Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
Putting away Christmas decorations can be a hazard. I saw a photo recently of a ladder leading up into a person's attic. Just to the left of the ladder, sticking through the ceiling's drywall, was a foot. The caption read that the person was warned not to step on the drywall, but they didn't admit to not knowing what drywall was until after stepping through it. If you, too, don't know what drywall is, it is a plaster that is held together between two sheets of paper. It is usually fastened to planks of wood to hold it up. When you are in the attic, you are to place your weight on the wood holding up the drywall, not the drywall itself. Now, maybe you are bit handier and wouldn't make such a mistake. You wouldn't place your trust in things that can't hold your physical weight. But are you as careful with your soul? The thing about the Lord is He gives wonderful gifts of financial resources, family, and even your local church, but the gifts are meant to be the pointer to Himself, the actual object of your trust. We don't trust the gifts; we trust the giver. Today, we jump back into Genesis to continue the story of redemption as it relates to Abraham so far. It began with the creation account showing us that God is very powerful. Once we got to Abraham's story, we see that God is faithful. He made promises to Abraham that He fulfilled and was faithful to Abraham even when Abraham wasn't always faithful to God. Today, we pick up with Abraham's son Isaac. What may be so surprising in this story is how little time we spend with him. Isaac's story only lasts about a chapter before moving quickly on to Jacob who will be the focus more or less through the end of the book. This doesn't mean that he is unimportant or that there isn't so much that we can learn from this chapter. Our main point today is that we are to Trust in the Giver, not the Gifts. Chapter 26 opens by reminding us very much of Abraham. There is famine in the land yet again. This is the land granted by God, but that doesn't mean that things will always be going well. Isaac heads off to Gerar and is approach the land of Egypt. His father before him went the same way for the same reason, but this time, God tells him not to go down there but remain in the land. The opportunities to trust God immediately begin. Famine means that there is no food, so to stay in such an area would seem very non-sensical, but this is exactly what he does. It helps that this is a path that his father has walked before, but more importantly, the promise are following, too. God isn't asking for a blind leap of faith, for He lays out the promises. Here we see the same land, seed, and blessing promise that we saw in Genesis 12, but there is one important addition: God promises to be with him. God's presence is such a precious promise. It is moving back towards Eden as God is committing to be personally involved and present. This is something that we will see grow in greater degree as the Bible unfolds. Later on in the Old Testament, God will be present in the Tabernacle and Temple, but one can only get so close. When the New Testament comes, Jesus will arrive, physically present! How do these promises arrive? At first glance, it looks like Abraham earned it for Isaac. Abraham did what he was supposed to do, and now Isaac gets the benefit of it. As always, we need to keep all of Scripture in mind. The reason why Abraham is blessed is not because Abraham so impressed God that He had to respond with reward. It is, as one scholar put it, “God will fulfill His purposes because He has taken the oath, but we pray that He will be able to use the faithfulness and obedience of His people to help accomplish His plan for the blessing of Abraham to come to the nations" (Belcher, 175). In other words, God uses means. God always planned to use Abraham to bring blessing to the nations, but He decided to use Abraham's obedience to accomplish His will. Abraham's obedience was real and useful, and Isaac does get the benefit of it, but all the credit goes ultimately to God for fueling that obedience. May we be so blessed as to be used in the same way. Now, while the famine is a real problem, at the very least Isaac is heading back into what should be friendly territory. This is the same place that Abraham journeyed in, and when he was there, the local king made a covenant with him. Amazingly, this promise was made despite the fact that Abraham's deception nearly killed the king when he said Sarah was his sister. We might think that Isaac should be comforted by the previous history of covenant making, and should have been unafraid of the people of Gerar. In addition, he had a personal visit from God, not only confirming the promises, but additionally promising to be with him! If there was ever a moment in which fear would be banished it would be this one, right? Instead, Isaac pulls the old "she's just my sister" scheme again. What happened? Isaac forgot about the promises. He wasn't trusting God. You play by the rules of the one you trust. If Isaac was trusting in God in that moment, he wouldn't be lying. However, he did trust the Philistines that they wouldn't kill him as long as they didn't think they needed to. Those rules demanded he lie. We are quick to make the same error. We trust that we need our jobs more than be faithful to the truth, so we will sin in order to keep our jobs. We believe that it is more important to be thought well of in the community, so we will keep our Christian faith to ourselves. We feel the pressure to make sure our kids have every advantage they need, even if that means putting them in sports over and against Sunday worship. Whomever we trust is the one we obey. Isaac decides to lie, but just like all other lies, the truth comes out eventually. The king happens to see Isaac being a little closer with Rebekah than would be expected of siblings. Interestingly, the word that the Bible uses euphemistically is "laughing." My old Hebrew professor points out that Isaac's name means "laughter," so named because Sarah dismissed the idea of being able to have a child in her nineties. She wasn't showing faith. And here, in this moment, neither is Isaac. He is making a mockery of God's promises by lying. He's laughing at them, and laughing at the people of the country as he does so. Thankfully, just like last time, the Lord is faithful and the people are more honorable than given credit for, and the king makes sure that Rebekah is protected. And that isn't all. Isaac proves to be quite the farmer as the seed that he sows reap a hundred times more than planted! Truly a miracle! We might stop here and ask, "Why does God bless Isaac like that and not me?" Why don't my crops or paycheck increase a hundredfold? Well, for one thing, as moderns, we are living in a world in which Isaac could have barely imagined in how good it is, but secondly, it isn't always good for Isaac either. In fact, even the increasing riches themselves prove that ancient wisdom: mo money; mo problems. He gets so rich and powerful, the locals are afraid of him and want him gone! So they keep him moving, and the way they do this is by sealing up the wells, the wells that his father dug. He reopens them, and they claim them back. Instead of fighting over it, he renames them "Esek" which means "contention" and "Sitnah" which means "enmity." Usually, in the Old Testament, to name something is to own it, so I don't wonder if this is the Bible's way of saying, "Yes, Isaac gave the wells away, but he was just going to let them use them." Despite these troubles, things end well for Isaac. For those of us who have hoses attached to our houses, the idea of losing a well sounds more like the loss of something nice rather than something necessary. Remember, he's got flocks and servants in a desert climate, but he trusts that God is with him and eventually ends up in Beersheba, the place where Abraham settled. Once there, God appears to Him and restates the promises made to him, which he responds to in worship. Finally, just like with his father, the next generation of Abimelech comes out to make a treaty with him, because the blessings of God are undeniable, which he does. What can we draw from a story like this? One of the main things we miss in our Christian life is that the peace we desire for our souls is not found in new information but a reminder of that which is old. In this story, yes, Isaac is told that God is with him, but we have been blessed to know that this whole time. This is the only anchor that we have in our lives. It isn't the presence or absence of gifts. Isaac should have been, from a human perspective, been set for life. He was heading back into a land which he has a divine right to, the people who live there made a treaty with his father century ago, and he is the rightful heir to that promise. He is going towards wells that belong to him, and the seed that he plants turns out to grow more than any farmer's wildest expectations. He knows how to interact with the locals to protect his wife. All's good! Yet it can all change. One look out the window at the right time shatters that seemingly protective lie. The very riches that brought comfort, caused him to need to be moved. And well after well that was rightfully his gets stopped up and claimed. This wasn't a bad week for Isaac, for according to one source, this chapter plays out over the course of one hundred years (Phillips, 157)! Isaac has to deal with things over and over just like you and I need to. The difference is, with a misstep or two along the way, he trusts God to provide more water (which he does) and hold up His promises. We must do the same. A key thing for what this looks like practically is our prayer life. This will mean that when problems inevitably surface our first response is prayer. After that, the next course of action is guided by Scripture and good old common sense. Don Whitney: if you only have 15 minutes, read for five and pray for ten! You have a Savior who has also promised that He will be with you to the end of time, so trust in that, and not what you can see. All that we can see is drywall. Don't lean your weight on it.
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