In the last session, I made the point that Esau’s mantle might equally have been called Isaac’s mantle or Thomas’ mantle. But I call it Esau’s mantle because that’s how Jesus treated it. Obviously He wasn’t prepared to blunt the shock of God showing favour to the ‘hated’ one.
Now the mandate carried by this mantle is, as I indicated last time, about reconciliation between brothers. This legacy passed down from Isaac to Esau.
Isaac often gets overlooked in the sweep of Scriptural history. I consider him one of the most underrated men in the Bible. Sandwiched between his father Abraham and his son Jacob, both of whom travelled to distant lands, came face to face with God, and lived adventurous, conflict-filled lives, Isaac seems passive. Almost boring. Things happen to Isaac; he rarely seems to be the instigator of the happenings.
Who’d want to emulate Isaac when a role model like Abraham is available? Who’d want to carry the wood of sacrifice as Isaac did up Mount Moriah and Jesus did at Calvary?
Isaac’s achievements are quiet and understated but, in many ways, he’s a spiritual giant compared to his father or his son.
First of all, Isaac wasn’t passive in the way Adam was passive. Adam was there, in the garden, with Eve while the serpent was messing with her mind. He did nothing to correct her misunderstanding of God’s instruction about the tree, and he did nothing to stop her eating the forbidden fruit. This wasn’t Isaac’s kind of passivity.
Isaac was a man who tried to set things right in the ethical and moral sphere. He made his own bad judgments as a result, but the overall pattern of his behaviour indicates he was trying to rectify his father’s mistakes. Only overall because, of course, he repeats his father’s deception at Gerar.
Unlike his father who had three wives, and both his sons who had four apiece, Isaac had only one.
Unlike his father who fell in with his wife’s plan to get a son through a maidservant, Isaac prayed for his wife to conceive.
Unlike his father who tolerated abuse towards his firstborn, he honoured his firstborn—going to the opposite extreme and favouring him.
Also unlike his father who cast out his firstborn so that the younger could inherit all, and unlike his son Jacob who spoke as if his ten of his twelve sons had never even existed, he was ready to apportion a blessing to both when he realised his health was failing.
Certainly, he wasn’t impartial but, compared to both those who came before him and after him, he was evidently trying to be fair. Especially since the traditional role of the firstborn was to take responsibility for the widows and orphans of the wider family in the case of the demise of any younger siblings.
Isaac was a man who tried to avoid conflict. When the herdsmen of the king of Gerar clash with Isaac’s shepherds, filling up the ancient wells with dirt and then stealing the new wells Isaac digs, he doesn’t engage with them, either by fighting back or retaliating with tit-for-tat theft. He simply moves on, prayerfully, until at last he is able to say in Genesis 26:22 NET, ‘The Lord has made room for us, and we will to prosper,’ and there is no longer any competition over the water.
Isaac was a man who, most importantly of all, fostered reconciliation. No doubt this was made easier by his avoidance of conflict but it was also made harder by duplicity and jealousy. He’d deceived the king of Gerar in the same way his father had done—over a beautiful wife—and created distrust. When his crops then yielded a hundredfold and he became so wealthy that the neighbours in Gerar became jealous, he was ordered by the king to leave the country. Later, however, the king comes to him and proposes a covenant. That would not have been possible unless trust had been restored.
The greatest reconciliation Isaac achieved was with his half-brother Ishmael. We learn that, at the very end of Abraham’s life, both Isaac and Ishmael buried him together. That would not have been possible if Isaac didn’t know exactly where Ishmael was and send for him in time to attend their dying father. Furthermore, the stories of Hagar and Ishmael after they left Abraham’s home could only have become part of tribal history if someone had been in contact with them to hear them and pass them down as relevant to family history. The hints of how it happened are all laid out in Scripture. They’re subtle, they’re allusive, they’re fragmentary. But they’re hidden in plain sight.
The fate of Isaac after his father tries to sacrifice him on Mount Moriah is unclear at first. Abraham is mentioned rejoining his servants and going home, but no mention is made of Isaac. If you’d been hearing the story for the first time, you’d wonder: What happened? Did the angel speak in time? Did Abraham obey? Is Isaac alive? Or dead?
We get to hear of Abraham’s return to Beersheba, of news of his relatives, of Sarah’s death and the negotiations for her burial and—finally—a hint that Isaac is alive when Abraham sends off his servant to find a bride for him. At last, Isaac himself comes back into the story. We discover he’s been living at Beer-Lahai-Roi. The last time this locality was mentioned in Scripture, it was in Hagar’s story. She met an angel there. Abused, traumatised, wandering the desert, this was the well where she met God and called Him the living One who sees me.
Suddenly the story unfolds. Isaac was apparently traumatised by his father’s actions on Mount Moriah. He’d been the beloved, adored, doted-on son who suddenly, out of the blue, faced a death threat from none other than his father. How can anyone process that kind of grief? Maybe by going to the one person he knew who had experienced something very similar before him: Ishmael, beloved one day, cast out the next, facing death in the desert from thirst.
Isaac seems to have sought out Hagar and Ishmael and reconciled with them. Esau, who took after his father, not only married Ishmael’s daughter, but apparently followed in his footsteps when it came to reconciling with his estranged twin brother, Jacob.
Jacob, on returning after more than twenty years, expected a confrontation, not a welcome. Yet Esau invited him home—not coincidentally to the same area as Ishmael and Hagar’s home—and Jacob accepted. But then he went off another way.
Hundreds of years later, the descendants of Esau refuse to accept the assurances of the Israelites that they’ll pass through Edomite territory without leaving the highway.
But how could it be otherwise? Esau would have instructed his children, ‘Watch out for the sons of Jacob. Don’t trust them. If they take after their father, they’ll be deceivers. He never changed, even to the last. He said one thing and did another.’
The lack of reconciliation between the brothers had immense generational consequences. Instead of an alliance between the Israelites and Edomites, there was—with occasional exceptions—hostility and violence.
Until Jesus took a hand in the history.
This is Grace Drops and I’m Anne Hamilton. May Jesus of Bethlehem bring reconciliation in your family.
Thank you to Lorna Skinner of www.riversofmusic.co.uk for the background music.
