1 Transcription of 12ID1351 Genesis 28-29 “Jacob Growing in Grace”

Transcription of 12ID1351 Genesis 28-29 “Jacob Growing in Grace” September 12, 2012 All right, let’s open our Bibles tonight to Genesis 28. Last week, as we are continuing through Genesis, we had gone through chapter 27 and saw what a dysfunctional family Jacob grew up in. We looked, in particular, at four groups – the unspiritual father, Isaac, who certainly was not walking with God; a mother who was unsurrendered, as she plotted and planned against her husband and his Lord; an unscrupulous brother, Jacob, who didn’t want to be caught doing the wrong thing. He didn’t mind doing the wrong thing, just didn’t want to be caught; and then this unsaved son, Esau. And you begin to get the picture………..what a mess! Last time, when we looked at chapter 27, Isaac thought that he was about to die. He had lost his eyesight, he was older, he believed that his last days were upon him. His favorite son, Esau, he wanted to bless with the blessings of the firstborn, Esau having been born first. Although, seventy-seven years earlier, when he and his brother were born, God had very specifically said that the older would serve the younger – that God had reversed the order of His choice. Jacob would be the one that He would bless. The scheme of his dad and Esau who, dad said to Esau kind of quietly on the side – “Go make me some of that good venison meat, and I’m gonna bless you before I die.” Rebekah had eavesdropped and heard, and she quickly got to Jacob and said, “Now, we can’t let this happen. God wants you to be blessed. We’ve got to help Him out.” And so she, somehow, was able to take goat meat and make it taste like deer meat, and she dressed Jacob up in the goatskin so he would be as hairy as his brother, Esau. And he went in and deceived his father and lied to him, and we went through the whole thing last week. But, needless to say, he got the blessing out of his dad about the time Esau walked in the door with the stew, and Esau was fit to be tied. And Isaac realized that he had tried to mess with God’s plans and couldn’t. And Isaac ends up in Hebrews 11, the chapter of faith, simply by just now submitting to the fact that God would have His way. It broke Isaac. He realized he had really been trying to work over the Lord, if you will, and God wasn’t about to let that happen. Esau was angry – asked his dad to bless him. Dad really couldn’t bless him like he’d blessed Jacob, and though he had begged for that blessing, and Isaac realized God’s opposing hand, Esau was just furious that he had lost some financial kind of gain. So he hated his brother. He swore to kill him, and “As soon as dad is dead, 1 and our mourning time over his death is past, I’m going to get you pal.” And again, Rebekah, the meddler, she gets wind of it, and she goes to Isaac and says, “Could we just send Jacob back to my family in Haran – find a bride there? I don’t want him to marry a bunch of Canaanite women like Esau has been doing.” (which we read there at the end of chapter 26) “It’ll just be for a few days, and then he can find a wife, and then he can come home, and everything will get calmed down and all.” What she didn’t know was that it would be twenty years, and she would die before he would return. The whole picture of this conniving and sinful kind of – nobody wants to listen to the Lord or “We’re gonna help God out,” we kind of flushed out last week – that there are consequences. So Jacob leaves his mother, he bids farewell to his father, and at 77 years old, he hits the desert trail for points unknown. He knows where he’s headed, but he doesn’t really know what waits for him there. It is this picture that we will look at, in part, tonight; in fact, for the next several weeks. And you can really entitle these chapters, especially for the next four or five chapters, “Growing Through Grace” – just like we named our radio program. Because this is really twenty years of Jacob’s journey from being a man who runs his own life to a man that God will govern, and he will look to the Lord. And it is really Jacob learning to grow in the grace of God. Sometimes he learns that quickly. Sometimes he learns that very slowly. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like he’s learned it at all. Oh, he’ll get it, but he won’t get it today. And yet, ever so slowly, the grace of God continues to appear to him. It is a hard work, I think, for the Lord to bring us to the end of ourselves because we are so into ourselves. Sometimes it’s a long road. Sometimes events are extreme enough where we immediately seem to be broken, and “God, you can have all that I am.” Sometimes there are mild trials. Sometimes they have to become very severe. Paul said, at the end of chapter 10 of Hebrews (verse 31), “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” And indeed it is because you’ve given God permission to mess with you, to bring you to Himself, and He will. He’ll do it because that’s the most important thing that He can do for your life and in your life. So, you belong to Him. His desire is for all of you, and He’ll take you from being saved, He’ll subdue you, He will cause you to submit yourself, and He’ll be there every step of the way. And that, I guess, is Jacob’s story because he goes out Jacob – heel catcher; he comes home Israel – God’s governed man, ruled over, victorious in the Lord. And he becomes all that God intends. I suspect that you will be, too, by His grace. 2 Did you know that, according to Gallup, America’s favorite hymn is what? “Amazing Grace.” Absolutely right. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I’m found; was blind, but now I see.” And I think most of us know the words. I think most people get to that “wretch like me,” and that slows them down a little. “Wait a minute. I’m not sure that’s me! Is it really me?” When John Newton wrote it – John Newton was a fellow who grew up in a Christian home. His mom absolutely drove the Scriptures home to his heart, and he knew the Lord from an early young man. But his mother died while he was still young, and he had to be raised by relatives, and it caused him to be very angry with God. And for years, he kind of rebelled against God. He didn’t want any part of a relationship with the Lord. He eventually ran away from home, he joined the British Navy, and he was known, according to those who knew him and write about him, for cussing up a storm and drinking like a fish. I mean, this guy had a horrible reputation in the Navy. He became a slave trader. His conscience was all but, I think, seared. He nearly lost his life more than once. But God kept him, and eventually, through all of these hard lessons, he became a slave himself. And in that desperate place of being tied up and sold off, he thought about his mother’s counsel and the words she had spoken to him about, and he turned again to Jesus. And it was when he retired from the British Navy, he became a parliamentary chaplain, and then he wrote the song, “He saved a wretch like me.” It took him a long time to be able to say it. We sing it because we learn the words, but to say it and mean it, took a long time. It will take a long time for Jacob to say “a wretch like me.” Right now, he’s just saying, “Jacob, I can do anything. I’ve got it all figured out.” But Jacob could have written that song. I suspect any of us would have qualified for the lyrics, and that’s going to be the theme of the next several weeks – the idea of grace. And I suspect that somehow you haven’t necessarily thought all that through or grasped clearly the concept of grace. It’s not an easy concept to understand because, literally, to get something you don’t deserve and then be motivated by it - to serve - is a very difficult idea. We aren’t raised with the concept of grace. We are absolutely raised with the concept of works. That’s all that we know. You get good grades, you get a star on the top of your paper, and you get promoted. If you do well enough, you get paid to go to college. And if you do well enough, you get paid to have a job that others can’t really qualify for.

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