Here we go again

Good morning. Today we're passing the halfway point in Genesis. I hope you are enjoying the suspense. We won't be taking a machete to the rope bridge, however, because we're going to just use this as kind of the beginning point of the second half here and working our way chapter by chapter through the rest of the book.

One of the things we started off with, I'd like to return to just to kind of keep it fresh in our memories. Remember, we said that we would like for you to memorize the book of Genesis as we go through this. And the easy way to do that is to summarize it in eight words, right? That is easier than every single word. So let's do that together. Remember, it is creation, fall, flood, nations and that's the commemorative fig newtons flying by because I understand that the, well Courtney's visiting his first grandchild. Anyway, so the next one are Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. Okay, so those are the eight words to memorize and then you've got the book of Genesis pretty well covered, right? Okay.

Now, this book here starts in the second half of chapter 26, and chapter 26 has three themes. All of those themes are about Isaac. What's interesting is, whereas the book of Genesis goes for about chapter 12, on to about just a couple chapters back here focusing on Abraham. So roughly a dozen chapters focusing primarily on Abraham. Now we get this chapter here on Isaac and it's like we just buzz through the life of Isaac. The focus beginning chapter 27 shifts away from Isaac. He's mentioned some, but shifts away from Isaac substantially here after this chapter. So, Isaac is summarized quickly in this one chapter. The three themes go like this. Isaac settled in Gerar.

By the way, this is, sometimes you run into, ever run into any Bible names and you figure, how am I going to pronounce that? Ever have that? Okay. Here's one way that's going to help a little bit, okay. If you look at the names of people, names of places, and especially the Old Testament, but throughout the Bible, if you see it with a letter G, is it like in this case, Gerar or Gerar, okay? If it's a G, it's a G sound. If it's a J, then you got the J sound. So it's Gerar. Oh, by the way, there's always an exception, right? Genesis. Why the exception? Because it's not Hebrew, it's Latin. That's why.

Isaac dug anew or reopened his father's wells in Gerar and as we'll see here, this is not actually Beersheba but Beersheba. So he settled in Gerar, he established these wells and thirdly, he made a covenant with this guy named Abimelech. Now, Having said that, this may or may not be the same Abimelech that dealt with Abraham.

It is possible that it's either one of those family names that gets passed down or even just a title. It means my father is king. So if the father is always a king, I guess that you can pass that name down as long as you want. Abraham was a spiritual pioneer. The Lord said, go to this land that I will show you. He was a spiritual pioneer. The Lord had him go to places and do things where it was a first.

Now, Isaac had a role not of pioneering, but of maintaining what his father began. And that's one of the reasons why we see Isaac repeating replaying various things in Abraham's life. And as we go through this chapter, we're going to look at it and say, wait a minute, I think I've seen that before. It isn't a deja vu experience. It is simply that Isaac relived or replayed many of the things that were in his father's own life. So let's talk about patriarchal patterns.

This time of famine occurred with each of the patriarchs. Abraham went through a time of famine. Isaac, as we see in this chapter, goes through a time of famine. That's how the chapter starts. And Jacob went through a time of famine. The difference in those being that this last one with Jacob, we'll get there, was a very long famine and also far more widespread. Typically, people who are in the midst of a famine would head down to Egypt and even Egypt had a famine to deal with. So we'll see that when we get there. But each of the patriarchs went through a famine, so we're seeing that introduced with Isaac.

The other thing is each of them had water issues and somehow things centered around wells, water wells, okay? And that's one reason it's too bad Courtney isn't here since he would feel so at home. But, okay. Abraham first dug them and named them. Isaac, not always, but often reopened a well that had been filled up that his father had dug. And he developed others. In the patriarch Jacob, as we'll soon see, wells were not something he developed or reopened, but they were pivotal in his life.

Pivotal. Okay. Now, the first theme here, what do you do when there's not enough water or food? That's the first theme. There's the famine. During a famine in the land of Israel, and we mentioned each one of the patriarchs went through one, the upper lands, that is the land between the Mediterranean and the top of the valley that dropped into the Jordan, would typically be short on, you know, nice green grass and other vegetation, and the amount of surface water would dry up.

There were no, you know, really large bodies of water in that upper area. There were no major rivers running through it. Even the Jordan, which was a fairly small drainage area, as we'll see, even the Jordan from the Sea of Galilee all the way down to the Dead Sea was all below sea level. And the Dead Sea is the largest body of water in that area, and you don't want to drink it.

Now, when a drought and, of course, a famine came to the land of Israel, the tendency, because you have this little tiny area up here, was to head down to Egypt at least for a while to try to wait out this famine. That was real common. Even the Egyptians have records of this pattern. where they would go back into Egypt from other places when there was a famine.

However, the Nile River is not the largest drainage area, but it's the longest drainage area of any river on the planet. And so there was a wide area, and a drought in one part of it would oftentimes be kind of moderated by water flow from another area. So the Nile would frequently be an area where people could go to for water and for food when other smaller drainage areas were having a drought. So here this 4,000 plus mile long river drainage offered some kind of water supply and crops during those off years in other places.

So now, what do you do? What do you do when there's not enough water and food? Now, when a threat to our basic physical needs appears on the horizon or even in a time when we see opportunity to better our means materially, what's the best thing to do at a time like that? Should you make the decision that seems to put you in the best material, maybe I'll even use the word financial circumstances. Should that always be the best decision to make?

As we read through this passage, what we find is the Lord said, Isaac, don't make that decision. Don't head down to Egypt as people would typically do. Stay here through the drought. through the famine, and in the midst of that, I'll bless you." In the midst of that, I'll bless you.

Now, does that make any sense? Does it? Not from an earthly standpoint, does it? When material survival or questions of prosperity are at issue, ask what the Lord has in mind. That's the principle. What may seem to be the best course of action from a material standpoint isn't necessarily the best choice of all. The top priority questions are ones like this to ask. What does the Lord have in mind? Or, what will be the spiritual outcome from this choice or that option? Or how will those whom I love and am responsible for or that I influence be impacted spiritually by my decision?

I was recounting just recently an instance. Oh, this was better than 10 years ago. I had a job offer up in Boise that would have doubled my salary overnight and would have put me as a regional manager at a nationwide consulting firm. And it would have been a great career move. I turned it down because I was concerned that it would have not the best spiritual impact on my family. So the question was not, what's going to give me the most bucks? Because the answer to that question would have been, take the job. But what's the spiritual impact? What's the spiritual impact? That's the first question to ask.

It says here that the Lord appeared to him twice in Genesis 26. We see that verse here in verse 2, but later on we see it again in verse 24. Just as the Lord had appeared to Abraham even in the very first chapter where we began studying Abraham back in chapter 12 and then again in 17 and 18. These appearances of the Lord to Isaac are taken as being of the angel of the Lord. And as we've shown in previous studies in Genesis, the angel of the Lord seems best identified as the pre-incarnate Son of God.

What do we mean by that? Jesus Christ before He was born of Mary. You have on page one of your handout here, this slide, why the angel of the Lord is not the same as an angel of the Lord. We've been through this before, so I won't belabor it, but just to say that there are a number of passages where the angel of the Lord speaks as God and does the things that God does.

Secondly, some who see the angel of the Lord say that they have seen God. We saw that earlier in Genesis with Hagar. You can see it with Manoah. By the way, you might be saying, who's Manoah? That's Samson's father. Samson's father also had an appearance by the angel of the Lord. And the angel of the Lord having appeared to him, Manoah, Samson's father said, I've seen God.

So that was a frequent reference. Appearances of the angel of the Lord, though we've seen them already in Genesis and we're not done, we will see more. And at Christ's birth, there's no more appearances of the angel of the Lord. It's one of the strong inferences that the angel of the Lord is the Son of God before Christ was born of Mary.

One of the things that happens here in this passage, Five verses here. The Lord reveals truth to Isaac. Truth that causes Isaac to do something different than what he would ordinarily do. Ordinarily, a family would come. He'd say, I'm getting out of here. I'm going to where there's water. I'm heading down to Egypt.

The Lord deliberately revealed truth to him that caused him to behave differently. That caused him to make a different decision. The Lord revealed to Isaac just what he needed to know for the circumstances he was in. He revealed that what seemed like the obvious choice materially was not the Lord's choice. The Lord said, my choice is different than what would seem the obvious choice.

For us here in the body of Christ who have the complete revelation in God's Word in our own day, He has provided abundant guidance for us in His Word. And for those rare times when we need an indication beyond what He's already given us, He's going to make that clear. Very often you will find somebody looking for the Lord to have some special revelation for everything in their life. or have the Lord go and confirm something through some miracle. I've even heard of one fellow who said, I'm going to pray and depending on what the light is at the traffic light, whether it's red, yellow or green, then I'll know God's will when I say amen. But no, we don't need to go look for some kind of external confirmation when God has revealed everything in the first place. Quite often we might look at something and say, well, God hasn't told me exactly what I'm supposed to do. And in those circumstances, if you're really looking for what the Lord has in mind and you've looked at what God's Word says about it, if God has not revealed something specific, then the specifics probably don't matter. Make a choice, he's saying, and I'll be with you each step of the way. For those rare times when we need an indication beyond what's already given us, he will make that clear.

Seven and a half years ago, I got a call from Hal. And I was surprised. You know, because at that time, I was just first starting to talk to Holly Hills here. And Hal says, well, it looks like you're it. And I didn't know quite what he meant. But apparently, how things had progressed is they'd sent six questions, and you've probably heard of Holly Hill's infamous 75 questions, right? Sent six questions to about a half dozen people, and two of them responded with answers that were received well here. Hal called the other fellow first, and Hal says, we've got 69 more questions. At that point, the phone melted, okay?

That's when he called me up and he says, well, looks like you're it. The Lord will make it quite clear if specific direction is needed. The Lord will point that out. Even if your phone melts, He'll do that. So, we have a question here. It's kind of a puzzler.

What does Genesis 26.5 mean? It says this, Because Abraham obeyed me and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws. And first of all, you're wondering, what does he mean by that? Because the law of Moses, the whole law of Moses was 613 laws, 365 of them are don't do this, don't do that, right? With all those laws, that hadn't been developed yet. As a matter of fact, it was centuries away. So what's he talking about?

What we know of from Scripture is that God had revealed a relative few things that Abraham had to do. And we know what God promised to Abraham. We know those few things that he required of Abraham. Abraham did in fact err, so it was not perfect in this, but I think the indication, as you read through Genesis, is that Abraham walked by faith. God delighted in Abraham's walk by faith, in Abraham's faithful response, even to the point of saying Abraham believed God and it was counted unto him as righteousness.

Now you have this chart at the top of page two. And this spells out some of the passages for the five categories of revelation, that is, the way God has revealed himself. Just like with Isaac there, where God revealed truth to him, we have abundant truth revealed to us. And these are in nature, providence, conscience, Those are general revelation, as we've got them outlined. And then for special revelation, Scripture and Jesus Christ. You have the references there. I'm going to move ahead to a slide that does not have the Scripture references, but just to make sure we understand what those things are.

Nature, the natural world around us, reveals God's existence and some aspects of His character. Providence, that is God's guidance of affairs here, provides for and sets limits to cause humans to seek Him. Conscience, as revealed to us in the early chapters of Romans, reveals innate, built-in moral law. Even the person who has not read God's Word will commonly have a sense of this is right, this is wrong, this is not correct, and even of themselves have that innate moral law, the idea that there is a right and wrong.

We have available to us, however, some very more specific revelations, special revelations as they're called, and that's scripture. These are the 66 books of the Old and New Testament. And those pages of Scripture reveal to us specific truth. Specific truth. Statements that go beyond what nature could ever reveal. And then finally we have Jesus Christ reveals God Himself. He is God's message, God's living word. in the form of man and he is the one who revealed and brought about salvation. So those five categories, the first three, general, the second two, special revelation.

Now, what does Isaac do? He goes to, because the Lord just said stay in the land, don't go to Egypt, right? So what does Isaac do? He goes to this place called Gerar. And Girar is here as you see it on the map, closer to the coastal area than to the inland area of the Dead Sea in the Jordan River Basin. So here is Girar. It's another place where Abraham had been. And here's the site of ancient Gerar, looking at one part of it. What you see there now is just kind of agricultural land and some of it even open land that's not developed at all.

But at the time, and the excavations prove out, that that was an occupied and actually wealthy city in the time of Abraham and the time of Isaac. As he goes to Gerar, one of the things that happens is he, Isaac, like his father Abraham, comes up with this idea, oh no, they're going to kill me for the sake of my wife.

I'd better tell them that she's my sister. He comes up with the same scheme. He's got the same fear his father has. His father had not passed along this lesson. So here is Isaac. He comes up with this story. Abimelech, if it's the same guy as confronted Abraham, Abimelech is somehow clued into, I better keep an eye on this guy. He looks there and sees Isaac caressing Rebekah. Ah-ha! Gotcha! And then he has a pronouncement. Nobody touches her. I don't want any trouble here.

No doubt what had happened with Abimelech at the time of Abraham was still in their memories, culturally speaking, at a minimum there. He didn't trust the Lord when it came to his wife. So here's what's interesting. He trusted the Lord so far as stay in the land. He didn't trust the Lord so far as his wife. He felt like he still had to lie. Isn't that interesting? I'll trust the Lord and stay in the land even though there's a famine. But I can't quite get to the place of trusting the Lord enough to just say, yeah, she's my wife.

Like his father, he had to lie about it, and he didn't even have the half-sister truth to repent upon. Instead, here was Rebecca, not his sister at all, and he still came up with a story, thinking that that was necessary to preserve him. Isaac trusted God for staying in the land, but didn't trust that God could keep him safe.

Isn't that interesting? Do we ever run into that? Oh, I can trust the Lord for this, but not for that. Oh, I'll trust the Lord in this area, but that other one, I've still got to stay in charge. Can that happen to us? Yeah, it can be. One thing that's interesting is that this kind of event, this she is my sister event, never occurred again so far as is recorded in the book of Genesis. It seems like Isaac learned his lesson out of this one. and perhaps passed it along, because it never shows up again. A key lesson that comes out of this portion of chapter 26 is just trust God. Whatever it is, trust Him. Amazing how complicated that gets, huh? Alright, theme two. What do you do when others wrongly, mistakenly feel that you're a threat? What do you do? Ever had that circumstance? The second theme here shows up in chapter 26. Others saw Isaac as a threat. It happened with more than one party.

In fact, he was not a threat at all. But Isaac could trust God about the water. Interesting that that's something he could trust the Lord about. Providing water for his livestock. Neither the envy of the people, nor of the king, nor filled in water wells, because that's what happens is one well of his father and then another gets filled in by the inhabitants of the land, nor the contention over the wells were a threat to God's ability to fulfill his promises to Isaac.

Can we ever get in that spot where we get in a situation when we're concerned I wonder if God can really pull this off in my life. Is He really adequate for this? Or maybe we think, you know, I'd better be afraid right now, because that seems like the wisest course of action.

No, what He has here is just a realization I can trust the Lord for this. I can trust in what he said. I can trust in who he is. I can trust in his faithfulness. This is trusting God about holes in the ground because a lot of this second theme has to do with these wells.

And I've been in a situation where I've, I would say, I would almost say I've hand dug wells except that we use dynamite. I lived in a county where Boy, you were in deep trouble if you had fireworks. But dynamite, no problem. Buy it by the case, okay? And so we would blast these wells and occasionally things other than rocks would come out of them.

I think I told a story about a ladder that went flying out and a cow that went flying by. Anyway, it's really a matter of trusting God about these holes in the ground, okay, that I can get the water out of them. Abraham had dug a well during his lifetime, which others seized subsequently, but he made an agreement with the region's king, that is, Bimelech, in order to reclaim it. We saw that back in Genesis chapter 21. He named the place of the well Sheba, or Be'er, which looks like beer. Be'er means well. So, and sheba means oath, so well of oath, okay? And so just to have it clear, what looks like beer is pronounced bay air, and beer means well. Okay.

Isaac reopened his father's well. The locals disputed it because after having filled it in, they wanted to make sure that they had access to the water, and especially remember there's a famine going on. So fighting over waters, very likely event. So he reopened another one that his father had dug and that the locals had filled in. And they disputed that as well. So Isaac reopened a third well. All right, I'll go ahead and reopen another one. He renamed each of the wells as his father had named them. Interesting. It's like the name had somehow fallen out of use. So he says, okay, what did my father call them? I'll call them that again.

So here are the three wells. One is Essex, means contention, and it fit because there was contention over the well. The next one, Sitna. And because there was enmity about this well. And finally, the last one, broad places, open places. Rehoboth. Have you noticed that many people in this world are drawn to revenge?

Yeah. There's even books if you want to learn how to do it better. Some of those are available. I suppose you get them on Amazon or something of that sort. They sell pretty well. Scripture, however, has a different direction for us to head. Here's Romans 12, which was studied in the Romans elective not that long ago. And verse 17-19 reads like this, Never pay back evil for evil to anyone.

Respect what is right in the sight of all men, if possible. If possible. So far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men. One is, is it possible? And two, Is there any factor that depends upon me? If that's the case, be at peace with all men. That's the directive to Christians. Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God. For it is written, vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. There's a key lesson in here. It says, trust God. Theme number three that comes in this chapter.

What do you do when others seek peace with you? How did that come about? It came about because Abimelech, who had told Isaac to please move away from us, decided he'd made a mistake. What I suspect took place is that initially he had some envy and distrust of Isaac, but then realized, hey, this guy is prosperous, the Lord is blessing him, and my having sent him away kind of takes that blessing away from us. And we're going through a little bit tough time because of this drought and the famine, and having a guy who's blessed by God nearby, that's not a bad thing. So Abimelech decides to go and see if he can bring Isaac back into the good graces of Gerar. So Isaac responded by accepting the invitation to a peace agreement.

And as believers, we likewise are free to do so. Should we always agree to such an arrangement? Maybe not. If there's a compromise involved that we ought not to be making, then we may need to say, no, I can't do that. But in this case, he was free to do so, and we may find ourselves in similar circumstances.

And so as long as that peace is not placed above spiritual principle, then yeah, it's a good thing. We're free to do that. James chapter 3 verses 17 and 18 provide some insight here. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable. Notice first pure, so we're not talking about compromise. We're not talking about accepting untruth. It's gentle, it's reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without hypocrisy. And the seed whose fruit is righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. Believers are free to do that. As long as we understand that first pure, we're not looking at spiritual compromise or moral compromise, we're free to do that. The key lesson here is, amazing thing, trust God. Now, this chapter has an un-grand finale. It has an un-grand finale and that's Esau's choice in wives.

Isaac, as you recall, had two sons, Jacob and Esau. And Esau had a poor choice in wives when he was 40 years old, which is about the same age that Isaac was when he got married. Esau here, one of the two twin sons of Isaac, married a couple of Canaanite women. And this was really distressing, brought great grief to Isaac and Rebecca.

Now, it doesn't say what exactly brought great grief. They may have just been like any old, you know, Canaanite local girls. I don't know. But whatever it was that brought great grief, it was something memorable and notable. I have no idea what that was, okay? OK, finally, and this is a kind of a sneak peek, chapter 28, verses 8 and 9. So this is a couple chapters out here.

So Esau saw that the daughters of Canaan displeased his father Isaac. So Isaac's got a headache here. Esau went to Ishmael, one of Abraham's sons, and married, besides the wives that he had, Mahalath, the daughter of Ishmael, Abraham's son, sister of Nebaioth. So now three wives, I don't think that fixed it, but nonetheless.

There is, I think, a lesson to be drawn from this. It seems that Esau goes from one problem to the next. As parents, we do have a brief window of opportunity to pass along biblical wisdom about what a godly husband and a godly wife look like. What I suspect is Esau was too busy going out hunting to listen and stick around for that. There may be opportunities later to support in a choice that's already been made, to support in a godly way. But the other half of that, the other half of the handoff, is that sons and daughters whom God intends to be growing into these adult choices and life relationships also have an opportunity to listen. also have an opportunity to listen and to seek out godly wisdom about those critical life choices.

The key lesson here, trust God. As we go through this chapter, one of the things that we see repeatedly, did Isaac do everything right? Nah. Forget it, he didn't. Isaac did, however, live out some things here that we can definitely learn from, both the ways in which he erred and stumbled and fell short, even in informing his son Esau. But as we look at the truths coming out of this chapter, it is abundantly clear Trusting the Lord for what he has revealed. Trusting the Lord for what he has made clear to us is his key point.

When we decide on our own that we've got some wisdom that's better than the Lord's. When we decide on our own, no, my feelings are far too strong for me to trust in what God's revealed. At those moments, then we sign up for a lot of pain. Then we sign up for basically a waste, a waste of time, except that the Lord, by His discipline, can return us.

Let's pray. And yet the lessons keep coming home as well. And we just pray as we look at these that we would be drawn to trust you, to depend upon you, to walk with you, to rely upon you in every way. And we just thank you for the life that we have in you and your life in us. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.