Chosen Before They Could Choose
Notes
Transcript
Readings: Genesis 25:19–34 and Romans 9:6–16 · NIV UK
Claim: Right through Genesis, God sets his love on the one with no claim on it.
Focus: Three scenes that show the promise running on God’s choice — not on merit, birth order or effort.
Function: To empty the self-confident, steady the fearful, and show us all God’s grace as we prepare for Genesis 26–50.
1. THE POT OF STEW
1. THE POT OF STEW
Imagine the smell of it.
A man comes in from the open country.
He has been out since before it was light hunting for meat to put on the table.
He is filthy. He is aching.
And there in the doorway of the tent is his younger brother. Stirring a pot.
Red stew. Lentils. Steam coming off it.
He is so hungry he cannot think straight.
Clearly, otherwise he’d have waited for some meat to be added to the lentil stew!
He said to Jacob, ‘Quick, let me have some of that red stew! I’m famished!’
And the younger brother does not reach for a bowl. He looks up, and he does what most brothers do to their siblings,
he takes advantage of their weaknesses, but this is not loving brotherly banter!
Jacob replied, ‘First sell me your birthright.’
[pause]
Even in the heat and tiredness of the moment, it’s an immense request.
here
The birthright.
In any family in the ancient world that means the double portion, the headship, the name.
But in this family it means more than that.
In this family, the birthright is the promise of God himself.
Handed down from Abraham.
That through this line, one day, the whole world would be blessed.
And Esau sells it.
For soup.
Four verbs, are fired at us in v34 to emphasise how shortsighted Esau was after selling his birthright to Jacob:
. He ate. He drank. He got up. He left.
So Esau despised his birthright.
That is the most expensive meal in the Bible.
And to understand the full depth of why — to understand how a bowl of lentils can cost a man the world — we have to go back twenty-five chapters.
Next Sunday we begin in Genesis 26, and we will be in this book, on and off, for some time.
We’ll be following the storiess of Isaac. Jacob. Joseph.
Good stories, but not stand alone stories.
They sit in the big picture of Genesis as a whole.
So this afternoon: we’ll see what the big picture of chapters 1-25 is,
so we’re ready for the next chapters:.
And the big truth is our next point:
2. GOD KEEPS CHOOSING THE ONE WITH NO CLAIM
2. GOD KEEPS CHOOSING THE ONE WITH NO CLAIM
We see this all through Genesis. Here are 4 examples.
1 Abel.
1 Abel.
Genesis 4. Two brothers bring an offering to God.
God accepts one and not the other
— and within a few verses the first murder in human history occurs.
And it is a murder about worship.
So the godly son is dead, Hope should be over.!
Except it is not.
Adam made love to his wife again, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, saying, ‘God has granted me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.’
The line of promise and blessing from God survives by replacement.
Somebody dies, and God provides another in his place.
We are going to meet that idea again before we finish.
We are going to meet it on a hill outside Jerusalem.
But for now, God has chosen a replacement for Cain,
a replacement who is a baby. He hasn’t earnt favour at all, an yet God chooses Him.
2 Noah.
2 Noah.
Genesis 6. The world is so corrupt and evil that God resolves to wipe it out.
Again, looks like the end fo the line for God’s blessing and promises to humanity.
But then.
But Noah found favour in the eyes of the Lord.
We assume Noah was a good man, and so God liked him.
But Genesis 6:8 says Noah found favour.
Genesis 6:9 then says he was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time.
God’s Favour first. Righteousness comes second.
That order is not an accident, and it never changes anywhere in the Bible.
Not for Noah, and not for us.
God chooses Noah to continue his favour.
3 Abram.
3 Abram.
Genesis 12. God speaks to a man in Ur and tells him to leave everything behind.
And who is this man? What is on the CV to be chosen by God?
Joshua tells us plainly, years later.
Joshua 24:2 — Long ago your ancestors, including Terah the father of Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the River and worshipped other gods.
Abraham didn’t earn God’s favour,
God reaches into a family of idol-worshippers,
pulls out one man,
and stakes the salvation of the world on him.
God spoke, and so Abram went.
4 Isaac.
4 Isaac.
Genesis 16 to 21.
Abraham and Sarah get old, and nothing happens,
despite God having promised Abraham he would be the blessing and father to all nations.
So Abraham and Sarah take matters into their own hands — And he has a son with the servant, Hagar, and his name was Ishmael.
But God says no. You cannot earn or direct my plans and promises.
I have pormised that blessing will come through a true son through Sarah.
A boy who is not even born yet.
Through the impossible child,
to be born to a ninety-year-old woman who laughed when God told her.
Certainly That child had not chosen God, he hadn’t even been conceived
- but God had chosen Him.
You can’t really read Genesis without seeing that despite the sinfulness of Man, that we see in all these stories,
God’s plan cannot fail.
Four times over, the line should have died.
Abel is murdered.
The world is drowned.
Abram’s family worships idols.
Sarah is ninety years old and barren.
And every time, the promise survives.
Not because the people carrying it were strong.
They were not.
It survives because God had chosen.
If God’s plan depended on the quality of the people in it,
it would have ended in Genesis 4.
What and who God chooses, God decides and God completes.
Paul in Roman’s in the NT tells us this same truth,
And he uses Gen 25 as the clearest example:
Becasue in Gen 25, and this is our 3rd point:
3. THE CHOICE COMES BEFORE THEY EXIST
3. THE CHOICE COMES BEFORE THEY EXIST
Isaac is married to Rebekah. And Rebekah cannot have children.
Twenty years. Twenty years of praying, and nothing.
And then God answers.
And she is pregnant with twins.
And the pregnancy is agony, because they are fighting each other in the womb.
So she goes to enquire of the LORD, and this is what she is told.
Genesis 25:23— Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger.
We started the sermon by seeing how the older would end up serving the younger,
as he sells his birthright for some stew!
But what we now see is that this was all predetermined by God before they were even born!
Paul reaches for these two babies in Romans 9
to proove that it is God who chooses whom to bless
- it is not based on biology, race, intellect, interests.
These 2 babies had, obiously, the Same father.
Same mother. Same womb. Same birthday.
Not a thing to choose between them.
Neither has done anything good.
Neither has done anything bad in a moral sense.
Neither of them had even been born yet.
And God says: ‘that one.’
Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad—in order that God’s purpose in election might stand: not by works but by him who calls—she was told, ‘The older will serve the younger.’
Not by works but By him who calls.
For those of us who feel we have earned our place with God,
we must remeber:
Jacob’s CV, on the day God chose him, was blank.
He was minus 3-6months old.
He had not prayed a prayer,
kept a commandment,
or had a single moral thought.
Perhaps none of us would say out loud that we earned our salavtion.
We all know the right answer.
But perhaps this attitude turns up subtly…
For example:
this truth should impact how we think about or love those who don’t seem to believe the Gospel.
How do we talk about the friend who has stopped coming to church after trying it for a bit?
What is our attitude and our talk about the neighbour or school friend who thinks the Christianity is a fairy story?
When it comes to salvation, we should pray for oneanother in love and humility.
Not contempt or pride.
They will only get it, when God opens their hearts.
We are no better than they are.
Or what about for those of us who feel we have no claim at all to faith.
When we have an underlying feeling that if God knew the half of our heart and sin he would be finished with us.
That thinking is also to think salvation depends on us.
Genesis 25 reminds us that
Neither of those babies felt anything.
Neither of them had an experience.
Neither of them woke up one morning with a sense of God’s presence.
God’s love landed on Jacob before Jacob had a personality to be loved for.
So if our assurance is resting on how the week has gone
— on whether we prayed,
whether we snapped at a friend,
whether we kept our temper
— then we have built it on completely the wrong ground.
It’s still a form of pride, we think we are more important than we are when it comes to salavtion.
But It was never resting on us. Not for one second.
For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.
So we must humble ourselves in true repentance, and yes ask for God’s mercy afresh.
All the while praising Him alone that He chose us for His Glory and purposes.
We take confidence in Him alone.
So, now we are confident in God’s promise, back to the lentil stew to heed a warning:
4. TWO APPETITES
4. TWO APPETITES
‘Look, I am about to die,’ Esau said. ‘What good is the birthright to me?’
He is not about to die.
He is a fit young hunter who has missed his lunch.
In realities He is not tempted by anything grand.
There is no rival god here.
No great seduction.
There is a pot of soup, and a man who wants it now.
He ate, he drank, he got up, he left.
‘Esau despised his birthright.’
pause
Genesis 25:23 says God chose. Genesis 25:34 says Esau despised.
The Bible is comfortable holding both of those together.
We are often uncomfortable with God’s choosing,
and us still being accountable for our choices before him.
But The bible is not.
What is in front of us this afternoon is this.
Jacob is no better than his brother.
Esau sells the blessing of God for a bowl of soup, because he does not value it. That’s on him.
And Jacob buys it off him in a cold calculated way. But God chooses him anyway.
One brother despises the promise.
The other one cheats to get it.
There is not a good man in this chapter.
But God blesses Jacob because God had made a promise — Genesis 25:23,
God said it. So it stands.
And every promise God has ever made to us rests on exactly that footing.
Not on our record. On his word.
So alongside our confidence in God's promise to us if we believe the Gospel of salavtion through Jesus,
We must also be on the look out in ourselves for despising God’s Word.
Because despising, temptation - looks so ordinary.
Esau was not seduced by anything dramatic.
He was hungry, and the blessing of God seemed less real to him than lunch.
Esau did not wake up that morning planning to throw away the promise of God.
He just wanted his lunch.
Friends do not despise God’s blessing, do not take it for granted.
It is a glorious gift from God.
Let our appetites be always for God’s Word - the bread of Life.
And never for the lusts and desires of this life.
We’ll explore more of this over the coming weeks.
But let us finish by considering what I hope we all know, but cannot enjoy any of this without.
If neither brother was ‘good’, how can God bless!
5. THE ELDER BROTHER WHO DID NOT SELL
5. THE ELDER BROTHER WHO DID NOT SELL
Esau comes up again in the NT, this time in Hebrews.
Where he is a warning for us - similarly to what we have just said.
See that no one is sexually immoral, or is godless like Esau, who for a single meal sold his inheritance rights as the oldest son.
Ok, we get it, it is godless behaviour to reject God’s promises.
but still how does God handle our sin and choose us, we’re not much better that Esua:
well a few verses later, he tells us why we can come to God in hope rather than fear. Not to a mountain of fire and darkness and terror.
But you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
The NT uses Genesis, Esau and Able etc to show us the ultimate man.
Because there is one elder brother in the whole of history who did not throw his inheritance away.
He is the firstborn over all creation.
Everything belonged to him by right.
And he did not sell it for a bowl of stew.
He gave it away. Deliberately. To us.
How can God bless people who do not deserve it, and still be just?
How can he keep a promise to a man like Jacob?
How can he keep one to people like us?
I know we all know it - but we must be careful not to despise hearing it all the time in exchange for some red stew…
Because of the swap.
Jesus took the cup of wrath that was coming to us.
And we get the blessing that was coming to him.
pause
Esau traded his birthright for a bowl, and got a hot meal and judgement.
Jesus traded his birthright for a cross, and got us.
God chooses whom to bless through a replacement.
Seth for Able,
Jesus for Us.
Which means our place here does not rest on us at all.
It is why God is able to choose his own, despite us.
So if we are in, let’s be clear what we are in on.
We did not qualify.
We did not earn it.
We were not the stronger one,
or the older one,
or the better one.
We were chosen before we existed, and it was paid for while we were still his enemies.
That is not a doctrine to try and work out and justify to our modern sesibilites.
It is the only hope any of us has.
Our part, alongside that reassuring truth?
do not despise His Word of promise in Jesus.
Next week, and onwards - more of God’s incredible grace to this family:
Genesis 26.
Isaac walks into Gerar and tells exactly the same cowardly lie his father told
— ;that is my sister, not my wife’
— and God renews the covenant with him anyway.
Genesis 27,
Jacob steals the blessing that God had already promised to give him,
and then spends twenty years in exile paying for how he got it.
Genesis 32, God has to injure the Jacobs’ hip before he will stop grabbing what he wants.
IN other words - Genesis is not a celebration of human faithfulness to God,
It is a celebration of God’s faithfulness to his chosen ones.
And that is what our church and life should be as well.
Not a celebration of Ourselves,
but a celebration of our faithful God.
Let’s pray.
