Jacob & Esau: The Sovereignty of God in the Birthright & Blessing | Genesis 25-27

Hello and welcome to Through the Bible with Les Feldick. An Oklahoma rancher and farmer, Les Feldick has been teaching homestyle Bible classes for 20 years in Iowa, Oklahoma, and Texas. Les Feldick's unique style of Bible teaching has made the books of the Bible come to life. When Les is teaching, it's so interesting that people say time just seems to fly by. And now, here is Les Feldick. And good evening, and it's good to have everybody back here in the studio. And for those of you on television, we want to welcome you to our class, and we trust that you can just be a part of it. And as we've suggested so often, take your Bible and, we trust, write some notes and follow right along with us. Now, before we get started, I'm constantly being uprated for not making enough announcements, but there are several things we've got to share with our TV audience. And that is, number one, we have VCR tapes available from everything all the way back to Genesis chapter 1, and if you would be interested in a VCR tape, please give us a call on the 800 number or write to us. And secondly, we have been asked to remind folk that our program is not underwritten by any group. We are totally dependent on the gifts of God's people. We've always said we would never ask for money on this program, but on the other hand, people have to know that this program is supported by God's people. So, with that, we'd like to just get right back now into the book of Genesis where we left off last week. And for just a little bit of review, I'd like to have you turn to chapter 25 again, and we're dealing with these two twins now in particular, Jacob and Esau, the sons of Isaac and Rebekah, you remember. And all of this is right in line now with the Abrahamic Covenant. Now, I realize that a lot of people are picking up our program on television and have only been watching it for a few weeks, so sometime in the next couple or three weeks, we'll make another extended review and especially back to that Abrahamic Covenant, because I told one or two of my classes in the last couple evenings, unless you understand that Abrahamic Covenant and all that it entails, it's just pretty hard to understand the New Testament and even our Age of Grace and prophecy and the Middle East. The whole Middle East situation is resting upon what we have back here in Genesis. And for this reason, I've put a partial timeline on the board again, and we're going to be looking at it because I think a lot of people are going to be surprised of the time element that takes place between so many of these things that we normally read and think, well, it must have been just a week or two, but in actuality it was years. Because you want to remember, God promised Abraham that from His call to go to a land that He would show him, which of course was to Canaan, until Israel would be a nation coming out of Egypt is going to be 430 years. Now, God delineated that, 430 years. And we're going to see how an exact middle of that 430 years is when Israel is in the middle of her sojourn, or the beginning, I should say, of her sojourn in Egypt. In other words, 215 years of time elapsed before the sojourn in Egypt even begins. And again, I think we've all probably been under the impression that the Israelites were in slavery and in bondage for the whole 400 years. Well, in actuality, of course, it was still a long time to be under those circumstances, but in actuality it was only about, I think, 140 or 150 years that they were in that kind of a slave existence. Because you want to remember, as long as Joseph was on the throne, the Israelites had it just super good in Goshen, but it was after Joseph died that the slave situation came in, and that was, of course, like I said, only about 140, 150 years. All right, but what I wanted to show you before we get back into this timeline on the board is the sovereignty of God again, how that God is in control of every jot and tittle of what takes place, not only in the life of Israel, but I think in the life of every child of God in particular. And I think, as the old cliche once said, that the world is His stage, and indeed it is, and God is bringing it all to fruition in His own time. All right, now if you've got Genesis chapter 25, like I said, for just a little review, I'd like to have you come back to verse 19 through 23, where it says, These are the generations of Isaac, Abraham's son. Abraham begat Isaac, and Isaac was forty years old when he took Rebekah to wife, the daughter of Bethuel the Syrian, up there in Paddan Aram, up in Syria, north of present -day Damascus. And she was the sister of Laban the Syrian. Now verse 21, And Isaac entreated the LORD for his wife, because she was barren. Well, you'll notice up here on the board that indeed she was barren for almost twenty years, from the time that Isaac was forty until he was sixty, when the twins are finally born. Anyway, so Isaac entreated the Lord in verse 21 on behalf of Rebekah, and then in verse 22 we see that there are twins in the womb, and they struggle, even in the womb. Now this is kind of amazing, that the two personalities are already showing their metal before they're even born, and she said, that is Rebekah did, If it be so, why am I thus? And she went to inquire of the LORD. Now verse 23, And the LORD said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb. Now what is that? That's the sovereignty of God. He is bringing it all to pass, even before these little children are born. Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner, or two kinds of people shall be separated from thy bowels, or thy innermost being, and the one shall be stronger than the other. And then I want you to underline that final statement. The elder shall serve, or be under, the younger. Now who mandated then that Jacob would end up where Jacob ended up? God did. See? Now as we study this, and again especially when we come into the conniving that Rebekah and Jacob do to get that blessing away from Isaac, never lose sight of the fact that God had mandated this before they were ever born. But I think what we're going to see is just like Abraham got impatient with God's promises with regard to a son, and without God's instructions he connived, you might say, with his wife Sarah to bring about the childish male. Now that was all done in the energy of the flesh, and yet what was it in? It was in God's sovereign plan. And so keep these things in mind now as we go back to chapter 27 and pick up now the stolen blessing. But before we look at the Scripture, I just want to lay this out on the board before we get started, just a brief outline of the time element. At about 2,000 B.C., of course, is when Abraham received that call down at Ur of the Chaldees. And I put a question mark behind his age of 50, because we don't know from Scripture, but since the multiples of 5—50, 75, and 100, and dies at 175—are so evident in the life of Abraham, I think we can logically guess that God may have spoken to him at the age of 50 in Ur. Then he went up to Haran, you remember, and they sojourned up there in Syria where, of course, the relatives are still living. And then when God told him to go on down into Canaan, Abraham is now 75, and then when he's 86 is when he has Ishmael. And then 14 years later, when Abraham is 100, Isaac is born. And now I'm going to move over to the family coming out of Isaac. When Isaac is 40, he marries Rebekah, and then 20 years later, at the age of Isaac being 60, the twins are born, Jacob and Esau. And then when Isaac is 75—let's see if I can keep my figures right here—when Isaac is 75, Abraham dies being 175. So Abraham's off the scene. Now then, when the boys are 24 years old, when Jacob and Esau are 24, that's when Jacob got the birthright by selling that bowl of red bean soup, if you remember. Now, they're only 24, but there were no enmity created from that, evidently. You don't pick it up in Scripture at all. There is nothing to indicate that Jacob and Esau have now become enemies because of that birthright deal. Then, 16 years after Jacob takes the birthright from Esau, Esau marries the Canaanite women. Now, you remember we touched on that last week. And the Canaanites were a grief of mind, you remember, to Isaac and Rebekah. Now, all of this indicates, I think, the kind of a man that Esau really was. Remember I said last week he was a man destitute of faith? He saw no importance whatsoever in that birthright at the age of 24. It didn't mean a thing to him. And consequently, I think his life was intermingled with the pagan Canaanites until finally he ends up marrying a couple of them at the age of 40. And this is what's so amazing, and I guess I didn't pick it up until I was studying this more in depth in the last few weeks. Normally I've always thought that it was just maybe a few weeks or at most a month or so until Jacob connives with his mother to get the blessing, but in actuality it was 37 years. Now, that shocks you, doesn't it? It's 37 years from the time that they're 24 and Jacob gets the birthright until here Jacob literally connives with his mother to get the blessing, and then, of course, Jacob has to flee, doesn't he? He goes up to Syria, back up to where Abraham's relatives had been left off years earlier. He goes up to Paddan Aram. Then 20 years later we're going to see Jacob coming back, of course, with all of his children, all 11 sons. Benjamin will be born after he comes back. But then Jacob comes back with his two wives, you remember, Rachel and Leah, and they each had children by their handmaids. So he comes back with his wives and his 11 sons, and then 10 years after Jacob has come back to the land of Canaan, Rachel dies in childbirth, you remember, with Benjamin. And then it's another 15 years until our 12 or 15, remember, but then finally Jacob hooks up again with Abraham down in southern Israel, down in Beersheba. And so Jacob literally, with all of his offspring, enjoys several more years living with his father Isaac, who now dies at the age of 180. And the twins, Jacob and Esau, are now, of course, 120. So you want to remember back here Isaac was 60 years old when they were born, so the twins are 120. And then here's another little interesting date. By the time Isaac dies at 180 and Jacob and Esau are now 120, Joseph is 29, and he's already been down in Egypt for 12 years, because, you see, the boys sold him into slavery when they took that coat of many colors, you remember? It says Joseph was 17. So here you've got the whole spread of these years, and then as you come on further, and we'll be getting into the book of Exodus, hopefully after these four programs, I'm hoping we'll start Exodus, if not sooner. But by the time Isaac dies and the twins, Jacob and Esau, are 120, Joseph is 29, he's already been in Egypt 12 years, and then 64 years after Joseph dies, Moses is born. Now, does that kind of put the whole picture together? I hope that helps a little bit. And so, you see, from the time of Joseph's death and the birth of Moses, this brings us up then to that 215-year time, which would be exactly halfway in that 430 years that God mandated would be from the call of Abraham until Israel would leave Egypt. A total of 430 years. So, as I said earlier, that means that the abject slavery was not the whole 400 years. It wasn't even 200 years. It was more like 140 or 150, whatever. All right, now if you can come back in your thinking all the way to chapter 27, the twins, the boys, are not boys in our line of thinking. They're now 77, 37 years after the birthright episode. They're still at it, aren't they? All right, verse 1, And it came to pass, that when Isaac was old, and his eyes were dim, so he could not see, he called Esau his eldest son, and said unto him, My son. And he said unto him, Behold, here am I. And then verse 2 is kind of a verse that makes you smile. He said, Behold now I am old, and I know not the date of my death. Well, he must have had, like we like to say, a spell of some kind, and he thought he was going to die. But you know what? He didn't die for another forty-three years. He got revived, and boy, I mean, he just took off and he just lived another forty-some years. But all right, now verse 3, Now therefore, old Isaac says, take, I pray thee, thy weapons, and thy quiver, and thy bow, and go out to the field, and take me some venison. And you all know the story, and I'm not going to take all this verse by verse for sake of time, but I want you to come up with me to verse 11. And Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am smooth. My father, peradventure, will feel of me, and see that I seem to him as a deceiver. Now, you remember that's the exact word that Jacob meant. And I shall bring a curse upon me, and not a blessing. And his mother said unto him, Upon me be thy curse, my son. Only obey my voice, and go fetch me them. Now, we don't know how much else happened to poor old Rebekah, but if anything was a curse, I think the one thing was, do you know that after this and when Jacob had to flee for his life because of the anger of Esau, Rebekah never saw him again? And that was the end of her association with her favorite son, and I think that in itself was probably enough to break her heart. Now, of course, Isaac lived on, and as I've already mentioned, according to the timeline, Jacob actually spends a good number of years yet with his father Isaac when he comes back, but Rebekah dies in the meantime and never sees him again. All right, now let's come down to verse 14, where it says, And he went and fetched and brought them to his mother, and his mother made savory meat, such as his father loved. Now, verse 15 is an interesting verse, and Rebekah took ... What's the next word? Goodly. Now, underline that, because there's a lot more to that word in the Hebrew than just that it was a nice garment. It was a word that designated the role of the eldest, and as I was reading here not too long ago, you know, this is still the custom in the Middle East that the eldest son is given clothes that pertain to his position. Now, whether they've become westernized and they're wearing double-breasted suits or whatever, the eldest son will still wear clothing that designates him as the eldest son. Back in the antiquities, of course, it was as Jacob did for Joseph. It was probably a coat of many colors, and that was the reason that the brothers got so jealous, because they saw that their father was designating Joseph as the head of the brethren, even though he wasn't the eldest. So anyway, what Rebekah is doing here is taking that special designated cloak of Esau's, which showed that he was the eldest, and she puts it on the youngest. Now, do you see that? Again, in the energy of the flesh, but God doesn't stop it, because He had mandated in the beginning that this is the way it should be. And so we can't jump on Rebekah and Jacob too hard. Morally, we look at them and we think, well, what a bunch of cheats. How could they get away with this? But the whole thing is that they were merely fulfilling what God had mandated in the first place, only they were doing it in the energy of the flesh, but God is bringing about in His own sovereign way. All right, so she took the goodly or the special clothing of her eldest son Esau, which were with her in the house, and put them upon Jacob, her younger son. And now verse 16, there's another word I want you to underline. It's the little word K-I-D-S. Now, you say, why? Well, I'm not going to tell you right now until we get a couple chapters down the road, and I'm going to show you how, well, the Old Testament says, you sow to the whirlwind and you reap it. The book of Galatians, Paul says that you'll reap what you sow. And at least here in Oklahoma, I never heard of it when we were still living up north, but I like the saying down here that we use, what goes around comes around, and you can just bet on it. What goes around comes around. What you sow, that's what you reap. All right, now keep this in mind. Just file this up in your computer that she puts the skins of the kid of the goats upon his hands and upon the smooth of his neck. In other words, she's going to use the kid to deceive. Got that? All right, now we'll go on. So verse 17, she gave the savory meat and the bread which she had prepared in the hand of her son Jacob. He came to his father, and he said, My father, and he said, Here am I, who art thou my son? And Jacob said unto his father, I am Esau thy firstborn. Now we've got to stop a minute. We look at that, and I used to almost cringe at teaching this. How could he tell a bold-faced lie before his own father? But again, you have to look at it in the light of what God Himself had designated, and that was what? Jacob was to be the role of the firstborn. And so Jacob was not lying. He was in his position now, the firstborn. Now does that help? Now maybe a lot. You're going to still say he lied. But whatever, whatever. According to the way God reckons things, this is exactly where Jacob was going to be. He was going to be the role of the firstborn. Now we say, was God unfair? No, because what had God seen in the makeup of Esau? No faith, see? Now what does Hebrews chapter 11 verse 6 say? We've looked at it over and over. Without faith, it is impossible to please God. So no matter how morally good Esau may have been, and I doubt that he was because of his marrying the Canaanites, but even if he was a better man than Jacob, God couldn't use him because he had no faith. Now listen, it's the same way today. The reason people are turned off by Christianity, the reason they don't want anything to do with spiritual things is that they are destitute of faith. They can no longer believe that this is the Word of God. They have become so intellectual, they've been so scientifically minded that they say, well, unless you can prove some of these things, I just can't believe it. Listen, God doesn't have to prove anything. God is sovereign. God has spoken it, and He has every right in the world to expect mankind to believe it, see? And consequently He has said that if we haven't got faith, there's no way we can please Him, nor could Esau. And so Jacob, when he says here, I am only your firstborn son, according to how God mandated it, he didn't lie. And so now if you'll come on to verse 21, And Isaac said unto Jacob, Come near, I pray thee, because I don't think the old fellow didn't know that one son was hairy and the other was smooth. And so he said, Well, come on, let me feel of you. And he said, How hast thou been so quickly? Verse 20, My son. And he said, Because the Lord thy God brought it to me. Now there is another statement that we have a hard time swallowing, but on the other hand you have to look at the fact that this is the way God had sovereignly mandated. And then verse 21, Isaac said, Come near, I pray thee, that I may feel of thee my son, whether thou be my very son Esau or not. And Jacob went near unto Isaac his father. He fell to him and said, The voice is Jacob's, but the hands are the hands of Esau. And so he discerned him not, because his hands were hairy, as his brother Esau's hands, so he what? He blessed him. And you want to remember that in the ancient Middle Eastern world, even in the pagan kings, and you see that so often in Scripture, like in the book of Esther and with Nebuchadnezzar and others, when they made a decree, there was no changing it. Right or wrong, it stood. Well, it's the same way here. Isaac mandates or gives the decree that Jacob is to have the blessing. Now, I think I pointed it out in our last program, but time flies by and we're prone to forget the birthright, you remember, was the spiritual side of the family position. The eldest son was more or less the priest of the family, if I may use that word. He was the spiritual leader. But with regard to this little family coming out of Abraham now, it's more than just being the family priest. It's through this line that the promised Messiah, the Redeemer, will come. And this makes it all important that God's sovereign will is accomplished. Now, you see, Esau, according to his being born first, could have been in the line of the Messiah, but he canceled it because of his no faith, and it fell to Jacob. And so Jacob then got the birthright, not really by deceiving. I can't see that he deceived Esau. I mean, if the guy came in, was starving, and was willing to have a bowl of soup for the birthright, there was nothing iniquitous about that that I can see. And consequently, I think for that reason then, from the time that they're 24 all the way up until they're 77, we find no enmity between the brothers. I mean, they evidently, if they did have contact with one another, they got along all right. So you see, this birthright thing did not create the enmity that this blessing did, and the reason, of course, was that the blessing was the material side of the whole picture. Now, the material blessing said that the eldest son would get a double portion. So if there were three sons, immediately the father would divide the estate into four parts. The oldest one would get two parts, and the others each one. Here he would have divided it into three parts, and the eldest would get two and the other one. Now you can see a man like Esau, he was interested in that. He wasn't about to give up that double portion, and that's why he got so uptight when he found out that Abraham had already given the blessing to Jacob. Now that meant, of course, that Jacob was now in the line of the Messiah, which meant nothing to Esau, but also that Jacob would get a double portion of the wealth of his father Isaac. And you want to remember, these people were wealthy for their time and day. They had flocks and herds and servants, and even old Abraham, you know, he had a pretty good collection of gold and silver. And so just remember this, if nothing else, that the reason Esau got so excited about the fact that he'd missed the blessing, this is something material, whereas the birthright never did bother him because that was something spiritual. Now, I hope that all helps to kind of settle these things in our mind, and then we'll see in our next program how things progress after this deception by Jacob and his own mother. Thank you, and be sure to tune in next time.