Faithbase

What you're going to read today is going to make absolutely no sense. You're going to be tempted to believe that it means that God is wicked, twisted, even evil, but that's not the truth. I wish I had time to dive into all of the theology around this story, but trust me when I say it's beautiful. The culture in which God called Abram and Sarah to separate themselves from was known for child sacrifice. They were known for religious prostitution and rape. God needed to desperately separate their idea of who God was from the polytheistic religion in which they left. God says, we are going to sacrifice Isaac, which makes absolutely no sense to readers in 2024 reading the Bible, but to Abram, it actually just made sense. This was part of what he believed. Although he knew that God promised that a lineage of people would come from Isaac who had yet to get married or grow old enough to even have children, he knew that God was somehow going to show something, and so yet again, he trusted. As he goes to sacrifice Isaac, God says, wait, I am not that God. Your belief shows that you know that I am a God worth loving and worshiping and one that is in control of all things, but I am not at all the type of God who would cause you to do the things the little g-gods you used to believe in called you to do. My way is different. Over in the thicket over there, you'll find there was a ram who was stuck introducing the idea of substitutionary sacrifice. Instead of having to sacrifice his one and only son, God provided the means for Abraham to be able to sacrifice a substitute instead. This of course is a beautiful short foreshadowing of how God doesn't call us to sacrifice our children, yet he sacrifices his for us. Our idea of God has been and continues to some degree to be backwards, yet his love for us is something that we cannot even begin to fathom. Isaac grows up. He marries a woman named Rebecca, and the two of them have two twin boys, Esau and Jacob. The thing to remember about the culture in this day and time was when someone of wealth had an heir, the heir, the firstborn son was the one to inherit the blessing and the birthright. The birthright gave them control. It gave them the inheritance of the family, the business, the group of people, the nation in this instance. The blessing was the money and all of the material things that go along with that. What we see with these twin boys, Esau is born first, which means he is the one to inherit all of it. Although they're twins, he came out first, and it is said that Jacob comes out grasping the heel of his older brother. When they were in utero, it's said that Rebecca wondered why the two rustled about so much, and she was told that there were two nations at war within her womb. As we see this story progress, that's going to make a lot more sense, but to understand this tension and this feud between twin brothers, one of which gains this inheritance because he was born moments before the other, makes a little bit more sense. Isaac names that child Jacob, which means heel grabber or manipulator. These are very key moments and understandings in their story. As the two boys get older, they were two completely different people. Jacob was more of a homebody. He liked to cook. He was a smaller stature. Esau was big, red-headed, and hairy, as the Bible is very, very specific about. He was a huntsman. He was out and he was doing things, and he was just a bigger guy. When he comes home one day, he ends up selling his birthright to his brother. He's like, I'm going to get all this money coming at me. You can take the name. You can take the title. You can take the responsibility. I can care less. That says a lot. However, what we're going to see tomorrow is Jacob's responsibility and the part that he plays that isn't so glamorous in the story.