Choosing the Messes

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Don Filcek; Genesis 26:34-27:46 Choosing the Messes

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Welcome to the podcast of Recast Church in Madawan, Michigan, where you can grow in faith, community, and service.
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This message is by lead pastor Don Filsack and is a part of the series Beginning with God, Walking Through the
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Book of Genesis. If you would like to contact us, please visit us on the web at recastchurch .com
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Here's Pastor Don. Well, good morning. Welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsack.
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I'm the lead pastor here, and I'm glad that you joined together to worship God this morning. Be sure to fill out the connection card you received when you walked in.
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You can turn that into the black box. And if it's your first time with us, and you fill out one of those connection cards and turn it in, then we'd please also take a free coffee mug back there, just our way of saying thanks and glad that you joined us.
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Remember, any offerings you would choose to give also go in that same black box, and anything marked expansion fund will go towards the eventual desire to build a building on the property that we purchased.
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And so we don't pass an offering plate. That box is there. Use it, or you can recycle that envelope right next to there, either way.
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As we turn to our text this morning, I want you to think about a question. I think, you know, throughout this, throughout the message, throughout the worship time, throughout the remainder of this morning,
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I want you to contemplate and consider this question. What kind of people does
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God choose to use? What kind of people does God choose to use? I think many of us, when we consider what kind of people
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God chooses, we think of those who are holy. And then whatever that means, you have all different kinds of backgrounds and history and things that have gone on in your past to kind of help define that.
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Some of you have a pretty biblical understanding of what holiness means. And so you think that God is going to choose somebody who follows the law, or somebody who does this, or somebody who does that, or acts in a certain way.
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And so you'd be thinking that God would look around the world and be looking for a specific brand of person, a specific type of person that he would choose to use.
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We tend to think that the more spiritual a person is, the more useful they are to God, as if he's looking all over and going, man, if I could just find a person like that, then they'd be super useful to me.
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But the problem, as we're going to see in our text this morning, is that God has no good people to use.
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That's the reality, isn't it? Does he have any truly good people to choose from on the face of the planet?
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I mean, if we know our own hearts, and we know where we stand, a couple people raised their hand. You're in the right place.
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If we know our own hearts, right? We see our own crud and our own junk in our lives, and the messes that we make, and the things that are going on in our hearts, and we're acquainted with our own sinfulness and the darkness in there.
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As God seeks to accomplish anything through his people, he only has messed up, jacked up people to choose from, people like us.
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And so as we come to this text this morning, we're gonna find a people that are messed up and jacked up. That's the reality of what it is.
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We're gonna look at a text in the Old Testament, picking up where we left off in the book of Genesis. We're taking a few months off of there.
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We were extensively in the book of Genesis last year. We're gonna be wrapping it up this year. But even the chosen family of God was crazy dysfunctional.
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Crazy dysfunctional. As we dig into this text, it's like mind -blowing the types of things that this family are doing to each other.
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Some of us are very familiar with the story of Jacob and Esau. How many of you, when I say the word flannelgraph, you know exactly what
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I mean. Does anybody know? Raise your hand if you know what flannelgraph is. So you picture, you know, you can have a little Jacob and a little
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Esau. And then there's the goat and he's preparing the meal or whatever. And it just, if you don't have any clue what
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I'm talking about, just picture a cartoon that never moves. Okay, and that's kind of like, unless the teacher's really good and is like making them walk or something.
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Other than that, basically a static story. But that's, you know, as we think through that story and we think through the flannelgraph type of thing that we that we deal with,
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I think some of us in reality, we have a mindset that we want our Bible characters to be perfect.
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We want them to be superheroes. And so some of you want that and some of you are raised with that.
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And so you kind of have this vision of these people who were just doing everything right. And man, if I could just be like Isaac.
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Man, if I could just be like Jacob. Man, if I could just be like David. If I could just be like Noah or whoever.
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And we can hold these people up. But when it's all said and done, the Bible does not record for us a single perfect person aside from Jesus Christ himself.
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We're familiar with the story, many of us, Jacob and Esau. And yet as I studied this text deeply this week,
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I found joy welling up in me. A joy that that centers on not the messes and the crud.
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Because it's gonna be a bit of a downer text, to be honest. To watch these people behaving poorly towards one another, treating each other without kindness, stealing, lying, cheating from within the family.
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But this story reminds me that we serve a God who meets us in our messes.
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A God who meets us right where we are. He's a type of God who keeps his promises and he is a God who is faithful.
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He works through human history and he is accomplishing his will even in the most bizarre of human interactions.
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And believe me, we're gonna see some pretty bizarre human interactions in the text this morning. So I want you to open up your
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Bibles to Genesis chapter 26. And we're at the very end, 26 verse 34.
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We're gonna go all the way through the end of 27. If you're using the Bible in the seat back in front of you, you can go to page 18.
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That's an easy way to find it. So go to page 18 there. If you don't own a Bible or an English Standard Version of the Bible, you can take that one home with you, by the way.
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We want everybody to have a copy of the Word of God. You just throw that on your nightstand and read from it from time to time. But follow along.
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It's a big chunk of Scripture. So I know that some of us maybe it's kind of like you're not used to being read to for an extensive period of time.
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I think it's valuable for us to take in the Word of God. Sometimes I think this might be the most valuable thing I do on Sunday is actually read the text of the
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Scriptures to actually get it to where we're thinking about it. So I'm gonna read this in its entirety.
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I'd encourage you to have your Bible open to follow along so you don't begin thinking about if the pot roast is burning or anything like that.
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So just be thinking through this. Genesis 26, 34 through the end of 27, the words of God to us here this morning that we cast.
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When Esau was 40 years old, he took Judith, the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, to be his wife and Basemath, the daughter of Alan the
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Hittite, and they made life bitter for Isaac and Rebecca. When Isaac was old and his eyes were dim so that he could not see, he called
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Esau his older son and said to him, my son. And he answered, here I am. He said, behold, I am old and I do not know the day of my death.
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Now then take your weapons, your quiver and your bow, and go out to the field and hunt game for me and prepare for me delicious food such as I love and bring it to me so that I may eat, that my soul may bless you before I die.
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Now Rebecca was listening when Isaac spoke to his son Esau. So when Esau went to the field to hunt for game and bring it,
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Rebecca said to her son Jacob, I heard your father speak to your brother Esau, bring me game and prepare for me delicious food that I may eat it and bless you before the
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Lord before I die. Now, therefore, my son, obey my voice as I command you.
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Go to the flock and bring me two good young goats so that I may prepare from them delicious food for your father, such as he loves.
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And you shall bring it to your father to eat so that he may bless you before he dies.
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But Jacob said to Rebecca, his mother, behold, my brother Esau is a hairy man and I'm a smooth man.
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Perhaps my father will feel me and I shall seem to be mocking him and bring a curse upon myself and not a blessing.
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His mother said to him, let the curse be on me, my son, only obey my voice and go bring them to me. So he went and took them and brought them to his mother and he and his mother prepared delicious food such as his father loved.
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Then Rebecca took the best garments of Esau, her older son, which were with her in the house and put them on Jacob, her younger son.
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And the skins of the young goats she put on his hands and on the smooth part of his neck. And she put the delicious food and the bread which she had prepared into the hand of her son
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Jacob. Now he went in to his father and said, my father, and he said, here I am. Who are you, my son?
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Jacob said to his father, I am Esau, your firstborn. I have done as you told me. Now sit up and eat of my game that your soul may bless me.
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But Isaac said to his son, how is it that you have found it so quickly, my son? And he answered, because the Lord, your
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God, granted me success. Then Isaac said to Jacob, please come near me that I may feel you, my son, to know whether you are really my son
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Esau or not. So Jacob went near to Isaac, his father, who felt him and said, the voice is
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Jacob's voice. But the hands are the hands of Esau, and he did not recognize him because his hands were hairy like his brother
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Esau's hands. So he blessed him. He said, are you really my son Esau? He answered,
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I am. Then he said, bring it near to me that I may eat of my son's game and bless you.
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So he brought it near to him and he ate and he brought him wine and he drank. Then his father Isaac said to him, come near me and kiss me, my son.
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So he came near and kissed him and Isaac smelled the smell of his garments and blessed him and said, see the smell of my son is as the smell of a field that the
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Lord has blessed. May God give you of the dew of heaven and of the fatness of the earth and plenty of grain and wine.
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Let people serve you and nations bow down to you. Be Lord over your brothers and may your mother's sons bow down to you.
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Cursed be everyone who curses you and blessed be everyone who blesses you. As soon as Isaac had finished blessing
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Jacob, when Jacob had scarcely gone out from the presence of Isaac, his father Esau, his brother, came in from his hunting.
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He also prepared delicious food and brought it to his father. And he said to his father, let my father arise and eat of his son's game that you may bless me.
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His father Isaac said to him, who are you? He answered, I am your son, your firstborn Esau.
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Then Isaac trembled very violently and said, who was it then that hunted game and brought it to me and I ate it all before you came and I have blessed him.
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Yes, and he shall be blessed. As soon as Esau heard the words of his father, he cried out with an exceedingly great and bitter cry and said to his father, bless me, even me also, oh my father.
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But he said, your brother came deceitfully and he has taken away your blessing. Esau said, is he not rightly named
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Jacob? For he has cheated me these two times. He took away my birthright and behold now he has taken away my blessing.
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Then he said, have you not reserved a blessing for me? Isaac answered and said to Esau, behold,
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I have made him lord over you and all his brothers. I have given him, I have given to him for servants and with grain and wine
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I have sustained him. What then can I do for you, my son? Esau said to his father, have you but one blessing, my father?
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Bless even me also, oh my father. And Esau lifted his voice and wept. Then Isaac, his father, answered and said to him, behold, away from the fatness of the earth shall your dwelling be and away from the dew of heaven on high.
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By your sword you shall live and you shall serve your brother. But when you grow restless, you shall break his yoke from your neck.
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Now Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing with which his father had blessed him. And Esau said to himself, the days of mourning for my father are approaching.
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Then I will kill my brother Jacob. But the words of Esau, her older son, were told to Rebekah.
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So she sent and called Jacob, her younger son, and said to him, behold, your brother Esau comforts himself about you by planning to kill you.
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Now therefore, my son, obey my voice. Arise, flee to Laban, my brother in Haran, and stay with him a while until your brother's fury turns away.
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Until your brother's anger turns away from you and he forgets what you have done to him. Then I will send and bring you from there.
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Why should I be bereft of you both in one day? Then Rebekah said to Isaac, I loathe my life because of the
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Hittite women. If Jacob marries one of the Hittite women like these, one of the women of the land, what good will my life be to me?
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Let's pray. Father, we come to a text this morning.
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That's messed up. There's a lot of issues going on. There's a lot of family behaving poorly.
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There is your people who have been chosen and called out by your name and for your covenant's sake who are to a person behaving in an ungodly way.
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And yet as we reflect on our own lives, I think we can all see ourselves in Jacob and Rebekah and Isaac and Esau and in this interaction we can see our own tendencies towards selfishness and our own drive to please ourselves and to accomplish our own ends and and so we stand here and we're on the on the brink of offering worship and praise to you with our voices through song and Father, I pray that you would meet us in this place with a recognition of grace with a recognition of the cross.
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The place where we are brought into a healthy, right, good, forgiven relationship with you that we can sing these songs to you as a broken people who are being saved and being changed by the grace we find in Jesus Christ.
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May the power of your spirit rest in us and and meet us here in our hearts as we seek to bring honor and glory to you through our singing.
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Father, that it would not just be our again our exercise of our vocal chords, but that we would encounter you as you as you truly are high, exalted, majestic, lifted up in our
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Savior. So Father, move in us, transform us, change us, that we might worship with hearts that are devoted to you this morning.
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I ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. Make sure you have your Bibles open to Genesis chapter 27.
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I again remind you that that's page 18. Just so you've got that open in front of you as we walk through this text that you can kind of see the flow of the story as I'm kind of walking us through it and and going through the details.
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We've got a lot of ground to cover. I'm not going to be able to hit on every single verse, but get the flow of the text and kind of walk us through that way.
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And really what we're looking at is a story that looks a lot like a modern family in a lot of ways. Okay, there's dysfunction in here.
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There's all kinds of interactions and stuff that's going on. Everything in the text takes place in the context of family.
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And so I thought it might be good now that we're kind of picking back up where we left off in the book of Genesis last year.
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It's been a while since we were in the book of Genesis to reintroduce the main characters, to reintroduce ourselves to the family again and get back in the swing of things and thinking through who this family is.
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We spend a lot of time in the book of Genesis working through the life of Abraham, right? Some of you, those of you that have been here or those of you that have read the book of Genesis, you know that there's a huge chunk in there dedicated to this dude
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Abraham. He was a man called out by God and God made a promise to Abraham that if he would take him,
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Yahweh, to be his God, then he would give him, he would fulfill these promises.
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There was a threefold promise. He said, I'm going to make your offspring into a great nation. I'm going to give that offspring a great land to occupy.
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And in the process of giving them that great land, that great land is going to be a shelter for them on down through the ages to the point where eventually one of their offspring from your line is going to become a blessing to all nations.
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And we know who that one offspring was, that was an offspring of Abraham that would end up being a blessing to all nations, namely
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Jesus Christ himself. And so the very nature of this promise, this threefold promise was given to Abraham back early on in the book of Genesis.
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Now, God made it clear though his son Isaac, his second born son
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Isaac was the one through whom that promise was going to pass and that in essence he was going to be taking one of each child and then there was going to be a string of in the midst of this that the blessing was going to come through one through one through one and the offspring was going to come obviously hit from a line of descent.
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Abraham died. We read about that in the text. Isaac was miraculously provided a wife named
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Rebecca. Remember that Abraham near death sends one of his servants back to his his relatives back in Haran.
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He says I don't want you to marry a Canaanite woman. I want you to marry one of my people.
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And so he sends the servant back. He sits by a well. While he's sitting there at the well, he prays to God and he says may the woman who comes and offers me water from the well, he doesn't have a bucket so she needs to bring the bucket, may the one who comes with the bucket provides me with water and offers to water my camel too.
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May she be the one that you choose for my servant Isaac to be his wife. And Rebecca comes along.
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Rebecca's a diligent person. She proves herself anytime we see her in the text she's doing. She's a doer. She's busy and she immediately says hey, well, yeah,
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I'll feed I'll water your camels too. Which by the way was an hour or two's worth of labor for the camels that it says that he took.
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So it wasn't just like a small thing. And so then Isaac gets a wife named Rebecca. God blesses them along the way.
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Two boys come along. As a matter of fact, two twin boys, Esau and Jacob are born to Rebecca and Isaac.
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Esau was the firstborn, Jacob was the second. But God issued a prophecy at the birth of these two boys, actually just before the birth of these two boys, that Jacob, the second one, would be the one who would carry the covenant forward.
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He would be the blessed child. Now if you notice a theme, God chose Abraham second born and then he chooses
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Isaac second born. Is that social convention? Is usually the way that you understand inheritance laws and things like that, does it always go through the second born son?
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God is not a God who is tied to our social customs, is he? He doesn't just say okay.
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Well, that's the way you do things in America. So I'm going to do things that way too, right? I mean he is God and he is sovereign and he is making choices and choosing.
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I can say that it seems like God likes second born children because I'm a second born child.
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Oh, that wasn't fair. How many of you are second born kids? You guys know what
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I'm talking about, right? But no, I think that there is an indication that God actually likes to kind of push back against the customs of humanity.
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And as a matter of fact, I think a lot of times he likes to take the weak things of the world to confound the wise, the ignorant things of the world, the foolish things of the world.
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And so where, you know, there's something that's kind of like the first born son, there's something exciting about that and it's robust about that and something that's cool about that.
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And yet God is saying, you know, none of that business, none of that what you think is best, but how about we go with what
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I think is best? And God is doing that throughout the pages of scripture, choosing weak things and things that we would think, well, what value is that?
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And then God takes it and makes it blossom and does awesome things. And so I think that's what you've got going on here. But as the boys grow up, daddy, it's very clear in the text of Genesis that daddy favors
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Esau. But Jacob is a mama's boy. Jacob is a mama's boy.
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Daddy favors Esau. How many of you see in that already a recipe for problems?
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Do you see a recipe for problems in that? I think some of us already know where this is going. Now we come to verse 34 and 35 and we find out that Esau, the oldest, marries two
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Hittite women. Okay. Well, I mean, it's just part of the story, you know, kind of go on. But the fact of the matter is the
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Hittites are a subgroup of the Canaanites whom God told Abraham to not let his son marry.
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Uh -oh, I guess maybe there's an issue here then. It's not just merely a telling us that Esau married two
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Hittite women, but actually something's a problem here. Remember all the great lengths that Abraham went to to ensure that Isaac didn't marry a
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Canaanite woman. And yet Esau takes two. I do not think that it's reading too much in the text to see that both
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Isaac and Esau are painted in a bad light in this. I don't think it's a stretch to say that Isaac is painted in a bad light in this.
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Isaac doesn't provide for the marriage of his son like his own father had done for him. Do you agree with me on that? His father had gone through extra steps to ensure that his son, and by the way, we're talking about a culture of arranged marriages, so if you've got any notion in your mind about an
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American marriage where you fall in love and you date and then you kind of just decide whether you're going to get married or not, you got to remember that in the culture everything was arranged.
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And so either, we've got a couple of options in front of us, either Isaac didn't arrange it or Esau went against his father and arranged it himself or whatever, but in any case in this culture this is not an acceptable thing that he's married these
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Hittite women. Particularly from a covenant perspective, Esau, who sold his birthright for a bowl of stew, has shown himself to be impatient and is actually, to some degree, taking matters into his own hands one way or the other.
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So I think both Isaac and Esau are painted in a bad light. And I want to be careful because I recognize that I could really step on some of your toes.
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You go, hey, Isaac was a patriarch, a man of the faith, a man of the covenant. And so some of you, again,
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I mentioned earlier that you've got this notion in your mind that you need your heroes, you need the Bible characters to be heroes.
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But again, God isn't recording for us perfect people that he used. And does
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Isaac have a relationship with God? Yes. Is it a fallen, broken relationship with God?
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Yes. And we're going to see some messes here. In verse 35, we're left with some kind of ambiguous frustration between Esau's wives and his parents.
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We've got an in -law issue here right off the bat. I've got great in -laws.
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I'm sure you do, too. Right? All of us. No laughs.
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Very wise. I don't think we need too much imagination to think of what could have been some of the issues or problems between Esau's wives and his parents.
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There's not much imagination required in that at all. As a matter of fact, Esau has just married two pagan idol -worshipping women.
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So that's going to be some issues, some problems there in religion. But add to that other potential problems with the in -laws and the word bitterness is applied to the relationship between Isaac and Rebekah in Esau and his wives.
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Are there problems in this family? There's problems in this family just to begin with. Now, like I said, out of the chute,
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Isaac is shown to be a poor leader. Now, I say that, and I say that carefully, and I say that after studying him carefully this week, looking up the occurrences of the word
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Isaac in the text of scripture and trying to pore over that and figure out, am I justified in saying that Isaac isn't doing well?
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Should I cut him some slack? Should I be careful with him? And the more that I've studied him, I think it's a fair assessment to say that to my eyes, he appears like the bread in the middle of the
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Big Mac. Okay, so bear with me for a second. Have any of you ever eaten a Big Mac? Do you know what
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I'm talking about when I say a Big Mac? You know, the patties, the sesame seed bun that's in three pieces, and there's that one in the middle, and you're kind of like, why is that?
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Does that soak up the sauce, or what is that there for? Is it necessary? Is it really necessary?
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It's just extra carbs is what it really is. But um, so what I mean by that is I see like this really robust, meaty, thick account of the life of Abraham.
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Do you see that in the text? As you read Genesis, do you see this robust, intense, like, life of faith of Abraham?
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And then you see, we're at a breaking point where we're about to launch into a robust, meaty accounting of the life of Jacob.
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And in the middle, we've got this one really bizarre, crazy, jacked up account of Isaac offering a blessing to his son, and trying to offer it to the wrong one.
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As a matter of fact, if you go to the Hall of Faith, Hebrews chapter 11, if you're not familiar with that,
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I'd encourage you to read that. It's an awesome section of scripture, but Hebrews chapter 11 talks through the Old Testament characters, and it talks about their faith.
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This account is the only thing mentioned about Isaac. So it's as if this account of him in the darkness sitting there ready to bless the wrong son is the high point of the life of Isaac, according to Hebrews.
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Because, and this is true, we'll see this in the text, because he offered the blessing by faith.
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He trusted that God was actually going to do what he claimed he was going to do, even though he thought he was blessing the other son.
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So he still offers it by faith. He trusts that God is going to accomplish what he's going to accomplish, but he is, this is weird.
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Are you getting what I'm saying in that? Isaac is not above board in this text, and Esau is shown to be compromised in his choice of wives.
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So one day when Isaac is getting up in years, and his eyes have gone blind, he thinks to himself, I'm going to die soon, and I don't know when the day is.
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And who's going to be the one to carry the blessing forward? Well, Rebekah had been told 40 years before this in a prophecy who was going to carry the promise forward.
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She was told it was going to be Jacob. Now, what we have to either believe is that either Isaac is intentionally going against the known will of God, or at the bare minimum he's going against the will of God accidentally, and Rebekah has never told him the prophecy.
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Are you getting what I'm saying? But either way, he is getting ready to bless Esau alone, and that's not going to go well.
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So he calls his oldest son in, calls him in privately, and asks Esau to go out and hunt some game, to prepare a meal so that he can bless him before he dies, so that when he gets some food, he gets, so that he'll get worked up, he really likes, he really likes good food, and so he's going to get excited about that, and he's going to bless his son before he dies.
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And he calls Esau in private to do this. Now, to the ancient reader, this scenario, you have to, whenever you're reading the text, you can't think in terms of, how does this hit me as an
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American, especially these ancient texts, you have to understand what they would have understood as they were reading it in ancient times, and this would have reaped to them.
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They would have gone, what in the world is Isaac doing? Who does he think he is? Does he think he's going to get away with us?
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And we're going, what, he just called his son, said go out and hunt for me and get me some game, I'll bless you. Does that sound like pretty innocuous to us as Americans?
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Like, okay, well yeah, sure you can do that. But what we don't understand is that this pre -death blessing to the sons of your family was a really common occurrence in ancient times.
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It was a thing that was centered on a celebration with the family.
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You would invite the entire family in for this formal, almost kind of like farewell to dad kind of thing, and then he would take each son, depending on their age, on his knee and bless them and offer a blessing to them.
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Did you hear what I said? Each son. That is the culture. As a matter of fact, we're going to see
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Jacob do that later in the book of Genesis, and he's going to take every single one of his kids on his lap and bless them, one by one, all 12 of them.
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We're going to see him do it right, what his dad wasn't willing to do for him. Are you getting what
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I'm saying? Esau, Isaac is ready to take Esau in private alone. He hasn't even talked with his wife about this, and he is going to go off and bless only one of his sons.
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He is ready to completely forget Jacob in this entire process. Isaac is planning to secretively go against God's plan, whether he knows it or not, that's unclear.
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He's willing to overlook Esau's marriage to pagan women. He is ready to ignore
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Jacob altogether in order to offer the formal blessing only to Esau in private.
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So Isaac is at least sketchy. Do you agree with me on that? What he's trying to accomplish here is sketchy at best, and when you consider how much we learned about the relationship of Abraham, like I talked about the
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Big Mac, you know, so much about Abraham and his relationship to God and how little we see of Isaac's relationship with God.
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Scripture really does paint a picture, at least in this particular text, of Isaac being a spiritual loaf.
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It's interesting to note that more is mentioned about Isaac's passion for food than anything to do with his passion for God.
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Did you catch that as I was reading the text? How often does it say that he loved food?
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Did it say it quite a bit? Did you hear anything about his love and his passion for God in the text?
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Completely absent from this, the apex story of this dude's life, and we're talking about a lot about food here, several times in our text
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Isaac's love for food is mentioned, and the word for love there is one of deep relational passion to food.
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Like, English is one of the most lazy languages when it comes to emotions. Did you know that?
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So if you were to study, not study specific languages like go learn French or go Rosetta Stone, you know, Spanish or something like that, but if you were to study how languages work, you would find that English is an awesome language for explaining in detail things, material stuff.
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Okay, so each language, if you were to study all the various languages, they each have some kind of a strength in their ability.
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You know, like the romance languages are really good. Why are they called romance languages if you ever ask yourself that? They're really good at emotions.
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They're really good at expressing feelings, but English is not so good at that. So I say
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I love God, I love my wife, and I love tacos. Okay, and does love have like kind of a stupid range of meaning in the
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English language if I can say, if it's the same word that I apply to the almighty creator of everything and tacos, and I say the same thing, oh,
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I mean, what am I even talking about at that point, right? So love is a really rough word in the
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English language, but Hebrew and Greek are better at it. And you'll just have to trust me on this one, that the
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Hebrew word that's used here means that Isaac has a love affair with food.
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Okay, like this is an uncomfortable word for love here. Like that word ought not to be applied to food, okay?
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This is like romantic ooey gooey kind of love for, it's like, this guy is weird.
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Food really gets him going, okay? And he's really excited about food, and that's a passion of his, a particular passion.
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So this goes beyond, how many of you, if you're just honest, you kind of like a meal. And like the way to a man's heart is his stomach.
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This goes beyond that. I mean, the Hebrew text is explaining in depth this man's deal with food.
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So Esau exits the scene to obey his father, hunt down some awesome game, and then prepare a delicious meal for his father so that he can be blessed.
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But Rebecca has been listening, and I want you to notice this with me. Go ahead and look at the text and look at verse five with me.
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I want you to see the pronoun there yourself. Rebecca listened in, in verse five, to Isaac speaking to his son.
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His son. Who's his son? Esau is his son.
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And now in verse six, go on to verse six and look at the pronoun there. In verse six, Rebecca reports these things, these findings to her son,
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Jacob. How many of you think that there's going to be some problems in this family? How many of you think that favoritism in a family is a good thing?
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And yet in reality, if we're honest, if we're honest, we need to desperately guard our hearts against this in our families.
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That we would treat our family, our children with equity, with fairness, recognizing the different skills and abilities and talents that God has given them, and treating them all with love.
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And that's a challenge, because I can tell you what, we can curse our kids on accident without even meaning to.
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How often has an American father said to his son, why can't you be more like, fill in the blank.
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And you are doing damage to your kids when you say things like that, when you compare them to one another.
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This is a desperate situation in this family. It's a, it's a story with intrigue and twists and all kinds of cool angles.
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And to be quite honest, I love the story. It's like, I mean, how many of you, when you read this, you're just kind of like, wow, that's, that's cool. That's in scripture.
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But there is deep depravity in this as well. There is a warping that's going on in this family.
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It's, I say it tongue in cheek that Jacob was a mama's boy. I think that Jacob was protected from his father by his mom, to a large degree.
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I think that there was a lot of hostility in this household. I think there was frustration in this household and it's being played out in this chapter in the way that we see these people interacting and hatred being, the word hatred, the word bitterness being applied within this family unit.
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They don't seem to be strangers to this kind of frustration. This family is so utterly divided that Isaac doesn't even communicate with his own wife.
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He doesn't tell her his plan to go bless Esau. How does she find out? She eavesdropping.
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She happens to listen in and she hears what's going on. She considers
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Esau as Isaac's son, but Jacob is hers. Do you hear the divisions and rifts in this family?
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It's not like you have to read between the lines to catch it. It's like it's in every line there's division.
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So now verses eight through 13 show Rebecca taking charge. She's an example of a very strong woman in scripture, maybe like the patron saint of strong women.
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But in verse eight, it's clear that she takes command. Look at verse eight with me, look at the words. Now therefore my son go, now therefore my son obey my voice as I command you.
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She is taking charge and everything in this text indicates that Rebecca is using her authority as a mother to get her son to comply with her plan.
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She is pulling her full weight as mom. Time is of the essence. Esau's already exited stage right.
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He's out hunting. As soon as he gets back, he gets blessed. So we don't have much time to spare here.
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We've got to cook some food and cook some good food quick. So she doesn't have a lot of time to feel dissent from Jacob.
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You can disagree with me later. Just go do what I say. She tells him to go get two goats, which may very well, if you've ever thought about this, have you ever thought what was
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Isaac expecting to eat and his goat anywhere near it and it's likely that goat might very well be what
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Esau shows up with. I mean that's pretty common in that era and in that place for them to eat goat and there it is.
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Not only that, goat is pretty gamey anyways and it would pretty much match whatever he's going to come back with. She offers to prepare the food herself, again identifying how much her husband loves himself some food.
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Says it multiple times in the text. It goes overboard to explain this guy's love for food and in verse 10 she explicitly explains her intentions that he would be blessed, that Jacob would be blessed, instead of Esau.
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There's the reveal in verse 10. What is she trying to accomplish? He doesn't even know at this point. Now all of a sudden it snaps into focus.
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Jacob, being such a morally upstanding young man, disagrees with his mom right away. Mom, how could we do this? How could we do this against God?
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How could we take advantage of my blind old father? How could, I mean mom for real, how could you even suggest such a thing?
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Is that what the text says? No. Actually it's a bit ironic that he doesn't have any moral qualms with this at all.
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There is absolutely no disagreement with his mother on her intentions or what she's trying to accomplish, but there is a disagreement and that is what if I get caught?
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How often is that the case? How often is that the thing that holds us back morally?
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Well we've got great morals when there's a good likelihood that we're going to get caught, right? But you put us in secret and what is our heart capable of doing when we think we can get away with it?
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Isaac can no longer see, so Jacob says, of course he can't see, so we're halfway to the, we're halfway done with this deception, right?
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I mean we can take advantage of a blind man, which by the way the Old Testament law declares is abhorrent to God.
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He hates it when a person takes advantage of a blind man, stated directly in the Old Testament covenantal law of Moses.
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Do not take advantage of a blind person for that is abhorrent to God and that's what we see this wonderful bastion of the faith doing here, taking advantage of God.
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So he's blind, we can work with that, but mom, he can still feel and like dude, like I mean
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Esau is like a duck dynasty kind of guy, okay? He's a hairy beast, okay?
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He's got lots of hair and Jacob says, you know, like I'm more of a dancing with the stars kind of guy, okay?
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You know, clean -shaven, a bit manscaped, if you will. Like I picture
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Jacob to be the kind of guy who had an appointment, a standing appointment every Thursday to get his back waxed and that may well have coincided with Esau's bath day, right?
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So Esau is the kind of guy who's taking a bath once a week and Jacob's getting his back waxed.
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So I mean, well actually the text seems to be pretty clear that this is probably natural. I mean I just added that whole back waxing thing.
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It doesn't say it in there, just but Jacob's concern is legitimate in the text.
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It's a legitimate concern. Isaac might touch him and realize he is Jacob and curse him instead of blessing him.
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Is this, is there a lot at stake in this? There is. To totally go from like being blessed by your father to being alienated by your father is at stake for both
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Esau and Jacob. Can you feel the tension in the in the text at this point? But with speed and skill,
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Rebecca deflects the concern saying that she will take the curse on herself and further demands obedience from Jacob.
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Like a mom who would write her child's term paper and say I'll take the punishment but just let me write this for you so that you get a good grade so you can get into college.
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Can't imagine that ever happening. The only thing Jacob does in preparation for this deception is stated in three
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Hebrew words. Rebecca is in charge all the way through. All he does is he goes, he takes, and he brings.
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Goes and takes and brings and those are each one word, I mean three words in Hebrew. That's his contribution to the setup for this deception.
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She is running the show. She prepares Isaac's delicious food. She dresses up Jacob in Esau's clothes.
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She puts the goat skins on his hands and neck. She sets the food in his hands. He's just,
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I mean I picture, okay, she sets the food in his hands and it says run along son go deceive your dad.
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Run along son and kill it. If you could, if you could just make, you know, just sell it, okay.
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I wonder if there wasn't some like practice, you know, working back and forth of like well if he says this then say this and if he says this and I wonder how much she was coaching him in this and of course
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I'm reading into it a little bit but I would assume that there was some kind of interaction with them as she sends him off to go and deceive daddy.
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Anybody see a little bit of a jacked up situation here? Is this messed? Quite a bit.
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Up to this point it might be fair to be critical of Rebecca, but before we assume her motives we need to recognize how messy our own lives can become regarding morality.
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How many of you have ever been caught in a situation where you felt, and I want to be careful to say you felt, like the the only options out, the only way forward was the lesser of two evils?
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Have you ever been there? Raise your hand if you felt like you were there. Okay, now I think that that's a myth.
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I don't think that there's ever really a situation like that where you must sin. I think that the fact of the matter is there the way out in those situations most often we can identify another way out that just seems completely untenable to us.
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Maybe it's because we lose our job. Maybe it's because something else would happen that would be even harder for us and so then we go well that's not an option.
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I guess we have to choose one of these two evil things. Do you see what I'm saying? I mean isn't that most often the case where we could creatively in our mind think of a third way out that might just seem untenable to us because it's too costly.
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I think that's where Rebecca is at here. Before we assume her motives though we need to think through our own lives and figure that out.
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I'm not willing to dismiss her behavior as justified. I do not believe for a second that Rebecca's teaching her son to deceive in this situation is justified or encouraging him and helping to deceive her husband.
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I don't think this is a good thing that she is doing here. I'm not willing to say that all is well that ends well.
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Now who is the one that's supposed to in the end by prophecy receive the blessing? Jacob.
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Jacob by prophecy is the chosen one. He's the one that God chose from before birth.
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He's supposed to be blessed. So who ends up by the end of this text being blessed? Jacob.
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By the end of the text Jacob is indeed blessed. So all's well that ends well, right?
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Well could we possibly try to accomplish God's will through a sinful avenue? Yeah, that's what we've got here.
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Is the will of God still end up being done in this situation? Yes, but it's done eventually through sin and I don't think it had to be done that way.
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I'm not suggesting for a second that she had to do what she did to preserve the covenant. As a matter of fact,
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I'm not sure what her motives really were if you think about what you know about Rebecca just from the text alone. She loves
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Jacob more than she loves Esau, okay? That's in the text. That's earlier in the book of Genesis and then it's kind of spelled out here.
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So is she motivated out of a love for one son over another son? That could be part of it and as messy as that looks that's probably part of her motivation.
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Is she partly motivated out of a desire to preserve the covenant and the promise that God made? Probably. So do you see how like human motivations and God's motivations and different things get all warped in together?
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And I was reading a commentary just to kind of clarify some of this stuff and Warren Wiersbe said and I was just reading it yesterday to kind of clear some of this up in my mind as I sent out my sermon and people respond to it and I was kind of trying to wrestle through some of this stuff and Warren Wiersbe says that Rebecca overstepped what
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God would have desired for her and that it's quite possible that if she had just let this ride God would have shown up and defended his own, his own.
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He would have defended Jacob on his own. I mean did she have to deceive in order to accomplish this or was there another way that God could have worked to provide the blessing to Jacob?
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Are you getting what I'm saying in that? And I think that that makes that makes sense to me. Genuine belief, genuinely believe that she did what she did to honor what
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God had promised at least in part to the birth of her children. But then we've got to consider Isaac in this situation.
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Isaac is not even remotely leading his family in the covenant. Do you see that? Do you see his lack of leadership in this entire scenario?
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There he sits in the darkness awaiting another tasty meal. Isaac right now in this text stands as the biggest roadblock to the covenant being fulfilled as God has promised through Jacob.
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And I would suggest to you that sometimes we are the biggest roadblock to the things that God wants to do in us and through us.
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Did you hear me on that? I think sometimes we are the biggest roadblock to things that God wants to do in us and through us.
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But hear me carefully. You cannot stop God. Do not for a second think that I'm implying that you as a roadblock are anything to God.
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That you can put yourself against God but can he go through you if he wants to? Can he go around you if he wants to?
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Can he go over you if he wants to? It's a real question, can't he? Yeah.
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So do you see what I'm saying about this? This whole idea about you being a roadblock to what God wants to do in you or through you is a bit of a different way of looking at it.
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I'm suggesting that we can put ourselves in a position where God will have to accomplish his will despite you.
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You getting what I'm saying? He will accomplish his will. He's going to get it done, but he might have to do it despite you.
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And that is what I see happening here with Isaac. We can stand with God seeking his will and promoting his plans or we can do it our way and watch
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God go around us or over us or through us and sometimes in all honesty he's got to knock us out of the way.
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I don't want to put myself in that situation. Do you want to be in a position where you are in opposition to what God wants to accomplish and you are, you're something he needs to go around, something he needs to go over or something he needs to knock out of the way to get done what he wants to get accomplished?
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Rebecca is taking control here in the text. She's trying to preserve the covenant of God and we see a history of women in the chosen line of God who try to make promises come to pass and in the process they achieve heartache and pain for themselves.
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I think Rebecca is a lot like Sarah. Sarah offering Hagar to her husband to get the promise accomplished.
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Rebecca's solution here will also, just like Sarah, will result in her own pain and loss.
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But now it's Jacob's turn to shine. Mom has shooed him out. He's got the food. Okay mom, what do I do now? And he's on his way, but it's his time to shine, his moment to act a part.
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He's his part in the play is to act Esau and he is going to nail it. This is in his wheelhouse.
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This is a nice floater over the outside edge that he's just going to take down the first baseline and go yard with.
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He excels at lying. He's good at it. Okay, let's just say that. He lies.
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He's good at deep deception and he lies to his father. He blasphemes twice. He adamantly tells
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Isaac to his face, I am Esau. Okay, there's a lot of literary tension in this part of the story.
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Kind of, I actually thought several times as I was preparing this week about Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf.
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You know, come a little closer and is that, you know, is that really you, grandma? And what big teeth you have and all that stuff.
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Is that really you, Jacob? Is that, are you really, are you really Esau, I mean?
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And so there's a lot of tension going on here. His father isn't quite dead yet and appears to be immediately suspicious.
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How did you find the game so quickly, his first question. I don't know if Jacob had rehearsed an answer to that or not, but he immediately has a reply.
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His father was expecting dinner and he shows up with lunch and so he says immediately that it was
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God, your God, Isaac has provided me with this game.
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Jacob is good at being bad and he invokes the name of God in his lie which amounts to blasphemy.
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He credits God with the speed of his hunting. But there's a subtle observation worth noting if you look down at verse 20.
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Whose God does Jacob say helped him? What's the pronoun there? Whose God is this? Your God, speaking to his father, your
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God, not our God, not my God, but the
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God of his father, Isaac's God. I believe that this phrase is a sign of what we're going to find out explicitly later in Genesis in a couple of chapters.
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Jacob is not yet willing to call Isaac's God, his father's God, his
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God. He's not there yet. I believe that this is an indicator that Isaac's sons have not embraced his faith and although we cannot guarantee that, is there any guarantees that if you raise your kids in godliness they're going to walk in the ways of godliness?
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Can we make that happen? No, but ought we to be doing things in the lives of our kids to instill in them faith in this awesome and almighty
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God who has provided a means of salvation for them? Even those, this family who are the chosen by God, the ones chosen to carry on his blessing to all humanity are barely hanging on to a relationship with him in this messed up text.
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The tension builds further as Isaac says, come close, I want to feel you, to know that you really are Esau because the voice is that of Jacob.
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Can you feel the tension in the room? Am I going to get away with this? Is this going to work? What's going to happen? You see
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Isaac's ears are working fine but then once he touches him, he feels the goat skin and his fears are eased.
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I think that shows one of two things, either Isaac had gone so far down the road of age that he no longer can feel well or that Esau was indeed a hairy beast.
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Okay, if the goat skin works, he was uber hairy. Okay, I mean this guy needed to get waxed.
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So this is like, yeah, this guy is hairy. But Isaac is so confused that he asks one final time in verse 24 and Jacob lies to his face again.
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I am, he says. Are you really Esau? I am. Isaac digs into his lunch because probably this whole conversation was getting boring because there's food on the plate.
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So he digs into his lunch, has some wine to soften the mood and then he, by what would have been common in the pre -death blessing, he asks his son to come forward and kiss him.
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And what Jacob gives it amounts to, in essence, a kiss of betrayal. A kiss would have been a routine part of this blessing but in the case, in this case, the kiss is a tool of deception because as he draws close the wonderful field, the wonderful funk of the field from Esau's clothing hits
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Isaac's nostrils and he gives him an agricultural blessing because apparently
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Esau commonly smelled like agriculture. Okay, so you can do whatever you want with that but it's certainly his clothes have some funk to them.
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And so immediately Isaac smells him, draws close, he kisses him on the cheek, gets close, he smells it and then immediately begins to bless him.
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And there's a three -part blessing Isaac offers to his son. He gives him agricultural success.
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He gives him domination over others and that's two parts. Others being other nations, whole nations.
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He says the nations are going to bow to you as well as your siblings, your immediate family are going to bow to you.
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And then he provides to, of course, we know Jacob instead of Esau, curses to anyone who curses him and blessings to anyone who blesses him.
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When you remember that Isaac was thinking he was giving things to Esau, you need to recognize how equally deplorable what
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Isaac is doing is to what Rebecca and Jacob are trying to do. He is also trying to deceive his family.
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He is also trying to bless Esau in private alone. And I don't know how you measure those on a scale.
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What Isaac is doing and what Rebecca is doing, I just don't think we're meant to understand from the text who's more at fault in this.
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I don't think that's really ultimately a healthy question for us to ask. All of the family are acting deplorably.
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They're all behaving poorly. Actually, consider one who doesn't seem to be doing too bad.
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Esau is out in the field doing what he loves. He's got a ball in his hand and he's hunting some game. He's just having a good time out there.
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Dad told him to go hunt him some game, prepare some food. He's like, I'm on it, and there he is. The blessing concludes.
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Jacob exits stage left. Esau has been blessed with finding some game. He enters stage right.
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I think this is almost made for, made for stage, kind of. The timing in this is like, you know, he just, just as he steps off,
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Esau shows up and is ready to receive the blessing from his father. He's prepared.
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He prepares the delicious game, steps in. Isaac is clearly confused, and when he finds out he's speaking with Esau, the text says literally, he trembled a very great trembling.
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That's what the text says in Hebrew. He trembled a very great trembling. The Hebrew of this text cannot get any more extreme in the emotions of Isaac and Esau expressed in this text.
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The Hebrew goes over the top to explain how shocking and how loud the wail is from Esau and how emotional this moment is and where we can remove ourselves from the situation and kind of be like, well, this is an interesting story.
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Can you feel the emotion on Esau? Can you feel the trembling of that old man
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Isaac as he realizes he's been deceived? And not only has he been deceived, but he has indeed blessed the wrong son.
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We're going to get there in a second to explain what's the significant, what's the big deal with that? Why is that even significant?
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Can't he just recant that blessing? How many of you thought that before? Don't you have more than one blessing? How many of you are just, you're creative enough to think of things that Isaac could say right now to bless
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Esau? You're like going there in your mind. You're like, well, couldn't he like just say, well, you'll have lots of good stuff too?
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And wouldn't that be enough, right? I mean, have you thought that before? Like, what's the deal with this?
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There's more to it, and we're going to get there here in just a second. But Esau, Esau's cry, Esau's crazy, extreme cry, exceedingly great, according to the text, exceedingly great and bitter cry, bless me, even me also, my father.
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And I don't picture that to be just a one -off. He just said that really loud once. I picture him pleading, weeping, crying, begging, screaming, bless me, bless me, bless me, father.
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Give me something good. Give me something for my life. Tell me that you love me. Tell me that you can give me good things. Tell me that I will be something.
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His father said, I've got nothing for you. I've given it all to your brother who stole it from you.
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The very nature of the blessing being offered here is patriarchal. It is not the same as you sitting down and offering wishful thoughts to your offspring.
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Something more significant, more covenantal, more relationship, more relational, and the promise of God down through from Abraham being passed along to Isaac, then now being passed along to Jacob.
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This is a pledge, a vow, a commitment. He has offered to him a covenant blessing in the name of the
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Almighty. To reverse this would be similar to breaking an oath or breaking a vow before the
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Almighty God. He has passed along the mantle of family leadership.
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He has passed along the formal blessing of God declared openly to Abraham and then passed to Isaac and now it has gone to Jacob and it cannot be repealed.
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And not only that, but the nature of the blessing he has offered make it particularly difficult for Isaac to say anything to Esau that's going to help.
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I've made you his servant. I've made you his slave. I've given him everything that he needs to sustain him.
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Esau has now been pledged to serve his brother and Isaac of course figures out right away that it was Jacob.
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He had his guesses anyways and now that's confirmed. Esau then accuses
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Jacob of stealing his birthright and and living up to his name, which is just a little off of the word cheater or swindler or deceiver.
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And so Jacob, so Esau accuses his brother, yeah he just lived up to his name. He steals. The desperation in Esau is deep and painful and the word used is hatred.
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He hates his brother. Any of you think maybe I can understand why?
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Anybody, if you're just being honest, you can kind of like, I get that in the text. I can see where Esau might be a little angry.
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He has in one moment lost any significant role in the future blessing of his family. He went from being the guy one moment to being the servant the next.
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And Isaac is only able to utter a repeat of his blessing to Jacob but gives one glimmer of hope that eventually
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Esau will come out from underneath the yoke of his brother. Oh great. So you're going to serve him for a while and then eventually you will cast off his leadership over you.
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Esau is told, it's prophesied here, that he will be a man of the sword and it proves to be true that he is indeed a violent man of the sword.
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Anytime we see his offspring mentioned, Edom is the nation that comes from him and they are seen to be a warrior nation, a militant people group.
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Edom. Whenever you see Edom throughout the rest of scripture, they are the direct descendants of Esau.
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Esau proves though that he can be a good guy. He is patient in his grudge. Okay, so he takes a step back.
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Okay, I've just lost everything. Compose yourself. Okay, what can I do? What can I do?
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What can I? Well, okay. The days for my father to die are coming soon and then
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I can kill my brother. Okay, okay. I feel better now. Alright, so he, what a great guy to be willing to wait because he doesn't want to keep that on his dad too, the death of his other son and so he's just kind of like, well, you know,
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I'll wait until dad dies and then I'll take out my brother. Great. Wonderful.
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But in his enthusiasm, his plan leaks out and gets back to his mommy. And by the way, the way that his mom replies to it makes it clear that he was taking comfort in the death of his brother.
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So it's kind of like, man, you've lost everything, Esau, but you seem to be getting a good night's sleep. What's going on there? And he's like, yeah, every time
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I set my head on my pillow, I think at night, I close my eyes and I'm like troubled by this and I just think, I just think about my brother dead and I just go to sleep.
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I get comfort from that. I relax when I think about that. You see the mess here?
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He takes comfort in the notion. His only solace in life is the thought, yeah, one day I'll get to kill my brother. This is messed.
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Messed up big time. But in his enthusiasm, I said, his plan leaks, it gets back to mommy. She warns
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Jacob that he needs to get out of Dodge quickly. She tells him to go stay with her brother until things blow over and little does she know that in the text, the word that's used for a little while actually has in Hebrew the word days, a few days.
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We could translate it that way and we probably should. So go stay with my brother Laban for a few days and I will send for you after your brother's anger subsides.
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And it's going to be 20 years before Jacob ever returns. And in that time, Rebecca will die.
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She'll never see her, her son Jacob again on the planet. Did she achieve heartache for herself?
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Did she achieve frustration in this plan? Yes, she did indeed. Her fear, her fear in the text is stated that she will lose both sons.
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And in the end, that seems to be exactly what happens to her. In verse 46 though,
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Rebecca is still at it. She's still manipulating. She's still trying to get her way. It appears though, everything in the text, the way that it's spelled out that Isaac didn't obey,
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I mean, I'm sorry, that Jacob didn't obey his mom in this one. He followed her to a T in the other thing. But now she says, go, you know, get out of Dodge.
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And he's like, I kind of like it around here. Or whatever was his motivation. And so she has to pull out the big guns and try to convince
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Isaac that it's his idea to send Jacob away. And so she actually goes to him and still in her manipulating fashion, comes up with a way to have
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Isaac think it's his idea to send Jacob away to go find a wife. She says, these Hittite women, if he marries one of them,
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I think I'll just die. I just can't stand this anymore. These daughter -in -laws are driving me crazy.
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And if we end up with one more Hittite as a daughter -in -law, just, I can't survive. And so she puts the pressure on Isaac and Isaac caves in and sends away
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Jacob. Pretty good story. It provides the tension, the drama, the twist, the crazy timing, you know, all of the intrigue of like a really good story.
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Like I said, made for a movie or whatever. But what do we do with this? How many of you are familiar with this?
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You've heard this story before. I'm not really talking about a story you haven't heard before. But have you ever applied this?
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Have you applied this to your life? I mean, most of us could tell the story. We could tell it to our kids. We could even remember the flannel graphs and stuff.
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But have you ever applied it? You ever thought, what do I do with it? We should always think that when we encounter scripture, what should
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I do with this? And I want to point your attention back to the first question that I asked, the question that I was hoping you were thinking about all along in this.
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What kind of people does God choose? What kind of people does God use to accomplish his purposes?
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Of the characters in this text, who would you select to be in your family? Of the characters in this text, if you wanted to set up a nation to show your glory, and you could pick people to start that nation, which ones of these would you choose?
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Who would you be picking out in here? Isaac? He appears to be pretty lax.
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There he sits, old and spent, looking forward to some tasty food. He's willing to throw it all away to bless his favorite son.
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His appetite drives him. His lack of leadership has set up the whole mess to begin with. Well, what about Rebecca?
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Well, maybe Rebecca, right? She's got a plan. She works the plan with precision. She's really good at getting stuff done.
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Would you agree with me on that? Does she prove herself to be pretty efficient? She gets it done fast. She's like, boom, boom, do this, do that, do that.
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She's got the management down. I believe that she has at least in part the covenant in mind here, but unfortunately she is willing to be ruthless in her drive to get her way and to get things done.
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How many of you think that a mother that steals from one son to give to another son, is that an issue?
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Or that she encourages her son to deceive her husband, his father? Is that a problem? Does Rebecca have some issues?
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God forbid that our families might look like this. Would you choose
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Jacob? Surely he's the victim here. He's caught between obeying his mommy and doing what's right, and she's commanding him.
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She's telling him to do this. So honor your father and mother, right? He's dishonoring his father, right?
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So how does that work? But surely he's the one that's caught, right?
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But before we chalk him up as a victim, remember how adept he is at lying. Remember his blasphemy and incorporating
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God in his lies. He is deceitful, and he is going to prove in his life to be pretty good at it.
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It lives up to his name. If I'm honest, I picture myself most like Esau in the text.
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I give myself the benefit of the doubt, right? He's just doing his own thing when wham, everything is taken from him.
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And of course, then his sin is justified, right? Because his anger and his rage and his murderous intent, well, we could cut him some slack on that because we could imagine how it might feel.
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You know, somebody does something bad. How many of you, if you're with me on this, you have an easy time justifying your sin because somebody else made you do it?
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Anybody ever been there? Somebody else always is making me sin, and if they would just stop it, then
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I wouldn't sin, right? You see how maybe we could take the side of Esau on this and kind of lean in his direction, and when
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I sin, I can always work around the justification to being someone else's fault. Esau did indeed have his blessing stolen, and there he sits plotting murder.
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Poor, poor Esau. But did you hear what I said? He's plotting murder.
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There's another character that we should conclude the text by discussing. That is the Almighty God.
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He is not absent. He didn't take the day off. It's not like, oh, I just step out for a second and you see what my people do.
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I gotta get back in here and get things back on track because they mess everything up. Is God in here? Is God working in this mess?
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God is advancing his covenant promise through the avenue of a desperately dysfunctional family.
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He's getting his will done. What kind of people does our God use? Lazy and lethargic men like Isaac?
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Manipulative, demanding women like Rebecca? Deceptive and opportunistic men like Jacob?
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Murderous, victimized men like Esau? In this case, he happens to select the deceptive and opportunistic man,
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Jacob. Not because his sin is less, but because God has the right to choose. And I'd like to point something clear out to you.
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God did not choose Jacob at this event. God did not choose Jacob because everybody else in his family was operating poorly.
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And so he just said, you know, well, I'll take Jacob because he's the least of the sinners. God chose
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Jacob when? Before he was even born.
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He didn't have time to prove his strength. He didn't have time to prove his morality. He didn't have time to prove his ethics.
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He didn't have time to prove that he was a covenant kind of guy. God chose him before he was even born.
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Before he had taken a breath. But I love this. Because I love where we're going in this text.
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God is not going to allow Jacob to stay deceptive and opportunistic. Over the years, we're going to get a chance, not over the years in real time, over the years of his life.
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We're not going to be in this for years. Over the months that I'm preaching on this, we're going to get a chance to see transformation in the man
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Jacob. Right now, Yahweh is Jacob's father's God, your
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God, he says. But we will get a chance to see Yahweh become Jacob's God.
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And it's a powerful thing to see. I'm glad that God can make beauty out of ashes. Are you glad for that?
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I think if you're here and you are in with Christ, then you know what I'm talking about. Because he's taken the ashes and the messes of your life and he has forgiven you and washed you and cleansed you if you are in Christ.
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He can use fickle, feeble, sin -cursed people like you and me to advance his kingdom. It's an awesome thing.
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I'm glad that he doesn't leave us this way. He doesn't leave us in the mess that he finds us. He doesn't ignore our sin, but he has made a way for us to be cleansed.
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And from the place of cleansing, we move out to know him better. We move out to walk with him. We move out to grow in faith day by day with him.
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We come to a communion this morning, in conclusion, to remember that our sin required a decisive sacrifice.
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Our sin required, we needed hope. The hope of Rebekah, the hope of Isaac, the hope of Jacob, the hope of Esau.
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The only hope provided to sinful humanity is Christ, that God would provide a way because we cannot do it.
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We can't accomplish it on our own. So the only hope that we have as sinful humanity is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
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And the fact of the matter is, I fear that you could listen to this message and go, well, I guess I'll just keep going on sinning and God can use me in my sin.
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I'll just keep doing what I do and God will just get his will done and it'll be awesome. But God doesn't look at our sin, throw up his hands and say, you know, people will be people.
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God looks at our sins, throws up his hands, doesn't just say, well, no big deal.
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No, it's a very big deal. He died for you and me. At the cross, he made a way for us to be forgiven.
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And in the cracker, we remember the body of Jesus broken for us. And in the juice, remember his blood that was spilled out for us on the cross.
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If you've asked Jesus to be your Lord and Savior, then please join in together in taking communion this morning as we pass it.
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But let's go out from this place rejoicing that God is a merciful God who can use us despite our messes.
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And I want you to ask this question as we come to communion and then begin to walk out of this place to this next week.
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Are you willing to let God use you? Are you willing to let God transform you?
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you for these examples.
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They point out to me, I see a lot of myself in this text and they point out to me that you are a
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God who is faithful to your promises. You keep them. And you promise things like, for your children there is therefore now no condemnation.
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For those that are in Christ. Father, what a joy it is to know that you are a
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God who keeps your promises. Father, as we look at the messes in this text, they're just not far off of our messes.
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They're not far off of the way that we live our lives and the types of things that we do. And so, Father, I ask that you would help us to order our families correctly.
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That you would help the men here to take a step up from where Isaac was in this scenario and to take leadership in the spiritual things in their household.
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Father, that you would protect moms and dads from taking sides and treating kids unfairly and things like that.
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Father, that you would work in our hearts, but most importantly that you would impress on our heart the glory and the joy of being used by you.
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Father, that you would not allow us to have an attitude that we have to accomplish it and that sin might be an avenue for us to try to get things done.
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Father, we know that you are not light on sin. The cross is evidence of that. And even as we come to communion, we remember that our sin is very costly.
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It's not something to take lightly. And so, Father, as we have an opportunity to take the juice that reminds us of the blood of Christ and the cracker that reminds us of his body,
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Father, that you would help us to remember that great cost, but also your great love.