Genesis 25:19-34

Chapter number 25.

Genesis 25.

Verse 19 through 34.

I

title, I don't normally put titles to my sermon.

So y'all let me know what you think.

Rachel, let me know what she thought, and we may not be getting anymore.

We're going to be talking about Jacob.

God's rogue his rascal.

And his birth.

All right, Genesis chapter 25

versus 19 through 34,

God's word says, now these are the records of the

generations of Isaac.

Abraham's son.

Abraham became the father of Isaac.

And Isaac was 40 years old when he took Rebekah, the

daughter of Bethuel, the Aramaean, of Padam,

the sister of Oban, the Aramaean, to be his wife.

Isaac prayed to the Lord on behalf of

his wife because she was barren.

And the Lord answered him, and Rebecca, his wife, conceived.

But the children struggled together with her, and she

said, if it is so, why the not am I this way?

So she went to inquire the Lord.

The Lord said to her, 2 nations are in your womb, and

2 peoples will be separated from your body, and one people

shall be stronger than the other, and the older shall

serve the younger.

When her days to be delivered were fulfilled,

behold, there were twins in her womb.

Now the 1st came out, came forth red, all

over like a hairy garment, and they named him Esau.

Afterward, his brother came forth with his hand holding on

to Esau's heel.

So his name was called Jacob.

And Isaac was 60 years old when she gave birth to them.

When the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter.

a man of the field, but Jacob was a peaceful man living in tents.

Now Isaac loved Esau because he had a taste for

game, but Rebecca loved Jacob.

When Jacob had cooked stew.

Esau came in from the field, and he was famished, and

Esau said to Jacob, please, let me have a swallow of

that red stuff there, for I am famished.

Therefore, his name was called Adom.

But Jacob said, 1st sell me your birthright.

Esau said, behold, I am about to die, so

of what use then is the birthright to me.

And Jacob said, 1st swear to me.

So he swore to him and sold his birthright to Jacob.

Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and

he ate and drank and rose and went on his way, thus

Esau despised his birthright.

Let's pray.

heaven Father, we love you and thank you for this morning again.

We thank you for your word that you've given us to teach us your ways.

I pray that we would listen today intently.

You bless our minds and our hearts for your word, and the message in

spite of the messenger, for your grace and your glory in Christ's name.

Amen.

All right, so we have made our way back to the

1st section of the Old Testament.

Remember last time we were in Amos, and now we're

back into the Pentateuch and into the 1st book of the Bible, Genesis.

And, uh, I know everyone's memory is real

fresh, and, and, and remember, you remember everything.

So about a year and a half ago, if you do remember, we

talked about the Abrahamic covenant and

how God, by his grace, his

grace alone chose this man, seemingly

random to us, from the land of Ur

of the Chaldees, to be a nomad and

leave his home land, to form a

new family in a new country in the Near East, which

we would later be called Israel, and later, our

Lord and Savior would come from his family in that land.

He promised that out of the nation that

he would build out of Abraham's family, that

blessings would come to the whole world, and we

see that is true.

I mean, look at all the nations and ethnic backgrounds we

have here, not all of us are Jews.

Um, were all kinds of mix of all kinds of different things here.

But the blessings of God has come to the whole

world, through the promises that he made, to Abraham,

end in Genesis.

And there's something about the promise

and the situation when God made the promise to

Abraham that is extremely remarkable.

And we're going to see over and over again in this

family with the promises that God makes to this family.

But let's 1st look back and remember what that part

of that promise was that we looked at in Genesis 15.5.

And he took him outside.

This is God taking Abraham outside and said, now look

toward the heavens and count the stars, if

you are able to count them.

And he said to him, so show your descendants be.

Now, unfortunately for God,

Abram may have been the wrong

man from the error of the Chaldees to pick because there was an issue.

There was an issue with Abram and

fulfilling this promise to have a nation

and descendants as many of the stars are from the sky.

And Genesis 151.

It says after these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram

in a vision saying, do not fear, Abram, I am a shield to you.

Your reward shall be very great.

Verse two, Abram said, O Lord, God, what will you give me?

Since I am childless.

Abram and his wife Sarai were

barren, childless.

They had fertility issues.

And on top of that, at this point,

even though they weren't able to have kids in the past, now they were very old.

Abraham in his 90s.

But God didn't make it promise

that he doesn't keep.

God keeps every promise that he makes.

And this was certainly the case, because even with their barrenness,

and even in their old age, God

blessed them with a son that they named Isaac.

And all who would come after everything

we read in the Old Testament about the Hebrew people,

all of them come from this promise that

God kept to Abraham.

And by extension of that promise,

All of us who are in the faith, are

recipients of that promise, and that covenant that he

made to Abraham as well, through Christ,

the promised seed, that God brought

through Abraham's family that blessed

the whole world.

So Abraham gets several chapters

starting, I think in verse 12, and going all

the way up here into the 20s, but Isaac, his

son, the promised son only gets 2 chapters devoted to him.

Chapter number 24, and then again, in chapter number 26.

And most of that was explaining how Abraham

found him a wife of his own family in

Rebecca.

But uh, Jacob,

on the other hand, gets about 10 chapters.

So a lot of the Old Testament account of Abraham's

family is devoted to Jacob, and then into

Jacob's son and Joseph.

But as usual, the Bible gives

a very detailed account of

not only the good things about these men

and women, and the storied

life of Jacob is told in great detail with all the blemishes,

that in the deformities that he had, and

those are in the forefront of these accounts.

So, in other ancient literature, when

there's a, they're trying to create a mythology or

a fairy tale, the protagonist, the main characters,

are usually portrayed as Supermen, uh,

with, that they can just destroy armies by themselves with

one spear, or, and they can, they, they don't make any mistakes.

They always do the right thing.

But in the scripture, it's a little different.

There's no filter.

Here.

We have Jacob, as we'll see, full

of issues and deformities and blemishes,

and scripture brings those out.

In fact, a lot of his blemishes are brought out

more and more detail than the good things about him.

But because of this, we are

able to relate with Jacob and to really

relate to the stories and the accounts of his life

here in scripture.

And so were all the people

who were reading it at first.

Jacob is God's rascal.

He's God's rogue.

He's a man who uses treachery and

deceit to get ahead.

But God uses the clay of

Jacob's life to make a beautiful sculpture that

we can mire as we read and study his story in

this history of redemption, his part in it.

And with this, we can really be

thankful, because we are all made out of

the same clay.

We're all a mess.

Our God's rogue gallery of sin

and complication that God uses in the

same way that God used Jacob's life,

blemishes in all.

And fortunately for us, even though we're kind of the same,

most of us here in Podunk, uh, central

Louisiana, um, are

complicated on a much less, a much

smaller scale than Jacob was.

And our blemishes aren't going to be recorded in scripture

for 1000000s and 1000000s of people throughout time to

be recorded and to read.

So just like the birth of Isaac,

where Sarah and Abraham were barren,

and they prayed, and God told them that he would have a

son, and they were old, and they still had a son.

The things in Jacob's life, his life started out very

complicated, but not too complicated for

the God of the universe, the sovereign over

all things, including the reproductive

system of men and of women.

He is able to use this rogue in

Jacob to carry out all his plans and to

bring about this great nation and his plan of redemption.

So let's begin and look at Jacob's life, and

see how this covenant that God made to Abram,

who later become Abraham, would be

worked out through Jacob's life, even with all the complications

that were given in Jacob's life.

The 1st one is the complication of Jacob's

family tree versus 19 or 20.

Now, these are the records of the generations of Isaac, Abraham's son.

Abraham became the father of Isaac, and Isaac was 40 years

old when he took Rebecca, the daughter of Bethuel,

the Aramaean, of Pedan Aram,

the sister of Loban, the Aramaean, to be his wife.

If you're familiar with your own family

tree, your family history, you are surely

aware of complications that exists in it.

All of us have that odd crazy person,

that an uncle from a long time ago, our

aunt, that was not all there, and maybe

made the newspaper for this or for that, or maybe

there was a tragic story in your family history,

that maybe you learn about later, or maybe you were closely related to.

And sometimes, we all have real

heroes in our family trees, people that are

strong, men and women of honor and character that

we can look back and copy.

The family trees in scripture are no different.

And the book of Genesis, especially, has a bunch of

these family trees, these histories

of families.

In fact, as you go through the book of Genesis,

it is divided by these family

trees, they're in this 1st verse

of our passage, the Hebrew word Tolodoff is

used when it talks about generations or the descendants of.

And so these are the generations of Isaac.

And you will see that over and over again.

So the people have divided the book of Genesis up with that toledoth,

that Hebrew word that means generations of,

this is the family tree of this man or that man.

And so Jacob's account begins to

be told with the lineage, up to that

point, starting with Isaac and going back to Abraham.

And this is an important thing

for us to realize, especially in scripture, especially

in Genesis, because the direct recipients

of the book of Genesis, the ones that it was originally

given to by the author Moses, were

a people who just came out of Egyptian slavery

of 400 years.

Now, I don't know about you.

Maybe you have been connected to your family for a couple generations.

I know we have some great, great grandparents here in the room.

And so, But

I don't know past a couple of my generations back.

So imagine going back 400 years.

Where did you come from?

Who are you exactly?

Um, the the Jews, the

Hebrew people, uh, were not always Egyptian slaves.

And so Moses, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit,

wrote this book down to show all the way back to the beginning, where

do you, who are you and where did you come from?

Where are you supposed to be now that God has rescued

you through the exodus, from Egyptian slavery?

And now if we zoom out, it's

important to us, as we see the things that were

written to these ex-Egyptian slaves, to show

them who they were, it's important to see that from

the beginning of Genesis, and to the end of

Genesis, when the Hebrew people become Egyptian slaves,

that God made promises to their

ancestors, Abraham, was the Egyptian, the Hebrew

people's ancestor, and now they would be able to start

connecting the dots

to see that he was keeping his promises even

hundreds of years later, even through the pain and

the trial, the complication of

Egyptian slavery.

And so as they read it, as we read this book and

these stories and accounts, we can see the bigger picture that

God is trying to paint of his faithfulness

and of the story.

So there's a lot more here than

just one lifetime than the problems

that Jacob runs into in his life.

He is put into the middle of a family that

is already there, and so many other things around

him, are influencing who he is, and

what he is to do.

And that's what Jacob had

to go live into.

He was the son of the son of the man

who God made a personal promise

to in an audio visual way.

If you remember the story of cutting the cows

in half, and then the fire

and the smoke smoking pot, walking through

them, confirming the covenant that God made with Abraham

personally.

And there's not been anyone else who had that type of covenant

made with him in the way that God made that covenant

with Abraham.

And Jacob is only two generations

removed from Abraham.

That's a lot to live up to as your family.

So maybe you have some stories about

your grandfather or your father, that make

you proud, that make it difficult for you to walk into,

in their shadow, or maybe, as Philip

mentioned this morning, maybe there's hard stories.

Maybe your father acted shamefully

or embarrassingly to you.

And Jacob had both.

Abraham did such things that

were worthy of honor and looking up to, but he

also did some blemishes and pimples

him himself.

Both of them, Isaac and

Abraham, Jacob's ancestors, our father and

grandfather, were men of God,

but also were sinners, and that is clearly listed

out in scripture, if you read their accounts.

But God used the good, and the bad,

and the ugly, to sculpt an amazing story, that

we're still reading and leaning from today, and

this little Near Eastern family, that we can still marvel

out, marvel at how God worked through their lives and through their families.

And he is still doing that today, no matter what

your history is, what your family tree is, God is still working

through our lives.

And this is the illustration, an example of just that.

Our lives, our families.

A lot of times they're a mess, right?

There's always something going on, something's going wrong.

But God, in those messes,

God takes those complications and straightens

it out and works it all out, he has promised to

work it all out so that in eternity, all those messes

will be turned into his glory.

And he does that through his covenants, his promises,

to us and his people, and through the gospel

of Jesus Christ.

So this 1st part of the story,

of the birth of God's robe, Jacob.

And we see that he was born into a lot.

There was a lot there for him to live

up to as the grandson of Abraham

and the son of Isaac.

And the 2nd thing I want us to look at is that his birth

was complicated.

His family was complicated, and his birth was complicated.

Verse 21.

Isaac prayed to the Lord on behalf of

his wife, because she was barren, and the Lord answered

him, and Rebecca, his wife, conceived, but

the children struggled together within her, and she said,

If it is so, why then

am I this way?

So she went to inquire of the Lord?

The Lord said to her, 2 nations are in your womb, and

2 peoples will be separated from your body, and one

people shall be stronger than the other, and the older shall serve the younger.

When her days to be delivered were fulfilled, behold,

there were twins in her womb.

Infertility has been a constant problem,

not just in our times, but in families going

back, even to, as we discussed, Abraham and Sarah.

And it seems to be,

especially for the 1st family of the Hebrews, a

constant, consistent problem.

Abram and Sarai, now Isaac and Rebecca

were experiencing the same problem.

Rebecca was barren.

She could not conceive a child.

And then in the future, Jacob himself

would experience the same issues with his wife, Rachel.

And so there's a pattern that

is arising here.

And every time there's a pattern in scripture, we need to pay attention to it.

Why would God, out of his grace,

choose a whole family that would constantly

have problems, conceiving children,

if he was promised to make a

nation as abundant as the stars in the sky and the sand

on the seashores from that family?

Remember, not too long ago, we went over the

story in John chapter 9 of the

man born blind, right?

And the disciples had come to Jesus, and there

was this man that was born blind, and they asked him, you know, who sinned?

Did his parents sin, that he would deserve to be born blind?

Was it punishment to his parents, that he was born blind, or

is it some sin that he would later commit, that God made him blind for that sin?

That was the thinking of the time, that they had.

Well, Jesus responded in John 9, verse 3.

He says it was neither that this man sinned, nor

his parents, but it was so the works of God

might be displayed in him.

God sovereignly used the blindness,

the disease of that man, in his

life, all the hardship that man went through from the time

he was born until the time that Christ healed his blindness,

was all for the purpose that Christ

would use his life and his healing as an

illustration of Christ bringing us from

darkness, the blindness of sin into the light of salvation.

And he used the barrenness of

this 1st family, as an illustration that

God is faithful to keep his promises, in spite

of everything on the outside, that it may look.

It may look impossible on the outside, but

God was the one who has specifically

making these families have babies.

Now, Isaac had a half brother.

Remember?

Abram, when they were

getting old, and God obey this promise, he took matters into

his own hands, and Sarai gave him Hagar,

her slave, to be one of his wives,

and that she would conceive a child who would be

an heir to Abram, in spite of what God said.

And his Isaac's half brother, Ishmael,

had the opposite problem of Isaac

and Rebecca.

And Genesis 25, 13, it says, these are

the names of the sons of Ishmael, by

their names in the order of their birth.

Nebayoth, the firstborn of Ishmael,

and Kadar, and Abbeel, and Mipsum, and

Mishma, and Dumah, and

Tamah, Juter, Nayfish, and Kadama.

So, he had 12 kids.

The opposite.

Isaac and Rebecca couldn't have one, but Ishmael,

who was not the one the promised would go through, was able to

have a whole baseball team.

It was easy for him and his wife.

Wouldn't it been easier for God, just

to go ahead and use Ishmael, like it was Abram and Sarah's

plan in the 1st place.

But no, God would use the once baron

Sarah, who had become Sarah, to

fulfill his promise by her conceiving and burying a child.

And Isaac now knew that story.

He knew where he came from.

And I'm sure Abraham told him over and over

again around the fire, this is what God had done

for us, you are a gift of God, and he gave him the

promises that God had made.

But now Isaac was struggling and suffering

with the same problem, Isaac and Rebecca.

And so the only thing that Isaac could do

is to go to God and pray, and this is so good.

Genesis 25, 21, Isaac prayed to

the Lord on behalf of his wife, because she was barren,

and the Lord answered him, and Rebecca, his wife conceived.

Now, my Hebrew is a little rusty, so

I have to use other smarter people than me for reference,

but one of them talked about how this

phrase prayed to the Lord on behalf of his

wife means that he prayed in front of his wife.

In the presence of Rebecca, is where he prayed.

He was leading his family, and going to God in faith,

for the issue that they were having.

They were praying together.

And he was comforting his wife by praying for, and

that is a good lesson for all of us, husbands.

He was doing this for a long time.

praying and waiting for God to answer.

Verse 20 says that when they were married, Isaac was 40 years old.

And then in verse 26, when he had the twins,

it said that he was 60 years old.

So this is Isaac praying on

behalf of in front of his wife for 20

years for God to answer his prayer.

And that is a great example and encouragement to

us, that if we go before the Lord in faith, and

we pray, and we wait on the Lord to answer, he will always

come through according to his will.

And I'm sure during that period of 20 years

of praying for a child, it

may have seemed hopeless to them.

There was no chance, externally, that they could

see for them to have a child, much

less for Isaac to be part of

that line that would father nations of people.

But this is how God works over

and over and over again.

He uses the weakness of us, the weakness

of his people, to show that he is strong.

He uses the hopelessness of

our situation sometimes to push us to him,

and to force us, to hope in

him as the only one who has the solution for

our problems.

And we're all of us, in here today, examples of that, in

one way or the other.

We're quite an unimpressive lot.

You know, I don't plan the psalms.

I mean, I plan the psalms, but there we go one after the other.

And this morning, the psalm was talking about how the

situation, and of course, the one who

interprets the psalm and puts it into English for us, interprets

it into the church as it should be, but

it talks about how much the church struggles and

how much pain the church is and how unimpressive the church is.

And that is the case, especially

in certain periods of time.

But the church has an almighty God,

as our source of strength and hope, no matter what

the situation looks like on the outside.

And I found this illustration, and I thought it was fitting.

If you could put yourself into the place of a

boss or a manager who had the job of

hiring someone to fulfill a position that

required public speaking.

And in walks a young man who

stutters, and on top of the stuttering,

he has a lisp.

And then nothing on his resume seemed impressive.

He doesn't have a degree.

He's never been to college.

And one of his reference references,

told you that in one of his first times doing

public speaking, he fainted out

of fear of public speaking.

But what if I told you that

you were interviewing a young Winston Churchill,

one of the greatest public speakers of history,

especially recent history.

And that's how the church is right now,

in our form now, we're not bad impressive.

But one day, when we're fully sanctified,

when we're fully glorified, and we're fully prepared in

front of our Lord Savior, Jesus Christ, by his grace through

his salvation, we will be very

impressive for his glory.

And that's how Isaac and Rebecca were.

They couldn't even have a kid.

And especially at that time, that was how

you were someone.

That was how you grew your family economy.

The Belgian confession says

this about God's church on this earth, and it really matches with

the song we read in song.

It says, this church has existed from the beginning of the world

and will be to the end.

For Christ is an eternal king who

cannot be without subjects.

This holy church is preserved by God

against the fury of the whole world, although

for a while, it may look very small and

as extinct in the eyes of man.

Our only hope and strength, for all of our

existence, is in the Lord Jesus Christ,

God the Father, and the power of His Holy Spirit,

who protects the church, even when it looks bleak.

But the problem of conception

wasn't the last problem that Rebecca had with her babies.

So God answered their long

prayer and waiting time with Rebecca

conceiving and becoming pregnant.

And it turns out that not only did he

answer their prayer for a child, he answered their prayer

for two children all at once.

And these two children were quite

the lively pair even before birth.

Verse 22 says, but the children struggle together within her.

And she said, if it is so,

why then am I this way?

So she went to inquire of the Lord, that

struggling together within her, could be translated

as smashing into one another.

inside.

So Rebecca goes to God, and

praise again to him, and listen

to what she says that I can barely get out, and it's that way on purpose.

If this is from you, which it obviously is,

because we couldn't conceive, then why is it so hard?

Why does it hurt?

And she says it even in the Hebrew,

according to what I read, it's kind of jumbled.

She's saying this in the midst of her pain.

And when she can't even get the words out from this pregnancy.

So we obviously know that

this pregnancy is from you because we couldn't conceive.

But now that you've given us this joy

and this blessing, why does it hurt so much?

Why is it so hard to

be pregnant with your blessing?

And I want you to remember that question,

even though you may not be able to remember how it is, she said it

in her inner pain, because that'll

probably a question, you will be asking yourself throughout your life.

If this is your will, God.

If this is what you have for me to do, why is it so hard

and why does it hurt?

And always remember that God

answered Rebecca in verse 23.

The Lord said to her, 2 nations are in your womb,

and 2 peoples will be separated from your body, and

one people shall be stronger than the other, and the older shall

serve the younger.

So he said, one of the reasons you're hurting is because

there's two, not just one in there.

We have ultrasounds now, but Rebecca had

God himself tell her that she was having twins,

and they weren't just going to be twins.

He's extending his promise through them.

He called them in this verse to nations

are growing up inside of you.

And there would be the start of the nation of Israel

and the nation of Adam.

Or, as we like to say, Edom.

And so let us know again, that God is

in control of all the outcomes.

He adds another twist to his

promise.

He says that the older will

serve the younger.

And this puts the

general thinking and the culture of the time on its head.

The older was always the one who got the biggest

blessing, who received the double portion

of the inheritance, and that the younger

would serve the older as a

general rule.

But God says, no, I'm going to show you, it's from me.

I'm gonna place that on its head.

The older will serve the younger.

And we can make, and we must make a connection

between how God works in Rebecca's

life, through those two boys, into even into his

church today, and he does it over and over and over again.

This is just one example.

New Testament gives us a great example of this, of

how even we are like this in

1 Corinthians 127, but God has chosen the

foolish things of the world to shame the wise.

And God has chosen the weak things of the world, a shame the

things which are strong, and the base things of the world, and

the despised, God has chosen, the things that are not, so

that he may nullify the things that are, so that no man

may boast before God.

If this isn't how God worked.

Then we would have no hope, because there's no great

people in here, there's no shining examples

of goodness in here.

There's no world leaders that are in this

church, but God has saved us, in

our baseness, in our foolishness, in our poverty,

in our difficulties, to show that

he is God, and that he deserves the glory,

not us, and anything that we've done, and it's the same thing

with Jacob and Esau.

He uses the hardness of Rebecca's pregnancy.

He uses the turning around of the

cultural norms here to grow

his people, and to show them his hand is

over and in everything.

She said, if it is so, why then am

I this way?

Because God is showing her this

very important truth.

So Jacob had a complicated family tree.

He had a complicated birth story, and

then finally, he had a complicated brother.

And Esau, verse 25.

Now the 1st came forth red,

all over like a hairy garment, and they named him Esau.

Afterward, his brother came forth with his hand holding

on to Esau's heel.

So his name was called Jacob, and Isaac was 60

years old when she gave birth to them.

When the boys grew up, Esau became a skillful hunter,

a man of the field, but Jacob was a peaceful man,

living in tents.

Now, Isaac loved Esau because he had

a taste for game, but Rebecca loved Jacob.

To say that the relationship between

these two fraternal twins was

complicated is kind of an understatement, and

their relationship will be iffy all throughout their

lives into adulthood.

So Moses here, the author of Genesis

through the Holy Spirit, gives us a lot of details here to

show us exactly how different these two brothers were.

They look different.

They enjoy different things.

And one of them was favored by uh,

Isaac and one of them was favored by Rebecca.

So a couple of these things that I just want to go

over before we're done, to show

their differences is 1st their names.

Esau came out covered in thick,

red hair, that the word Esau

looks like a play on the Hebrew word for felt.

And so it looked like he was already covered

in a felt clothing.

But he came out first, but then Jacob

came out right after Esau, with his hand around

his heel, trying to pull him back in so he could be first.

And so, uh, it looks

like Jacob was the instigator of all the struggles

that Rebecca had in in utero.

And he was named for this act of grabbing

on to Esau's heel.

And they probably meant it kind of jokingly

and cute when they named him that.

But it sounds like the

word for heel.

Jacob sounds like the Hebrew word for healed.

But later, other people

would use that name because it sounds like another

Hebrew word that means to supplant or to trip.

And so the, the, the idea

is that we're in a race and and

Tim is is going right in front of me.

In order for me to get ahead, I stick my

foot out and heal him.

I trip him up so that I

can be the winner of the race.

And this is very fitting for who Jacob is.

Jacob is a deceiver.

He's a supplanter.

He twists things and schemes things so

that he can be on top.

As you'll see, if you read the story of Jacob.

And the 2nd thing I want to bring out is

they both have a unique personality and

kind of a unique system of faults in

their life, they're more disposed to.

their personality failures kind

of come out over and over again in the 10 chapters

of Jacob's life.

Esau was a man with no foresight.

He was apathetic about the future.

He could care less about what was coming up next.

All he thought about was right here and right now.

He didn't care about the gifts of God.

Imagine being a part of that family, especially that close, where

the promise was made, that it was going to be your family that

was going to father this great nation.

Esau could care less about what God said about his family.

He was living for right now, and we see that.

That fact demonstrated in this story of

Jacob and Esau and the stew.

Esau was out in the field, either hunting or

working in the garden.

But he forgot to look to the future.

He didn't even think about dinner.

as being in the future.

So he came back completely unprepared for the end

of the day, and when he returns, he found Jacob cooking

a red stew.

verse 30, Esau said to Jacob, please, let

me have a swallow of that red stuff there.

For I am famished.

Therefore, his name was called Edam.

And he didn't know what the stuff was.

He didn't know what Jacob was cooking.

All he knew is that he was hungry right now, at

that very moment, and he wanted that stew.

No, he needed to have that stew or he would die.

So that the little heel grabber, Jacob, scheme to plan in his mind.

He says, okay, sure, bro.

I'll give you some of this stew.

All you got to do is trade me for your

birthright.

That doesn't sound like a fair deal to me.

I might give you a couple bucks for a bowl of stew, especially

if I'm only asking for a swallow of stew,

but my birthright.

The reality that I'm the oldest and I

get the double inheritance.

I'm not going to give that up for us, but Esau could

care less about any of that stuff.

Anything that it meant to be in his family, his

family name, his family honor, who he was, all

he cared about, was right now he was experiencing a

pretty extreme hunger.

He sacrifices the future on

the altar of the right now.

And this is a constant theme

for Esau's life.

And this became such a joke to

the people around them that they started calling

him a Dom, which just means red.

And so every time somebody would call him red,

they weren't talking about his hair, they were talking about the red

stew that he traded his birthright

for in shame.

But as usual, when people don't

think about the future, and then they get to the future, and

bad stuff happens, what do they do?

They don't blame their lack of foresight or wisdom or care.

They blame someone else, or something else,

and that is exactly what Esau does in verse 34.

Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he

ate and drank, and rose and went on his way.

Thus Esau despised his birthright.

Esau is the quintessential secular man.

He is given not just a birthright as

a child of Abraham.

He is given a birthright as a child of God in

the sense that all men are images of

a holy God.

He looks at the creation and he says,

no, God.

I'd rather do what I want to do right now than

to think about the future.

And this is exactly what the author of

Hebrews, which should be the next book you preach through, says

about Esau in chapter number 12,

verse 15, see to it that no one comes

short of the grace of God, that no root of

bitterness, springing up causes trouble, and by

many be defiled, that there be no immoral or

godless person like Esau, who sold

his own birthright for a single meal.

Another word for godless here is

profane, or useless, or

pointless, a profane, useless,

pointless, godless person, living

their life as if their life had no purpose

and no point doing whatever they wanted to

do right now.

And this is the life that we

see Esau here, living.

But we also get a glimpse of the scheming

of Jacob here.

We've got these two brothers, the secular Esau

and the conniving Jacob, the red

and the old heel grabber supplanter.

So what has God to do with

all this complicated mess?

How is he going to work out his plan of redemption

and his plan of covenant with Abraham through

this mess?

Well, maybe you feel

a similar way about the circumstances of your life.

I know there are some circumstances in my life right now that

are very difficult and very complicated.

But we do what Isaac and Rebecca do.

We pray, and we wait, and we look at these examples here

in scripture, as the example of what

God can do in our lives.

As he works out, all this mess that we make into

a straight line that goes straight to glory in heaven,

through Christ, and through his truth.

God loves.

This is what he does.

He loves to work in real people's lives,

and show himself almighty,

and show himself sovereign over everything.

He takes the material that he has,

this mess that we are, that Jacob was, and

molds it into a family, that one day would

be as numerous as the stars of the sky, and

as many as the strains of sand by the seashore,

all for his glory, even though they worked so

hard against them sometimes.

He worked all that out to

fulfill his promise to Abraham, and to us,

through Abraham.

And one day, through Christ, all of our messes and

complications, all of our problems will be worked

out in Christ Jesus for eternity, before the face of God.

And things that we don't understand now,

we'll be able to look back on and say, I

see now how you were weaving and working that

out through my life.

And now you've brought it into this glorious place.

That is the promise for all of us.

And that is just a little bitty example seen

in the life, the birth of Jacob and

his family there.

So let's remember that as we live our lives,

as we face the trials and struggles and hardships of our life.

Let's remember that God is always faithful, and he always

keeps his promises, even when we don't understand.

Let's pray.

And, Father, we love you and thank you for your mercy on us.

What a great God you are, a sovereign God, who loves

us for reasons we don't understand, but because of your grace,

because of your mercy, you're even using us to fulfill your plans.

I praise you for that.

I pray that you bless us as we leave for your glory in Christ's name.

Amen.