“When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, ‘I am Almighty God; walk before Me and be blameless.’”
—Genesis 17:1 (NKJV)
Genesis 17 opens with a divine interruption.
When the narrative last lingers on Abram in Genesis 16, he is eighty-six years old and holding Ishmael—an apparent answer to God’s promise. When Genesis 17 begins, Abram is ninety-nine. Thirteen years have passed. More striking than Abram’s age, however, is the spiritual silence that marks those years. Scripture records no word from God to Abram during that entire span. God speaks to Hagar, but Abram hears nothing.
Then, without explanation or invitation, God appears.
The text gives no indication that Abram was seeking God, praying, or calling on His name as he had in earlier chapters. God arrives unannounced, not to reassure Abram, but to reassert His own identity: “I am Almighty God.” Only after that self-disclosure does God speak of Abram’s responsibility: “Walk before Me and be blameless.”
The order matters. God does not begin with Abram’s needs, fears, or interpretations of the promise. He begins with who He is.
This moment stands in sharp contrast to Genesis 15, where God identifies Himself as Abram’s shield and exceedingly great reward, addressing fears Abram has not even articulated. There, God’s mercy leads with promise. Here, God’s holiness leads with command.
Between those two encounters lies silence—and that silence appears to have shaped Abram.
Over time, Abram seems to have accepted something produced by human effort as the fulfillment of divine promise. Ishmael did not come from rebellion so much as accommodation: a slow recalibration in which the promise remained important, but the Promisor receded into the background. What Abram held in his hands felt sufficient. And perhaps that is why the silence became tolerable.
Genesis 17 suggests that God is not merely correcting Abram’s method. He is confronting Abram’s orientation. Abram appears to have found satisfaction in what he believed the promise to be, rather than in God Himself. God’s opening declaration—“I am Almighty God”—functions less as comfort and more as confrontation. It presses Abram toward repentance, reorientation, and renewed obedience before the living God.
Silence as a Warning, Not a Neutral Space
The narrative forces an unsettling realization: Abram seems unaware—or unconcerned—that he has not heard from God in thirteen years. Divine silence has become normal because something else has taken God’s place as functional reward.
This is where Genesis 17 quietly but powerfully speaks to the nature of legacy.
Legacy stewardship is often framed around outcomes—what is produced, preserved, or passed on. But Genesis 17 reframes the question entirely. The issue is not whether Abram has something to show for the promise. He does. The issue is whether that “something” has displaced God Himself as Abram’s true reward.
In this light, stewardship is revealed not primarily as management of gifts, but as fidelity to relationship. God does not ask Abram first what he has built or secured. He asks him to walk before Him—to live consciously, obediently, and blamelessly in the presence of Almighty God.
Legacy Planning Through the Lens of God as the Reward
When Genesis 17 is allowed to define legacy stewardship, several sobering contours emerge.
First, a legacy built on human effort—even when connected to divine promise—can quietly train the heart to live without ongoing dependence on God. Abram’s life was not empty during the silence. It was full. That fullness made the silence survivable.
Second, time itself can distort interpretation. Thirteen years did not erase God’s promise, but they did appear to reshape Abram’s understanding of how that promise should feel when fulfilled. Legacy planning, when untethered from continual attentiveness to God, risks preserving what seems like fulfillment rather than what God has actually promised.
Third, Genesis 17 insists that legacy stewardship begins with God’s self-disclosure, not human aspiration. “I am Almighty God” precedes “walk before Me.” Any legacy that begins with the question “What will I leave?” before asking “Who is God to me now?” has already inverted the order.
Awakening Before the Silence Becomes Comfortable
While Genesis 17 is not explicitly linked to Luke 20, the theological resonance is unmistakable. In Luke 20, Jesus confronts those who have anchored their hopes in what belongs to “this age” rather than the age to come. He exposes how easily religious familiarity can coexist with spiritual misalignment.
Genesis 17 exposes the same danger earlier in redemptive history. Abram appears to have settled into a life shaped by something he produced, to the point that the absence of God’s voice no longer alarms him.
That is the quiet danger legacy stewardship must guard against.
A faithfully stewarded legacy is not measured by how convincingly it resembles fulfillment, but by whether it continually orients the heart toward God as the ultimate reward. Anything else—no matter how well-intentioned—risks becoming a substitute that dulls spiritual sensitivity.
Genesis 17 leaves us with a searching question, one that belongs squarely at the center of legacy planning:
Have we ever become so satisfied with what we believe fulfills God’s promise that we fail to notice how long it has been since we last heard from Him?
If so, the call remains the same as it was for Abram—clear, weighty, and graciously disruptive:
“I am Almighty God; walk before Me and be blameless.”
By Christopher L. Walker at myfathersestate.com
