Clough Genesis Lesson 68
Isaac: repeats his father’s mistake; Gets priorities straight – Genesis 26
Over the past few Sundays we’ve been dealing with the doctrine of election in conjunction with the stories of Isaac, Jacob and Esau. Last week we finished the various propositions in the doctrine of election and therefore this morning before we continue I want to take some time to respond to some of the feedback cards. Some of these are questions which unfortunately were covered earlier, but we’ll go through them anyway because obviously the questions are still on some people’s minds.
The first question is that since God is a jealous God are believers able to be jealous without sinning? And the answer is yes, if you have the same motive. The jealousy of God is defined by that over which He is jealous and He is jealous to perform His will, and He is jealous for His will, and this can be a righteous form of jealousy. On the other hand there are a lot of illegitimate forms of jealousy and one has to distinguish. So the answer is yes, if you really know what the jealousy of God is.
The second question is I thought the Bible said the Holy Spirit confirms assurance in our spirits that we are saved, rather than (quote) “being attracted to the Word.” Where is being attracted to the Word in the Bible? In other words, when I taught assurance I deliberately said as a definition of assurance one evidence in your life is an attraction for the things of the Word. I did not say the Holy Spirit confirms in our human spirits. Romans 8:16 does say that the Holy Spirit confirms in our human spirit that we are the children of God but the point is that that statement itself is in the Word of God, therefore you have to be attracted to the Word of God. An example of this would be Jacob and Esau, the stories we’re studying now. Esau is progressively turned off of the Word of God; Jacob is attracted to the Word of God so much that he’s willing to steal the Word of God to get it away from someone else. That’s what we mean by attraction to the Word of God. Moreover, if you look at Romans 8:16 you’ll see that it’s in a proposition form; “the Holy Spirit bears witness that we are the children of God,” well how do you define the children of God. Again, by reference to the Scripture.
So there was a reason I said that that way and the reason is that I have to teach the Word of God into this generation and in this generation we’ve got a peculiar problem and that is that people always want to make things subjective; people always want to make things depend on how you feel. How do you feel about this, or how do you feel about that; you see it in interview shows all the time. Well somebody ought to say would you mind me telling you how I felt instead of how I feel; you see, it’s a very subjective generation so when we come across the Romans 8:16 statement that the Holy Spirit confirms to our spirit that we are the children of God we want to make sure that we understand that objectively. And the statement left by itself is like Ephesians 5:18, “Be filled with the Spirit.” Left by itself that statement is vulnerable to all sorts of problems, so this is why I prefer when I teach assurance to say attracted to the things of the Scripture.
A third question is, listen carefully: Did God arrange history so Adam would sin or did Adam have the choice to sin or not to sin? The asker of this question has made an assumption when he asked the question and the assumption is that if God arranges history so it’s certain Adam sinned, then that negates any kind of a choice Adam had. But that itself cuts away the Scriptural presentation of the position. So the only response I can have to this question is God arranged history so Adam would sin and Adam did have a choice as to whether he sinned or not. This is the way the Scripture presents it.
A fourth question is much like this: Regarding election and predestination, if God’s sovereignty is stronger or extended more in the area of good, what is it that causes prophecy regarding evil happenings to come true. This goes back to my statement, as we taught the doctrine of election, that God is sovereign over all, but His sovereignty over good and evil is not the same, that the sovereignty over good and evil is different, of a different sort. It’s still sovereignty but it’s of a different sort, so again the question is if God’s sovereignty is stronger or extended more in the area of good, that is, it seems to be a more direct link here, then what is it that causes prophecy regarding evil happenings to come true. Well, I answered that; Isaiah 45:7 and Proverbs 16:4 and that is obviously ultimately God’s sovereignty. But if you’re asking what is the proximate cause of evil in the world it’s the creature’s rebellion against God’s will. That’s the best we can do making the distinction of causes. You see, you have to be careful; that’s why I cautioned back four Sundays ago when we started. You don’t plow into these kinds of discussions, grab hold of one word and then start pressing that one word. Now the asker of this question said: what is it that causes prophecy. At what level? Ultimate cause or immediate cause or approximate cause? You have to define the question more thoroughly.
Also a part of this is if one is lost because one was not elect, isn’t this a form of predestination by default? The answer again, first of all, is that the word “predestinate” has to do with this kind of sovereignty. It doesn’t have to do with the other kind of sovereignty. You can do a word study yourself on it and check it out. It’s not used that way, so we have to rephrase the question. I think what you’re saying is if one is lost because one was not elect, isn’t this a form of sovereignty? Well obviously, in the ultimate sense God designed history with a Judas Iscariot in it, with a Satan in it, with a lake of fire in it, and He’s not surprised. So ultimately once again who causes history? God and His sovereignty. Now as to the details of the immediate causes of history, that’s another story and it gets complicated. So if that dissatisfies you see me personally.
The last question is a very, very important
question because this question shows basically what I’ve said all along for the
many, many months, and that is that goes under the banner of Reformed thought,
16 and 17th century kinds of rationalism. Let me repeat the question: After berating
logic you have used logic to assume that if God is sovereign over evil as he is
over good, then He is the immediate author of evil; this is a logical deduction
and is no more warranted by our fallible knowledge than is the idea that God is
unjust. Perhaps you can offer more
evidence than the one passage in Romans 9 in which you imply that God does some
things actively and others passively.
Your Genesis 1 passage was simply allegorical interpretation. In Romans
Now this has to do with, again, this doctrine of asymmetry. The problem involved, I think, can be seen in the very first part of the question and listen to the first part of the question carefully: after berating logic you have used logic. The implication of the question is you either have to use logic comprehensively or you can’t use it at all. Now this either/or-ness, when you deal with systems of thought, is found basically at one level and it’s always found at the level of presuppositions. And this confirms exactly what I thought and that is what we’re fighting here is that if I limit and make the Creator/creature distinction in the field of logic, then I’ve destroyed logic, or translated what it means is either we must have absolute logic or no logic whatsoever. We can’t have limited uses of logic, which is a bare naked assertion of rationalism and not just rationalism but 16th and 17th century forms of Cartesian rationalism.
Let’s go back to a diagram I used four Sundays ago; some of you weren’t here when I did this; maybe this will explain it because I’m sure some of you may have the same questions. All logic is based on this sentence; I don’t care what the system is or how sophisticated it is; it’s called the law of non-contradiction. And what it says is that a quantity or an idea is not its opposite in the same way at the same time. In other words, the law of contradiction can’t be just stated A is not non A. It can’t be stated that way. It’s got to be qualified; it’s got to be qualified, A is not non A at the same time in the same way. Remember when I explained this I said I deliberately made four terms in red so you would observe that in order to make this work you’ve got to plug in quantities in all four places; not just two places. And what we’re saying in Bible doctrine and in Christian theology is that often times in the Scriptures we will get a statement like God is one but God is three. Now how are we going to say this: are we going to yield to our atheist colleagues who say see, you Christians have an internal contradiction; A is not non A; God is one but He’s three, there is a contradiction. Now how do we respond to that atheistic assertion against the doctrine of the Trinity? It is simply to revert to this full use of the law of non contradiction and that is to say that God is one in some way and He’s three in another way. And thus we elude the force of saying this is a contradiction. And this is done time and time and time again. So the full use of the law of logic requires all four quantities to be known.
Now as I said when I taught the first point in the doctrine of election, I wasn’t berating logic, I was simply drawing the Creator/creature distinction in the field of logic which some don’t like and this distinction says that only God can fill all four of those terms in every instance. God is 100% logical; God is 100% rational; we creatures can’t be because He never gives us enough data, or most of the time He does not give us enough data so we can fill this in, so I hold that God is one and I hold that God is three, on the authority of the Scripture, not on the authority of my logic. I am not present logic as my first presupposition. I’m presenting the Scripture as my first presupposition and this cuts down Cartesian rationalism, a rationalism that flourished in western thought all the way up to the time of Hegel, until the existentialists tried to cut it down. And here’s the progress; there was classical rationalism that said that logic precedes all knowledge. And finally, the system couldn’t exercise, I mean, the whole history of philosophy shows the fallacy of this.
So by the 19th century the non-Christians were desperate, what could we do with this, we can’t make the system work; we see increasingly so, whether it’s in theoretical math, whether it’s in the field of logic itself which was developing then, or whether it’s in just overall broad philosophy that logic has limits to it. And so there arose a group of people in the 19th century called existentialists and they just simply gave up; they just simply said well, we just act, we realize the limitations of logic so we just act. Well, they threw the baby out with the bath water. What they said was, exactly as this question, if you limit logic you’ve destroyed logic. If you’ve said there’s any kind of limitation on the logic machine, from that point forward you have no right to make logical deductions, and that’s the form of the existentialists. If you can’t have it all then smash it all; either/or. But that’s not the portion of Scripture. The Bible says that the Word of God precedes human logic, that is, God’s logic precedes human logic. I’m a creature, I’m sorry, I’m creature, all I have access to is creature logic. All I have access to is partial revelation and I must work within those boundaries. Now to have the audacity to stand up here and tell you that the entire system of doctrine can be logically deduced and forms an axiomatic system would be for me to say that I possess all of God’s knowledge.
A second response to this is that evidence of asymmetry, once again, forgetting this and moving on, what about this problem of asymmetry? Is that shown in the Scripture or not? The accusation is that my interpretation of Genesis was allegorical. Remember what I did? I said that there was light and there was darkness in the Genesis text. And I said that this physical light and this physical darkness was a picture of spiritual light and spiritual darkness. In other words, what I did was I took a physical thing, light and darkness, and I said that that was analogous to the spiritual light and spiritual darkness. For that this is said to be allegorical interpretation. Well, that’s technically untrue. There is such a thing as allegorical interpretation and there is such a thing as a topological or metaphorical interpretation. Those who are in the Song of Songs series realize I spent hours clarifying the difference. Here it is once again: you can have a physical object, like water, light, darkness, or what have you and you can use that physical logic to teach about a spiritual truth but you can do it allegorically or metaphorically. Now here’s the difference: under allegorical interpretation this linkage is arbitrary; in other words, you’re free to make light stand for whatever you want to make light stand for. If you’re dealing with water and you want water to illustrate anything you can make water illustrate anything you want to. That is arbitrary link between the physical and the spiritual. That is allegorical interpretation. But that’s not what I did.
If you had listened carefully what I did was I linked physical light with spiritual light, a link which the Bible itself makes. And that is not allegorical interpretation; that is topological or metaphorical interpretation, the difference being that whatever I take, water, light or whatever my physical object I am entitled to teach spiritual truth from that as long as I make the linkages that the Bible itself makes, which I did. Witness, for example, the way John uses the terminology. So therefore Genesis 1 does show asymmetry and it shows it not by an arbitrary allegorical interpretation but by a scripturally controlled metaphorical interpretation.
Other evidences of this, again we’re
studying God’s sovereignty, and the fact that the sovereignty over good is a
different kind of sovereignty than the sovereignty over evil. We can see this in Genesis 6; the earth was
filled with violence and then God reaches down and He saves Noah. Now when you read the Genesis 6, 7 and 8
narratives do you really see God says I filled the world with all the violence
and then I reached down and saved Noah?
Do you read the story coming across as double predestination? No you don’t.
Not at all. You read the story as
the earth being filled with violence and then you read God actively reaching
and saving. You go to Genesis 11 and the
earth is with one voice, one language, and men formed the first United Nations
tower. And then God reaches down, he
crushes the tower and He calls Abraham out.
Do you read the story as though God makes the U.N. and then He brings
Abraham? No, you don’t read it in the
same way; it’s different. And anyone’s
sense of a narrative ought to be able to see this. Genesis 19,
We could go to Genesis 20 when Abraham goes
down to Gerar, like Isaac goes down to Gerar in the chapter before us this
morning. Do you read that God makes
Abraham go down to Gerar as you do read God bringing him back? There’s a difference. It’s the same sovereignty yet it’s different
in some way. And that’s what theologians
mean when they say asymmetry. And when I
taught this I carefully quoted from one Reformed representative in
So I’ve given you scriptural evidences; I’ve shown you where the Creator/creature distinction lies and I’ve cited references from orthodox theologians and I think I’ve answered the question.
Let’s go to Genesis 26. In Genesis 26 we continue the story of the family of Abraham and Isaac. And you’ll notice this story has a theme, it’s the father/son theme once again, except the fathers and the sons here today we will all see the bad side of our relationship. Before we said the father/son theme in Genesis shows the love that a father has for his son is so highly thought of by God that God designs it as a physical analog to the relationship between the First and Second Persons of the Trinity. In Genesis 26, however, we see this: all during this 26th chapter, with all the details associated with it, here basically is what’s happening. I use this terminology up here in the gizmo, -R lbp and that means minus R or unrighteous learned behavior patterns, not instinctive, animals have instinctive behavior patterns. Man has very few instincts; in fact, it’s true physiologically that men have to learn how to drink water. Animals instinctively know the water needs of their body; people do not. As infants one of the things you learned along with learning language and mastering other things was mastering how to drink water. Even the simple act of drinking water is not known instinctively to man; it is something that must be learned. So therefore we use “learned behavior patterns,” and there are these unrighteous learned behavior patterns.
Now I’m going to add a new little feature to this symbol that I use to talk about and I’m going to put a little number after lbp. Today I’m going to put the number three there. Number three means that I’m talking about the minus R learned behavior patterns in the third divine institution or the family. That is, we’re talking now about God’s institution of the family and how sin patterns, which are learned by the parents, are transmitted to the children, and the truth we’re going to observe in Genesis 26, applicable to every home represented here in this congregation this morning, is that children are expert students at picking up the parents sinful behavior patterns and they are morons at picking up the righteous behavior patterns. Here we have an empirical evidence of the fall of man, of depravity, operating inside every single home. And you don’t have to be a parent too long before the humbling situation occurs where you clamp down on little Johnnie and realize that the sin that you’re clamping down on little Johnnie strikes a familiar tone; that somewhere in your experience you saw that same thing happen; in fact, in your own life you saw it happen, and so we’re seeing Abraham, who had certain –R learned behavior patterns and they were quickly picked up by his son Isaac. He did not have to sit down and tell Isaac, Isaac, here’s how to sin, this is how we do it in our family. No, Isaac sat there and he watched his father respond sinfully to situations in life and little Isaac just took it in, took it in, took it in, took it in and started patterning himself after it.
So this is what the author in Genesis 26 wants us to study. Watch how easy it is for a family to crater out; it doesn’t take any effort on the part of a parent to teach their children how to sin with a family distinctive. But it does take great, great effort at trying to get the child not to sin the way your family likes to sin. Now I don’t know what kind of family you come from; you can pretty well guess the family I come from but in your family, you’re quiet and you don’t get a chance to let it all hang out in the pulpit so you people can… you know, you’ve got your privacy. But the point remains that every one of you have family patterns of sin and therefore you have a study project on hand. And that is you have to say to yourself, now look, in our family before we start looking down our nose at this family and that family, we’d better start looking… some families are filled with certain mental attitude sins. You’ll see patterns of it. Certain clans just wallow in this kind of thing and where you really see it is where you have a stagnant rural culture and where members of the family don’t go to the city or they don’t go and they don’t mix with other groups and this family just stays very close together. And if they’re not very vigilant spiritually it gets worse and worse and worse, the mental attitude sins get on top of mental attitude sins, on top of other mental attitude sins. So that’s what we’re observing here, that’s the big picture of Genesis 26. Now let’s watch the details.
Genesis 26:1, “There was a famine in the land, beside the first famine that was in the days of Abraham. And Isaac went unto Abimelech, king of the Philistines, unto Gerar.” Now obviously in the very first verse the author wants to tell us there’s a connection between what’s going on here and what went on in the time of Abraham and you remember what went on in Abraham’s time. You remember the problem? Twice it happened to Abraham; Abraham had pressure put on, here’s the land and he was down in this area, farming up along that ridge line that runs north/south in Palestine, and when the famine came, which was the pressure on the male because remember folks, from the way the curse is applied to the human race, ERA may not make sexual distinctions but God does, and He makes sexual distinctions in how you get clobbered.
Genesis 3 says that a woman will have her hardest time; a woman will experience the most pressure in her life in connection with rearing children and bearing children. She will also have problems in an ambiguous attitude toward her husband; that’s also given in Genesis 3. In other words, true, it may not operate in every single instance 100% of the time but as a pattern that is true of the human race; every woman will get clobbered that way more than any other way. But then when God turns around to curse the male, to curse the man in the situation, what does He say? “In the sweat of your brow you will eat of the ground.” Now what does that communicate? It says that the pressures on the man of the house will generally come in connection with that area where he is being productive, usually on his job. And so therefore we say generally speaking that the greatest trials a man will face in his life come, really not through his home, they come through his job and the pressures of that job whereas the pressures on the woman come from right within the home. This is the way the Genesis 3 curse reads.
Now therefore it’s no surprise that here you have an enterprising male, he’s a believer and a businessman, where do you suppose God’s going to clobber him? Cutting him in the area where he needs it the most, water for his ranching business—famine, no food to feed the flock. Now that happened twice to Abraham and each time it happened to Abraham instead of saying to himself this land God promises me and if God promises me that land, then there’s got to be provisions sufficient for the trial within the promise of God. There’s got to be, I can’t figure it out, I haven’t run it through my logic machine but I know, based on the authority of God’s promise, that somewhere around here there’s got to be water, there’s got to be sufficient food for my ranching business. But no, Abraham cops out; he wants to add a human solution to God’s provision. So over here we have a human gimmick of Abraham’s which is take a business transfer down to Pharaoh; he winds up having his wife stuck in a foreign king’s harem, pulls the same stunt in Genesis 20 with Abimelech at Gerar.
Now when we read in Genesis 26:1 what do we find? Famine in the land; what is Isaac in, same business as his father, in fact he’s inherited his father’s business. So where does he get hit, the son; he gets hit in the same place his old man got hit and that is in the area of wiping out the provision for profit in their business. I phrase it that way deliberately, men, so you’ll see that in your business, whatever it is, a profession, a craft, or whatever you want to call it, it’s the same story. Don’t think of a famine as something disparate. Think of your own business and think of something equivalent to your business as a famine and then you’ll be in gear and in frequency with what’s going on in Genesis 26.
He starts to pull the same stunt his father did, learning the –R learned behavior pattern of his dad and he starts to leave. He starts to figure I can fix a human gimmick in addition to what God has provided because God’s provisions really aren’t quite enough. Well in en 26:2, “And the LORD appeared unto him, and said,” and in the Hebrew the connotation is “Stop going down into Egypt,” if you want to visualize it, it’s more like this: along the Mediterranean coast there was a major north/south highway called the Via Maris, and Abraham is over here and Isaac is, and they start to come out here and Gerar is the turn-on on the Via Maris freeway, and so they’re about ready to turn on and they get on the ramp and God appears and says huh-un, huh-un, off ramp buddy, stay off this highway to Egypt, stop right here. And so the rest of the chapter is he’s puttering around the ramp on the freeway trying to figure out where he’s going.
Let’s look at the details of this and
before we do this let’s also look at what that land looked like so this way
maybe some of you can get more sympathy for Isaac. Looking at our map of the area Beersheba is
down at the bottom and as you can see there’s this north/sough high terrain,
further away from the Mediterranean, therefore drier and then along the coast,
being closer to the coast it’s more moist and looking at it more closely the
modern city of Gaza, the Gaza strip you read about all the time in the
newspaper, there it is, the Philistine area still causing problems. Then over in here you have an area, it’s a
tel which archeologists think is the ancient site of Gerar and then over here
you have
So Isaac is moving out here and he’s about
ready to get on the freeway and right over here, bang, he gets
intercepted. Now here’s the land around
Gerar and it doesn’t take a farmer to realize that this is quite fertile land,
and obviously this is a great temptation.
Obviously business would be better in this physical climate than in this
physical climate. This is the area around
So Isaac gets intercepted just prior to
pulling off the deal his father tried to go and that is go to
He stays in Gerar, [6, “And Isaac dwelt in Gerar”]; and what happens? The second –R learned behavior pattern learned from dear old dad, and that was when in trouble hide behind your wife, especially if she’s a beautiful woman, which she was. Remember, Rebekah’s an instance where a believer, single man, waited for a girl who had character, spiritual character as well as looks, and God did not fill her full of ugly pills before He brought her to him; she was a beautiful woman. And I’m convinced that what made her the beautiful woman she was was she had a beautiful character. It wasn’t just some sort of a book cover with nothing inside. This girl had lots inside and it made her very attractive; not only to her husband and not only to the believers but the unbelieving men deeply appreciated her too. So you see girls what power you have if you just press the right buttons and use all the stuff God gave you. Well, here’s how impressive she was and it’s a testament to her beauty. Everywhere she went, all the men, hey, look at that, Rebekah walked in. [7, And the men of the place asked him of his wife; and he said, She is my sister; for he feared to say, She is my wife; lest, said he, the men of the place should kill me for Rebekah; because she was fair to look upon.”] So Rebekah was this kind of woman that deeply attracted male attention and Isaac knew it and so he said well, I’m going to hide behind her, just like his father did. See, he learned this, it’s easy to see where he learned it from.
Genesis 26:8, “And it came to pass,” now
this is a little amusing incident because it shows you God’s gradual withdrawal
in this family; it’s something that happens so subtlety in Genesis that you
won’t see it if I don’t point this out to you and then when I point it out to
you I’ll think you’ll watch it. In
Abraham’s generation you have God appearing, God appearing, God appearing, God
appearing, you have altar, altar, altar, altar.
In Isaac’s generation you have one altar and maybe God appears
twice. In Jacob it’s less, and finally
you go down to the fourth generation of Joseph, and what’s Joseph known for in
Sunday School stories all the time?
Dreams but he’s known for dreams because God doesn’t talk to him
directly; the revelation cuts down.
God’s relationship is slowly withdrawing from this family as the family
learned behavior patterns increase, their resistance to Scripture increases,
and had God not sent them down to Egypt today we wouldn’t be here. That awful experience in
As we’ve said before, perhaps you would have a very interesting experience if in your own family history you could go back on your genealogical table in your home, your father, your mother, your grandfather, and work it back and watch. Watch for lines that die out. For example, there’s old aunt so and so and she never married and there’s uncle so and so and he never married, or they married and their child died or something and that was the end of that section of your family. That’s not an accident. It may not be due to this but I’d be very suspicious that it would be due to this, that God is simply terminating your family because of some pattern in it. Do you know why that is? Because He wants to keep the people in your family savable; and He will kill off parts of your family to do this.
Well here, in this fourth generation God’s revelation in this family has dropped. And in Isaac’s case, though he gets in the same jam as his father, his wife is being jeopardized. In Abraham’s case it was a spectacular way God moved in. Remember what happened? He caused physical illness on the part of the people. Well now God has pulled back a little bit and by the time you come to verse 8 He pulls off a joke. Instead of coming in with a miracle and saying well, we’re going to just clobber this outfit, God says okay, Isaac, you don’t trust me, I’m going to make you embarrassed but good. So apparently, we don’t know all the situation, obviously in verse 8 Abimelech is looking out the window down and so we presume he wasn’t making love to his wife out in the backyard somewhere unless it would have been in the tent, but the tent must have been so constructed that Abimelech could look out his window and look in, and he looked in and he says wow, that isn’t his sister. [8, “And it came to pass, when he had been there a long time, that Abimelech, king of the Philistines, looked out through a window, and saw, and, behold, Isaac was caressing Rebekah, his wife.”]
So he drew the obvious conclusion and from there he confront him in verse 9; he says, “[Abimelech called Isaac, and said,] Certainly she’s your wife; and how did you dare say, She is my sister?” And then this pitiful whiney answer, “[And Isaac said unto him,] Because I thought, Lest I die for her. [10] And Abimelech said, What is this thou have done unto us? One of the people might lightly have lain” or were just about to “with your wife, and you should have brought guiltiness upon us.” Now this Abimelech in verse 9 and 10 is not the same Abimelech in chapter 20. Abimelech is a title, it means our father is king; it’s a title like Pharaoh so don’t wonder how this guy could be the same one. But though he isn’t the same Abimelech, here’s the point of the passage. Here’s Abimelech I and Abimelech II; Abimelech I got clobbered, didn’t he, in Genesis 20. Remember he came out with this big song and dance at the end, oh God, I’m so pious and so on; God said listen friend, you’re not pious, I just made you impotent for the last three months so you couldn’t mess around. And that was the source of his good, it was human good. Good brought about by God’s restraining common grace, and he had no claim to this. Had God not done that he would have got himself in trouble. And yet because of God’s restraining grace he could not claim to have that merit. Well, Abimelech I learned something and guess what he taught Abimelech II; son, if those Jews come down here again, you watch it when they try to pass off these women. And so this is why you get this response in verse 10. Abimelech II realizes that boy, I remember how dad got clobbered in this situation and there’s one thing I’ve learned and that is don’t mess with these people, these Yahweh people, just leave them alone, and he didn’t.
Now here’s the irony of the passage. Who’s learning something? The unbeliever or the believer? You guessed it, the unbeliever; stupid believers here, here’s Abraham and Isaac, they haven’t learned anything. He’s just repeating everything his father did that was wrong, but Abimelech has learned something. And so the fact he’s learned it is shown by the fact in verse 11, he issues a decree and says hey, I want this protected, I don’t want to mess up my reign like dad got clobbered. [11, “Abimelech charged all his people, saying, he that touches this man or his wife shall surely be put to death.”] So again, grace of God. You see, the believers, we are pictured as sheep and there’s a metaphorical interpretation, not allegorical, because when God sat down in eternity past to design animals He called in all the angels and figured out, hey guys, can you design me a stupid animal, really a brilliantly stupid one, and they come and committee design with a sheep, and the sheep was deliberately designed so that later God could say I’ve got a lot of other stupid creatures that I’m going to work with in history and they are so stupid they need an illustration, so I want you to design me an animal that would be the perfect audio-visual aid and the sheep is that audio-visual aid. So this is a picture of the sheep-like character of believers… baa!
So now, verse 12, the second phase of
Isaac’s toolie trip. The first phase is
embarrassment, the second phase is harassment. And God will often use harassment to ease us
back into the center of His will. You
see, if you can think of this geographically, you’ve got him over here on that
ramp to the freeway to
Let’s watch the process because as we watch this process in Genesis 26:12-23, this policy of harassment, you can learn a lot about how God will work in your life. The first thing is, “Then Isaac sowed in that land, and received in the same year an hundredfold: and the LORD blessed him.” I don’t know exactly what that hundredfold is, I asked a farmer in our congregation and the best we could come up with was that the hundredfold must refer to the weight of the crop versus the seed, and this is the way it’s done today so it means if he planted one pound of seed he got a hundred pounds of whatever it was he was raising. And apparently in the Scriptures this is taken as an extremely bountiful crop, because in Matthew 19:29 and other passages it’s used metaphorically of eternal life and it says if you will lose your life for My sake, if you will invest your time, your talents then you will reap one hundredfold unto eternal life. So a hundredfold must have been an expression in the ancient agricultural economy for an extremely plentiful crop. So what it’s saying is that his business is blessed down here. But why? Why is his business blessed? Because he’s so good? No, because God has a plan for that man, in spite of the fact he’s an idiot, God still wants his plan to go on and so he’s blessed in spite of it.
Genesis 26:13, he expands his business and becomes very powerful, [“And the man became great, and went forward, and grew until he became very great.”] then what happens in verse 14 is that the Philistines envy. A footnote at this point, something very important, particularly for the men here today. There is pressure, always, upon you, by your peers, to keep your production down to their miserable level. This will always be brought against you, there will always be men that envy you because you happen to be a productive person, a hard working person; there will always be these people. Recently there was a sociological team that went down to Peru or Chile, one of the countries in South America, and they were trying to answer this question: why is it that when we put millions of dollars in aid, aid to people for international development and other agencies the United States has, why is it we pour money and money and money and money and money into these under-developed countries and nothing happens? We send them the special varieties of seed to plant; we send them cropping techniques; we send them fertilizing techniques; we tell them all about irrigation and still these idiots can’t produce enough food to feed themselves; now what is the matter. We know the technology can do it, why can’t they do it. And this sociological team came back with this answer: do you know why they can’t do it? Because in the villages there is organized envy, that is, there’s an internal envy that operates, unstated but socially, in the community such that if one peasant goes out here and he irrigates his field and gets a better crop he is ostracized, socially, in that community because he has out produced his peers and they don’t want it. So there’s built-in envy; that’s the problem. It’s not technology, it’s envy.
Now I mention the Chile/Peru situation
because it’s easy for us Americans to ha-ha about it but let’s come closer to
home. Isn’t that basically what happens
in a lot of organized labor movements today; isn’t that the key behind a lot of
union activities, that basically organize the production at the lowest level
possible and if you are on the line or you’re doing something and you out
produce or you’re zealous to do something, work a little bit more, oh, we can’t
have that, that’s not what the contract calls for. You see, it’s not just the peasants in
Okay, you’re looking at it right here in verse
14; here’s a man, he’s productive, he does his job as unto the Lord, the Lord
blesses and what happens? All he incurs
is the envy of the people around him.
Not only are they envious but they’re stupid; look at verse 15, “For all
the wells which his father’s servants had dug in the days of Abraham his
father, the Philistines had stopped them, and filled them with earth.” Now that’s real brilliant guys; you’re
fussing because you’re not producing.
What did you do to all the wells, idiots? You stopped them up. Why?
Because you were jealous of Abraham.
Now that was a cute trick, a brilliant way to increase production. Get mad at your competitor, try to fake him
out and fake yourself out while you’re doing it; make it impossible so you
can’t do anything, jam all the wells so you can’t irrigate your fields and
graze your crops; boy, that is a brilliant strategy. That’s what they did and that’s what they’re
still doing. In
Finally, in verse 16 it comes to a parting of the way, “And Abimelech” representing that society, cannot stand a free enterprise producing man and he sends him away, get out of here, [“Go from us, for thou are much mightier than we.”] Get out of that land, remember I showed you the slide, all the wheat growing in the fields; get out of here, go back into the desert where you came from, the hard place.
And now to understand the next few verses
visualize it this way. Here’s Gerar, in
that slide with all the wheat growing, the nice fertile land, and there’s a
wadi called Wadi Gerar and it’s actually just a dry river bed, the kind of you
see in the cap rocks that’s filled usually only in the springtime or when you
have a heavy thunderstorm and they act as conduits for the water to drain off
the edge of the cap rocks here out to the east.
Normally speaking these stream beds are dry. That’s like the stream beds here; it’s a dry
stream bed, but Abraham is going to be forced back up the stream bed and at the
area up here is
Genesis 26:17, so “Isaac departed from
there,” and he pitched his tent in the wadi.
[18] And Isaac dug again the wells of water, which they had dug in the
days of Abraham.” Verse 19, “Isaac’s
servants dug in the valley,” that’s the best place to dig, it’s the lowest
lying area, “and they found a well of living water” or “springing water,” very
productive water. So now what happens;
it’s their well, the old man dug it, these queers stopped it up, they unstop
it, move their business away and they’re still getting chewed out because in
verse 20, “And the herdsmen of Gerar stove with Isaac’s herdsmen, saying, The
water is ours,” what do you mean the water is yours? Who dug the well in the first place?
Abraham. Who was the idiot that stopped
it up? You guys. Now I am unstop it and the water is
yours? Now what kind of logic is that,
but that was the logic and so they kept on putting the pressure on and on and
on. Verse 21, “And they dug another
well, and the strove for that also,” same concept, couldn’t stand somebody
being productive. It’s like certain
school systems where if the student excels, penalize him, concentrate all the
activities on the morons. [23] “And he
went up from there,” finally, “to
Now you find God speaking to him; now you find the communication and fellowship enriched. [24, “And the LORD appeared unto him the same night, and said, I am the God of Abraham, thy father: fear not, for I am with thee, and will bless thee, and multiply thy seed for my servant Abraham’s sake.] “And the Lord said to him, I am the God of Abraham, thy father, don’t fear.” You see, he was quite a discouraged guy. He tried to make it down here, every time he’d get water, every time he’d get pushed out of the way. And now he’s finally at that tel that you saw that Avi Yonah was excavating there in the picture, and look at the land around; that’s a real fine place, boy, you can hear him say to himself as he looks at his books, boy, this business in the last couple of months has really prospered, hasn’t it. Boom, every time I try to set up I get bounced out of the area; every time set up I get bounced out of the area. But in some mysterious way he is in the center of God’s will. Now God says stop fearing.
So in verse 25 the first act he does is not
dig a well. Notice the order of events
in verse 25; the first thing he does is he builds an altar. Now he’s got his priorities straight. “Seek ye first the
Now the Bible stops in verse 25 mentioning the well until another point is reached. So I want to take you through, thread you through the sequence of events that the author loves to do this, whoever put Genesis together under Moses’ editorship. [26] “Then Abimelech” you see, verse 24, he’s in the center of God’s wall, geographically he’s right where God wants him to be, he gets his priorities straightened out in verse 25, finally gets his altar first, then he starts doing legitimate business, getting his wells so he can irrigate and so on, then Abimelech came to him, of all people, the guy that threw him out in verse 16. And Isaac asked why, and he says in verse 28, let there be a business contract or arrangement between you and us. Why? Well, he says, because in verse 28, “we saw certainly that Jehovah was with you.”
Now, what an encouragement, what an encouragement! It’s awful for a man to have to go through this experience in his life. It is awful for a guy who particularly is a productive man to be bounced off one thing after another thing after another thing after another thing and finally after this begins to happen every man worth his salt thinks to himself hey, is my life really worth anything, and you get discouraged, and you wonder, you know, I can’t even make money, my business is going down the drain, what kind of a testimony am I, and it begins to eat away at your soul. But look, that’s the confirmation. Once he got his spiritual priorities straightened out in 24-25, now he gets the encouragement from his former competitor in verse 28. He says hey, we treated you bad but we just want you to know that all the time we were stepping all over you, all the time we were trying to fake out your business, deep down in our heart we knew God was with you. So men, if you get in that situation just think of Isaac; it may not be evident to you and your competitor or whoever is giving you a problem may not admit it to you, but you think of this incident when that happens to you.
And so they’re actually afraid of him in
verse 28-29; Isaac is gracious, he gives them a feast in verse 30, and sends
them away in peace in verse 31. And what
happens in verse 32, what’s the last of the sequence? They found water. “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and all
these things shall be added unto you.”
God doesn’t forget his legitimate business need; he needed water to set
up businesses in
Now the chapter closes with two peculiar verses and some have said that these two verses ought to belong to chapter 27, and that’s a legitimate consideration, but I prefer to keep these two verses, for now, just in the same general overview of the chapter and I think they are a comment on chapter 26. It says: [34] “And Esau was forty years old when he took as his wife” two heathen, [35] Who were a grief of mind unto Isaac and to Rebekah.” What did I say the main idea of chapter 26 was? I said the main idea was that the son learns the –R learned behavior patterns from his old man far easier than he can watch his father cope and win victoriously in his life. Fathers will have a harder time teaching their sons godliness and to teach successfully your son ungodliness all you have to do is do nothing, because they’ll pick it up automatically. Well, here’s a situation where we know he had at least two patterns; we saw how he responded to famine by leaving the field of production. We saw how he hid behind his beautiful wife any time he was threatened. But now, not only did he learn his old man’s sin pattern but he improved on his old man’s sin pattern. To his fathers two he adds a new one and the new one is a neglect for grooming his son for the inheritance. Who is the firstborn of the twins?
You notice these two verses say nothing about Jacob. Now don’t get so hyper deterministic here that you’re always thinking God loved Jacob and He hated Esau and so there you go Esau, boo to you. That’s not the way to read the text. Verses 34-35 depict the temporal development of Esau into one who was rejected of God in the stream of history. And what is the early sign? He, as the first born, ought to by his father have been groomed for his business. If some of you men think this is too spiritual let me just put it over in business terminology for a moment; there wasn’t so much a spiritual concern to teach these sons Bible verses. The concern of the father was that after they put all their life efforts into the business they didn’t want some clod son to take it over, so the old man had a vested in training up his son to carry on the family wealth. It wasn’t so simple as today, just go out and get a small business loan or something; it didn’t work that way in the ancient world. There wasn’t a banking system as such; the only banking system you had was your father, your family. So you had to have something to pass to your son or your son could not go into business or a profession. It had to be that way. That’s why the firstborn son received a double portion. The firstborn son was to be the manager of the family estate upon the death of his father and because he had the added responsibility of managing the family property he was given a double portion.
Well now here’s Esau, in Genesis 26:34, the eldest, the firstborn, who normally would be heir to the family fortune. Has he been trained by his father? Remember what Abraham did for Isaac; remember the chapter where he sent a long-range mission to get a bride for his son, and what did he tell that guy? Don’t get a girl from this area for my son; go up there and get her from where our family came from, don’t get one from down here, I don’t want one because they don’t have character down here and they can’t take it and I don’t want that company for my son. So he got a good character in Rebekah; he took time and effort, and in verses 34-35 you see no time or effort; you see polygamy starting, not one, two women, and you see the irritation it causes in verse 35, they were “a grief of mind” to Isaac and Rebekah, the family begins to shred. Here begins the awful pattern of family deterioration.
What does this show? It shows the importance of being shepherded
properly. You see, as fathers we’re depraved too, we need someone else to do
the shepherding, to show us how to run our homes and this is why we’re going to
sing hymn … focusing on the shepherding nature of Jesus Christ.