I invite you to open your Bible with me now to Genesis chapter 27.
As we think today about getting what you want, getting what you want, I meet bi-weekly with
an accountability partner and have done that now for a number of months.
In our meetings we ask ourselves questions, we ask each other questions.
And one of the questions that we deal with is, are there any unresolved conflicts in
your life?
That is an important question.
Unresolved conflicts are like submarines.
They submerge only to surface again in new circumstances.
The longer that we have unresolved conflicts in our lives, the more danger we are in.
Unresolved conflicts is one way to describe the home of Isaac and Rebecca.
In the chapter we're going to look at today, there are some human elements in this conflict
that I want us to note.
Let me draw some of them out for you.
First of all, we have here a father and mother who have each chosen their favorite son of
the two boys.
One of them has chosen to favor Esau and the other to favor Jacob.
We have a father and mother who are not living on the same page.
They're not conducting their lives in their homes with the same values, the same goals.
But I would remind you that this is not a newly married couple we're talking about.
They've been married almost a hundred years and they still are not on the same page in
their marriage.
We have a father who is a believer but whose faith is somehow so weak it does not touch
the lives of his two sons.
We have in this chapter a resourceful and willful mother who knows God's purpose for
the twins but who it seems cannot trust God to bring that purpose to pass without her
help.
And therefore she manipulates the situation to help out God.
We have two brothers who are just worlds apart in their character, in their outlook, and
in their values.
And in fact they are working against one another.
We see in this chapter past conflicts come to the surface again.
The conflicts have not been resolved and as a result of that there's bitterness and there's
distrust that is now years old.
We are talking about twin brothers who are not kids.
They are in their upper 70s.
That's right.
They are in their upper 70s when this takes place in this chapter.
The past conflict is still eating away between them.
And we note at the end of chapter 26 that Esau when he was 40, which is about 37 years
ago now, married two Hittite women, two Canaanite women from the land around them.
And as it says in verse 35, they brought grief to Isaac and Rebekah.
So you think your home has problems.
Listen to what we have here in this home that is ridden with conflict that is unresolved.
In fact, sad to say this home sounds a lot like homes of the 90s, doesn't it?
With all kinds of problems and conflicts and intrigue built into it.
And it is that intrigue that I want us to look at first today.
There is a suspenseful plot in this chapter with detail enough to keep the reader's interest
right to the end.
It is a sordid family conspiracy that is going on.
And in fact it is so electric with energy that if it were happening today it would probably
be made into a successful television movie.
It is that kind of a story.
It begins to unfold in this chapter at least with the defiance of a father.
And we notice in the first few verses that Isaac, although he knows the purpose of God
to exalt Jacob and to give him the blessing, yet Isaac chooses to try to give that blessing
to Esau.
We begin reading in verse 1.
It came about when Isaac was old and his eyes were too dim to see.
Isaac, by the way, is about 137 years old at this point.
I think that qualifies as old.
I shouldn't offend anybody here.
And he called his older son Esau and said to him, my son, and he said to him, here I
am.
But Isaac said, behold now, I am old and I do not know the day of my death.
Now we could all say that, couldn't we?
Not necessarily that we are old, but that we don't know the day of our death.
It seems as though Isaac has some sort of premonition here that he is about to die.
Or it could be that Isaac is manipulating Esau a bit saying, I may die today.
Would you go fix me some of that special stew that I like?
I would say this, that if Isaac had a premonition that he was going to die, he had very bad
premonition because he's going to live another 43 years after this.
So he's not really about to die at all.
He says, please take your gear, your quiver, 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.
Here we have the defiance of a father.
Isaac knows that God's purpose is to exalt Jacob, but he wants to give that blessing
to Esau.
He seems to be more interested here at least in his appetite than he was in spiritual things.
Sadly, we note that Isaac is not the man that he might have been, nor is he the man that
he perhaps once was.
Having said that about Isaac, though, I want to put this footnote in.
It is not easy to be the son of a great man.
How many sons of great men have blown it in their own lives?
You start with the secular political leaders of our country.
You go to the religious leaders of our country, and you find that time after time, a son who
feels overshadowed by his father struggles.
Isaac is a man of faith, but he's in the shadow of Abraham.
Isaac is a bridge man.
His generation is a bridge generation from a great father and a great son, but here he
is in the middle.
He is not in an envious position, but here we see that even though he's in that tough
position, he does not make the most of it.
He is defying God's purpose in what he attempts to do.
As he says this to his son, there are some ears listening in the tent wall.
It's the ears of his mother.
Rebekah was listening while Isaac spoke to his son Esau.
So when Esau went to the field to hunt for game to bring home, Rebekah 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 to me two choice kids from there, that I may prepare them as
a savory dish for your father such as he loves, and then you shall bring it to your father
that he may eat so that he may bless you before his death.
And so we see the deceit of a mother as this drama continues to unfold.
The deceit of a mother.
We understand that her motive may have been righteous, but her method was wrong.
It was a good thing that Jacob should get the blessing.
He deserved it.
He had the birthright, and it was God's purpose that he should have it.
So her motive may have been right, but she went about it in entirely the wrong way.
W.A. Griffith Thomas has said, we may account for it, that is, her actions, but we cannot
justify it.
We can understand why she did what she did, but it's impossible for us to excuse it as
though it's okay, because it is not.
She is being deceptive.
And Jacob at first recognizes this, and he says to his mother, behold, he saw my brothers
a hairy man, and I'm a smooth man.
Perhaps my father will feel me, and then I shall be as a deceiver in his sight, and I
shall bring upon myself a curse and not a blessing.
He was concerned when he heard this plot.
But his mother said to him, your curse be upon me.
Boy, that is a serious statement.
She means it.
She says, your curse be upon me, my son.
Only obey my voice and go and get them for me.
So he went and got them and brought them to his mother.
He relented.
He agreed.
He went along with it.
And so his mother made the savory food, such as his father loved, and 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 kids on the backs on his hands and the smooth part of his neck.
She also gave the savory food and the bread which she had made to her son Jacob.
And so the plot is put into motion.
Isaac is unsure at first, and then he accepts the food and he goes along with it.
He came to his father and said, my father, and he said, here I am.
Who are you, my son?
And Jacob said to his father, I am Esau, your firstborn.
He begins to lie here.
I've done, as you've told me, get up, please.
Sit and eat of the game that you may bless me.
Isaac isn't sure.
He says to his son, how is it that you have done it so quickly, my son?
Jacob's response is, because the Lord your God caused it to happen to me.
He's digging this hole deeper, isn't he?
Now he's bringing God into his plot, into the scheme.
He says, God has blessed me, so I was able to get the game and come quickly with the
meal.
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 Isaac, his father, and he felt him and said, the voice is the
voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.
And he did not recognize him because his hands were hairy like his brother Esau's hands,
so he blessed him.
And he said, are you really my son Esau?
He said, I am.
There's another spade full of dirt out of the hole he's digging.
So he said, bring it to me and I will eat 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.
And then his father Isaac said to him, please, come close and kiss me, my son.
And so he came close and kissed him.
And when he smelled the smell of his garments, this time out for a moment here, got to remember
there wasn't wash and wear clothes in those days.
And Esau was the kind of a man who was an outdoorsman.
He liked to be out in the field.
And so there was a certain aroma, shall we say, about his clothing.
And so Isaac smells the clothing.
This is his final test.
He wants to see if what's happening here passes the smell test.
And as far as he's concerned, it does.
And he blessed him and said, see, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field which
the Lord has blessed.
So there was this scent of wild game.
It sounds like a nice cologne, doesn't it?
There was the scent of the open field that God had blessed.
He says, now, may God give you of the dew of heaven and of the fatness of the earth
and an abundance of grain and new wine.
So he blesses him with prosperity.
Many nations, may nations rather, serve you and nations bow down to you.
Be master of your brothers, and may your mother's sons bow down to you.
And so he blesses him, secondly, with power.
Cursed be those who curse you and blessed be those who bless you.
And so he blesses him with protection.
By the way, you will recall that that last sentence comes directly out of Genesis chapter
12 in the promise of God to Abraham.
And so Isaac is weaving in the covenant and the promise and the blessing to his father,
Abraham, to this blessing that he is giving to his son.
And so the deed is done.
Through the deception of a mother and a son, we see that the blessing is given to the right
one.
That's interesting, isn't it?
How God super intends even the sins of Rebecca and Jacob to accomplish what he wanted accomplished.
Well, we come next to the third movement in this drama, the third chapters that were,
the third scene.
After the blessing is given, Jacob departs.
And no sooner had he left the presence of his father than Esau, his brother, came in
from hunting.
You see the two almost passing in the hallway.
And he made also a savory food and brought it to his father, verse 31.
And he said to his father, Let my father arise and eat of his son's game, that you may bless
me.
And Isaac, his father, said to him, Who are you?
And he said, I'm your son, your firstborn.
Esau.
Isaac trembled violently and said, Who is he then that hunted game and brought it to
me so that I ate of it, all of it, before you came?
And blessed him.
Yes, and he shall be blessed.
And 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, oh my father.
And he said, Your brother came deceitfully and has taken away your blessing.
Well, there's truth and there's falsehood in that statement.
The blessing didn't really belong to Esau in the first place.
And he said, Is he not rightly named Jacob?
For he has supplanted me these two times.
Had he really?
You look back at that text we studied last week and you see that Jacob hadn't deceived
Esau when he got the birthright.
He bargained for it.
Now, it was a clever plot to get it.
But Esau knew exactly what he was doing.
He had not valued the birthright.
But you see, here is a man who perhaps 25 or 30 years later is still bitter about what
happened and this is how he sees it.
And he says, He has deceived me these two times.
He took away my birthright and behold, now he's taken away my blessing.
And he said, Have you not reserved a blessing for me?
This is pitiful.
But Isaac answered and said to Esau, Behold, I have made him your master and all his relatives
I've given to him as servants.
And with grain and new wine I've sustained him.
Now, it's for you then.
What can I do, my son?
You see, Isaac recognizes the irretrievability of the blessing.
He has given it.
It's gone.
Esau said to his father, Do you have only one blessing, my father?
Bless me, even me also, oh my father.
And so Esau lifted his voice and wept.
I tell you, this is high drama.
And your heart cannot help but be touched by the tears of this man.
What happens here is what the writer of Hebrews is talking about when he writes these words.
Just there be no immoral or godless person among you like Esau who sold his own birthright
for a single meal.
For you know that even afterwards, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected,
for he found no place for repentance, though he sought for it with tears.
That is, he sought for the blessing with tears, pleading for his father to bless him.
But in his heart, there was no real repentance.
There was no change in his life.
Esau still had the same values, the same character, only he missed out now on the blessing and
he had only himself to blame for what had taken place.
But of course, he blamed Jacob, his brother, because of Jacob's deception of his father.
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.
And by your sword you shall live, and your brother you shall serve.
But it shall come about when you become restless, that you shall break his yoke from your neck.
Well, this is a backhanded blessing, isn't it?
At best it's a secondary blessing, but it's all that Esau, or rather, Isaac felt he could
give to Esau was this kind of a blessing.
And the last part of it probably speaks toward the conflict that carried on for generations
between the descendants of Jacob, the Jews, the Israelites, and the descendants of Esau,
the Edomites.
The desperation of a brother.
He desperately wants the blessing, but it's too late.
He seeks it with tears.
He is desperate for it, but it's gone.
It's gone.
It's irretrievable.
That brings us to the last part of our text, and that is this fourth unfolding of the drama.
And we see here the demolition of a family.
Believe me, the dynamite has been in place for decades, but the fuse is now lit and the
family blows up.
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.
And 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.
This lady had ears everywhere, didn't she?
Now she hears about this plot on the part of Esau.
She says to Jacob, Now therefore my son obey my voice, arise, flee to Heron, to my brother
Laban, and 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
shall send and get you from there.
Forget what you did to him?
Isn't she overlooking somebody who suggested this scheme?
Why should I be bereaved of you both in one day?
And Rebekah said to Isaac, I'm tired of living because of the daughters of Heth.
Those are the two wives that Esau had married 37 years before.
She says, I'm worn out with these women.
She says, 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?
She says, I would rather die than have daughters-in-law like that.
And of course, neither of the sons should have married women from the land.
So Isaac called Jacob and blessed him and charged him and said to him, You shall not
take a wife from the daughters of Canaan.
Arise and go to Padinarum to the house of Bethuel, your mother's father.
And from there take to yourself a wife from the daughters of Laban, your mother's brother.
And may God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and multiply you that you may become
a company of peoples.
You see the blessing he's giving here again, restating it in different words.
May He also give you the blessing of Abraham to you and to your descendants with you, that
you may possess the land of your sojournings which God gave to Abraham.
So Isaac, though reluctant to give the blessing to Jacob, now sees it's his nonetheless,
expands it, gives it to him fully before he leaves.
And Isaac sent Jacob away and he went.
And he saw all of this happening and that Jacob had obeyed his father and his mother
and had gone.
And so his scheme now is evaporating.
Notice what he does, verse 8.
He saw that the daughters of Canaan, that is his present wives, despised his father,
displeased rather his father Isaac, and he saw went to Ishmael and married.
Besides the wives that he had, Mahaleth the daughter of Ishmael, Abram's son, the sister
of Nebeoth.
So what did he do?
Well people interpret this differently.
Some say that he went out and married another person outside of the family.
But if you think about it, what he may have done is this.
Instead of going to his mother's side of the family, he decided to go to his father's side
of the family, to Ishmael's descendants.
He married their cousin.
And he may have done this, this is speculation, but he may have done this to yet try to please
his father.
Now this is like a good serial drama.
We're just going to stop it at this point and say well to be continued because the story
goes right on, but we're going to take a break from the narrative this week.
What we see here though is a story about some people who wanted to get something and then
how they went about to get it.
What they wanted was good, but how they went about getting it was bad.
Beyond the human drama of the story, there is a divine perspective that I want to point
out to you.
And we see this in Hebrews again, the 11th chapter this time if you want to look at it,
verse 20, which is the only verse that really speaks to the life of Isaac in this chapter
regarding faith.
It says Hebrews 11, 20, by faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau even regarding things to come.
Now just think about that verse for a moment with this story in your mind.
How do you put that together?
By faith, Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau regarding things to come.
If you were writing that chapter, would you have said something different?
I probably would have, but the Holy Spirit writes it just that way.
Why?
Why does God leave out all of this other stuff that we read about this morning?
I believe because God wants to illustrate for us who think about this, the abundance
of His grace.
We sang this morning about the wonderful grace of Jesus, the marvelous grace of our loving
Lord.
I believe that's what we see here in Scripture.
Because you see, God chooses to overlook all of the unseemly things that happened in this
incident.
And even though Isaac had a different purpose in mind when he began and was a man who was
apparently somewhat weak in faith, not very aggressive, God says nonetheless to His credit
that it was by faith that He blessed both Jacob and Esau.
Only one got the blessing regarding the promise of God through Abraham and his descendants,
and that was Jacob.
The other, Esau, got a blessing as well with a promise regarding a future to come.
And so Isaac in that sense was blessing by faith, which is the assurance of things hoped
for and the evidence of things not seen, Hebrews 11.1.
So he was looking ahead, he was looking into the future of his sons and gave them both
a blessing.
And in that sense, it was by faith.
I want to say that to encourage some of you who as you listen to this chapter this morning
says, you know, this sounds too much like my home.
This sounds too much like my marriage.
This sounds too much like my own life circumstances.
Because of that, you pour upon yourself guilt and shame and the feeling of failure.
And you probably see yourself this morning as though God somehow has said, well, you
have blown it so much, I'm just going to put you aside and I'll see you in heaven.
And that isn't what the Scriptures tell us.
God is so full of grace that He is able to take even the failures and the disappointments
and the sins in the dynamics of your family and your marriage and your life, and He is
able to make something positive come out of it.
That's a good thing about God.
We have a wonderful God who is able to take our lives when we have blown it and still
find something good there to build on.
So let Him build in your life where He wants to, will you?
I just want to close with three quick statements of instruction that I see regarding this text
in our lives.
Some insights to keep in mind when you want to get something real bad, like Jacob and
Rebecca.
First of all, nothing, nothing is worth the price of your character.
We see the character of these two being exposed.
They are frustrated.
They think that what is right, what is good, what ought to happen is not going to.
And so they take matters into their own hands.
They lie, they deceive, they concoct a plot, all of which was really unnecessary because
God had already determined who was going to be blessed.
You see their character is exposed in this.
And so it is when the goals that you and I sometimes see before us are frustrated.
Even our character is exposed in that time as well, but nothing is worth the price of
compromising your character.
Why did God choose somebody like Jacob, a supplanter, a clever man, a deceiver, because
of his grace?
Because I'll tell you something, Jacob is not a whole lot different than you and me.
And the only reason that we're here today and call ourselves the children of God is
because of the grace of God, not because there's something in us that causes God to feel good
about us.
It's His grace that is at work.
Here's a second insight and that is trying to get what you want in the wrong way may
cost you more than you think.
I'll tell you this family came apart as a result of this.
Jacob had a deep rift with his brother that had already lasted now for decades and it
was going to go on for 20 more years.
He is leaving home.
He's leaving his father and his mother and traveling to a distant land where he's not
been.
It's a price to pay.
Rebecca, probably she destroyed her relationship with Esau.
What was her relationship to Isaac like after this?
And to top it off, her favorite son was Jacob.
She here schemes to send him away to protect his life and folks, she never sees him again.
She dies before he comes back home.
You see, trying to get what you want in the wrong way may cost you more than you think.
And finally, this exhortation, allow God to purify your wants and your ways.
That is the ways that you get what you want.
Will you ask God just to search out your wants today, the things that you're dreaming about,
the things that you've set your mind on, your goals, will you let God purify those?
And then will you allow him to purify the ways by which you will go about getting those
goals?
Because it is so easy for us to fall into the same trap of this mother and son and to
say, what I want is a good thing and therefore whatever I do to get it is justified.
But that's not the case.
That's not the case.
And so let's let God search our hearts, let's allow him to purify the dreams that we have
in life, even the good things, and then let's let him direct our steps to get there.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart.
Lean not to your own understanding and all your ways acknowledge him and he will make
your path straight.
Let's pray.
Father God, I pray this morning that you will search the hearts of every one of us.
And even where we have good dreams and goals, may we gladly allow you to search them out,
to test them.
For sometimes what we think is good is not what you think is good.
And then in the course that we have chartered in our lives to get there to what we want,
we choose today to trust you and not our own schemes.
We choose to lean not upon our understanding, but to know you, to commune with you in all
of our ways so that then you can make our paths straight.
Will you make that your own purpose and your own prayer this morning before we go?
Giving your goals and your wants to God.
And now Father as we go from here, I pray that we will go with an attitude of surrender
and yieldedness and find great joy in that because there is joy in knowing you in all
of our ways.
We pray that you will form the desires of our hearts as we delight in you and then bring
them to pass in your time and in your way.
Amen.
God bless you.
We're dismissed.