You may be seated. When Isaac was old, and his eyes were dim so that he could not see, he called Esau's older son and said to him, My son, and he answered, Here I am. He said, Behold, I am old, I do not know the day of my death. Now then, take your weapons, your quiver and your bow, and go out to the field and hunt game for me, and prepare for me delicious food such as I love, and bring it to me so that I may eat that my soul may bless you before I die. Now Rebecca was listening when Isaac spoke to us on Esau, so when Esau went to the field to hunt for game and bring it, Rebecca said to us on Jacob, I heard your father speak to your brother Esau, bring me game and prepare for me delicious food, that I may eat it and bless you before the Lord, before I die. Now therefore my son obey my voice as I command you, go to the flock and bring me two good young goats so that I may prepare from them delicious food for your father, such as he loves, and you shall bring it to your father to eat so that he may bless you before he dies. But Jacob said to Rebecca, His mother, Behold, my brother Esau is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man, perhaps my father will feel me, and I shall seem to be mocking him and bring a curse upon myself and not a blessing. His mother said to him, Let your curse be on me, my son, only obey my voice and go, bring them to me, so he went and took them and brought them to his mother, and his mother prepared delicious food such as his father loved. Then Rebecca took the best garments of Esau, her older son, which were with her in the house, and put them on Jacob her younger son, and the skins of the young goats she put on his hands, and on the smooth part of his neck, and she put the delicious food into bread which she had prepared into the hand of her son Jacob. So he went into his father and said, My father, and he said, Here I am, who are you, my son? Jacob said to his father, I am Esau, your first board. I have done as you told me, now set up an eat of my gain, that your soul may bless me, but Isaac said to his son, How is it that you have found it so quickly, my son? He answered, Because the Lord your God granted me success, and Isaac said to Jacob, Please come near that I may feel you, my son, to know whether you are really my son Esau or not. So Jacob went near to Isaac his father, who felt him and said, The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau, and he did not recognize him, because his hands were hairy like his brother Esau's hands, so he blessed him. You pause and pray with me, Father the words that we've just heard red are your words. You inspired them, and they were written for us. And so we ask that you would speak to us from them today, for your glory and for our good in Jesus' name, Amen. What I'd like to do with today's passage for us is just to point out two spiritual realities that I think you can see operating in this story, two spiritual realities you can see here. The foolishness of sin, and the victory of grace, those two things, the foolishness of sin, the victory of grace, before I get into that, let me just give us a little background information in way of review. We have been studying the life of Jacob together from the Old Testament, Jacob was a man who came from a unique family, Jacob's grandfather was a man whose name was Abraham, a man who had been called by God for a specific purpose. God called Abraham and God promised him that God would use Abraham's family, his descendants, his family to be a source of blessing for the whole world, for the whole world. God said to Abraham in Genesis 22, he said, in your offspring shall all the nations of the world be blessed. Now, when you analyze that promise of theologically and historically, you see that what God was declaring to Abraham was that one day the Messiah, the Savior of this world, one day the Savior would descend from him, the mercy of the Lord for all the nations of this world, would one day come to us through a person, a son, a chosen son, whom God would send through Abraham's line. Now, during the days of the patriarchs with each passing generation of Abraham's family, because God had given this promise to bring blessing through them, with each passing generation, God would choose one person to be the blessing bearer. One person would receive this blessing and carry it on to the next generation. One person would be the one through whom Messiah would descend. For example, Abraham had several sons, God chose one of them. He didn't choose the oldest son, Ishmael, God chose the second son, Isaac, to bear the blessing. Isaac, in turn, had two sons, and God chose one of them. God did not choose the older son, Issa, God chose the second, the younger, the weaker son, Jacob, to bear the blessing. Before Isaac's sons were born, God said to their mother, the older shall serve the younger. In other words, God was saying to that family, the second son, Jacob, he is the one I choose. I will send my blessing through him. So since God said, I will send my blessing through him, he was saying, I therefore want you to give your blessing to him. Jacob is the one that I want you to bless. Now, that's the context in which today's story takes place, the context in which we see these two things, all right? The foolishness of sin, the victory of grace. First, let me talk about the foolishness of sin. Now guys, I say this as a sinner, speaking to sinners, all right? Sin is foolish, it's so foolish. Rebelling against God is the most self-destructive thing that we can do, just foolish. And I want to give you two reasons why that you can see in this story, two reasons why. First, sin is foolish because time is short. Sin is foolish because time is short. What did God tell Isaac's family? He said, the older shall serve the younger. God said, Jacob, he's the one I choose, bless him, right? What did Isaac do? When it comes time to pass on the blessing to the next generation, verse 1 says, he called Esau, his older son, Isaac called Esau to give the blessing to him. Now, you know, you can see what's going on here, right? And direct contradiction to what God has told them through his behavior. Isaac's essentially, he's saying, listen, I don't care what God says, I don't care. I don't care about God's word, I'm going to do with my life, I'm going to do what I want to do. Esau happens to be my favorite son, so I'm going to bless him. I don't listen. I don't want to do things God's way, I want to do them my way. Now if you think about it, that desire to do things our way rather than God's. You could say, that's the essence of what sin is, my sin, your sin, that's what it is. Sin is any lack of conformity to or any transgression of God's law. When, listen, whenever my life fails to line up with God's desires for what the human life is supposed to be God's commandments for his people, whenever that happens, that's sin. James 4 verse 17 says, whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it for him, it is sin. Now why is sin foolish? Why was, listen, why was it foolish for Isaac to rebel in this way against God? Because Isaac was about to die. Verse 2 he said, behold, I am old and I don't know the day of my death. Verse 4, prepare for me delicious food such as I love, bring it to me so that I may eat that my soul may bless you what? Before I die, Isaac was, he's old, he's in his sick bed, he can't see anymore, his body is frail. Now think about the audacity of this, as far as Isaac knows, death could be just hours away. As far as he knows, in a few short days he could be standing before the judgment seat of God and it's as if he's in denial, right? It's like he doesn't even care, he doesn't care if the last breath from his lungs is used to speak words that God has forbidden him to say, he doesn't care if his dying act is an act of defiance against his creator, he has, it's like he's unaware that the clock is ticking, he's got no fear of God, no recognition of what's happening in his life. So why is it foolish for him to sin because as far as Isaac can tell, his time is short, time is short. Now all right, no one wanted to hear this when you woke up this morning but the guys we need to listen, there's something we just need to understand. Our time is short too, right? I mean what was true of Isaac in this passage is true of every person in this room from the youngest baby to the oldest one among us. Isaac said in verse two, this is what he said. I do not know the day of my death. I do not know the day of my death. Let me tell you something, neither do I, neither do you. James 4 verse 14 says, you don't know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? You are a mist, a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Most of the way the Bible describes the span of our life, we're the steam on the bathroom mirror. It's there right now and you come back a few minutes later, it's gone, it's done that fast. So why is sin foolish, listen, why is it just self-destructive to live a life of rebelling against God because every morning when we wake up, we are faced with the reality that listen before the sun sets on that day any one of us could find ourselves standing before our creator, facing judgment. Now I know what some of you might be thinking, that's not very sophisticated form of motivation. I like this is 2004, maybe that works for my grandparents generation but we need something a little bit. We need nobler reasons to serve the Lord, let me tell you something, maybe you are more spiritual than the apostles where I don't know because I'll tell you what. It was the thought of God's judgment that motivated them to live for his glory. This is what got them out of bed in the morning, listen to what the Apostle Paul says, second Corinthians 5, he says, we make it our aim to please the Lord. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, all of us, Christian, non-Christian likes so that each one may receive what is do Him for what is done in the body with a good or evil, they had this awareness, time is short, every minute counts. Like it says in Hebrews chapter 9, it's appointed for man to die once and after that comes judgment, time is short. Now when I engage in the frivolity of sin, when you engage in the frivolity of sin, when we harbor some petty grudge and refuse to forgive someone, when we indulge in some embarrassing loss, when we live self-centered, God-ignoring, unbelieving lives, whenever we do this, we're in denial. We are living as if we actually think that cemeteries are for other people, those for other places like that are not for people like me, but they are for us all, aren't they? So time is short. This is why Isaiah the prophet said, seek the Lord while he may be found, call on him while he is near, but the wicked forsake his way and the evil man, his thoughts, let him turn to the Lord, and he'll have mercy on him and to our God for he will freely part. We only have a limited amount of time here, and it goes by quickly. Now I don't know about you, but I am really, really good at forgetting that. I mean, I just can put that out of my mind and go days without thinking about the reality of my life that it's going by, and I'll stand before God, I'm good at forgetting that. And so one thing that I did, I found this old prayer in a prayer book, I mean hundreds of years old, and this certain part of it just really, it nailed it for me. And so I typed it out, printed it up, I've got it pinned to my bulletin board right in front of my desk so that many times a day I'll just look up and I'll read it so I won't forget. This is what it says, it says this, I hasten toward an hour when earthly pursuits and possessions will appear vain. When it will make no difference, whether I've been rich or poor, successful or disappointed, admired or despised, but it will be of eternal importance that I've mourned for sin, hungered and thirsted after righteousness, loved the Lord Jesus in sincerity, gloried in the cross. May these objects form my chief desire. So one reason why sin is foolish, you see it here in Isaac is because time is short. Another reason is because there's nowhere to hide. Isaac and Esau, they both conspired together to overthrow the purposes of God for their family, but you'll notice something about how they do it, right? They go about their plan in secret. Now normally in the ancient world, and when it was time for the father to pass on the birth right, pass on the blessing and the inheritance to one of the sons normally, you would expect him to do this, to do it in public, you know, some sort of ceremony, gather the camp together, all the people there, the whole community stand up and speak some words of affirmation and then have a party and a celebration, something like that, that's what you would expect. But when Isaac decides to give the blessing to his son Esau, they go about in secret. It's like Esau, come here, I want you to go out in the heart, get me something to eat. You cook it by yourself, bring it back here, right, between you and me. You would think, I mean Isaac's time is limited, he's on his death, but you would think he was saying, Esau, why don't you take some guys to go help you hunt, so we can get this done faster. And you know, I know you're not a very good cook, we've got better cooks around here, why don't you get someone else to stir the pot for you, it's not like that. Why does he send Esau to do this alone, you know the answer, because they don't want anyone else to know what they're doing, they know something's wrong, you know, some of us have perhaps areas of our life that we hide from everyone else and that we like to tell ourselves, it doesn't have anything wrong with this, there's nothing wrong with this, this is not wrong, this is not wrong. If it's not wrong, why don't you let anyone know? They knew what they were doing was wrong, and they tried to hide it. Now Jacob and Rebecca, they're guilty of the same thing, I mean, you know from this story, they are sinning too, right, I mean, it is true that Jacob and Rebecca want the blessing to go to the person got has chosen, it's, I mean, you could say that it is true that they want to see the will of God done, but they're still sinning, because they're trying to do God's will their way, right, not God's way, their way, you know, as soon as they see what's going down with Isaac and Esau instead of, instead of, instead of, instead of confronting their father with the truth and encouraging him to be obedient to God, or instead of, you know, if that was too hard, at least taking the problem to God in prayer, they said, God, look what's happening, can you help with this? What did Jacob and Rebecca do? Well, they start lying, they start stealing, they're engaging in deceit, Jacob dishonors his father, you know, last time I checked that is one of the 10 commandments, right, he dishonors his father by lying to his face, Rebecca disrespects her husband, just trashes her marriage commitment by, you know, sneaking around behind his back. If you look at this passage, Jacob even commits the sin of blasphemy, he blasphemes the name of God. He uses the Lord's name in vain, he uses God's name as part of his lie, verse 20, how is it that you found it so quickly, my son? The Lord, your God gave me success. That's blasphemy. So Jacob and Rebecca, they're sinning just as much as Isaac and Esau are and you get the sense that they're doing it with the very same thought in mind. They're sinning with the assumption that no one will ever know, no one will know. But you know, what happens, you can predict what happens, nothing remains hidden, nothing remains hidden. You know, Isaac's plan is discovered and uncovered by Rebecca by him before Esau is even out the door and as far as Jacob and then Rebecca's plan, I mean, how can you be so dumb? I mean, they're going to notice when they get back, hey, the blessing's gone. And that's what happens. Esau comes back from hunting, he immediately learns what his brother has done. And we didn't include it in the passage that art read for us, but if you read on through this chapter, the fallout in their family because they all engage in this kind of sin, it's horrifying. I mean, listen, we place our hope, guys, in the fact that God is a God of mercy, he's a God of forgiveness, he is that there are some sins that we can commit in our life and God there, they are not unpardonable. God can forgive them, but I want to tell you something, they can have consequences that we will live with for the rest of our earthly lives. We are children, our families, our church. And this, it happens. I mean, their, their family never survived the events that happened that day. They never survived it. It was never the same in their home again. There was, there was anger and division, there was mistrust and confusion. Esau is fulfilled with rage. He's plotting to kill his brother, Jacob, please for his life, Jacob, the son, Rebecca loves, she wants to see him blessed. Because of the way they go about this, he flees for his life for over 20 years. He never comes home again. And by the time he does get home, his mom has died and she's buried in the ground. She wants to see her little boy blessed. She never sees him again. And the crazy thing is, they all think they can conceal their wrong doing. They all think, you know, just like Adam and even the garden, right? Just like Jonah running to Nineveh, just like me, just like you. They all think that somehow they can hide from the consequences of their rebellion against God. You can't. You, I'm not saying it's hard to do. You just can't. We cannot hide from the consequences of our sin. Why? Because this is the way that God has designed the moral nature of this universe. This is the way God made things. Jesus said in Luke chapter 12, he said, there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed. There is nothing hidden that will not be made known. What you said in the dark will be heard in the daylight. And what you whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the rooms. There is Moses said in numbers 32, be sure your sin will find you out. So listen, as I said, I speak as a sinner to sinners, why is this so? This is madness. This is so selfish. Why is it so foolish? Because there's nowhere to hide. There is nowhere to hide from God. I don't know if you've ever read that novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the great Gatsby. If you've read that novel, you know, it tells the lives of some very, very wealthy people who live out in Long Island back in the 1920s, the roaring 20s, and they're very wealthy and they're very wild. And they just lived decadent lives. You know, there's a greedy, they're selfish, they're unbelievably shallow. The wives are always cheating on the husbands, the husbands are having affairs behind the backs of the wives. It's just horrible lives. Okay. And in the book, as Fitzgerald describes the scenery, he describes what it's like in Long Island back in the 20s, the big mansions where they live. He always describes throughout the book this one particular billboard that someone has set up next to the road. Okay. The road that they'll drive. I don't know if they had the LAE back then, maybe it was Northern Boulevard goes all the way that the road that they would drive into the city. There's this huge billboard there. They see it every day when they drive into the city every time they ride the train, they'd look at the window. And the billboard is an advertisement for some ophthalmologist named Dr. TJ Echoberg. And the billboard is these huge pair of glasses with enormous eyes looking out from them. Okay. And throughout the book this billboard, he keeps talking about the billboard there on the train. There's Dr. TJ Echoberg's eyes and they're, you know, they're cheating on their husbands. Dr. TJ Echoberg's eyes. I read the this book when I was a sophomore in high school. Okay. And it was assigned in English lit class. And the teacher says to us, all right guys, let's talk about this book. What is the author trying to do with this billboard? Dr. TJ Echoberg's eyes. And we're all like, I don't know. And we were just glad we had actually read a book, you know. And she says, let me explain. The author is using a literary device. Dr. TJ Echoberg's eyes symbolize the eyes of God. No matter where they go, no matter what these people do, no matter what they're planning, what they're plotting, what they're trying to hide, no matter where they are. Dr. TJ Echoberg is watching. God is watching. Now, I don't know if this teacher actually believed that God is watching everything we do. I went to public schools. I, you know, she didn't strike me as a very God-fearing person. I don't know if she actually believed this, but I'll tell you why. It is true. It's true. Hebrews 4 verse 13 says, no creature is hidden from God's sight, but all are naked and exposed before the eyes of Him to whom we must give account. Jeremiah 17, 10, the God says, I, the Lord, search the heart and examine the mind to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what is deeds to serve. And so listen, here's what we see in this letter. We just see folly, the foolishness of people living sinful lives. Why is it foolish? Because time is short. I don't have much time. And because not the end of the day, there's nowhere to hide. We see the foolishness of sin in their lives. If we open our newspaper, we see the foolishness of sin in our world. When I look into the mirror or I look into God's word, when you do the same, we see the foolishness of sin in us. We see it everywhere, everywhere, but that is not all we see. Not in this story, not in God's story. We see the foolishness of sin, but we see something else. We see here in this messed up miserable home. We see in their home, the victory of God's grace. You know, there's a verse in Romans 5 verse 20, it says, where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. You know what that means? It means that we are all of us. We're pretty good sinners, aren't we? We're pretty good at sinning, but we are not nearly as good as sinning as God is good at saving. We're sin increased, grace abounded, grace abounded. All the more, look at this story. Listen, in spite of these are some messed up people. In spite of their sin and their foolishness and their rebellion and their self-deception, in spite of all this, when all is said and done, God does not abandon the people he called. Right? You get to the end of the story. God is still there and they are still his. God never abandons the people whom he has called. I mean, in spite of what they're doing, what happens in this story, with all the lying, all the deceit, when the story is done, to whom is the blessing given? The very one God chose. Jacob still gets the blessing. It's like God is saying, you know what, you guys are messed up. You can mess up as much as you want, but there's one thing you will not mess up. You will not mess up my plan. You will not. No one messes up my plan. That's what God says. Like it says in Isaiah 14, this is the plan determined for the whole world. This is the hand stretched out over all the nations. For the Lord Almighty has purposed and who can thwart him. His hand is stretched out and who can turn it back. That's what you find in this story. These are the most messed up people. They're doing all kinds of things wrong and yet God has a plan. God has a promise. He will bring salvation to this world through them. He says, I don't care how much you mess up. I'm going to bring the Savior. I'm going to do it. The blessing will be carried on. Most commentators that I examined this week point out that this is probably the main message that the Bible is trying to communicate through this story. Let me just read a little bit from one commentator. He writes this, God's purposes for man's ultimate good will stand. They cannot be frustrated by human failures. This is a tremendously important biblical principle. He writes, your sin even while it may have real and lasting earthly consequences cannot derail God's gracious purpose for your life. In spite of sin and the bitter fruits that sin brings in its wake, God purposes to bless his people and his purposes are eternally secure. Grace is at work. Grace is at work in the lives of Jacob's family and the grace of God will not let them go. In spite of their sin, even through their sin, God can and God will achieve what he has planned. He will bring his promised Redeemer. And that's the victory. That's the victory of grace that you see here. The blessing is passed on to the next generation just as God has decided. God's plan to bring our Savior goes on without a hitch. Now who is that Savior? Who is that Redeemer? The Redeemer they needed? The Redeemer we need? His name is Jesus Christ. His name is Jesus. Jesus Jesus is the promised offspring of Abraham. He's Abraham's seed. He's the one who comes through whom blessing reaches all the nations of the world. He's the one who came to deliver me, deliver you from our sin. You know, Rebecca, what a crazy mom, huh? She's messing her son up getting him involved in this stuff and she blurt out to him in verse 13. Oh, well, let the curse be on me. She doesn't have a clue what she's talking about. But when Jesus comes, he says the same thing. He says, let your curse be on me. And when Jesus says that it's true. It's true. We we deserve God's curse because we've broken God's law. Jesus dies on the cross and he takes the curse for us. He takes the curse from us. He takes the curse in our place. He does what Rebecca could not do. Galatians 3 verse 13 says, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us where it is written, curse it is everyone who's hanged on a tree. You know, this story, Jacob was dressed in someone else's clothing, right? So that he could steal a blessing. Jesus was also dressed in someone else's clothing so that he could steal the curse. So he could take our curse and give his blessing to us. You know, the Bible says before they crucified him, they clothed him in a purple robe borrowed from some Roman soldier. And before they buried him, they clothed him in a death shroud borrowed from some wealthy Jew. He says even before that when he was incarnate in his mother's womb, it was as if God the creator clothed him with our human flesh. He wore our clothing. Not to steal our blessing. But to take away our curse and give us a blessing and said and therefore whenever anyone turns to Christ, I don't care who they are. I don't care what they've done. I don't care what kind of, you know, habits have a hold on their life whenever anyone turns to Christ in repentance and is united with him through faith. It's kind of like this story happens for us only different, right? You know, just as Jacob comes and receives a blessing, he doesn't deserve because his father thinks that someone else standing there, we come before the Father. We receive a blessing, we don't deserve, you know, because we remind our Father of our out the brother, Jesus, right? We're clothed with him, his righteousness. We receive the blessing of the first born. We don't deserve it. We've done everything our whole life to trash it. And yet because Jesus gave it up, God says I'm giving it to you because you're united with him. There's an interesting place at the end of Hebrews, Hebrews chapter 12, the author is describing heaven as a vision of heaven. He describes it this way. He says heaven is the assembly of the first born whose names are enrolled in heaven. It's like you say when we get to heaven, we're going to discover every one of us there is the first born son. We are all the first born because the real first born, the real first born, God's real chosen son, Jesus. He didn't steal our blessing. He stole our curse. He gained his blessing to us. Let's pray together. You know, before we pray, maybe you have your head bowed like I do right now, I think it's worth asking ourselves what our appropriate response is to a story like this. For some of us, we just need to be alerted to the folly of sin. God would lovingly cause us a little pain today so that we turn from what we destroy. Others of us just need to be reminded that though we have really messed up our lives, we have not messed up God's plan to save us and we need to take comfort in that. Others of us need to realize that God has kept his promise, sent the world to Savior, and yet we've never yet come to him and we need to do that. You could do that this morning. You could say, I, Jesus, I've messed up my life. I'm under God's curse. Take my curse from me. Be my redeemer.
Fathers, we consider the various ways that perhaps you would want us to respond to this. I pray that you would just make it clear and that through your Holy Spirit you would remove any kind of excuse that our silly heart would throw up in front of our eyes to keep us from just doing what you're calling us to do. Be merciful. Set us free from our own self so that your word can produce fruit in our life that will bring us eternal joy. We ask this in the name of the one who gave the blessing for us in Jesus' name. Amen.