Genesis 27:1-29

That’s a weird twist.
All right, hey, friends, welcome back.
We are getting into the thick of the Jacob story,
at least the beginning part of the stories today.
Chapter 27,
we won’t read all of this
’cause we do wanna cover some ground,
and some of this is details.
But this is really,
in some ways, this is the crux of
the Jacob narrative.
At least it sets it in motion.
So you will remember that Jacob has swindled his brother Esau.
Eh, maybe that’s unfair language.
He has traded, he has gotten Esau
to trade his birthright for food.
And so having been given the birthright,
he now,
with the help of his mother,
sees an opportunity to get the blessing as well.
So let me read a little of this
and then we’ll start talking about it.
Isaac was old and his eyes were dimmed
so that he could not see.
And he called his elder son Esau and said to him, “My son,”
and he answered, “Here I am.” He said,
“See, I am old.
“I don’t know the day of my death.
“Now then, take your weapons, your quiver, and your bow “and go to the field,
hunt game for me.
“Prepare for me savory food such as I like
“and bring it to me to eat,
“that I may bless you before I die.”
Now,
Rebekah was listening when Isaac spoke
to his son Esau,
so when Esau went to the field
to hunt for game,
Rebekah said to her son Jacob,
“I heard your father say to Esau,
“‘Bring me game and prepare savory food,
“‘that I may bless you
before the Lord, “‘before I die.
“‘Now, my son, therefore obey my word as I commanded you.
“‘Go to the flock and get me two-choice kids
“‘that I might prepare from them savory food
“‘for your father as he likes,
“‘and you shall take it to your father to eat,
“‘and that he may bless you before he dies.'”
So here the plan is set in motion.
Rebekah over here is Isaac speaking to Esau.
Esau is sent by Isaac out to the field to hunt game.
We’ve been told that Isaac likes that.
And when Rebekah hears that,
she sees the chance to insert Jacob into the story instead.
She calls Jacob and says,
“Go get a couple of goats,
“and I will fix them the way your dad likes them,
“and I’ll send you in,
and he will bless you instead.”
And you know,
this is one of those stories
that’s a little bit
crazy, and it just drops in from,
I mean, we’re not really told
that there’s animosity between Rebekah and Isaac,
though this seems pretty disrespectful.
And in fact,
there’s no question, it’s downright deceitful.
Again, this is one of those stories that theologically,
God doesn’t weigh in on, God doesn’t,
she’s not acting on directions from God,
nor does God seem to be upset at what they’re doing,
though it is borderline unlawful.
He certainly pushes the Holy Code,
Holiness Code of do not disrespect your father.
It pushes that pretty hard.
But that’s how the plan gets started.
Only note that I would add to that,
Clint, is just recognize that here,
we have a very different kind of take.
With Sarah, we had a kind of impatience,
or a lack of trust that God would
bring that child,
that was the child of the promise.
Here,
it’s not a question of whether there will be a child
to pass on the family lineage,
that we have that happen.
In fact,
it was notable how that happened within one verse.
Rebekah was unable to conceive,
Isaac prayed, and then suddenly we hear that God makes a way.
So that is handled.
What we have here is really kind of another kind of will
that’s being brought to bear here.
She wants her son,
the one that she prefers,
Jacob, to get the blessing.
And so she’s willing to,
in this case,
maybe the right word is even scheme to get that done.
And so this is her plan that’s hatched.
Now, Jacob is fully complicit in going along with it,
but it’s interesting how now for both of these,
father and son, Abraham and Isaac, we have this narrative in which they are having
these conversations with their wives,
and in some ways they’re taking the situation
into their own hands.
And I don’t know that that’s necessarily a commentary
on either of the women per se,
but it’s an interesting note of the text.
Yeah, and it’s interesting.
So let me just talk you through this next part.
Jacob does react.
In fact, Jacob objects to this,
but not on any moral grounds,
but that he’ll get caught,
and that if he gets caught, he’ll be cursed.
And Rebekah says, “Then let that curse fall on me.
“I’ll take the curse.”
And we treat blessing and curse language
as kind of metaphorical,
but understand that this is for them a reality,
that a curse implies actually that
you will bear the weight of it.
We saw Cain cursed,
we’ve seen that in the text.
And a blessing implies just the opposite.
So this whatever happens has tangible power
in Jacob’s life,
and his mother says,
“If it goes wrong,
I will stand in your place.
“Let the curse fall on me.”
And so what they end up doing is taking the skin of the goats,
the hair of the goats,
and putting it on Jacob’s arms
and the back of his neck,
so that he would be able to hopefully fool his father.
She gets some of the clothing from Esau,
his closet, we might say.
She raids his closet.
She puts that on Jacob,
so that he would have that scent, that smell.
And she then sends him in.
Yeah, and from that point on,
fundamentally,
the text goes to great lengths
to point out how far this ruse goes.
It isn’t just a matter,
in this case,
of the food itself being prepared.
It’s actually,
Isaac does indeed touch Jacob
to see if he can feel the hair.
He smells the cloak to see that it smells like Esau.
I mean,
the text goes out of its way to point out
the multiple levels of deception that are involved here.
And at the very end,
we discover
that Jacob does indeed receive the first blessing.
He receives the thing that was intended
for his brother Esau.
And this comes right here.
Let’s look at it verse,
end of verse 18.
“Here I am,
who are you, my son?” And Jacob says to your father,
Jacob says, “I’m Esau, your firstborn.” He,
right in the text, literally lies.
He says a thing that is not true.
I mean, so this is,
at the end of the day,
Clint, this is just straight up deception to get a thing.
And it’s at multiple far extremes
that have been gone to make it happen.
Yeah, and interesting, Michael.
I think it even goes farther than that.
If you read verse 20,
Isaac said to his son,
“How have you found the game so quickly?” And Jacob answered,
“Because the Lord your God
granted me success.” So now he’s even explaining his success.
He’s essentially bringing a theological
or a spiritual answer into,
“Well, God was good to me.
God blessed me so that I could get this to you.”
Which he may believe in some sort of twisted way,
but it certainly isn’t accurate.
Then Isaac said,
“Come near that I may feel you.”
So he went and he felt him.
He said, “The voice is Jacob’s voice,
but the hands are the hands of Esau.”
He didn’t recognize him because his hands were hairy.
And he said,
verse 24,
“Are you really my son Esau?”
So clearly Isaac is struggling.
He’s having doubts.
He has something in his mind that this isn’t right.
And Jacob answered,
“I am.” And he said, “Bring it to me that I may eat.”
So he brought it to him and he ate
and he brought him wine and he drank.
And his father said,
“Come near and kiss me,
son.” So he came near and kissed him.
He smelled the smell of his garments and blessed him.
Now, again, this is a troubling text.
People have struggled with what to do with this text.
From a moral ground,
you have a son lying to his father.
You have a mother and son deceiving their husband and father.
From a right and wrong perspective,
this text is questionable.
But it fits this overall narrative
that the younger son is going to carry the lineage,
that it fits the idea that two people
are making a way forward,
even if they have to be crafty and will be generous there
and say crafty to do it.
And so set against the larger picture of Israel,
this text has gotten a pass.
And in many ways,
these actions have gotten a pass
that may be harder for us
because we don’t put as much into the Israel part
of the story as we do the personal part.
Yeah, well, this is reprehensible ethical behavior.
I mean, it crosses the line at pretty much every level.
But I wanna point out,
if that makes you uncomfortable,
Jacob’s gonna be an uncomfortable character for you.
I mean, Jacob continually presses the line
and presses the advantage.
There may be some cultural gap in that for us
where we don’t value shrewdness
with the same level of importance.
And so maybe we miss some of the positives that come
from a cultural reading of this.
But you know what,
there’s also a level here,
let’s just be honest.
This is the way that the story goes.
And I think the authors in some way
are painting for us a picture of how there has been struggle
in the midst of the covenantal promise
that God made this promise to Abraham
and immediately with Isaac,
the one who is the one of laughter,
the one who God gave miraculously,
it’s within his own direct family
that you immediately see the conflict
over the promise having risen.
And so we’re gonna see conflict so many times in the future
if you continue reading through the Old Testament
where people are unfaithful,
people take matters into their own hands,
where people endeavor
by both positive and outright negative means to accomplish their own ends.
And yet God is still working through it.
This is really the fountainhead of that theme,
which is gonna come up many,
many times that no matter how humans for our own selfish,
prideful reasons can get bent in the wrong direction.
God’s plan is still sure.
It’s still going to come to pass
because it is God who will be faithful to the promise.
But that said,
it’s notable that in a text this long
that God’s not weighed in on the side here,
Clamp, that God’s not told anyone to do anything.
In fact,
there isn’t like lightning bolts
thrown at the end of this story either.
I mean, God doesn’t bring judgment
upon what would appear to any reader
to be a miscarriage of justice.
So it’s a really interesting reading of this story.
There’s a clear assumption here
that God is going to honor the recipient of the blessing,
that Isaac has the blessing to give
and that it is to some extent up for grabs
and the one who gets it is going to have it,
is going to benefit from it.
Years ago read a book about the early days
of NASCAR stock car racing.
And there was an entire chapter devoted to the ways
in which they tried to break the rules.
And there was an old crew chief who said,
“If you weren’t cheating,
you weren’t trying hard enough.”
And I just bring that up that that’s sort of the idea here.
There is this goal and Jacob has no chance.
He can’t fight Esau,
he can’t make himself older.
All he can do is try to engineer a moment
where he stands in
Esau’s place at the right time
and he gets the thing.
And once he gets it,
it really is his.
That’s the way this story is told.
You can’t take it back.
You can’t, if he can
engineer a moment to receive it
even through deceit, then it belongs to him.
And the story for whatever reason chooses to honor that
and God seems to stand back and let that play itself out
as well though God has sort of foreshadowed the idea
that Jacob is going to find his way to the front of the line
because that’s the kind of person he will ultimately be,
the one who replaces,
the one who supplants.
So let me just quick,
we’ll finish today with just let me read the blessing for you.
Isaac says, “The smell of my son,
like the smell of a field,
the Lord is blessed.
May God give you the dew of heaven
and the fatness of the earth
and plenty of grain and wine.
Let people serve you and nations bow down to you.
Be Lord over your brothers
and may your mother’s sons bow down to you.
Cursed be everyone who curses you
and blessed be everyone who blesses you.”
And so with these words,
that blessing is conferred upon not Esau
who Isaac believes to be in front of him,
but Jacob.
And at that point really the die is cast.
In fact, the first thing we’ll look at tomorrow
is this sort of sad story of what happens
when Esau shows up and hopes to be included.
But done is done in that regard
and it now has passed to Jacob.
Clint, it’s really interesting that the stuff that you’re going to expect
is exactly what’s gonna happen.
Both Esau’s grief as well as the anger
that’s gonna follow this story.
What is striking here is
that this really begins for us to answer the question,
you know, what happens when the promise
or when the lineage gets messy?
What happens, and we see this
in even the genealogy of Jesus,
how the promise took many interesting turns,
unexpected turns.
And here we see one of those turns,
but we see it being done through human choice
and competition and it’s going to create
all the baggage that you think it will.
Division between brothers,
you know, anger, and even a kind of infighting.
This is going to be a sea change moment
in this entire family.
And strikingly,
it’s done while Isaac is old in age.
We’ve already said there’s not much about him
in his younger years.
It’s in his old age.
It has his wife involved in it.
So there’s conflict between his very wife,
the one who God blessed to give him his sons.
And then now these sons are paid against each other,
not only in the blessing,
but the birthright.
Clearly,
this is getting messier and messier
and it’s only gonna get more messy as the story goes on.
That’s a hallmark of the Old Testament,
particularly Genesis, where it really doesn’t
try to glorify or put a nice gloss
on some of these characters.
It just presents it and it lets us make interpretations
as to what we might think because ultimately,
God doesn’t weigh in with a moralistic judgment.
To some extent, this may be a reflection of the fact
that the families in the stories are getting bigger.
But as we go from Abraham to now Isaac,
and certainly as we move to Jacob
and move into the Joseph stories,
the stories also get messier.
They get more multi-layered.
There’s always been messiness in the story.
But we continue to see the tensions,
the jealousies, the competition,
the conflict in families.
We’ll see that tomorrow.
Jacob and Esau, we’ll see it again with Jacob
as he goes and spends some time with extended family.
But there is,
this is not the script you would write
if you were planning to tell the story
of the blessed family of the covenant
who God had reached out to and made the heirs.
This is a very human kind of story
with very human kind of characters,
which makes it, I think, far more interesting, but makes it also more difficult
to always know what to do with.
Well, I think that’s where we’ll leave it for today.
Do join us tomorrow as we look to Esau,
his response to it,
and hope you all have a great evening.
Thanks, everybody.