4/11/2024 0 Comments Audio sermon genesis 20![]() ![]() Later Jacob will meet up with his Uncle Laban and those two titans of trickery will duke it out for years until finally Jacob gets the best of his uncle, who is lucky to escape his dealings with his nephew with the shirt on his back.įirst things first, however, and so we get this first story about Esau and Jacob in Genesis 25 (by the way, it’s telling we usually say these stories are about Jacob and Esau, naming the younger twin first. Jacob on the other hand appears to have inherited from his mother a family tradition of tricks and deceptions and schemes. This never sat well with Jacob but lucky for him his brother Esau was never, shall we say, the sharpest knife in the drawer. Heel-Grasper or Jacob was destined to be second fiddle. Red came out first but was in hot pursuit by the brother who seemed, even while still in utero, to be trying to pull Red back so as to put himself in first place.Īlthough twins, the custom of the day was that the one born first, Red or Esau in this case, would be the recipient of whatever blessings and wealth the father had to lavish upon him. The very names of the twins are arresting: Red and Heel-Grasper. ![]() In any event Rebekah brings two boys into the world and their story will occupy that next chunk of Genesis in narratives that are sometimes downright rollicking with drama and intrigue. This may in part be what motivated the evangelist John to note in the prologue to his gospel that all who will become children of God through the work of the Word made flesh will get their status in the divine family not in the usual way children get born or because some human male impregnated his wife but ever and only by the will of God alone. It is grace and not human achievement that will get it done. Maybe it was God’s way of conveying that the keeping of this promise was going to be all about God in the long run. But honestly, you’d expect this whole covenant fulfillment thing to spool out more smoothly. Here, too, we are told God intervenes and eventually Rebekah bears twin boys. First he begins with a pair of childless senior citizens-and even then takes 25 years before bringing about a promised son-and now once we move on to Isaac, we discover that for nearly 20 years of marriage, Isaac’s wife Rebekah was unable to conceive, too. Seems like God kept stacking the deck against himself. And yet in story after story we deal with some level of infertility that becomes a deep source of concern and that God eventually is said to step in and resolve in semi-miraculous ways. Since the fulfilling of God’s covenant with Abraham hinged hugely on Abraham’s having descendants, you would think that in the childbearing department things would have gone more easily. ![]()
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