Isaac & Rebekah

Hear now the word of the true and living God, Genesis twenty-five, starting in verse nineteen.

These are the generations of Isaac, Abraham's son.

Abraham fathered Isaac, and Isaac was forty years old when he took Rebekah, the daughter of Bethel, uh, the Aramean of Padenaram, the sister of Laban the Aramean, to be his wife.

And Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife because she was barren, and the Lord granted his prayer, and Rebecca his wife conceived.

The children struggled together within her, and she said, If it is thus, why is this happening to me?

So she went to inquire of the Lord, and the Lord said to her, Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you shall be divided.

The one shall be stronger than the other, the older shall serve the younger.

When her days to give birth were completed, behold, there were twins in her womb.

The first came out red, all his body like a hairy cloak, so they called his name Esau.

Afterward his brother came out with his hand holding Esau's heel, so his name was called Jacob.

Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them.

When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man dwelling in tents.

Isaac loved Esau because it ate of his game, but Rebecca loved Jacob.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathran.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

You're all in new seats.

Congratulations.

You know when it's springtime and you're cleaning your house and you think, let's move some furniture around?

You guys know about that?

It's kind of like that.

So we're trying it.

There's two rows, there's space.

Look how spacious, so luxurious.

These wide lanes.

Well, enough about that.

This is our marriage series, and let's pray together before we move into our text for the day.

Lord God, we praise you for your steadfast love, your unceasing grace towards us.

Lord, as we gather together this morning to worship you, we remember the qualities that you are working into our hearts by your spirit.

Lord, that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control.

Lord, that you work those into our hearts because you show those qualities to us by your spirit.

Lord, you are peaceful.

You have established peace between us, Lord, and we praise you for that.

Lord, you have joy over us, and you call us into your joy.

You're patient with us.

You're loving towards us.

You are kind to us.

Lord, you show self-control in dealing with us like a kind Father.

Lord, you call us into your goodness.

Lord, I pray that we would understand and grasp deeply how what your disposition is towards us.

And that as we seek to honor and glorify you, that we would trust your patience towards us.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So this is our, we're we're in our marriage series still.

And continuing in our marriage series, we're going through these case studies.

Now, the uh last case study that we did of a biblical marriage was the marriage of Abraham and Sarah.

And uh this uh case study is their children.

We're looking at uh Isaac and his wife Rebecca.

So if you were listening to the scripture that was read this morning, that we'll be working through, at least in part, as we look through even more to see the story of their lives.

You probably heard that um Rebecca conceives children, and there are two nations in her womb, that the older shall serve the younger, and they have Jacob and Esau.

And you heard that their house was, in a sense, divided by these two brothers, and Esau is loved by Isaac, who's a hunter in the field, and Jacob is loved by Rebecca, uh, and he is the quiet one who lives in tents.

And you probably thought, well, this is a marriage series, I'll just do that in my marriage.

Whatever that is.

So we'll explain it a bit more, uh, and hopefully come to understand a bit of what uh what this means and what this division in their marriage was.

But for the second case study, if we remember back to last week, Abraham and Sarah, their story showed us that marriage requires a patient faith.

And the glory of their marriage and what we celebrate in their faithfulness is the patience, because most of what they did was wait for the Lord to show his promise.

Now, for Isaac, it's a different story.

Isaac's faith is Isaac, who was the promised son, he is the result of their patient faith, that by faith, while they were yet dead, or as good as dead, they conceived Isaac.

Abraham and Sarah conceived Isaac.

But Isaac, uh the drama of Isaac and Rebecca's faithfulness is not whether or not they will receive the blessing.

The drama is will they pass it along?

This great blessing that they've received, will they be able to pass it along to the next generation?

Will their marriage prove fruitful?

And with what they've received, will it become more glorious, or will this great blessing that they've received from the Lord terminate with them?

And will it sort of crash on the rocks of Isaac and Rebekah's marriage?

That's what we're looking at today.

And so to begin with, we'll explore what was their marriage and how did Isaac and Rebekah come to be married?

Well, Isaac receives.

That is the main thing that Isaac does in his life is receives the blessing.

Isaac, you know, if you think back, you can kind of get an outline of what Abraham's story was.

There's God coming and renewing the covenant with him several times throughout his life.

Abraham and Sarah's faith wavering, and them having to go out of the land and then come back into the land.

Well, Isaac, he's in the land the whole of his life.

He is the child of promise.

And Isaac just keeps getting richer and richer.

Basically, the story of Isaac's life is like great investment strategy.

And whenever anybody tries to take from him or they fill in wells, he'll get, you know, some people that he's living around will get jealous over him and they'll come behind him and they'll fill in the wells.

You know how people fill in wells that happened.

We uh this is kind of a personal note.

We we Megan and I were we were robbed on the internet.

Somebody took money out of our bank account on the internet.

It's kind of like a filling in of a well, you know?

It's kind of what that's like.

Anyway, we're taking an offering later today.

I'm just kidding.

We're f we're fine.

It's just a minor internet inconvenience.

But those these things happen.

But what happens with Isaac, the wells get filled in with dirt by his enemies, and then they're digging later, and it's like, oh, a spring.

A spring of water that just flows even better than any of these wells that we had to dig with.

That's basically the story of Isaac's life.

It's just things, he inherits the blessing, and things kind of get better and better for him.

He gets richer and richer.

Now, in our culture, we kind of look down on the ones who receive great things.

And we have this intuition that like there's we have a very bootstrap culture.

Like the stories that we like to tell are you you started with nothing, started from the bottom, now we're here.

Okay.

Started from the bottom, now we're here.

The whole gang's here, sitting in different places.

The whole gang's here.

That's now i in our culture, we we those are the types of things that we celebrate.

We have negative words for inheritance.

You know, we like look down on people who have who've inherited good things.

Like we have the word nepotism.

It's a bad word in our culture.

Which nepotism is like prioritizing things for your family.

That doesn't that do that doesn't seem bad to me.

You know, like I have we have um savings accounts like for our children's college and and things, which were also robbed this week.

No, they weren't.

And uh there's uh it and uh I no offense to any of you.

I love you all as your as your pastor.

I don't have savings accounts for any of your children.

I don't have any.

I don't intend to.

I won't.

That's not bad.

That's not a bad thing.

It's glorious to be able to pass on this wonderful inheritance.

And so Isaac, uh but the the challenge for the one who inherits is different from the challenge of the one who looks forward.

And the challenge is can you keep it?

You've received this glorious thing.

Do you think that this is something that you just deserve because you've received it?

Do you think that the reason that you've received it is so that it could be spent on you?

Or so or so that it could just increase you and increase your joy?

Or do you think that you've received something, the glory of it will be in your passing it along?

Many of you don't remember a time when you weren't a Christian, and you've inherited that.

You've had patterns of glorious marriages that you get to receive, and that that's a good thing.

But the question of your lives is can I pass this along?

This wonderful blessing that I've received, will it continue to multiply with me?

Or do I see it as something that's just here to serve me, to satisfy my appetites?

That's the question of Isaac's life.

And it becomes the question of Isaac and Rebecca's marriage.

And so let's look at how it is that they became married, that they became married.

Believe it or not, this glorious marriage of Isaac and Rebecca is something that Isaac really just receives.

He just gets it.

He doesn't even have to go anywhere.

It's like Amazon Prime, like he just sat in his house and somebody else went out and then brought him back a beautiful wife.

And Isaac's response was great, great.

Now I have a beautiful wife.

So Abraham, he's looking forward to the promise.

And he knows that he's received this glorious promise of this son, who's the promised son, and he knows that the promise of this son leads to the salvation of the world.

And so he looks forward to this promised offspring and the promised offspring that will come through his children.

And so he knows that Isaac needs a spouse.

He needs a wife in order for this promise to continue, that through their line all the families of the world will be blessed.

And so he goes to his oldest servant, whose name is Eleazar.

Eleazar would be in line for the promise if it weren't for Isaac.

But Eleazar is a true Christian.

He's a true believer in the promises that have been given to Abraham.

And so he's not concerned that Isaac will, that he'll lose out when Isaac is blessed.

Instead, he seeks the promise that Abraham has been given.

And so Abraham calls Eliezer to him and says, Put your hand under my thigh, make an oath to me that you won't seek a wife for Isaac from the people of the land of Canaan.

These are bad people.

These are not people we're meant to assimilate with.

These are people we're meant to later conquer in the land, if you'll keep reading the story.

Instead, go back to my own family and get a wife for Isaac from there.

And Eliezer goes and he does that.

He does just that.

He seeks the promise, seeks the fulfillment of the promise, one which will actually, in a sense, displace him.

But he knows that in this promise coming to fruition, that he'll actually benefit from the fruitfulness of this in a way beyond anything anyone could imagine.

And you know, this faithfulness that Abraham and Eliezer show to the promise of God, it's faith that salvation will come through the promised offspring.

That's our faith.

They're Christians like us.

Our faith is that same faith.

Only now we get to look back and see that promise was fulfilled in Christ.

The offspring has come.

And the true atoning sacrifice has arrived.

And so we are saved in the same way by faith in the promised offspring.

And so they express it here.

And Eliezer goes back to where Abraham is from, and he his mission, should he choose to accept it, is to go and find a wife for Isaac.

So if you're gonna go find a wife, and you've been listening to this series for the past five weeks, where do you go to find a wife?

You go to a well.

That's right.

Wives are at wells.

That's our application for today.

Single folks.

And so he goes to a well where Abraham is from, and he's got tons of camels, and this whole, you know, basically he's showing up to say, like, I'm serious about this.

I'm a serious guy looking for a wife for my master's son.

And when he goes to the well, he prays, and he prays to the Lord, and he says, Lord, would you bless my master?

And would you bless the intentions of Abraham to find a son for Isaac?

And would you show me that I found the right woman by this sign?

When I ask for her to give me water from the well, she will say, Yes, I'll give you water from the well, and I'll water your camels also.

That's the sign that he prays to the Lord that he might see, so that he knows that he picks the right woman.

And there's you think of this is a pretty high responsibility quest that he's been sent on.

This is like the the wife who will bear the offspring that will lead to the redemption of the world.

You know, this is like they will need to match on all 29 dimensions of compatibility.

And the test that he describes is one where she will offer like these the she will be, she herself will be like a well.

Well, from her and her actions will flow life.

And he'll be able to see that she cares not just for the man, but for the whole household that he brings, which is sort of represented by these camels that were part of their caravan when they went there.

And so the the this is the quality that he's looking for in the future wife of Isaac.

And so he sees Rebecca coming, she's beautiful, and she walks towards him, and he asks, Could you give me a drink from the well?

And in Genesis 24, verses 18 through 19, she said, Drink, my Lord, and she quickly let down her jar upon her hand and gave him a drink.

Genesis 24:18–19

When she had finished giving him a drink, she said, I will draw water for your camels also, until they have finished drinking.

And it just says Eliezer just looked on to see if he had found the right woman.

And of course he had.

You can see her heart is displayed here.

She is a righteous woman who is seeking to serve and show this hospitality even to this stranger.

That's a glorious image that we first see of Rebecca.

And so he explains his quest.

He goes right after she gives this to him, he puts a nose ring in her nose, which was a thing.

You know when you meet someone and he puts these golden bracelets on her, and they go back to the house of her brother and her father.

Uh we meet Laban, and he tells the whole story.

They say, Let us uh give you some food, and we'll eat dinner and we'll kind of catch up.

And he's like, Look, before we eat, let me tell you this whole story.

Abraham sent me, he had a child in his old age, and he sent me to find someone.

And when when we were at the well, I prayed.

And I prayed this prayer.

I prayed that she would water me and my camels also, and then I saw Rebecca.

And Rebecca came in and she did exactly that.

She watered the camels, me and the and the camels also, and I knew that I'd found the right woman.

Rebecca is the one who should marry Isaac.

And what he's explaining there is that this is not just some uh random meat cute at a well, that he has sought the guidance of the Lord, and by the signs that he had prayed, and in seeing them fulfilled, he is recognizing that the Lord has chosen this woman to be the one who bears the seed that will lead to the salvation of the world.

And that this is for sure the Lord's doing.

And so they respond in kind and they recognize that this is the Lord's doing, and they say, Well, if the the story that you just told, it looks like this is the Lord's decision.

We can't speak about it either good or bad.

This is the thing to do.

And they ask Rebecca and they say, Why doesn't Rebecca stay here 10 more days?

And if she stays here 10 days, we'll be able to, you know, have our goodbyes.

And he says, uh, we need to leave tomorrow morning because this is an important thing, and it seems like the Lord is moving, let's move in faith.

And Rebecca says, Yes, let's leave tomorrow morning.

Now, Rebecca is one of these glorious women in Scripture where she is, and we'll see this through as the story unfolds, that the Lord works through Rebecca to preserve the promised seed by her quick and fearless faith.

That is the way that Rebecca works throughout this whole story of their marriage.

Rebecca is, in a sense, she kind of becomes like the star of the glory of this marriage.

And so uh they're in the caravan back home, and Rebecca sees uh Isaac and he's meditating in the field because he's like a single guy at this time, and single like guys they meditate if they get all this time.

And in uh uh Genesis 24, verse 67 says, Then Isaac brought her into the tent of Sarah, his mother, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife, and he loved her.

Genesis 24:67

So Isaac was comforted after his mother's death.

And so he takes Rebekah, brings her into the tent of his mother, Sarah.

Remember, Sarah means the princess.

And Sarah was dead at this point, and it meant, what that means is that this royal family, this family of the royal promise that God had given them, had no princess.

Sarah means the princess.

And so now he brings Rebecca into the tent of Sarah, and she is now the princess.

We have a new royal family.

Isaac and Rebecca are the ones who have been given this responsibility to care for the promise that God had given to this family.

A promise through which all the families of the earth will be blessed.

And so we continue in uh so their marriage.

They would look back on, and what they ought to consider of their marriage is that certainly God has done it.

Just like everything else Isaac could say in his life, certainly the Lord has done this.

The glories that I am surrounded by, even my wife, the Lord has done it.

And it is to be received with gratitude.

Now, their story continues in Genesis 25, in verse 21, it says, And Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife, because she was barren.

And the Lord granted his prayer, and Rebecca his wife conceived.

All the women in Genesis are barren.

All the women who are given this promise that the seed will come through them can't have children.

And this is, we should understand this pattern of the way that God does things.

Because often the way that God bestows a blessing, something that you see that is good, that you desire for yourself, is he backs you into a corner until you can't possibly get it for yourself.

And then he freely gives it to you, so that you might know he is the one who gives good gifts.

These are not things we wrestle out of his hand, but they are good things that he freely gives to us.

And so all that time, what he's cultivating in Isaac and Rebecca is the same sort of faith that he was cultivating in Abraham and Sarah.

It's a patient faith.

A faith that will be able to understand, I do not have it now.

But that doesn't mean I won't, because I know that the Lord is faithful.

And they are gaining this ability to have a patient faith.

It's not something that, like a patient faith, there's no shortcut to getting a patient faith.

There's not a particular prayer you can pray, there's not a particular pill you can take.

There's only the Lord cultivating it in you.

And that's what he does for Isaac and Rebecca.

And I think that's why we see this pattern of barrenness.

Because the promised one is not something that we can acquire for ourselves.

It's something that we can only look to the hand of God for him to freely give to us.

Now that little verse, Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife because she was barren, and the Lord granted his prayers, and Rebecca his wife conceived.

That little verse covers twenty years.

Twenty years Rebecca is barren.

They're forty when Isaac is forty when they get married.

And so for twenty in uh he's sixty years old when they finally conceive.

Remember last week, Abraham and Sarah's story?

Remember the drama of that story was when uh they're unable to conceive, and so Sarah gets her servant, um Hagar, and says to uh Abraham, You should have, you should conceive through Hagar, and then we'll we'll say that's the promised child, the promised child that you conceived through Hagar.

They had waited ten years, ten years of barrenness before they abandoned the promise of God and sought to accomplish it by their own means.

We can see already there's this fruitfulness that Isaac and Rebecca had inherited.

You know, you could imagine the conversations of going back to Abraham and Isaac sitting with Abraham and it's like we've been trying, and we're trying we're tracking, and another month goes by, and we're following the you know patterns of the moon, and it's another month, and those stomach pains that she had, and we got so optimistic about it wasn't pregnancy again.

Twenty years going back.

But Abraham's there, you know, and he might have been able to say something, like, you know, we waited a long time to.

And Isaac, remember, when I had you, I we couldn't conceive.

There was there was no way.

We were as good as dead.

Your your mother was 90 when she conceived.

I was a hundred when she conceived.

And so they it by the time they conceive, I think the scripture is showing us the time had doubled.

But they did not fall into the same sin that their parents had fallen into.

The patience of their parents' faith had multiplied in their lives.

This is the type of hope that we should have for the fruitfulness of our marriages, for our children.

That we would want to look forward and see that the faithfulness that we had experienced or that the Lord had worked into our hearts, man, wouldn't you hope that doubled in the lives of your children?

That the faithfulness that you had practiced with your wife, that it would show in the lives of your children or the people who looked into your marriage, and it would have this multiplying effect.

There's a glory there that I think is on display.

But the scripture doesn't emphasize their patient faith.

Instead, the scripture, in their story, in Isaac and Rebecca's story, emphasizes whether or not they're able to pass the faith on.

And so the drama of their story comes in with their two children and the one that they were required by God to pass the promise on to.

In Genesis 25, 22 through 23, it says, The children struggled together within her.

And she said, If it is thus, why is this happening to me?

Which is one of those phrases that you can hear.

When you hear a phrase like that in Scripture, you should think, that's probably hard to translate.

Because who talks like that?

So it is hard to translate, but you should just think she's saying, What's going on?

It's basically what it means.

What's going on?

I feel weird.

What's going on?

So, in what we would expect from Rebecca, she went to inquire of the Lord.

So she went to inquire of the Lord.

And the Lord explains to her exactly what's going on.

It says, Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you shall be divided.

The one shall be stronger than the other.

The older shall serve the younger.

And what she's seeing is God's saying, that strange feeling that you have in you?

Twins.

It's twins.

That's what that weird feeling is.

In the sense that they're striving within you, it's true.

And they will wrestle because what you have in you is one son who will receive the promise and receive the blessing, and another son who will attack him.

And so there's this conflict that's within you.

And he's, in a sense, handing over this responsibility where he's saying you're going to have to handle the conflict, not in an intuitive way.

The intuitive way would be that you would pass it along to the older brother.

And the older brother would receive a double portion of the inheritance.

And just like all of the culture around you, the older brother would be the one who the promise is passed along to.

But God is saying to Rebecca and to Isaac, remember, this is my sovereign choice.

Because they would have thought, like, Rebecca, why are you the one who was brought into this family?

And they would hear the story from Eliezer and say, it was clearly God's sovereign choice.

Remember the prayer that I prayed?

God has been working his sovereign choice this whole time.

And they would go to Abraham and they would say, Abraham, why were you the one given the promise?

And Abraham would say, I don't know.

I don't know.

The Lord, by his sovereign choice, selected me by his grace alone.

And there's nothing that I can point to within me that says I ought to have received this.

All I can do is point to the grace of God towards me.

And so the sovereign choice here is the older shall serve the younger.

Rebecca hears this word and believes it by faith.

In Genesis 25, 27 to 28, it says, When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, dwelling in tents.

You can hear the difficulty of them getting along already.

Isaac loved Esau because he ate of his game, but Rebekah loved Jacob.

Okay, two sons, Esau and Jacob.

Esau is the firstborn, the older.

He's the hunter.

He's hairy.

He likes the outdoors.

Jacob is the younger.

He's more of an indoor cat.

He likes tents.

He's the younger.

He's the one who the promise is meant to be passed along to.

Now here's the division of the marriage.

Isaac loved Esau.

Why did he love Esau?

Because he ate of his game.

He liked venison.

He liked a more gamey meat.

Rebecca loved Jacob because he was the child of promise.

In our uh in the ESV, what we're reading from today, it describes, it says, Jacob was a quiet man dwelling in tents.

Now I think it's because we Jacob can be such a difficult character to interpret.

And our text doesn't want to go all the way with our interpretation of Jacob because that word, he was a quiet man, is the very same word that's used to describe Job at the beginning of the book of Job, where it says he was blameless.

So what we should read here is that Jacob is blameless before the Lord.

He's righteous.

That's what Jacob is.

And Jacob has a life where he's he, in one reading of it, he's just like this trickster.

And I think, and if you think that, and you've been in our church for a while, part of the reason that you think of Jacob as a trickster is well, it's my fault.

Because I preached him that way so many times.

And I think if I were to go back, and this always happens when you return to texts that you've already preached on, it's like, ah, I would have done it differently.

And my would have done it differently this time, is I would have preached Jacob as righteous.

Because throughout his whole story, Jacob is righteous.

And it's not that he's faultless, but he's righteous.

And he's seeking and striving after the promise that the Lord had given him.

And so Jacob is a righteous man.

Now the point of this distinction is that Rebecca is her love and affections are given towards the right son who should be given the blessing, the one who God himself said should be given the blessing, and the son who shows righteousness before the Lord.

Even the one being a hunter, and even Esau being a hunter and Jacob being a dweller in tents, what they're commanded to do is to take dominion of the land.

A hunter is a wanderer, and they can go anywhere.

But someone who's dwelling in the tents, that's a dominion type of person.

This is someone who is saying, This is my land, and I am taking dominion of the land.

So you can see it there as well.

So now the question comes.

And at this time, Isaac is old and he can no longer see.

He's gone blind.

Now we should read this spiritually, because throughout scripture or throughout Genesis, seeing is linked with judging.

And this is true in the book of Genesis from Genesis 1.

God makes a day, and then he saw that it was good.

He looks and he judges.

So when Isaac is blind, we should read it as like a spiritual condition.

Isaac is no longer able to make right judgment.

And we see that what Isaac does instead is he judges only according to his appetite.

So that is what will immediately satisfy me now.

I have these felt needs within me.

And goodness, what I judge is good, are those things which are able to immediately satisfy me.

So because Isaac loves Esau and he loves him because he is able to immediately satisfy his appetite by going out and getting the game that he likes to eat, he sets in his mind that he will pass the blessing of God, that he will pass the promise that he has inherited on to Esau, the older son, but the son whom he has received specific instruction from the Lord not to bless.

This is an incredibly vile sin that Isaac is set to commit in his heart.

He instructs Esau, and he says, Isaac blind says to Esau, 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.

What is his love?

Sometimes it's difficult to interpret the Bible.

Sometimes it's like, what is it?

What is the love that motivates Isaac?

Delicious food.

This is the love that motivates him.

Delicious food, such as I love.

Okay, it's not hard to interpret.

And bring it to me so that I may eat, that my soul may bless you before I die.

And we'll see as the story goes on.

The blessing that he intends to give to him is not just a double portion, where you could think of it as two-thirds, and then the remaining third of the blessing would go to the remaining offspring.

This is what he intends to do is give the whole blessing, all of the inheritance, and the whole promise of God to the wrong son, denying what God had chosen.

So you can think of this as Isaac has inherited the blessing.

And he has lived his whole life as one who receives.

But his disposition towards the blessing has become one of not something that he receives with gratitude and knows fundamentally belongs to the Lord, and that he, like his father before him, looks in patient faith towards its continued growth and glorious fulfillment in the redemption of the whole world.

Instead, his mind has shifted and his eyes have become dark because he thinks that this blessing that he has received is not a demonstration of the sovereign choice of the Lord, but it is something that he deserves.

And that the purpose of the blessing is not the means by which he might serve the Lord and glorify the Lord, but the purpose of the blessing is so that he in this life might be satisfied.

Now there's clear marriage instruction here.

Because our culture teaches us that the value of your marriage is whether or not it satisfies you and your needs right now.

That is the this is like the way that you're supposed to learn how to have a healthy marriage is you you discover one another's felt needs and then you seek to uh support those.

You know, I I have a rule for the weddings that I do, which is uh that you if you write your own vows, they can be that's nice, but you're gonna say the traditional vows.

And that's because when when people write their own vows, and if you go to friends' weddings, not yours, you know, but your friends that aren't here.

We talk about them all the time.

When you go to your friends' weddings, you'll hear their vows and they'll they'll vow things like, I promise never to get in the way of you expressing your true self.

And I'm sitting there watching these vows happen, and it's like, don't vow that.

Don't vow that.

First of all, you can't you can't do that.

There's no way you as a person can do that.

You can't just like make sure that you're never in the way of them becoming their true self.

What does that even mean?

When do you know if you're doing it or not?

But and then it they leave, and it in it what we what the types of vows that I like, I like I like vows like this.

For better or for worse.

That's a vow.

That's a vow.

Because it it just like the covenant that Abraham had received, when we received this covenant from the Lord, where we make a covenant of marriage with one another, we're we're vowing things like it could make my life worse.

And I will remain faithful to it.

Now, how could you vow a thing like that?

You could vow a thing like that if you trusted that there is a promise from the Lord for marriage, that He is the one who can finally and ultimately satisfy you, that there is a glory and a joy that can be worked in your marriage, that if you try and cause your marriage to serve you, to serve your immediate desires and your immediate satisfactions, you would actually destroy your marriage.

And you would turn it into not a marriage at all.

And so what Isaac is showing here is that his main lens of judgment is whether or not he is immediately satisfied.

And what he wants to preserve and pass along, and the people that he wants to be close with are only those people who will immediately satisfy his own appetites.

His eyes had become dim because he he cannot look forward to a glorious future, one that's beyond his imagination.

So Rebecca steps in.

Before Isaac is about to commit this, uh what I hope you see now is a horrific sin.

Rebecca steps in and she comes to Jacob and she says, I overheard your father.

And his intention is to bless Esau.

And if we've learned anything about Rebecca, she doesn't say, so we're gonna take some time and we're gonna think about what to do.

She says, we got to move fast.

Esau's out in the field hunting.

I don't know if he's going to catch anything.

Here's what we're going to do.

You go in to your father, go get me some goats.

I'll cook the food that I know your father loves.

And you go in with that food.

You say that you're Esau, because in a sense, you are like God has said you're the older brother.

And so you're going to go in and you're going to say that you're Esau, and then he's going to bless you.

And Jacob is like, but my skin is smooth.

And he's concerned that when he goes to Isaac, that it will be clear that he is not the one that Isaac, not the son that Isaac is intending to bless, and that he is in fact going to receive a curse from Isaac for tricking him.

And Rebecca says this, which is which is glorious.

In Genesis 27, 13, his mother said to him, Let your curse be on me, my son, only obey my voice and go.

Bring them to me.

Now what's happening here is like the marital inverse of Abraham and Sarah.

Abraham and Sarah are like a repeat of the garden.

Because Sarah comes up with this sin that Abraham would take Hagar, her servant, as a wife, and she holds it out like this forbidden fruit to her husband.

And Abraham, like Adam, when his wife holds out the forbidden fruit, he listens to the voice of his wife instead of listening to the voice of God.

But in this instance, Abraham is the one, excuse me, Isaac is the one, the husband is the one who is seeking to commit this grievous sin.

And so Rebecca comes in and she is the one who, in the station that she is in, as the submissive wife, seeks to prevent her blind husband from sinning against the Lord.

And this is important to understand about the shape of the submission that wives are called to.

The submission that wives are called to is it must finally be a submission to the Lord.

Because if her submission was finally a submission to Isaac rather than a submission to the Lord, then she would have gone along with the sin of her husband.

Instead, Rebecca sees that her final submission is to the Lord.

And the way to love her husband in this instance is not to participate in his sin, but it is to seek to intervene to prevent his sin from taking place.

And so there's this glory that happens here.

Now, I know we're uncomfortable with it because Rebecca deceives, and deception, you know, that doesn't seem good to deceive, but there's this other thing.

You know, Eve is deceived by the serpent.

And then throughout the scriptures, there's a sort of this pattern where the women of God deceive the serpent, and it's good.

So one instance of this pattern is here, Rebecca.

And there's a sense in which the serpent, which is calling Isaac towards this temptation, towards his appetite, is at work in Isaac.

And she deceives that serpent in order that the righteousness might continue on.

There are other examples of this.

Remember when Pharaoh says to kill all of the Hebrew boys?

And who is it that deceives Pharaoh, that great serpent?

Do you remember?

It's the midwives.

It's these Hebrew women.

And so the one who is deceived in glory, they sort of become the one who deceives the deceiver.

And the deceiver is deceived because he's being brought into the truth.

You know, it's sort of this double move that happens.

Or remember Rahab?

When the spies come in to Jericho and they need to be hidden, and uh she is the one who deceives her countrymen so that she might preserve the promise of God.

It's kind of a wild thing.

I don't really even I I don't really have an application here.

But you see it, right?

You see it.

So I guess what I'm trying to show in this text is that Rebecca does the right thing.

Rebecca does the right thing in seeking to step in.

One way to think of this deception is something like the way that Nathan, in a sense, deceives David.

Nathan, the prophet David, after David, uh after David uh commits adultery and commits that murder, then Nathan comes in and he tells him this whole made-up story about uh uh a sheep that gets stolen and taken and killed.

And David hears that story and he says, Oh man, this is this is terrible.

That's a terrible thing that happened.

And then Nathan says, You're the man.

And so there's a sense in which there's this deception, but the purpose of the deception is restoring the deceiver to the truth.

And that's what Rebecca does here.

So what happens is Jacob goes in, he receives the blessing from Isaac, the right son receives the full blessing, and then Isaac is brought to repentance.

And Isaac being brought to repentance looks like Esau comes in and is there to receive the blessing, and it becomes revealed, I blessed Jacob.

I blessed the son that I didn't intend to bless, but that I should have blessed in the first place.

And when he blesses Jacob, it says that, or when he realizes that he had blessed Jacob instead of Esau, he trembled violently.

And this is not a trembling of Jacob deceived me.

This is a trembling before the Lord, of realizing that his great sin was uncovered.

But by just the wonder of the wife that God had chosen for him, it was by just a hair's breadth avoided.

And we know that he has been restored to the Lord and he rediscovers by the work of his bride this glorious restoration to the covenant promises of God.

Because when Esau asks for further blessing, Isaac doesn't say, you know what, you're right.

I take it back.

I accidentally blessed Jacob.

I'll talk to Jacob later and say, no, that blessing's not the real blessing.

Instead, it says this same thing.

Esau says, Don't you have anything left to bless me with?

And Isaac says, No.

I gave the fullness of the blessing to Jacob.

Now we hear that in our modern minds, and we tend to think like, did Isaac like use up all his blessing magic?

It's like the way we read that a lot of times.

That's not what's going on here.

This is not magic.

This is covenant.

This is the fidelity to the promise.

And so Esau turns on Jacob, and because of this catastrophe that happens in this division that's brought into the family by the by the appetite of Isaac, Esau seeks to kill Jacob, and so Jacob needs to go on the run.

But before Jacob goes on the run, Isaac comes back to Jacob, they return to one another, and Isaac blesses Jacob.

And in Genesis 28 it says this, Then Isaac called Jacob and blessed him, and directed him, You must not take a wife from the Canaanite women.

Arise, go to Padon Aram, to the house of Bethuel, your mother's father, and take as your wife from there one of the daughters of Laban, your mother's brother.

Then he says, God Almighty bless you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you, that you may become a company of peoples.

May he give the blessing of Abraham to you and to your offspring with you, that you may take possession of the land of your sojournings that God gave to Abraham.

This blessing which was almost just almost not given to the right son, by the work and faithfulness of Rebecca is restored to Isaac and Jacob.

And Isaac is brought back into this right position where his eyes are now opened.

And he is able to look into a glorious future.

And the glorious future that he looks to for his son, who is now on the run from his brother, almost being killed, and is going, and he knows he is sending off to be a sojourner outside of the land.

He looks forward with this glorious vision of faith from the promise of God that says, You will be multiplied into generations of faithfulness.

And the generations of faithfulness will come and they will receive the promise of this land from the Lord.

That becomes the glory of the marriage of Isaac and Rebecca.

And so here's just our lesson for today, the moral of this story, which I hope sparks our imaginations.

Look at the threat to your marriage, and you know this of your appetite.

Consider that when you think of your marriage as something that is here just to serve you or to satisfy your appetites, it changes the way that you consider your spouse.

You start to assess their goodness based on whether or not your particular needs are being met.

And you start to compare them to the men or the women that you could have married.

You know, and they always, we always got along like this and had conversations like this, and they become this mythical character that might exist out there to satisfy your appetite.

What's happening there, it feels like you're spotting true things around you.

And it feels like you're seeing clearly, you're being honest with yourself, with the truth of your own needs and desires.

In fact, you you'll you will go to a therapist and you'll probably even be taught that.

You know, you're finally being honest with the truth of the desires that you have and recognizing the terror of the person that you're with.

But instead, you need to recognize your eyes are going dim.

That when the assessment of your marriage is based upon your appetites and your satisfaction, your eyes are going dim.

You're becoming blind to the truth of the goodness that is before you.

Instead, lift up your eyes towards a glorious future, the type of glorious future that Isaac has his eyes lifted up to for his offspring.

Lift up your eyes and see, this is not exactly the way that I expected it to be, but I know that the Lord has brought us together.

And he did not bring us together for our harm.

He brought us together for this glorious goodness.

And I can't see it right now.

But I'm learning to have my eyes trained to become the eyes of faith, which don't just look towards my immediate satisfaction, but they look towards the glorious future that the Lord has promised to us.

And just like the bride's submission is fundamentally a submission to God, your ability to participate in faith in the covenant that you've made in your marriage becomes grounded in the covenant promise of God towards you, where you know for better or for worse in this life, it will be better and more glorious than I could possibly imagine as we look towards that glorious future.

And what that faithfulness shown here and what that being restored here means for us is that the line continues and it shows itself in Jesus Christ.

And so we know that true fidelity amongst sinners requires a sacrifice that feels like death because Christ Himself paid that death for us.

And so we know our bearing with one another in that love will feel like death sometimes.

It's the way that we're meant to participate in our marriages, is to say, you know what, I am putting to death these fleshly desires, but we put them to death in hope of the resurrection that we've seen in Jesus Christ.

And the resurrection is on the other side of this death, there's something more glorious than I could possibly imagine.

That's how we participate in our marriages.

That's a God-glorifying marriage.

That's a marriage where you can say, I said for better or for worse, and I meant it.

Because I can say for better or for worse and know that it will be better.

Just like in Christ, Christ has these tricks that he plays on us.

You know, Satan plays a trick on us.

And Satan's trick is come and take your life for yourself.

Then you'll be satisfied.

But the trick is that Satan's promise of life leads to death.

So Jesus has another trick that he plays on Satan.

And he says, come and die.

Come and die in covenant faithfulness.

And there's life.

There's life on the other side of that.

That is the shape of our marriages, and we see it in Isaac and Rebecca.

All right, I've preached a long time, so no questions today.

Let's pray.

Father, I pray that you would work these truths into our hearts.

Lord, help us identify those tendencies that we have in our hearts to assess our relationships by how they satisfy our appetites.

Lord, help us put those to death so that we might remain faithful to you and look towards the greater promise.

The greater promise of the fruitfulness that you can bring in lives that honor you.

Lord, we have good reason to trust it.

And good reason to trust that on the other side of those putting those appetites to death, there is true life.

Amen.

In First Corinthians eleven.

Oh no, my ribbon was in the wrong spot.

In First Corinthians eleven, starting in verse 23, it says, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

That the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

So on the night before he was betrayed, Jesus took the bread and he broke it.

He said, This is my body, which is broken for you.

And he took the cup, and he said, This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

And Paul instructs us that we do this in remembrance, in proclamation of the death of Jesus, until he comes.

Because we know that on the other side of the death of Jesus, which atoned for our sins, which accomplishes it for us, not just like Rebecca, it's not just like making sure we didn't sin just in time.

This is after we sinned, we are washed and cleansed by the blood of Jesus.

And we proclaim his death because we know that on the other side of death there is life and resurrection.

Our sin and temptation, Satan, they work together to teach us that this life is all there is, and that you must be satisfied in this life, otherwise there will be no satisfaction for you.

Jesus says, Come and die to that, and there is a glory beyond your imagination, and he has purchased it for us.

It is ours.

Just like the promise was just given to Isaac, he was born into it, so too this promise is given to us from Jesus, just directly from God.

So let's come and celebrate how we are brought into his covenant.

Let us learn from him how to participate in the covenants of marriage that he has brought us into, and uh celebrate this proclamation of his death at the table this morning.

Holy Father, I pray that you would bless this meal as you invite us to your table.

Lord, that we are brought into this celebration of the true marriage of your bride, the church, and you, our true Lord, true husband.

Lord, we praise you that you not only prevented us from sinning, but Lord, while we were yet sinners, you laid down your life for us.

Such is your love towards us.

If you have that type of love for us, Lord, you will surely be able to work in us the endurance and patience with joy that is required to remain faithful in the marriages that you've called us to, and in the lives that you've called us to as well.

Lord, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.