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.