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When a mess lands in our lap—whether it’s the fallen world’s doing or our own—the natural move is to grab control and start fixing, doubling down on whatever we think will work. In Genesis 28, two sons of the same broken family face that same moment, and the difference between how they respond reaches right into the choices we face today.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Okay. We’ve seen some really, really horrible disasters in our world recently. If you’re following the news at all, some of it has just been so utterly heartbreaking. I was just talking with Jeff before the service; we were talking about some of the news just in this past week—the massive attack, the barrage of missiles sent by Iran on Israel. Thankfully, the missile defense systems were effective, but it still did some damage. I think there was some loss of life, and so that’s horrible, but just the powder keg of the Middle East.
Then here at home, we’ve seen some absolutely horrible things. We’ve seen just utter destruction from Hurricane Helene that, well, I saw this picture, and I think it gets out exactly what happened better than I can possibly describe. Have you seen this picture? Here’s a satellite image of what it normally looks like on the eastern part of our country. And if you look at that picture, that incredible picture of all the city lights, you can see the different cities and the highways and so on. Well, take a look at what happens after the hurricane. It looks like someone just took a giant paintbrush and painted up the eastern seaboard. And I look at that, and it’s just mind-boggling.
We’re not talking about a little place somewhere, as tragic as that would be. We’re talking about just this huge swath of the country suddenly gone entirely dark. And then we hear the stories coming out of there, and the horrors and the death and the destruction and the broken hearts from people who’ve watched their lives destroyed or seen their loved ones taken away from them, maybe swept away from them right in front of their very eyes. Just the horrors of it. And on top of that, what do we see? Well, we see all the stuff that we always do—the political just mumbo-jumbo, the government being slow to do it, the people being angry at the government, the fighting.
This week I saw in particular, because that’s always the place that gets things solved, two of the most visible figures in our country bickering on X, on Twitter, about getting hurricane relief—Elon Musk and Pete Buttigieg, the cabinet secretary. And they were bickering about whether or not there would be flights allowed that Elon Musk was trying to arrange for relief aid. Now why am I telling you that? I could talk any week and tell you about notable people in the political realm bickering, but here was the thing that actually was notable that I found incredibly encouraging.
After Musk had posted something about how the flights he was trying to arrange had been prohibited by the FAA, Buttigieg responded on X and told him, “Give me a call.” And what do you know? Over the course of several different messages of the two of them responding back and forth, they actually proved that two people on very different sides of the political aisle could have a decent conversation together. And by the end of it, the relief aid had been cleared and was going to arrive. And they both said some nice things about each other along the way. I thought, you know, that’s worth taking note of because it doesn’t happen very often.
But it reminds us of what we would all like to see and what we all hope to see and what we often don’t see. When things go wrong and we try to figure out how to make sense of the mess, sometimes that mess is just the consequence of the fallen world and it’s like that hurricane and that huge section of the country just shut down by it. And sometimes it’s the very much more human side of it, like how we manage our government and try to get the things into place to resolve the problems that we’re facing. And those are both very real messes.
But in all those cases, the question is very much the same: How are we going to handle it? What are we going to do? Are we going to double down on what we think is going to fix it? And somehow if we just double down enough, and that’s what we generally see in our society, “I’m going to double down on being angry, I’m going to double down on accusations, I’m going to double down on this or that.” Or am I going to actually try to do something different because I realize I don’t have the power to fix it?
And I think with something that massive, what we’re reminded of is that there isn’t a single person in this world who has the power to fix it on his or her own. No one can. God ultimately will fix it. He’s the only one that actually has the power to fix it. But certainly in the meantime, there’s no one person who can just say, “I have it all under control. I am going to fix it.” So the question is, what do we do?
And the question isn’t really all that different in our lives because we have messes. Sometimes it’s messes that are the consequence of the fallen world. Sometimes it’s messes that we bring on ourselves because of sin. But we have those messes, and the question is, are we going to double down on those messes and double down on our pride that says, “Well, we can fix whatever is broken and wrong in this world.” Are we going to do something different?
As we look at this next part of the story of Isaac and his sons, what we see is that we get two very different approaches to how to handle a terrible mess. And how we approach that makes a huge difference. And that’s exactly what we see in our story. So let’s go ahead and pray that as we read this story, we see these very familiar figures and their very familiar bickering, that we wouldn’t just see a story that we know, but we would see how it speaks to what we often do and what God’s calling us to do. Would you pray with me, please?
Lord, we do pray that you would help us, that you would help us to turn to you. Lord, we can’t fix things ourselves. We can’t even go out and tweet enough to somehow get other people to help us to fix the things on ourselves. We need you. Father, we pray that you would help us to see that more clearly, that you would remind us of the truth of your love, and as we think of you as the same God, yesterday, today, and forever, that we would have the confidence to proceed realizing the only solution to the messes that we find ourselves in. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Well, I usually like to start with the negative side first, and then, you know, if there’s good news and bad news, go ahead and tell me the bad news, let’s deal with that, and then get to the good news. But tonight we’re going to do it in reverse because that’s the way that scripture tells it, and that’s what we see in verse 1 of chapter 28. It says,
So here’s the first option, and if you’re here, you probably already know it’s the option you should take, which is that if we’re going to double down on something, we should double down on God and His blessings. God and Him, God and He alone as the one who can guide us and give us strength.
If you recall last week, we looked at the second time that Esau and Jacob come to loggerheads over something to do with inheritance. The first time, Esau sells off his birthright for a bowl of soup or stew—that’s not good—and then the second time, Jacob tricks his father into giving him the blessing that Isaac intends for Esau.
Now, as we saw last week, all four of the figures involved in this story—Jacob and Esau, of course, but also Isaac and Rebecca—they’re all guilty. They all are scheming and trying to arrange things the way that they think they should be and failing to do what God’s called them to do. So they’re in a mess, and that mess is breaking apart their family. And then the question is, as that hurricane rips through their situation, as the lights are turning out, what are they going to do next?
Well, right before this story starts, we see what Rebecca’s answer is, which is she’s going to keep doing the same sort of thing. And so what does she do? She comes up with a strategy to encourage Isaac to get Jacob out of the way before his brother kills him. And so she starts complaining about the fact Jacob hasn’t married yet, but Esau has, and Esau has married foreign women. And so she starts complaining about how distressing it is that her son has married foreign wives. He has two wives, and just the terrible burden of that. She makes sure that Isaac knows that with the plan that Isaac will, with peace, send Jacob off to go marry someone of their own kinsmen, and by doing that, it gets Jacob out of the way. He’s not going to be killed.
It’s a plan that works, but there are a number of layers that are going to be necessary for it to work, and the first one is Isaac’s role. Isaac could be so mad at Jacob, he could say, “I don’t care if he does die because I wanted to give that blessing to Esau. He’s just messed up my whole plan. I want nothing to do with him. I had a plan. I knew what I wanted as far as how God’s blessings and covenant poured out in the future,” and Jacob messed it up. “I don’t care what happens to him. And Rebecca, I’m sorry this distresses you so much about Esau, but I don’t care because I know you came up with the plan.”
That’s what Isaac could have done. He doesn’t, though, and it goes with what we talked about at the end of last week, which is that we see that Isaac realizes that he’s been defeated in his schemes, that it isn’t going to work. And what does he do? He moves from scheming to figure out how to get away from the fact that God had always said that Jacob was going to be the son that receives the blessing, to accepting it, to accepting that this is what God’s will is. And as he accepts it, that allows him then to find this new situation and say, “Okay, I do want what’s best for Jacob, and I want what’s best for Rebecca.”
While he doesn’t say this part, but I assume, I don’t think he suddenly liked it, he’s ready to do the right thing. And so what does he do? He blesses Jacob, and he blesses Jacob recognizing with full clarity now. He gave the other blessing without knowing who Jacob really was. Now he gives a blessing to Jacob knowing exactly who Jacob is. It is his son Jacob, and he blesses him and says, “You’re going to go with the Lord’s blessing. He’s going to be with you, and He’s going to make your descendants a great people.”
And for the first time in Scripture, he uses the word that often is translated here in our Bibles as company. It could be assembly. If that word sounds familiar, it’s a word used over and over again later in Scripture to refer to the group that is the people of God. The word that ultimately, as it moves between languages, we now think of in a New Testament sense as church. He says, “God’s people, you’re going to be God’s people. You’re going to go do that. I want to bless you and send you off in peace to go do that.”
So Isaac looks at his son who’s tricked him. He doesn’t say, “Now let me bring my wrath down upon you.” He says, “I realize what God’s plan is, and I want to double down on that. I could keep just strengthening my fortress of my will and my desires, but no, I want what the Lord wants, and I’m going to encourage that.” And so he speaks a wonderful blessing to his son, a blessing that is true, and also, I believe, probably greatly encourages Jacob because now he doesn’t have just the illegitimate blessing that he stole from his father. He doesn’t have the blessing that he made a deal—he did legitimately make the deal with Esau—but it still makes us kind of squirm a little that he’s willing to actually hold his brother to selling his birthright for a bowl of soup.
But now he has it legitimately. And so here’s another thing that we see. When we start to double down on God’s blessing and recognizing that God’s the one in control and God’s the one whom we want to follow, then we start to be able to pass along that blessing. Jacob receives a blessing from his father, a genuine blessing, a blessing aligned with God’s will. Isaac could have withheld that. It doesn’t mean that God’s will would have been defeated, but so much better it is that Jacob receives that blessing from his father, and he now proceeds with it. In a very real way, Isaac gives a blessing that wouldn’t be with Jacob otherwise, which is that he knows he goes with his father behind him on this.
And then what happens? Right after our story, we’re not going to look at this passage in our series since we’re focused on the life of Isaac, but right after this story, we have Jacob and his dream—Jacob’s ladder—and he sees the holiness of God as he’s traveling, and you see the dots start to connect. And keep that in mind because we’re actually going to come back to that story in a moment. But I think it’s so beautiful that we go from Isaac having to wrestle with, “Okay, here’s the situation now,” and I suspect Isaac kind of has a pretty good sense of why Rebecca is complaining at this moment. So he has that; he has to decide what he’s going to do with that and everything that’s come before.
He makes the right decision, and now as he blesses Jacob, Jacob is able to go clear-eyed and experience God’s blessing as a head. I think that challenges us as we interact with people and sometimes, most importantly, people that we feel have not treated us rightly. Are we going to send them with the Lord’s blessing when we realize what they’re doing is in accordance with God’s will?
Note, Isaac here doesn’t decide, “Okay, Jacob has schemed and connived his way into something that is clearly not the Lord’s will. I am now going to bless it anyway.” Our society wants us to do that. Our society wants us to say that we are going to bless things that are clearly opposed to God’s will, and we’re going to do that because it’s the loving thing to do. That’s not what’s happening here. What’s happening here is that Isaac realizes he was wrong, and yes, Jacob sinned as well. Yes, Jacob was scheming and lying, and he was deceitful. He did not love his father well by doing this. He wasn’t kind to his brother in doing this. But in the midst of that, Jacob was on the path that the Lord wanted him to be on.
Where he was headed was where he was supposed to be going, and Isaac says, “I am going to get on the path the Lord wants as well.” And we had that opportunity. Here’s the thing: We often think that what brings blessing and success is all sorts of different things we can insert into the Christian life. If I read my Bible enough, I’m going to experience blessing. If I pray enough, I’m going to experience blessing. If I come to church enough, I’m going to experience blessing. If I give enough money to the poor or to missions or whatever, I’m going to experience God’s blessing. And let me say, those are all wonderful things. We all should be reading God’s Word. We all should be attending church and being with God’s people. We all should be excited and supportive of missions and so on and so forth all the way down the line.
But what we need to understand is that is not what brings the Lord’s blessing. What brings the Lord’s blessing is turning to Him and saying, “God, I need you.” Now, if we genuinely do that and we love the Lord, we should want to do those things. They are markers of a healthy Christian life if we have the desire and the will to do those things. And even as we struggle when we don’t necessarily feel the will but we struggle and do it because we love the Lord and we want to honor Him and worship Him, those are good things. But they aren’t the source of blessing. They’re not the secret ingredient to a successful life.
So often we think we know the thing that we need, and we’re wrong. I have a talent, that talent is knowing what type of battery I think a device needs, like say, one of our microphones or something. Especially though, the things that don’t need to be changed all that often. I have a talent for coming up with what I think should go in those devices. Now, notice I keep saying the word think, and that’s very intentional because I’m almost always wrong.
If it needs double A’s, I think triple A. If it needs triple A, I think double A. If I actually am right on one of those, I really need C batteries. It doesn’t matter what it is that it needs. I can come up with a very decisive, pretty, I mean, you would think I had just read the manual and knew exactly what needed to go in it. I know what this needs, and I go and get the batteries. Oftentimes I don’t have them, so I go and buy the batteries, and then I go to put them in and I have the wrong batteries.
So often that’s what we do. We think, “My life doesn’t seem to be powered up with God’s blessing. It just seems to be—it’s not the Energizer Bunny. It’s the opposite of whatever the Energizer Bunny is. It just is dead in the water. It’s just sitting there. It’s not going anywhere. I need those new batteries.” And we go and we get what size we think needs to fit in.
Now, here’s the good thing, though, that’s different than batteries. We don’t have to spend a lot of time wondering. We don’t have to be going and finding the manual or opening the battery compartment trying to make sure we discern the right size. We don’t have to do any of that. All we need to do if we look in God’s Word is see what God clearly says, which is that we should follow Him, that we should turn to Him. He calls us to love Him.
And I think, as I think about Isaac in this moment, he gives a blessing that sounds not the least bit bitter. I don’t think that’s because he didn’t care. I don’t think it’s because it didn’t sting him deeply what happened. I think it’s because he thought about who the Lord is and the power of the Lord and the majesty of the Lord and the faithfulness of the Lord. And he realized, I want to follow Him.
Having tried putting in different batteries to arrange his life the exact way he wanted, now he’s going to do what the Lord’s called him to do. And here’s the thing that’s so important for us in that because we all find ourselves in those messes—the mudslides and the power outages and the lack of food, spiritual food—we’re all starving in some way. We’re all just trying to figure out how to get through this mess. And we’re all just starving in some way, sometimes in a very physical way.
A little over a week ago, it would sound weird to be talking about that in a large scale in our country. And yet we realize that’s going on right now. But whether it’s physical or mental or spiritual or some combination thereof, we need to come to the Lord and simply say, “I’m in this mess, and I know I can’t fix it. And I need you.”
Isn’t it funny? Scripture gives us a pretty simple solution. It’s a one-step instruction manual, in a sense. Yes, there’s a ton of stuff in the Bible, but really when we get down to it, there’s one instruction that leads to everything else: Turn to Jesus. I wish everything had a one-step instruction manual that got it working. And here we have that because we see over and over again, the call is to love the Lord.
But we like a different way. We say, “Okay, maybe it’s something religious I need to do.” And so we do start to think, “Okay, maybe I need to reprioritize, but we don’t double down on loving the Lord. We double down on religiousness.”
Genesis 28, once again, verses 6 to 9: Now Esau saw that Isaac had blessed Jacob and sent him away to Paddan Aram to take a wife from there. And that he blessed him. But as he blessed him, he directed him, “You must not take a wife from the Canaanite women.”
And that Jacob had obeyed his father and his mother and gone to Paddan Aram. So when Esau saw that the Canaanite women did not please Isaac, his father, Esau went to Ishmael and took as his wife—besides the wives he had—Mahalaleth, the daughter of Ishmael, Abraham’s son, the sister of Nebaoth.
Do you see what Esau does there? He gets part of the message. Something that scripture tells us later on, and we saw hints at in the last few weeks as we’ve encountered him, is that Esau is a man that doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what is right. And I don’t think he gave it any thought that it might not be good for someone who’s in the covenant family to go and marry people who worshipped other gods, who gave no care about the Lord. He just did whatever came to him to think that he wanted to do in that moment.
But he does get the message eventually. He says, “Well, everything just keeps going Jacob’s way. Now, not only has he received my birthright, not only has he received my father’s blessing, now he’s been set off in peace and given a very clear instruction to do something that’s different than what I’ve done. Maybe somehow I can claw back part of that blessing still.”
And so what does Esau do? He says, “Well, if my parents don’t like the fact that I’ve married Canaanite women, I’ll just marry someone else as well. And how could I do that rightly? Well, I know my grandfather Abraham had another son. That son was Ishmael. I’ll find out which one of his kids is eligible to be married, and I will marry one of his daughters, and then everything will be great, and then my parents will love me more, and God will bless me more, and everything’s gonna be great.”
“I’ll just double down on what I’ve been doing, but I’ll recognize, I’ll just make some tweaks to it so that I can do the things that I’ve been doing and just improve on them. And then once I improve on them, everything will be okay.”
And I think it’s such an interesting contrast when we look at what Esau’s experiencing here in contrast to Jacob. There’s one difference between the two of them. One of them is, in his own sinful, flawed way, chasing after the Lord. And we see that as he encounters the Lord in verse 10 and following, as he has that vision. He doesn’t get it all, but he’s receptive.
Now Esau, he doesn’t consult with the Lord. He doesn’t even consult with his parents. He just goes and he marries one of Ishmael’s daughters. And there’s an irony to that because not only is he going without really thinking about how that really solves anything, he’s still married to the two Canaanite women. He’s not going to somehow change that. He doesn’t think about any of that.
What does he do? He goes to the line of Ishmael. And what do we know about Ishmael? Well, Ishmael is there in that family tree because Abraham and Sarah didn’t consult what the Lord wanted and didn’t follow His ways. They didn’t trust that God was really going to fulfill His promise and give them Isaac. And so you have Ishmael.
And so you see one person’s attempt to put under human control God’s promises and his family meeting another person trying to put God’s promises under human control and somehow thinking taking these two aspects of human control and putting them together is what’s going to actually bring them in line with God’s blessing. And it doesn’t. It never does. And yet we do it over and over again.
But Isaac, while he’s turning to the Lord, his son Esau says, “I still need to hold it. I need to do something with my own hands. I’m going to do this. I’m going to get myself out of this mess. It’s the last thing I do. I’m going to get myself out of this mess.”
And Esau isn’t weird in that. Esau is normal in that. That’s what we do over and over again. If we think about the Pharisees several thousand years later, they’re doing the same thing. They say, “We want God’s blessing, and things keep getting worse. We’re now an occupied country that has Romans oppressing us. What can we do?” We’re going to double down on following religious ceremonies that people look at that and say, “Ah, here is someone who’s holy.” And that, of course, when everyone recognizes how holy we are, God’s going to bless us. We’re going to be the ones who are genuinely blessed.
Take a look at Matthew 15. Jesus says to the Pharisees, he answered them, “And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God commanded to honor your father and your mother, and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die. But you say, if anyone tells his father or his mother what you would have gained from me as given to God, he need not honor his father. So for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God. You hypocrites.
“Well, did Isaiah prophesy of you when he said, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’”
You see, the Pharisees—they wanted to make a system of law where they could say they were following it perfectly. And when we’re doing it by our own strength, we will seek to do that.
I remember talking to a wise man years ago about a particularly legalistic branch of Christianity. And I said, with the way that they speak, were they actually denied that the Old Testament law had any binding on people today? Why are they so legalistic? Because we were studying about how the Old Testament carries through and that there is validity to what God commands in the Old Testament that hasn’t been just thrown away with the New Testament.
And it seems ironic that those people who would set it aside—they often are more legalistic. And I thought, why? And he looked at me and he said, “When we create a vacuum of God’s commands, when we’ve taken them away, our human heart fills back in the emptiness.”
We know we need direction. And so if we’re not going to listen to God’s direction, we’ll find something else. Esau found something else. He said, “Oh, if the blessing isn’t coming to me, it must be because I married these Canaanite women. I’ll just marry another woman who isn’t a Canaanite woman, and then everything’s gonna be great.”
He’s making a law unto himself to somehow explain why things aren’t going right and thinking somehow that’s going to fix things in the future. That’s what the Pharisees were doing. They couldn’t perfectly honor their mothers and fathers. They couldn’t perfectly care for the poor. So what did they do? They created a system of laws that they could follow perfectly.
Because what could they do? Well, if they didn’t want to give money to their parents, for example— their parents are destitute and in need of care in their old age—and the Pharisees don’t want to give up their money. They’re working hard for it. They’re important members of the community, and they need that money to fit in with the important members of the community.
Well, what do they do? They just say they’re dedicating that money to God. And since they’re important members of the community, because they’re religious teachers, they just say, “Well, you know what? I need a new cloak. I need some new writing instruments to write down the word of God. When I need different things, what do I need them for? I need them because my life is an offering to God. And so I’m just going to say this is all for God.” And then I don’t have to give it to my parents. And I get to keep it. And I get to wear the nice clothes and have the nice tools because it’s really all for the Lord anyway.
The only problem is that loophole they made. Well, God didn’t say that. He didn’t put it in his Word. He did tell them to honor their mothers and fathers. He did tell them to care for the poor. But they create a loophole. And Jesus calls them on that loophole because as much as they’re presenting themselves as people who are deeply, deeply concerned with the Lord’s will, what they really meant was they were deeply, deeply concerned with the religious presentation of being concerned with the Lord’s will.
They want people to look at them and say, “Look at these holy men.” And God said, “Well, I’m the one that’s holy. I just want you to look at me.”
There are a lot of things when we make something, when we cook something, that go into that something that aren’t very tasty by themselves. For example, in my office, from when we had a pizza cook-off or a pizza kitchen a few months ago, I still have a bottle of canola oil sitting there. And if some of you are getting kind of hungry now, maybe you didn’t have dinner before you came and you’re feeling hungry, I want you to know that’s in there. And we put that in the pizza that was in there. It was on the pizza. It was in the pizza dough. And many of you said you enjoyed the pizza. So I assume it must be pretty good. There wasn’t anything spoiled about it.
So would anyone like me to hand you the bottle of canola oil? You can just kind of chug it along as we’re going here and you’ll feel satisfied, right? It’d be great. Anyone? Lots of calories in it. You’d have energy to burn. It’d be great, right? And if it didn’t taste good when you first took some, you could just drink more of it, right? You can have the whole bottle, anyone that wants to here. No? Why not?
Well, because while it’s a good thing, it’s not good taken in some absurd way. It’s not good taken out of its intended purpose. And a lot of times when we’re thinking about God’s law, we take the one part that we feel like we can complete, we pull it out of context, and we have that bottle sitting there—one of the ingredients of a good Christian life. And we say, “Well, this must be what I need to double down on so that God loves me.”
And I’m just going to start just drinking that bottle of oil. And it doesn’t taste very good at first. It doesn’t seem to actually be working in the right direction, but you know what? Maybe I just need to drink more of it. And so we double down more, and we keep doing more and more of the stuff that we thought would work to get God’s blessing. Esau, he’s drinking that bottle of oil with wild abandon. And the problem is it keeps tasting even worse, and he keeps getting more sick to the stomach. The blessing isn’t coming.
But he says, “Well, seems like I’m going in the right direction now.” The Pharisees, they say, “We’re doing all this stuff and putting on this grand religious presentation.” And in truth, they were holier than a lot of people. They weren’t perfect, and boy, did we find in Scripture, we find out about their flaws. But if you were taking them against everyone else in that society, they weren’t necessarily the worst.
But the problem is they found part of something, and they were just chugging that bottle of oil. They needed the actual essential ingredient to bring it together. And that’s the difference that I alluded to earlier when we think about, “Well, should I read my Bible every day?” Well, yes, it’s a good thing to read your Bible every day. Should you come to church every week? Yes, it’s a good thing to come to church every week. God wants His people together. Should you give money to the work of God’s church around the world? Yes, that’s something that God says we should do. Should you have compassion on people who are hurting? Yes, that’s a wonderful thing that God says we should do. And on and on and on.
These are good things. But the problem is when we pull them out in isolation, when they’re not baked into the proper recipe, they’re actually often harmful. Just like if I drank that whole bottle of oil, I’m confident I would not be capable of doing anything useful tomorrow. It wouldn’t be good for me. It wouldn’t be good for you. And when we’re just chasing after those religious practices, even ones that are actually from Scripture, even the ones that are good, it doesn’t help.
What Esau needed to do here was not to just rush off and see if he could course correct on his own. He needed to stop and come before the Lord and say, “Okay, I know you have a plan for my brother.” And I know that I’m still part of this family and that you haven’t forgotten me. How, Lord, can I actually be used by you?
But that’s not what Esau does. That’s often not what we do either. And you know, every time that we just grab that bottle and start drinking it, we come up empty. Bottle’s empty. Still not feeling that great. And then it kind of gets into our system and we’re really not feeling that great. It doesn’t work.
We know we need to do something, but we need to actually do what Scripture says over and over again. We need to do, we need to turn our hearts towards the Lord. We need to say, “God, I can’t do this, but I need you now.” That’s why I love that we were singing that earlier, “God, I need you now.”
Sometimes it takes those really, really awful moments in our lives where we just feel like there’s nothing left that we can do for us to actually say that. But those are the moments that are most beautiful. Those moments that we actually come and say, “God, I have nothing left. I need you.”
I do think, to Esau’s credit, there is some reflection later in life. We jump ahead to Genesis 33. We read these words: Jacob comes to him and says, “Please accept my blessing that is brought to you because God has dealt graciously with me and because I have enough.” Thus he urged him, and he took it.
Now we say, “Well, oh, Jacob bribed Esau.” But no, if we think about that whole exchange, there’s a fascinating exchange as the two brothers essentially negotiate out in a very near, ancient Near Eastern way whether Jacob is going to give Esau some gifts or not.
But by this point in life, Esau seems to have recognized, “I don’t like what Jacob did. He’s my brother, and the Lord is with him. And yes, I vowed to kill him, but now that I can’t, I don’t want to.” Jacob assumes that Esau may want to kill him still. But clearly, by the way they interact with each other, Esau has moved on from that.
And I think that’s a great reminder to each of us that we can have doubled down on the mistakes and the errors in our ways. We can double down on religiousness for year after year after year. And then we can look at God’s Word and say, “You know what? That isn’t what He wants me to do.” And today can be the day we turn and do something different.
Maybe all your life you’ve gone to church. You’ve sung hymns and praise songs. You’ve even read God’s Word, but you haven’t actually trusted in Him. And if that’s the case, it’s not too late today. Someday it will be too late, but it’s not too late today.
Maybe you’ve been living as a Christian for decades now. And yet you keep trusting in your religious practice and the piety that you can put forward rather than in the fact that God loves you and turning to Him and doing those things that are good and pleasing to Him out of love for Him rather than out of obligation.
Maybe that’s you. And I think for most Christians, at times we’re going to slip into this. Today’s a great day to say, “I just want to recognize what God really wants for me. I want to recognize that God is in control and that God loves me and things are going to work out in my life, not because I get everything right, but because God loves me. Full stop.”
It’s interesting in Jacob’s encounter in that dream—we know it as Jacob’s ladder—he reflects on God saying He’s going to be with him. And Jacob says he wants to be able to return to his homeland someday in peace. That’s the sign that Jacob’s looking for. And Jacob reflects on that at a time that doesn’t look like it should happen.
And yet when we turn to Genesis 33 and we see that encounter with Esau, we see that it’s exactly what does happen. That God has been working. And that God’s promise that He’s going to be with Jacob isn’t something that’s just sort of there, maybe there, sort of there, maybe there. No, it’s really there, and Jacob gets to experience it.
But so too in that, as he does that, he doesn’t come back with swords to put his brother down one last time. He trusts that God has it under control. And in that, I think in some real way, Jacob’s gift to Esau—that gift meant to provide some healing between the brothers—is in some sense the same sort of gift that Isaac gave to Jacob years before.
As Jacob says, “I’m following in the Lord’s will, and because He’s blessed me, I want to bless you, brother.” That while Esau is flawed in so many ways, and Esau is undoubtedly not the one who has the promise that’s going to carry on that promise as Jacob and his descendants, in that moment, Esau gets to taste a little bit of it.
And that’s something that we’re all challenged to be people who bring to this world, to give people a little taste of God’s blessing. And as we do, then to see God work and draw those people into His kingdom. God blesses us not because we get all the ingredients right in our own strength, but because there’s one ingredient that we can’t bring that He does, and that’s that He loves us. And that’s what we can trust in today and every day with our God who is always the same.
Would you praise me, please? Father, would you help us in those places where we try to take control, those places where we think that we have everything under control, those places where we think that we can solve our problems. Lord, would you help us to turn away from trying to solve things on our own and instead turn to you all the more?
Father, we pray this, knowing that we are in desperate, unfixable darkness without you. We pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
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