Abraham
The short answer
Abraham stands at the beginning of the Bible's covenant story. In Genesis 12, God calls him to leave his homeland with a promise: through him, all the families of the earth would be blessed. In Genesis 15, God makes that promise a covenant, and the text says Abraham "believed Yahweh," who "reckoned it to him for righteousness." That single sentence became one of the most important verses in the whole Bible.
Here is why the order of events matters so much. Circumcision, the physical sign of the covenant, doesn't appear until Genesis 17 — two chapters and many years later. When God counted Abraham's faith as righteousness, Abraham was still uncircumcised. The apostle Paul seizes on this timeline in Romans 4. If Abraham was already declared to be in the right with God before he was circumcised, then circumcision cannot be the entry requirement for belonging to his family. Faith is.
This was a live controversy in the early church. Some Jewish Christians insisted that Gentile converts had to be circumcised to become full members of Abraham's family. Paul argued the opposite, in both Galatians and Romans: God's promise to Abraham was always aimed at a single worldwide family, and the mark of membership in that family is faith, not ancestry or ritual.
So when people ask who Abraham is in the Bible, the answer works on two levels. He is the historical ancestor of Israel — the father of Isaac, grandfather of Jacob. But in Paul's reading, he is something larger: the father of everyone who trusts God the way he did. Abraham moves from being a genealogical figure to being the pattern of faith itself, the person in whom God's plan for one family drawn from every nation first took root.
What scholars say
In these passages, N. T. Wright walks through Paul's argument about Abraham: since Genesis 15 comes before Genesis 17, Abraham was counted righteous while still uncircumcised, so circumcision cannot be required for membership in his family. Wright connects this to Paul's larger claim that God promised Abraham a single worldwide family whose identity-marker is faith.
“It was, of course, the big question that lay behind the controversy in Galatia: Jewish Christians were trying to persuade Gentile converts that they needed to get circumcised in order to be full members of Abraham’s family, and Paul is adamant that they do not. He uses in Romans some of the same arguments as in Galatians, but this particular one is new: he points out, to put it simply, that Genesis 15 comes some time before Genesis 17, so that when God established the covenant, calculating Abraham’s faith to his credit in terms of being in the right, Abraham was still uncircumcised, and remained so for some while after that. Therefore, Paul reasons, one cannot possibly suggest that circumcision was a necessary part of belonging to Abraham’s family.”
“The words Paul uses as his shorthand for Christian identity, for belonging to God’s family, are usually translated ‘righteous’ and ‘righteousness’. This English word has different meanings to different people. For Paul, as we shall see in the next chapter, it is related to God’s promise to Abraham, now fulfilled in the Messiah, that God would create a single worldwide family, whose identity-marker would be faith. And it speaks of the family identity, the status of covenant membership, which God gives to all his family, to all who believe the gospel. Out beyond that, it speaks gloriously of God’s saving justice embracing and healing the whole unjust world, and rescuing in the present those men, women and children who trust his love revealed in Jesus. This is the people who are ‘declared righteous’, or ‘justified’.”
What it means for you
Abraham's story answers a question most people still ask in some form: what makes me acceptable — my background, my credentials, my performance? Paul's point is that Abraham was welcomed by God before he had the badge of covenant membership, on the basis of trust alone. That means belonging to God's family has never depended on where you come from or what boxes you've checked. It depends on faith. For readers today, Abraham offers both relief and invitation: relief from the exhausting project of proving yourself, and an invitation to trust a God whose promises reach across every boundary of nation, culture, and pedigree.
In context
Abraham's story unfolds across Genesis 12–25, but two chapters carry special weight: Genesis 15, where God covenants with him and counts his faith as righteousness, and Genesis 17, where circumcision is given as the covenant sign. Centuries later, Paul returns to that sequence. In Romans 4 he builds his case that Abraham is the father of all who believe, circumcised or not, and in Galatians he defends Gentile converts against pressure to be circumcised. Both letters treat Abraham as the test case for how anyone joins God's people.