Living With Blessings

Scripture: Genesis 26

Sermon: Living With Blessings

Topics: Blessings, Isaac, Death

Preached: November 9, am, 2004 Woodlawn

Rev. Mike Abma

GENESIS 26

Now there was a famine in the land, besides the former famine that had occurred in the days of Abraham. And Isaac went to Gerar, to King Abimelech of the Philistines. ²The Lord appeared to Isaac and said, ‘Do not go down to Egypt; settle in the land that I shall show you.³Reside in this land as an alien, and I will be with you, and will bless you; for to you and to your descendants I will give all these lands, and I will fulfil the oath that I swore to your father Abraham. ⁴I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven, and will give to your offspring all these lands; and all the nations of the earth shall gain blessing for themselves through your offspring, ⁵because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.’

6 So Isaac settled in Gerar. ⁷When the men of the place asked him about his wife, he said, ‘She is my sister’; for he was afraid to say, ‘My wife,’ thinking, ‘or else the men of the place might kill me for the sake of Rebekah, because she is attractive in appearance.’ ⁸When Isaac had been there a long time, King Abimelech of the Philistines looked out of a window and saw him fondling his wife Rebekah. ⁹So Abimelech called for Isaac, and said, ‘So she is your wife! Why then did you say, “She is my sister”?’ Isaac said to him, ‘Because I thought I might die because of her.’¹⁰Abimelech said, ‘What is this you have done to us? One of the people might easily have lain with your wife, and you would have brought guilt upon us.’ ¹¹So Abimelech warned all the people, saying, ‘Whoever touches this man or his wife shall be put to death.’

12 Isaac sowed seed in that land, and in the same year reaped a hundredfold. The Lord blessed him, ¹³and the man became rich; he prospered more and more until he became very wealthy. ¹⁴He had possessions of flocks and herds, and a great household, so that the Philistines envied him. ¹⁵(Now the Philistines had stopped up and filled with earth all the wells that his father’s servants had dug in the days of his father Abraham.) ¹⁶And Abimelech said to Isaac, ‘Go away from us; you have become too powerful for us.’

17 So Isaac departed from there and camped in the valley of Gerar and settled there. ¹⁸Isaac dug again the wells of water that had been dug in the days of his father Abraham; for the Philistines had stopped them up after the death of Abraham; and he gave them the names that his father had given them. ¹⁹But when Isaac’s servants dug in the valley and found there a well of spring water, ²⁰the herders of Gerar quarrelled with Isaac’s herders, saying, ‘The water is ours.’ So he called the well Esek, because they contended with him. ²¹Then they dug another well, and they quarrelled over that one also; so he called it Sitnah. ²²He moved from there and dug another well, and they did not quarrel over it; so he called it Rehoboth, saying, ‘Now the Lord has made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land.’

23 From there he went up to Beer-sheba. ²⁴And that very night the Lordappeared to him and said, ‘I am the God of your father Abraham; do not be afraid, for I am with you and will bless you and make your offspring numerous for my servant Abraham’s sake.’ ²⁵So he built an altar there, called on the name of the Lord, and pitched his tent there. And there Isaac’s servants dug a well.

26 Then Abimelech went to him from Gerar, with Ahuzzath his adviser and Phicol the commander of his army. ²⁷Isaac said to them, ‘Why have you come to me, seeing that you hate me and have sent me away from you?’ ²⁸They said, ‘We see plainly that the Lord has been with you; so we say, let there be an oath between you and us, and let us make a covenant with you ²⁹so that you will do us no harm, just as we have not touched you and have done to you nothing but good and have sent you away in peace. You are now the blessed of the Lord.’ ³⁰So he made them a feast, and they ate and drank. ³¹In the morning they rose early and exchanged oaths; and Isaac set them on their way, and they departed from him in peace. ³²That same day Isaac’s servants came and told him about the well that they had dug, and said to him, ‘We have found water!’ ³³He called it Shibah; therefore the name of the city is Beer-sheba to this day.

34 When Esau was forty years old, he married Judith daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Basemath daughter of Elon the Hittite; ³⁵and they made life bitter for Isaac and Rebekah.

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

INTRODUCTION

My week did not start very well.

Before the dust settled on the Sunday evening service, I was working on Sarah V’s funeral, the third funeral in three weeks in our church family. By Tuesday I was hoping for a bit of a reprieve from bad news. But there was no reprieve. Tuesday had a barrage of bad news:

* we heard that Ben, Roy and Nancy’s son, was admitted to the hospital;

* another church member phoned with some disappointing news;

* and yet another church member emailed some distressing news.

The day felt heavy.

And just to top the day off, Shirlene happened to lock her keys in the van while helping with a school trip to the zoo — you know, it is always those small things that break the camel’s back.

The result was, I was irritable – with Shirlene, with our kids, with life in general.

I was even irritated with the Scripture passage I had for our sermon series.

I didn’t want to spend the week with Isaac.

I wanted to spend the week with Job.

I wanted to sit in an ash heap somewhere, scraping soars, and lamenting, “God, what’s going on here?”

I guess that was what was underneath it all — my irritation with God.

I didn’t understand why he wasn’t allowing for a let up, a reprieve, in bad news.

Why were so many bad things happening to good people?

I went to bed Tuesday night worried, restless, and even angry.

ISAAC

But Job was not on my path this week. Isaac was.

Isaac, the middle patriarch.

Isaac, the one who lived in the shadow of his larger than life father Abraham,

and in the shadow of his grasping and scheming son Jacob.

What could this pale patriarch teach me?

Genesis 26 is the only chapter in which Isaac doesn’t share the stage with either his father or his son. Genesis 26 is the only chapter that gives an overview of the life of Isaac. It does so in an odd hodge-podge of events. So what could this chapter teach me?

My mood was such that I resented having to deal with Isaac.

He had no great tests of faith like his father Abraham;

He had no great tales of grasping for blessing like his son Jacob.

No, Isaac simply appeared to be the mediocre man in the middle,

always staying pretty close to home.

In contrast to his father, Abraham, and his son, Jacob,

Isaac seemed to live a pretty boring life.

So I began the week resenting having to deal with Isaac.

But then….. then I began to read this passage.

And I read it again and again and again.

Slowly this passage shed its light upon my dark mood.

* The Chapter starts with a famine. Instead of going all the way to Egypt, like his father, God tells Isaac that he can find refuge right next door with the Philistines.

* Then there is another problem – Isaac passes his wife Rebekah off as his sister – like father like son. By all rights, this should have gotten Isaac into all kinds of problems. But things turn out for the good. Abimelech the king puts a shield of protection around Isaac, Rebekah and their household.

* Then Isaac tries his hand at farming. What would Isaac know about farming? His dad was a wandering shepherd? But lo and behold, Isaac plants a crop and he reaps one hundredfold. A hundredfold is as big as a crop gets in the Bible. Amazing! Almost without trying, Isaac becomes richer and richer and richer.

* But wealth comes with its own troubles. It isn’t long before the Philistines can’t stand having Isaac around. So they kick him out of town to try scrape together a living out in the sands of the Negev desert. Again, what looks like calamity ends in blessing. Every time Isaac puts a shovel into the sand, he seems to hit water.

* The local shepherds can’t believe it and keep claiming the wells. Isaac is a peaceable guy. He doesn’t like fights. So he keeps moving farther and farther out into the wilderness, even as far as Beersheba, a place in the middle of nowhere.

From start to finish, Isaac is truly blessed.

Even when things go wrong, they turn out for the good.

In fact, all things work together so that he is blessed.

Why was that?

Well, at the very beginning of the chapter, God says,

“I will be with you.

I will bless you

I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky.

Through your offspring all nations will be blessed

And why was God saying this?

Because of the obedience of Abraham. (vs. 3-5)

Then, nearer the end of the chapter, when Isaac is in Beersheba, God makes another visit, and he reminds Isaac,

I am the God of your father Abraham

Don’t be afraid.

I am with you.

I will bless you.

I will increase your descendants.

Why?

Because of my servant Abraham.

Isaac lives a blessed life.

He knows it and the people around him know it.

Abimelech shows up with an entourage and says to Isaac,

Let’s make a peace treaty

Why?

Because the Lord is with you

And you are blessed.

The more you read this chapter, the more you realize that it is less about Isaac and more about the God of Isaac.

This God of Abraham and now Isaac keeps showing up

to provide blessings in the most unlikely of places:

food in the middle of a famine

protection in the middle of foreigners

wealth in the middle of poverty

water in the middle of the desert.

Isaac in Genesis 26 does very little to deserve all these blessings.

His blessings come because of another — because of the obedience of Abraham.

But the picture of God in Genesis 26 is one of blessing, of bounty, of abundance.

The blessings of God are as real as the water that gushes forth in those wells.

In fact, the world presented in this chapter is a world teeming with life,

teeming with good gifts.

And all these good gifts are from above.

We simply need the eyes to see it,

the minds to know it

and the hearts to believe it.

DAY WITH TWO MEALS

Tuesday night I went to bed feeling lousy.

Wednesday morning I woke up still feeling lousy.

Now it just so happened that Wednesday morning was my turn to take our daughter Lydia to breakfast at the Boston House Restaurant. Shirlene and I have this little tradition of taking turns taking our children to breakfast before school on Wednesday mornings.

So there I was, in a booth at Boston House, sitting with Lydia.

I was still in my funk – quiet and taciturn.

Lydia pipes up, “I love breakfast at Boston House!

Hey, Daddy, why so quiet?”

As her face beamed with pleasure, it slowly began to dawn on me

What an absolutely wonderful daughter I have,

And what absolutely wonderful kids I have,

And what an absolutely wonderful wife I have,

And what an absolutely wonderful life I have.

I had been so busy stewing about what is wrong in the world and all the bad things that have happened, that I was becoming blind to what is right in the world and all the good things that have happened.

Even a simple thing like eating breakfast with my daughter was really not that simple.

It was a privilege and a blessing.

Such a thing would have been unheard of for my own parents,

who had lived through the depression

and survived the second world war;

who had made an epic pilgrimage to a new country

and then lived week to week, sometimes day to day with all the

uncertainties of life.

Breakfast was slowly opening my eyes to the beautiful reality

that life is good, very good,

And more fundamentally, God is good, very good.

Wednesday was one of those autumn gifts we sometimes get in November.

It was bright and sunny and surprisingly warm.

My day began with breakfast in Boston House.

My day ended with another meal.

This time it was a meal at the home of Jim and Shirley.

This time it was Peter, one of our elders, Carol, and I, going to share communion with Jim and Shirley.

Jim was nearing the end of his life because of cancer.

It was a different meal – bread and wine

And it was under different circumstances – Jim lay stretched on the couch.

And yet, as he lay there,

bathed in the day’s fading light,

we all knew God was there in that room.

And we all knew that we were receiving the gifts of God.

And we all knew that we had lived with the blessing of God

and were still living with the blessings of God,

not because of anything we had done

or because in some way we had deserved it.

No, we were the recipients of all these blessings

because of Jesus Christ,

the one who became a servant for our sake,

the one who became obedient to death – even death on a cross.

The blessings of God – We saw. We knew. We believed.

and our hearts welled up and gushed forth with gratitude.

Amen