We will read the text as announced, the text we read last Lord's Day morning. But, this morning I want to consider these verses, the second half of chapter 25, as an introduction to the entire account of Jacob and Esau, from their birth and youthful antagonisms to their maturity of life. What is introduced here, at least the main themes, continues to be the primary subject of the narrative as it continues.

The major themes of this material include a great struggle over the blessing, over the inheritance of the blessing, between Isaac and Rebekah and between Jacob and Esau. The heir of Abraham who receives the blessing, is to be the bearer of life -- life that saves the world from death, life that is worthy to be called life, life that has within it the presence and fellowship of God himself and eternal fulfillment as human beings.

And how that blessing comes to Jacob and not Esau is a most fundamental lesson in the Bible. We know that with certainty because the Bible itself returns to this material many times and in many ways to draw out attention to its lessons.

And the lesson comes in the classic form of biblical teaching, with two truths, at polar opposites from one another, two truths that only together, only held in tension with one another, only both given their due at the same time, enable us to think rightly about our salvation and to practice rightly our salvation. Indeed, it is not at all too much to say that the whole message of the Bible is here in a historical and personal form in the account of Jacob and Esau. Get this, and you get everything. Mistake this and you must go deeply wrong.

Let me try to demonstrate this.

Paul himself, you remember, preached sermons on this text. We can surely assume that what he wrote in his letters was first in his preaching. And he wrote of this history and its lesson in his letters, especially in Romans 9:10-15. He has already made the point, in the early verses of chapter 9, that the fact that Israel had not believed in Jesus is no proof that God's promise and covenant had failed. For, he says, "not all who are descended from Israel are Israel." And in proving that proposition he reminds his readers that not all the descendants of Abraham were heirs of the promise. It was Isaac through whom the promise was to be fulfilled, not Ishmael. And then he proceeds:

"Not only that, but Rebekah's children had one and the same father, our father Isaac. Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad -- in order that God's purpose in election might stand: not by works but by him who calls -- she was told, 'The older will serve the younger.' [He is citing our text here, Genesis 25:23.] (Paul goes on) Just as it is written, 'Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.' [A citation from Malachi 1:2-3, a demonstration of how this history and its lessons are referred to throughout the Bible.] (Paul concludes) What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! For he says to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.' It does not, therefore, depend on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy."

That is the point that the Apostle Paul takes away from the text in Genesis we have read and the history it records of Jacob being preferred and not Esau: salvation depends not on man's effort, but on God's choice, or election; the mercy he gives to one and not to another. The sermon Paul preached on Genesis 25:19-34 was entitled: "Divine Election."

And he was absolutely right to draw the lesson he drew from this text. It is writ large over this history of Jacob and Esau, and not only here in chapter 25, but through the entire history.

Think of the divine initiative and the divine choice and the divine working that lies behind Jacob's receiving the blessing. See how God determines it all.

First, God opened Rebekah's barren womb. It is precisely to demonstrate that Rebekah was not going to have children by any normal means, that she and Isaac were themselves helpless, that twenty years elapsed between their marriage and the birth of their twin sons. And the attention drawn to Isaac's prayers for his wife and for a child only further accents the point: God must give the child, and it is God who does give them children.

Second, -- and this is the point Paul especially draws attention to -- before the sons were born, God told Rebekah what would be the outcome of their lives, and which of the two sons would have his blessing and carry his blessing onward. You cannot read v. 23 to mean anything else. It was God's doing, God's choice, God's favor, that accounts for Jacob getting the blessing.

This is confirmed, thirdly, by the fact that God contravenes the norms of the culture, the laws of primogeniture, that would have guaranteed Esau, as Isaac's firstborn, the blessing and the right of inheritance. That the younger precedes the elder further demonstrates that the outcome is not the result of ordinary, human factors.

Fourth, the Lord, as we will read in chapter 27, in order to get Jacob the blessing, overrides even the patriarch's right to bless his sons. Isaac intends to bless Esau, but blesses Jacob instead. You know the story. But God honors Isaac's blessing of Jacob. He didn't have to, but he did, and made Jacob the heir of the promise, came to him, and made the covenant again with him.

Later, to get Jacob the blessing and to reinstate him in the promised land as the bearer of God's covenant blessing, God must override Laban's social position, as a superior to Jacob -- which God does in the most supernatural way, as we will see -- and then, as Jacob returns to the promised land, God must overcome Esau's military might to protect Jacob from his estranged brother, which God again does.

And sixth, and finally, from the beginning to the end of this material, God must continue to bless and protect and prosper Jacob in spite of Jacob's sins: the shortcomings, the failures, the betrayals that the Scripture makes no effort to hide. Jacob was not worthy of this blessing. On his part, he stole it: he took advantage of his older brother's weakness and he lied and cheated his own father. But God grants him the blessing.

The history proves Paul's point. Salvation, the inheriting of the blessings of God's covenant -- this is God's doing. It can be explained, accounted for in no other way. And not only here, in regard to Jacob and Esau, but everywhere else in the Bible and everywhere else in the salvation of men and women.

As Pascal put it so memorably: "To make a man a saint, grace is absolutely necessary; and whoever doubts this does not know what a saint is, nor what a man is." And Pascal, disciple of Augustine that he was, meant nothing other by the word "grace" than God's sovereign election, his choice to save a man or woman, and then his sovereign working in that man or woman's heart.

And this is divine grace and mercy. That is Paul's point and Moses' here in Genesis 25. Jacob did not deserve to be the inheritor of God's promise; nor did Esau. The striking thing is not that Esau was not shown this mercy, but that Jacob was. Think of this, the angels were all individuals. There was no family or covenantal relationship between them as mankind has with Adam. They did not fall because Satan fell. Each was judged individually for his own actions. Those who sinned were condemned, immediately and forever. There was no grace, no redemption for them. How amazing it must seem to them that out of all the sinful, rebellious, unworthy human beings in the world, some, so many, are loved by God and saved by his grace!

There is no way you can handle this material here in Genesis, the account of Jacob and Esau, in any other way than as an account of God bestowing his favor on one unworthy man in a way he did not bestow it upon another.

And that raises questions in the mind. Surely it does. And we haven't the time to deal with them in all the ways the Bible does deal with them. We haven't even the time to deal with them as Paul does himself in Romans 9. He immediately anticipates the objections people will have and gives answers. But, let me hurriedly say just a few things.

First, if you receive this truth -- that salvation is of the Lord and that you are utterly dependent upon God's grace to you -- you will be a Jacob and not an Esau. If, on the other hand, you feel that you must have all your intellectual problems resolved and must suspend judgement until you are satisfied, then you will be judged -- hear me-- and you will deserved to be judged. And you will be last seen straining to untie some particular knot. Paul had it right: "Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?" Remember, God owes you nothing. You have chosen the way of sin ten thousand times ten thousand times. Even if there were some way to know ahead of time that you were an Esau (Lord Byron said that while Calvinism was true, he couldn't accept it!), you would have no grounds for complaint against God. You would get from him nothing but what you deserved and chose for yourself. You should be glad that at least some were treated with mercy. You were deprived of nothing; you got what was due you, nothing else. But, the fact is, you do not know and cannot know that you are an Esau, and the Bible invites you to be a Jacob. If you have questions about your own salvation, do what is in your power and lies at your hand to do. If you want to be sure that you will be an Esau, read pornography, or spend your life watching television or seek the diversions of this world. If you would be a Jacob, stay under the hearing of the Word of God, seek to believe and to obey it. If faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God, make it your business to know and believe the Word of God.

But here is the first truth of this material: Salvation is of the Lord. It comes because of divine election, a choice that God has made to bestow his favor on particular individuals. Nothing could be clearer in this material from Genesis 25:19 on.

But, in the second place, and over against that first truth, in this same material we have a great emphasis placed on the fact that the divine election and grace come to pass, are worked out through the covenant and through the response of God's covenant partners among men.

The promise God made to Rebekah, that her younger twin son would be advanced over the older, came to pass through, by means of the actions of the sons themselves, Jacob's and Esau's, and not in spite of anything they said or did. Always the divine sovereignty is mediated in salvation through the responses, the thoughts, the words, the deeds of human beings, through their faith or, contrarily, through their unbelief.

This is what makes the "covenant" so important in the Bible -- it is the other pole of salvation. If divine election and sovereign grace lie at one end, the covenant lies at the other. We are used to speaking in terms of sovereign grace and human responsibility. The Bible speaks instead of sovereign grace and the covenant. Covenant is the part of salvation that includes the human instrumentalities -- that which man does: faith, repentance, love, obedience, and perseverance in all of those until the end.

The Bible's doctrine of salvation is not fatalistic, as though God simply appoints the end irrespective of means. Those whom God chooses go to heaven, and that's that. No, it is God who is in you both to will and to act according to his good purpose. Our faith, our obedience, from beginning to end is crucial in the Bible. God's salvation does not come to pass in any life without it. And all of that -- the gospel that we believe, the law that we obey -- is what the Bible calls "the covenant."

And we see that too here. The covenant is God's promise and the summons to believe it and to live according to it. And, strange as it may seem to say it, Jacob did that! Jacob had faith and Esau did not; Jacob embraced God's covenant and Esau did not, and that difference explains the entire history. Jacob gets the blessing, in the final analysis, because he wants the blessing, he cares to have it. While Esau does not.

Now, don't mistake me. Jacob is not admirable in this history. But, in spite of his terrible faults and ugly sins -- in that too, of course, he is the father of all who believe in Christ, who while they live as Christians remain very sinful --, I say, in spite of his terrible faults, Jacob had the outlook of faith. He valued the seed of the covenant, the promise of God to bless Abraham's descendants through the covenant. He wanted to be that seed and to pass that seed on to the next generation. He identified with the land, it was always important to him, the promised land. Even when he had to leave it, he was always thinking about returning to it.

But, not so for Esau. Here in chapter 25 he dispenses with the seed of the covenant, with its inheritance, with his place in the line of God's saving grace in the world for some stew! The last sentence of the chapter tells us the significance of that. It really was, in Esau's case, more important to him to satisfy his hunger -- he wasn't going to starve to death! the great hunter? -- than to maintain his birthright as the inheritor of the promise of God. He despised it; he thought it nothing of importance.

And, then, at the end of the next chapter, we learn that Esau married two Hittite women. He had no concern for a holy seed, to pass on the life of faith in God to his children. He chose women to marry without thought for God's covenant. Not so Jacob, who, though his reasons were not unmixed, chose wives from among those who would care for the spiritual commitments of his family.

And, in another most revealing text, in chapter 32:3 we learn that Esau had gone to live in Edom, near Mt. Seir. He didn't have to live there, but he chose to. He preferred to live somewhere else than the promised land. The land that God had promised to Abraham and his descendants, the land that was -- as the Scripture everywhere teaches--the prefigurement of heaven, meant nothing special to Esau. He didn't give a thought to living somewhere else. While Jacob worked for years to have the wherewithal to return to the land of his father.

Esau throughout is concerned with immediate gratification and with prosperity as it is measured by the world. He had no taste for spiritual things. Jacob, on the other hand, is concerned about God's covenant, the promise of a spiritual seed and the land. And in Genesis, the tests of true faith are one's attitudes toward the promised seed and the promised land.

It is all the more interesting because in some ways it is easier to admire Esau in all of this history than it is to admire Jacob. In some ways he is a good character and comes off better than Jacob. He gives up his birthright but he doesn't steal it like Jacob; he never cheats and deceives his father as his younger brother will. We can even sympathize with Esau in his rage to have revenge upon his brother after he stole Isaac's blessing from him. But, at the end, at the dramatic conclusion to their history, when Jacob, returning to the promised land, feared Esau's wrath, Esau is more magnanimous than Jacob deserves for him to be. But, then, we have all faced the problem of this, haven't we. Of unbelievers who, in certain says, seem to us more attractive, more admirable, than some of the Christians we know.

But, still, at the end, Esau has no taste for God's covenant, no commitment to it; he does not identify with the things of God. Jacob, for all his terrible faults, does identify with the things of God. And there is the difference that divides the world!

What we see out in front of us, is God's covenant -- his promise to be his people's God, his summons addressed to sinful men to believe in him, to trust and obey him, to live before him and in fellowship with him. We see Jacob embracing that covenant and Esau rejecting it.

Behind all of that, of course, is a still more ultimate reality, which is also noticed here -- the election and sovereign grace of almighty God. And those two realities -- divine sovereignty and the history of God's covenant in the world -- are what we see everywhere in the Bible, from beginning to end. It is the Bible's philosophy of history. istory is the outworking of the divine purpose, fixed from eternity past. Christ is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. The saints were chosen in Christ, Paul writes, before the foundation of the world. Those who are appointed to salvation, believe. And many other things like those the Scripture says. But history is also the outworking of God's covenant, in which the faith and repentance of men and women bring salvation and in which unbelief cuts people off from that salvation.

The intersection of those two realities -- divine sovereignty in grace and the covenant -- is shrouded and must remain shrouded in mystery. But that each are true and vitally true, no one who believes the Bible can doubt.

And what then is the Christian mind and the Christian heart, but to believe absolutely that one's own salvation is God's gift and God's doing from beginning to end. I am saved to live forever because He chose me, Christ died to save me, the Holy Spirit came to work in my heart. "Jacob have I loved; Esau have I hated." This is the lesson Paul took from our text, the same lesson he puts this way in 1 Corinthians 1:30-31:

"It is because of [God] that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us...righteousness, holiness, and redemption. Therefore, as it is written, 'Let him who boasts boast in the Lord."

And, then, firm in that conviction, also to believe in the absolute necessity of faith in God and Christ and a life of faith, of embracing the covenant of God and living in it and according to it. As the author of the Letter to the Hebrews says, in arguing the necessity of faith and a persevering faith,

"By faith Abraham made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country...as did Isaac and Jacob who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God." (11:;9-10)

And what is the lesson of that for you and me? He tells us:

"So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised. ...we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who believe and are saved." (10:35-39)

Election and covenant. Divine grace and our faith, yours and mine. A God who does what pleases him in heaven and on earth; who works out all things according to the counsel of his will; and a God who summons men everywhere to repent and promises to save those and those only who trust in him. That is the Christian faith. And that is to be your life and mine. Every day, all day long, election and covenant. Salvation by grace and grace alone; and salvation through faith and faith alone.