From Human Weakness to God’s Faithfulness

Introduction

I’m going to revisit the book of Genesis this morning, looking in chapters 25 and 26 mostly. We’ve been around this text a few different times in recent months. And so some of this is kind of disordered thoughts. I don’t mean that it’s not organized. But sometimes I’ll preach through a book. Sometimes as I’m reading and working through a book, ideas will come at different times. And this one has actually been here for quite a while. It just hadn’t fully formed it to what I wanted to do with it, working through this text. But I think there’s some great lessons in this section that really actually expand beyond chapter 25 and 26. That’s one of the difficulties of a book like Genesis. The stories overlap and they work together in so many different fascinating ways, it’s hard to just nail down a single concept within one section or with a chapter.

And we’ll see that this morning as I kind of work back and forth through some of the surrounding text to make some of these points. But I think the overall concept and one of the main themes we see within a book like Genesis, and it sort of goes throughout scripture in gener in general, is the majesty of God, his might, his glory being accentuated through the weakness of humanity. Paul talks about it a number of times, Isaiah, various other biblical authors really come down on this theme, and rather than the story being about me or being about you, the story is about God. The story about his is about his plan through Jesus Christ, which then of course brings about necessary responses, and we see that even through this story in Genesis 25 and 26.

So I want to read a section of this text and then I’ll work from there to just bring out what I think are some pretty general points. But things that we can take and then use them individually, it’s it’s hard for me to apply this directly to things in your life. Obviously, I know my life way better than yours, but we can take the principles and we can use them in terms of our relationship with God and where this is going to take us forward. So begin in Genesis 25 and verse 19. Genesis 25 and verse 19, removing from the story of Abraham now to the story of Isaac, it says, These are the generations of Isaac, Abraham’s son. Abraham fathered Isaac, and Isaac was forty years old when he took Rebekah, the daughter of Bethel, the Aramean of Pandanaram, the sister of Laban the Aramean, to be his wife.

And Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife, because she was barren, and the Lord granted his prayer, and Rebekah his wife conceived. The children struggled together within her, and she said, If it is thus, why is this happening to me? So she went to inquire of the Lord. And the Lord said to her, Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you shall be divided. The one shall be stronger than the other, the older shall serve the younger. When her days to give birth were completed, behold, there were twins in her womb. The first came out red, all his body like a hairy cloak. So they called his name Esau. Afterward his brother came out with his hand holding Esau’s heel. So his name was called Jacob.

Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them. When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter and a man of the field. Well, Jacob was a quiet man dwelling in tents. Isaac loved Esau, because he ate of his game, but Rebekah loved Jacob. Once when Jacob was cooking stew, Esau came in from the field and was exhausted, and Esau said to Jacob, Let me eat some of the red stew, for I am exhausted. Therefore his name was called Edom. Jacob said, Sell me your birthright now. Esau said, I’m about to die. Of what use is a birthright to me? Jacob said, Swear to me now. So he swore to him and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lintel stew, and he ate and drank and rose and went his way.

Thus Esau despised his birthright. Now there was a famine in the land, besides the former famine, that was in the days of Abraham. And Isaac went to Gerar to Abimelech, king of the Philistines. And the Lord appeared to him and said, Do not go down to Egypt, dwell in the land of which I shall tell you. Sojourn in this land, and I will be with you, I will bless you. For to you and to your offspring I will give all these lands, and I will establish the oath that I swore to Abraham your father. I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and will give your offspring all these lands, and in your offspring all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.

So Isaac settled in Gerar. When the men of the place asked him about his wife, he said, She is my sister, for he feared to say, My wife, thinking, lest the men of the place should kill me because of Rebekah, because she was attractive in appearance. When he had been there a long time, Abimelech, king of the Philistines, looked out of a window and saw Isaac laughing with Rebekah, his wife. So Abimelech called Isaac and said, Behold, she is your wife. How then could you say she is my sister? Isaac said to him, Because I thought lest I die because of her. Abimelech said, What is this you have done to us? One of the people might easily have lain with your wife, and you would have been would have brought guilt upon us.

So Abimelech warned all the people, saying, Whoever touches this man or his wife shall surely be put to death. And Isaac sowed in that land and reaped in the same year a hundredfold. The Lord blessed him. I’m gonna just paraphrase this next section just for sake of time. He’s digging wells, and then the people of the land are coming and taking those wells, and then he’s having to move to another spot, dig another well, and this kind of plays out over and over again. And so there’s this quarreling over wells, which makes sense when there’s famine, when there’s difficulty in the land as there is now. And Isaac is continually blessed in this process. It says in verse 21, then they dug another well, and they quarreled over that also, so he called its name Sidna.

And he moved from there and dug another well, and they did not quarrel over it. So he called its name Rehoboth, saying, For now the Lord has made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land. And from there he went up to Beersheba. And the Lord appeared to him in the same night and said, I am the God of Abraham your father. Fear not, for I am with you and will bless you, and will multiply your offspring for my servant Abraham’s sake. So 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. So I wanted to capture the end part of that, as we’ll come back to that thought here in a little while.

And one aspect of this that we continually see within this story, kind of at the end of these sequences, there’s lots of building of altars, worshiping. You know, they go through these various struggles and difficulties, and yet at the end of them, there then is a rededication to the Lord, as we see here with Isaac and Genesis 26. In 2006, the Ford Motor Company was on the edge of collapse. That’s I want to picture, I want to kind of use this story of Ford to picture what I think is happening here in this text with God and Isaac. They were about to go bankrupt, they were losing billions, their culture was toxic. Everyone expected them to take a government bailout to survive. And then they hired this guy, Alan Mulale, who was an engineer for Boeing.

He had no experience in the car industry. And very few people thought he could actually save this broken company. But he did something pretty simple, as often happens in these kind of success stories. He fostered a people first culture in which honesty was the key. You may remember this part of the story. If you don’t remember anything else, you probably might remember this one thing that happened. He was being taught to about this new position. He wasn’t actually in it yet. And something came up about the cars, and he made this statement. This kind of illustrates this honesty or kind of truth first thing. He said his Lexus LS 430 was the finest car in the world. This is a guy who’s about to go work for Ford.

Okay, so maybe that helps understand what he means here about the Fords are not the best cars, right? That’s what he’s saying. And our goal then, he sets forth this vision to try to help Ford recover the ground that they had lost. Part of that was taking ownership of their mistakes rather than hiding them, right? So there’s mistakes made, and people don’t want to admit it, they don’t want to go up the chain of command and let people know that something was went wrong. And so what happens because of that? Well, things just get worse and worse and worse, right? And so he wants to stop that, make it okay to admit mistakes, to then take care of them, and then unify the company with the vision, with clarity, humility, consistency.

And of course, I wouldn’t be telling you the story if it didn’t work. Right? So it worked, and they didn’t just survive, they thrived. They were the only U.S. automaker that didn’t have to take a bailout, and there’s a lot of things that go into that. But it wasn’t because Ford was a strong company. It wasn’t because Ford was so great and they had so many great things going for them that Millale could just walk in there and then everything just kind of worked. That wasn’t the story at all. It was actually because, however, the decision was made and whoever made the decision, it just happened to be that the right person was steering the ship. And so the right things took place, he corrected the right mistakes.

And so, despite the problems and the difficulties and the failures and the mistakes that had taken place and the struggles they faced, some of them were not their own, economic struggles. Despite all of that, he was able to kind of set things in order and get them on the right course. That’s the kind of story we see in Genesis. Isaac, he doesn’t have a picture perfect story. He has good moments, but also he has a history of weakness and failure and repeated mistakes from his father, from Abraham. We see that within this story as well. His marriage starts with barrenness. And then once he has children, they’re even fighting in the womb. And then they come out with struggle, and the story is about their struggle with each other and how they continue to fight.

This isn’t a picture perfect home life, even. They play favorites, and there’s all sorts of problems that come from that. The land is suffering barreness. It’s not just his wife, but also the land they’re living in. He’s at odds with all the people around him. They’re struggling with difficulties of life. Isaac isn’t a self-made man. But all the while, and through all of that, through the difficulties and the struggles, some which are his fault, some which are not, God is there guiding and correcting and blessing. And just like in this kind of relatively simple story of an American company, someone had to come in there and fix things and get them working again. We have a God who doesn’t give up on us when things are not going well.

When everything seems broken and beyond repair.

1. God's Glory Accentuated by My Weakness

And it reaches back to Abraham. It’s going to reach forward to Jacob and to Joseph and to others. And so it spans all of these different stories. But one of the things I want us to get out of this story is that God’s glory is accentuated. It is highlighted by the reality of my weakness, the things that I do wrong, how I don’t get it right. It’s not a story of just continual escalation where there’s never any mistakes and nothing ever goes wrong. If it were, then I would account all of that to my own glory. And you would as well, and so would Isaac and so would Abraham that we made all these right decisions and things are just going the way that we wanted them to go, and we would forget God.

That’s what happens often in prosperity. That’s why Moses warns the Israelites about this in places like Deuteronomy 8 and 9. And so through human weakness, which is just a reality, actually, God’s glory is magnified. This is not about embarrassment and shame. It’s there. That happens. But God is not revealing these stories to us about Abraham and Isaac and Jacob to embarrass them, to make them look bad. The reality is to edit out the negative parts would actually make the stories unrealistic. I mean, we have stories like that. We have movies like that, right? We go, we see a movie, and the hero of the movie, he does everything right and he never makes mistakes, and everybody who tries to fight him ends up on the ground, and he’s the hero.

He does everything correctly. But then, can I identify with that? Can you identify with that? I mean, maybe there’s moments that we can feel some sort of connection, but the reality is that’s that’s not true. That’s not how life actually works. And so the stories which are handpicked, I think, throughout this account of Genesis for very specific purposes, they’re revealing that men like Abraham and Isaac, as great as they are and as faithful, particularly as Abraham is, even pointed to in this text, he makes mistakes at various times. And they’re pointed out in the text because we make mistakes too. And there’s a message that is being threaded through this account. There’s a few of them that we’re going to look at that relate to who God is and what that means for me.

And then maybe how we can wrestle psychologically with some of the mistakes we make and how we can work through that ourselves. But one of these is the idea that we can portray, we can reframe our weakness, not to condone it, not to say we continue in it. Paul has some things to say about that, but to realize that even in my mistakes, God is glorified. Because what we see is he is so different than me. He is so far above me. I mean, even in the times when I don’t do things right, God can work his plan and do his will. And we’re seeing this through the life of Isaac. I mean, the story starts out that way. I mean, this is no fault of their own, right?

I mean, Sarah is barren, Rebecca is barren. Isn’t that the whole point of what God is doing? He tells Abraham, and then he reaffirms this to Isaac multiple times, I’m going to make you a great nation. Abraham waits years and years and years, and Sarah doesn’t have a child. She’s barren, and yet God is saying, I’m going to make great things come from you. But their struggle in the moment, I can’t imagine what that was like for Abraham and Sarah. I mean, we have we probably have moments like this too where we expect certain things to happen, but they’re just not happening, right? It’s not going the way we thought it would go. We want to push forward. We get a little bit impatient. We see them do that in the story as well.

And so maybe to some degree we can understand a small piece of this. But Abraham is getting the message from God and Isaac as well here, that from your seed, all nations of the earth are going to be blessed. And he’s saying, What seed? What offspring? I don’t have any. And probably from their perspective, as we see in other parts of Scripture, like Romans 4, they’re thinking, I mean, time is running out. Actually, time has already run out. How can we even have children anymore? But don’t we see that’s the point? I mean, that’s the whole point of the story. In terms of human ability and human will and ingenuity and talent and wealth and wisdom and all of that’s not what God needs. And he makes this point repeatedly in the story.

He takes Abraham, who is as good as dead, Paul tells us. And as Sarah herself says, the way of women is no longer with her. She, from a human perspective and human power and ability, she cannot have children. But this is what shapes the entire story that God uses our weakness to then magnify his glory to show that it is actually him working behind the scenes to make all of this work out. He is guiding the ship, not me. Not you. Not Abraham and not Isaac. Yes, they act in faith and trust. Sometimes that’s about all they have. Because they do the wrong things and they make mistakes and they are out of alignment, and yet they still come back to God and they have a heart for him and they trust him.

And so, yes, they seek obedience and they seek the will of God, and yet through all of that, there are these ups and downs that continue to take place, but yet God is still glorified, even in man’s weakness. Let’s see some New Testament texts that talk about this specifically. 1 Corinthians chapter 1. 1 Corinthians 1, Paul is actually appealing to this idea, and he’s doing it for slightly different reasons. He’s saying it’s not about being a great rhetorician, right? It’s not that I have great worldly wisdom, and that’s why you should listen to me. It’s because I’m speaking truth, right? It’s the word of the cross that matters, the power of the word of the cross, not that he has great oratory skills and all of that.

That’s the sort of thing that they look for in their culture. Right? So that’s what he’s getting at here. He says in chapter one and verse 23, I’ll start there and we’ll read through the end of this section. But to those, or sorry, we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews, and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God. For full the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards. Not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth, but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.

God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness, and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, let the one who boasts in the Lord.

There’s going to be no boasting in Isaac. Isaac is not the one who brings this all about and makes everything work.

It is God that is doing this work. God is the one who is repeatedly blessing him in all of these situations. And everybody around him can see it. Right? If we read this text in its fullness, Abimelech and all his people, they keep coming to him and they say, We know you’re blessed, not because of your hard work, not because of your ingenuity and your talent and your ability. I mean, they had all those things, and they were trying to do the best they could, and yet they’re not getting any good reward from it. They look at Isaac and they say, We know you are blessed of the Lord. It’s the Lord doing this. And not only is the Lord blessing Isaac, but actually indirectly, he’s blessing all the people around Isaac.

He’s digging wells and finding water. And I’m not saying their behavior was good, they’re quarreling over it, but still in the end, they’re blessed by how God is blessing Isaac, even if they don’t appreciate it. This is the kind of God that we serve. Paul has more to say about this in Romans chapter 3. Here he’s talking about the advantage of Judaism and the law. He’s saying that justification comes by faith in Jesus Christ, not the law of Moses. But there are some things that have been helpful about the law of Moses, and he’s working through this idea. And in the process of this, he’s talking about how even when we are unfaithful, God remains faithful. And he’s going to do a lot of work with this, and we just talked about this in the high school class.

I really enjoyed that process working through this with them. He talks about it in detail in chapters 9 through 11. But I want to pay close attention, beginning in verse 5. Romans 3 and verse 5. But if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say? That God is unrighteous to inflict wrath on us? I speak in a human way. By no means. For then how could God judge the world? But if through my lie God’s truth abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? And why not do evil that good may come? As some people slanderously charge us with saying, their condemnation is just. Now there’s some things happening here that we don’t have to get into, but I just want to get the basic point he’s making.

What he’s saying is, even, and he’s using terms pretty generally, he says, with my lie, so when I do things wrong, when I act unjustly, when I am acting in unrighteousness, it only goes to accentuate and abound to God’s glory, that God remains just. When we look at humans and we look at the mistakes that we make and how we are not truthful and we are unjust and we are unrighteous, all it does is just show how great God’s justice and righteousness are. Have we not all been there? I mean, who among us has never been unjust? Or never told a lie. That’s a specific thing he mentions here. Anybody say that? This is sort of Paul’s point. At some point we’ve all done something wrong.

He actually goes on to say that exact thing a few verses later. We’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, which then again only magnifies God and his glory and who he is. Right? And so this is not just in this story with Isaac and Genesis 25 and 26. This is really kind of a continual story throughout scripture that I want us to see that it emphasizes God’s strength, that he’s the hero in the story. He’s the one making the good things happen and bringing blessing. It is not just because man is so great and has done so much. It’s not because Ford was such a good company. No, they are on the brink of destruction and bankruptcy. And someone came to steer the ship.

And that’s what we see happening time and time and time again in Scripture, and I believe even in our own lives. We don’t always know how God’s working behind the scenes. And it’s not that he’s going to fix all of our physical problems and make them all go away or fix whatever struggles we have. That’s that’s not really the idea, but he is there. He is ready to bless. He wants to bless us. He wants us to be part of his plan. And the reality is the world is just full of struggles and difficulties. Some of that spurns from the fall of man itself. From what God created good, then was subjected to futility, Paul says in Romans 8. Which then kind of brings me to this next idea.

2. Failure or Crisis Provides Opportunities for Growth

It was hard to conceptualize all of this in a couple lines on a screen. So you have to give me some time to explain this. One of the things I really want to pull out of what’s happening here in the story is the pattern. And I couldn’t find a good way to put that on the screen. So there’s limitations sometimes on what you can do with this. But so what I chose to do here on this point is just say the idea of failure or crisis, difficulty in life, these things provide opportunities for growth. They also have the opportunity to bring doubt and fear and destruction if we allow it. But there is the opportunity here for us to grow through the struggles that we face.

But a part of this concept, particularly within 25 and 26, if we are observant readers, is that there are patterns of difficulty that come about. And that’s hard. And we like to think, I’ll do better.

Our parents or our grandparents. And we see the good things, but then maybe we see the things that we don’t like so much, and we think, well, I’m going to do it better than that. Maybe some this morning feel that way. But then life happens. And interestingly enough, we find ourselves in similar places as our fathers. Sometimes handling those situations better, sometimes making the same mistakes that they meant. And I hope in those moments it kind of pushes us toward a perspective of humility. Again, realizing that this is not going to happen through me or through some other human.

And reliance upon him and what he says to do. But let me get a little more specific here in the text so you understand what I’m talking about. These crises and these difficulties, even sinful actions, these are patterns that are happening through this text. Now, a lot of them we can face ourselves. Some of them we mitigate, particularly in our country, at least for now. I don’t know how long this will last. You know, we have all sorts of ways in which we have plenty of food and all of that. And so the idea of famine seems very foreign to us. But just notice, even in the text, it mentions this is not the first time. Right? Verse 1 of chapter 26. Now there was a famine in the land.

Besides the former famine, that was in the days of Abraham. The text is telling you we’re setting up some parallels here. Notice some similarities between what’s happening with Abraham and what’s happening with Isaac. We’ve already mentioned some of these. We have Sarah’s barrenness and Rebecca’s barrenness. And of course, the idea of barrenness actually fits both what’s happening in the land and what’s happening with these women. There’s a barrenness problem here that goes across the board that they have no control over. And that’s one aspect that I want us to get here. There are parts of these crises and difficulties over which we have absolutely no control. Again, in our world, we like to think we have control, and sometimes we have the imagination that we control a lot of things.

Until something like a massive natural disaster happens, you know, something that we just simply cannot deal with as humans. Those kinds of things then remind us that we don’t quite have as much control as we sometimes think. And so it’s not the crises itself or the struggle or the trial, the difficulty, whatever you want to call it. It’s not always that itself is the issue. It’s more about how we handle it. And Isaac, we see deals with this sometimes in a slightly different way than Abraham. Sometimes he goes right along with what Abraham did. But the same patterns are there, right? We have barrenness of their wives, the barrenness of the land through famine, their sibling rivalry. Then we have land conflicts. All of these are part of this parallel structure that’s happening with Abraham and his story and with Isaac and his story.

And actually, this just continues on over and over and over again throughout biblical stories. Famines are a frequent part of how God produces action, how he uncovers character. And so the idea of famine or struggle is part of what uncovers who we are. When we go through the difficulties and the trials, whether they’re of our own doing or whether they’re beyond our control, it then reveals who we are. It is opening up our character and making it known. And so there’s an opportunity here to keep working and growing toward God, even in the midst of our own weakness, realizing it’s about Him. The answer is not to give up or to feel hopeless or inadequate in our weakness. But it is simply to recognize that this is part of what it is to be human, just like with Isaac and just like with Abraham.

Just like with Jacob and his sons. And essentially, every story we read in Scripture, the disciples, everyone we encounter, except for kind of the small characters that are in and out of the story so quickly, they only serve like a single purpose. But the characters that are throughout scripture, we see this repeatedly, they are human just like we are. And the message here is that it’s not all dependent on me getting it all right. It’s about a God who is gracious and merciful and has a plan who can redeem what is broken. And that’s what we’re seeing here in the story of Isaac. Maybe you imagined you’d be in a better place in life by now. Often we think of this physically. You know, by whatever age, I want to have this much in my retirement account, or this kind of house, or this kind of car, or whatever it may be.

We kind of set parameters of what we think success is. And sometimes that’s gauged by maybe where our parents were at a certain age. And throughout time, maybe we get there and we’re just not satisfied with where we’ve gotten, or maybe we’re thinking about this spiritually. I really hoped I’d be in a better spiritual condition than I am now, myself or my family. I wanted to be a better spouse or a better parent or a better leader or a better disciple. And so we can stay in that mindset as long as we want to, and it’s not really going to help anything if we don’t also then back that up with realizing that it is God that is at work behind the scenes, and that growth requires, yes, recognizing my failures and my weaknesses, but also having the mindset to work through them for God’s glory.

And so if I recognize today that I’m not the kind of spouse I should be, what am I going to do about that?

If I if I realize I’m not serving Jesus, I’m not a disciple the way I ought to be a disciple. I look at the things that Jesus is doing in Scripture, and I just see I’m not lining up. I’m not doing the things he’s doing. How am I going to handle that? These are the questions that matter in terms of am I going to continue to grow according to the plan of God and according to the working of God and allow him to work in me? God is always lying in wait, not to destroy, but waiting to bless us. And through all the difficulties and struggles in these texts, I think that’s what we see over and over and over again. Let me just take a quick aside before I demonstrate that to you a little bit more fully.

3. How My Choices Influence My Children

And just point out, I think what is an important part of this text. When we notice that Abraham lies or deceives, if you want to say it’s not lying because Sarah is technically his sister, we can at least say it’s deception. He’s purposely deceiving. And then when Isaac finds himself in that same situation, what does he do? He straight out lies. There’s no bit of truth to this. And so, as a parent, I mean, this kind of hits hard as you’re reading through an account like this. How can I possibly work through all the choices of my life to try to help my kids not make the same mistakes that I make? And I’m not even sure that’s necessarily the right question to ask, but it is correct to notice that this is happening in the text.

And then for me to think about my choices seriously. The things that I’m doing and what I think is important, the priorities I have in my life and the perspective I bring to Scripture and to brethren and all that, and think about how that’s going to shape my children. Now it’s up to them, just like it was to Isaac.

He prays to the Lord and she conceives. He handles this a little bit differently than Abraham. And so that’s great. You know, Genesis 16, they get a little impatient, and Sarah pushes Abraham to take Hagar, her handmaiden, and she conceives and has a child with Abraham, and that was not the answer. You know, they tried to kind of jump ahead of God’s plan a little bit. And so in this case, Isaac, I think, does this better? You know, we don’t know the whole story and all the details, but he doesn’t get to a point where he’s impatient and then does something that he shouldn’t have done. Here he prays for Rebecca, his wife, and she conceives. But then in the famine story, he kind of falls back into the same pattern.

And the whole point here is what kind of impact and influence am I having on my children and honestly, even other people’s children and other people around me by the decisions I’m making, by the behavior I exhibit, how is that influencing the people around me? It’s a critical element of the story.

I need to have my heart set on doing the will of God, and when I don’t do it right, admit it. You know, have the humility to admit error. How many of us have had to do that with our children? You know, they see something that was not godly. And we just have to confess to them and tell them we’re sorry. That is so important. And then back it up with proper action. Realizing the importance of these choices. And how even in scripture in these stories, we see how the way that I act and the choices I make then influences particularly my children. And then now I want to kind of pivot back to God being the focus here. Yes, we have crises and we have struggles and difficulties.

4. Even in Our Struggles and Weaknesses, God Offers Hope

How do we frame those in our mind? We have to have, I think, a growth mindset. What can I learn from that? And what opportunities can I take from that? Because there’s things that are difficult, they’re hard. We go through them. And there’s struggles that we face, all of us, to some degree. Are we going to face those with trust and dependence upon God, or we think it’s all reliant upon ourselves, and then we’re going to live with disappointment? I think those are ultimately the two choices. But I want us to see, even in our struggles and our weaknesses, God offers hope. And I referenced this earlier in terms of how through the repeated failures or through the struggles they’re facing, sometimes it’s just difficulty like Abraham having to go to war to get Lot and his family back.

I mean, that’s an unpleasant thing to do. And yet, time after time, through any of these circumstances, whether it’s their own fault or whether it’s no fault of their own, God continually reassures them that He is there and He is ready to bless. We see it multiple times in our direct text that we just read early in chapter 26. He says, I’ll be with you and I will bless you. Later in chapter 26, after the quarreling over the wells, right? Maybe sinful things happen there. I don’t really know exactly what went into all that. But certainly it was unpleasant. Right? And maybe there’s questions. I dig these wells. This is a lot of work. I mean, they’re in famine. Isaac’s trying to take care of his family.

And they dig these wells and they find water and they get pushed off the land and they got to do it all over again. And so what’s happening to you mentally, psychologically as you’re working through all this? Is God really protecting me? Is God really taking care of me? And then God then again speaks up to them and says, I’m with you. I will bless you. But I want to back out a little bit from this direct text. And there’s more than even I put on the screen here. It continues on in the book of Genesis. But I want us to see how this just keeps happening over and over again. And often, as I’ve, these are the sorts of things I love seeing as I read through a text.

I don’t know if I’d really recognize this before, but it tends to be, and it happens other times too, but it tends to be after some sort of crisis or failure, even sin, that God offers this reaffirmation. Abraham lies about Sarah. There’s this difficulty of famine. There’s strife between Abraham and Lot’s herdsmen and their herds, and they have to separate, and there’s some tough decisions that are made there, and then right after that there’s an affirmation. God’s saying, I’m with you. I’m going to bless you. The covenant is still in place. The promises are still there. We’re just saying standing on the promises, right? The promises are still there. You can still depend on God’s promises. God is faithful. After Lot separates, he goes to Sodom and Gomorrah.

We had a sermon a few weeks back about that and all the problems and devastation that takes place there. But before you even get there, in 14, they’re fighting with foreign nations, and Lot and his family, and the people he’s living among get taken away. Abraham has to go rescue them. And then God reaffirms his covenant to them. Abraham takes Hagar. God reaffirms his covenant.

This is the parallel story to what we just read. So Genesis 20, 21, it’s almost exact. They’re in the same exact place, Gerard, they’re dealing with Abimelech. They’re in the same city with the same at least group of people. I don’t know if it’s the exact same people. God even tells Isaac not to go to Egypt, but you stay here. This is where this exact same thing happened to Abraham, and now Isaac is going to do it again. And yet God then reaffirms his blessings to Abraham. Isaac as his child follows the sin of his father, lies about his wife, and yet God blesses him a hundredfold. And twice tells him in this text, I will be with you. In the beginning of this, it’s fascinating.

In chapter 26, if you do what I say, if you’re obedient, if you sojourn in this land and you don’t go somewhere else, I will be with you and will bless you. Now, I want you to notice he didn’t say, if you’ll do what I say and stay here, I will bless you and be with you unless you mess up while you’re here. And then he follows through. Now, what I’m not saying is exactly what Paul said he wasn’t saying in chapter 3, that we just continue in sin, that grace may abound. What I’m not saying is that we just live however we want, and it’s no big deal. God’s made some promises, and so we don’t have to worry about it. That’s not the point.

It is the reality of the human condition that at some times we are weak, other times we are strong, but we need to trust in the promises of God. Trust what God has told us that he is with us, and if we are in Christ, we can have assurance. This is the carryover from the Old Testament. This matters to us. It means if we trust God, we can have confidence as his people. It’s not kind of this in and out thing, like, oh man, I can’t believe I did that yesterday. God hates me and is not going to bless me anymore. That’s not how it works. I mean, look at the story in Genesis and how he’s working with these very flawed people who have flawed marriages and flawed relationships with their children, flawed relationships with the people around them and the cities they’re dwelling in.

Almost everything about them is flawed at certain times, and yet God continues to bless them and work through them. Romans 5, 1. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Three chapters later, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Romans 8 and verse 1. John, the inspired writer says, and this is the promise he has made to us, eternal life. The idea I’m trying to convey this morning is exactly what we’re saying. Stand on God’s promises. Believe in them. Work for them. Not because you’re going to be so great or I’m going to be so great that we’re going to get what we need and everything’s going to work out.

That’s not the point at all. But God is so great, and his promises are so great, and he is so faithful that even in the midst of our struggle and our weaknesses and our flaws, he can make his plans come to fruition. He can make it all work out.

5. They Also Matter to the World

There’s a lot of wisdom in following things that God says that could take care of even earthly things. But that’s not really the point. There’s something so much better awaiting us. And so this principle and these ideas, they matter to us, but they also matter to the world because the world faces the same problems that we face. Just like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, and all of them have these patterns of struggles and trials, some of their own doing and some not of their own doing. The world’s not any different now. We have all of that, but people who are not in Christ have all of that too. They just don’t have any hope. And so what will we do with the message of Jesus Christ?

Well, certainly it needs to be a message of assurance for me and for you. But what about for the people in the world around us who face these same problems and difficulties, who find themselves in trials like famine? Maybe we try to avoid it in our day, but we have similarities, don’t we? Health struggles, financial crises, whatever it might be. What is their hope? Is it all tied up in the here and now? Or do they have a message of true hope in Jesus Christ? Jesus is the answer. The answer is not better politics or school boards or a better job or medical treatments. Yes, those things can kind of treat some temporary things and solve temporary problems, but it is not what our heart is aching for, and we are filled with an eternal purpose and we’re searching for actual meaning in life.

Conclusion

There has to be something more than what we go through here. Or else there’s just no point in any of it. And what’s amazing about these stories, we get behind the scenes pictures, not just in Genesis, but other parts of Scripture that tell us that God is there. He is working for us. And so God isn’t waiting for perfect people. He’s working through very flawed people. People like me, people like you. These familiar struggles we face, they are invitations to grow, not to give up. And I want us to understand that God’s faithfulness is the anchor. It’s what holds everything together. It’s what steers the ship if we allow it. And with him, all things are possible. Could be this morning that you are dealing with your own struggles, trials, difficulties, feelings of weakness.

And if you feel that this morning, I think that’s a good thing. You realize you need something else. It’s not going to be within you. And that is a proper feeling. It means you seek God. You’re feeling a sense of a need for God this morning. We want to help you with that. Not because we have all the answers, but God has given us answers in Scripture. He says, if we are in Christ Jesus, there is now no condemnation. Are you in Christ? If you’re not, we can baptize you into Jesus Christ this morning. You can begin this new life for Him. Can you help you? Why don’t you come while we stand and we sing?