Sermons from Lone Rock Bible Church
Stevensville, MT
Index of LRBC Sermons: www.sermonlinks.com/Sermons/LoneRock/Sermons
April 17, 2005

Problems and Promise
Genesis 26

God put Isaac in a position to face difficulties and still trust in Him. How he handled these issues affected God’s reputation and Isaac’s family. Just how did he do? How do we deal with such problems relating to:

1. Famine (1-5)
2. Fear (6-11)
3. Fighting (12-33)
4. Family (34-35)

1. Famine (1-5)

¹Now there was a famine in the land, besides the previous famine that had occurred in the days of Abraham So Isaac went to Gerar, to Abimelech king of the Philistines.
²The LORD appeared to him and said, "Do not go down to Egypt; stay in the land of which I shall tell you.
³"Sojourn in this land and I will be with you and bless you, for to you and to your descendants I will give all these lands, and I will establish the oath which I swore to your father Abraham.
⁴"I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven, and will give your descendants all these lands; and by your descendants all the nations of the earth shall be blessed;
⁵because Abraham obeyed Me and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes and My laws."

Amos is a book of God’s railing against His people in Israel for their apostasy. They think they are fine spiritually, but God knows better.

Amos 5
¹⁸Alas, you who are longing for the day of the LORD,
For what purpose will the day of the LORD be to you?
It will be darkness and not light;
¹⁹As when a man flees from a lion
And a bear meets him,
Or goes home, leans his hand against the wall
And a snake bites him.

We wonder sometimes, if the Lord is in it, shouldn’t it all be good? Shouldn’t it all be better?

Isaac was like you and me. He lived in a world described by Job, who was probably his contemporary nearly 2,000 years before Jesus. Job said man is born to trouble as sparks fly upward. Trouble, trouble is everywhere. Like us, Isaac was sometimes a victim of trouble. Other times, he is the culprit. He is like you and me.

Chapter 26 of Genesis is all about Isaac stepping into first position with God and, God’s promise to save the world. It is how Isaac found himself in that position despite his troubles, some of which were not his doing but others clearly were. Isaac needed to learn, as do we, that God’s people need to represent God well in a troubled world.

Circumstances of nature forced Isaac to make a move. Have you ever been there? Stuff happens outside our control and it’s time to move. We can’t stay where we are. In the case of Isaac this is precisely what happened. He was living in a place way to the south called “The well of the Living One who sees me.” This is where Hagar met God many years before. Isaac was living there and there came a famine in the land. Famines are gradual. They don’t hit all at once like a twister or a hurricane. They creep in, giving an individual time to think, time to fear, time to weigh alternatives, time to plan.

Isaac had to do something. He lived right on the border between Egypt to the south and the Promised Land to the north. In those days, Egypt was the reigning empire of the world and we know from further study elsewhere in the Bible that Egypt always seemed to represent the place you really shouldn’t go. Is it man’s empire we want, or God’s kingdom?

Isaac chose wisely and moved north. It was occupied, at that time, by a bunch of different tribes scattered all about, but the promise had come to Abraham and from Abraham to Isaac. It’s all going to be yours some day. Stay in it. Sojourn there. He no doubt prayed, made his choice, struck his camp, and moved north in the name of common sense and, hopefully, God’s honor.

2. Fear (6-11)

⁶So Isaac lived in Gerar.
⁷When the men of the place asked about his wife, he said, "She is my sister," for he was afraid to say, "my wife," thinking, "the men of the place might kill me on account of Rebekah, for she is beautiful."
⁸It came about, when he had been there a long time, that Abimelech king of the Philistines looked out through a window, and saw, and behold, Isaac was caressing his wife Rebekah.
⁹Then Abimelech called Isaac and said, "Behold, certainly she is your wife! How then did you say, 'She is my sister'?" And Isaac said to him, "Because I said, 'I might die on account 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 charged all the people, saying, "He who touches this man or his wife shall surely be put to death."

Despite the circumstances of the famine, despite the fact that things weren’t looking real good on the outside, Isaac said, “We’re going to honor God anyway.” So north he went, to Gerar. It was a Philistine city and there he renewed an old family acquaintance in the person of Abimelech. The Bible says Abimelech was the king. The word Abimelech is like the word Pharaoh. It really isn’t a name; it’s more like a title. It means “father of the king.” Either this man or his father of the same name appears earlier in Genesis 20 where Isaac’s father, Abraham, went through a very similar situation and made a very similar mistake.

We need to understand something about Abimelech and his Philistines. They too had been immigrants. The Philistines came to that stretch of the southern coastal land of Israel from the island of Crete in the Aegean Sea. Before Crete, many feel they had actually lived in Egypt. So is it possible that this nomadic bunch of folks had gone to Crete and after a number of generations had headed back home, and settled almost a stone’s throw from their original stomping grounds in Egypt at Gerar.

They understood some thing about being immigrants, about being sojourners and travelers and circumstances forcing them this way and that. They knew about uprooting and trials, so they were kindly disposed toward Isaac.

Abimelech was no dummy. He was in this position of responsibility and leadership no doubt for a reason. Abimelech not only understood Isaac’s situation as a transient, but he also understood a thing or two about the difference between his gods and the God of Isaac. He had history with the God of Israel, the God of Isaac, the God of Abraham. He understood that there was a profound difference between the gods his people could literally create; (Psalm 115 speaks about gods that have eyes that cannot see and mouths that cannot speak and hands that cannot touch, that people come to resemble, a very interesting study in idolatry) a big difference between those on the one hand and the living God of Abraham on the other. The living God who, no doubt, had plucked Abraham, who is a nobody, in a nowhere place, an old man as good as dead, having a wife unable to bear children and through a miracle of life literally created a family, a nation. Through them He would reach the entire world. Amazing! Abimelech had known that. He knew about Abraham. He knew about the promise and he knew that Isaac was Abraham’s miracle child.

“Come on in,” he said. “You’re welcome here in Philistine land.” He received Isaac and his huge entourage, but he had some memories. Abimelech liked Isaac; at least he appeared to. Abimelech may have been born at night, but not the night before. So when Isaac came to him explaining, “Abimelech, that good-looking woman there -- she’s my sister. She’s not my wife. She is an aunt to these two young men.” And we can just about imagine Abimelech saying, “Could it be? Isaac’s wife is missing but his sister just happens to be there. They don’t look a whole lot alike, but on the other hand she does resemble one of those boys and they are sure treating her like a mom.”

The Bible says Abimelech kept an eye on things. After a long time had gone by Abimelech looks out his window and sees Isaac treating Rebekah not like a sister. His suspicions are confirmed and he confronts Isaac with this. He forces a confession from Isaac. Even though God had been so clear to Isaac when He said, “Isaac, you are the man now. The promises I made to Abraham are now yours. From your descendants, your descendants, your descendants -- that expression is three-fold -- I will bless, I will honor, and I promise."

But once Isaac thought he was in a hard spot, he forgot the promise and yielded to fear. Abimelech called him on it, caught him red-handed and no doubt red-faced and left him with three problems to face. Now Isaac is not alone. He is remarkably like most of us. The first problem was Isaac was not trusting God, the God who made the promise, the God of the covenant. He feared for his life more than he feared the God of the promise. Your father went through this back when you were just a kid, Isaac, but he was told to offer you up on the altar. Abraham said, “OK, Lord,” not knowing exactly what would happen.  The book of Romans tells us later that Abraham was so convinced God could bring life from the dead that he was willing to prove it in sacrificing his son, Isaac.

Abimelech said, “Isaac, I knew Abraham. Abraham was a friend of mine. And you are no Abraham. You put your own fear ahead of the promise. That problem is number one with you, Isaac.” That  problem is also number one with  us. We just let fear run us far too frequently, in spite of God’s promises.

Secondly, “Isaac, you have no concern for us Philistines.” Abimelech is really a lead character, he understood the terms of the deal. God had told Abraham, “In you all the families of the world will be blessed and the nation that blesses you I will bless and the nation that curses you I will curse.” Abimelech understood it is clearly in the best interest for him and the Philistine people to be good to God’s man or face the consequences of the living God.

“You have no concern for us, the Philistines, your host.” The Philistines, who are outside the commonwealth of the faith of Abraham and Isaac need to be inside also. They need to know the living God, but Isaac didn’t care. His testimony to the lost world didn’t matter and far too frequently it doesn’t matter to us either. We’ll just go on giving way to the fears that come our way or the dispositions of our hearts and forget the lost ones. That’s wrong, and Abimelech called him on it.

Thirdly, this is one that will come back to get him, he had no respect for Rebekah. He put her in a losing position. He compromised his marriage, he compromised her as his wife, and he set a horrible example for his two boys. “Be sure when you’re asked, boys, to say this is your aunt. I don’t want them to kill me.” He is running on fear.

When I read this and reflect on other passages in Scripture, I need to say that it is so important, in the kingdom of God, that men must lead. Men must take the lead particularly in the homes. Men must lead physically. Men must lead morally. Men must set the boundaries because wives and daughters are inclined so powerfully to want to trust the main man in their lives. If they trust that man, whether it is their dad or their husband, they are secure, they thrive, and they become all that God wants them to be. If they are insecure because they can’t trust their husband or can’t trust their dad because of his behavior or duplicity, they will act out in insecurity, the home will be disrupted. Wouldn’t you know that that is what is coming to Isaac’s world because he let down his wife and his sons. Trust and respect are huge and it begins in the home with husbands and dads who lead a good example.

3. Fighting (12-33)

¹²Now Isaac sowed in that land and reaped in the same year a hundredfold. And the LORD blessed him,
¹³and the man became rich, and continued to grow richer until he became very wealthy;
14for he had possessions of flocks and herds and a great household, so that the Philistines envied him.
¹⁵Now all the wells which his father's servants had dug in the days of Abraham his father, the Philistines stopped up by filling them with earth.
¹⁶Then Abimelech said to Isaac, "Go away from us, for you are too powerful for us."

¹⁷And Isaac departed from there and camped in the valley of Gerar, and settled there.
¹⁸Then Isaac dug again the wells of water which 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 same names which his father had given them. ¹⁹But when Isaac's servants dug in the valley and found there a well of flowing water,
²⁰the herdsmen of Gerar quarreled with the herdsmen of Isaac, saying, "The water is ours!" So he named the well Esek, because they contended with him.

²¹Then they dug another well, and they quarreled over it too, so he named it Sitnah.
²²He moved away from there and dug another well, and they did not quarrel over it; so he named it Rehoboth, for he said, "At last the LORD has made room for us, and we will be fruitful in the land."
²³Then he went up from there to Beersheba.
²⁴The LORD appeared to him the same night and said,
"I am the God of your father Abraham;
Do not fear, for I am with you
I will bless you, and multiply your descendants,
For the sake of My servant Abraham."  

²⁵So he built an altar there and called upon the name of the LORD, and pitched his tent there; and there Isaac's servants dug a well.
²⁶Then Abimelech came to him from Gerar with his adviser Ahuzzath and Phicol the commander of his army.
²⁷Isaac said to them, "Why have you come to me, since you hate me and have sent me away from you?"
²⁸They said, "We see plainly that the LORD has been with you; so we said, 'Let there now be an oath between us, even between you and us, and let us make a covenant with you,
²⁹that 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.'"

³⁰Then he made them a feast, and they ate and drank.
³¹In the morning they arose early and exchanged oaths; then Isaac sent them away and they departed from him in peace.
³²Now it came about on the same day, that Isaac's servants came in and told him about the well which they had dug, and said to him, "We have found water."
³³So he called it Shibah; therefore the name of the city is Beersheba to this day.

So with egg dripping from his face, Isaac begins to farm. Here I find, so amazing, so remarkable, so wonderful a God who stays faithful to His promise. Isaac goes out and puts some seed in the ground. This is non-irrigated land and the Bible says the first year he farmed. He was not from a farming background; he was from a merchandizing background. He puts some seed in the ground and gets a hundred-fold return, a hundred-fold harvest. That translates roughly, in our terms today, into a hundred bushels to the acre on non-irrigated land.

My farmer friends, who are dry land farmers, are absolutely ecstatic, in that rare year, when a part of their farm might pull in 65 or 70 bushels to an acre and that’s with the technology and all that goes with farming today. You still cannot control the rain. But someone can. If Isaac is farming, let’s say he had a big place. Let’s give him a 20-acre piece, which is a lot for one guy to be working by hand. And he got 100 bushels to the acre. That means the rain fell selectively. That’s how it works in dry land farm country. You can sit and watch your neighbor get it all -- some summer shower that is timed perfectly and you know his yield just went up and yours stayed the same.

So you have these Philistine farmers surrounding Isaac’s spread. They are sitting there in the evening watching rain hit Isaac’s place again. They are aware because they have this innate religious sense that someone up there is more pleased with him than with them. It eats on them. Harvest time comes and they are finished in a day and a half.   Two weeks later Isaac is still stacking. They are irritated. They move from irritation to envy. So they tell him he needs to leave. They don’t care a lot for him right now.

Bad feelings and misunderstanding and envy lead to overt, in-your-face, confrontational conflict. How do we deal with that? In a fallen world, even in a best case scenario God’s people had better learn how to manage conflict. In a fallen world it is here to stay. When your neighbor doesn’t understand, when misunderstanding and rumor and all kinds of things enter into our lives we better stand by for problems.

Isaac faced them and decided he needed to move again. So he moved out from Gerar and headed up the valley, trying to get himself clear but then enters in this whole business of the wells. We can see what Isaac is doing. He is following his father’s trail. He is searching out the wells his father had dug. He is riding, in his own mind, on his father’s coattails.

In this country, when they had a problem with a well it is much more difficult to fix than our problem with a well. Their wells were dug by hand. There were wells that were dug for an entire community that had a circumference half the size of this building or larger. They were dug by hand and the dirt was piled in baskets and drug out. Wells that were so huge had big stair steps that were carved into them spiraling down to the bottom where the water may be 30 or 40 feet below. The steps were large because the animals had to use them to carry the large pots of water.

Digging a well is not just a matter of “I think I’ll dig a well today.” It’s a big deal and it is labor intensive. But it is more than that here because water symbolizes something. For one, it symbolizes survival. It is life! If you don’t have water in this country, you are done!             Water is everything. That’s why they fought over it. That’s why they argued over it. And that’s why if the people of Gerar really wanted to get a dig in on Isaac they would fill up the wells. It is not only a physical attack, it is intended to demoralize and symbolizes “you don’t have a life here.”                                                                                                      

So they dug one, and fought over it. Dug another and fought over it. Finally, he dug a well and it was OK. It’s a new one. It is Isaac’s well now, all dug out. Things are looking good. Symbolizing that now he has a life, he has sustenance, and he has a personal blessing from God that doesn‘t require going where Abraham had been. He is now his own man and remembers your descendants, your descendants, your descendants. God is now saying, “It‘s you now, Isaac You are the one through whom I will work out my promise to redeem the world.”

Please don’t hear me saying that Isaac is the only one who is going to get to go to heaven. Isaac is the one in the front line representing God’s agenda. Isaac has these two sons, Jacob and Esau. Through Jacob now, God’s promise is carried through. That’s coming. For now, Isaac has to own it and he owns it through the problems. He finally gets his own well.

He is connected, obviously genetically, to Abraham. But he moves on now, as God’s chosen vessel in the covenant. It says in verse 23 that he goes up to Beersheba. Beersheba is still today a city on the southern edge of the land of Israel. Frequently in the course of biblical description, you read the expression ”from Dan to Beersheba,” a distance of about 120 miles. North to south, that’s the length of the land. They are now on the southern edge, at a place called Beersheba. That night (verse 24) God appears. This is a breakthrough point for Isaac. God shows up and says, “Isaac, don’t miss this now. I am the God of your father Abraham. Do not fear for I am with you. I am with you, Isaac, and I will bless you and multiply your descendants for the sake of my servant Abraham.”

It is the same promise. He builds an altar and there they dig a well. They name that well, “The Well of the Oath.” The covenant is renewed and now Isaac is in first position. Meanwhile, in Gerar, Abimelech has not missed much. He has been watching, continuing to observe what is going on with God’s people, with Isaac and his company.

So he comes to Isaac, not because he is impressed with Isaac because he is not. Remember what went on back in town. He is not impressed with Isaac but he is very impressed with Isaac’s God. He evidently gives Isaac some slack. He is not offended beyond the point of recovery but he goes to him. Isaac again entreats him, “Why did you come to me? You hate me and you kicked me out of your place.”

“We see plainly that Yahweh is with you. And if He is with you, then we want to be with you too. We need to have an oath, a contract, a promise.” Why? Abimelech knew the covenant. The nation that blesses you I will bless. The nation that curses you I will curse. Abimelech is saying, as for as me and my people, Isaac, we want to be aligned with your God because we see how wonderful He is. His is the team we want to be on. It’s not about you, Isaac. It’s that we see that the God you name has no real competition.

So the oath was struck out of respect for Isaac’s God. Verse 29 -- You are now the blessed of the Lord.” That is a huge, huge statement. So in the morning they got up and exchanged oaths. Swore promises to one another. This is a remarkable testimony to God’s faithfulness despite Isaac’s failings. God has promises to keep, promises to save and promises to populate heaven. He said I will use you people in that process. If you are unwilling, if you are fearful, I am going to keep My promises anyway, but you are going to pay for your behavior.

You will either lose rewards in glory or there will be other prices to pay, but I won’t let it go. God will be honored as the hero of His kingdom building enterprise and He has invited us to join. They name the wall Sheba. Beersheba is the name and it is all about God’s faithfulness to His promises.

Isaac had been riding Abraham’s coattails to this point. God walked with him, took him down Abraham’s trail to impress upon him that “You are the man. You are my chosen conduit to bless the world.” Abimelech saw it before Isaac did and gravitated to Isaac’s God.

4. Family (34-35)

³⁴When Esau was forty years old he married Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Basemath the daughter of Elon the Hittite;
³⁵and they brought grief to Isaac and Rebekah.

That doesn’t mean we have a happy ending to the chapter. Now we flash inside the tent, as it were. We see a little bit of where this goes. Time to take a wife, Esau says, so he marries Judith, a Hittite girl. One evidently wasn’t enough, so he marries Basemath, another Hittite girl. They brought grief to Isaac and Rebekah. Do you see what is happening in this home? These two verses are all about Esau. For you and me, they begin transitioning our thinking to what happens next. This is just a lead into the next chapter where we get more detail about this very interesting family.

Family, where we love the fiercest and fight the hardest, and this is where it is going. Esau has two problems and that comes through every time we meet him in the book. For one, he is self-centered and impulsive. He sold his birthright for a bowl of stew. He gave away his inheritance because he was hungry. “Feed me. If I am dead, I can’t enjoy it anyway.” So he despised his birthright because of his self-centered, impulsive nature.

The second problem, which comes through so clearly here, he is disrespectful. He is disrespectful with regard to his parents. He doesn’t respect Isaac, his dad, because he sees the duplicity of Isaac’s character. He was no doubt asked to lie along with his dad. He knew who Rebekah was and he doesn’t respect his father. He also doesn’t respect his mother because Isaac didn’t respect her either. Boys will pick up on that from their dads. Dads who disrespect their wives can’t expect their boys to respect them either.