Genesis 27:1-28:9 "A Holy Sneak" Scott Hoezee

This morning we talked about justice, particularly justice in interpersonal relationships. We talked about not taking revenge when we have been wronged by someone but instead trying to imitate God's gracious way of dealing with our sin when we must deal with the sins of others. Often you can expect to be treated unjustly by other people. That's not a pleasant fact of life but a fact it is. When wrong-doing and injustice crop up, God enters the scene through the Spirit to give us the strength to forgive, to forego vengeance. If God needs to be involved in unjust things at all, you expect it to be in the form of God's helping us to forgive or in the form of God himself some day judging the evil.

What you mostly do not expect, however, is to find God himself appearing complicit with what seems to be something unjust. Yet throughout a good deal of Genesis, God frequently appears to be on the wrong side of things. The most consistent example of God's apparent injustice is his routine ignoring of an iron-clad ancient societal rule: the rule of primogeniture. The firstborn son, the eldest child in the family, was the most important one. He was the one who, by virtue of birth order, was to inherit most of the land and household goods. He would be the one to take his father's place one day as the paterfamilias, the head of the whole clan. The notion of the firstborn being of first importance was so widely assumed in the Ancient Near East as to be virtually unassailable. That is simply the way things were done. That was simply the way things had always been done.

In the Bible, however, God keeps choosing as his favored one the younger child. It started with Abel, who seemed to garner God's favor more than the older, firstborn Cain. It continues with Esau and Jacob. Or is it "Jacob and Esau." That's the way we usually say it, isn't it: Jacob first, then Esau. That's not how they tumbled out of the womb, however. Esau was older. Granted, he was older by only a minute or two, but firstborn is firstborn. Eventually in Genesis we will see another example of God's choosing whomever he wants irrespective of birth order when young Joseph rises up above his ten or so older brothers. Moses will one day rise above his older brother Aaron, David will get chosen ahead of his more strapping elder brothers, and so on.

But to people steeped in the tradition of "Firstborn, first in line," God's way of operating seemed profoundly unfair and unjust. But nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of younger Jacob. The tale we read tonight is a much beloved Bible story that has been told with great drama in Sunday school and Worship Center classrooms around the world from time immemorial. Sunday school teachers at church and parents reading to their children at the dinner table never skip this story. But neither do we always savor its full punch or appreciate its theological scandal. Think of it this way: can you imagine a father reading this story to his children in the hopes that maybe one of his kids will dupe the old man the same way crafty Jacob did his father?!

Obviously no one hopes that will happen! But then how come you never hear of a parent reading this story and then saying to the kids, "You ever try to lie to me like Jacob did and I'll whoop your hide!" We don't dare to say that because we sense all along in Genesis that Jacob is the hero here. But if so, he's a kind of anti-hero. He's a born sneak. He came out of the womb grabbing at his older brother's heel and he basically never stopped grabbing at every opportunity. He worked the angles, exploited his twin brother's dim-witted nature, told lies like a professional, and could work out whole scams in his head without much effort at all. He was a crook, a sneak, a liar, and also by the way God's kind of guy. And if you don't find that even mildly amazing, you didn't pay attention to what we just read.

We try to explain the scandal away. I once heard a Sunday school teacher say that what Rebekah and Jacob did was right because, after all, Esau had already sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Back in Genesis 25 Esau (who, by the way, did not get the brains of the family) came in from a hunting trip famished. Jacob, a quiet, mommy's boy type of fellow, was quietly stirring a pot of awfully good-smelling soup. So he demands that his younger brother serve him, to which Jacob replies, "Sure, but only if you let me have your birthright." Jacob may as well have said, "Yeah, OK, I'll get you a bowl, brother. It will only cost you about 25,000 bucks! Deal?" Blinded by hunger, Esau agrees. So, some say, in Genesis 27 Jacob is just taking from his father Isaac what was rightfully his, what Esau had already given him.

That doesn't work, though, in that the birthright and the blessing are two different things. So just because Esau let Jacob have his birthright benefit did not mean it was right for Jacob later to angle for the father's special blessing, too. He just stole it, that's all. What makes this theft even more dramatic is the way Rebekah and Jacob speak during this affair.

You maybe didn't notice this when we read the whole story a few minutes ago, but do you know that neither Isaac nor Esau ever utter the holy name "Yahweh"? Do you know who does invoke God's holy name: Rebekah and Jacob smack in the midst of their deceit! In verse 7 Rebekah reports Isaac's words to Jacob, claiming that Isaac had told Esau that he would give Esau the blessing, "in the presence of Yahweh." But look back at what Isaac is reported to have said in verse 4 and you will see that Isaac actually did not mention the presence of Yahweh. Rebekah does. Rebekah is well aware that the scheme she and Jacob are quite literally cooking up will take place in the presence of Yahweh. Yet still she presses forward with the deception.

Then, once Jacob appears before dottering old Isaac, the old man wonders how Esau had managed to hunt down some critter so quickly. It is then that Jacob tells one of the more bold-faced of his lies, but look at how he tells it in verse 20: "Yahweh, your God, gave me success." He not only lies, he brings Yahweh down into this tawdry action, evoking this holy God of Abraham and Isaac and so, in a way, making Yahweh his partner in crime!

In the narrative as we have it, God is not said to do or say anything directly. The motivations for all this appear quite secular, mundane, and so very human. Rebekah may have loved both of her boys, but she didn't much like Esau. He was about as dumb as he was hairy and Rebekah simply couldn't abide the thought of his taking over the family once Isaac was dead. What made all of this more acute for Rebekah was a small, but telling, little detail at the very end of Genesis 26: at the age of 40 Esau married two Hittite girls named Judith and Basemath and from the sounds of things, as daughters-in-law go, these two were a real burden to Isaac and Rebekah. They were, we are told, "a source of grief." However, you get the feeling that the fact Esau had married two such losers was not a source of amazement, at least not to Rebekah. The amazing thing would have been if Esau had actually managed to settle down with a nice girl.

Rebekah just liked Jacob more. True, God had tipped her off with a cryptic oracle about how the older would one day serve the younger, but you don't get the sense in Genesis 27 that Rebekah is trying to fulfill some divine command. She is instead taking matters into her own hands. She doesn't pray for God's guidance, doesn't try to reason with Isaac. Instead she chooses a course of deception and she is well aware from the get-go that Jacob has the wits, the intelligence, and the native ability to be a good liar to make the thing work. And it does. Isaac is taken in by fake hair and the smell of the outdoors from Esau's clothes on Jacob's body.

For reasons not clear to us, Isaac has just one blessing to give such that once Jacob scams it, there is quite literally nothing left for Esau but a quasi-curse in the form of Isaac's prediction that Esau is going to have a rough life of drought, hunger, fighting, and (worst of all) serving his younger brother. Again, we've been taught since Sunday school to admire Jacob somehow and more-or-less ignore Esau. But Genesis 27 makes very clear that Esau was deeply hurt. We are told twice that he cries out in lament and weeping. "Daddy, no! Say it isn't so! Pleeeeeeease bless me, too!" It's pathetic. It is also properly heart-wrenching. Esau is not the sharpest knife in the drawer by any means but there is no evidence in Genesis that he's a bad sort of fellow. In fact, as we will see later on in this series, eventually Esau becomes a most radiant stream of grace and mercy. He gets the short end of the covenant stick but in the long run he makes peace with that and serves God as best he can anyway.

We should feel bad for Esau and we should be none-too-quick to claim that Jacob's actions are readily understandable or justified. In a sense, the whole thing ends rather badly. It doesn't take too long before Esau's deep hurt curdles into murderous anger. So long as his father is alive, Esau refuses to break the old man's heart by ripping Jacob's lungs out. But some evenings after dinner, Rebekah would see Esau methodically sharpening his hunting knife but all the while glaring across the room at Jacob. Esau was anything but subtle and so it didn't require a genius to see what was on his simple mind. So Jacob has to flee. Here, again, Rebekah manages to make Isaac an unwitting accomplice, convincing him to send Jacob on his way on the pretense that he'd find a better wife among Laban's people than the nettlesome little witches Esau had married from among the Hittites. Isaac agrees and so Jacob steals away in the dead of night, escaping his brother's fury but leaving his parents for good. So far as we know, Jacob never again saw his mother alive.

After what he had done, you might be willing to say that such an unhappy ending is pretty much what Jacob deserved. But as we will see in two weeks when we return to Genesis, God is going to break his silence in the very next section of Genesis 28 but what he ends up saying to Jacob is not exactly what you would expect the holy God of heaven to say to someone who is essentially a thief on the lam!

For tonight, however, we can restrict our focus to just this story and so wonder why or how the promises of God can go forward through so much deceitfulness. Granted that we know that God had for some reason pre-chosen Jacob over Esau. Granted that God, in his sovereign will and wisdom, most certainly may work through whomever he wants, irrespective of mere human traditions like primogeniture favoring only the firstborn. Granted all that and similar matters besides, we still have a story that startles us for its cloak-and-dagger, soap opera-like shenanigans. Jacob was a crook but apparently he was God's kind of crook, and we would do well to wonder how that works.

I myself don't have any amazing insight into all this. What I do know is that Jacob is hardly the only biblical character who had less-than-stellar traits but through whom God nevertheless managed to march the plan of salvation forward. In fact, the Bible is honest about its characters in ways we sometimes rather neatly ignore in the tidy ways by which we clean up these stories in our memories. But think about it: we noted already Abraham's many early failures in trusting God's protection. Tonight we're thinking about Jacob but eventually we'll see that Joseph was not just a dreamer but a bit of a braggart, too, who genuinely irritated his older brothers in ways we can fully understand.

Moses was as great a leader as Israel would ever see, but he was shaky, hesitant, and ultimately even lost his temper at a key moment. Samson was a great hero but also a fool, always vulnerable to being taken in by a pretty face. Saul was a near-total disaster. David did far better but there was that small matter of impregnating Bathsheba and then arranging her husband's death to cover it up. Solomon liked women too much and then failed to secure the future of the kingdom after his death. And so forth and so on, all the way down to even the disciples whose initial failures to understand Jesus are well-documented throughout the gospels. But since those same disciples were the ones who mostly made sure the gospels got written in just the form they did, you get the feeling that they themselves believed that the rest of us in later years could learn something valuable from even their own prior cluelessness and fearful failures.

Maybe the author of Genesis sensed something similar. He didn't pretty up these stories as surely he could have. He didn't claim that Yahweh himself whispered into Rebekah's ear to give her this scheme to deceive Isaac. Nor does the text claim that God smiled on all that happened as exactly the way he preferred to see events unfold among his chosen people. But the story is what it is and so gets told in unvarnished form. More amazingly still is the clear indication that despite it all, God was able to make the best of it and so kept pressing forward with the promises once made to Abraham.

If we can be honest with ourselves in assessing our own walks of discipleship, then we have ample reason to find good news in this story. This morning we wondered about how to deal with life when other people sin against us. But, of course, being a Christian is not first of all about other people's problems but our own. We may have at any given moment a list of people from whom we'd love to hear an apology, but most days we have a pretty good list of people to whom we ourselves could well proffer an apology, too.

If the Bible were a book about plastic saints, shining figures resplendent in their holiness and blissfully free of the tawdry and soiling sins so common to us, then we could well find reason to despair over our own status as God's saints. If the only way to qualify as a saint is to live a life that looks like a figure caught in stained glass, all halos and beatific glances heavenward, then who among us could find much hope for our own holy status?

But if God can both love us and work through us despite our lamentable faults, silly mistakes, and even plotted deceptions, then suddenly a gospel light flickers on the horizon of our souls after all. I said earlier that most parents, upon reading this story to their kids, do not follow the story up with a stern warning never, ever to behave like that sneak Jacob. Then again, we also don't typically encounter parents who say to their children, "Feel free to lie like Jacob did, kids!" No, we would not hold up this scheme as something to imitate. But then, even without directly recommending such a lifestyle, we know that both our children and we ourselves already fit the Jacob bill more than we'd care to admit sometimes.

Jacob, in other words, is a vignette of grace. That's good news all by itself but before Genesis is finished--and we'll get to this in a few months--we will come to see that even sneaky old Jacob learned a thing or two about grace. Eventually Jacob gets re-named Israel, acquiring a limp in the process--he got a bum hip and yet for the rest of his days, with each lurching step he took, he'd remember the grace and blessing of God. Jacob got the best of lots of people in his day: Esau, Isaac, Laban. He didn't get the best of God, however. Or maybe he did get the best of God: he got God's blessing, not by snookering God out of it, of course, but by grace. It's the same way all of us Jacobs get blessed. And all of us Esaus, too. But we do get blessed. Thanks be to God!