In the providence of God we reached this text on Valentine's Day. Now Valentine's Day is not a Christian holiday, but its theme is certainly a biblical theme. It is not, to be sure, the theme of this chapter of Genesis. As I will want to demonstrate next Lord's Day, this chapter is really about something else and something very important to the developing story of these chapters in the toledot or family history of Isaac. Chapter 26 has to do with the demonstration that the blessing of Abraham was handed on to Isaac. But, there happens to be in the detail of the chapter a confirmation of God's interest in wedded love and, it being Valentine's Day, it seemed unwise to pass that detail by. It was our Savior, in John 10:35, who taught us that every single word in the Bible is important. And we have found ourselves, in the reading of God's Word, that not only the main points but the details of the argument, the background, the illustrations, serve to communicate God's heart and will to us. Here we have the patriarch in a romantic embrace. That is not in the Bible for nothing!

Nor do I apologize for taking an entire sermon to consider it. It is a subject of immense personal importance as everyone knows. The question of romance bears mightily on the happiness of human beings and Christians among them. The lack of it can be very destructive to faith and life. The loss of it can be one of life's greatest sorrows. The hunger for it can make a man or woman almost uncaring of anything else.

Twenty years into my ministry I understand this better than I did before and I am much more sensitive to the difficulty in preaching the subject than I once was. For some folk romantic love -- which at first glance would seem as happy a subject for preaching as there is -- is a matter of the deepest disappointment. And it is so for people both married and unmarried. Either because they do not yet enjoy it and fear they never will or because they had it and lost it, discussions of romantic love are painful for them, salt in an open wound.

Then there are others who are embarrassed by the subject. It is an area of life and conduct, after all, where a great many people have made capital errors. Whether under the influence of strong desires, or cooling interest, or fear, people look back upon their romance with regret or shame. The subject cannot be discussed without self-recrimination rising in the heart.

And then, there are people whose experience has made them cynical, hard, and unbelieving about the entire matter. They are inclined to think the whole notion of romantic love something of a fairy tale; not something, perhaps, that never occurs, but something that is rare enough not to set one's hopes upon. They have come to take a much more prosaic view of sex and marriage and, if the truth be told, somewhat resent the suggestion that they are missing something important if they are missing the passion of romance.

But there is too much romance in the Bible for us either to avoid the subject or to think it unimportant. It is a crucial part of the Bible's understanding both of human life and God's blessing in the life of his people. We have it in the most straightforward, unblushing presentation in Proverbs, in the Song of Songs, even in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. But, we have it first here, in the form of an illustration. It is, I believe, the first romantic picture we are given in the Bible after Adam's celebration of Eve in Genesis 2. I don't say that there wasn't romance before this -- of course there was. The love of men and women is integral to human life as God made it. But this is the first portrait of a romantic couple in the Bible, this scene of Isaac caressing Rebekah (v. 8).

But, before we go further with this theme, we need to consider the context, because it alters the way we think about what is happening here.

Commentators on Genesis 26 are quick to point out the obvious. The chapter seems definitely out of place. 25:19-34 introduces the tension between Jacob and Esau. That narrative is resumed at 26:34 and if 26:34 came immediately after 25:34 the narrative would be seamless. But, here in the middle, we have this account of Isaac among the Philistines and then the Lord's blessing of Isaac. But, there is more than just this. It does not seem in chapter 26 that Rebekah is a mother. It is easy for her to pass as Isaac's unmarried sister. Where are the twins, Esau and Jacob, in this account? They have disappeared. What Moses seems to have done in arranging his material is to stick chapter 26:1-33 in this place as an anachronism; he intentionally located it out of place in the chronological order of events. What is described in the chapter actually happened in the years before the birth of Isaac and Rebekah's twin sons. But it is put here for several reasons: 1) to show what the blessing is that Jacob and Esau will struggle for in chapter 27; 2) to demonstrate that Isaac's problem was not the lack of God's blessing -- he had been given everything his father Abraham had been given; he wanted for nothing; and 3) to show that Jacob did not need to deceive in order to inherit the blessing -- Isaac neither lied nor fought to obtain the blessing; God graciously gave it to him. Jacob could have done the same!

So, the picture we have of Isaac and Rebekah here is not of them in the later years of their marriage, not when their sons are young men themselves. This event apparently happened earlier in their lives, during those twenty years between their wedding and the birth of their twin sons. And, it apparently happened before Isaac began that spiritual slide, later in his life, that was to do such untold harm to his family and his descendants, that slide that explains, as we said several weeks ago, why Isaac is "gapped" in the record of the patriarchs. It is true he sins here, very badly. But his sin is not the settled spiritual indifference, the chronic worldliness and sensuality that would someday far too much overtake his heart.

So, then, what have we here? We have a man, unfortunately a cowardly man, who placed his wife -- and so the covenant seed -- in jeopardy. Fearing that he might be killed by someone seeking to gain his beautiful wife, he lied to the people where he was and said that Rebekah was his sister and, dutiful wife that she was, Rebekah went along with the lie. What she thought about her husband's cowardice and commitment to her we are left to guess. But this deceit was maintained, we read in v. 8, "for a long time," indicating that Isaac's fears were unfounded. No one had sought to take Rebekah. But once the lie had been spoken, he couldn't go back on it. He and she were stuck with being brother and sister! But one day Abimilech, by accident as it were, sees them "caressing." The NIV's translation is good. The word literally means "playing", but in the sense of a euphemism for intimacy that would be appropriate only between lovers, and so, only between spouses.

It is a lovely picture. Isaac loved Rebekah in the way in which a husband ought to love his wife. He betrayed her by his cowardice, but his actions finally spoke louder than his words. He couldn't help but give away his true relation to his wife by the way in which his passion and his affection got the better of him.

And that is the Bible's picture of married love. Whether it is the father in Proverbs 5 wishing for his son a romantic and erotic marriage as the true and permanent antidote to sexual sin or whether it is the breathless passion of the Song of Songs or whether it is the stately Paul the Apostle reminding Christian couples not to underestimate the importance of their marital passion to everything else in their Christian lives. The Bible celebrates this and I have no doubt that we are to take verse 8 not only as an explanation of how God saw to the protection of the covenantal patriarch and matriarch, but as the picture of something beautiful that existed in that marriage and was the means to the blessing of that couple. That a man should caress his wife is a good thing, a beautiful thing, a most important thing. That he should be unable to resist the urge to do so even when discovery of his love might prove dangerous to himself is still more beautiful. This is the teaching of this small piece of Isaac and Rebekah's personal history.

And perhaps especially in our culture and in our historical moment we need to be reminded of this. We are a culture that still celebrates romance, but we have deeply conflicted, deeply ambiguous, deeply confused ideas about it. Our culture has separated sexual attraction and romantic love from marriage so completely that it has had to develop a completely different understanding of romantic love. Romantic love is tied to sex in our culture but not to marriage. It is something that is, for that reason, intrinsically impermanent, insecure, uncertain. It becomes, in that social context, something that one practices only for oneself, one's own pleasure. And the result is this terrible double alienation we see everywhere in our culture: an alienation from true love, which cannot exist without the expectation of permanence, sacrifice, and self-giving, a true union of lives; and, at the same time, an alienation from marriage, the only possible means to that missing fulfillment, but which now, after many experiences of dating, mating, and separation, seems impossible and more and more actually become impossible. This latter attitude toward marriage is what some commentators have called "commitment terror." [Gallagher, Abolition of Marriage, 166] The soaring divorce rate hasn't helped either, of course. When one sexual relationship follows another, marriage too often becomes simply another relationship that has ended, but with many more complications to deal with. Demographers now estimate that upwards of 65% of new marriages now fail. So while we crave romantic love as much as people ever have, for we were created for it and have the longing within our very natures, our culture has, to justify its life and practices, been required to reduce its expectations significantly.

Natalie Cole may, with the technology of the 90s, be able to sing a lovely love song as a duet with her father Nat King Cole, who died when she was a little girl:

"When I fall it love, it will be forever, or I'll never fall in love... "When I give my heart, it will be forever, or I'll never give my heart..." "And the moment that I feel that you feel that way too, is when I'll fall in love with you."

But that, alas, has not been Miss Cole's own experience in love in the 90s! Listen to Allen Bloom, in his Closing of the American Mind [122-124]:

"The best point of entry into the very special world inhabited by today's students is the astonishing fact that they usually do not, in what were once called love affairs, say, 'I love you,' and never, 'I'll always love you.' One student told me that, of course, he says 'I love you,' to girlfriends, 'when we are breaking up.' It is the clean and easy break -- no damage, no fault -- at which they are adept. This is understood to be morality, respect for other persons' freedom.

"Young people, and not only young people, have studied and practiced a crippled eros that can no longer take wing, and does not contain within it the longing for eternity...

"When I hear such things, all so sensible and in harmony with a liberal society, I feel that I am in the presence of robots. This ideology only works for people who have had no experience of the feelings, have never loved, have abstracted from the texture of life. ...Their lack of passion, of hope, of despair, of as sense of the twinship of love and death, is incomprehensible to me. When I see a young couple who have lived together throughout their college years leave each other with a handshake and move out into life, I am struck dumb.

"[Women] despise what men used to think women had to offer (that is partly why it is now offered so freely), but they are dogged by doubt whether men are very impressed by what they are now offering instead. Distrust suffuses the apparently easy commerce between the sexes. There is an awful lot of breaking up, surely disagreeable, though nothing earthshaking. Exam time is a great moment for students to separate. They are under too much stress and too busy to put up with much trouble from a relationship.

"'Relationships,' not love affairs, are what they have. Love suggests something wonderful, exciting, positive and firmly seated in the passions. A relationship is gray, amorphous, suggestive of a project, without a given content, and tentative."

But this is not the Bible's view at all. It requires that love and death be held together, that the "forever" in true love be protected at all costs, but, also, from beginning to end, it calls upon men and women to experience in marriage a romantic passion and to settle for nothing less. For all his faults, Isaac was a true Christian husband in this and Rebekah a true Christian wife. Isaac treasured his wife, he had deep feelings for her, his love for her was filled with what the Germans call "Sehnsucht" -- longing -- physical, spiritual, emotional longing.

The Bible can speak, to be sure, of the obligations of marriage, of the specific duties of husbands and wives. It can sometimes speak in a way that might give someone the impression that it has a more practical, commonsensical, utilitarian view of marriage: as, for example, when Paul recommends marriage as an antidote to sexual sin or when he advises young widows to marry in order to avoid an idle and indolent life and the temptations of a busybody (1 Timothy 5:11-15). Marriage is too fundamental a part of life and too important to the outworking of a Christian life not to have many purposes and to be spoken of in many ways in the Bible.

But, when the Bible shows us a good marriage, at its beginning or at its end, it always shows us a man or woman or both who love each other deeply, who delight in one another, and who find that attraction the more pure and the more powerful precisely because it is unto death. I don't say, of course, that a Christian marriage is always this way. Alas, it is not. But you will never hear from this pulpit that it is not supposed to be this way, that it is not the calling, the sacred calling of Christian husbands and wives to make it this way, that it is not to be the expectation of men and women when they marry that they should love one another in this powerful way of delight and longing and exclusive devotion.

You may have heard recently the deeply disappointing report concerning Paul Johnson, the English historian and journalist, whose books have been so eagerly read by large numbers of Bible believing Christians. His history of the twentieth century, Modern Times, is nothing short of a masterpiece and he has written other major works of real value, including a history of Christianity and of the Jews. His book, Intellectuals, published in 1988, was a learned and highly interesting demonstration of the fact that intellectuals, the people who have shaped the philosophical and moral directions of our society, are very often profound hypocrites; people whose own lives are the demonstration that no one need pay any attention to what they say! In that book he described in detail the personal immorality of such intellectual luminaries as Rousseau, Marx, Ibsen, and Sartre. All of these men proclaimed a new morality for the world to follow, but, themselves, lived genuinely ugly lives in many ways and left a trail of broken hearts and damaged lives behind them. Johnson himself is a devout Roman Catholic. But now, we learn that for years he has kept a mistress. He frequently mentions his wife, Marigold, in his newspaper columns, and had recently published a tribute to her and to his marriage. Infuriated, and fearing that she was about to be rejected for a new girlfriend, the mistress went public and even gave an English tabloid a tape recording in which Johnson admits his adultery.

The press, of course, has loved to find a champion of the old, Christian morality caught flagrante delicto, red-handed, in a gigantic hypocrisy of his own. And there is no doubt that damage has been done. Johnson has confirmed the suspicion of many in our culture that such a life of exclusive and life-long devotion to a single person is only possible if expectations are lowered and one contents himself or herself with a marriage that is polite and useful but not passionate and full of intense pleasure and longing. Why, Margaret Mead thought people were doing well if they could get five good years out of a marriage. She wanted the church to develop services of separation that would celebrate the ending of a marriage and send the partners on to their next relationships.

But no honest reader of the Bible can permit the lowering of standards in that way in the matter of wedded romantic love. Even those Christians who have been the most deeply disappointed in love cannot accept that the Scripture permits us to believe that a Christian marriage should be anything less than the passionate devotion of a man and a woman for one another and delight in one another. And the more they have the interests of God and his gospel on their hearts, the more they will care that the Christian marriages around them are a demonstration of God's wisdom and goodness to his people. In our culture, in this time of such trouble and misery in the matter of love, how powerful a testimony such marriages must be, all the more when it is clear that lying beneath them is the gift and the blessing of God and the possibilities for lasting love that are created by a man and a woman's commitment to live according to the will and the law of God.

You men know how well you have cultivated your wives affections and you women know how well you have welcomed and returned that romantic attention. You stand before the Lord here also. At this point as well you must give an account of your lives to God. Here also you love or fail to love the Savior of your souls. You young people -- here too is what it means to be a Christian -- not only to reserve your sexual life for marriage, but to commit yourself to a life of passion and romance in marriage!

The Lord Christ would never have compared his love for you, his love for his church, to the love of human marriage, of husband and wife -- which he does very often in the Bible -- unless he thought and we had been taught to think that married love is something very wonderful, powerful, delightful, life-giving, ardent, thrilling, and permanent.

It is the glory of the Christian church that, even in a culture such as ours, she holds before her people and the world this concept, this picture of married love, this and nothing less! "Will you pledge your faithfulness to her...as long as you both shall live." "With this ring, I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow!"

It was such a love that, in the providence of God, saved Isaac and Rebekah and the covenant seed, from disaster. It is such a love that has saved countless men and women through the ages from spiritual shipwreck. And it is this love, this holy romantic desire and delight that still today brings the most profound credit to God who made all human beings to long for this love and then, in his word, shows his people how to have it and keep it through the years of our lives.

Isaac was a very foolish man to have risked such love. But he was a very wise man to have demonstrated it as he did. Perhaps he couldn't help himself, you say. Perhaps not. But then, he had never even met his wife until they married. And see how he loved her now! I give the second to the last word to the Puritan Thomas Watson. It is a word to husbands, but it applies, necessary changes being made, to wives as well.

"It is not having a wife, but loving a wife, that makes a man live chastely. He who loves his wife, whom Solomon calls his fountain, will not go abroad to drink of muddy, poisoned waters. Pure conjugal love is a gift of God, and comes from heaven; but like the vestal fire, it must be cherished, that it go not out. He who loves not his wife, is the likeliest person to embrace the bosom of a stranger."

Or, in other words, as the Scripture always tells us, there is but one way to deepen love, to purify it, to warm it: and that is to speak it and to practice it! His love for Rebekah saved Isaac and Rebekah too. t will do the same, in many ways, for every Christian in every marriage.

The last word belongs to another Puritan, Thomas Gataker. This is from a sermon published in 1635. Quoting Proverbs 5:15, he tells the listening husband concerning his wife:

"Joy and delight in her. Drink,' saith the wise man, 'the water of thine own cistern. Let thy fountain be blessed: ... and rejoice in the wife of thy youth: let her be unto thee as the loving hind, and the pleasant roe: let her breasts...content thee at all times: and delight continually,...even dote on the love of her.' As if the Holy Ghost did allow some such private dalliance and behaviour to married persons between themselves as to others might seem dotage: such as may be was Isaac's sporting with Rebekah."

"[It is] an illusion of Satan, whereby he usually persuades the merry Greeks of the world; That if they should once devote themselves to the service of Jesus Christ, that then they must bid an everlasting farewell to all mirth and delight; that then all their merry days are gone; that in the kingdom of Christ, there is nothing, but sighing and groaning, and fasting and prayer. But see here the contrary: even in the kingdom of Christ, and in his house, there is marrying and giving in marriage, drinking of wine, feasting, and rejoicing even in the very face of Christ." [Cited in D. Doriani, "The Puritans, Sex, and Pleasure" WTJ 53 (1991) 131.]

We are sinners and we fail often. But there is grace for us and help and blessing if only we will content ourselves with nothing less than that blessing which Christ has promised to husbands and wives. Or, to put it in another way, seeing as we are reading a chapter about the blessing of God that came to Isaac, so long as we will content ourselves with nothing less than what Isaac and Rebekah had!

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