Welcome back.
As we continue through Genesis finishing,
hopefully finishing the 27th chapter today,
a look at the
contest conflict between Jacob and Esau.
Mostly contest ends with a little bit of conflict.
We saw yesterday that Jacob has tricked
Isaac into giving him the blessing and not Esau.
Rebekah was complicit in that.
She helped him do it.
And Jacob has conferred the blessing onto Isaac.
And that is
non-transferable, that is non-repeatable, that is done.
And the way the story is told,
that is a hard line that has now been crossed.
And we see the aftermath.
So we’ll read/tell you some of this,
and then we’ll talk about it.
Verse 30 of chapter 27.
“As soon as Isaac finished blessing Jacob,
when Jacob had scarcely gone out of the presence of his father,
his brother Esau came in from hunting.
He also prepared savory food and brought it to his father and said to his father,
‘Let my father sit up and eat of his son’s game,
that you may bless me.’
His father Isaac said to him, ‘Who are you?’
He said, ‘I’m your firstborn, Esau.’
Then Isaac trembled violently and said,
‘Then who was it who hunted game and brought it to me and I ate it all before you came?
I have blessed him.
Yes, and blessed he shall be.’
When Esau heard his father’s words,
he cried out with an exceedingly great and bitter cry,
and said to his father, ‘Bless me also.’
But Isaac said, ‘Your brother came deceitfully
and he has taken your blessing.’
Esau said,
‘Is he not rightly named Jacob?
For he supplanted me these two times.
He took my birthright and looked now my blessing.’
Then he said, ‘Have you reserved a blessing for me?’
Isaac answered, ‘I have already made him your lord.
I’ve given him all his brothers his servants with grain and wine and sustained him.
What thing can I do for you?’
Esau said to his father,
‘Have you only one blessing, father?
Bless me also.’
Esau lifted his voice and wept.
Then Isaac answered him,
‘See away from the fatness of the earth,
your home shall be.
And away from the dew of heaven on high,
by your sword you shall live.
And you shall serve your brother.
But when you break loose,
you shall break his yoke from your neck.’”
So this is an interesting story in that
Esau is not a very well-developed character
in the scripture, but in many ways a noble one.
We see him kind of being tricked and we sort of question his
sharpness, maybe we’ll say,
when he gives away his birthright.
But here he expresses deep grief.
He’s pained by this moment that his brother,
he’s done nothing wrong.
He did as his father asked.
He went out.
He hunted.
He brought that back to honor his father.
He thinks that he stands now ready to receive the blessing.
He seems to be
willing to live into that role as the firstborn.
And when he finds out that that’s no longer available to him,
I think we see conveyed here, Michael,
genuine pain. Yeah, absolutely.
There’s a really sort of human element to this text here,
Clint.
We don’t often get a chance to really see the backside of some of these stories.
You don’t
get a whole lot of detail when Hagar and Ishmael are sent out in the Abraham story.
You don’t hear
certainly any sort of reflection or prayer or begging from those characters.
Here,
Esau,
very clearly we hear in his own words the deep pain and grief of having lost this opportunity.
And to the original audience, Clint,
this kind of expression of grief is almost
required or necessary to make sense of this story.
Because here, the expectation has been completely reversed.
It was first reversed in the selling of that birthright.
But now with the deceit that has ended with Jacob also receiving the blessing,
you’ve now had a complete upending of everything that any person would have believed would be the
normal outcome.
The brother who would have been first in line to receive both of those has now received neither.
And now what’s interesting is here,
though, and you can’t interpret the text based upon what’s not there.
But what’s not here immediately,
at least as he speaks to his father,
is not immediate anger at Jacob.
It’s not even anger at his father for having done this thing.
It’s a true heartfelt expression of grief.
“Dad, what can you do for me?
You surely didn’t give away the entire blessing,
did you?” And then we see,
as Isaac turns to this really bittersweet kind of blessing,
a blessing which is both a promise and has some elements of curse in it,
and with that ultimate promise
that in the end,
the yoke of the brother will be broken,
it’s certainly a bittersweet promise
in the end, Clint, as opposed to what he would have hoped for.
Yeah, and
the Bible doesn’t unpack the relational kind of ripples of this event,
but it must have made for an uncomfortable household.
Isaac
still living,
Jacob in the house,
knowing that he’s deceived his father,
his father knowing that he’s been deceived by his youngest son,
probably putting two and two together
and understanding that his wife helped,
the oldest knowing that he had two of his family
members working against him to take what rightfully belonged to him.
That had to be an uncomfortable…
However long that lasted before Jacob leaves,
and we’ll see that in the next text,
however long that lasted,
it must have been uncomfortable.
It must have been…
I can only imagine that that was a pretty tense house.
Yeah, right.
This is an example par excellence.
It’s only going to get more so as this text goes on, Clint.
These stories now will follow into some of the deepest and darkest places of family
relationships.
In fact, it’s going to take just a few words,
and we’re going to discover how deep
Esau’s anger and hatred and even vile is going to go,
at least as he reports to others and
there’s a fear that Jacob’s life is in danger.
What we’re going to discover is when the promise is on the line and as families navigate this promise together,
it doesn’t always go smoothly.
There’s not a clear, easy,
sort of ordered handoff from one generation to the next.
No, now we’ve seen in Jacob and in Esau that it’s going to be messy,
and that messiness is
going to get…
Quite frankly, it’s going to get even worse,
and that’s maybe one of the great insights
of the Old Testament is that it’s within the stories of the messy hierarchy,
the stories of how difficult these families navigated very tumultuous waters.
It’s within that that we discover God’s patient, abiding presence,
the faithfulness to the promise,
and we,
if we’re at all open to the world that surrounds us,
Clint, we live in a world full of as much complexity,
families that struggle to find ways to compromise in
different ways, and especially in tumultuous seasons,
to find ways to care for one another,
to show deference to one another.
This is clearly recorded in these human relationships in this text,
and the promise is that God is here,
though interestingly,
and we’ve already noted it,
God does not explicitly speak,
and in fact, God is not explicitly named.
There’s a way in which these stories both recognize human agency and also implicitly
trust that God is at work,
even in the midst of some very difficult human choices.
Yeah, absolutely.
And
the first thing we see in terms of the ramifications of this is,
as you would expect,
a break in the relationship between the brothers.
Whatever it was, it is now going to get worse.
So,
rather than read this,
we’ll just kind of talk you through the rest of the story here.
Esau is angry.
He says,
“I’m not going to do anything.
I’m going to bide my time.”
But the exact words were,
“I know that my time of my father’s morning will soon be over,
and then I will kill my brother.”
So, he has a clear plan in place that when Isaac dies,
he will live out that time in
mourning that is required,
and then Jacob’s done.
He’s going to kill him.
And I think we take that as
certainly an expression of anger,
but I think we take
that given who Esau is and what we’ve been told about him.
I think we take that as a real plan, a real threat.
Certainly, Rebecca, when she hears that that’s been said,
she takes it as a real threat,
and she tells Jacob,
“Hey, I think it’s time you get out of Dodge for a while.
You need to get out of town.”
And you might remember she has this brother, Laban,
and he lives off.
And so, she tells Isaac, “I don’t want Jacob to marry one of these local women.
I want him to go back and get a wife from our people,
and I want to send him to Uncle Laban’s
house.” And she probably,
at some level, she probably does care about that.
But what she most wants is to separate him from Esau.
She says to him,
“Until your brother’s anger against you turns away,
and he forgets what you have done to him.”
Now,
we’re not told how long that’s going to take.
We’re not told that that will ever happen.
But Jacob decides, “Hey, yeah, this probably is a good time to get out of town.
Go check on Uncle Laban.” And so, essentially,
then Abraham
blesses Jacob and sends him off,
again, under this goal of finding a wife from his own people.
But it’s this story,
it’s this kind of,
again, a little bit of scheming on Rebecca’s part
that ends up in the place where,
leads us to the place where Jacob leaves for Laban’s house.
Yeah, there’s some family intrigue in here.
The fact that this is Rebecca’s family,
you know, certainly important.
She
clearly exercises a lot of control in the family.
And so, the idea that she’s sending her preferred son to the preferred family
is clearly important to her.
And, you know,
maybe Clint, what strikes me as most difficult in reading stories like
these,
is exactly the point that we are to make from it.
You know, when we were in the Abraham text,
certainly with Isaac,
even the binding of Isaac’s story that we spent some time in,
the takeaway though, those are very difficult stories.
The takeaway still makes itself apparent in lots of ways.
We can all reflect on when God asks us to do difficult things,
or we could talk about how ultimately God makes a promise,
and it’s hard to trust that promise.
I mean, there’s a connectiveness to those kinds of texts.
But Clint, here,
it’s hard to see in a text like this,
beyond what is clearly a lot of broken,
deceptive, manipulative family conflict.
There’s just a clear emphasis on reaching,
grabbing, claiming, fighting.
And to be fair,
the text said that from the very beginning.
It said that Jacob was holding on to his brother,
right?
This idea from the very moment of birth,
he was reaching and grasping.
So the text has been clear about it.
I do think as we come as interpreters trying to read it,
study it as Scripture,
it’s maybe a little less open to some of that personal devotional kind of reading.
It reflects humanity not at its best.
I mean, there’s no way around that.
I think what is challenging about Scripture in general,
certainly this portion of Genesis,
is that we love the idea that when God declares a plan,
that the path toward that plan is going to be smooth,
it’s going to be just,
it’s going to be clear cut,
and it’s going to be kind of right.
It’s going to look like righteous and ness and holiness.
And that’s just not how the book of Genesis works.
The people of God are messy,
broken human people, and they’re sort of clawing their way forward through fits and starts and stops
and relational outbursts and good decisions and bad decisions and jealousy and competition
and all the rest of human experience.
And yet in the midst of that,
it is not simply moving randomly towards some end,
it is headed toward the very goal that God sets.
The younger will lead the older.
Now, how do we get there?
It really messies almost painful stories.
I will bless the peoples of the earth.
How do we get there?
Through some shrewdness, through some trickery, through some boldness, through some conquest.
And I think it’s a good challenge for us to remember that simply because
something is in keeping with the goal that God has stated,
it doesn’t make it easy to deal with.
There is a complexity to that that we don’t always,
I think, want to acknowledge.
Yeah, and maybe that’s a good word here as we get ready to close out for a week here
over the Christmas season.
And that’s the same story of Christmas.
I mean, ultimately,
we have a tendency maybe to make the nativity story clean and shiny
and all put together.
But maybe this is a good moment to pause and say,
like in the Old Testament,
where God works through messy, difficult,
very, very broken circumstances and broken human choices,
God is able to work through census taking,
a tax measure,
cities that are full,
innkeepers who don’t have room,
shepherds who get called out of the fields.
All of this stuff,
which we’ve made part of our holy story,
is just as human as this,
you know, maybe minus the deceit.
And in the middle of that,
you know, there’s a good lesson for all of us.
Whatever lies ahead in this moment and celebration of a season,
not for all of us,
one of pure celebration.
God is at work in present, even in that.
Yeah.
And,
you know, we hope that as we do come to a close here,
just days before Christmas,
that your own Christmases,
whether they are exactly as you planned or messier than you expected,
we hope that they are filled with grace and we hope that you find your way to the manger,
because that promise does not come to a people for whom everything is as it should be.
The very promise of Christmas is a promise that God is with us in the midst of our stuff
and working towards his purposes.
And so, as we hold on to that hope,
we hope that it finds you
and that you are blessed by it this Christmas season.
Thanks for being with us,
everybody.
We’ll see you in a week or so.