Blessing of the Firstborn
Download MP3Genesis chapter 25. We are the 18th week through what was going to be a 20 week series on Genesis, and it's it's growing a little bit, probably 25, 30 weeks or so. And tonight, we begin looking at the life of Jacob, and we'll be there for the next 5 or 6 weeks. Begin reading in chapter 25 verse 20 3. And the Lord said to her, 2 nations are in your womb and 2 peoples from within, you shall be divided.
Joel Brooks: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.
Joel Brooks:Afterward, his brother came out with his hand holding Esau's heel. So his name was called Jacob. Isaac was 60 years old when she bore them. When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful, skillful hunter. A man of the field.
Joel Brooks:While Jacob was a quiet man dwelling in tents. Isaac loved Esau because he ate of his game, but Rebecca loved Jacob. Go to chapter 27 verse 1. 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.
Joel Brooks: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 Rebecca was listening when Isaac spoke to his son Esau.
Joel Brooks: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 2 good young goats so that I may prepare them for 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.
Joel Brooks:But Jacob said to Rebecca, 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 be 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.
Joel Brooks:And his mother prepared delicious food such as his father loved. Then Rebecca took the best garments of Esau, her older son, which were with her in the house and put them on Jacob, her son, 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 into his father and said, my father.
Joel Brooks:And he said, here I am. Who are you my son? Jacob said to his father, I am Esau, your firstborn. I've done as you told me. Now sit up and eat of my game that you that your soul may bless me.
Joel Brooks: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 really are my son Esau or not. So Jacob went near to Isaac his father who fell to 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.
Joel Brooks: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 we brought it near to him and he ate and he brought him wine and he drank.
Joel Brooks: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 peoples serve you and nations bow down to you. Be Lord over your brothers and may your mother's sons bow down to you.
Joel Brooks:Cursed be everyone who curses you and blessed be everyone who blesses you. As soon as Isaac had finished blessing Jacob, and when Jacob had scarcely gone out from 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?
Joel Brooks:He answered, I'm your son, your firstborn, Esau. Then Isaac trembled very violently and said, who 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.
Joel Brooks:This is the word of the Lord. Pray with me. Lord, we ask now that you would even honor the very reading of your word, that just as we have heard it spoken, it would already begin penetrating into our hearts, that fruit would already begin being born in our lives. And now Lord, as I speak and I I teach from your word, may you give me great clarity, wisdom, may you give the people here open hearts, open minds and ears to receive your truth. May we hear from you.
Joel Brooks:I pray that my words would fall to the ground and blow away and not be remembered anymore. But Lord, may your words remain and may they change us. And I pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen. So we're gonna spend the next 5 or 6 weeks looking at Jacob.
Joel Brooks:We're not just skipping over Isaac. We are gonna look at Isaac, but we're gonna look at Isaac through Jacob's eyes. I love studying Jacob, because it's somebody you can actually identify with. There's nothing really to love about him. We're gonna see in the coming weeks that he is a liar, a manipulator, a heartless man at times.
Joel Brooks:He does not seek after God. He has so many flaws and very few good qualities. When the author of Hebrews points out, you know, in the the hall of faith in Hebrews 11, and it points out the life of Jacob. It has to go to the very end of Jacob's life to pull out anything of faith. It seems that the faith that Abraham had and the faith that Isaac had somehow really didn't get passed on to Jacob.
Joel Brooks:Their sins did. If you remember Abraham twice lied about his wife, Sarah, and said, she's not my wife. She's my sister. Isaac did the same thing. He lied about his wife said, no, she's not my wife.
Joel Brooks:She's my sister. And then he come down to Jacob and Jacob also just lies continually. Although he is going to put their lives, you know, that he's going to make them seem like nothing compared to what he does. And the story that we just read, we saw Rebecca give birth to twin boys, Esau and Jacob. But everybody knows the story as Jacob and Esau.
Joel Brooks:They've already got the names flipped. They've already put the younger before the older. When they were born, this came 20 years after waiting for Rebecca, 20 years of barrenness and before they were finally born, before God finally came through on his promise. Esau was born first. Jacob came right behind grabbing hold of the heel.
Joel Brooks:And Jacob means, the name literally means, he holds the heel or he takes or he grabs the heel or he cheats. And this would be true of his whole life. After they were born, the parents played favorites. Parents should never play favorites, but they did. Isaac showered affection on Esau, but paid very little attention to Jacob.
Joel Brooks:And you see from the just brief narrator gave that Esau is a man's man. He was an outdoorsman. He smelled of the woods. He was charismatic. He, he loved to use weapons.
Joel Brooks:He loved to go and hunt, make his dad some good venison stew. And Jacob is the polar opposite. Jacob didn't like to go outdoors much. He, he liked to stay indoors. He liked to dwell in tents.
Joel Brooks:He was a mama's boy and it was this way for 40 years. Jacob always lived in the shadow of his brother until finally he decided he had enough. He always longed for his dad's affection. He always longed for it. He never received it.
Joel Brooks:And now he he's realized if I'm going to receive any kind of blessing, any kind of blessing from my father, I'm going to receive any kind of blessing, any kind of blessing from my father, I'm gonna have to take it. And so he already kind of swindled Esau out of Esau's birthright and now he's going to use outright deception to take the right of the firstborn being blessed by his father. The story is possible because Isaac at this point is old. He's really old. He's about a 100 years old now and he's looking every bit of it.
Joel Brooks:He, he can't move around much. He's blind. We'll see later that actually a lot of his senses are beginning to fail him. He thinks it's the end of his life, although he still lives all the way through Genesis 49. He's actually gonna live quite a bit longer after this, but he feels like it's the end.
Joel Brooks:And so he calls Esau, says, Esau, come here my son. I want to bless you, but first I want you to go and hunt some game and bring to me that delicious dish that you make. And and you can already see right there that Esau and his father Isaac are both people that are ruled by their stomachs. They're very similar. He says, when you get back I will bless you.
Joel Brooks:Look at verse 4 of chapter 25. Sorry. Not verse 4. Verse chapter 27, chapter 27 verse 4. It says, prepare me delicious food such as I love and bring it to me that I might eat, that my soul may bless you before I die.
Joel Brooks:And when he says, That my soul may bless you, this is very strong language here. It's stronger than, bless you with all my heart. This is, I want to bless you with all of my being is going to go into this blessing when you return. And this is unusual because normally a father would bless all of his children. That's typically what you see in scripture is all the children being blessed, all the children gathered before their father, and the father blessing all of them and reserving a special blessing for the firstborn, but everybody receiving some blessing, But not here.
Joel Brooks:Not here. He just wants Esau to get the blessing in the firstborn and, and everything that goes with that. All of the wealth, all of the land, all of the prosperity, all of the promises going to Esau. So when he doesn't call his other son Jacob, you can kind of sense something there. There's some form of disdain for Jacob.
Joel Brooks:It's also direct disobedience to the Lord because the Lord had already told him, said, Isaac, the older is gonna serve the younger. But Isaac just couldn't. He couldn't take that because he loved Esau and he couldn't bear for that to happen. And so he's outright disobedient. This is such a fractured family here.
Joel Brooks:Such it's so divided and so split. The, the great Hebrew scholar, Robert Alter, in his, book, The Art of Biblical Narrative. He points out that in this these scenes here, and there are 6 scenes here, you never want to see the whole family together. Ever. It's always a couple of them here and a couple of them there and, and it's like the family can never unite.
Joel Brooks:They're very dysfunctional. They're very fractured. You might think that you come from a dysfunctional family, but it is nothing compared to this family as you will see in the weeks ahead. Now, the key to understanding this passage is you've got to understand what it means to be blessed. You've got to understand what they're fighting over.
Joel Brooks:What is this blessing of the first born? What is a blessing in general? I don't know if you remember, but when we first started the series on Genesis, I said blessing is one of the themes of the entire book. God said that he was going to bless Abraham so that Abraham might be a blessing to others. So you have to be blessed in order to bless others.
Joel Brooks:And one of the ways that God was going to bless Abraham and bless Isaac was he was going to bring a a rescuer. He was gonna bring a Messiah that was gonna be a descendant from them, to come and make the world right. And he was also gonna give them a land and he's gonna give them a kingdom. And so whoever is blessed, whoever gets that special blessing, receives those things. And so Isaac had received that blessing and the messianic line wasn't gonna go through Ishmael.
Joel Brooks:The promise wasn't gonna go through Ishmael, it was gonna go through Isaac. And now who is gonna get it, Jacob or Esau? Isaac wanted it to be Esau and he wanted it with everything in him. It's kind of hard to understand what this blessing is because we don't really have the equivalent of it today. You know, when we think of, when you just hear the word blessing, the first thing you think of is the prayer you give before a meal.
Joel Brooks:To be blessed by someone, you might think of going to to Walmart or some store, and in the checkout line, the cashier saying have a blessed day. You know, and there's, there's your blessing. Have this blessed day. But I cannot imagine anybody, like, trying to to deceive and to lie and to go through all of this in order to receive a little have a blessed day. This is so much more.
Joel Brooks:It's a big deal. There's all this lying. It's all this drama, this bitterness, all for this blessing. And Jacob knows he's not going to get away with this. He knows he's going to be caught.
Joel Brooks:He knows this will be discovered and yet he still goes through with it. He knows it's likely going to cost them any bit of family relationship he has. It's likely gonna mean he's gonna have to run away and flee. He knows his brother is now gonna hate him with the most intense hatred. He knows it's going into it.
Joel Brooks:Yet he says, It's worth it. I got to get this blessing. When we tell someone that they are such a blessing to us or have a blessed day, it doesn't even come close to this. A blessing is not a generic kind of well wishing sentiment. And it's not just a superstition held by, you know, people who live 4000 years ago.
Joel Brooks:No, I think these people correctly understood how powerful words and symbolic gestures put together can be. That words and gestures put together can shape entire lives. Some words can devastate. Some words can heal. Let me give a illustration that I hope helps with this and I can't this illustration isn't mine.
Joel Brooks:I heard it from somewhere. I think it was from Tim Keller. If not, I'm gonna go ahead and credit him with it. He said, imagine if that you were a really, really good pianist. I mean, you were really good, and you play the piano all of the time, and so your your mom or your grandmom or some of your friends come up to you and say, wow, you're fantastic.
Joel Brooks:I mean, the way you were playing is just unbelievable. I've never heard anybody as as good as you. You're going to go and do great things. That's not a blessing. It's not a blessing because the person who spoke that to you knows nothing about the piano.
Joel Brooks:They're just like you. And so, you know, it's it's kind, it's affirming, but it's not a blessing. Now picture this different scenario. You've just played in a recital and one of the greatest pianists alive comes up to you after you have played and he grabs your hands and he holds them up and he looks you in the eye. He says, my son, these hands are made for greatness.
Joel Brooks:You played beautifully tonight. You you will play in the grandest halls in all of the world. That's a blessing. That's a blessing. I mean, can you imagine if that was you and you heard those words, how how that would change you?
Joel Brooks:How that would transform you? How hearing that from that person would give you life? Even set the course of your life upon hearing that? I mean, imagine the opposite if the person, that same pianist came up to you, grabbed your hands and said, these hands are worthless. It hurt my ears to listen to you.
Joel Brooks:If if you were to practice night and day, the best that you could ever hope for is to to moonlight in some local bar. Give it up. That would be almost a curse. It would, it would doom you. It would devastate you.
Joel Brooks:And even if you decided, alright, I'm gonna prove that person wrong, I'm gonna I am gonna practice 10 hours a day, I'm gonna get lots of instructors. I'm gonna dedicate myself to this and become a great pianist. Even if you did that, it just shows you how powerful his words were. It they still change the course of your life. Words can do that from the right person.
Joel Brooks:The renowned Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann said that modern people tend to just think of language as describing things as they are. But the people here understood that words can create something new in somebody. Words have substance and can bring life. They can bring purpose. And so a blessing can alter the course of your life and so can a curse.
Joel Brooks:And you cannot just bless yourself. A blessing has to come from somebody else. You can't just say, you know what, I'm great. I know it. That's all that matters.
Joel Brooks:You have to have somebody else say that to you. I mean, why do you think we meet in Girls Inc? Why do you think they have so many posters everywhere in all the rooms saying, you are great, you are wonderful. You know, they're saying all these things because people need to hear from an outside source. You can't just believe it of yourself and it be true.
Joel Brooks:You've got to be told. A blessing is looking deep into a person with tremendous personal affection and love and you affirm who God has created them to be. There's a blessing for you. It's not just a compliment, not even close. And Jacob has longed to be blessed his whole life.
Joel Brooks:He's gotten nothing. He's longed for his father to to look at him and to speak those words, and he hasn't gotten them. His whole life he has lived in Esau's shadow, longing to get the the same looks from his father that his father would give Esau. He longed for those same looks, longed for the same blessings, and nothing. And so now he is going to steal not just a blessing, but the blessing will be his.
Joel Brooks:And so Rebecca heard Isaac's plan and she quickly told Jacob, her favorite, about it. And said, You've got to do this. And Jacob just springs into action. He just does everything she says. And they put goat skin on his hands and his neck, put on Esau's clothes.
Joel Brooks:Rebecca goes and makes the stew. And then Jacob pretends to be Esau. Look at verse, verses 18 19. So Jacob went into his father and said, my father. And he said, here I am.
Joel Brooks:Who are you my son? Jacob said to his father, I am Esau, your firstborn. I have done as you told me now. Sit up, eat of my game that your soul may bless me. Go to verse 32 and compare this when Esau enters.
Joel Brooks:His father Isaac said to him, who were you? And he answered, I am your son, your firstborn Esau. Now there's a very subtle distinction here that the the author wants to pull out. And in Hebrew, you save what you really want to accent for last. That could be your last thing.
Joel Brooks:And so look at Jacob. When he comes in, he says I'm Esau, your firstborn. It's his last word. Esau comes in here and says, I'm your first born, Esau. You can tell right now that when Jacob comes in here, this is all he wants.
Joel Brooks:Is to be treated like the firstborn, blessed like the firstborn, to no longer be in Esau's shadow anymore. Isaac might be old, but he's not a fool and he's suspicious. And so he asks, how did you get the food so quickly? Jacob responds, well the Lord helps me. He helped me, which is blasphemy.
Joel Brooks:And notice that he said, the Lord your God helped me. He doesn't say the Lord my God. This isn't the Lord his God. Isaac remains suspicious. So he says, Jacob, come come close to me.
Joel Brooks:And he feels his skin and it does feel like Esau, but even still he's not convinced. And he says, Are you really Esau? And then finally he tells him, Come closer. Let me give you a kiss. But it's really, all he wants to do is get him close enough to smell of his clothes.
Joel Brooks:And he smells the outdoors and he says, these are Esau's clothes. And then finally, Jacob gets what he has longed for his entire life. His father looks at him in the eyes with deep affection and blesses him. Blesses him. Now all of us are like Jacob.
Joel Brooks:I don't know who you identify with in this story. I identify with Jacob and I think we all are like him and that we will all dress up to get what we want. All of us are looking to be blessed. We want somebody to look at us with affection, somebody to look at us with pride, and to say, you know, I'm so happy for you and you're going to do great things. And we want to be praised by others.
Joel Brooks:We, we, in our very soul, we want to be blessed. That's the reason we do so many things, or the reason, you know, we we dress up nicely to be noticed by others when we go out. Why? Because we want to be noticed and praised by others. It's, it's the underlying reason why some of you work so hard at your job in order to get promoted because you want the respect and you want the honor that comes with that.
Joel Brooks:You want to be blessed. You say things that you you don't want to say, or you do things you wouldn't want to do, all because you want the approval of somebody. All of us are guilty of dressing up but you you cannot steal a blessing. You can't do it. Not a real one.
Joel Brooks:I mean, that that look that Jacob got, that he'd been waiting his whole life for, had to feel so hollow. It had to. I mean, the hole in his heart was not filled in that moment when he got that, because he knew it wasn't him really being blessed. I mean, yes, he's gonna receive everything that that blessing promises. He's gonna receive the land, he's gonna receive all this power.
Joel Brooks:The messianic line is going to go through him, but he's going to leave feeling more hollow and with more hurt than when he came in. His life's going to be devastated after this. When Jacob receives this blessing, he, he then leaves And I mean, almost right afterwards Esau comes in. He's already cooked his stew and he's ready to receive his blessing. And looked down at verse 32.
Joel Brooks:His father Isaac said to him, who are you? And he answered, I'm your son, your firstborn, Esau. Then Isaac trembled very violently Yes, and he shall be blessed. There there's a lot going on in these few verses here. When when Isaac finds out he has blessed the wrong person, he trembles violently.
Joel Brooks:You, you, you cannot get any stronger language than this. I mean, it's like he's going into convulsions. He has been so shocked at what's happening before him. But then what he does next, I find absolutely shocking. He doesn't take any of the words back.
Joel Brooks:I mean, I've got to kind of think, you know, alright, no, I'm gonna bless you with the same blessing. I'm gonna kind of take this back. I mean, are you allowed to do that? Certainly, there's some kind of technicality that you can't steal another person's blessings or, you this is under false pretenses that I gave this. Certainly you could take this back, but it, it doesn't happen here.
Joel Brooks:And actually, almost every commentary points this out. Something in Isaac changes at this moment. Something changes. I think it's here when he finally realizes what has happened, he sees the Lord's sovereign hand at work and he begins to understand God's grace. When he says yes and he shall be blessed, you can translate this is like something he realized, like, behold, like he just realizes this, behold, he will be blessed.
Joel Brooks:I mean, at this moment, I think Isaac is beginning to realize how wrong he had been, how disobedient he had been, and how God really does use the younger, God really does use the weak and the base things of this world for his purposes. God uses the Jacobs of the world. And when Esau, at this point, realizes that his father would not take back that blessing, he's got nothing left. It's really like a curse that he gets. He turns against his father, whom he has loved his whole life.
Joel Brooks:And we'll see this play out in the coming weeks. Now, don't take any moral lessons from Jacob here. Jacob's obviously wrong in what he did. He was also, his presumption was wrong that you could steal a blessing and it still be a blessing. It doesn't work.
Joel Brooks:It won't work in your life when you try to dress up and get that blessing. There is a terrible need, a huge hole in our hearts that need affirmation, that need blessing. It's there. How are we going to get it? How are we gonna get God to bless us?
Joel Brooks:That's the blessing we need above all else. How will, how can God bless us? There's another story in the Bible that happens 2000 years after this, in which there is a another deception. There is a another betrayal that results in blessing, ultimately. It's the story of Jesus as he was betrayed by by one of his closest friends, How he was sold for 30 pieces of silver.
Joel Brooks:The Lord Jesus was betrayed. He who is described in Colossians as the firstborn of all creation. The firstborn that all firstborns point to, Jesus. He is the Son of God, the true firstborn, and he is entitled to his firstborn blessing, which is ruling over all the earth. For all of eternity he has been blessed by his father.
Joel Brooks:When he came to this world, he lived under the blessing of his father. If you remember his baptism, this is one of the places you can see it, at his baptism. When he begins his public ministry, you hear this voice from heaven says, this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. And then the Spirit of God descends like a dove and it rests on him. So you have the spoken word and the gesture and the symbol together.
Joel Brooks:This special blessing on his child. He is blessed and he is loved by his father. But then Jesus gives up his firstborn blessing. And he chooses to dress like one of us. It's hard to believe.
Joel Brooks:Jesus puts on our clothes. He puts on our shame. He puts on our guilt, our flesh in order not to receive the blessing from God, but the curse of God. In order that we might receive the blessing due Him. Martin Luther said you would see this.
Joel Brooks:You could see this clearly on the cross when Jesus cried out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And that's the only time in all scripture that Jesus calls his father God and not my father. But he's no longer receiving that blessing of the firstborn there. It's there that he is dressed up like us, with our wearing our sin and our shame and receiving the curse of God. You want to hear something amazing, and we don't have time to unpack this, but you know what the author of Hebrews calls us here, calls the assembly of the church?
Joel Brooks:Do you know what the author of Hebrews calls us? He says, you are the assembly of the firstborn. You're the assembly of the firstborn. We receive that blessing. And we are wearing the very clothes and the righteousness of God.
Joel Brooks:And so if you want to be blessed, if you want to be blessed by God, you don't dress up like others. You don't try to become better. You realize who you are, that you are a sinner. You were fallen before him, but that God has taken off that shame, that sin, those filthy rags and he has put them on himself. That he might be cursed.
Joel Brooks:And then he has taken his righteousness and he has clothed you with it that you might be blessed. That's what you have to realize. That's what you have to believe if you wanna be blessed by God. That is the only way you can walk out of here, feeling his love and his affection. And he could become the person that God has created you to become.
Joel Brooks:Jesus does it all for us. Pray with me. Lord, we acknowledge now that our righteousness before you is like filthy rags. But if we trust in Jesus, if we have been washed by His blood, that's not what you see. You see us in pure white shining forth in righteousness.
Joel Brooks:Father, you see your son. We give you thanks and praise for that. I pray if anybody here does not know you and has never felt your words of affirmation, you speaking life and truth and blessing in their life. May you break down those walls of resistance and may you flood their hearts. And I pray this in the strong name of Jesus.
Joel Brooks:Amen.
