“Genealogical Irony” – FBC Morning Light (1/9/2024)

Well, a good Tuesday morning to you. Today in our Bible reading, we're reading in Genesis chapters 25 through 28, and we're actually taking a couple of brief detours into 1 Chronicles chapter 1. And again, I remind you we're reading through the Bible chronologically, and if you'd like to follow that chronological plan, you can go to our church website, faithbaptiststerling .com, click on the menu bar to the tab Articles and Devotions, and the Bible reading plan.

There's a link to click on. You go to that link, it opens up a new page, and the plan is divided into four quarters, and you can download any one of those quarters, follow along, print it off if I have it for yourself, or even look at it on the internet and on our website, follow that way, whatever you choose.

Anyway, so I want to point out, yesterday I mentioned, I referred to the promise that God made to Abraham that he would inherit the land of Canaan, and 62 years passed before he got the first installment into that promise, the fulfillment of that promise, and that amounted to a burial plot, a graveyard, a cemetery, if you will.

Well, today there's another aspect of that promise that seems like, man, is this ever going to be fulfilled? And it's the contrast between the descendants of Ishmael, Ishmael's genealogy, and the genealogy of the descendants of Abraham.

Again, I point you back to the promise to Abraham, the Abrahamic Covenant. God said to Abraham, I'm gonna make your offspring, he takes him out at nighttime, says, look up at the heavens, count the stars.

If you can count the stars, that's how many offspring you're gonna have. And that's quite a promise, and basically what God was saying is, you're going to be incredibly fruitful. Your descendants will be an innumerable host.

Now, with that in mind, with that promise in mind, we come to Genesis chapter 25, and there's this record of the genealogy of Ishmael. So verse 12 says, this is the genealogy of Ishmael, Abraham's son, whom Hagar, the Egyptian, bore to Abraham.

Now remember that, you know, Abraham had this son Ishmael, wasn't the way God intended it, planned it. God promised that the covenant would come through a descendant, a son, from Abraham and Sarah, and that son, of course, was Isaac.

So these are the descendants of Ishmael, and you read through the the names of the sons of Ishmael, and there are several of them, there's several names that are given there. Firstborn of Ishmael, Nebajoth, and Kedar, Abdeel, Mibsom, and so on and so forth, down through verse 15.

Verse 16 says the sons of Ishmael were, these were their names, by their towns and their settlements, twelve princes according to the nations, and Ishmael dies. And then verse 19 says, this is the genealogy of Isaac.

Remember, Isaac is the covenant promised heir, that the descendants of Abraham are going to come through Isaac, and they're going to be as innumerable as the stars. This is the genealogy of Isaac, Abraham's son.

Abraham begot Isaac, and that's it. That's it. And then it moves into a description of a problem that Isaac and his wife Rebekah had, that is exactly the same problem that Abraham and Sarah had, and that is, they couldn't have any children.

They could not have any children. It's ironic that the difficulty that Abraham and Isaac had in bearing children, and that is both Sarah and Rebekah were barren, until God miraculously intervened in their behalf.

Isaac appeals to the Lord and pleads with the Lord to give him a son, to give him children, and the Lord graciously does so. And Rebekah gets pregnant, and she's pregnant with twins, Jacob and Esau. And then, in verses 27 through 34 of chapter 25, Genesis 25, you see the sovereign hand of God, that He is in control not only of the womb, but of the fruit of the womb, as these two babies in the womb are fighting with each other, they're wrestling with one another.

And Rebekah wants an explanation, what's going on? What's going on with these two children? And the Lord explains, the Lord gives an answer to that question, and He says to her, two nations are in your womb, two peoples shall be separated from your body.

One people shall be stronger than the other, and the older shall serve the younger. The Lord says, this is the way it's going to be. And the reason that He can say that is that He is sovereignly in control of these two babies that are going to be born, Jacob and Esau.

Esau ends up being the older, Jacob the younger, and it is through Jacob that the promises are going to come. Again, we're going to see more about the nature of the fulfillment of God's promises in the days ahead.

But for right now, I want us to just note how ironic it is, the way God works, according to the way we think. We would think that when God promised Abraham that his son was going to be the father of a great nation, that Abraham would have a whole bunch of sons, and those sons would have a whole bunch of sons, and before you know it, the family of Abraham would be just an innumerable host.

But that's not the way God chose to work. So we need to trust Him. We need to trust the workings of God when things don't work the way we think they should work, and not according to our plan. Let's trust our God to work His plan in and through us.

So our Father and our God, I pray we would learn this lesson even from this experience of Abraham and Isaac. And as they trusted in you and Isaac, we went to you in prayer, beseeching for a child. May we so trust, and may we take our concerns and burdens and desires to you in prayer.

And we pray these things in Jesus' name, amen. All right, listen, have a good rest of your Tuesday. I hope the Lord gives you a good day. God bless.