Hebrews 11:20-By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau in regard to their future.
When he was 40 years old, Isaac married Rebekah. She was having difficulty conceiving a child, and Isaac prayed to the Lord for Rebekah to be able to conceive. God doubly blessed them with twins. The pregnancy was turbulent at one point as she felt the babies jostling or fighting with each other in her womb and she even asked, “Why is this happening to me?” She didn’t know she was having twins.
Rebekah had a prayer life as well and she went to the Lord to ask what was going on. God said to her, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated. One people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger.” Genesis 25:23 (Remember that last phrase. The older will serve the younger.”
That prophesy from God was telling and unusual. In it, He declared a departure from cultural norms. In ancient times, the older brother never served the younger brother. Rebekah did conceive and have twin boys.
Isaac and Rebekah prospered. In fact, in Genesis 26, we read that they became very wealthy. Isaac knew and followed God. Remember, this is the guy who saw the angel of the Lord stop his dad from killing him. He saw God provide the ram in the thicket. He had been strapped to the altar of sacrifice because of his dad’s complete faith in God. How that encounter would have shaped his faith. Genesis 26 goes on to detail how God reiterated his covenant with Abraham to Isaac and how Isaac built an altar to God and worshiped God. People from other nations saw how the Lord was with Isaac.
Well, Isaac grew old, as we all do. His eyes were weak, Genesis 27:1 says, and he couldn’t see. He knew his time to depart from earth was growing close, and he needed to offer the customary blessing over his firstborn son and then over his other son. He favored Esau. He planned to bless Esau, his hairy first-born. This was going to be an act of his will, the execution of a decision he was making. He knew what God had said before the twins were born, but he loved Esau and planned to give him the firstborn blessing. Isaac sent Esau out to kill some game and prepare it for him so that they could have a “blessing meal” of sorts.
Hebrews 11:20-By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau in regard to their future. How does Hebrews 11 hold Isaac up as a person of faith if he is planning on going against what God had declared? Hold on to that question.
Rebekah overheard the plan. She favored Jacob. She also had received that prophetic word about the older brother would serve the younger brother. That sure sounded good to her. She wanted Jacob to rise to the top.
She knew she could take advantage of Isaac’s blindness and devised a scheme for the younger son to receive the blessing that Isaac had purposed to give to the older one. She told Jacob to just go out to their flock of goats and kill them. He wouldn’t have to hunt for anything. He probably wouldn’t have known how. He wasn’t the hunter. He was the homebody. So, she told him to take the shortcut of just killing some of their flock. She even prepared the food for him to take into Isaac.
To ensure that Isaac wouldn’t suspect he was talking to the wrong son, Rebekah dressed Jacob in Esau’s clothes and she covered Jacob’s hands and the back of his neck with the goatskins. Esau must have been one very hairy dude if it took animal skin to fool Isaac. That’s a lot of hair! They should have named him Chewbacca instead of Esau. Just saying. Jacob, wearing his disguise, took the food to his dad and claimed to be Esau.
Isaac suspected something wasn’t quite right. The voice sounded off, so he asked his son to come close enough for him to touch. Oh, touching the child during the giving of the blessing was customary, but Isaac actually said, “Come near so I can touch you to know whether you really are my son Esau or not.”
Genesis 27:22, Jacob went close to his father Isaac, who touched him and said, “The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau,” so he proceeded to offer Jacob the blessing meant for Esau. He hesitated for a second and asked one more time, “Are you really my son Esau?” Jacob said, “I am.” They ate together and then Isaac asked his son to come close.
Genesis 27:27-29- 27 So he went to him and kissed him. When Isaac caught the smell of his clothes, he blessed him and said, “Ah, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed. 28 May God give you heaven’s dew and earth’s richness— an abundance of grain and new wine. 29 May nations serve you and peoples bow down to you. Be lord over your brothers, and may the sons of your mother bow down to you. May those who curse you be cursed and those who bless you be blessed.”
What a blessing! It was packed with incredible promise and prosperity. Isaac thought he had done what had been in his heart to do, what he had planned to do, what he had purposed to do, but after Jacob left his presence, in walked Esau. He was back from hunting and cooking a meal of his own for his father, and it caught Isaac by total surprise to the point where he asked Esau, “Who are you?” Esau had to be totally confused. He said, “I am your son, your firstborn, Esau.”
Genesis 27:33ff: 33 Isaac trembled violently and said, “Who was it, then, that hunted game and brought it to me? I ate it just before you came and I blessed him—and indeed he will be blessed!”
Here is the faith part. Why do you think Isaac trembled violently? When he realized Jacob and Rebekah had tricked him, do you think he just trembled because he was angry? No, this wasn’t a fit of rage. I mean, no blessing, no contract would be binding if it had involved deception. He could have called Jacob back in and revoked the blessing he had given him. Maybe he could have cursed Jacob even as he revoked the blessing. But no, he didn’t do that.
In that moment, Isaac realized that his will had not been God’s will. His desire to bless his eldest son was not the plan of God. His decision to do what he wanted hadn’t been what God had declared. This was a lightbulb moment of faith for Isaac. Though he had acted in faith at other times in his life, though he had let God be God in other circumstances, he had acted according to his will in this instance. Isaac realized that even though he had messed up, God still had His way, and his statement of faith is subtle, but profound. “Indeed, he will be blessed.”
Isaac had resisted God regarding the plan for the two boys, and in that moment, he acquiesced. He didn’t try to reverse what God had clearly done. I know the deception, trickery and disguise bit makes it hard to see this as the hand of God, but God works in all things, even in our foolishness, to work out His will. In that moment, Isaac made a faith decision to trust the will of God over his own wants.
People of faith yield to the will of God even when it is difficult to do. Listen, there are times in your life when you are going to have to say, “God, I thought I knew the way, or God I had given my heart to a certain direction” or “God, I was committed to what I was convinced was best for my life, but in the end, You are in control. You have knowledge I don’t have. You have a perfect plan that I cannot always see. You have a will the supersedes the steps I have taken, and I yield to your authority and sovereignty in my life.”
Yielding isn’t easy for us. Some of us are really strong-willed Children of God. Maybe sometimes we think we are fully surrendered, but like Isaac, we get to the end of our lives and find out we hadn’t fully given our will up and given ourselves over to God’s plans.
Have you ever found yourself in conflict with the will of God? Have you ever argued with God about the path He told you to take? It is impossible to express faith in God without accepting His will for our lives. Do you believe that God knows what He is doing?
Perhaps you need to settle something. Perhaps you need to settle that God is trustworthy. Isaac had an earthly perspective. His plan was culturally accepted. He was just following protocol. It was the older son who always received the double blessing. Was he really doing anything wrong? His plan was clouded by his feelings. He loved Esau over Jacob. I know that isn’t good parenting, but it isn’t his parenting, but his faith that we are examining this morning. What Isaac had to settle in the moment when he had released his blessing over what he perceived to be the wrong son, he had to trust that God had chosen Jacob. He had to rest in the reality that God is omniscient. He is all-knowing, and His knowledge is perfect. Because God sees the end from the beginning, that means every decision He makes is clear and right.
We may pray for a healing or a new job or a change in our relational status or for a friend that is going through a rough time, and we may pray in faith to the best of our earthly ability, but at some point, we have to trust that God sees a bigger picture than we do. If God answered our prayers exactly the way we prayed them, what role would God be playing in our lives? What would that say about our knowledge versus God’s? That we know best? That we know how every story should end?
Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways submit to him, and He will make your paths straight.”
Faith submits. Faith yields to the greater plan of God. Isaac chose Esau, but God chose Jacob. By faith, Isaac accepted God’s choice. I don’t know all the reasons why God chose Jacob instead of Esau to receive that blessing, but because chose him, it was the right decision, and in faith, Isaac yielded to God. God has a perfect, righteous reason for every decision He makes. Our ability to yield to Him in moments when we would want to make a different decision is where faith comes in. We either trust Him or we don’t.
