Can You Really Trust God When He Hasn’t Come Through Yet?

• Why it’s okay to have real doubts and unanswered questions, even if you consider yourself a person of faith
• Why being made right with God was never about being good enough — and why that’s actually freeing, not risky
• How one strange, ancient ceremony quietly points forward to what Jesus would eventually do on the cross

We’re living in a moment when trust is in short supply — in institutions, in leaders, in each other. So it’s a fair question to ask: can you actually trust God, especially when life hasn’t gone the way you expected or prayers have gone unanswered? This page looks at Genesis 15, where Abraham asks God that exact question out loud, and walks through what happened next.

According to this passage, yes. Ten years after God promised to give Abraham land and descendants, nothing had happened. So when God tells him, “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward” (Genesis 15:1), Abraham essentially pushes back: “Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless…You have given me no children” (Genesis 15:2–3). He’s frustrated, and he says so directly. God doesn’t scold him for asking or shut the conversation down. Instead, God responds with patience, taking Abraham outside to look at the stars and reaffirming the promise. Honest questions, even skeptical ones, aren’t treated as a problem here — they’re met with a real response.

After God repeats his promise, Genesis 15:6 says, “Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.” This is one of the most important verses in the Bible because it explains how a flawed person gets right with God — not by racking up enough good behavior to earn it, but by trusting God’s promise. Abraham didn’t understand exactly how God would deliver on what he’d said. His circumstances hadn’t changed — he and his wife were still childless. The only thing he had was God’s word, and he chose to rest his future on that. This is the difference between trying to earn God’s approval and simply trusting that he’s told the truth.

The passage doesn’t fully explain the delay, but it does show how Abraham responded to it — with real, unfiltered frustration. Abraham had already tried to solve the problem himself, informally adopting a servant as his heir since he had no children of his own (Genesis 15:2–3). God makes clear that wasn’t the plan: “This man will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir” (Genesis 15:4). The delay didn’t mean the promise was off — it meant Abraham had to decide whether he’d trust God’s timing or try to force a solution on his own.

In the ancient world, this was how binding agreements were sealed — two parties would cut animals in half, arrange the halves opposite each other, and walk together between the pieces, essentially saying, “If I break this agreement, let what happened to these animals happen to me” (Genesis 15:9–10). Normally, both parties in a covenant like this would walk through together. But in Genesis 15, only a symbol of God’s presence — described as “a smoking firepot with a blazing torch” (Genesis 15:17) — passes through the pieces. Abraham doesn’t walk through at all. That detail is significant: it means God alone is taking on the responsibility for the outcome of this promise.

Because it means God was saying, in effect, “If this promise fails, let the consequences fall on me” — not on Abraham. In a normal ancient agreement, both sides would be on the hook if they broke their word. Here, God takes on all the risk alone, even though it’s Abraham and his descendants who would eventually fail to keep their end of things. This moment quietly sets up something that plays out much later in the Bible’s story: rather than making people pay the penalty for their own failures, God takes the consequences onto himself.

Centuries after Abraham, that pattern from Genesis 15 plays out fully. Just as Abraham experienced “a thick and dreadful darkness” during this covenant ceremony (Genesis 15:12), a descendant of Abraham — Jesus — would later face a far deeper darkness at the cross, where he was treated as if he had broken the covenant, even though he was the only one who ever kept it perfectly. In Genesis 15, God essentially said, “If you fail, may the consequences fall on me.” At the cross, that’s exactly what happened. It’s the same idea John 3:16 gets at: God sent his own Son, so that the penalty for human failure would land on Jesus instead of on us.

The passage doesn’t pretend this is a small question — it takes Abraham’s doubt seriously and answers it. The argument isn’t that everything will make sense or resolve on your timeline. It’s that God has already shown, at great personal cost, how far he’s willing to go to keep his word. As Romans 8:32 puts it, “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all — how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” The suggestion here is: when circumstances make you wonder if you’ve been forgotten, don’t measure God’s care by how things currently look — measure it by what he’s already been willing to give up.

Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.

This single verse explains something central to the entire Bible: Abraham wasn’t made right with God because he’d earned it through good behavior — he was made right because he trusted God’s promise, even without any proof it had come true yet.

Mike Woodruff is the Lead Pastor at Christ Church, where he’s been teaching through Scripture for decades. He has a knack for taking big, ancient ideas and making them make sense for regular life — not talking down to you, and not assuming you already know the Bible inside and out. If you’re new to church or new to the Bible altogether, he’s a good person to learn from.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you can really trust God — especially when life hasn’t gone the way you hoped — you’re asking the same question Abraham asked. We’d love to walk through it with you. Come as you are.