Clough Genesis Lesson 69
The role of a family – Genesis 27:1-40
We’ve been studying in the Sunday morning services this section of Genesis dealing with God’s plan through Abraham. We’ve watched how these various incidents form pictures and that to understand appropriately a particular doctrine of Scripture you ought to know the historical picture that accompanies that doctrine. We’ve studied the doctrine of election and therefore we’ve looked at the story of Jacob and Esau, to watch how election played out in history. And when we come to a chapter like Genesis 27 it’s important to remember that you can’t equate God’s eternal plan with the historical playing out of that plan, in the sense the two are different; there is some sort of difference between them. And a failure that many people who operate in a Reformed framework, with good doctrine, they lose the force of a lot of Scripture because they reduce their viewpoint.
For example, here on a timeline would be the story of Jacob and Esau’s family. We have Jacob and Esau begin, twins, same womb, same home. We know from the theology of Genesis that one is elect and the other reprobate. And the common tendency, knowing this, is to go all the way down, turn the clock ahead, get down here at the end, after Esau is, so to speak, a finished product, after Jacob is a finished product and then view them all the time in this history here, when they’re young boys, as though they’re the final mature products of God’s plan. That’s wrong. That’s not how the text presents them. The text presents them in time. Now not in God’s plan for they always were the way they were in God’s plan, but in time they become elect and they become reprobate by their actions. Since you and I dwell in time and not in eternity, this is a parallel.
And here in Genesis 27 we’re going to study the role of a family. The determinist is obviously wrong when he knocks human responsibility and says that everything is your environment. We know biblically that’s wrong but we also have to, if we’re really biblical people, we have to acknowledge the fact that God did design the family to do something, and Genesis 27 shows the powerful influence of a family on children. And it shows in particular the powerful influence it has when it doesn’t function right to produce very, very bad and sad results. In fact, there are certain flaws in this home situation between Isaac and Rebekah that will produce before they die children who are as distant from each other as heaven is from hell. And it’s the story of an awesome work of the sovereign God through everyday situations in one particular home.
Now the story begins in Genesis 27:1 with Isaac, the old man. Certain things have already taken place. Let’s go back to Genesis 25 just to refresh
our minds what has already transpired before we get to this point. Remember the problem of the barrenness of
Rebekah. In Genesis 25:22 it says, “the
children struggled within her; and she said, If it be so, why am I thus? This is the story of this woman as she’s
carrying in pregnancy these two boys and she detects, as a woman in that day
would have detected, because in that day the time of pregnancy was not just a
time of preparation, it was also a time when they prayed about the destiny of
the children that would be born from that pregnancy. The woman here is
detecting uncommon fetal motion. Now
women obviously detect fetal motion but this in this case is an unusual thing;
the children kept on struggling within her and there was something unusual
about that fetal movement that tipped her off that as a believing mother God
was doing something special. And it
bothered her and she kept asking this question, “if it be so,” that is, if God
has blessed me, what is this struggle going on.
And at the end of verse 22 she goes to inquire of Yahweh, or Jehovah, and the verb to inquire does not mean individual prayer. If you do a word study on this verb you’ll find that it is always used of going to a cultist, or a religious center, apparently an altar somewhere, maybe Abraham had built and there would be some men that served as priests around this altar, and go to inquire means go to consult an oracle of God. It doesn’t mean simply she prayed about it. She obviously did pray about it but she did more than just pray about it. She took it one step further and went and she demanded revelation from God. And the Bible just skips over, doesn’t tell us where she went to get this, doesn’t tell us how the revelation came.
But in verse 23 the revelation to this mother is given. “And Jehovah said to her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy belly; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger.” Nowhere in the text does it say that this woman told her husband; we have to presume she must have. We have to presume this to make sense of the interpretation. But in the prophecy of verse 23 notice two parts. First there’s a prophecy about nations; then there’s a prophecy about the individual boys that she’s carrying. The last prophecy at the end of verse 23, “the elder shall serve the younger” is about the two individual boys. But these boys are not looked upon just as boys because the Bible always views history genealogically; it doesn’t view it chronologically, necessarily, but it views it genealogically. That is, it looks upon a boy and his sons and his sons and his sons and so on, the stream of history that is going to come out from these two boys. And so one prophecy is about the immediate babies, the elder baby will serve the younger one, but then another one, out from these two boys there’ll be these two nations and they will be people who will struggle together.
Now in the last part of verse 23 where it says “the elder shall serve the younger,” there’s a reversal of a common custom in the ancient world. And this wasn’t a custom that was 100% obeyed but it was one that was generally obeyed, and when a husband got down to the point of death, whether God supernaturally told him this or not we don’t know; my observation has been that people generally know in old age when they’re going to die, whether you call it premonition or what; some of you observed this with the older people in your family, that they just know that they’re going to die and it’s not a suicide wish or anything, they just have this distinct awareness. Well, when this distinct awareness would strike the man who was the head of the home, the husband, he would have this very, very important service that would take place. It was called the blessing. We don’t know too much about it but the Scriptures on occasion let us glimpse it. Genesis 49 is an example, where Jacob does the same thing. Prior to his death he would assemble all his sons; son number 1, son number 2, son number 3 and so on. Maybe the daughters were there but sorry ladies, daughters didn’t count too much then.
In this ceremony it was the sons because the sons would carry their father’s wealth. And in particular the firstborn son; son number one that would be the one that would be singled out. Later, in the Mosaic Law, son number one would receive a double portion of his father’s inheritance. That was before inheritance taxes. But son number one got a double portion, not because he was favored in a bad sense of the word “favored” by his father but simply that if son number one was to be the executor of his father’s estate, son number one would bear the responsibilities and the costs of taking care of his deceased father’s business. Thus the law provided that the firstborn would get double portion of the inheritance; he got double responsibility and since the laborer is worthy of his hire, he got double payment.
In this case, however, God predicted to Rebekah that this pattern would be reversed; the elder will serve the younger. In this case, God says, to Rebekah, son number two will receive the blessing; son number two will receive the inheritance. And so she had known by the end of verse 23 something about her two sons, and we suggest that this something that she did know about her two sons she did share with her husband because by the time we get to Genesis 25:28 we have patterns that begin to develop inside that home that are not healthy and this is one of the flaws in this particular family that God in His sovereignty will use but nevertheless, we as Christians can learn and benefit from it. Isaac loved Esau because he did eat of his venison but Rebekah loved Jacob. The parents are split; the parents both are playing favorites. One favors one son and one favors the other. This is a wide open symptom for trouble in any home. And it begins, apparently, very early.
We don’t know all the reasons and all the background behind it except we can at least infer several things. One thing is that the Bible never blames Rebekah for what she does later on in chapter 27. The Bible never blames Jacob for what he does, in lying to get his birthright. It doesn’t mean that it’s right, it just means that the Bible doesn’t make that too much of an issue. So we might infer, then, that the reason why Rebekah loves Jacob is because Rebekah, as a godly woman, appreciates the will of God for her son. What we might be reading in verse 28 and not just that she subjectively liked him just because she liked him, was probably because she took the prophecy of verse 23 seriously; she loved her son Jacob. God had prophesied something about him. But now verse 28 also then reveals something wrong with the father in this particular family unit. The father, first of all, favors his oldest son, according to normal custom, not according to God’s prophecy. He goes, so to speak, conservative to his tradition rather than to the Word of God. And here you have a father who loves his son, not just because he loves his son either, but because he can eat of what his son provides.
Now it didn’t dawn on me until I prepared for this morning and chapter 27 that all three instances in the story of Isaac and Rebekah deal with food. We have the situation here, verse 28, the comment. We have verses 29-34, the theft of the will all over an issue of food. And later on we’re going to see chapter 27 has to do with food. Look at Genesis 25:29-34; remember the passage, this is where Jacob bought the birthright. If you want to visualize this visualize it in terms of an inheritance document; visualize a parchment or a document. Now whether it literally was a document or not, at least that’s what it would correspond to in our day. In this situation, again verse 29-30, Esau comes in and he wants something to eat, and his concern to eat takes priority over his concern for spiritual things. It’s interesting that the Old Testament is so concrete, it’s not abstract, it’s concrete, and one of the things it does, it stresses the senses, the empirical senses. And over and over again the Bible stresses taste, and here is an interesting thing. One of the famous psalms of David he says, “O taste, and see that the LORD is good.” And in another psalm David talks about, “O LORD, I seek you as a hart pants after water,” the sense of taste. And so over and over again, you can see this in Psalm 119, how tasty the things of the Scriptures are.
Well, here is the spiritual taste of man,
seeking first the
Every family has learned behavior patterns. Every marriage has learned behavior patterns. Every individual has learned behavior patterns. Nations have learned behavior patterns. And what we’re seeing, like we saw last week in Genesis 26, we’re seeing a behavior pattern in the home transmitted into the next generation. You learn the behavior patterns of your home. Now this was intended by God originally to help us because it was intended by God that Adam learn wisdom, put that wisdom into his children, his wisdom in his children would go out, they would lay more wisdom on top of Adam’s wisdom and you have a cumulative product of many generations of wisdom. That’s the way it ought to have worked, but since the fall of man it works two ways, and that is homes and families and marriages can transmit ungodly learned behavior patterns and these can increase in intensity with time unless they’re corrected by the Word and the Spirit.
And so here we have an ungodly behavior pattern having to do with food and diet, and it’s being transmitted, now, to Esau. So Esau comes in from the field as we read the story earlier, and Jacob in verse 31 says, “Sell me this day thy birthright.” Please notice it’s no theft; I’ve been a lot harder on Jacob I think in the past than I ought to have been. Jacob here is not blamed by God for doing this. He proposes a bargain, and yes, the guy accepted the bargain, it was a bad deal for Esau but that’s Esau’s problem, not Jacobs. Jacob, in this story, is not condemned because he didn’t consult the consumer protection agency to register the validity of the product he was proposing to sell. The reason for that is that we used to have an expression in western society called [can’t understand words] which means let the buyer beware, meaning the final responsibility for a sale rests on the person who’s foolish enough to buy, not on the seller, as long as there isn’t over deceit. And so here we have Jacob proposing a business deal to his brother and his brother, because his priorities are reversed in his life, he prefers the physical taste to the spiritual taste, so friend, go ahead and conduct your economic life in accordance with your priorities. Buy and invest according to what you consider the primary things of life. So he does.
That’s the backdrop for Genesis 27; so we come to Genesis 27 and it’s many years later. The father now is about to die and what does he do? He calls Esau to him in verse 1. And it’s preparatory, as we can tell from the first four verses, for the blessing ceremony that’s about to take place. The thing that’s wrong in verse 1 is why is Isaac calling Esau and not Jacob? Why is it this father, who knew from his wife the divinely given destinies of their children, deliberately defies the prophecy of God, “the elder shall serve the younger?” Isaac doesn’t think so; I’ll make the younger serve the elder. And later on you’ll see just how much he demanded that this take place; he shakes his fist into the hands of God’s prophecy and says I will override it; this is my home and I will run my home the way I want to run my home, independently of the Scripture and the will of God. Well, Isaac is going to have a little comeuppance here before we’re all finished.
So he calls Esau, in defiance of the prophecy; he calls Esau now in defiance of the inheritance act of Genesis 25. After all, which of the two sons carries, so to speak, in his hand the paper that guarantees the inheritance. It’s not Esau; what’s he blessing Esau for? Genesis 27:1 shows the father is carnal, he’s out of fellowship at this time; he’s in rebellion against the known will of God that was articulated to him on at least two occasions, and probably three. And probably repeated many, many times. And so he says in verse 2, “I am old,” I know the day comes, come get me some venison. And the real motive in his life is shown in verse 4 in the last purpose clause. He says you go out and you get me some venison, Esau, and bring it to me, prepare it just the way I like it, “that,” see that purpose, “that my soul may bless you before I die.” Now what is this strange thing? You mean to say that here is a man who comes to the last days of his life, the highest thing that the Hebrew male husband could do in the home was to pass the blessing of God on his family on to his son; he gets down to the last breath of his life and where is his attention? It’s what I want to eat, get me something nice to eat because that’s my joy and when I am fully satiated and when I have my physical taste satisfied, then we will talk our spiritual business. But I can’t get involved in all that spiritual stuff on an empty stomach, and you know what I like best to eat. And so we have this obsession with food, food that I love, notice the word “love” in here.
And so the author of this particular text emphasizes it so often by repeating the word. In the King James, in verse 4 you’ll see the term, “savory meat.” In the Hebrew there’s a term like this: [sounds like: met a miim], and it literally it literally translates tasty things. And the author of Genesis emphasizes, he didn’t have ways to underline the text so he couldn’t put underline under the important words so he repeats the same word. So instead of taking, say five or six Hebrew words that were all synonyms, all meant the same thing, when the author wants to get your attention and focus in on something, what he’ll do is he’ll drop all the synonyms, pick up one word and then drop it in the text a dozen times or so. And that catches your eye as you read it and you say ah, that’s what he wants, he wants me to track there. So watch what he does.
In verse 4, “savory meat,” see, that’s metamiim [sp?]; verse 7, Rebekah repeats it, she says “Bring me the venison, and make me savory meat.” Verse 9, “Go to the flock” and so on, “and I will make them savory meat.” Verse 14, “he went and he fetched, and brought them to his mother: and his mother made savory meat, such as his father loved.” And then it goes on and repeats it several more times in the story. Well, obviously the author here wants you to track that it’s the physical taste; this is where the man’s heart is; this is why he’s lost his ability to spiritually lead his home. He’s got a carnal pattern of behavior that stresses the taste of the body. All right, the tasty things is one kind of thing repeated in Genesis 27.
One more thing before we go any further to observe about this author and that is that almost every other verse in this chapter has a familial term in it. Notice in verse 1, “Esau, his eldest son,” verse one, “My son.” Later on in verse 5, and verse 5 and verse 6 are crucial to see this, In verse 5, “Rebekah heard when Isaac spoke to Esau, his son.” Now look at verse 6, “And Rebekah spoke unto Jacob, her son,” oh, what have we here? Split allegiance in the home between the parents and they begin to attach their own personal… he’s my son, well, he’s my son, and now we have the parents taking their fight out through their children. Verse 8, “my son.” And then it goes on through, verse 10, “thy father.” Verse 11, “Rebekah, his mother.” Verse 11, “Esau, my brother.” Verse 12, “My father.” Verse 13, “his mother.” And it goes on and on and on through the text this way. So what does this tell you? Immediately, without going any further in Genesis 27 you know one thing, that the Holy Spirit is emphasizing the dynamics of a family. So if we study this we’re not only learning heavy theology about election, we’re learning how that very heavy theology of election plays out through the dynamics of a family unit.
So we see now the family is weakened, it’s got this fatal flaw in it. The parents are divided. Now this is always a problem for a believing woman. I’m thankful God made me a man, I don’t have to be a woman because this would be awful, a person of my temperament to be stuck in this situation. To have a husband out here that is out of it, spiritually, he’s failed to lead and so she correctly sees the will of God and she wants to do something about it. But yet her position in the home is one in which she’s supposed to be subordinate to the man. And this is an endless frustration for many Christian women. We’re not to say it doesn’t work the other way too but Genesis 27 is the case where the wife is under the 8-ball here with a husband that’s just not leading. So what does she do? Genesis 27, ladies, is going to tell you what not to do.
It’s an eloquent description of a godly woman, motivated by the Holy Spirit, but because she broke something in the home she up a thousand years of history that were full of bloodshed; one woman did this. Now it’s again not to blame Rebekah because the Holy Spirit would come down and blame Isaac for not leading, but it is to show that what the woman does in the home has deeply far reaching effects. You see, the socialist planners of our time that want constantly to break down the family and replace it with the state do recognize something, even if we Christians don’t and that is they recognize the power of the family to mold the future because the children are the future. And if the government and state planners can just get their hands into the home and their long tentacles to control the values the children are being taught they’ve got the future in their hands. So therefore the pressure in our day is between the state and the family for that reason. Who decides the future? The parents or the state? Well here it is; in Genesis 27 the eloquent testimony that God has so designed history that the family determines the future, for good or evil.
So this goes on and Isaac proposes, illegitimately, to pass the blessing on to his oldest son instead of his youngest son as God requested. Now Genesis 27:5 shows you yet another symptom of something gone wrong in this home. The King James translation really doesn’t translate it in the full force of the word. It says “Rebekah heard when Isaac spoke to Esau, his son,” but in the Hebrew the narrative breaks here and there’s a circumstantial clause and it reads: “And Rebekah, she was overhearing what Isaac was talking to his son.” Ah, overhearing, spying on her husband to make sure that clunk doesn’t do something else wrong. Sound familiar ladies… Rebekah was spying, just to make sure, because she knew more than her husband about this and in fact here she was right, but nevertheless, still something is wrong. She spies on her husband, she runs and talks to her son, see, verse 5 and verse 6, that’s where the his son-her son starts. In verse 5 she heard him speaking to “his son.” So she went and got “her son” to pit against “his son.” So now we’ve got suspicion brewing between wife and husband and now we have sides being taken in this long debate.
Now let’s look at Rebekah a moment. To her credit this is a woman who knows the future because God told it to her. Presumably she loves Jacob because she is motivated to see that he performed what God promised ought to happen in that home. So Rebekah has what we’ll say is a godly motive, she did want the will of God for her children. We’ll credit her with that, but what she is doing by her little maneuver here and this little stunt she’s about to pull is she’s fracturing the order of the home by placing herself over the husband and now taking over the reigns to control him. Not only will she do this but shortly she does it for her own son. This is why in verse 8, if you look down where she suggests, she calls Jacob her son, she says hey look, your father is going to wrongly give Esau the blessing so now look at the strong language she uses to her son. Remember, this son is forty years old here; he’s not somebody that just dropped out of the toddler seat. “Now therefore, my son, obey my voice according to that which I command thee,” … command! A mother commanding a forty year old man, what is this? This is the strongest verb that’s possible. It’s the verb used in the Hebrew Scriptures for a general commanding his soldiers. And here mama is commanding her son to do something; something’s wrong with this. Even though she has a godly motive something’s wrong.
Now it’s true and research has shown it over and over again that one of the reasons why we’re having increasing problems and anybody who does counseling or is in the ministry or psychology knows this today, we’re having an increase of homosexuality. And the people that have done the work in the field all report the same thing and I can say from the little data I’ve seen, I’ve personally observed the same kind of thing, that where you have a rise of homosexuality in the men look back in the previous generation and you will see domineering mothers and men who failed to exercise leadership. The sons were raised in homes where there was something wrong in the leadership pattern. The man just was not perceived to be the leader; the woman was. And apparently in some way yet to be researched this creates propensities to sin in particular directions. It doesn’t explain or excuse homosexuality; it just kind of shapes and gives a propensity to sin in this direction instead of this direction. And so what it must do in the male mind is he begins to resent the female in authority which then becomes a resentment against all females. And this shows up in this very text by Jacob’s response to his mother’s suggestion. Something is wrong in the mother/son relationship. She’s gone in, godly motive, but she, instead of trusting the Lord, she is going to solve the problem herself. She’s going to stick her hand in her husband’s business and going to try to take over and rule. So she now winds up commanding her son to do something.
So she sends him out to the flock, [9] get me “two good kids of the goats, and I will make the tasty things” just like your father likes. And again, the powerful propensity and capacity to do evil because she knows her husband so well she knows all his weaknesses. [10] “And you will bring it to thy father, that he may eat,” notice verse 10, Rebekah reads her husband like a book. She knows that he isn’t going to bless until he gets that gut of his filled with good T-bone steak or veal if you want a substitute. The whole point is that she knows what turns him on—food. So we’ll give him some food Jacob.
Now verses 11-12 shows you this is coming through with the wrong frequencies to the son. Even though Jacob does what his mother tells him to do, he has misgivings about it and it comes out in one particular word, the kind of misgivings. “And Jacob said to Rebekah, his mother, Behold, Esau, my brother, is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man. [12] My father will feel my arm” or something and know, see this, “and I shall seem to him as a deceiver;” it says in the translation, “and I shall bring a curse upon me, and not a blessing.” But that’s not the word; the word “deceive” is… the better word to translate this is one who mocks, and we don’t have time but 2 Chronicles 36:16, you’ll see where this word for mock is used with this connotation. Jacob’s afraid, he knows he’s going to lie to his dad but that isn’t the sin that bothers him the most; he isn’t concerned so much about appearing as a liar or deceiver to his father; what really bugs him is he’s going to appear as a mocker to his father.
Now what’s the difference? A deceiver is one who tells a lie and he’s worried about what his father is going to think, but the mocker is one who defies his father’s place in the home and that’s what Jacob fears. Jacob knows that this is some out of kilter situation; it may be his mother that’s suggesting this, husband and wife and here’s the son, and he’s listening to the woman, but something doesn’t ring true. He is taking his orders from his mother against his dad. And this reverses the authority of the home and that’s what bugs him. Lying would be one thing but wrenching the whole chain of command out of kilter is quite another thing and Jacob realizes this. And Rebekah, apparently is so desperate that this is going to take place that everything is out of control, God isn’t sovereign, her husband isn’t sovereign and so she’s going to be sovereign, and so she buts in here and in verse 13 look what she says, very powerful words. “Well upon me by thy curse, my son, now you obey my voice and go get them.” Now we don’t know whether Jacob went yes mamma and walked out in the field and did this or what the reaction was, I leave it to your sanctified and unsanctified imaginations to follow on, but if you were dramatizing this thing you do think as we go through the text how you’d cast the characters. So he goes and he gets them and he brings them back.
And in verse 15 another strange thing occurs and this one I confess I don’t really know the details and men have struggled over this verse for many centuries and still don’t know what’s going on here but something is happening in verse 15 that we’re not really too sure of. “And Rebekah took” and it says “goodly [the choicest] raiment,” and the problem, what the goodly raiment is, “of her eldest son Esau, which were with her in the house, and put them upon Jacob, her younger son.” Verse 15 is an enigma because of two things. First of all, the term “eldest son” and “younger son” wouldn’t be repeated unless the author is trying to force our attention to the big motif of the story which is the sovereignty of God working out to make the elder serve the younger. And he deliberately puts this in here; there’s no immediate contextual reason why “eldest son” or “younger son” should be there; he could have done the same thing by just saying Jacob and Esau. But the fact that he entitles them ought to tip us off that something else is happening. Now what the something else is, and I label this as a guess, this is the best guess that I’ve run across, is that these garments have something to do with the mantle of the priestly rite of the home, that like if you have an orthodox Jewish friend you know that the man has the yellow whatever they call it that goes around the neck, and when he leads the family in Passover he’ll stand up and he’ll put this around him. Well, apparently they had something similar to that here and that’s what the “goodly garment” is, that it had something to do with the rank of Esau. That’s why “eldest son” and “younger son” are put there. And the eldest son having this rank was supposed to be leader. Well, we know Jacob had already gotten the document that said he was going to inherit.
Now the real clinker in verse 15 is what, if that’s the case, what is this doing in Rebekah’s house, because Esau had already married two women, gone off and lived apparently separately from Rebekah, and yet verse 15 says that the remnant that belong to him in some sort of ranking way had been left in Rebekah’s house. Why this? We can only conclude that Rebekah had something to do with this little operation; that Rebekah must have known that Esau didn’t care anyway about exercising the priesthood, so I’ll just take Esau, the next time you wanted it ironed Esau, fine, I’ll go ahead and iron it but I’ll never give it back to your closet. So you want me to do your ironing for you, I’ll do your ironing for you and I’ll just keep it here and she kept it hidden away in her closet. Now she gets it out and she puts it on Jacob, along with the other paraphernalia in verse 16-17, which must have looked semi-hysterical as he goes in with skins wrapped his arm and around his neck. And he walks in and he deceives his father.
Genesis 27:18-26 is one of the central passages on lying in the Scriptures. “[And he came unto his father, and said,] My father: and he said, Her am I; who are you, my son? [19] And Jacob said I am Esau, thy first-born….” And Isaac asks the question, as you observe how quickly he can come back. Now verse 21, notice, “And Isaac said unto Jacob, Come near, I pray thee, that I may feel thee, my son, whether thou be my very son Esau or not.” Now see, there’s a third evidence that all is not well in this home. The father is suspicious of maneuvering that takes place. Now why would Isaac be suspicious of maneuvering if there hadn’t been previous maneuvering? Well, obviously Rebekah and Jacob had been maneuvering for some time and the old man senses this.
So therefore, verse 21, and then verse 24,
“Are you my very son Esau?” again, I doubt it he’s saying. So what kind of home is there, where there’s
this intense distrust. Now we know the
Scriptures, as a general principle, condemn lying; Ephesians
So it goes on and he blesses starting in verse 28. Now let’s watch the blessing that he makes. He says, and as you read this blessing, think now, of all this resentment in the home, resentment between the husband, resentment with the wife, suspicion between the brothers, and all this sense of maneuvering, look at how he blesses. Keep in mind verse 28-29 Isaac thinks apply to Esau, that’s what he thinks when he says it. Now see if, as you read verse 28-29 you don’t see evidences of the father’s intent, resentment over Rebekah, and intense resentment over Jacob.
Genesis 27:28, “Therefore God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of grain and wine:” the “dew of heaven” is the water supply, “the fatness of the earth” is soil fertility, conditions for agricultural blessing. [29] “Let people serve thee, and nations bow down to thee:” now that’s not wrong in itself because that would be a continuation of the Abrahamic blessing, but now look at the next one, “be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother’s sons bow down to thee:” now in one sense that’s not wrong in the sense that that’s the position of the eldest son in the family to come but you can’t read the story and not detect a trace here of okay, now you take Rebekah and you take her little cute boy Jacob and you make them follow your lead. And then he goes on, “cursed be everyone that curseth thee, [and blessed be he that blesseth thee].” that’s just a re-quote of the Abrahamic blessing.
Some of you have read Greek tragedies and you know the tremendous way the authors of the Greek tragedies would work the story out so there’d be this fatal flaw and the way they would terminate the story as though the flaw itself, the person or the hero trying to get around the flaw fell into it. For example, Oedipus complex, the Oedipus, and here you have Oedipus having it prophesied that he would have sexual intercourse with his mother; he does everything he can to try to avoid having it and the very acts that he does in trying to avoid it work out so he comes out it fulfills this awful prophecy. Well now here you’ve got a biblical counterpart; here you’ve got a man who shakes his fist in God’s face and says this is not going to come to pass, my eldest son as normal will be my inheritance and so I’m going to take special precautions, and he takes all the special precautions and the very act that he uses to try to defy the Word of God fulfills the Word of God, and he winds up, verse 30, the author of Genesis has a marvelous sense of providential timing; we’ll see this later in the Joseph stories.
Genesis 27:30, “And it came to pass, just as soon as Isaac made an end to blessing Jacob, and Jacob had scarce gone from the presence of Isaac, his father,” along comes Esau; the time is beautiful. Jacob walks out of the tent having received the blessing and within a second, if you were to dramatize this, along comes Esau, charging in with his meat and his weapon after the tent flap has just stopped flapping from Jacob going out; beautiful timing.
And now the awfulness of it. Isaac suddenly realizes in verse 32 who it was and now in verse 33, the climax of a man in disobedience, when he’s finally brought up short. The Hebrew is very strong here, if I were to translate verse 33 literally it would read: “Isaac trembled a great trembling,” (comma) “exceedingly,” that’s a rough, literal translation. “Isaac trembled a great trembling, exceedingly.” There was a crisis point when suddenly everything falls apart. He’s built his whole lifestyle in his home, on a rebellious principle that God’s pattern is not going to be followed here. And he gets down to the last breath of his life and what has he done? He has fulfilled the pattern that he established his rebellion against.
And it’s just a shaking, what you’ve got here is a total collapse, we would say verse 33 describes what modern people call a nervous breakdown; nerves don’t break down but here’s the trembling. And he says “Who? Where is he that has taken the venison, and brought it me, [and I have eaten of all before thou came, and] have I blessed him?” And then before he finishes his lament he adds that last clause and the last clause is a key because it shows that in the middle of this awful crisis of his father he suddenly realized all right, I was wrong and God’s will goes on, and Esau, I’m sorry, I can’t do anything about it, because the last phrase says “and he will certainly be blessed.” That’s an admission of his absolute surrender to the sovereign plan of God this late in his life but nevertheless he finally did surrender to him.
Now the counterpoint; here’s Esau and we’ll comment more on this next week when
we get into the Hebrew commentary on verse 34, “And when Esau heard the words
of his father, he cried with a great and exceedingly bitter cry, and he said to
his father,” this is the awful sense of rejection, in a less serious note but
in a dramatically equivalent I think, those of you who went to see Superman,
remember the way he responded at the end when Lois Lane was dead and almost as
though it was a crude form of Christ in the kenosis and he said I had all that
power and I couldn’t do anything, and then he cries out with his cosmic cry;
there’s a picture of this cry you’re observing here in verse 34, this total
sense of complete frustration. See,
that’s what happens when you try to fight the sovereign will of God; in the end
you’re crushed. There’s only one thing
and that’s you have to submit. He
couldn’t and so he cries out, “Bless me,” bless me to, “O my father.” And his father says Jacob had come and… [35,
“And he said, Thy brother came with subtlety, and has taken away thy
blessing.”]
Now verse 36, Esau said that’s his name, his name is Yacob, or Jacob and the word “Jacob” means the one who grabs or the one who supplants or the one who overtakes, it has all those meanings. And you remember the first way this boy was named was how they were born. Remember as they were coming through the birth canal Esau came out first the Scripture says, but Jacob had wrapped his arm around… this twin had wrapped his arm around the leg of the first twin as he was born, and so his parents watching that named him because it was significant, what happened in pregnancy, what happened at birth was significant to the future of that child. So the parents watching the manner of birth named him Yacob or Jacob, so now he says yes, and you named Jacob and surely that name has come to be fulfilled, “For he hath supplanted me these two times: he took away my birthright;” now that’s wrong, Jacob didn’t take away his birthright, he was just a stupid fool and sold it to him. But he feels sorry for himself here, it’s self-pity that’s involved; “Jacob took away my birthright,” that, incidentally, is the rise of anti-Semitism, that’s an anti-Semitic thought there; Jacob took my birthright, as though Jacob is to blame.
“…and, behold, now he has taken away my blessing. And he said, Have you reserved a blessing for me?” And the sad answer his father basically is no, “I have made him thy lord,” what was the prophecy to Rebekah? The elder will serve the younger. I didn’t want to but in my rebellion I made him thy lord and fulfilled the word anyway, “and all his brethren I have given to him for servants; and with the grain and the wine I have sustained him: and am I going to do to you, my son. [38] And Esau said unto his father, But haven’t you one blessing, my father? Bless me, bless me too [O my father]. And Esau lifted up his voice, and wept.”
Now the only blessing he can eek out for
Esau is this one and it really isn’t a blessing at all; those who have the King
James won’t recognize…I think if you have a modern translation they do a better
job translating this, [39] “Behold, they dwelling shall be from” or “out of the
fatness of the earth, and out of the dew of heaven,” now what was the fatness
of the earth and the dew of heaven? The
pre conditions for agricultural prosperity or the Promised Land. And what verse
39 is doing is it is excluding Esau and his descendants from the Promised
Land. So that forever in history they
lived down in this area, southeast of the Dead Sea whereas Jacob and his
descendants live up here in the fertile area.
Next week we’ll show you some pictures of
The Genesis 27:40, “And by thy sword shalt thou live,” no peace for Esau, “by thy sword thou shalt live,” all down through history, “and shall serve thy brother; and it shall come to pass when you shall have the dominion, that you will break his yoke from off thy neck,” struggle, war. The first part of verse 41, “And Esau hated Jacob….” What did this woman do when she intruded into the structure of the family? She touched off a thousand years of history. We don’t have time this morning to trace it completely but let me show you three verses that will take you on a time line from the time of this incident here in Genesis, all the way through the Exodus, all the way through the conquest to the time of the kingdom, down to 586 BC, during this time of great history of the Old Testament.
Turn to 1 Samuel 14:47 here’s what the
history was of the descendants of Jacob and the descendants of Esau. This is the passage in Samuel when the
monarchy is being established in the nation
1 Kings 11:14, Solomon, whose name means peace, when he got out of fellowship his kingdom began to fracture and weaken and dissolve and in 1 Kings 11:14 who is the first adversary? “And the LORD stirred up an adversary unto Solomon, Hadad the Edomite.”
Finally, turn to 2 Kings 16:6, the
amalgamation of the Edomites and the Syrians to form what we now call the
Arabs, part of the Arabs. “At that time
Rezin, king of
What a tragedy in history was created by a woman who was out of place in the home. And what’s doubly ironic is when you survey history and you see the bloodshed and imagine the thousands of boys that lost their lives in the wars and imagine the thousands of mother who lost their sons; it would be the women who often are the pacifistic elements of society that say can’t we stop the bloodshed, why does my son have to go to war and come back in a box; why does that have to happen? The Bible tells us that at least in some cases it was a woman who was deeply involved in bringing the situation about, wasn’t she? It was Rebekah who set the wheels in motion for the death of thousands of soldiers, awful wars in battle. Prior to her didn’t we see Sarah do the same thing? Remember what Sarah did? She got out of it and tried to suggest something to straighten out her husband and wound up creating the Arabs in Ishmael. And what has that begotten in history but constant warfare, constant strife. The woman, source of peace, or she can be a horrible source of war.
Finally, tracing it all the way back to the Garden who was it whose scheme it was that was adopted by her husband to eat of the fruit of the tree. See ladies, don’t ever think that the Bible has a low view of womanhood; it doesn’t. The women are key actors in history for good, virgin Mary, or for evil, the Eve’s. Don’t think that you’re sidetracked to a less than first class role. This story ought to warn you that you are so important to history that you can completely foul up the system for thousands of years after you die by one act you do in your home. That’s how serious the Bible takes it.
One of the great scholars summed up the
thought of Genesis 27, the great Lutheran Old Testament scholar of the 19th
century, Frederic Keil; he said, in concluding how the story plays out and
everybody gets judged, nobody is happy at the end of Genesis 27. He says: Rebekah was obligated to defend her
pet son into a foreign land away from his father’s house in an utterly
destitute condition. Rebekah didn’t see
him for 20 years, even if she did live until his return and possibly this woman
never saw the son she loved ever again.
Jacob had to atone for his sin against both brother and father by a long
and painful exile in the midst of privation, anxiety, fraud and want. Isaac was punished for retaining his
preference for Esau in opposition to the revealed will of Jehovah by the
success of Jacob’s stratagem. And Esau
was punished for his contempt of the birthright by the loss of the
blessing. In this way,” says Dr. Keil,
“a higher hand prevailed above the acts of sinful man, bringing the counsel and
will of Jehovah to eventual triumph in opposition to human will and human
thought.” Jacob have I loved; Esau have I
hated.