Abraham endure it? Hebrews 11:10 offers the answer: he was looking forward to a city with foundations, whose designer and builder is God. His hope was never primarily anchored to the land of Canaan. It was anchored to something eternal, an unshakable kingdom that God himself was constructing. When your eyes are fixed on that kind of horizon, a hundred years of tent living becomes, in the grand sweep of eternity, a brief moment.
Faith obeys even without all the details because it knows where home really is.
The Impossibility of the Promise
Uncertainty is one thing. Biological impossibility is something else entirely.
When God told Abraham that Sarah would conceive a child, she was ninety years old. Her initial response, recorded in Genesis 18:12, was laughter — the kind that escapes before you can stop it, the laughter of someone who has just heard the most absurd thing imaginable.
And yet that laugh of disbelief was eventually transformed into a laugh of pure joy. Her son Isaac's very name means "she laughs" — a permanent reminder that God had done the undoable.
Here is the theological hinge on which Sarah's faith turned: she considered him faithful who had promised. Her confidence was not in the plausibility of the outcome. It was in the character of the God who spoke. This is the same God who called the universe into existence out of nothing, who later called Lazarus out of a sealed tomb, who calls each of us out of spiritual death into life. When you know that God, the impossible stops being a barrier to faith. It becomes the very arena where his faithfulness is most clearly displayed.
Nothing is impossible for the God who speaks life from nothing.
The Identity of the Pilgrim
Hebrews 11:13-16 pauses to make a striking observation about all of these patriarchs: they died without receiving the fullness of what was promised. They greeted the promises from a distance, like waving to a ship on the horizon they would never board in this lifetime.
Why could they live with that? Because they understood something profound about their own identity. They considered themselves strangers and exiles on the earth. Their citizenship was not in Ur, not in Canaan, not in Egypt. They desired a better country — a heavenly one.
The apostle Paul echoes this in Philippians 3:20, where he declares that our citizenship is in heaven. This is not escapism. It is a reorientation of priorities that changes everything. When you know your true home is elsewhere, the hardships of this present life lose some of their crushing weight. The rises and falls of earthly fortune still matter — we feel them, we live through them — but they no longer have the final word.
No earthly comfort, no matter how good, can fill the space in the human heart that was made for God's presence. The hole we feel is a longing for home.
The Cost of Radical Obedience
Then comes the hardest test of all.
In Genesis 22, God asked Abraham to offer Isaac — the son he had waited twenty-five years for, the son through whom every single promise of God was meant to be fulfilled — as a sacrifice on Mount Moriah. Three days of walking. Three days of looking his beloved son in the face, knowing what lay ahead.
How does a man put one foot in front of the other in a moment like that?
Hebrews 11:19 tells us: Abraham reasoned that God was able to raise Isaac from the dead. He did not have proof. He did not have a guarantee of the outcome. But he knew two things with absolute certainty. First, God had promised that through Isaac his descendants would be named — and God does not lie. Second, God had already brought life from what was as good as dead. He had done it before. He could do it again.
So Abraham raised the knife — and God stayed his hand, providing a ram caught in the thicket. Isaac was, figuratively speaking, received back from the dead.
And centuries later, on a hill called Calvary, the deeper meaning of that story was revealed. Another beloved son carried wood up a hill for his own sacrifice. But this time, there was no ram waiting in the thicket. Jesus Christ was the Lamb of God, the one who came to take our place, to bear our sin, to be the offering we could never provide for ourselves.
The cross is the ultimate proof of God's faithfulness. Romans 8:32 asks the question that answers itself: he who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all — how will he not also graciously give us all things?
The Reason for Unreasonable Faith
Faith can be genuinely hard. Waiting for promises that seem perpetually out of reach is hard. Living as a stranger in a world that feels increasingly hostile is hard. Obeying when the cost seems too high is hard.
But we have a reason for faith that goes beyond feelings and circumstances. We have a God who has proven himself faithful at every turn, and most definitively at the cross and the empty tomb. The resurrection is the final word on his power to bring life from death.
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph all greeted the promise from afar. We look back to Calvary and forward to that eternal city — the one whose foundations were laid not by human hands, but by God himself. And what awaits us there is better, by immeasurable degrees, than anything this world can offer.
That is the reason unreasonable faith is, in the end, the most reasonable thing we can do.
Pastor Matthew Dionne
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