The Deception that Saved the Covenant

Introduction

The most assuring thing about serving a completely sovereign God is his complete control over everything. This means that it is impossible to undo his plans and thwart his purposes. Any enemy of God must shudder at this prospect because it means that anything they would do to counteract God’s plans will not only be foiled, but more often than not will be used by God to do the very opposite of what was intended. It makes God an impossible adversary and an unfailing King for those who submit to him. God will defeat the sins that our fallen hearts still struggle with, and as painful as it can be, it is the greatest comfort to those who truly desire holiness and the greatest disappointment to the apostate who seeks to continue secretly in sin. In our text today, we see God’s sovereignty at work in one of the messiest family conflicts in the entire Bible. Ultimately, God’s great purposes will come to pass as the story of redemption continues to bring the narrative of Scripture closer to the coming of Christ.

The Problems with Esau

As our text begins, we are aware of two big problems with Esau, problems that would disqualify him from being the covenant head of the people. First is his choice of marriage partners, and second is the fact that he has already sold his birthright, and yet he seems to expect this blessing which, if successfully given to him, would take the promise of God away from the family dynasty that God had established through Abraham, since Esau was not set to inherit the household. Through his poor decisions and through the actions of Rebekah, God will see that his Word and will will come to pass.

Hittite Wives

So first, this man who naturally would inherit the family dynasty is that his choice of marriage partners is very poor. When Abraham thought he was nearing the end of his life, he was careful to make sure that Isaac did not marry one of the Canaanite women. This be because these women would be more likely to lead the family astray into idolatry as they lived in the land of their family and their gods, and it’s also because God has promised judgement on the Canaanite tribes, including the Hittites, and marrying them is therefore an act of unfaithfulness since he is linking himself to a group of people under God’s judgement.

Marriage is a God ordained covenant, and the people of God are not meant to knowingly enter into such a covenant with someone who is an enemy of God. If you are married, God’s will for you is to always stay faithful to the marriage you are in. But if you are unmarried now and thinking about marriage, God’s will for you is to only consider another believer as a potential spouse. Esau betrays the purity of the covenant community by mixing himself with the pagan people of the land by uniting in marriage, not just once but twice. The idea of two families joining together through the marriage of two of their members was even more apparent in that culture than it is today. It assumed an alliance and a forged familial relationship between them, a relationship that cannot exist between the people of God and the tribes destined for judgement. In this case, uniting with these pagan tribes through marriage while being the covenant head of an exclusive relationship with God is incompatible.

Birthright Sold

The second thing that disqualifies Esau from being the heir of the promised covenant is something we have already witnessed in chapter 25. Esau sold his birthright to his brother for a pot of stew and in doing this did not consider the promises and blessings of God with faith like Jacob did, even if that faith was expressed in a wrong way.

So what is the difference between a birthright and a blessing? This is not very clear, and that tells us something about the nature of this blessing that Esau doesn’t understand. The birthright likely refers simply to the inheritance of the family tribe, he was giving up his place as the next patriarch in the line of the family dynasty. The blessing refers specifically to God’s covenant promises of land, descendants that would become a great nation, and the enduring providence and blessings from God’s hand. Esau thought he could have the blessing without the birthright, but that was not true. Hebrews 12:16-17 says that Esau acted in an unholy manner when he sold his birthright, he did not count the dynasty of God’s Kingdom as worth more than a pot of stew. And in selling his birthright, he was also selling the blessing.

The promises of God are not something we should see from a human-centred perspective. Esau thinks he can take the blessings of God’s covenant and divorce them from the glorious plans that God has for the covenant people. Essentially, Esau wants to enjoy the blessings of God’s provision without God being glorified in the process. This is the way that sinful human beings most often treat the good things of God. They take them out of their intended context, divorce them from their created purpose, and try to twist them to serve their own ends. In this case, Esau wants to keep all of the benefits of the promises without being the divine image bearer as head of the chosen people of God. He falsely separates God’s blessings for Abraham with his covenant with Abraham. God is not going to bless a family that shoots off of Abraham’s line, he is going to bless the lineage which means he is going to bless the one with the birthright.

These two things alone make Esau ineligible to receive the blessings of the Abrahamic covenant, but at the foundation of both is a lack of faith. He didn’t value the birthright, nor did he value the purity of the covenant people in his marriages. His view was so lacking of divine focus and the value of God’s purposes because he didn’t believe or submit to God.

The Problem with Isaac

But despite these compelling reasons why Esau must not receive the covenant blessing, Isaac decides to give him the promise anyway. We know from chapter 25 that Isaac favoured Esau. He was a real mans man, the visible definition of raw masculinity, and he satisfied Isaac’s taste for wild game. Although Isaac still has many years ahead of him, apparently at this point he was not looking so great and thought his time was short, and the time had come to give him the blessing of the patriarch, a blessing that was covenantal in nature. So the almost blind Isaac takes his son secretly aside and asks him to make a meal of wild venison prepared the way that he likes it. A meal was common with an official transfer of leadership or other covenantal actions. But we can’t help but notice that Isaac is particularly looking forward to his favourite meal.

Motivated by Fleshly Desires

This touches on one of Isaac’s big problems in this text. When considering the future of the people of God, he is mainly motivated by his fleshly desires rather than the glory of God. He has let his personal cravings influence his decision, and the secretive nature of his meeting with Esau suggests that he knows there are problems with appointing Isaac with the blessing, but he doesn’t seem to take these problems seriously. We are told that Esau’s marriages had brought grief to him and his wife and he apparently knows that Esau sold his birthright, but he lets his own subjective desires take precedent over these. This is Isaac at his worst, blind not only physically but also spiritually because he is walking according to fleshly desires and not by faith.

Ignoring the Prophecy

His lack of faith is not only obvious in his willful ignorance of the problems with Esau being the subject of the blessing, but in him pretending like there was no prophecy about the older serving the younger. Rebekah had recieved explicit revelation from God that Jacob would be the covenant heir and Isaac choose to ignore that fact. In other words, Isaac does not believe the Word of God in this story, and this is always the definitive stage that faith is tested. When Abraham heard the promise of God, he believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. When Rebekah heard that the older would serve the younger, either Isaac did not take his wife’s account seriously, and their relationship does not seem great anyway, or he simply did not believe it.

Rebekah’s Solution

So Isaac goes ahead and sets up this blessing for the wrong child, and Rebekah overhears it and comes up with a plan. Her plan is to trick her husband into blessing the wrong son. Now what we’re witnessing in Rebekah’s behaviour and in Jacob’s as a result is not justified morally. Nobody looks good in this story. Esau and Isaac are being unfaithful to God’s word, Isaac and Rebekah have a terrible marriage by all appearances, and Jacob is both deceitful and a bit cowardly in this plan.

If you think about what they actually do, it seems like a really bad idea. Putting on animal fur and Esau’s clothes with a plate of lamb, not Isaac’s favourite dish of venison seems like it would not work. Even while Jacob carries out the plan, he recognizes Jacob’s voice and still blesses him. This plays into the obvious irony that Isaac’s blindness sets up. Not only is he blind, he has no spiritual perception and now it seems very little perception at all. His ears are working fine, his taste buds are working find, and his mind seems to be there, but somehow he is completely unaware that he is being taken in and tricked even though the evidence is certainly there for him to perceive.

God’s Purposes despite sin

What do we conclude from that? It shows that throughout this entire, unhappy situation, God remains in control. Isaac and Rebekah are probably one of the worst examples of good communication in a marriage. Rebekah intentionally deceives her husband, and Jacob is persuaded to halfheartedly join in. Isaac is going against God’s word and Esau has all kinds of problems, but despite all this, God’s purposes work out. God is never the author of sin, but he is still sovereign over it. Sin is rebellion against God’s will, and yet God does not loose control as a result of our rebellion. Even our rebellion and sin is taken in account in the great sovereign plans of God. Through these deceitful means, God’s plans come to pass. The blessing goes to the one it was meant to go to. This is in no way a defence of these immoral actions, but rather an acknowledgement of God’s great planning that makes it impossible to thwart God’s plans.

It is similar to how God will use the jealousy of Josephs brothers and them selling him into slavery in Egypt will be used by God to save the covenant family. When people try to mess with God’s plans, what they end up doing is being used by divine sovereignty to make those very plans come to pass.

It’s also important to note that, while Rebekah and Jacob do wrong in their deception, their motivation is at least based on faith. God had promised the blessing to Jacob, and they are acting on that, even if they’re actions lack a trust in God’s sovereignty that he would bring his promises to pass. This cannot be said of Isaac, who acts opposite to faith and is instead motivated by worldly desires. This results in him being tricked into giving the blessing to the one God willed. It also makes Esau show his true colours, revealing him to be a spiritual descendant of Cain. Like Cain, he is jealous of the favour and blessing that God has shown his brother and not shown him because of his sin, and as a result he swears to kill him, although he never gets the chance. The theme of the chosen faithful and the rejected faithless continues, however it is less black and white before in terms of the character of the two boys. Esau is faithless, Jacob a trickster, and through it all God is glorified in preserving the righteous line through imperfect and sinful people.

When Rebekah hears of Esau’s murderous plans, she prepares to send Jacob to her relatives in Haram, the very same area when Abraham had come before he was called and where Abraham had sent his servant to find a wife for Isaac. In 27:46 we read of a second motive to have Jacob sent away, so that he would find a wife from their family and not from the cursed Canaanites into which Esau had married.

Resolution: Finding a Suitable Matriarch

Rebekah shares her feeling to Isaac that she is sick of these Hittite women. It’s very unlikely that they have accepted the worship of YHWH, and it is probably their pagan worship and immoral practices that are getting to her to the point that she loathes her life. If Jacob married such women, she says there would be no point to her life anymore. While she may be speaking personally, the risk of dissolving the covenant people into the pagan world around them is very real. Jacob must not follow in the steps of his brother, especially now that he has the covenant blessing.

Isaac has now accepted that Jacob, and not his favourite son Esau, will get the blessing. He now gets some sense and listens to his wife, who is definitely in the right here. Like his father before him, who sent a faithful servant to Haram to find a wife worthy of being the next matriarch to the people of God, Jacob is now being sent out for his own good and the good of the people of God. The narrative will continue to follow the life of Jacob from here, as he takes the blessing with him.

Takeaways

There are a couple more things we can take away from this famous story

Warning Against being led by passion rather than truth

Isaac makes perhaps the most serious mistake of his life in this text. He let himself be led by passions and appetites rather than the glorious purposes and promises of God when it came to choosing an heir. This was not a decision for hiim to make to begin with, and letting his stomach and the pride of his firstborn make that decision is the opposite of how a Christian should act. There certainly isn’t anything wrong with liking wild game, but when our appetites cause us to forsake God’s Word we fall into a self-centred idolatry. It is treating ourselves as worthy of something only God is worthy of: the right to choose between right and wrong. For those of you who have been following this series since the beginning, you may recognize this kind of decision making as it is exactly what happened in the garden in Genesis 3. A desire for good food and a desire for the liberty to make moral calls led to the very first sin. By his actions, Isaac was basically telling God that he wanted his own will to be done instead of God’s will.

How often Christians fall into the same attitude, with sometimes disastrous results. Falling into sexual immorality, whether it is adultery, homosexual activity, or simply an unmarried couple sleeping together, happens when those involved decide to make their decisions based on their own passions, and the morality of the world around them, rather than on the Word of God. Taking a bribe has the same motivation, a desire to benefit financially by perverting justice. This can also happen subtly, such as forgoing our Christian witness because of a fear of what those close to us may think. The desire for friends who respect you, just like the desire for food or for sex, is a good desire. But it cannot be a ruling desire, that it, it cannot be a desire that trumps our devotion to keep God’s Word. How dangerous and anti-Christian it is for us to let ourselves be ruled by our passions rather than the Lord we claim to love.

God’s election works out through means

Second, despite the godless behaviour of Isaac and the dishonourable actions of Rebekah, God’s plan of election works out according to his sovereignty. Everything anyone does in this story is problematic, and yet at the end of the day the right boy has the promise and is on his way to get a wife from Haran like Abraham did for Isaac. Only God can take such a messy situation and cause it to turn out right. Despite the sins of God’s people, sins that are on equal footing to the sin in the garden, God’s plans endure. This shows us that God was never out of control when Adam and Eve sinned. All the time, his plan of redemption culminating in the person of Jesus Christ. It had been decreed that our Messiah would come through Jacob, not Esau, and even the worst mistakes of God’s people cannot undo that.

That’s not to say that their sins don’t have consequences. One cannot imagine Isaac and Rebekah having a close marriage after this. Esau tries to rectify his choices by marrying another girl, this time a Ishmaelite, a relative of his father, but a relative of the rejected family and a further disruption of marriage, which is created to be monogamous. Jacob and his mother will never see one another again, although ironically the “dying” Isaac will be alive for another 80 years. Isaac will be away from the promised land for a while as well and will marry the next matriarch under less than ideal conditions. Sin has it’s consequences, and God will often let his children experience those consequences for their own good, but it is impossible for our sin to change God’s purposes of election. His election is part of his own plan, and we can’t do anything to mess it up.

As a Christians, sin will do a lot of damage. It will hurt your relationships, eat away at your confidence in Christ, destroy your witness, and bring potentially painful discipline from our loving Father. A love for sin and unwillingness to fight it seriously will prove you to be unconverted, which is why Jesus tells us to take the fight so seriously we would be willing to pluck out an eye to cut off a hand. But, one thing your sin cannot do is foil God’s plan, including God’s election. That is why it is impossible to lose your salvation. If anyone could lose God’s election, it would be Jacob. But God’s plan endures for all he has called to be his. He makes the change in their hearts and you will hate sin as a result. But when you do sin you cannot undo what he has already done.

It is the same mindset we should have with other Christians. When a Christian sins against you and hurts you, remember that God does use imperfect people for his purposes. Remember that he is slowly making them in his image in the lifelong process of sanctification, and remember that even their sins are under God’s control. The people we are called to love are sometime going to sin against you, but don’t let that discourage you from the love you are called to. Be encouraged that God’s purposes are being done, and his will for you is to live with the same grace for your fellow believer that Christ has for you.

Conclusion

Jesus Christ is the centre of all of God’s plans. It is his Kingdom, his glory, and his name that are the end of all that God does in this world. When we are faithless, God remains faithful at all times because he will always be faithful to his own character and his own glory. His people, the church, are saved and sanctified for that end, and his mercy and patience are as sure as his own dedication to his own glory. Let that give you the confidence you need in his forgiveness and grace, and the motivation you need to live a Christ-like life.