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THE PRETENDER
The Gospel According to Jacob, Part 2
Genesis 27:1-36
September 17, 2006
Pastor Bob Sanders
Last week we began a series of messages called “The Gospel According to Jacob.” Jacob is a very contemporary kind of character. We find it easy to relate to him because, like us, he’s got all kinds of doubts and struggles. He is, as one preacher put it, “the most unheroic character in the Bible.” A hustler and a striver. A cheat and a con artist. And yet, he’s remembered as one of the patriarchs, one of the giants of the Old Testament. How can that be? As we’ll see, it has more to with God than with Jacob. Today we come to second part of his story: Jacob the Pretender..
Genesis 27:1-36 (The Message)
When Isaac had become an old man and was nearly blind, he called his eldest son, Esau,
and said, "My son."
"Yes, Father?"
"I'm an old man," he said; "I might die any day now. Do me a favor: Get your quiver of arrows and your bow and go out in the country and hunt me some game. Then fix me a hearty meal, the kind that you know I like, and bring it to me to eat so that I can give you my
personal blessing before I die."
Rebekah was eavesdropping as Isaac spoke to his son Esau. As soon as Esau had gone off to the country to hunt game for his father, Rebekah spoke to her son Jacob. "I just overheard your father talking with your brother, Esau. He said, 'Bring me some game and fix me a hearty meal so that I can eat and bless you with God's blessing before I die.'
"Now, my son, listen to me. Do what I tell you. Go to the flock and get me two young goats. Pick the best; I'll prepare them into a hearty meal, the kind that your father loves. Then you'll take it to your father, he'll eat and bless you before he dies."
"But Mother," Jacob said, "my brother Esau is a hairy man and I have smooth skin. What happens if my father touches me? He'll think I'm playing games with him. I'll bring down a curse on myself instead of a blessing."
“If it comes to that," said his mother, "I'll take the curse on myself. Now, just do what I say. Go and get the goats."
So he went and got them and brought them to his mother and she cooked a hearty meal, the kind his father loved so much.
Rebekah took the dress-up clothes of her older son Esau and put them on her younger son Jacob. She took the goatskins and covered his hands and the smooth nape of his neck. Then she placed the hearty meal she had fixed and fresh bread she'd baked into the hands of her son Jacob.
He went to his father and said, "My father!"
"Yes?" he said. "Which son are you?"
Jacob answered his father, "I'm your firstborn son Esau. I did what you told me. Come now; sit up and eat of my game so you can give me your personal blessing."
Isaac said, "So soon? How did you get it so quickly?"
"Because your God cleared the way for me."
Isaac said, "Come close, son; let me touch you—are you really my son Esau?"
So Jacob moved close to his father Isaac. Isaac felt him and said, "The voice is Jacob's voice but the hands are the hands of Esau." He didn't recognize him because his hands were hairy, like his brother Esau's.
But as he was about to bless him he pressed him, "You're sure? You are my son Esau?"
"Yes. I am."
Isaac said, "Bring the food so I can eat of my son's game and give you my personal blessing." Jacob brought it to him and he ate. He also brought him wine and he drank.
Then Isaac said, "Come close, son, and kiss me."
He came close and kissed him and Isaac smelled the smell of his clothes. Finally, he blessed him,
Ahhh. The smell of my son
is like the smell of the open country
blessed by God.
May God give you
of Heaven's dew
and Earth's bounty of grain and wine.
May peoples serve you
and nations honor you.
You will master your brothers,
and your mother's sons will honor you.
Those who curse you will be cursed,
those who bless you will be blessed.
And then right after Isaac had blessed Jacob and Jacob had left, Esau showed up from the hunt. He also had prepared a hearty meal. He came to his father and said, "Let my father get up and eat of his son's game, that he may give me his personal blessing."
His father Isaac said, "And who are you?"
"I am your son, your firstborn, Esau."
Isaac started to tremble, shaking violently. He said, "Then who hunted game and brought it to me? I finished the meal just now, before you walked in. And I blessed him—he's blessed for good!"
Esau, hearing his father's words, sobbed violently and most bitterly, and cried to his father, "My father! Can't you also bless me?"
"Your brother," he said, "came here falsely and took your blessing."
Esau said, "Not for nothing was he named Jacob, the Heel. Twice now he's tricked me: first he took my birthright and now he's taken my blessing."
He begged, "Haven't you kept back any blessing for me?"
The Blessing
Old Isaac is nearly blind and not sure how much longer he has to live. So he calls his eldest son Esau and tells him to go hunt down some wild game and fix it up the way he likes it, and bring it to him to eat, “so that I can give you my personal blessing before I die.”
Isaac’s wife, Rebekah, overhears this and she’s furious. She’s furious that Isaac is choosing Esau, his favorite son, over Jacob, her favorite son. So she comes up with this scheme. She’ll cook up a dish like Esau’s, then have Jacob dress up in Esau’s clothes and put hairy goat skins on him so he’ll look like and feel and smell like Esau. Then all he has to do is bring the food to Isaac before Esau gets back and grab the blessing.
The blessing – that’s the key to this story. And blessing is something we really don’t understand. Our idea of blessing is pretty wimpy. Someone sneezes and we say, “Bless you.” Or it’s time for dinner and we hold hands around the table while someone “says the blessing.” That’s not even close to what’s going on here. The key to understanding this story is in this mysterious, powerful thing known as the blessing.
Obviously, It’s something very desirable. So much so that Rebekah and Jacob plot this crazy scheme to steal it. They knew they’d get caught, but they do it anyway. As we see at the end of the story, the blessing is permanent, irrevocable. Once it’s given, it can’t be taken back. It’s something like what we call a “last will and testament.” Isaac says to Jacob, “You will master your brothers, and your mother’s sons will honor you.” He’s giving him the right to be the head of the clan, the family, like in a will. But what about this other stuff? What about “May God give you of Heaven’s dew and Earth’s bounty of grain and wine”? Some scholars say we have to remember these are primitive people, and the blessing is some kind of magical incantation to assure prosperity, a successful life.
Well, maybe. But I think it’s more. So do psychologists and family therapists. They know there’s a lot more to the blessing than that. They know that words have power. Spoken words, especially words from a parent to a child, have power to shape our lives forever. If we rephrase the old nursery rhyme along the lines of our story this morning it would come out: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make or break my very soul.”
It’s true, isn’t it? Certain words get into our ears, lodge in our memory, work their way into our soul. They may be words of affirmation and valuing, or they may be words of criticism and condemnation. But once we hear them, they stick forever. They shape us into who we are and who we’ll always be. We’ve all seen how an offhand comment can hurt us and ruin our day or it can energize and empower us. How much more words solemnly spoken by an aged parent in a deathbed setting?
The blessing like this has two crucial components. First, a blessing involves an accurate spiritual discernment of who this person is – what God has been doing in this person’s life, what gifts God has given and what God is making this person to be. And the second part is using words, words carefully chosen, to affirm who that person is and to empower him or her to become even more the person God intends.
Depth spiritual discernment followed by words of affirmation and empowering. If you’ve ever been blessed that way you’ll never forget it. If you’ve ever had a wise person look deep inside you and discern what God is doing, then express it in words that empower you, you’ll never forget it. I will never forget the time my mentor in ministry, a wise and deeply respected senior pastor named Bob Oerter, did this for me. I had just turned thirty years old, and I was struggling over whether to take a call to be pastor of a church in California or stay where I was in Colorado. After listening to me express all my fears and doubts, Bob said these words to me: “You need to know that wherever you go, God is going to bless people through you. God is going to use you to bring others to Him and to bring good into their lives. You have trouble seeing it. But it’s true. And you need to know it.”
Now you have to realize, Bob Oerter didn’t hand out compliments very often. I can count on one hand the number of positive comments he’d given me up to that point. So this wasn’t flattery. This was something more. This was his blessing. And it shaped me then, and it still shapes me today. But it’s so powerful and so personal, I’ve never told anybody about it until now.
We Need It
The power of blessing: we deeply need it. If we don’t get it, we’re forever seeking it, striving for it, grabbing after it – like Jacob. The struggle for blessing is the theme of his entire life. We’ll see this when we get to the climax of his story in a few weeks, to that strange scene in Genesis 32 where Jacob wrestles with the angel of the Lord and holds on to him all night, refusing to let go. Do you remember why? Do you recall what he says to this mysterious figure when he realizes it’s not just a human being? He says, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
Jacob comes to his father Isaac desperate for blessing. The old man hears him enter and says, “Who are you?” And Jacob says, “I am Esau, your firstborn son.” See, in this patriarchal society, the firstborn son was special like no one else. He got the lion’s share of the family estate and became the leader of the clan. And so the father would dote on his firstborn, because he was the future of his name, the future of the family. And all other sons, and certainly all daughters, were pretty much ignored by comparison. We saw this last week in Genesis 25 – how Isaac loved Esau, his firstborn. He was this rugged outdoorsman, this hunter, this man’s man. Jacob was smaller, quieter, more of a mother’s boy. Rebekah favored him, but it was his father’s blessing that Jacob desperately wanted. And over the years he watched Isaac dote on Esau, shower attention and affection on Esau, say again and again to Esau, “There’s no one like you. You are the special one in my eyes, and I love you.”
This is the blessing Jacob craves: to have this uniquely valuable person, his father, say to him, “You are uniquely valuable to me.” And Jacob is so desperate for this blessing he does this cold, calculating thing. He says to his father, “I am Esau, your firstborn son.” In other words, Jacob is saying, “I’m the one you should be doting over. I’m the one who should be the firstborn. I can lead this family better than my impetuous, shallow, temperamental brother. I’m the one. Give me what I want. Give me your blessing. Smile on me. Dote on me. Bless me, father.”
It’s a picture of every human being. We all want the blessing of the firstborn. We all want to be uniquely valuable. We all want that powerful, important person to look at us and say, “There’s nobody like you. I love you more than anyone. You’re special. You’re unique.”
And the fact is, you cannot bless yourself. I know there are lots of psychological self-help books out there that insist your sense of value has to come from inside you, that you have to create your own self-esteem and not rely on others to do it for you. OK, but no one says, “Everybody else thinks I’m stupid. But that doesn’t matter, because I know I’m really smart.” It doesn’t work. You have to have a smart person say you’re smart to feel smart. You have to have a good person tell you you’re good to feel good. You have to have blessing from outside as well as on the inside. And we need to have people we value come alongside and say, “There’s no one like you.” That’s the blessing of the firstborn, the blessing passed along in this old patriarchal society. Now the way they did it messed up peoples’ lives, as we see in this story. But we still need something like it. We all need blessing.
The Pretender
Notice one thing more. Notice how Jacob goes about trying to get that blessing. How does he do it? He has to pretend to be somebody else, somebody he’s not. To get the blessing he has to feel like Esau, smell like Esau, sound like Esau. Why? Because to get the blessing he couldn’t be himself. He couldn’t be his Jacob-self. That had never worked. He couldn’t be his smooth, little, domesticated self and get his father’s blessing. So he had to become big, hairy Esau. He had to lie and pretend to be someone else.
And we’re still doing that, lots of us. How do we get blessing? How do we get what we really need from people? By not letting them see who we really are, not letting them see the flaws, not letting them see the fears, not letting them see the needs. We pretend to be somebody else, somebody we’re not. Some of us do this with our jobs. We take on careers that don’t fit us, that don’t have anything to do with our passions or our gifts. Why do we do them? We do them for the status, for the financial security. We do them so the world will bless us. We dress up like someone else – an engineer, a lawyer, a banker, a minister – so we can get blessed.
Some of us do this with our families. We do what we do because we’re trying to please our parents. Even though we’ve been on our own for years and years, we’re still trying to earn Dad’s blessing, Mom’s approval. Trouble is, what we’re doing with our lives isn’t really us. We’re pretending to be Esau, the child that, at least in our imagination, they really loved. We pretend to be someone we’re not in order to get the blessing.
And, if we’re really honest, some of us come to church, all dressed up as someone we’re not. We pretend to be that really good Christian – the one who is full of faith and has life all under control and never has any doubts or makes any serious mistakes. We dress up this way because we want the blessing of – I don’t know – other Christians, or the pastor, or maybe even God. We want so much for them to think we’re special.
But it doesn’t work.
It doesn’t work when we have to pretend, when we try to be somebody we’re not. It didn’t work for Jacob, that’s for sure. I think the saddest part of this story is when old Isaac says, “Come close, son, and kiss me.” Jacob comes near and kisses his father, and Isaac smells that scent from Esau’s clothing and it evokes for him the sight of his firstborn, big and powerful, out there in the field with his bow, his favorite son. “Ahhh,” he says, a smile of love and joy and pride on his face, “the smell of my son is like the smell of the open country blessed by God. May God give you of Heaven’s dew…” and on he goes.
Think about this. Right then, Jacob got the look on his father’s face he’d always wanted to see, and he got the words from Isaac’s lips he’d always wanted to hear. The blessing at last…
Do you think it helped? Do you think it changed him? It didn’t. This blessing never got anywhere close to that needy part of his soul. Why? Because Jacob knew it wasn’t him Isaac was seeing. It wasn’t him Isaac was loving. It wasn’t him Isaac was blessing. And I suspect this hurt him more than anything that had gone before. To get that close to finally getting your father to love you, but it’s not you – because you’ve dressed up, you’ve pretended to be someone you’re not, and you’re not really blessed.
The Moral of the Story
This is not a happy story. It ends in tragedy for everyone. Isaac has nothing left with which to bless Esau, and Esau is so bitter he plans to kill Jacob as soon as their father dies. Rebekah has to send Jacob far away to live with her relatives to avoid Esau’s rage. Jacob skulks off, a penniless and homeless refugee. He’ll be gone for the next twenty years, and Rebekah will die without ever seeing her beloved child again.
Perhaps you’re wondering, “What’s the moral of this story?” Good question. I’ve thought of several. See if one of these fits you.
One might be how God can work through even the most screwed-up and dysfunctional families to bring blessing. Maybe you think your family situation is pretty bleak, pretty hopeless. But if God can use Jacob’s family in all its weirdness, he probably can use yours as well.
Another might be to think about the power of blessing in your own life. Who was it that you most wanted to receive the blessing from? Did you ever get it? What has it meant for you? Or, you might think about how you’re using the power of blessing that you have. Have your children received your blessing? Have you told them in words how special they are, how much you love them, how much you value each one for who he / she is? Maybe your children are quite young. Maybe they’re already grown and gone. But no matter their age, they still long to receive your blessing.
You might also think about your power to bless people like your spouse or your close friends: to discern what God is doing in their lives, and to choose words that affirm and empower them to become that person. You have the power to give blessing, or to withhold it. How are you using it?
And one other idea. Like Jacob, it may seem like you have to pretend to be someone you’re not in order to get the approval and the blessing of the people in your life. It happens. I know. But I want you to know this: you don’t have to pretend to get the approval and blessing of God. You just have to be yourself – even if that self seems pretty pitiful, pretty inadequate. Even if that self isn’t the one others want to see. It’s the self God sees, and loves, and cherishes.
“There’s no one like you,” God wants to say. “I love you so much I sent my firstborn Son, to die for you. He dressed up like you, took on your sins and failures, so that you might become like him – my beloved child. Don’t keep trying to fake it. Accept it: the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” Amen.
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