Genesis 25:19-34, 27

So what’s it like to grow up as the Child of the Promise? To be honest, I don’t know. I was never the Child of the Promise because I was the second born, the younger. Esau was the older, the one who was always called the Child of the Promise. And I have to tell you, I don’t think he much cared. Maybe it was because he just grew up with it, so it didn’t seem important to him. But for me, it was something always just out of reach, something I wanted more than anything else because I couldn’t have it.

Being a Child of the Promise had one other enticement. It meant that Esau was special to the Lord, that the Lord blessed him. Not being a Child of the Promise meant that I was not special to the Lord, that the Lord didn’t care about me. At least, that’s what I thought.

Once I thought I might have the promise within my grasp for a little while. Esau had an uncontrollable appetite. It wasn’t a matter of patience; he could sit for hours waiting for a deer to come within range. It wasn’t a matter of willpower. He could will himself to do some amazing things. But his hunger he could not control. He had to eat and eat often.

So this day I knew he was going out hunting. Mother always prepared a bag of food for him – some cold meat, some fruit, some bread. He took it with him, but when he walked away from it just for a minute before he left the camp, I emptied the bag and put the empty bag back with his bow and his quiver. He picked them all up and never noticed anything.

When he came back in at the end of the day, he would have given his right arm for my soup. Only I didn’t want his arm, I wanted his birthright. The plan had seemed a good one at the time.

Usually, Esau returned with some game, but this time he came back empty handed. Was that a sign that God approved my plan? I don’t know, but the stew cooking drew my brother over to me. “Quick, let me have some of that red stew! I’m famished!”

I shook my head and kept stirring. “First sell me your birthright.”

Esau raised his arms and spread them out. “Look, I am about to die. What good is the birthright to me?”

Not that I didn’t trust him, but I picked up a bowl and said, “Swear to me first.”

I don’t remember what he swore by, but he swore he was selling me his birthright.

I scooped some stew into the bowl and handed it to him with some bread. As he ate and drank, I wondered how he could consider his birthright to be such a trivial thing.

But, of course, the trade meant nothing if Father didn’t go along with it. There was no way that he would. Esau was his favorite son. As far as he was concerned, Esau was his only son. I was only number two, the unchosen one, a little better than a servant.

Early on Mother tried to make up for it. I became her favorite, and I have to tell you, it was better to be her favorite than nobody’s. When Father took Esau hunting as a little boy, leaving me at home, Mother would do something special with me, or she would let me go out with the shepherds and listen to their stories. They enjoyed teaching me about the sheep, and I enjoyed learning. I really wasn’t into hunting, anyway.

So time passed and I pretty much stayed out of the way of Father and Esau, and they pretty much ignored me. Mother and I were close, but in those days, being special to your mother didn’t mean much. It was the father who was important, who mattered. The father and the older son.

As I say, time passed. Father began to feel older and older. His sight was failing, and his hearing wasn’t all that great. He spent a lot of time in bed, because it took too much energy to get up out of his blankets.

Early one morning he called Esau to him. “I am now an old man and don’t know the day of my death. Now then, get your equipment—your quiver and bow—and go out to the open country to hunt some wild game for me. Prepare me the kind of tasty food I like and bring it to me to eat, so that I may give you my blessing before I die.”

Mother had seen this coming, and she had a plan. I brought in a couple of young kids, nice and tender, and Mother prepared them the way she had taught Esau. That was the easy part. The hard part would be convincing Father that I was Esau, the hairy one. I didn’t have as much hair on my head as Esau had on either arm! Father would curse me rather than bless me. But Mother had thought of that.

Swimming in Esau’s clothing, kid skin on my arms and the back of my neck, I carried in the meat dish to Father.

I tried to make my voice sound deeper when I addressed him. “My father.”

Even with his bad hearing, he could tell, he was suspicious. “Yes, my son. Who is it?”

I cleared my throat and tried again. ““I am Esau your firstborn. I have done as you told me. Please sit up and eat some of my game, so that you may give me your blessing.”

I could tell by his face he didn’t believe me. “How did you find it so quickly, my son?”

“The Lord your God gave me success.”

He called me to him. He felt my hands, smelled the clothing, and said, “The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” I didn’t actually give a sigh of relief, because he would have heard that, but I felt it. The kid skin worked.

After eating, he gave me the blessing, the coveted blessing that I had desired all my life, the blessing that made ME the Child of the Promise!

I backed out of his space and could hardly contain myself. I finally had it! Finally, I was the one who was blessed! My life’s dream had been accomplished! 

Except . . . of course, we still had to deal with Esau. Or not. So before Esau could catch me alone, Mother convinced Father that I should return to her land, to Grandfather Abraham’s land, to seek a wife from among our own people, from among people who worshiped the Lord. And off I went, with not much more in my bag for the entire trip than what Mother always packed for Esau for a single day, plus some oil and flour to make bread. Not that I intended to slow down enough to wait for the bread to bake over the fire, but you know how mothers are.

I traveled the rest of the day. I moved fast, on foot, of course, but moving my feet as quickly as I could. I wasn’t sure that Esau wouldn’t come after me. Because he spent so much time outdoors, he was not only stronger but also faster than me.

Of course, I had some time to think as I hurried along, to think about that birthright, the blessing that Father had given me. To be honest, I had always considered it to be something, a thing, like a cloak or a staff or a tent, something you could carry around with you, or maybe something that carried you around. Something more valuable than gold, but something physical, even though, somehow, I knew you couldn’t see it. At least, I had never seen it. Maybe it was something that Father had only shown to Esau because he was the Child of the Promise.

And it was connected to the Lord. I had never seen the Lord, but Father used to tell stories in the evening about Grandfather’s encounters with the Lord. Grandfather had actually seen the Lord, spoken to him, listened to him, and even fed him once.

Father only told us once, and then very softly, almost reluctantly, about the time he had heard the Lord’s voice. 

Young he was, and Grandfather had tied him up and laid him on the altar like a lamb. With the knife raised high in his hand, he and Grandfather both heard the Lord’s voice. “Do not lay a hand on the boy or do anything to him.”

The Lord had said more, but Father only remembered hearing that much. He was too frightened by the sight of the knife above him to remember more than that. Later Grandfather told him the rest, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”

And Father shivered as he told us the story. Being the Child of the Promise had been very frightening that day.

But I had never heard the Lord speak or seen any angels or other heavenly beings. I wasn’t sure they even existed.

Finally, it was dark, and I couldn’t keep going. To say I was exhausted would be putting it mildly. Now, as I said, I hadn’t brought much with me. I certainly didn’t have a pillow! So I found a rock about the right size. You’re probably aware that pillows are soft, and rocks are hard, but to sleep on my side, to keep my head from falling off, I had to put something under it. I felt around in the dark for quite a while before I found one about the right size.

Now I don’t know what was in that rock, or if it was the rock. I was afraid to go to sleep for fear that Esau might be following me, but I didn’t stay awake very long after I put my head down on my stone. Sometime during the night, a stairway appeared. It just popped up, solid on the ground, but reaching upward to . . . well, it wasn’t braced against a tree or a mountain or a wall or anything that I could see, it was just there, reaching upward, connected to that dome in the sky, that dome that separates our world from God’s world. 

And if that wasn’t strange enough, beings started coming down it. They came down, touched the ground with their feet, and then turned around and went back up. It was wide enough that two or three of them abreast could ascend or descend! That was strange! And some of them didn’t even touch the stairway.

But it got stranger! Because suddenly there was someone standing beside me (at this point in my dream, I seemed to be standing, not lying down with my head on that rock). And that someone spoke to me.

“I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

That sounded suspiciously like what Father told us that God had promised to Grandfather – offspring like the stars in the sky, the land to which he had traveled, and blessings upon all the families, all the nations, not just his descendants. The promise that God had given to Grandfather Abraham, the promise that had been passed on to Father, that blessing from the Lord had actually become mine! I had become the Child of the Promise! The promise was mine, not Esau’s! It was mine after all!

Those words rang in my ears for the rest of the trip. “I am with you … I am with you …. I am with you.”

I really don’t know what was in that rock, but whatever it was, it was special. It was sacred. It was connected to that stairway and to the Lord speaking to me. 

“Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it!”

Have you ever had an encounter with the Lord? When Father told of Grandfather’s encounters, he never mentioned Grandfather being afraid, but I certainly was! All my life the Lord had been something that belonged to Grandfather, like the birthright, and maybe to Father, although I wasn’t so sure about that. It had been frightening to him, too. The Lord had been the one who had demanded the sacrifice of Father, even though it didn’t actually happen. 

The Lord had never been anything to me, and I had never felt that I meant anything to the Lord. But here was the Lord, and those words kept ringing in my ears, “I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

There was nobody else around, but I couldn’t help shouting, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven!”

Out here in the middle of nowhere, out here where nobody lived, out here in the wilderness, this was the house of God and the gate of heaven. So I set up that rock as a pillar, and I poured my oil on it, anointing it. I called that place Bethel, Beth for House, El for God. It was a sacred place.

Later, when I finally returned home, I settled here in Bethel. And God renewed the promise to me, the same promise made to Grandfather, the promise of offspring and land, the promise that will be fulfilled — not in my lifetime, but it will happen.

You see, when I was a child, I did not know that the promise was not just for one child at a time. I thought that the promise carried God’s protection, God’s care, and it was not to be shared with anyone. Because Esau was the Child of the Promise, I could not be. Then, when I became the Child of the Promise, Esau could not be. 

But now I knew better, because when I came back, I discovered that was not the case. Esau inherited our father’s flocks and possessions. I had plenty of my own. Esau was blessed by the Lord, just as I was. It’s that part about the promise that we often forget, that all the nations, that all families would be blessed. That all people are Children of the Promise, Children of God.

For consideration:

General Questions

1) How does this story follow its Scripture?

2) How does this story expand its Scripture for you?

3) What is the message of this story?

4) How does the message apply to us today?

Specific Questions

5) Why would God choose a trickster and a conman to continue the line of the promise to Abraham?

6) Jacob wondered if Esau returning without game was a sign that God approved of Jacob’s plan to trade the stew for the birthright. What do you think?

7) Which would you trust more, your hearing (Jacob’s voice) or your sense of touch (the hair on Esau’s arms)?

8) In Genesis 27:20, Jacob says to his father, “Because the Lord your God granted me success.” What did it take for Jacob to recognize that he too could claim God?