Nobody in this chapter behaves well. Isaac sets out to bless Esau in secret, ignoring the word God gave Rebekah that the older would serve the younger. Rebekah answers deception with deception. Jacob lies to his father's face and invokes the LORD's name to cover it. 20"Because the LORD your God granted me success." Esau still wants the blessing he had sold for a bowl of stew.
Jacob hesitates before any of it. 12"Perhaps my father will feel me, and I shall seem to be mocking him and bring a curse upon myself and not a blessing." The objection is practical. He is afraid of getting caught. Rebekah's answer is the most chilling line in the scene. 13"Let your curse be on me, my son; only obey my voice." Rebekah offers to carry a consequence that God alone enforces, and the text never tells us she saw her favorite son again.
The disguise works. Isaac, uncertain, puts his hands on Jacob and says the truest sentence in the account without knowing it. 22"The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau." He feels the contradiction and blesses him anyway, and once the words are spoken they cannot be called back. When Esau returns, Isaac 33"trembled very violently" and gives up the fight he spent the chapter trying to win. He says of Jacob, 33"Yes, and he shall be blessed."
Esau's grief lands on the same wordplay that marked his brother at birth. 36"Is he not rightly named Jacob? For he has cheated me these two times. He took away my birthright, and behold, now he has taken away my blessing." The Hebrew words for birthright and blessing sound nearly alike, so the man named heel-grabber has now grabbed both. Isaac has nothing left to give Esau but a mirror image of what Jacob received.
What is hardest to sit with is how directly God's word from twenty years earlier is fulfilled through the sin. Nobody in this chapter is trying to obey God. Still, when the dust settles, the older is serving the younger just as God said, accomplished through a scheme God never asked for and that no one involved can be proud of. Paul later reads this family and concludes that God's purpose stands because of him who calls (Romans 9:11). Genesis 27 is what that looks like from the inside, messy and human and full of guilt that has consequences, and still landing where God said it would.
God's purposes were not derailed by the worst afternoon this family ever had, and that comforts anyone whose family history includes favoritism or deception.
What outcome have you been managing that God has already promised to bring about? Put down the goat skins and wait. Faith in this story would have looked like Rebekah trusting the oracle she heard, and telling Isaac what God had said, and letting the LORD keep his own word in his own way.
Prayer
Father, we confess how much of Isaac, Rebekah, and Jacob lives in us, the desire to arrange outcomes our own way. Thank you that your purposes do not depend on our getting it right. Where we carry the cost of someone else's scheming or the guilt of our own, meet us as you met this fractured family. In Jesus' name, amen.