From the Beginning: A Devotional Commentary on Genesis (XIV)

In Genesis 27 we have the story of how Jacob tricked his father Isaac into giving him his brother's blessing.  Over the course of the many thousands of years that this story's been told and re-told, the profound drama that’s going on here has maybe worn a bit smooth for us. Jacob has just perpetrated the most appalling fraud imaginable (really: imagine tricking your blind father, on his death bed, into signing a forged will that gives you the whole inheritance and cuts your brother out of the deal...) an appalling fraud, like I say, instigated by his own mother, who loved him more than his brother (again, try to imagine it...), and immediately after this, while Isaac his father is sitting there blindly assuming that he’s just blessed Esau, it says, “Jacob had hardly gone out from the presence of his father when Esau came in from his hunting...”

When you slow down to visualize this scene, the tension is almost palpable: the liar leaves just as the hot-head arrives. What stands out to me in all of this is just how messed up Jacob’s family is. A mom who hates one son and loves the other, two brothers who despise each other, one a bully, the other a cheat, a weakened dad caught in the middle: it’s the quintessential dysfunctional family.

But maybe there’s good news, here, too, because this is the family that will give birth to God’s Redemptive History. It will start, in fact, with them, and it won’t stop until their great-great-great-great-fifty-times-great Grand Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, sprouts beautiful from their family tree. Of course, Isaac’s family is hardly the only dysfunctional family in history (not by a long-shot), but if God could bring Jesus out their messed up family, what can’t he do with ours, if we will give them to him?