Full Sermon Transcript
WELCOME
Pastor Chris Paavola:
Hey everybody. Good morning. Good morning. Good to be with you guys today. Hope you had a safe and happy fourth. It was like having 4th of July on a Thursday. It felt like Thanksgiving, man, on Friday, I thought it was Sunday. I was all mixed up and it was like an extended vacation and hopefully you guys took advantage of it. I know those of you watching online did take advantage of it. So thank you and for tuning in and welcome to you guys as well. Today in this series, like you just heard, we are continuing. It’s not just 4th of July weekend. We are continuing this series called Greater Than, and we started this last year actually, we did the story of Abraham and we’re just kind of looking at the patriarchs of the faith. So, we looked at the story of Abraham last year and this year he is greater than.
And then in the month of June this year, we continued it and we looked at the story of his son Isaac. And then now in July here we shift gears to his son Jacob. And we’re continuing this series and as Jacob discovers, so we discover a life greater than the one we know with a God who is greater than we know. And every week in this series, we don’t set the agenda in this by the way. It’s like whatever happens in the story, whatever happens in the narrative, that’s what we talk about. And so I could cherry pick topics to be things that we’re interested in and some kind of important life application, and that’s important. But there’s also just a point of as you explore the faith that’s just important to learn the stories and we call this the whole council of God. And so rather than cherry picking and selecting what it is we’re going to talk about, we’re just going to let the story speak for itself so we can learn the story and then pull some concepts from it.
And as we look at the life of Jacob, instantly we are just slapped in the face with the problem of God’s blessings. And you might not think that blessings are a problem and they’re not. We love blessings. I love getting blessings. Give me get it right, like more and more we love blessings. The problem isn’t the blessings I get. The problem is the blessings others get and in particular those who don’t deserve it. So we love stories. We love stories like the story of Martha Stewart does some insider trading and she gets caught and she does prison time and that makes us smile or we smirk and we smile When we find out Lan Armstrong was cheating and after he was caught doping, then they strip him of his Tour de France titles and there’s a part of us that feels vindicated and like, okay, good, he got caught.
Or we smile and smirk to ourself. When Lori Laughlin of Aunt Becky fame gets caught, bribing college professors and college admissions people for and paying them exorbitant amounts of money so her daughter can go to school there. And we love those stories when they get caught and even when we’re watching tv, think about we enjoy bad guys. It’s the basic of every movie. There’s a good guy and a bad guy, and the bad guy at the end gets caught and he’s in handcuffs and he’s covered in mud and the hero gets the girl. We love that story. We love if there’s a sense of justice in the world, we don’t want there to be imbalance and injustice. And unfortunately though, this is not always the way the story goes. Sometimes cheaters win and people who cut corners get ahead. People like Anna Nicole Smith, remember this in the nineties, mid-nineties, 26-year-old model marries an 89-year-old billionaire oil tycoon.
And this was before social media, but it caught the world in a frenzy. We’re like, it’s so obvious she doesn’t. She’s just marrying him for the money. This is a gold digger. Give me a break. She doesn’t love him. And we were enraged and incense, it was on the front page of every tabloid at the grocery store. It was on Inside Edition every night. We couldn’t believe. And so this goes to courts for like a year and a half. Oh, and a year and a half later he does pass away and she is the rightful heir and a half his wealth. And we were like, no, unfortunately this is the story. Sometimes cheaters get ahead, sometimes swindler prosper. That’s what the prophet Jeremiah asks when he is looking at the world around him. He said, why do the wicked prosper? Oh Lord. Or Jesus says He makes the rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous. Why?
If you’re just looking into Jesus, if you’re just exploring God, one basic existential question, people always, always ask, and it’s a good question, you should ask it at some point. We will talk about this together. But the question we always ask is why do bad things happen to good people? It’s a good question. But today’s story is going to pose a different question for us today. We’re going to hear a question, why do good things happen to bad people? How come cheaters get ahead? How come the wicked prosper? And not only does this story going to make us ask this question, but there’s actually a few moments where of things we can take from it that will help us answer this question. So we’ll get there in just a second. We need a little bit of context and backstory because it is a bizarre, clumsy, awkward, clunky story to read.
ABOUT JACOB
We’re just like, wait, what is going on and how is this probable? What is this? He’s dressing up like a goat. Like what? This doesn’t make any sense. So a little bit of backstory to either refresh your memory or bring you up to speed. We’re talking about Jacob here. And so Jacob is the grandson of Abraham and Sarah. Last year we looked at the life of Abraham. Then in June we looked at Isaac with Rebecca, and then Isaac and Rebecca have two kiddos. They’re twins, haw and Jacob. And Jacob is a swindler. He is a liar, a cheat, a thief, a con artist. If it was a modern trope, he would be a salesman selling used cars. Sorry, Dan.
He would be selling penny stocks. He would be selling snake oil. That is Jacob. And in fact, when he’s born, Esau is born first, they’re twins. But as Esau comes out, Jacob is grabbing onto his heel. He’s always scratching and clawing and trying to get other people’s like what belongs to other people and to prosper at the expense of other people. So he’s holding on to Esau’s heel and they name him Jacob, which means in Hebrew to follow, but it also sounds a whole heck of a lot, unfortunately like deceiver. And so his nickname and his brother actually calls him this later on is the deceiver. This is Jacob who will eventually be renamed Israel, you guys, Jacob, okay?
That’s how he begins life. A little bit later on in life, Esau is a hunter and Jacob is kind of a homebody and Esau is out and he’s out hunting and he’s tired and he is hungry and he tells his brother, make me or give me some of your soup that you just made. And Jacob says, well, I’ll give you soup if you give your birthright and we switch, you give me the rights of the firstborn and I get the rights, you give me the rights of the firstborn and I give you the rights of a second born. And he saw it says, despised his birthright despised his inheritance. So he is like, sure. And for a bowl of soup, it sounds so weird, but they exchanged birthrights. Now Jacob is in line to receive all of the firstborn inheritance of his father’s wealth. Very wealthy man and Esau is now in line to get the leftovers.
ABOUT BLESSINGS
The reserve is the second born and he just doesn’t want it. But the birthright, the last will and testament is different than what we’re talking about with this blessing. The birthright, the last will and testament is not the same as the blessing. And that’s the next contextual thing we got to talk about before we can even make sense of this very bizarre account. The blessing. We use the word blessing all the time. Bless you. When somebody sneezes, we say Bless you, or gesundheit or whatever, bless you. If you’re in the south and somebody’s giving you a passive of aggressive backhanded compliment, they say, oh, bless your heart.
They do. Or this week, during 4th of July, you heard Ray Charles maybe singing on a playlist. God bless America, we throw the word blessing around all the time we just bless, bless, bless, bless, bless. And it’s fine. That’s fine. But when we’re talking about a biblical blessing, the biblical idea of blessing is different than that. First of all, a biblical blessing. This idea, and especially we see it in the practice in this patriarchal society. The fathers bless their children and it is a onetime thing. It is an irrevocable, irreversible irretrievable thing. Once you speak the blessing, it’s done. The blessing is future oriented. The birthright, the inheritance is now the present and the blessing is future. In fact, there’s five things about a biblical blessing that they’re a little bit different. One, it’s always accompanied by meaningful touch, right? So like when somebody sneezes, we don’t touch them and say, bless you, right?
FIVE PARTS OF A BIBLICAL BLESSING
- MEANINGFUL AND APPROPRIATE TOUCH
- A SPOKEN MESSAGE
- ATTAIN HIGH VALUE TO THE ONE BEING BLESSED
- PICTURE A SPECIAL FUTURE FOR HIM OR HER
- AN ACTIVE COMMITMENT TO FULFILL THE BLESSING
But it is why when we pray for one another, do intercessory prayer. We put hands on your shoulder and pray for you. Or if you come forward for a blessing during the communion line, the ancient world, they didn’t have electricity but they understood there is some kind of transference of power, a conferring of something like energy, like electricity, that when we touch, it’s transferred to the other. So there’s always an element of touch and biblical blessing, very interesting. Second thing is it’s always a spoken message. So it’s not just like, oh, I think good thoughts about you. If you’re a strong silent type dad, you got to buck up and say the words. You have to speak the blessing over your child so that they understand what it is they received and you have to articulate it so everyone can understand and hear what is your blessing for your child?
Then third, it always attaches a high value. If it attaches a low value, what is it a curse? And that’s another thing we throw around a lot. We just curse and we’re always cursing. And okay, think about this. If a blessing has transformative power for the future, then when you are cursing things, you have transformative power for the future of the thing that you’re cursing. This is the claim that scripture is making. Be very careful. Guard your mouth, guard your lips out of the same mouth should not flow blessing and curses because they have the power to change. So when you are walking in the house in the middle of the night and you step on a Lego and you curse the Lego, you are cursing that thing. Or when your car makes a funny sound and you say you stupid car, you never work.
Think about it. You are changing the future. You’re declaring a future over this car. This is a stupid car that never works. Or when your neighbors decide that it’s midnight is a good time to light fireworks and you curse your neighbor, you are changing their reality. You are speaking a future over them. And by the way, when people were doing that last night, I wanted to this morning set off some fireworks about 6 37 when I got up. If you don’t sleep, I don’t sleep right? Anyway, anyways, I didn’t, didn’t light off any M 80 this morning though I wanted to. But the point is, when you understand this idea of blessing and curses, it makes you much more careful with your words, doesn’t it? Much more judicial.
We’re proclaiming something to be true and then it’s always a picture of the future. It’s this thing that’s it is a word association. There’s often imagery associated with it. And then finally, it’s a commitment to film it. Meaning that the person blessing is saying, I will do my part. I will contribute my resources and my energy and my time to ensuring that this thing will be true, but it’s future oriented. So that’s the biblical idea of a blessing. That’s who Jacob is. And then now we can kind of wrap our heads around this clunky story. You have Isaac, who’s around a hundred years old at the time, 4,000 years before hearing aids and glasses. So he’s dang near deaf and dang near blind. And he knows he’s near the end of his life.
THE STORY OF JACOB STEALING HIS BROTHER’S BLESSING
Obviously, his sense of touch is going away as well. And he’s battling with senility and he’s at the very end of his life and he tells his son, Esau, I’m going to give you my blessing. Go hunt some food for me, prepare it, and then we’ll do this blessing thing, this ceremony, this very special one-time father to son blessing Rebecca, his wife overhears this and her favorite son is Jacob. She’s the homebody. So she runs and tells Jacob, okay, go put on that goat skin leather jacket and I’m going to make some food and we’re going to steal this blessing. And he agrees to it. So she gets this food, puts on a tray, he’s dressed up like a goat, and you can kind of see the image. They open the door of the tent, they pull the flat back and sunlight rushes into this dark tent. And there’s this just old man hanging onto life by a thread lying there. And Jacob approaches him. And in Genesis 27, we hear what happens next.
Jacob brought it to him and he ate; and he brought some wine and he drank. 26 Then his father Issac said to him, Come here, my son, and kiss me” 27 So he went to him and kissed him. Issac caught the smell of his clothes, he blessed him and said,
Genesis 27
Isaac asks, “are you really my son Esau”, right? Everything’s blurry, everything’s you can’t quite make it out, but are you really my son? “I am” Jacob replied. There’s no going back now. And then Isaac said, “my son, bring me some of your game to eat so that I may give you my blessing.” Jacob brought it to him and he ate. And I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a nursing home at lunchtime, it’s not fast. And this is a tense moment. He’s trying to pull off this heist. His brother’s out there somewhere, so you got to think he’s looking out the door of the tent the whole time just, okay, he’s not back yet. Come on. Okay, that’s enough dad, that’s good. H, the smell of my sone’s giving him small portions. He’s like, that’s enough dad, let’s have some wine now. And so he hands him some wine and he drank. And then his father, Isaac said to him, “come here my son and kiss me” long before Jesus was betrayed by a kiss from Judas. Isaac is betrayed by his own son, Jacob soon to be Israel with a kiss. And he kissed him. And when Isaac smelled his clothes, he blessed him and said, I love this.
“Ah the smell of my son is like the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed. 28 May God give you heaven’s dew and earth’s richness – and abundance of grain and new wine. 29 May nations serve you and peoples bow down to you. Be lord over your brothers, and may the sons of your mother bow down to you. May those who curse you be cursed, and those who bless you be blessed.”
Genesis 27: 28-29
That’s how the blessing starts out. You hear this deep breath, the smell of my son. Yesterday my daughter was babysitting an actual baby and she had to use the restroom. She’s like, dad, can you hold the baby? And every time I’m holding a baby, what do you do? You smell the top of their head. I do. Anyway, so this baby is there and I’m like, I love the smell of the top of a baby’s head. It is the weirdest thing, but it’s like, so I’m holding this baby. Ah. That’s the image we get here he is just taking this deep breath and then loving the smell of this baby or of his son. And he says, it is like the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed. We would go visit my grandpa. He had a farm. And when we’d get there and he was spreading manure, we would always complain of how it smelled at the farm.
And he’s like, Chris, that’s the smell of money. That’s kind of the image you get here too. He is like, it’s the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed anyway. And then he goes On, may God give you heaven’s due. And we see all of these things, right? We see word, pictures, declarations about the future. We see touch, we see a commitment of resources, and it’s all future oriented. May God give you to heaven’s due and earth’s richness, an abundance of grain, a new wine. And then verse 29, may nations serve you and peoples bow down to you. Be Lord over your brothers. And may the sons of your mother bow down to you. May those who curse you be cursed. And those who bless you again, curses and blessings, may they be blessed.
WHEN CHEATERS PROSPER
And there it is. It’s over. The blessing is irrevocable, irreversible and irretrievable. The cake is baked, the check is cashed, it’s over. He’s got the blessing. Esau can’t come into the tents, catch his brother and say, father, he’s tricking you. Un bless him. It’s done. It’s done. It’s over. And as we read and we see in the rest of Genesis, Jacob is incredibly blessed, overwhelmingly wealthy again and again and again. And it brings us back to our question again. Why do good things happen to bad people? Why is my coworker who is just a jerk? Why are they the ones who get ahead? Why is my brother who is so selfish, why is he the one who gets ahead? What about me? Why do the wicked prosper? Why do good things happen to bad people?
This story is helping us ask this question, but there’s actually providing us a little bit of context to help us answer it. If we look beyond the story at the rests of scripture, the question of good and bad is an interesting one because the Bible is full of messed up people messed up people. Noah was a drunk, Abraham was a liar, Isaac was a hoarder, Jacob was a swindler, David was a philanderer. So was his son. Gideon was a coward. Don’t even get me started on the disciples. And do you know why the Bible is so full of messed up people?
YOU ARE JACOB
Because the Bible is full of stories of people. We are messed up, we are jacked up, we are selfish. And when we think about good versus bad, like okay, if you were going to ask me, okay, do I think you’re good people? Yes, I look at this room of people. I think you’re generally good people. There are average people out there, not you. You’re good people and there’s below average people, but not you. Average is the middle, right? You’re all above the middle. I think you’re all really good people. There might even be some great people in here compared to other people.
And the problem is when we read scripture, you and I aren’t compared to other people. If heaven is perfect, then the standard is perfection. God is perfect. And if God in heaven are the standard, holiness is the bar. We are not good people. We are far, far short of it. And God blesses us anyways. A blessing by definition. We heard it from the children’s message this morning. A blessing by definition is a gift. You haven’t earned it. You don’t deserve it. If you did, it would be a wage, it would be a compensation, it would be a paycheck, a reward, but it’s a blessing. You don’t deserve it. It is unmerited and unearned and God gives it to you anyway. Why do good things happen to bad people? Because God is good to bad people like you and me and Jacob. And when you read this story, if it’s an earthly illustration, a heaven reality, well God is Isaac blessing us in spite of us, which makes you and me, Jacob, you are Jacob. Every time you lie and you cheat and you steal every time you roll the golf ball. To get a better lie, every time you roll the dice again to collect $200 and pass go. Every time you roll through a stop sign, you are Jacob. Every time you put on clothes to be someone you are not to fit in or to be a hypocrite or to fly under the radar. Every time you do that, you are Jacob. Every time you look with covetous eyes at your neighbor’s house, their spouse, every time you just are filled with greed for a new car, a new watch, new clothes, new shoes, every time you are Jacob and God blessed you anyway, you are so ridiculously obnoxiously, absurdly blessed. You have breath in your lungs this morning you woke up in a country where you have the freedom to worship. There’s billions of people who do not have that same luxury. You celebrated that freedom this week with family and friends. You love eating gluttonous amounts of grilled food. You are blessed, richly blessed..
BLESSINGS IN CHRIST
And not only that, not only do you have temporal blessings, but for those of you in Christ followers of Jesus, the apostle Paul wants you to know that you are blessed beyond measure. Every blessing you have right now will be so far outweighed by the glory and the blessings of heaven that are waiting for you.
3 … God has blessed us in heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.
Ephesians 1:3
He writes about in Ephesians one, we put this up a couple of weeks ago and we’ll do it again. God has blessed us in the heavenly realms, not just here in the heavenly realms, with not just some of, not just the leftover of with every spiritual blessing, the inheritance of Jesus through with, in and by Christ, which means when you read this story, if God is Isaac blessing you, even though you don’t deserve it, Jacob, then Jesus is Esau. But the difference in the story is he wasn’t duped out of his inheritance. Now he came to live a perfect life, die a perfect death as a penalty for all of your mischief and deception and wickedness. So it’s paid in full on a cross and he rises again from the dead that you may now enjoy his father’s inheritance. It’s all for you here. Welcome to my father’s inheritance. There’s plenty to go around and it far outweighs anything you’ve ever dreamt of. That’s what’s waiting for you. When you believe in your heart, confess with your lips that Jesus Christ is Lord and risen from the dead. Wow.
And actually, that’s how I want to end today. So often we do this, but we have guests every week. Praise God for that. Thank you for inviting your friends and realizing it’s not about you. Thank you for making a church with an inviting culture. And that means every week there’s an opportunity for someone in here to confess for the first time that Jesus Christ is there Lord. And to know not only are there sins forgiven, but the inheritance of heaven and the blessings of Christ are now available to them. And so that’s how we’re going to close. Lemme pray for you.
PRAYER
Heavenly Father, I thank you for this group of people and I thank you, God for all of your blessings that you’ve poured out on us, the freedom in our country, the roof over our heads, the clothes that we have, the food on our table. We thank you for all of these blessings. God forgive us for not appreciating them, for despising our birthright. And God, just this morning, we ask for your forgiveness for not fully appreciating all of your blessings. God, we thank you this morning for blessing us with your son who died and rose from the dead, that we might receive all the blessings of heaven. Not because we are good, because you are good God
And Father, for anyone in the room who has never confessed Christ as Lord, we give this moment to you now and ask that you would hear the confession of their heart, that they may know this is the day of their salvation, that you forgive their sins and open up the treasure troves of heaven for them.
And Lord, whether this is the first time they confess these words of that I believe, or this is the hundredth time that we’ve said this, we all join our voices together using the words of the Apostles creed, this statement of belief that has served the church for thousands of years. And we join our voices now together to declare what we believe, knowing that when we believe these things and confess them before one another, you will confess us before the Father in heaven and the riches of heaven await us. And so we join our voices together saying, I believe in God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth. And in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under conscious Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. And the third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty. From then, he will come again to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Christian Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.
