Genesis 26:34-27:46 Choosing the Messes

The Dysfunction of Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, and Esau

Welcome to the podcast of Recast Church in Madawan, Michigan, where you can grow in faith, community, and service. This message is by lead pastor Don Filsack and is a part of the series Beginning with God, Walking Through the Book of Genesis.

If you would like to contact us, please visit us on the web at recastchurch .com.

Here's Pastor Don. Well, good morning. Welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsack. 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.

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.

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.

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. 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, I want you to contemplate and consider this question. What kind of people does 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 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.

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.

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. 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.

But the problem, as we're going to see in our text this morning, is that God has no good people to use. That's the reality, isn't it? Does he have any truly good people to choose from on the face of the planet?

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. 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.

As God seeks to accomplish anything through his people, he only has messed up, jacked up people to choose from, people like us. And so as we come to this text this morning, we're going to find a people that are messed up and jacked up.

That's the reality of what it is. We're going to look at a text in the Old Testament, picking up where we left off in the book of Genesis. We've taken a few months off of there. We were extensively in the book of Genesis last year.

We're going to be wrapping it up this year. But even the chosen family of God was crazy dysfunctional. 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.

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 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 Esau, and then there's the goat, and he's preparing the meal or whatever. And just, if you don't have any clue what 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. Other than that, basically a static story. But that's, you know, as we think through that story, and we we think through the flannelgraph type of thing that we that we deal with, I think some of us in reality, we have a mindset that we want our Bible characters to be perfect.

We want them to be superheroes. And so some of you want that, and some of you were raised with that, and so you kind of have this this vision of these people who were just doing everything right. And man, if I could just be like Isaac.

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, 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.

We're familiar with the story, many of us, Jacob and Esau. And yet, as I studied this text deeply this week, I found joy welling up in me. A joy that that centers on not the messes and the crud, 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. But this story reminds me that we serve a God who meets us in our messes.

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. He works through human history, and he is accomplishing his will, even in the most bizarre of human interactions.

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 Bibles to Genesis chapter 26, and we're at the very end, 26 verse 34. 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. That's the 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.

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. 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.

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 Scriptures, to actually get it to where we're thinking about it.

So I'm gonna read this in its entirety. 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. 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. When Esau was 40 years old, he took Judith, the daughter of Beri the Hittite, to be his wife, and Basemath, the daughter of Elan the Hittite, and they made life bitter for Isaac and Rebekah.

When Isaac was old and his eyes were dim, so that he could not see, he called 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.

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.

Now Rebekah was listening when Isaac spoke to his son Esau. So when Esau went to the field to hunt for game and bring it, Rebekah 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 Lord before I die.

Now therefore, my son, obey my voice as I command you. 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, and you shall bring it to your father to eat, so that he may bless you before he dies.

But Jacob said to Rebekah, his mother, behold, my brother Esau is a hairy man and I am a smooth man. Perhaps my father will feel me and I shall seem to be mocking him and bring a curse upon myself and not a blessing.

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.

Then Rebekah took the best garments of Esau, her older son, which were with her in the house and put them on Jacob, her younger son. 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 Jacob. Now he went in to his father and said, my father, and he said, here I am, who are you, my son? 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. But Isaac said to his son, how is it that you have found it so quickly, my son? He answered, because the Lord, your 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 Esau or not. So Jacob went near to Isaac, his father, who felt him and said, the voice is 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 Esau's hands. So he blessed him. He said, are you really my son Esau? He answered, I am. Then he said, bring it near to me that I may eat of my son's game and bless you.

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. 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 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. 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.

Cursed be everyone who curses you and blessed be everyone who blesses you. As soon as Isaac had finished blessing Jacob, when Jacob had scarcely gone out from the presence of Isaac, his father Esau, his brother came in from his hunting.

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. His father Isaac said to him, who are you?

He answered, I am your son, your firstborn Esau. 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.

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. But he said, your brother came deceitfully and he has taken away your blessing.

Esau said, is he not rightly named Jacob? For he has cheated me these two times. He took away my birthright and behold, now he has taken away my blessing. Then he said, have you not reserved a blessing for me?

Isaac answered and said to Esau, behold, I have made him Lord over you and all his brothers. I have given to him for servants and with grain and wine, 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? 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.

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. 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. Then I will kill my brother Jacob. But the words of Esau, her older son, were told to Rebekah. 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.

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, until your brother's anger turns away from you and he forgets what you have done to him.

Then I will send to bring you from there. Why should I be bereft of you both in one day? Then Rebekah said to Isaac, I loathe my life because of the 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?

Let's pray. Father, we come to a text this morning that's messed up. There's a lot of issues going on. There's a lot of family behaving poorly. 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.

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 so we stand here and we're 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, 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.

May the power of your spirit rest in us and meet us here in our hearts as we seek to bring honor and glory to you through our singing. Father, that it would not just be, again, our exercise of our vocal cords, but that we would encounter you as you truly are high, exalted, majestic, lifted up in our Savior.

Father, move in us, transform us, change us, that we might worship with hearts that are devoted to you this morning. I ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. Make sure you have your Bibles open to Genesis chapter 27.

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 going through the details.

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. 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. There's all kinds of interactions and stuff that's going on. Everything in the text takes place in the context of family. 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, 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.

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, Abraham.

He was a man called out by God. And God made a promise to Abraham that if he would take him, Yahweh, to be his God, then he would give him, he would fulfill these promises. There was a threefold promise.

He said, I'm gonna make your offspring into a great nation. I'm gonna give that offspring a great land to occupy. And in the process of giving them that great land, that great land is going to be a shelter for them on down to, through the ages to the point where eventually, one of the offspring from your line is going to become a blessing to all nations.

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 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.

Now, God made it clear though, his son, Isaac, his second born son, Isaac, was the one through whom that promise was going to pass. And that in essence, he was gonna be taking one of each child and then there was gonna be a string of, in the midst of this, that the blessing was gonna come through one through one through one and the offspring was gonna come, obviously hit from a line of descent.

Abraham died, we read about that in the text. Isaac was miraculously provided a wife named Rebecca. Remember that Abraham near death sends one of his servants back to his relatives back in Haran. He says, I don't want you to marry a Canaanite woman.

I want you to marry one of my people. And so he sends the servant back. He sits by a well. While he's sitting there at the well, he says, 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 a bucket provides me with water and offers to water my camel too. May she be the one that you choose for my servant Isaac to be his wife. And Rebecca comes along. 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, 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.

So it wasn't just like a small thing. And so then Isaac gets a wife named Rebecca. God blesses them along the way. Two boys come along. As a matter of fact, two twin boys, Esau and Jacob, are born to Rebecca and Isaac.

Esau was the first born. 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.

He would be the blessed child. Now, if you notice a theme, God shows Abraham, second born, and then he chooses 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?

God is not a God who is tied to our social customs, is he? He doesn't just say, okay, well, that's the way you do things in America, so I'm gonna do things that way too, right? I mean, he is God and he is sovereign and he is making choices and choosing.

I can say that it seems like God likes second born children because I'm a second born child. Oh, that wasn't fair. How many of you are second born kids? You guys know what 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.

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. And so where 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.

And yet God is saying, none of that business, none of that what you think is best, but how about we go with what 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?

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 Esau, but Jacob is a mama's boy.

Jacob is a mama's boy, Daddy favors Esau. How many of you see in that already a recipe for problems? 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 Hittite women.

Okay, well, I mean, it's just part of the story. You know, we kind of could go on, but the fact of the matter is the Hittites are a subgroup of the Canaanites whom God told Abraham to not let his son marry.

Uh-oh, I guess maybe there's an issue here then. It's not just merely a telling us that Esau married two 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 Canaanite woman.

And yet Esau takes two. I do not think that it's reading too much in the text to see that both 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.

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 American marriage where you fall in love and you date and then you kind of just decide whether you're gonna get married or not, you gotta remember that in the culture everything was arranged, 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 Hittite women, particularly from a covenant perspective.

Esau, who sold his birthright for a bowl of stew, has showed himself to be impatient and is actually to some degree taking matters into his own hands one way or the other. So I think both Isaac and Esau are painted in a bad light, and I wanna be careful because I recognize that I could really step on some of your toes.

You go, hey, Isaac was a patriarch, a man of the faith, a man of the covenant, and so some of you, again, 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, but again, God isn't recording for us the perfect people that he used.

And does Isaac have a relationship with God? Yes. Is it a fallen, broken relationship with God? Yes, and we're gonna see some messes here. In verse 35, we're left with some kind of ambiguous frustration between Esau's wives and his parents.

We've got an in-law issue here right off the bat. I've got great in-laws. I'm sure you do too, right, all of us? No laughs? 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.

There's not much imagination required in that at all. As a matter of fact, Esau has just married two pagan idol-worshiping women, so that's gonna 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 and Esau and his wives.

Are there problems in this family? There's problems in this family just to begin with. Now, like I said, out of the chute, 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 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?

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 Big Mac, okay?

So bear with me for a second. Have any of you ever eaten a Big Mac? Do you know what 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?

Does that soak up the sauce, or what is that there for? Is it necessary? Is it really necessary? It's just extra carbs is what it really is. But so what I mean by that is I see like this really robust, meaty, thick account of the life of Abraham.

Do you see that in the text? As you read Genesis, do you see this robust, intense, like life of faith of Abraham? 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.

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. As a matter of fact, if you go to the Hall of Faith, Hebrews chapter 11, if you're not familiar with that, 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. 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.

Because, and this is true, we'll see this in the text, because he offered the blessing by faith. He trusted that God was actually gonna do what he claimed he was gonna do even though he thought he was blessing the other son.

So he still offers it by faith. He trusts that God is gonna accomplish what he's gonna accomplish, but he is, this is weird. 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.

So one day when Isaac is getting up in years and his eyes have gone blind, he thinks to himself, I'm gonna die soon, and I don't know when the day is. And who's gonna be the one to carry the blessing forward?

Well, Rebekah had been told 40 years before this in a prophecy who was gonna carry the promise forward. She was told it was gonna 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.

Are you getting what I'm saying? But either way, he is getting ready to bless Esau alone, and that's not gonna go well. 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 gonna get excited about that, and he's going to bless his son before he dies.

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 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 reeked to them.

They would have gone, what in the world is Isaac doing? Who does he think he is? Does he think he's gonna get away with this? 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? 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.

It was a thing that was centered on a celebration with the family. 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, you know, depending on their age, on his knee, and bless them and offer a blessing to them.

Did you hear what I said? Each son. That is the culture. As a matter of fact, we're gonna see Jacob do that later in the book of Genesis, and he's gonna take every single one of his kids on his lap and bless them, one by one, all 12 of them.

We're gonna see him do it right, what his dad wasn't willing to do for him. Are you getting what 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 gonna go off and bless only one of his sons. 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.

He's willing to overlook Esau's marriage to pagan women. He is ready to ignore Jacob altogether in order to offer the formal blessing only to Esau in private. 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 Big Mac, so much about Abraham and his relationship to God and how little we see of Isaac's relationship with God.

Scripture really does paint a picture, at least in this particular text, of Isaac being a spiritual loaf. It's interesting to note that more is mentioned about Isaac's passion for food than anything to do with his passion for God.

Did you catch that as I was reading the text? How often does it say that he loved food? Did it say it quite a bit? Did you hear anything about his love and his passion for God in the text? 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, Isaac's love for food is mentioned. And the word for love there is one of deep relational passion to food. Like, English is one of the most lazy languages when it comes to emotions.

Did you know that? 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.

So each language, if you were to study all the various languages, they each have some kind of a strength in their ability. You know, like the Romance languages are really good. Why are they called Romance languages?

Have you ever asked yourself that? They're really good at emotions. They're really good at expressing feelings. But English is not so good at that. So I say, 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 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, I mean, what am I even talking about at that point?