God's Choice (Rock Springs UMC)

Our scripture today is Genesis chapter 25 verses 21 through 26.

Genesis 25:21–26

Isaac prayed to the Lord on behalf of his wife because she

was childless. The Lord answered his prayer and

his wife Rebecca became pregnant.

The babies jostled each other within her and she said, why is

this happening to me? So she went to inquire of the

Lord. The Lord said to her, two

nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will

be separated. One people will be stronger than

the other and the older will serve the younger.

When the time came for her to give birth, there were twin boys

in her womb. The first to come out was red

and his whole body was like a hairy garment, so they named him

Esau. After this his brother came out

and his with his hand grasping Esau's heel so he was named

Jacob. Isaac was 60 years old when

Rebecca gave birth to them. May the Lord add his blessing to

the reading and hearing of his word.

We're talking about God's choice today and one of the clearest

examples of choosing things that that I can think of in my own

life experiences. Choosing teams.

You ever part of choosing teams, whether you know, we used to

play, whether it was baseball or football, we played straight

base when we didn't have enough people to have a full baseball

team. We play with just, you know,

home base and second base and run back and forth.

You can do that with four people or football volley, whatever.

We were playing kickball, we would choose teams.

I always wanted to be the one choosing the teams, right?

You want to be able to choose. When you get the choice to

choose teams, what are the two criteria that you use?

Best people. That's one.

You like to win, don't you? Absolutely.

You don't care who, whether your friend, they might be your best

friend, they might have donated you their kidney, but if they

can't hit, they're going to get picked last.

So to to win, what's the other criteria?

If it's not picking the best people, picking your friends,

you don't care whether you win. You want to have a good time

with your friends. So even if your friend can't hit

or catch, you're picking your best friend first.

That's what we do when we're choosing teams.

What happens when God is the one choosing the teams?

What does that look like? We're getting a picture of that

in the scripture that we read today.

One of the things that I'll back in, in Jacob and Esau's day,

Isaac and Rebecca's day, I don't know if they picked teams for

things or not, but they had to pick some things.

And one of the things they had to pick was when mom and dad

die, who gets the stuff? Who gets the land, who gets the

property? And, and you are wise enough to

know and experienced enough to know that not everyone's a nice

person. And sometimes when you have an

inheritance to pass on, siblings will fight over it.

And, and sometimes that fighting in our day and age can take

legal forms. And that day and age, it could

become very violent and very disruptive, particularly when

you had an estate as large as Abraham's was or as Isaac's was.

Massive amounts of wealth, no real property at that point, but

lots of wealth, lots of livestock, lots of animals.

And in in that time and that place and that culture, they had

developed a custom and tradition to help grease the wheels when

it came for time for inheritance is to be divided up.

And and it was what everybody understood.

It's what everybody accepted. It's what everybody around

agreed on. And under Hammurabi, it

eventually became law in Babylon.

And under Moses, it eventually became law for the children of

Israel. And that was the custom of

primogeniture. They didn't want people

fighting. They didn't want wealth being

wasted in family squabbles. They wanted a smooth system to

pass on wealth without creating social disruption.

And the custom which became the law of primogeniture was this.

The eldest son inherited it all, and then it was the eldest son's

responsibility to provide for other siblings.

It was a custom that eventually became a law, which God it

seems, well, it doesn't seem in fact ignored.

In this case, God ignored it. God picked Jacob.

Esau was the older. In the case of twins, just like

now, the first one out of the womb is the older and and and

Esau was the elder. Under the custom of

primogeniture, Esau would inherit Isaac's wealth and

Rebecca's wealth as well, including the blessing,

including that blessing that came to Abraham, that Abraham

passed on to Isaac. It didn't go to Ishmael.

It didn't go to Abraham's other kids.

It went to Isaac. And for as far as Isaac was

concerned, it was going to go on to Esau.

Esau was his oldest. He loved Esau.

Esau was a man's man. He loved the outdoors.

He loved hunting. He was hairy.

I have Italian ancestry. I thought my relatives were

hairy. I felt I'm hairy.

But when you hear he saw, he saw was not only born with a full

head of hair, he apparently had back and arm hair at birth as

well. That would freak me out a little

bit. Just going to say he was.

And he loved to hunt. He loved the outdoors.

He was a real man's man. And he was Isaac's favorite of

the two. Jacob was a real mama's boy,

very much so. He was favored by his mother.

He didn't like to go out in the fields.

He didn't want to go out and take care of livestock.

He didn't want to go out and hunt.

He stayed among the tents. He learned to cook, and he was

his mom's favorite. And God picked Jacob to inherit.

And for centuries, millennia now, people have argued and

debated and discussed, well, why did God pick Jacob?

God must have had a reason. One of the main reasons that I

was taught when I was growing up, kind of the thing that I

heard most often, it was that because Esau didn't value his

inheritance, his birthright, highly enough, he disdained it.

And God, no, he didn't do that till he was an adult.

But God being God, knew he was going to do that.

And so God had already decided to give it to Jacob because Esau

just didn't value it enough. And we see that when Esau comes

back from a hunting trip. Yeah, you would've thought that

he would have at least learned how to cook enough to, like,

kill a rabbit and cook it out in the field, but he came back

really hungry. I haven't had anything to eat

for days. I'm dying to starvation.

Jacob had just made a big pot of Stew.

Apparently, Jacob was a pretty good cookie.

So I'll give you some food, brother, if you give me your

birthright. And.

And Esau made the worst bargain in the history of the world, and

he sold his birthright for a bowl of Stew, and Jacob took it.

Jacob took it, and then later Jacob disguised himself as Esau

when Isaac was very old and he was blind and it was time to get

the father's blessing now, which was more than just words.

It carried weight, it carried significance, and it had

practical and real impact for the one who received the

blessing and and Jacob disguised himself as his brother Esau.

Here's how hairy Esau was. Jacob took goat skin, goat hide

and glued it on his hands. And his father felt the goat

furries like, oh, it's Esau that's a hairy dude.

I don't know why the Bible felt the need to tell us how hairy

Esau was, but he was a hairy dude.

But here's Jacob lying to his father.

He he swindled his brother once. Now he's outright stealing from

his brother and he gets it and he gets away with it.

He had to run for his life, but he got away with it.

He ran away with the birthright and the blessing.

Why did God choose Jacob? Some folks say Esau didn't value

his birthright. Esau's character was too low.

He was too focused on the material things of this world

and not on the things of the future.

Well, Jacob was pretty darn focused on the material things

of this world and demonstrated no high character whatsoever.

Instead of just my goodness, give your brother a bowl of soup

already. Let him have some food.

I know you don't get along real well, you're not bosom buddies,

but let him have some food and don't steal their father's

blessing from him. But that's what Jacob did.

Why then would God have chosen Jacob over Esau?

Paul tells us in Romans, but it's not the answer we really

want. Let's take a look at it in

Romans with Esau, and I'd say with Esau and Jacob, God

violated the cultural custom and tradition of prima generator.

God said that's y'all's custom, that's your tradition, that's

your law. I'm God, I'm not bound by your

laws. I'm not bound by your customs.

I'm not bound by your traditions.

Why though? Why did God choose Jacob?

Why? Let's hear what Paul says in

Romans. Yet before the twins were born,

or had done anything good or bad, in order that God's purpose

and election might stand, not by works, but by him who calls she.

That is, Rebecca was told, the older will serve the younger,

just as it is written, Jacob I loved, but he saw I hated.

What then should we say, Is God unjust?

Not at all, For he says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom

I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have

compassion. It does not therefore depend on

human desire or effort, but on God's mercy.

Here's the reason we're giving. God says why did I choose Jacob?

Because Because I did. It's like when our kids, mom,

why can't I have it? Because I said so.

Dad, why do I have to do this? Because I said so.

God, why did you choose Jacob? Because I did.

Because I'm God. God chose the younger to

demonstrate yet again. He'd done it before.

He accepted Abel's offering and rejected Keynes, and he would do

it again. He chose David, the youngest

son, to be king because he's God.

It's very, very important to God to remind us repeatedly that

He's God and is not bound by our customs, laws, and traditions,

even if our customs, laws, and traditions are based on the

Bible. By the time David was born,

Moses had written Deuteronomy. It was the law of the land,

God's given law of the land in Deuteronomy that the eldest

would inherit. But David, the youngest, was

chosen David the youngest, not the oldest.

Trying to explain or justify God's choice of Jacob really

misses the point. It's a waste of time.

And it misses the point because the point is, God chose Jacob to

demonstrate that God is God and we are not.

And God is not bound to do things the way we think he ought

to do them that we think the way we think they ought to be done.

God's choices supersede our choices, our customs, our

traditions, and our laws. Even when our laws are based on

things that God has said already and done already in the

Scripture, God is still not bound by them.

God gets to do what God wants to do.

This is an extraordinarily easy thing for us human beings to

forget, an extraordinarily important thing for us to

remember. And I'm going to explain why as

we take a look at what I I very poorly labeled practical

implications. This is we'll get to the

practical stuff in them, but my 4 bullet points here are more

more doctrine and theology than they are practical, but they

have the practical implications are in here.

We'll get to them. The Kingdom of God is not based

on what humans assign value to. There is a way of ordering

society and government called ascriptive society.

Ascriptive being what we ascribe value to, what we assign value

to. In Isaac and Rebecca's day,

people assigned greater value to sons, and particularly to the

eldest son. There's some cultures that way

today in certain parts of the world where girls just aren't as

valuable as boys. Men are just more valuable than

women. The Kingdom of God is not based

on that. The Kingdom of God is not based

on who's older or who's younger. The Kingdom of God is not based

on skin color, the Kingdom of God.

And when I talk about the Kingdom of God, I mean entry

into the Kingdom of God and life within the Kingdom of God.

It's not based on what human beings seem to, and a lot of

senses very arbitrarily assigned value to.

It strikes me as an extraordinarily arbitrary thing

to say that males are more valuable than females.

I got to tell you. Without the females, the males

aren't here. Without the males, the females

aren't here. Seems extraordinarily arbitrary

to say that white skinned people are more valuable than brown

skinned people. Extraordinarily arbitrary to say

brown skinned people are more valuable than white skinned

people. Extraordinarily arbitrary.

And, and even when those systems have been designed by human

societies to grease the wheel of social advancement and social

progress and the minds of the people who are in charge of

these things, God says I am not bound by that.

I'm just not even our moral and ethical systems.

That's what Job was about. The moral and ethical system of

that ancient time was a system of reward and retribution.

You had wealthy people that became patrons of folks that had

less wealth and they needed, they needed the patronage, they

needed the support of the wealthy powerful people.

And the wealthy, powerful people would give them housing, they

would give them land to work, they would give them shelter,

they would provide military protection for them.

And in return their their subjects would provide faithful,

loyal service. And if you were unfaithful or

disloyal, you would be there would you would receive

retribution, punishment for that.

If you were faithful and loyal, you would be rewarded for that

reward and retribution. It was an ethical system that

everyone understood and that most of the societies operated

on. And when people violated that,

the society at large would get together and punish them, except

Job, who was entirely faithful to God and instead got from God

what he and everyone else could only define as punishment.

And when Job said why God, God's ultimate answer was because I'm

God and I'm not bound by your systems of reward and

retribution. I will have mercy on whom I will

have mercy. I will have compassion on whom I

have compassion. I decide it's my choice.

God's Kingdom is not based on what humans assign value to.

There's another side of this coin, which is that God's

Kingdom is also not a meritocracy.

God's Kingdom is not based on what we can earn or achieve.

Theologically speaking, that's works righteousness.

I get into the Kingdom of God by being a really good person.

Therefore that's back to reward and retribution.

You know, I'll be really, really good then God is bound to reward

me for my goodness by including me in his Kingdom.

And if I'm a bad person, God is bound to punish me for my

vadnais and and exclude me from his Kingdom.

And God says, no, it was before Jacob where Esau were born,

before they had done anything good or bad, that God chose

Jacob, that God chose Jacob. God's Kingdom is not a it's not

based on assigned value. It's also not a meritocracy.

It's not based on what we can do, what we can accomplish, or

what we can achieve. It's based on God's choice.

And not getting our preferences is often a sign of God's will

being done. I'm going to take these three in

time together before we get the last one.

God's not based on God's will being done every week, right?

We pray every week. God, don't give me what I want.

You realize we pray that every week.

Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done.

That's what we pray, God. We want to be done.

We're asking you to do what you want to do.

The implication of that? God, don't give us what we want.

Instead, give us what you want. One of those I, I, you know, one

of the times in my adult life when I was whining, I don't know

what I was whining about. And I was whining to a pastor

friend of mine. And he said, you know, Scott,

one of the clearest signs of God's will being done in your

life is when your will is not being done.

If your will is being done, there's a good chance that it's

you that's in charge. If, if, if things are happening

that you don't want to happen, that's a good sign that God is

still in charge in your life. I hated that.

I hated hearing that. I hate the fact that I remember

that he said that I would much rather that God simply agree

with me that, that God would want for me what I want for me

and God would want for those I love, what God what I want for

those I love. But God is God.

And when we don't get what we want, that's a sign that God's

will is being done. And, and the further down the

road we go of being addicted to our assigned values or

meritocracy, the more likely the correction is to be something

that is very, very painful and very, very difficult when God's

will is ultimately done. Because God's will is always

ultimately done. And the further off track we've

got, the more painful the correction is.

This is what happened in Israel when twice in their history,

once by the Babylonian Empire and then another by the Roman

Empire, their entire country was wiped out, their capital city

sacked and destroyed, a large majority of their people

deported or killed. Why?

Because they made the mistake of believing that God lived by what

they assigned value to, or that they had earned God's favor by

merit. God chose Israel.

God chose Abraham. Why?

Because Abraham was a better person than other people?

No, because God chose Abraham. God chose Isaac.

Why? Because Isaac was a better

person than Ishmael and his other siblings?

No, because God chose Isaac. God chose Jacob.

Why? Because Jacob was No.

Because God chose Jacob. But gods, they're descendants,

which became the nation of Israel, the Israelites, they

began that they knew they were God's chosen people.

They've been taught that from the time they were, you know,

knee high to a grasshopper. They've been schooled in that we

are God's chosen people. And they began to believe that

God had chosen them because they were better than other people.

Why would we be God's chosen people?

Why would God choose us if we weren't better?

We're better than other. And if we're better than other

people, then what we want must be the best thing to happen.

And they just started doing things their way, believing that

God would have to honor them and support them and defend them

because they were God's chosen people.

God could not allow harm to come to them because God had promised

them to be a great nation, and all nations on earth would be

blessed through them. And God twice allowed them to be

wiped out to remind them that they were God's people because

God chose them. Not because they were better

than everybody else, Not because somehow God their their, their

race, their nationality, their language group, their moral and

ethical system was more valuable than other people's.

God chose them because God chose them.

Not because they earned it, not because they were worth it, but

because God chose them. Reception and, and when they

got, their nation was overrun. When their nation was overrun,

they were forced to contend with the fact that God's will was

being done when their nation was overrun because they had gotten

so far off track that God needed to correct them in very painful

ways. Reception into God's Kingdom is

a matter of God's choice, not our merit, not our assigned

value. And this is a very good thing.

If reception into God's Kingdom is based on our merit, then

we're all at risk because we are all going to fall short.

If reception into God's Kingdom is based on some sort of

assigned value, based on gender or skin color or, or, or age or,

or birth order, something like that, then most people will

always fall short. And those who don't fall short

will eventually be superseded by others.

But if reception into God's Kingdom and life in God's

Kingdom is based on God's choice and God's promises, then we

can't fall because God's promises never fail.

And God is always faithful. God is always faithful.

So Jesus is doing the choosing of the teams.

Jesus is doing the choosing of the teams.

And you don't have to sit back and say, I hope I'm, am I good

enough? Am I good enough?

Well, Jesus choose me. Am I good enough?

Am I, am I pretty enough? Am I smart enough?

Do I look right? Do I dress right?

Do I have this? Is it all of these things to my

right? Am I the right person?

Well, Jesus choose me. But Jesus, I choose you, and I

choose. You and you and you and you and

you and you and you and you and you and you and you.

I choose you and you and you and you and you.

And this knucklehead up here with the loud shirts on, I

choose him too. Because God chooses.

God chooses. And if it's God's choice, if

it's God's choice, then our place within God's Kingdom is

secure because God. God's promises can't fail.

God's promises can't fail. In Jesus name, Amen.

Amen.