May 13, 2018 The Beginning and the End XXXV. The Birth of Esau and Jacob Genesis 25:19-34 Dr. William P. Seel Easley Presbyterian Church Easley, South Carolina Scarcely have we met Rebekah and Isaac than the Biblical narrative hastens us along to meet their children: Esau and Jacob. Our reading this morning breaks down into three scenes: first, Isaac and Rebekah s struggle to conceive; second, the birth of their two sons and God s revelation regarding them; and then, third, the story of Esau selling his birthright to his younger brother. Now, the remarkable thing about each of these stories is that they each tap into a deeply important Biblical theme. We could read each of these stories on a surface level simply take each story as it is. But what I would like to do this morning what I think the Bible wants us to do is to look at these three stories in terms of that deeper theological thread woven through each one. So, Scene One. Isaac and Rebekah are struggling to conceive. They are experiencing barrenness, as our passage names it. Isaac prays to the Lord, and the Lord grants his prayer. Rebekah conceives twins, and the happy couple is well on their way to parenthood. But that theme of barrenness should already have struck a deeper connection with us for this is not the first time we have encountered barrenness. The same was true, remember, of Abraham and Sarah. 1 And the deeper theme that Abraham and Sarah s barrenness tied into is that promise of God, the covenant promise, that God would make of Abraham and Sarah a great nation. 2 Abraham and Sarah struggled with this promise in light of their barrenness for how could there be descendants if they could not conceive? But God intervened, and Isaac was born. So, now, how can Abraham and Sarah s lineage continue into that great nation if Isaac and Rebekah cannot conceive? But again, God intervenes and their children are born. So, clearly, this struggle with barrenness on the part of Isaac and Rebekah is meant to refer us back to that promise of the covenant as well as to provide assurance, again, that God can be counted on to fulfill the promises He has made. He proved it to Abraham and Sarah, and now He proves it to Isaac and Rebekah. But there is something even deeper here, in this theme of barrenness deeper even than the covenant God has made with Abraham and his descendants. In fact, this theme of barrenness takes us back even further into Genesis all the way back to Genesis 3 and the reason for that covenant promise in the first place. Genesis 3, remember, contains the story of Adam and Eve s turning away from God; their ill-fated choice to live on their own terms instead of His; their illfated decision to throw off God s loving design for their lives and to live instead as if they were their own little gods and goddesses living according to their own designs capital letter S Sin, in other words. 3 The punishment God administers for their Sin in Genesis 3 is less something He inflicts upon them, so much as something which just logically follows from their choice to turn
2 away from God. For to turn away from the Source of Life is, quite simply, to turn towards death. 4 To turn away from the Source of Life is to enter into a life devoid of light and right. It is to choose a life marked by the barrenness of our spirits, by the barrenness of our hopes, by the barrenness of our heart s long search for happiness and lasting fulfillment, by a cruel barrenness that renders our lives, in the end, to be nothing more than sound and fury, signifying nothing 5. It is to turn away from all that is good. And it is a barrenness which can only be overcome by our turning back to God a barrenness which can only be overcome by the Life-giving power of God. So Isaac prays out of his barrenness, and new life is granted to him and his wife. So we turn to God, from out of the barrenness born of our capital letter S Sin and God grants to us new life in Christ. The new and abundant life of those who, in Christ, have become born again. 6 For example, a pastor tells of the time his dad had a heart attack and underwent open heart surgery. The surgery was successful, and his dad recovered. But sitting through the surgery, sitting there keeping vigil over his dad as he recovered from his near encounter with death well, that whole experience worked profoundly upon that pastor. A few weeks later, he spoke these words to his congregation during his Sunday sermon: Three days after the surgery, with Dad out of danger, I went for a morning jog. (Nothing inspires healthy exercise like spending time with a heart patient). I jogged around the track in my old high school stadium. I thought of tackles I missed (and a few I made) on the football field on Friday nights, of my classmates who had already died, of the hopes we shared, of the lives cut short in Vietnam, or in cancer wards, or by drugs and alcohol. Around and around the track I plodded, seeing faces in the empty stadium. Let me speak for myself. Without the gospel of Jesus Christ my life would be nothing more than going round and round the track until my own heart gave out. The gospel is life, hope, meaning, grace. Without it I am lost, and only with it am I found. I could not live without the gospel, or to put it another way: without the gospel of Jesus Christ I am already dead. 7 So, there we have it the deeper theological meaning suggested by Scene One, the barrenness of Isaac and Rebekah, followed by God s gift to them of the conception of new life. Life lived apart from God equals barrenness. Life lived with God is a life that leads to true living. Remember the words of Jesus Himself: I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. 8 He came to deliver us from the barrenness of our Sin, and to give us new life, His own eternal life and that abundantly. Scene Two the birth of Esau and Jacob. Rebekah, says the Bible, had a pretty rough pregnancy. The two children tossed around in her womb so painfully that at one point she cried out, If it is thus, why do I live? In any case, she took her discomfort to God, inquiring of God why this was so. And God answered her prayer with an explanation: Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you shall be divided;
3 the one shall be stronger than the other, the older shall serve the younger. Now that explanation probably doesn t alarm us today, but it would have set off alarm bells back then. Especially that last line: The older shall serve the younger. For, back then, being the oldest was a big deal. In that time and place, being the eldest son meant that you received a double share of the inheritance and that you would be the head of the extended family following the death of your father. You d be the boss of all your brothers and sisters, and all their families. To be born the eldest son back then, in other words, was like winning the lottery and being crowned king all at the same time. This is just simply the way that it was, and no one dared question it. It was the law of the land. But listen to what God says to Rebekah in answer to her plea: The older shall serve the younger. In other words, God is upending the rightful order of things. God is turning this human rule upside-down. God is circumventing the ordinary way of things, inverting the human ordering of things and establishing his own ordering of how it shall be: The older shall serve the younger. It is hard for us to grasp the significance of this. For us the meaning of birth order is found only in pop psychology books at Barnes & Noble. But back then, birth order was everything an unquestioned assumption about how life is to be. Simply the way things are and the way things ought to be. And yet, here comes God turning the whole thing upside-down the older shall serve the younger. So, what is the deeper theological theme here? Well, every human culture, every human being inherits and upholds a certain assumption of how things are supposed to be a whole list of unquestioned assertions regarding what life is about and how we are to live it. These things change over time, and from culture to culture but every culture has an unwritten set of rules about how things are to be. Silly example: we drive on the right-hand side of the road, we always have done this, so this is just clearly the way it is meant to be. I don t have a clue what is wrong with the English on this! More serious example: for a long time our nation assumed that slavery was just the way it was, and therefore just simply the way it was meant to be. In fact, when this assumption began to be challenged, we came up with a whole host of high-minded reasons for why this not only was so, but was the natural order of things the way things were meant to be. So deep were our national assumptions regarding slavery that it took four terrible years of war to break the hold of that assumption and we re still struggling with lingering assumptions regarding race even in our own day. So much of how we live, how we think, comes from these cultural assumptions that the way it is, is just simply the way it is supposed to be. Is equals ought, as we used to say in philosophy classes. But, here s the thing: God s inversion of the human rule that the youngest always serves the eldest points us to the great truth that we live in a fallen world a world that is not at all the way it is supposed to be. And that, therefore, many of our human rules and assumptions, many of our established human conventions and customs, fall short of the glory of God, fall short of God s intention for how life is to be lived. What God s inversion of this well-accepted custom of the elder ruling the younger reminds is that a) we don t get to make the rules for life in God s creation, only God does; and b) that ever since Adam and Eve turned their backs on God s rules in the Garden, we have been completely ignoring point a. In other words, we think this world as we
4 experience is basically right-side up, because this world as it is is all that we have ever known it s normal to us. But we are forgetting the basic truth which emerges out of Genesis 3 and the story of Adam and Eve which is that nothing in this world is exactly as it is supposed to be. And I m not just talking about the stuff most people would agree is bad I m also talking about much of the stuff we all agree is good. Everything in this world is flawed and fallen. The truth is, we live in a fallen world, filled with fallen people, who follow fallen ideas of what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, what makes for success and what defines failure, and what defines strength and what comprises weakness. And so, over and over again in the Bible, God keeps trying to remind us of this truth. Now, The older shall serve the younger is not a new God-given rule for all time it applies only to this specific case of Esau and Jacob. But it is an example, a reminder, that our ways are not necessarily God s ways, and that our thoughts are not necessarily God s thoughts. 9 An example, a reminder, of how God is constantly seeking to break us loose from our ordinary, fallen assumptions of how things are supposed to be, how we are supposed to live in order that we might then learn His ways, the ways of the Kingdom of God. Think, for example, of the Sermon on the Mount 10 three whole chapters of Matthew s Gospel in which Jesus repeatedly says, You have heard that it was said... referring to our human assumptions of how life is supposed to be But I say to you..., meaning this is how it is really supposed to be. You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. Makes sense to us. But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you... 11 That s just crazy! In the world as we know it, Jesus command is sheer nonsense to us love your enemies and they will use it as an opportunity to knife you in the back. But the world as we know it is a fallen world, so what Jesus is doing is trying to get us to understand how it is really meant to be in our world and how it will be in the Kingdom to come, so that we can begin living towards that Kingdom even now, even here in the midst of this fallen world. Which is the meaning of how He ends that command, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven. 12 Not children of this fallen world, but children of our Father who is in heaven. So that we should come to belong, even now, more to the world the way it is meant to be, and less to the world as it currently is in its present fallen state. So that instead of living lives conformed to the wrongness of this present world, we should already begin to live lives transformed according to the Kingdom of God transformed according to how life was intended by God to be, transformed according to the way life will forever be once the Kingdom comes. 13 Which leads us to Scene Three Esau s decision to sell his birthright (his privileges as the first-born son) to his younger brother Jacob. Now Jacob is no angel here but it is Esau whose actions are most condemned by Scripture. Hebrews 12, for example, says this: Watch out for the Esau syndrome: trading away God s lifelong gift in order to satisfy a short-term appetite. You well know how Esau later regretted that impulsive act and wanted God s blessing but by then it was too late, tears or no tears. 14 And that is the deeper theological meaning of Scene Three. In Scene One, we encountered the barrenness of life lived apart from God, lived against the commandments of God. In Scene Two, we saw how God is even now subverting, inverting, the world as our sin has made it and
5 restoring the Creation back into what it was always meant to be: the Kingdom of God. Scene Three follows upon these two, in putting before us Esau s choice: will we, like Esau, chose the immediate gratification of living for the ways and means and rewards of this world as it is? Or will we choose, instead, to give ourselves to that new world, that true world, that right-side up world, that Kingdom of God world which God is even now re-establishing in our midst through Jesus Christ. Will we live for this world as it presently is? Or will we live our lives now in light of that world to come? Over and over again, Scripture says to us that we, like Esau, must choose. 1 Genesis 11:30. 2 Genesis 12:1-3. 3 Genesis 3:1-21. 4 Genesis 3:19 (14-19). 5 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5. 6 John 3:3 (1-8). 7 Sermon preached by Dr. Brant Copeland at the First Presbyterian Church of Tallahassee, Florida. Date unknown. 8 John 10:10. 9 Isaiah 55:8-9. 10 Matthew 5-7. 11 Matthew 5:43-44. 12 Matthew 5:43-45. 13 Romans 12:1-2. 14 Hebrews 12:16-17, as translated in Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary English (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2002), p. 2197.