Genesis 27

We are going to be back in Genesis this morning.

in the next part of the narrative of Jacob's

life, God's rogue, in

Genesis chapter number 27.

And we're going to look at the whole chapter.

There's a lot of verses, and I usually try to

read the whole chapter and then read where I get my points from, but

because it's so many, we're just going to do that in parts, because

I don't read quite as excitingly as Philip does.

But we're going to start reading in verse

number 30, and then read down to the verse number 46.

So Genesis 27 verses 30 46.

God's word says now it came about as soon as Isaac had

finished blessing Jacob, and Jacob had hardly

gone out from the presence of Isaac.

His father, that Esau, his brother, came in from his hunting.

Then he also made savory food and brought it to his father.

And he said to his father, Let my father

arise, and eat of his sons' game, that you may bless me.

Isaac, his father, said to him, Who are you?

And he said, I am your son, your firstborn Esau.

Then Isaac trembled violently and said,

Who was he, then that hunted game and

brought it to me, so that I ate of all of it before you

came and blessed him?

Yes, and he shall be, blessed.

When 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, O my father.

And he said, Your brother came deceitfully, and

has taken away your blessing.

Then he said, Is he not rightly named Jacob,

for he has supplanted me these two times.

He took away my birthright, and behold,

now he has taken away my blessing, and he said,

Have you not reserved a blessing for me?

But Isaac replied to Esau, Behold, I

have made him your master, and all his relatives I

have given him as servants, and with grain, and new wine, I have sustained him.

Now, as for you, then, what can I do, my son?

Esau said to his father, do you have only one blessing, my father?

Bless me, even me also?

O my Father?

So Esau lifted his voice and wept.

Then Isaac, his father, answered him, and said

to him, Behold, away from the

fertility of the earth shall be your dwelling, and away

from the dew of heaven from above, By your sword ye

shall live, and your brother ye shall serve, but it shall come

about, when you become restless, that you will break

his yoke from your neck.

So Esau bore a grudge against 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 near, then I will kill my brother Jacob.

Now, when the words of her elder son, Esau,

were reported to Rebekah, she sent and called her younger

son, Jacob, and said to him, Behold, your

brother, Esau, is consoling himself concerning you by planning to kill you.

Now, therefore, my son, obey my voice,

and arise, flee to Haran, to my brother Laban,

stay with him a few days, until your brother's

fury subsides, until your brother's anger against

you subsides, and he forgets what you did to him, then

I will sin and get you from here.

Why should I be bereaved of you both in one day?

Rebecca said to Isaac, I am tired of living.

Because of the daughters of Heth.

If Jacob takes a wife from the daughters of Heth,

like these, from the daughters of the land, what good will

my life be to me?

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we love you.

Lord, what a great morning it is to come and sing to you, and worship you, Lord.

And I pray that's just what we do in this message that you bless

the message, in spite of the messenger, in our hearts and minds, to

your truth, and for your glory in Christ's name.

Amen.

Jacob, as we saw, excuse me.

Jacob, the son of Isaac, the son

of Abraham, was born to Rebekah,

in the last passage that we looked at last

month, and he was born as a twin,

with his brother Esau, and right from

the beginning, we've already seen the trouble in

Rebecca's life, in Isaac's life, and now in Jacob and Esau's life.

Jacob and Esau were fighting prenatally.

They were struggling in the womb, the author says.

They gave their mother, Rebecca,

a lot of consternation during her pregnancy.

It was a very rough pregnancy, and she

felt awful and so awful.

She prayed to God, if you remember it, in chapter 25,

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.

And so Jacob and Esau were born, and

Jacob was such a mess from the beginning, that his

name he got from grabbing the heel of

his minutes older brother, as they

were being born.

This fact, this grabbing

of the heel, this kind of

trying to get his way, it was becoming very consistent

with his character.

His name was very fitting, that old heel grabber.

He was always scheming on how he could trip up the next guy,

and how he could get ahead himself.

And while Rebecca was going through that struggle

of pregnancy, and she prayed to inquire why

there was so much struggle in her womb at the

time, that the Lord answered her prayer with

a prophecy in the next verse in

chapter 25, verse 23, the Lord said to

her, Two nations are in your womb, and

two peoples will be separated from your body, and

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

shall serve the younger.

So this rogue of a man, as I'm

calling him, was set, as God's

choice, to be a nation that would be great and strong.

And kind of the point is that

it is because God chose Jacob, not because of

any good in Jacob, as we have seen, and

as we will continue to see, as we go through

Jacob's life, and that should make

us feel glad, right?

That should make us feel happy that God chooses to

use sinners, like Jacob, and like us

to fulfill his plans.

And so right out of the gate, as Jacob and

Esau grow older, the next account

of their lives, if you remember, was

how Jacob traded a pot of red stew for

Esau's birthright.

And this would begin, as

you could imagine, to put a strain on their

relationship as brothers.

Chapter 26, then, after chapter

25, tells a story of Isaac

and his struggles with some neighbors over some wells.

But then we come to our passage today, the next passage that

speaks of Jacob's life in chapter 27,

and we get a glimpse as to not

just Jacob, the sinner, but how the whole family

was dysfunctional, that

each one of them was quite a mess,

and the question is,

will all the Hebrew nation, will God's

chosen people come from this mess of a family?

All four of them are shown

here in horrible light.

None of them are painted in a favorable light.

There's no redeeming quality to any of the

four people in the story, and that's how

the Bible usually tells it.

It tells it how it is.

It's not a panegyric, like an old mythological

story about a great thing or a great family of old that

would just look perfect, or that the author would take

all the rough edges and smooth them out, so that they look

like super men.

But these are real accounts of real people, and

it's over and over and over again in scripture that

the scripture doesn't a roll over,

a pass over, any blemish for the sake

of making the characters of the accounts in

the Bible look better than they actually are.

And in the end, all of the

accounts of scripture, or how God can take those

real pictures of fallen

humanity, and fleshly sin, and dysfunction,

and mess, and shape it into his ultimate will.

And that's the theme, kind of today, is that

God's will be done, even

in our messes, in our dysfunction, and in our sin.

So the first part I want us to look at,

I'm calling the machinations, because it really is

some scheming going on here, of four sinners in our story.

And we're going to read verses 1 through 17.

Now, it came about, when Isaac was old,

and his eyes were too dim to see, that he

called his older son, Esau, and said to him, My

son, and he said to him, Here I am.

Isaac said, Behold, now, I am old,

and I do not know the day of my death.

Now, then, please take your gear, your quiver,

and your bow, and go out to the field and hunt game for me, and

prepare a savory dish for me such as I love, and

bring it to me, that I may eat, so that my soul may bless you before I die.

Rebecca was listening, while Isaac spoke to his son, Esau.

So when Esau went to the field to hunt for game to bring home,

Rebecca said to her son, Jacob, behold, I

heard your father speak to your brother Esau, saying, Bring me

some game, and prepare a savory dish for me, that I

may eat and bless you in the presence of the Lord, before my death.

Now, therefore, my son, listen to me as I command you.

Go now to the flock, and bring me two choice young goats

from there, that I may prepare them as a savory dish for

your father, such as he loves.

Then you shall bring it to your father, that he may eat,

so that he may bless you before his death.

Jacob answered his mother Rebecca.

You would think he would say, hey, that doesn't sound ethical.

That's not what he says.

Listen, behold, Esau, my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man.

Perhaps my father will feel me.

Then I will be as a deceiver at his sight, and I will bring upon

myself a curse, and not a blessing.

But his mother said to him, Your curse be on me, my son,

only obey my voice, and go get them from me.

So he went and got them, and brought them to his mother,

and his mother made savory food, such as his father loved.

Then Rebekah took the best garments of Esau, her

elder son, which were with her in the house, and put

them on Jacob, her younger son, and she put the

skins of the young goats on his hands, and onto

the smooth part of his neck.

She also gave the savory food and the bread,

what she had made to her son, Jacob.

So there's four people in our story.

There's Isaac, the son of Abraham, his wife, Rebecca,

and there's Esau, and then there's Jacob.

And all four of them, have

their own motivations, and their own plans, their

reason for doing these things, and all of their plans,

and all of their motivations, it seemed from the story, are

all through the eyes of flesh.

None of them are looking at it through

an eye for God's will, or God's law,

or for righteousness, or how to go

through life in a way that pleases God.

Each one of them are trying to go through life and trying

to make their life successful in a way that

it is fleshly.

The first or the plans of Isaac.

Isaac knew that the end of his life was coming up.

His eyes were going to go dark soon, and

it was time for his blessing to be given to one of his sons.

And at this time, the blessing is kind of

the last will and testament.

But Isaac knew that the

prophecy that was given to Rebecca, his

wife, as she was praying to the Lord, was

that the older Esau, would serve the younger.

And he knew

that ahead of time, but he liked Esau better.

The reason that Isaac liked Esau better

was because Isaac liked to eat, particularly

the type of food that Esau cooked.

We saw it here in the passage we just read, but also in

chapter 25, verse 28.

It says, Now Isaac loved Esau, because he

had a taste for game.

But Rebecca loved Jacob.

Isaac was led around by his stomach.

He made a decision, not based on God's word,

that the older would serve the younger.

He made a decision on which son he liked, because

he liked the taste of Esau's game and his cooking.

So he comes up with this idea for a private

ceremony, which was not the way these things were normally

done, with just Esau, Isaac,

and a ceremony, which is Esau, Isaac,

and Isaac's stomach in attendance.

Ralph Davies calls Isaac,

the patron saint, of all who say, I don't really

care what the word of God says.

I will follow my own feelings, and

we'll see, as we get into the next passage, next part of the passage.

that it's not just his stomach, his

taste, it's his feelings, his hearing,

all of his senses.

He's a very fleshly person.

So Isaac plans to have this private ceremony,

to go against the will of God, in secret,

and give his blessing to Esau, or the last will and

testament of his life.

And then we look at the plans of Esau.

Esau was a man of the present.

As we saw last month, he is that the

quintessential secular man, he could care

less about the future, about the promises of God,

about the name of his family, or even his own reputation.

He just wanted what he wanted at

the moment that he wanted it.

And in the end of chapter 26,

he marries someone from the tribes that

they were promised to have the land from.

Verse 34, when Esau was 40 years old,

he married Judith, the daughter of Barry, the

Hittite, and Basimuth, the daughter of

Elon, the Hittite, and they brought grief

to Isaac and Rebekah.

What does he care?

What's the big deal?

He loved them, right?

They pleased him, right?

The big deal was, he was only thinking of himself,

not thinking of the promise and the covenant of

God, to bless his family and all families

on the earth from his family.

His family, Abraham and Isaac,

had the promise and covenant of God on them.

But he could care less about that.

He was worried about what he wanted at the time.

But this lack of care, this lack of foresight,

or thinking of the future, is going to get him

into big trouble, as we're seeing in this passage.

And then the third person, in our story that had

schemes and machinations, was Rebecca,

the wife of Isaac.

There might have been, in her mind, this idea,

well, my husband is gone, and

I need to help fulfill God's plans.

I need to take action myself to make God's plan,

and God's prophecy come true.

What's a little lie?

if it furthers the greater good, or the bigger plan.

She could have reminded Isaac, that

it was God's prophecy, that Esau would

serve Jacob, and trusted in God,

to keep his promise in a way that

he would choose, but she took things into her own hands.

And she worked out a plan from her own mind to

make things happen.

And then the last person is Jacob.

the rogue himself.

Verse 11 and 12, as we saw, show that

his concern was not for what is right, but

his only concern about what might happen to him.

How might this hurt and affect him?

Verse 11 says, Jacob answered his mother, Rebecca, Behold, Esau,

my brother, is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man.

Perhaps my father will feel me, then I will be

as a deceiver in his sight, and I will bring upon myself a

curse, and not a blessing.

Complete pragmatist.

He's an only concerned about what might happen to him, not

about what's right or the right thing to do.

So all four of these sinners.

are all going about sinning in different ways.

They're all looking at the situation in one

way or the other, but in the end, they're all looking out for

number one, right, themselves, in their own

ways and their own personalities.

And maybe we can relate someone we know in

our life that fits into one of these four different patterns

of sinful behavior from our characters,

and maybe you can relate with someone in the mirror to one of these.

And that's the idea.

Maybe we don't want to admit it, but we probably

have a natural inclination to one of these four different types of character.

But all these different types of characters, and the rest of this passage,

the rest of Genesis, be honest with you, is here

to show us what Proverbs 1921 teaches.

Many plans are in a man's heart,

but the counsel of the Lord will stand.

And so the next part of our passage,

We see the four different characters and their schemes and machinations.

And now we see that the plan works, the deception

works, versus 18 through 29.

I know this a longer passage.

Just bear with me.

It's a good story.

Then he came 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.

Get up, please.

Set and eat of my game, that you may bless me.

Isaac said to his son, How is it that you have it so quickly?

My son?

And he said, Because, the Lord your God caused it to happen to me.

Then Isaac said to Jacob, please come close, that I may

feel you, my son, whether you are really my son, Esau or not.

So Jacob came close to his Isaac's

father, and he felt him and said, The voice is

the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.

He did not recognize him, because his hands were hairy,

like his brother Esau's hands, and so he blessed him.

And he said, Are you really my son, Esau?

And he said, I am?

So he said, bring it to me, and

I will eat of my son's game, that I may bless you.

And he brought it to him, and he ate.

He also brought him wine, and he drank.

Then his father, Isaac, said to him, Please

come close and kiss me, my son.

So he came close and kissed him.

And when he smelled the smell of his garments,

He blessed him, and said, See, the smell of my son is

like the smell of a field, which the Lord has blessed.

Now may God give you of the dew of heaven, and of

the fatness of the earth, and an abundance of grain, a new wine,

may people serve you, and nations bow down to you,

be master of your brothers, and may your mother's sons,

bow down to you.

Cursed be those who curse you, and blessed, be those who bless you.

A lot of this, could have been avoided with

a simple conversation between all four

of them, an honest conversation, but that doesn't happen.

The plan is so convoluted here, and deceitful.

There's so many ways that the plan could go wrong.

Jacob and Esau were obviously opposite people, even

though they were twins, they were obviously fraternal and not

identical twins.

But they went through the plan anyway.

Rebecca prepares the meal.

She dresses Jacob in a way that would cause a blind

man to think he was Esau.

And by the way, can you just imagine how Harry,

Esau, must have been, for her to have to use young goat's

pelt on his hands to trick Isaac

to think it was Esau.

I just think that's nuts.

I just can't imagine.

I know some people like that.

Jacob goes into Isaac's room

with full knowledge.

100% knowledge that he is being 100% deceitful.

He even uses the name of Yahweh

to further his lie in verse 20.

Isaac said to his son, How is it that you have it so quickly, my son?

And he said, Because the Lord, your God, calls it to happen to me.

No, he just went in the backyard and got two goats.

But Isaac begins to suspect something.

He tells Jacob to come closer, and he feels the

young goat's pelt on his hands.

But then he hears Jacob's voice, and it sounds like Jacob.

It doesn't sound like a big outdoorsman.

It sounds like a mama's boy, right?

And he questions his voice.

And then Jacob, again, lies to his

father, verse 24.

And he said, Are you really my son Esau?

And he said, I am.

Isaac, tasted the food, and it tasted

good, like something Esau would make.

Isaac feels Jacob, and it

feels like Esau.

But something is still off.

He needs to use more of his senses to really tell

what's going on.

So he tells Jacob to come closer to him, so he could kiss him.

And Jacob does so.

And because he's wearing Esau's clothes, it

smells like Esau.

And so the deception will be completed here,

when all of the senses of Isaac are

tricked into thinking that Jacob is Esau.

His emotions and his feelings are what's

controlling him here, not reality.

When all those feelings and emotions

and senses are tricked and satisfied, he

goes ahead and gives his blessing to Jacob instead

of Esau.

The blessing has two different facets

here that we can see.

Verse 28, now may God give you the dew of heaven,

and of the fatness of the earth, and an abundance

of grain and new wine.

God Isaac is

giving the blessing of land to Jacob, and his

mind, Esau.

And with that is the source of wealth.

This is basically someone willing

their property to one of their children and

not to the other.

But not only that, he's praying

that God would bless it with due, with fruitfulness,

with abundance, so the wealth of Jacob, would increase.

The problem is, he thinks he's giving it to Esau.

The second facet of it is authority.

Verse 29, May peoples serve you,

and nations bow down to you.

Be master of your brothers, and may your mother's

sons bow down to you.

Cursed be those who curse you, and blessed

be those who bless you.

And here, though the prophecy that God

had made, when they were still in the womb, to

Rebekah, is fulfilled, that the

older son would serve the

younger son, as hard as Isaac tried, to

get around it, and give that blessing,

to his preferred son,

God still, through all these machinations,

worked it out, to fulfill his own prophecy.

Esau will serve Jacob.

The deceitfulness of Rebekah and Jacob,

and all they had done were successful.

So now, Jacob has the birthright,

and the blessing of Esau.

And immediately after they're finished.

Jacob leaves a room, and Esau comes in with a

big old pot of savory game.

for his father.

And he's excited.

He's about to get the blessing.

But then he finds out what happened.

And Isaac realizes that he

had been duped by his own wife and his own son.

This is the dysfunctional family in

full view.

But in spite of all that dysfunction, the last part I

want to look at, is God's will still prevails.

Verses 30 through 46, but we're only going

to read 38 and 40 through 40.

Esau said to his father, Do you have only one

blessing, my father.

Bless me, even me also, O my father.

So Esau lifted his voice and wept.

Then Isaac, his father, answered and said to him,

Behold, away from the fertility of the earth shall be your

dwelling, and away from the dew of heaven from above.

By your sword you shall live, and your brother you shall serve,

but it shall come about when you become restless, that

you will break his yoke from your neck.

Isaac was so disturbed, when he realized

what happened, that the Bible says that he trembled violently.

And then Esau was so distraught when

he lost the opportunity to get the blessing,

it says that he cried out bitterly.

He shouted a cry, Please,

Father, is there anything left that you can bless me with?

Verse 35?

Your brother came deceitfully, and has

taken away your blessing.

And I want you to pay attention to Esau's

response in verse 36.

Then he said, and you got to imagine, he's crying, he's

shouting, he's angry and sad, is he not rightly named Jacob?

For he has supplanted me these two times?

He took away my birthright.

And behold, now he has taken away my blessing.

And he said, Have you not reserved a blessing for me?

Jacob did deceive him one time.

But he tells a little lie here, if you remember,

he didn't deceive him from his birth room.

He willingly gave that up for a pot

of stew.

And then the Bible says that he despised his birthright after that.

So why is he acting like he cares now?

Because he is a whiny hypocrite.

He wanted the stuff.

He wanted the land and the power.

He didn't care about his name, or his family.

He just wondered what came with the blessing.

And the fact is that even though

Isaac intended to give it to Esau, technically,

as the owner of the birthright, Jacob should

have received the blessing anyway.

And that's why Isaac and Esau were scheming

to do it in this private ceremony,

instead of in the normal way, with a

whole group of people and witnesses to it.

Their plan was to sneak the blessing onto Esau.

But then, their plan didn't work.

So Isaac gives Esau the truth.

He doesn't really curse him, but he kind

of gives him the anti blessing.

It's virtually the opposite of the blessing that

he gave to Jacob.

verse 39, Isaac his father answered and said to him, Behold,

away from the fertility of the earth shall be your dwelling.

And away from the dew of heaven from above, by

your sword you shall live, and your brother you

shall serve, but it shall come about when you become restless,

that you will break his yoke from your neck.

So what are we left with?

After all this is done, and I have all

this deceit and lies and dysfunction is out of the open.

These four people, whose side should

we be on?

There's four different people, four different centers,

four different ways that they mess

this whole situation up, and all that we are

left with is scorched earth.

Have you ever been in a family situation like that, where everything

seems to be messed up?

But this is the covenant family

of God.

If this was the material that you had to work with, is

there any way that you think you could fulfill

the promise you made to their grandfather and father,

Abraham, that all the families of the earth will

be blessed from this mess of a family?

There's no way that I could do it.

But God can, and God did.

In fact, he is still working that covenant

out through all of our messed up families in

our messed up lives, at the end of the day, in

spite of all their plotting, and all their sinning,

God's decree, from before the foundation

of the world, not based on anything that Jacob or

Esau did, but his choice, for his glory only,

his decree that the older will serve the younger will

absolutely come to pass, no matter the

scheming, no matter the sin,

that happened there, everything God decrees will

be the same, as this decree, and through

all of this mess.

And we should be grateful and

glad, and give praise to him that he is able

to do it even through sinful vessels,

that he will have victory, no

matter who or what, tries to stand in his way.

He will fulfill his word, no matter what the

resistance or rebellion of man, and

praise him, that it's not just through negative situations, that

he does use some positive situations as well.

We were talking this morning about Spurgeon and his sermons

being his wife, insisting that his sermons

be transcribed, so that people could read them in

their time, and even to this day, and at that time,

some of his sermons were printed in newspapers,

and not just in England, but also in America.

And it was during his time that there was an evangelist who

was requested to go to a public house, a

bar, in the small town of Nottingham,

England, because the pub's owner's wife was

dying, and he was asked to go and visit

her in her last moments and give her the gospel.

And he agreed to do that.

But when he went into her bedroom where

her deathbed was, he found her, that

she was praising Christ, and that she had become a saved woman.

And so he asked her, how did you

come to Christ as Lord?

And she said, by reading that, and she held

up this piece of torn newspaper.

And that torn newspaper held a segment

of Spurgeon's,

one of Spurgeon's sermons printed on it.

But that newspaper didn't come from London, it came from America.

And that little piece of sermon,

printed on an American newspaper, came to her via

wrapped package from Australia.

So it went from preached in the pulpit

of London to the newspaper of America, somehow got to Australia.

Someone was done with it, used it to wrap a package, and

when they tore a package open, they didn't throw it away.

She kept it, she read it and she became a Christian.

God, his decree, will

come to pass in negative and positive situations.

He will make his will happen.

And even if it has to circle the globe,

God's decree will come to pass.

This shows us that if God is nothing, he

is persistent, and we know that he's all things, because this is how he works.

He overcomes messes, even like

those in our text today, with great strength, with

great wisdom for his own glory, and he can turn the

most unlikely circumstance, the most unlikely

person into the instrument of his will at any

time he pleases.

If this rogue himself, Jacob,

isn't proof of that, then you can look at me, or

look at yourself and your own testimony, and how God uses you.

Ralph Davies, again, says that stubbornness

should be listed as an attribute of God, not

stubbornness like we have, but a holy stubbornness.

We should take great fact or comfort in

the fact that God will keep his word by

any means necessary, regardless of the human

rebellion or human stupidity.

Now, look at the sin of this one family that we just went over, one

situation, and there's, like, 10 more chapters of mess

in Jacob's life.

But we can look through that mess of Jacob's

life, Jacob's family, and look directly to

Jesus Christ, because Jesus Christ is a descendant of

Jacob here.

And God promised to bless all the families of

the world through this one family, and he

did it through Jesus Christ himself.

And it really is an amazing story.

So continue to read the book of Genesis

and see how God works out through sin,

his will.

But all of this started, when God made a promise, to

Abraham, and God is still, and will continue,

to keep that promise he made to Abraham until the end of

time itself, when we are in New Jerusalem,

bathed in the light of his glory.

Let's pray.

Hearly Father, we love you and thank you for your word.

And I thank you, Lord, that these men and women are just like me.

Or I'm just like them.

We're all sinners.

We're all messed up, but we have a great savior who

uses even our mess and our sin to fulfill his will.

And I pray that you continue to do that, you continue to help

us to see that, to rest in that in our lives.

In Christ's name.

Amen.