Faith Follows the Promise

On Sarah's Faithful Deceit

Genesis 25

This Sunday’s assigned Old Testament text is from Genesis 25 (for a recent sermon on the text, click HERE.)

As a way of avoiding the Bible’s authority and downplaying its coherence, critics often will insist that the Bible is not one, unitary book but, in fact, a library of books. And within that library called the Bible, critics will point out, there are many literary genres: histories, legal codes, gospels, liturgical prayers, primeval myths. There’s even a steamy, erotic poem.

The Bible, such critics contend, is like your Amazon Kindle; it’s a device with many different, possibly unrelated books on it.

Such a comparison is as common as it is incorrect.

By adding the story of Jesus Christ (the Gospels) and their story with Jesus Christ (the Epistles) to Israel’s scriptures, the ancient church made the assertion that the now Christian Bible tells a fundamentally connected and coherent story.

Lengthwise, from beginning to end, the Bible hangs together christologically; that is, according to Christ, who, before he is Mary’s baby, is the second person of the Trinity, eternal and pre-existent, by whom all things were made.

The Bible hangs together as a single Christological story.

Or, it does not hang together at all.

Therefore, Jesus Christ is the hermeneutic— the interpretative lens— by which all the Bible can be read.

Take, for example, the opening of the Jacob narrative in the Book of Genesis.

Like her mother-in-law, Sarah, Isaac’s wife does not become a mother until she is an old woman. For twenty years, the text tells us, Rebekah’s husband “prayed to the Lord for his wife, because she was barren.” Isaac— his name means “Laughter,” remember— pleaded with God for two decades, so long that his desire for a child went from no laughing matter in the beginning to what must’ve felt like a joke near the end. No one shops for maternity dresses or packs a hospital go-bag after they’ve received their AARP card in the mail.

The Israelites, whom God rescued from slavery in Egypt only after they had cried out to the Lord for generations, were the ones to write down these memories of their patriarchs and matriarchs. Surely they could resonate with Rebekah’s and Isaac’s prayers receiving a reply on such a tarried timetable. Not for nothing is the most common prayer uttered in the psalms, “How long, O Lord?”

Laughter is sixty years old when Rebekah conceives.

Rather than a normal quickening, the Hebrew says the children “clashed together within her womb.” Only, Rebekah knows that she’s pregnant with twins. Rebekah knows only that something is amiss. At her age, it would be odd not to fret.

The wife of Laughter grows afraid.

And so she prays.

She prays maybe the most common prayer ever prayed by absolutely everybody, “Why?”

“Why is this happening to me?”

And the Lord answers her!

Deus Dixit— And God spoke.

First, God gives Rebekah an explanation, “Two nations are in your womb.” But explanations are not what makes scripture hang together, and if you’ve come here today looking for answers you’ve come to the wrong place. God gives her an explanation for the commotion in her belly.

Notice—

The Lord also gives her a word about the future; that is, the Lord gives her a promise.

A promise that offends an ancient people’s sense of justice. A promise that turns the kin and kingdoms of their world upside down. A promise that surely sounded like foolishness and a stumbling, for it is a promise that contradicts the eternal, natural law of primogeniture.

“The elder shall serve the younger,” the Lord promises Rebekah.

You know the story.

The twins are delivered from her, one after the other, the younger clutching his hairy elder’s heel. Just so they name them, Hairy (Esau) and Heel (Jacob). But long after Rebekah last held her boys in her arms, she still held onto this promise from God, “The elder will serve the younger.” According to the text, at least forty years pass. Her children are grown men. Esau’s a married man. And everything remains as the world would have it, according to the law.

Rebekah’s an old woman, still with this promise from God socked away like a ball of rubber bands or a cigar box of old movie stubs.

Then one day, Genesis 27 remembers for us, Laughter is a very old man and very blind and very much dying. Isaac summons Esau. It’s time. Isaac must put the law into action; the eldest will not assume the father’s place.

When Laughter’s wife hears her husband aims to bless Esau, suddenly she knows. She recognizes the time has arrived for her to apply the promise. She sees God gave her the promise all that time ago— forty years— in order for her to apply that promise now.

Rebekah realizes that the promise isn’t simply a word God gave.

Rebekah realizes it’s a word that needs giving.

No matter how much it will upset and offend. Even though it will violate the law. Despite the cost. So she conscripts her youngest into a scheme to fool Isaac into blessing him, insisting to the skeptical Jacob, “Let your curse be on me, my son…” She takes on to herself the scorn and punishment that will justly fall upon the child for his transgression because she knows— by faith, she knows— the promise God had spoken was now seeking its moment of application. Surely she knows too that it’s a promise Jacob in no way merits. Actually he’s already earned the opposite of such a promise.

The Bible hangs together Christologically.

The promise given to Rebekah in Genesis 25 leads to Rebekah’s deceit of her husband two chapters later. Rebekah’s deceit has long preoccupied interpreters. Can the covenant rely upon a lie? What about bearing false witness? Honoring thy husband? Does this mean we’re free from the obligation to truthfulness?

The Protestant Reformers, however, were untroubled by this text.

Luther called it “the faithful deceit.”