Part of a series, The Man God Mastered:
A sermon preached at St Alban’s Highgate 23 July 2017
Genesis 27:1–40 with Ephesians 1:1–10 & Romans 4:13–17
Our subject this morning is blessing. I have never met anyone who didn’t want to be blessed. My first embarrassment as a young curate was to be verbally attacked at the front door of the church by an irate mother. She was angry because she had brought her children up to the communion rail for a blessing, and I hadn’t blessed them. I was embarrassed because no one had ever told me I was to be a purveyor of blessings; what blessings did I have to give? I wasn’t sure.
A young couple asked me to marry them. They were highly intelligent and very articulate. He was a recently graduated doctor, she was still a medical student. Straightaway they owned up that they were both atheists, but reassured me they did not want a church wedding for social reasons, but because only a Christian marriage service, gave their marriage significance. I objected that nothing had any significance if there is no God. They half agreed but felt that their marriage had meaning for them. Finally they said what to me was most revealing: “We are atheists, but we could not say we were absolutely sure. And if there is a God, we don’t want to miss out on his blessing.” A lot of people feel like that.
We have been studying the Old Testament. God has preserved his people Israel for over 4000 years by means of a story, in which God revealed himself to them, and in which the clues to their identity and destiny are found. We are focusing on the story of Jacob, who was to be renamed Israel, and who would become the father of the Jewish nation.
Jacob’s destiny began in the predestinating will of God, declared to his mother Rebekah when she was torn by the pain of twin boys fighting in her womb. Both children would become nations, she was told, but the younger would rule. The question that engaged us last week was the value of that birthright, passed down from Abraham to Isaac, which would normally have passed to Esau, the eldest of the twins, when Isaac died. We saw how Esau put little value on this quaint old promise, but how Jacob saw something of its value, and found an opportunity to buy it from his brother. Their different destinies were beginning to unfold.
We jump to when Isaac is old and blind – in more ways than one – and wants to give his fatherly blessing to his eldest son. Esau the hunter, the outdoors man, is Isaac’s favourite as well as his eldest. Doubtless Jacob and Rebekah have told Isaac that Esau sold the birthright to Jacob. Doubtless Rebekah told her husband the word God gave her about Jacob’s destiny. But Isaac has not taken either seriously, because now he plans to bestow his formal blessing on Esau. Perhaps they have discussed the succession. Maybe Esau has assured his father that there was nothing to that silly idea that he had sold his birthright. His father’s final blessing is the all-important thing, equivalent to being named the principal heir in Isaac’s will. It certainly means something to Esau now. Isaac is doing this without consulting Rebekah or Jacob. Rebekah overhears it.
By giving him his formal blessing Isaac intends to give Esau the place of leadership and prominence in regard to the family’s future, regardless of what squabbles he may have with his brother when they were young men.
But Isaac’s plan backfires. He is fighting the revealed will of God. God has already declared his choice of Jacob, and Rebekah is determined that Jacob will get the blessing. She succeeds.
The heart of the story is the actual giving of the blessing. Blind Isaac catches the smell of the forest on Esau’s clothes and it appears both to inspire his blessing, and to give him some inward conviction of its accuracy and power. When Esau returns and Isaac discovered he has been tricked he realizes he has been defeated. Although he did not mean to bless Jacob and although the intention was that the blessing should rest on Esau, nevertheless it had gone forth with power and now rests on Jacob.
This is puzzling. For us a blessing is a pat on the head and somebody wishing us good luck for the future. It is hard for us to see how one human being could pronounce on another something of such power and influence as is indicated in this story.
To unravel the story we must first ask, What is this blessing? Well, listen to it!
See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field that Yahweh has blessed! May God give you of the dew of heaven and of the fatness of the earth and plenty of grain and wine. Let peoples serve you, and nations bow down to you. Be lord over your brothers, and may your mother’s sons bow down to you. Cursed be everyone who curses you, and blessed be everyone who blesses you! (Genesis 27.27-29)
First of all it is is a prayer. It is a prayer that Jacob a) be endowed with prosperity, b) that he rule the nations, c) that he be the head of his own extended family – the chosen family, and d) that he become a source of blessing to others. We should recognize immediately echoes of the promise Abraham and then Isaac received from God.
But the blessing is more than a prayer; it is a prophetic prayer. This means that Isaac is the mouthpiece of God here. The prayer is inspired by God, and God gives him the inward confirmation that it has been powerful and effective. That is why when the trick is exposed Isaac knows he has been beaten. God was not deceived by Jacob’s disguise, and yet bestowed the blessing on him anyway. Jacob now is not only the predestined and the rightful possessor of the birthright, but the blessed. Isaac is unable to do anything about this. He cannot give Esau the blessing he wanted to give him. He can only open his mouth as it were and declare God’s word over the future of Esau. And that is not all good.
We are offended. The very idea that God could be party to this sort of cheating is quite horrid. But we lose the way if we get tied up at this point in moral judgements. A moral analysis of the story is extremely difficult simply because the Bible doesn’t give us enough details of thoughts and motives. What it is at pains to tell us is the bare bones of the true story of how Jacob came to be the father of Israel. What information the story does give us suggests that the behaviour of all the actors – Esau, Jacob, Isaac and Rebekah is sinful. Each in his or her own way is fighting God or failing to trust him, but God through it all works out his plan of salvation for the world. God sometimes uses evil to further his good purpose, though he never does evil himself.
It is important not to try to make a hero of Jacob. He is not a storybook character, but a real human being. So far he has done nothing of moral worth, except to recognize the value of the birthright and the blessing and to strive for them. His way of striving is unjust, and the results of the injustice will now boil over into Esau’s hatred and desire to kill him. Jacob will be forced to flee and will now begin a long and painful journey of suffering and character building – something that must come to all God’s elect children. Before him lies exile. For twenty years he will taste what it is like to be exploited by a relative. Beyond that lies struggles with God, the rape of his daughter, war with the Canaanites, his own playing favourites with a son blowing up in his face, and the agony of his apparent murder. He will go into exile again and die away from his beloved promised land. As an old man he will appear before the King of Egypt who will ask him how old he is. His answer is telling: “The days of the years of my sojourning are 130 years. Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life, and they have not attained to the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their sojourning.” (Genesis 47.9) The man at the end will not be the man who stole the birthright and cheated for the blessing; even his name will be different. Such is the path of sanctification and the road to life and blessing for sinful people like you and me. ‘Through many hardships we must enter the Kingdom of God’ (Acts 14:22).
The sheer struggle which characterized Jacob’s life – and indeed it characterizes the lives of many Christians – raises again the question of blessing. What is the blessing if it brings such seeming un-blessing?
We will start with God’s blessing of Abraham, which we looked at last week. Notice how many times the idea of “blessing” occurs – or its opposite, “cursing”
Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. (Genesis 12:1-3)
It is this blessing which lies behind the blessing Rebekah is determined to secure for her son. As I tease out its component parts I want us to see what lies behind it, and what lies in the future. Then we will see how we too can share in the same blessing.
The first part of the blessing is the promise of a blessed community descended directly from Abraham. Behind this lies God’s blessing of Adam and Eve at the beginning of man’s journey on the earth – “God blessed them and said, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth ..’” (Gen 1:26 [27] – 28) This blessing means God intends a happy and prosperous future for the community of men, woman and children – the family of Adam, as they possess and care for God’s creation.
We know that what was intended to be a blessed creation soon gave way to its opposite. The environment is cursed, the devil is cursed, Adam and Eve are sentenced to death – although, if you read Genesis carefully you will see that neither Adam and Eve are ever cursed. though one of their children is. Adam and Eve have brought trouble on themselves and have been sentenced to death. You would think that would be enough of a curse, but strangely God indicates that there will be ongoing struggle between the woman’s seed and that of the serpent. And this is what lies behind the story of Abraham. God’s promise to him marks a new beginning – God will fulfil his intention to bless mankind through a blessed community descended from Abraham. Jesus indicates what could be meant by the seed of the serpent when he calls his unrepentant audience “a brood of vipers” (a nest of serpents).
In Abraham’s future is Jesus – Abraham’s descendant or seed, who by his life and death, rising and ascending, rule and return will create a community of men woman and children reconciled to God and caring for each other. (John 10: 7-10, 14-16; Romans 4; John 8) When Peter realizes that Jesus is the Messiah Jesus says to him, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it”. Church means community, and Hades is the place of the dead. Jesus indicates that he is going to build a community which will not die; it will be eternal.
The second part of the blessing God unfolded to Abraham was of a land. (Genesis 15:5-8,17-21) In our next study we will see how God began to make that promise real for Jacob.
Behind the blessing of land lies God’s gift of the world to the human race, and his gift of Eden to Adam and Eve. God did not create us to live a disembodied or purely mental existence. Some philosophers and mystics have tried to distract man from his environment, to promote some purely spiritual experience as the highest life, but the Bible ties us to the land with a blessing. God saw all that he had made and it was good. God’s creation was intended to be good. With the fall the physical world was cursed with thorns and thistles and disease and death, but with Abraham hope is reborn for a land under God’s blessing, a land flowing with milk and honey.
And in the future lies the New Testament clarification that the whole of creation will be set free from its bondage to corruption (Romans 8), that the environment will be restored and healed to be a world which God will look at again and say, “It is very good!” We are not saved to be disembodied spirits in a ghost heaven, but full people with healed bodies to inherit the renewed universe, which God has in store for his children.
The third of Abraham’s blessings is relationship with God. (Gen 17:7-8) Behind this blessing lies the fact that God has made man in his own image, so that he might have friendship with us; he walks with Adam and Eve in the Garden. One day, in Jesus, he will walk with his friends throughout the promised land. In the future he will walk with all his children in a new world. Adam and Eve’s rebellion put an end to their easy relationship with God. They hid, and we are hiding still. But graciously and gently God coaxes us one by one out of our hiding places.
It is curious that relationship with God is the third blessing. Surely it should be first. Many spiritual preachers say we should not think at all about the blessings of family, of community or of material things, but seek God as the only thing that matters. I have always found that sort of preaching rather frightening. The thought of an unmediated relationship with God alone, without human community and activity in the world is beyond me. But the Bible never suggests that is God’s intention. Even when Adam and God were together Adam was lonely and God responded to his need by giving him animals first and then a human partner. Is it not most gracious of God that he awakens faith in Abraham first by offering him tangible blessings of family and land? Only as Abraham grows in his relationship with God does he realize that the greatest blessing God offers him is himself – as Abraham’s God and as God to his descendants. We need to remind ourselves that all the wonderful things which enthrall us, be it in the world of nature or in the love and affection of fellow human beings, are the creative thoughts of God. How wonderful to know the artist as well as enjoy his works.
God’s promise to Abraham is the start of a great rescue plan to bring a people out of hiding and walk with them again as his beloved sons and daughters. We have yet to see how God will draw Jacob into friendship with himself. So far in the story there is no sign that he knows and walks with God in the way his grandfather did – but he will. “This man too is a son of Abraham,” one day Jesus will say to Zacchaeus when he calls him from his hiding place in the tree, “for the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” (Luke 19:5-10)
The final blessing is the blessing of being a blessing. “In you shall all the families on earth find blessing.”
Behind this lies God’s determination to bless; his desire for the happiness and future of his creation and its inhabitants. Human sin brought the curse of death, but Abraham is to become a fountainhead of blessing. His descendants are to be the means of others being blessed. Isaac blesses Jacob with the words, “May those who curse you be cursed and those who bless you be blessed.” There is to be a community of blessing associated with Jacob, and those who set themselves apart from this community will have no good future.
And in the future stands Jesus. People decide their destiny by what they make of him. Those who curse him remove themselves from the community of blessing and the world to come. It worries me deeply that our nation is coming close to officially removing itself from any relationship with Jesus. Those who bless him – who trust him and join him – are blessed with eternal life and the fellowship of his people and an inheritance beyond imagination: a share in the new creation which God is bringing. How tragic to turn your back on that! What’s more, the Blessed also become fountains of blessing, as Jesus said, “Whoever believes in me, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” (John 7: 37-39)
Well, I think you will agree with me that the blessing of God is more than a pat on the head and an empty ‘Bless you my child’ – it carries a megaton payload.
Many seek the blessing of God on their marriage, their child, their new home, their business, their career, their holiday – everyone wants to be blessed, but many have already decided precisely what blessing they want. It may come. God is the ultimate source of every blessing we enjoy, including the rain that falls in its season and the present prosperity of our nation. But outside the community of Abraham – apart from a goodwill relationship with the seed of Jacob – there is no ultimate upward movement. Blessings can very easily turn to a curse, as Israel discovered in its later history. It will be so also with us, if we forget God. The tragedy of our times is that the more good God gives us, the greater our tendency to see him as irrelevant. Many have abandoned Christ for better things. They follow in the path of Esau. My appeal to all of us – myself included – is that we understand where blessing originates, and the path it follows, and how to have it, and where it finally leads. My prayer is that individually, and our families, and our church should live within the blessing.
Next time we will look at Genesis 28 and the way Jacob’s life unfolds.