I’ve lived in the same house since 1997. My wife and I have raised our family there. We’ve filled it with books, photos, memories, and plenty of things we probably should’ve thrown out years ago. And the thought of moving — of packing up, sorting through all those years of life, deciding what to keep and what to let go — honestly feels overwhelming.
Even taking a vacation is sometimes stressful. What to bring, what to leave, making sure everything’s taken care of before we go. What’s supposed to be a time of rest often starts with exhaustion. Now imagine being told not to pack for a trip, but to leave everything — your home, your security, your identity — without even knowing where you’re going.
That’s what God says to Avram: Lech lecha — “Go forth from your land, from your birthplace, and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” No roadmap, no destination; just a promise.
Leaving the Familiar
Avram’s call is not only geographical; it’s spiritual. It’s an invitation to step out of the predictable world of self-sufficiency and into the risky world of divine trust. And that’s where true faith always begins, at the edge of what we can understand. We could say, in our language today, that Lech Lecha is God’s call to renounce the ego’s need to rationalize and control, and to take that agonizing and precarious, and yes, risky step toward the place that God will show us. It’s what makes Avraham not just the father of a nation, but the father of faith.
Faith that Risks Everything
The Torah says in Genesis 15:6, “And he believed the Lord, and He accounted it to him as righteousness.”
Now, the rabbis ask an important question. Bereshit Rabbah 44:12 wonders, “Why is Abraham’s belief such a great thing? Had he not already seen God’s miracles and heard His promises?” Their answer is subtle and wise. Abraham’s faith was not abstract belief in God’s existence — it was trust in God’s word precisely in the area of his deepest pain and disappointment: the promise of a child when both he and Sarah were far beyond hope. Faith is easy when it costs us nothing. But when we believe God for the thing that feels impossible — that’s when faith becomes righteousness.
Avraham believed in the face of barrenness. He trusted when every reasonable calculation said otherwise. And that’s what God counted as righteousness.
Faith and Covenant
The covenant that God makes with Avraham and Sarah is not only about land and descendants. It’s about relationship — about walking with God in faithfulness and trust. God says: “I am El Shaddai. Walk before Me and be wholehearted. I will establish My covenant between Me and you, and between Me and your descendants after you, to be God to you and to your seed after you.”
This is the brit olam, the everlasting covenant. It’s not a political agreement or a legal contract — it’s a relationship rooted in faith. And that’s why emunah — faith, trust — is the heart of covenant life.
When Faith Meets Failure
But this faith doesn’t mean perfection. Avraham and Sarah’s story, like ours, is messy. They stumble, they doubt, they try to help God out with their own plans. And the result is conflict and heartbreak — Hagar, Ishmael, and years of waiting for a promise that seems to fade into silence.
Yet through all of this, God remains faithful. The covenant holds, even when their confidence wavers.
That’s part of what makes the covenant everlasting — it depends on God’s faithfulness even when our own faith falters.
A New Kind of Humanity
What emerges from this covenant is a new kind of humanity — one rooted in restored relationship. When God blesses Sarah directly, saying, “I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her,”
He restores dignity to the one who had been silenced by shame.
The same God who blessed creation through the union of man and woman now blesses both, separately and together, reuniting what was broken since Eden.
Even Hagar and Ishmael — outsiders by every social standard — are blessed. The covenant’s inclusiveness goes far beyond ethnicity or gender. This, the sages remind us, is what it means to be a “light to the nations.” The covenant was never for Israel alone; it was for the world through Israel.
The Sign of the Covenant
And then comes brit milah, the sign of the covenant. In the ancient world, circumcision was a coming-of-age ritual, a mark of manhood. But God transforms it into something entirely different — a sign to be performed on the eighth day, before the child can achieve or understand anything.
It’s God’s way of saying: “You belong to Me from the very beginning. This covenant isn’t something you earn — it’s who you are.” Just as the rainbow was the sign of God’s faithfulness to sustain creation, circumcision becomes the sign of humanity’s faithfulness to sustain relationship.
Faith in the Messiah
But that faith — that trust in God’s promise — doesn’t end with Avraham. It continues and reaches its fullness in Messiah Yeshua.
As Rav Sha’ul (Paul) tells the believers in Rome:
The words ‘it was counted to him’ were not written for Abraham’s sake alone, but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in Him who raised from the dead Yeshua our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. (Romans 4:23–25)
The same faith that led Avraham to trust God for a son is the faith that leads us to trust God for resurrection life.
In both cases, we are called to believe the impossible — that life can emerge from barrenness, that hope can rise from despair, that death itself can be conquered by love.
Faith in Our Day
We, too, live in a time that demands that kind of faith. Believing in a crucified and risen Messiah is not a popular position in the modern world. It doesn’t sound “enlightened” or sophisticated. But it is the same risky step of faith that Avraham took when he left everything familiar to follow the voice of God.
Faith in Yeshua calls us to trust that God’s purposes are still unfolding, that His covenant love still holds, and that His promises are still “yes and amen” in the Messiah. And when we take that step — when we dare to believe God in the very places that are hardest to trust Him — that faith is still accounted to us as righteousness.
Going Forth Before God
Each of us, in our own way, hears the call of Lech lecha.
Sometimes it’s a call to leave behind the comfort of certainty.
Sometimes it’s to forgive someone we’d rather forget, or to trust God when the outcome looks impossible.
Like Avraham, we may not know the destination — but we know the One who calls.
Faith doesn’t always feel safe. It rarely feels easy. But it is the only truly secure place to be — walking before God, wholehearted, trusting that He will lead us to the place He will show us.
So may we, like Avraham and Sarah, renounce the ego’s need to control and understand. May we walk before God with emunah shleimah — wholehearted faith — trusting the One who makes the impossible possible.
And may our faith, like theirs, be accounted to us as righteousness.