Hilton Head Island, SC – February 4, 2018
The Chapel Without Walls
Genesis 24:62-67; 26:12-22
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – The Lord blessed Isaac, and he became rich, and gained more and more until he became very wealthy. – Gen. 26:12-13
FOUR PATRIARCHS – 2. ISAAC
Years ago I wrote a book called A Light-Hearted Look at Genesis. It was intended to show some of the unintentionally humorous sections of the Bible’s first book, but also to portray the serious themes initiated by that humor. I called the chapter on Isaac Isaac-in-Between.
Of the four biblical patriarchs we shall be considering during this four-part sermon series, Isaac has far less written about him than Abraham, Jacob, or Joseph. What is written isn’t nearly as interesting as what we are told about the other three patriarchs, and frankly, it is mainly low-key, unexciting stuff. Isaac is between his father Abraham, the greatest of the patriarchs, and Jacob, his son, the most fascinating and flawed of the patriarchs. Isaac doesn’t do a whole lot, but he’s there; he makes the cut of the cast of characters in the Bible’s Book of Beginnings, which is what the word Genesis means: Beginnings. It starts with that very word in Verse 1 of Chapter 1: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
If you were here last Sunday, you will remember that Abraham and his wife Sarah had no children until he was a hundred years old and she was ninety. The numbers are nowhere near historically accurate. Suffice it to say they were both well past the usual age for becoming parents, but they became parents anyway. God had made a promise to Abraham that he would be the father of a great nation, and Isaac was the offspring who represented that promise.
In Hebrew the word for promise is berith. There is a Jewish organization for men and boys called B’nai Brith: “Sons of the Covenant”; you may have heard of it. No covenants mentioned in the Bible are one-way streets. That is, God doesn’t make promises to us, and He keeps them, or we make promises to God, and we keep them. Covenants between God and people are always two-way streets. In other words, we say this to God or God says this to us, “I’ll do this if you do that.” God promises to be our God if we promise to be His people. We promise to follow God if God will promise to allow us to follow Him.
God promised to make Abraham the father of the Hebrews or Israelites or Jews. Isaac was his son who made that a genetic possibility. Isaac had two sons, twins, and the second-born of the twins, Jacob, had twelve sons. The next-to-last of those sons, Joseph, saved Abraham’s descendants from starvation, as we shall see in the last sermon of the series.
The point is this: If God promises to do something for us, He will do it. But we must also keep our side of the bargain. We must promise to follow His commandments and do what God wants. Fidelity and trust and discipleship count with God. Those qualities Isaac had, but he displayed them in a low-key, unexciting way compared to his father, his son, and his grandson.
Those of you who are quite familiar with Genesis may recall that the very first thing God asked of Abraham after Isaac was born was to sacrifice Isaac to God. Those of you who are not familiar with Genesis won’t know that story at all. It is probably just as well to be in the latter category, because most biblical experts either avoid the story of God’s command to sacrifice Isaac like the plague or else they give the most convoluted, unconvincing explanations to be found about anything in the Bible in any commentaries by anybody. For that reason, I am going to say nothing at all about the story of Abraham’s willingness to slay his own son on Mount Moriah. If you want to know more about it, you aren’t going to learn anything about it here.
Therefore we shall turn to the second story about Isaac, and that tells about how he acquired a wife. Abraham discouraged his son from marrying a Canaanite woman, even though they were living in the land of the Canaanites. He told Isaac to go back to Mesopotamia, where Abraham had been born and where relatives of his still lived. So dutifully off Isaac went. (He doesn’t do anything theologically or ethically questionable, like Abraham did on occasion, nor is he rebellious against God, like his son Jacob eventually will be. Isaac just listens carefully to what he believes he should do, and he does it. Would that we all were like that!)
Through a peculiar stratagem that I don’t have time to explain, God told Isaac to marry the first woman in the Mesopotamian city of Nahor who offered to water Isaac’s camels. Without asking why so important a decision should be based on so apparently unimportant a factor as that, Isaac married the first Mesopotamian Hebrew woman who did that, and her name was Rebekah.
Without seeming to ask any questions, Rebekah’s father Bethuel approved the marriage, which was a requirement for all Middle Eastern marriages. By this time, Isaac’s mother had died, and Genesis gives us a fascinating verse of human psychology. It says that Isaac “took Rebekah, and she became his wife, and he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death” (24:67).
Most men need a woman, and most women need a man. It isn’t like that for everybody, but it’s that way for most people. When Isaac’s mother Sarah died, there was a void in his life. When he married Rebekah, and after a time came to love her (which is how it worked in the arranged marriages of the seventeenth century BCE), he was comforted, and life took on new meaning. I am greatly impressed by Genesis for those little psycho-religious touches. It is Oedipus centuries before either the Greek Oedipus or many other centuries before the Austrian Freud.
A while afterward, Rebekah had twin sons, Esau and Jacob. Esau was the first-born. He was very hairy and red, so they called him Esau, which means “Red.” When the midwife pulled Esau from the womb, his brother Jacob was holding tightly onto Esau’s heel. Therefore they called him Jacob (Yaakov), a Hebrew name which means, by a lot of linguistic gymnastics, “He-Who-Grabs-onto-the-Heel” or “He-Who-Supplants,” which loosely means “He-Who-Pulls-Fast-Ones,” or “The Shyster,” or “Watch-Out-for-This-Guy.” Jacob is going to grow up to be a first-rate con-man, as we shall see next week.
The next major thing we learn about Isaac is that he became a big-time farmer with lots of land and livestock. The text says of Isaac, “The Lord blessed him, and the man became rich, and gained more and more until he became very wealthy” (26:12-13). This brings up a common theme in Genesis, elsewhere in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament), in Job, the Psalms, and other places in the Hebrew Bible. It is the notion that if anyone is rich, it indicates that God particularly favors that person. It also says that about Isaac’s father Abraham and his brother Esau and his son Jacob and all of his twelve sons, especially Joseph.
The question is this: Is that accurate? Does wealth truthfully signify God’s favor? Throughout history, many people have thought so. As Tevye ruefully notes in Fiddler on the Roof, “It’s no shame to be poor --- but it’s no great honor, either!” John Calvin seemed to hint that wealth might indicate divine approval. The German sociologist Max Weber reflected the thinking of many people who support that idea in his famous essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Pentecostalism has become the fastest-growing branch of world Protestantism. There is a strand of Pentecostalism, as well as other forms of Christianity, called “The Gospel of Wealth.” It is the idea that God wants those who trust in him to become rich. There are famous preachers, such as Joel Osteen, who preach the Gospel of Wealth in huge megachurches all around the world. It is reflective of a concept first proposed in Genesis.
But is the concept correct? Is it theologically viable? In some instances, perhaps, but surely not in all instances. Some wealth is acquired honestly, but there are many who have much in “ill-gotten gains,” as we say. John D. Rockefeller gave away much of his wealth, but he gained it by creating a monopoly in oil. Andrew Carnegie built libraries all over America, but he got the money to do it by putting workers into hellish steel mills. Russian oligarchs are making billions on the backs of poor Russians, Kazakhs, Azerbajanis, and Uzbeks. By itself wealth is neither good nor evil. It’s how the wealth is acquired that determines whether it is good or bad.
What about Isaac? There is nothing to suggest that he became rich in an unethical or illegitimate way. So little is said about Isaac that we are led to believe he was indeed the blessing to Sarah and Abraham which God had promised. There are about fourteen chapters of Genesis devoted to Abraham, fourteen more about Jacob, another fourteen about Joseph, and a total of less than four about Isaac. Maybe if we knew more we would think less of him, but the writers of Genesis were very kind to Isaac-in-Between. He followed the commands of God, kept his nose clean, and died with a seat on the Chicago Board of Trade. He just wasn’t flashy, that’s all.
When Abraham’s wife Sarah died, Abraham and Isaac buried her in a cave Abraham had purchased near what is described as “the oak of Mamre.” Mamre was a city in the southern part of Canaan that later came to be known as Hebron. When Abraham died, Isaac buried his father where his mother was buried in that same cave. When Isaac and Rebekah died, they too were buried there, as were Jacob and his wife Leah when they died.
One of the holiest sites in the state of Israel is the large and impressive Tomb of the Patriarchs, constructed by King Herod over the cave of Mamre that Abraham had purchased seventeen centuries before Herod lived. Herod was the king of the Jews when Jesus was born. After the Muslim conquest of the Holy Land in 637 of the Common Era, the Muslims turned the Tomb of the Patriarchs into a mosque. It continued as a mosque until the Six Day War in 1967, when the Israelis conquered all of the West Bank. Ever since, Hebron has existed in a very uneasy truce between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The tomb is no longer either a mosque or a synagogue, but a kind of interreligious museum. The site is sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, because it is where the bodies of the great patriarchs and matriarchs of the three religions lie in uneasy perpetuity. As the hymn says, God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.
Before we leave Isaac, we need to remember that his wife Rebekah and his sleazy son Jacob tricked Isaac in his old age. For reasons which are never explained, Jacob, not Esau, was Rebekah’s favored child. She heard Isaac tell Esau that he wanted a certain kind of stew made from wild game. If Esau got that for him, Isaac told Esau, he would give Esau his final blessing. Off Esau went to shoot a deer with his bow and arrow. Rebekah quickly told Jacob to get a couple of baby goats for her to cook, thinking her elderly husband wouldn’t know the difference between venison and goat meat. Without going further into the details of this subterfuge, which are elaborate, Jacob took what the King James Version memorably calls “a mess of pottage” and gave it to his father. Because they were twins, and because Isaac was old and nearly blind, he thought he was blessing Esau, when in fact he was blessing Jacob. “Let peoples serve you, and nations bow down to you,” Isaac told Jacob, whom he had been tricked into believing he was Esau. “Cursed be everyone who curses you, and blessed be everyone who blesses you!”
Genesis says not a single word of reproach for the ruse Jacob and his mother played on Isaac and Esau. Jacob has already cheated Esau out of his birthright, which would have given him two-thirds of Isaac’s estate. Nothing negative is said about that either. The Hebrew Bible paints people as they were, not as we might like them to be.
Happily, Isaac is portrayed as a good man, an honest man, a fair man. People could and did take advantage of him, and not long before he died, his wife and his second-born son did just that. In our day, some might claim that Isaac wasn’t the sharpest tack in the carpenter’s box or the brightest bulb in the electrician’s bag. He wasn’t the kind of man to be voted Man of the Year by the Rotary Club or the Chamber of Commerce. But he was solid. He was dependable. God depended on him, and he depended on God.
Most of us are much more like Isaac than we are like Abraham or Jacob or Joseph. We don’t get our names in the newspaper, and if we do, it is not in the headlines. We are not queen bees, but worker bees, spear carriers in the drama of history, and not the stars. And that’s all right. Not only is it all right, but it is absolutely necessary. Not everyone can be stellar. Not everyone is a shining star. There can be no leaders if there are no followers. And there are far more followers than leaders. Abraham was the Father of Nations, but Isaac was the one who followed him, and who was the father of Jacob, the Man with the Twelve Sons, each one the father of one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Isaac was, and always will be, the man in-between.
Isaac is the right-hand-man to the CEO of the company, the one who really runs the show, but who does it very quietly, and always behind the scenes. Isaac is the teacher who for forty years opens the pages of history to a few thousand students, and a few hundred of them come to understand that the present cannot be understood without understanding the past. Isaac is the right tackle who never was named an All American, was selected in the twenty-third round of the NFL draft, and he served admirably in the trenches for seventeen years on four NFL teams, never missing a game because of injury.
There are far, far more Isaacs than there are Abrahams or Jacobs or Josephs. Their stories are not best sellers, and in fact are never sold. But they are there, the faithful followers who work hard and are loving spouses, parents, grandparents, colleagues, and friends. We are more impressed by the people who are supernovas, but it is the ordinary people who give the deepest meaning to ordinary people, because they have the most in common with one another.
When Abraham and Sarah were told by God that they, in very advanced age, were going to have a baby, they laughed. Who wouldn’t? So they decided to name their son Yitzhak. Maybe Isaac died thinking he had the last laugh. If so, he deserved it.