Thirteen years have passed since Ishmael was born and Abram tried to engineer the promise himself. Genesis 17 opens with silence broken: God appears again, and now he gives himself a name. Moses is writing for a people who knew the Egyptian gods by their functions — this one made the river rise, that one guarded the harvest. The God of Abraham introduces himself differently. He does not say what he does; he says what he is. El Shaddai. And then he renames the man standing in front of him, because covenant always rewrites identity.

From the writers we read together

John Lennox

Oxford mathematician and Christian apologist

Lennox often points out that the biblical God never asks for blind trust. He gives his name, he gives his word, and then he asks for a walk. Genesis 17 is a textbook case. Before God asks Abram to be blameless, he tells Abram who is asking. I am El Shaddai. The command to walk comes second, and it comes with an identity attached to it. That order matters. Abram is not being asked to manufacture confidence in a vague deity; he is being asked to respond to a specific God who has already shown up, already spoken, and already kept thirteen years of difficult promises in motion.

Lennox would say the modern objection — that faith is wishful thinking — collapses the moment you read this passage carefully. Abram falls on his face not because he has worked himself into a state, but because someone has appeared. The covenant is grounded in the character of the one making it, not in the strength of the one receiving it. That is good news at ninety-nine, when your own strength is no longer the variable that matters. It is good news at thirty-three, too, when you suspect it never was.