When Abraham’s son Isaac is 80 years of age, and his twin boys are 40 years of age what has Isaac done to copy his father Abraham in finding suitable wives for them? Nothing whatsoever! He has neglected his fatherly duties. We all are guilty of the sins of omission, and one of those sins may be failing to pray from the day our children are born for their choice of a spouse. After grace and salvation it is the biggest choice they will make. We can fail to talk about marriage naturally and easily as they are growing up. We can fail to encourage them to mix in camps and conferences with young people who are Christians. Pastors can fail to talk about marriage and the reasons why God created it and who are the ones that Christians should marry. We can bring trouble on our own heads by failing to talk to them directly and plainly about this, and then we are speechless when faced with a defiant fait accomplis. They a
re in a relationship the seriousness of which we did not guess, and they are not prepared to end it on any grounds at all. We often feel we have only ourselves to blame for some of the relationships entangling young people. They have suddenly moved in with a fellow, and we are gob-smacked, and while blaming them we blame ourselves ten times more. We feel we had a part to play in this, letting them down by a guilty silence. So it was with Isaac. He allowed forty years to pass without seeking wives for his two sons, until Esau peremptorily acted and married not one but two Canaanite women, and by the end of this narrative Jacob had been sent out of the promised land to Haran to one of the places his grandfather’s servant swore he would never take Isaac to find a wife (Gen.27:43).
So I am saying that Esau’s marriages were a rebuke to Isaac, to his non-involvement, his fatalism about whom his boys would marry and when. Isaac had failed to keep his promise to God. He had failed to instruct his children as Abraham his father had been careful to instruct him. We do not say, “Well, I will not interfere in my children’s lives. I am not going to tell them what is right and wrong. I am going to let them find out everything the hard way, by trial and error, by pain and perplexity, all by themselves.” We would not treat our children so cruelly. We will warn them about drug-taking and alcoholism and about becoming bullies and violent people, and emphasize to them duties, and the fact that other children exist, and they also have rights, and children must learn to wait their turn, and step aside, and be patient. Life does not revolve around an individual child. No child is an island. We are always belonging to a group, and we can encourage and help that group or we can increase its burden of cares. We will certainly tell our children about kindness and affection and respect and giving honour to whom honour is due. We will not brain-wash them; we will not abuse them, but we will share with them the blessedness and joy we ourselves have found in knowing the living God and doing his will. We are persuaded that there is a glory in this, and we don’t want to rob them of it by being silent. If the evolutionists are not silent we too will be quick to open our mouths.
ii] It was a rebuke to Esau. Esau was the first born of Isaac who had been the only child of Sarah and Abraham. If the aged Abraham had held him in his arms (and that seems to have been the case) he would have looked at him as the one in line to inherit the promises God had made to him. There had been Isaac, praise Jehovah! Now there was Esau! God was faithful! Yet what sadness was going to come from this baby’s life; Esau was to sell his birthright cheaply, for a bowl of lentil stew! Something so holy and precious thrown away in exchange for something utterly paltry. Esau could not have made a more eloquent gesture concerning his indifference to his birthright as the first born son and inheritor of this extraordinary promised inheritance.
Now Esau further despises the promise by deliberately taking two Canaanite women as his wives. Remember from Jehovah’s covenant with Abraham that the children of the Canaanites must one day be destroyed by the children of Abraham. That is part of God’s promise in giving to Abraham this land, but Esau jumps in and mixes the two lines, and his parents woke up to the announcement of what he’d done with broken hearts. Their daughters-in-law “were a source of grief to Isaac and Rebekah” (v.35). You find his mother and father talking together and his mother saying, “I’m disgusted with living because of these Hittite women” (Gen. 27:46). Were they loud, and coarse, and contemptuous of her and Isaac and their faith in Jehovah? Was it all take and no give by Judith and Basemath their daughters-in-law? Yes, all of that and more, but in spite of all of those things old Isaac was still prepared to give Esau his blessing (Gen. 27:4), if only Esau would kill a deer and make his old greedy father some venison pie. Both father and son, I say, seem to have been living in such a worldly way. The things of the world were so important to them. Great decisions were made on such carnal foundations; Isaac seems to have left his first love and have lost the divine gift of wisdom. Once he mediated in the fields; not any longer. Father and son have become lukewarm in their faith.
They are a great warning to us. Are you finding the companionship and wit and humour of the world more stimulating than the fellowship of the godly? Beware! Grey hairs are on you and you know it not. Are you finding the taste of good food enough to make you forget the marriage-feast of the Lamb that lies before you? Beware! Jesus said to some that because they were neither hot nor cold he would spew them out of his mouth. Beware of a religion that simply looks back to the early days, the good old days when you first knew the Lord. Even those days were not as you dream of them. Do not believe in the rosy glow of past religion. Then God had hidden realities from you in order to help you on your way as a toddler Christian. In your early walk with God you were an immature person. It was not that those were the days you were living for the Lord 100 per cent but not so today. There was an immaturity and big self then as there is today. It just takes another form now. The challenge at this moment is to love him with all your heart and to love your neighbour as yourself. Are you asking God to help you? Are you crying mightily to him to make you this day no longer a child, living in the past, and no longer luke-warm in the present, but a person who wants henceforth to be spent in serving the King of heaven?
2. THE MARRIAGE WAS IN DEFIANCE OF THE CLEAR WORD OF GOD.
The Lord had made it plain that his people should not marry those who serve and worship other gods. That is non-negotiable. It is not an understanding you arrive at after much prayer. It is a decision you take in simple obedience. It is not a matter of guidance. Let me show you this in the Scriptures; let us establish this fact that believers should not marry unbelievers. Let’s wake up and shuffle through the leaves of our Bibles together. Let’s fill this holy place with the noise of the turning of the pages of Scripture.
i] Genesis 6:2, “the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.” Let us say that the best meaning of this phrase ‘sons of God’ is that it refers to the promised line, the seed of the woman, while the ‘daughters of men’ refers to all the natural offspring of mankind, women indifferent and hostile to their Creator. The seed of God and the seed of Satan were by these marriages intermingled and compromised – through this plague of mixed marriages, and this results in the following generations being not just cool to God but far worse, every imagination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually (Gen. 6:5). Right after the fall of man (only two other chapters have passed since Genesis 3) this problem is found in the world.
ii] Exodus 34: 15&16 “Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land; for when they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice to them, they will invite you and you will eat their sacrifices. And when you choose some of their daughters as wives for your sons, and those daughters prostitute themselves to their gods, they will lead your sons to do the same.” They are words of God through Moses as to what happens when faith grows cold, and the worship of fertility gods beings and temp
le prostitution becomes acceptable in the Land of Promise. It was considered just as valid and acceptable a way of worshipping God as by the Tabernacle and its sacrifices and the confessing of sins at God’s altar. God is warning them, “Soon your sons will be marrying these good looking pagans and soon they will be off to the fertility rites. Ideas have legs; and these legs will be walking off to temple prostitutes.”
iii] Deuteronomy 7:3&4 “Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you.” In this context the Hittites are particularly named as one of the people your sons are not to marry at any time. You want blessing on your marriage? Then why play with the fire of God’s anger as your children are influenced by those gods your spouse worships, and your kids are finding worshiping them much more fun than worshiping the Lord?
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