So please turn your Bibles, if you would, to the book of Genesis. You're reading this morning from Genesis 26 verse 34 to Genesis 27 verse 40. We've been doing a series through the book of Genesis at Providence. This is a more recent message from this particular book, or up to about this point within the book of Genesis. You'll find that on pages 21 and 22 of the Pew Bible. So beginning our reading at Genesis 26, verse 34, and then reading down to verse 40 of chapter 27. This also will be our text for this morning. Hear now God's holy word. When Esau was 40 years old, he took Judith, the daughter of Beeri, the Hittite, to be his wife, and Basimath, the daughter of Elon, the Hittite, and they made life bitter for Isaac and Rebekah. When Isaac was old and his eyes were dim so that he could not see, he called Esau, his older son, and said to him, my son. And he answered, here I am. And 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, Rebekah was listening when Isaac spoke to his son Esau. So when Esau went to the field to hunt for game and bring it, Rebekah said to her son 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 Rebekah, 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 Rebekah 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 and the bread which she had prepared into the hand of her son Jacob. So he went to his father and said, my father, and he said, here I am. Who are you, my son? Jacob said to his father, I'm Esau, your firstborn. I have done as you told me. Now sit up and 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. Then 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. He said, are you really my son Esau? He answered, I am. Then he said, bring it near to me that I may eat of my son's game and bless you. So he brought it near to him and he ate and he brought him wine and he drank. Then his father Isaac said to him, come near and kiss me my son. So he came near and kissed him. And Isaac smelled the smell of his garments and blessed him and said, see the smell of my son is as the smell of a field that the Lord 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 people 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. As soon as Isaac had finished blessing Jacob, When Jacob had scarcely gone out of the presence of Isaac, his father Esau, his brother, came in from his hunting. He also prepared delicious food and brought it to his father. And he said to his father, let my father arise and eat of his son's game, that you may bless me. His father Isaac said to him, who are you? He answered, I am your son, your firstborn, Esau. And Isaac trembled very violently and said, who are you? Was it then that hunted game and brought it to me and I ate it all before you came and I have blessed him? Yes, and he shall be blessed. As soon as Esau heard the words of his father, he cried out with an exceedingly great and bitter cry and said to his father, bless me, even me also, oh my father. But he said, your brother came deceitfully and he has taken away your blessing. Esau said, is he not rightly named Jacob? For he has cheated me these two times. He took away my birthright and behold now, he has taken away my blessing. Then he said, have you not reserved a blessing for me? Isaac answered and said to Esau, behold, I have made him Lord over you and all his brothers. I have given to him for servants and with grain and wine I have sustained him. What then can I do for you, my son? Esau said to his father, have you but one blessing, my father? Bless me, even me also, oh my father. And Esau lifted up his voice and wept. And Isaac, his father, answered and said to him, behold, away from the fatness of the earth shall your dwelling be, and away from the dew of heaven on high. By your sword you shall live, and you shall serve your brother. But when you grow restless, you shall break his yoke from your neck. And that concludes the reading of God's holy and inspired word. May he bless that in our hearing this morning. Dear congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, this passage is strikingly dramatic. We get a very different picture in our minds when we hear that Jacob put goat skins on his hands and his neck in order to pretend to be Esau. And children, perhaps as you heard the story this morning, you wondered, would Isaac recognize him? But he figured out. Would he figure out the disguise? Maybe Esau would have arrived back from the hunts before Isaac had eaten the special stew that Rebekah made and blessed Jacob. Could Rebekah and Jacob get away with their tricky plan? Well, if anything, when we look at this passage, what do we see? We see sin, sin in this family. Isaac and Esau revealed their selfishness, Rebecca and Jacob show their deception, their deceit, dishonesty. The whole text stinks of sin. And it must have grieved the Lord very much to see how poorly this covenant family, his own covenant family, this is God's family, how poorly they behave, how much that must have grieved him, especially in light of his promises to be their God. However, once again, as we see so often in the word of God and throughout the book of Genesis, God's grace and God's blessing far outweigh sin. If anything, this chapter shows us that God is a God of grace, even though we don't deserve it. And the sins of this chapter are not to receive the full emphasis, rather what this passage speaks about most of all is the Lord. and his providence. If God left us to ourselves, we would certainly perish. If we depended on ourselves, our motives, our attempts at being faithful, we would lose everything. In order for us to be blessed by the Lord, therefore, it is necessary that he be involved in our lives. Though we fail time and time again, how thankful we can be that the Lord stoops to our weaknesses and our sins and that He leads us. How good it is to know that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior and that His Spirit does guide us. And so I call you to hear God's word this morning under the theme, A Dysfunction in the Covenant Family. The Lord upholds His decree in favor of the younger son. And we'll look at this passage with two points. First of all, two sinful schemes. And then secondly, two blessings. Well, really this passage should begin in verse 24 of chapter 26. In the context here, there's this interlude of peace that was between Abimelech, who was the king of the Philistines, and Isaac in his household. There was a lot of strife, but there was this covenant that was made. And within this piece, we have this interruption in all of it. It says that Esau married outside of the faith. He had no interest in God's covenant with Abraham. So remember that Abraham, he made a very specific instruction. When he called Isaac, he said, don't marry any of the Canaanites. Right, Mary within the family, Mary, the one who the Lord has appointed. And Jacob later on would get that specific kind of instruction as you'll see if you read from chapter 28. That's the sins of Esau, they really set the context for what's to take place next. He was not a man of faith. He was a man of the world. He was short-sighted, willing to sell his birthright for a bowl of stew, living for the here and now. And as we enter into chapter 27, we see two groups within the family, and there are two sinful schemes. When it comes to this first group, Isaac and Esau, Esau was an accomplice in his father's plan to give the blessing to him. His true colors have already been made known as we just said. Yet on the other hand, Isaac is clearly the one who is at fault here. We might not see this at first glance because he was the one who was deceived, but Isaac's disobedience, if we compare the context, the overall context of what is taking place here, Isaac clearly was disobedient. He was a man who had faith, but his faith sank frighteningly low sometimes. The text shows that he was at war here with God's will and his own conscience. Why do we say that? Because he knew that Jacob was to be the one to inherit the covenant, the promise of the covenant. Yet he chose to cling to Esau, though Esau despised the promise while Jacob wished to have it. Notice that Esau is called Isaac's son, while Jacob is called Rebecca's son. So it's in his favoritism, Isaac opposed God's will in making his own decisions. And thus he asked Esau to go hunting some wild game and prepare it for him, for he had in mind to give his blessing. But there are many other problems that we see here. In verse one it says that he felt he was about to die. almost completely blind. He was mistaken about that because actually he lived 20 years after this. And so why the secrecy we wonder? Well, the fact is Isaac knew what he was doing. He knew that God preferred Jacob. He knew that Esau violated the covenant. Still Esau was his favorite. Esau did what his father wanted him to do. He despised the covenant, but he wanted the temporal advantages that come with the blessing. He wanted the advantage of being the firstborn. And thus, Isaac and Esau were united in their resistance to the Lord. They rejected Jacob, who God had chosen. They didn't want God's blessing by submitting to his will. And you know how futile that is, to resist the Lord, to resist the Lord's will. Well, then we have Rebekah and Jacob. Rebekah overheard her husband formulating his plan. She made her own plan to seize the blessing for her son, the son that she loved. It was right that Jacob should have the blessing. Both parents knew that, but she was more submissive to the prophecy, the word of the Lord that had come to her at the very beginning when Jacob and Esau were born. And her favoritism helped her to have this conviction. She knew that Isaac's hopes could not be realized. And thus she called Jacob and told him a way to deceive his father, Jacob, or his father, Isaac, rather. Jacob was afraid to do this, but in verse 12, She was willing to take the curse if her plans failed. She was staking her convictions that she had taken from the word of God that was spoken to her. His word made her bold. His word made her bold, too bold. And she didn't fear the curse. She was firmly convinced that everything would turn out in the end. And so it's quite remarkable. Here we see her faith at work here, but it's mixed with her sin. She was so strong in her conviction that she even devised a clever plan to make this deception successful. And at the same time, we see her sin. Her deceit was deeply sinful. Deceiving a blind man is something everyone regards as deplorable. And you notice just how she came up with her plans. This is the part that's interesting to children. She got Jacob to feel and smell like Esau. Borrowing Esau's clothes, she put goat skins on him. Shows you just how hairy Esau must have been if his arm felt like a goat. She cooked food just as she knew Isaac would like it. And notice also when she was speaking to Jacob, the way she referred to Isaac as your father, rather than my husband, your father. She wasn't going to sit around and let her husband stand in the way of what she wanted for Jacob. And yet she should have waited on the Lord He had promised to do this instead of trying to obtain the Lord's blessing under false pretenses. And as we look at this passage this morning and as we compare it to our lives here today, we know that there are far too many families that can be like this, where there's conflict. This is a spiritual disease that has paralyzed our nation and other parts of the world. Every family can have its quirks, but there are several families that are falling apart. This is not just true of the world. We can also have spiritually dysfunctional families in the church. And one of those contributing factors is conflict. Brothers and sisters become estranged from each other. Children rebel. In-laws fault and constantly drive wedges between relationships. Wives nag husbands. Husbands disengage, always finding fault with one another. And you wonder how can a family grow spiritually together when you live together in a climate of conflict? How can it be possible? You know, if you look at this situation, this covenant family, how can it survive? How is it possible? Well, it's only when we realize the collateral damage that's caused by our own sin and how sin has a ripple effect on our marriages, on our children, and even on members within the church. It has that effect. Just to give an illustration of this, Paul Hegstrom. was a man who, he wrote a book called Angry Men and the Wives Who Love Them. And this book is not just for help in situations like this, it's his life story. And his life story is quite sad. He was a man who had years spent with his marriage to his wife in abuse. in uncontrolled fits of rage, in a way of manipulation, and it brought so much heartache, so much hardship within this family. And as his life story goes, his wife finally had enough of it, and she ends up leaving him, taking the children, and he has to go for counseling, because he's arrested. And if he doesn't go for counseling, the person who was assaulted was going to fully charge him. This was the only way that he could improve. So he went for that and he looked to the Lord to help him to get rid of the anger and the abuse that he brought on his family. And as God began to change him, his rage and his anger melted away and he connected again with his wife and with his children. And it's a sad story that turns out well because they got back together, they got married once again, and they carried on a ministry to those who have, to bring hope for battered and broken families. So Paul Hagstrom had this conflict within his family and he was healed of this because God is a God of grace. And it illustrates to us, beloved congregation, just how much God is at work. We might say things are impossible. How can God bring about good when we're dealing with so much conflict or so many obstacles in a family situation? But God is a God who can resolve family conflict. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He's alive and well, and he always brings hope and help through the gospel in Jesus Christ, and there's nothing that he cannot overcome or change. And so we must never ever think that we're without hope. You know, we look at this family situation here, this covenant family in the book of Genesis this morning, and even with all of the sin that was there, God was in control, and he was carrying out his promise for the glory of his name. Well, not only do we then see these two schemes, secondly, we see two blessings. There is the blessing for the deceiver and for his brother Esau. Jacob, of course, is the main character of the next section of salvation history. He's the one who would carry forward this seed of the covenant from him. The Messiah would eventually come. And yet notice the one who the Christ would come from. Right? He pretends to be his brother, Esau. You notice that Isaac was at first suspicious. Didn't sound like Esau's voice. Surprised him that his son could so quickly get the game ready for him. And here we see Jacob's sin. Notice in verse 12, in order to convince his father that he had found the game, he brought it home and prepared it in such a short time, Jacob said, it's because the Lord, your God, brought it to me. One of the most blasphemous mishandlings of God's name in the scriptures. Here, Jacob was taking God's name into this whole act, this lie. And then in verses 22 to 26, Isaac suspected something, yet God would not have his decree altered. Isaac finally fell for his son's trick with the smell of Esau's clothes and the food. And then in verses 27 to 29, we have the blessing that came. And we have to remember that this blessing came from one who spoke here as the minister of God. Here's the prophet of the Old Testament, this patriarch. These words are prophetic. He's bringing the word of God. Jacob would be powerful over the earth and powerful over the nations. And this prophecy was that Jacob's descendants would be the center of attention in the world. Like Abraham, anyone who blessed them would be blessed, and anyone who cursed them would be cursed. And that's because Christ was the one who descended from Jacob, and it came through this blessing. But this was also a test for Isaac. whether he would follow what was right or follow his worldly appetites and preferences. Here was a man who was following his own palate and his nose impaired him. And congregation, as we look at that, that says something to us this morning as well. We're to be people of the ear, right? We're not to be people who are led by our palate. We're to be people of the ear, not a people who do what we want. We're to listen to the voice of our shepherd. or to follow his direction. Isaac didn't want to do this. And we see how he responded to his error in the remaining verses there, verses 30 to 40. Jacob had hardly left his father when Esau came in. He also had savory food for his father. Only then did Isaac understand the deception. Before he was uncertain, now he was sure. And if you look at verse 33, it says that he trembled exceedingly. Perhaps he realized his error and not wanting to bless Jacob, but wanting to bless Esau. And thinking that he had done so, he knew that Jacob was to inherit the promise of the covenant. He must have therefore seen that the Lord was at work here. And so no wonder he trembled. There was nothing that could be done to change the blessing, as verse 35 says. Jacob had taken that away. Esau expressed his bitter sorrow by sneering at the meaning of Jacob's name, which means, literally, supplanter. In Genesis 25, he was called this because he held his brother by the heel, as though he would overcome him. But Esau still wanted a blessing. Normally, All the sons would be present, but because Esau had been summoned alone, and because Isaac intended to confer a blessing only on him, now he stood alone. And the words of verses 39 and 40 are also prophetic. Remember, Isaac is a prophet. He's speaking here as a prophet. And throughout the Old Testament, Edom, We follow scripture. These are the descendants of Esau. Edom was warlike and often very hostile to Israel. Notice that Esau's nature fit with the prophecy. He wouldn't have the fatness of the land as his brother. He would live in barren lands, living by the sword and serving his brother. Really, it's a dreadful prediction. He had rejected the promises, and he didn't want to have anything to do with the covenants. And now we see the direction that the Lord had taken him because of this, of his own choice. This is the way that he went. God's word is very clear about Esau. Some don't value their spiritual heritage. That's a very painful thing to have a son or a daughter show no concern for the rich heritage and the solid upbringing that they've been given. Like the parable of the prodigal son. You wonder how can that be? You know, here's someone who has been brought up in the truth. They've grown up with it from a sincere Christian family. But you know the Bible, and history are replete with examples of great spiritual leaders but have found the pathway less smooth. You think of Eli. Eli was the spiritual leader of Israel, one of the judges. He had two wayward sons, Hophni and Phinehas. Or of Samuel, the one who took over from Eli and his sons who didn't walk in the path of the Lord. And we think of David. He had wayward children. Enough stories are told about preachers' kids and missionaries' children for all to be aware of these problems. But not every way we're daughter or son is an Esau. A good example of this is Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham. You might think that growing up with someone who was considered a spiritual giant, like the way that the world looks at Billy Graham as a spiritual giant, that this would have a good effect upon you. But Franklin didn't find that to be the case. He hated being introduced as the son of Billy Graham. He rebelled against that, and he found other ways to express his independence of that, beginning with smoking and drinking. In his teen years, his rebellion found like-minded company at the private Christian school that he attended, and this rebellion continued all the way into college. until he was expelled for violating the rules. And he was in his early 20s when he finally came to see his sin, when he broke down and he surrendered his life to the Lord. And as he's known today, he's now the president of a Christian relief organization called Samaritan's Purse. And it's a reminder again to us of the hope that we have in Christ. Wayward children can waste years with foolish living. They forget the spiritual blessings and they despise the heritage. And even if they return from this, it doesn't mean that everything's gonna be easy. They may have a criminal record, an unbelieving spouse, or financial ruin. Life is never a fairy tale, but again, there's hope for us in Jesus Christ. There's hope always. for a changed life. And so congregation, this is the covenant family and the people that God bless with the knowledge of himself, his promises and his pledges of being their God forever. And you wonder why it is that God was with this family. Why did he bless Jacob, even though he was so sinful? Why was he with Isaac, a man who had such a intermittent and weak faith? There isn't anything admirable in this chapter. It's very ugly. Even Esau looked better in certain respects than Jacob. And yet, These three out of the four, excluding Esau, God blessed with eternal life, and from them, the Savior was born, Jesus Christ. What does that say to us today? Our disobedience, it looks exactly like it does here, as it's described in this passage. We think Isaac looks bad at opposing God's will. What about us when we oppose the Lord's will? Are we any better? No. We think Jacob is a liar. Well, what about us when we deceive others? All of us have our sins congregation, and they're all known to the Lord, and yet consider how the Lord Jesus Christ came from this family and how he's come to you and to your family through his Holy Spirit. Take that to heart. There's never any room for compromise or disobedience. There's never room for sin. And when we sin, we can be sure that the Lord notices. But let us be assured that we're saved when we believe in Christ. and turn from our sin and humble ourselves before the Lord. Christ is the one who sets us free. He is the truth. Let Him be the truth that sets you free and let your life be under His guidance. For He has taken that curse on Himself for our sin to give us life in Him. Amen. Let's pray. Our gracious God, we thank you for your word to us. We thank you for this passage in the book of Genesis as it accounts for the life of these saints who were sinners and who acted in such a strange and unusual way. And yet, Lord, we see your providence at work here. And when we compare ourselves, Lord, we know that in many ways we are no different. Perhaps even dealing with the kind of conflict and disharmony that's spoken of here in one way or the other. Or even having to deal with the the heartache of seeing someone in our family turn from you. Lord, you know the heart and you know our hearts today too. We've heard your word, we've heard the gospel. We pray that we would live in the hope that we find in the gospel once again today. We pray this all in Jesus' name, amen.