Rev. Peter J. Haugen
St. Paul Evangelical
Lutheran Church
Genesis 27:6-40 tells us about Jacob, one of the Patriarchs of Israel, one of the great Fathers of the Old Testament Church. And he is despicable. And yet God blesses him, honoring the blessing pronounced upon him by his father Isaac, making him a part of the lineage of our Lord Jesus, part of the Promise fulfilled … even though he secured his blessing through deceit, by dishonoring his father, by heeding his mother’s serpentine instruction. And yet he is an honored saint of the Old Testament.
We can understand how those who would question God might find fodder here. We can understand how even so many Christians can stumble over this. We are tempted to think that maybe, just maybe, God should try a little harder.
We must repent. We too often give lip service to the truth that God’s “thoughts are not [our] thoughts, neither are [our] ways [His] ways” (Isaiah 55:8), but when push comes to shove, we either are offended by Him and by what He does, or we seek to apologize for Him. Lord, have mercy upon us!
We see in Jacob writ large the prodigal son (St Luke 15:11-32), the son who wishes his father dead as he demands his inheritance now, right now, that he might get what is coming to him when and how he wants it. And the story of the prodigal son is nothing if not the story of the grace of our Lord for us who are so unworthy. Grace is the inheritance of unfaithful sons and usurping liars. In a real sense, Jacob is the patron saint of all us Gentiles, us who have been grafted into the vine purely by the grace of God rather than by any right of birth or inheritance or merit. He is the lesser, the second born twin, the usurper, the liar, the one who secures the blessing that belongs to another.
And this should be a great comfort to us prodigals, to us Jacobs, to us who know intimately and personally how little we deserve what we have been given by our Lord – life and salvation and all spiritual blessings, yes, but also the temporal blessings that our Lord daily and richly lavishes upon us, purely out of His Fatherly goodness and mercy. We are not worthy. But what we receive is not based on our worthiness; it is based upon the God who watches for us, runs to us, and brings us prodigals into His own family, naming us son and slaughtering the fattened calf for us, giving us the blessing that belongs to another, to our Lord Jesus.
Whatever we have been in the past, whether that be rebellious or wasteful or judgmental or duplicitous or lying or arrogant, let us now once again be repentant. We have denied our Father, but He would bring us back into His family. We have been lost, but He seeks us. We have been dead, but He would make us alive. Amen.
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