Last week we looked at a section of a letter in the Bible
called the book of Genesis and discovered that God’s promises overcome our
attempts at favoritism or deception. Just as God overcame the favoritism and
deception of Isaac and Rebekah to fulfill His promises and plan, God will and
does overcome our attempts at favoritism and deception to accomplish His
promises and plans.
We ended last week with Esau forming a plan that was fueled
by a grudge against his brother Jacob that would enable him to regain the
birthright and the blessing that had been deceitfully taken away from him by
Jacob. However, after becoming aware of Esau’s plan, Rebekah came up with a
plan of her own that involved sending Jacob on an out of town trip to stay with
her brother Laban.
In the rest of Genesis chapter 27, we see Rebekah
deceivingly convince her husband Isaac to go along with her plan to send Jacob
on his out of town trip by pointing to Esau’s two marriages to women from the
land of Canaan. In Genesis 26:35, we discover that Esau’s Canaanite wives
brought grief to Isaac and Rebekah. Now the word grief here literally means
bitterness of spirit. These women were far from God and reinforced Esau’s
rebellion from God and from his family.
And as Isaac and Rebekah looked at the bitterness and the
division that these Canaanite women that Esau married brought to their family,
they did not want the same thing to happen to their other son Jacob. So as we jump back into the book of Genesis,
we see Isaac put Rebekah’s plan into action, beginning in Genesis 28:1. Let’s
look at it together:
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, go to Paddan-aram,
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. "May God Almighty
bless you and make you fruitful and multiply you, that you may become a company
of peoples. "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." Then Isaac sent Jacob away, and he went to
Paddan-aram to Laban, son of Bethuel the Aramean, the brother of Rebekah, the
mother of Jacob and Esau.
After witnessing the bitterness and division that Esau’s
marriages brought to the family, and having been deceivingly convinced of the
motives behind Rebekah’s plan, Isaac calls Jacob into his presence in order to
put the plan in action. Isaac commanded Jacob not to marry a woman from the
land of Canaan. Instead Jacob was to travel to the land of his mother Rebekah’s
relatives, which was 400 miles away, and find his uncle Laban. Upon finding his
uncle, Jacob was to then find a wife from one of Laban’s daughters.
In addition, Isaac prayed that God would bless Jacob with
prosperity and with a family tree that would result in a multitude of peoples
and nations. Isaac prayed that Jacob would experience the blessing of Abraham.
When Isaac refers to the blessing of Abraham, he is asking that Jacob and his
descendants would experience God’s promises that were made to Abraham,
including the promise of possessing and living in the land that God had
promised to Abraham.
Moses tells us that Jacob responded to his father’s
command by leaving the land of Canaan to travel to a foreign land to find his
uncle Laban. Rebekah’s deceptive plan worked. Jacob was able to flee in fear
from his jealous and angry brother Esau, whom he had deceived, while still
receiving the promises of the blessing and birthright from his father Isaac,
whom he had also deceived. Moses then records for us how Esau responded to what
had transpired in verse 6:
Now Esau saw that Isaac had blessed Jacob and
sent him away to Paddan-aram to take to himself a wife from there, and that when he blessed him he
charged him, saying, "You shall not take a wife from the daughters of
Canaan," and that Jacob had obeyed his father and his mother and had gone
to Paddan-aram. So Esau saw that the daughters of Canaan displeased his father
Isaac; and Esau went to Ishmael, and married, besides the wives that he had,
Mahalath the daughter of Ishmael, Abraham's son, the sister of Nebaioth.
When Esau heard that Jacob followed his father’s
instructions to not marry a woman from the land of Canaan and to instead travel
to find a wife from his mother’s relatives, Esau recognized that the lifestyle
and morality of the Canaanites was displeasing to Isaac. Moses tells us that
Esau responded to this reality by approaching Ishmael’s family to ask for
permission to marry one of their relatives. As we discovered in the promise
series, Ishmael was Isaac’s brother, who was a result of Abraham and Sarah’s
impatient plans apart from God’s promises. At his point in God’s story,
however, Ishmael had already died.
Now a natural question that arises here is “why would
Esau ask Ishmael’s family to give one of their relatives to him in marriage? I
mean, doesn’t he already have two wives?” The reason that Esau wanted to marry
a relative of Ishmael is due to the fact that Esau hoped that the marriage
would please his father. Esau, far too late in the game, recognized that he had
displeased his father, who had always viewed him as his favorite son. And now
after losing out on the birthright and his father’s blessing, Esau was trying
to please his father by doing what he believed his father had originally wanted
him to do.
Notice, however, that Rebekah is not mentioned here. You
see, Esau did not care what his mom thought, because Jacob was mom’s favorite;
Esau was only concerned about what his father thought and pleasing his father.
And here we see the seeds of Isaac and Rebekah’s dysfunctional favoritism and
deception in their relationships with their sons bear fruit in the relationship
between Jacob and Esau.
Esau’s jealousy of Jacob and favored status with his
father drove him to attempt to please his father by marrying someone he thought
his father would approve of. However, Esau had already demonstrated, by his disregard
of his birthright and blessings, that he was rebellious against God and God’s
direction. And Jacob, who had favored status with his mother Rebekah, was now
fleeing for his life from the land that God had promised him to a land and to
relatives that he had never met.
Tomorrow, we will see what happens next as Jacob flees
for his life in fear into the unknown…
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