v. 1 The mention of the earlier famine during Abraham's time invites comparison with that episode recorded in Genesis 12.

v. 2 "Live in the land where I tell you" is very like what God told Abraham -- "Go to the country that I tell you..."

v. 4 A virtual quotation of God's words to Abraham in 22:17-18.

v. 5 The gracious plan of God comes to pass through the faithfulness of the covenant partner.

v. 10 Isaac was supposed to be a blessing to the nations, not a curse.

v. 16 Though Isaac had been the sinner in his relations with Abimilech, God blesses him until the blessing poses a problem for him among Abimilech's people.

v. 17 Though very greatly blessed, Isaac remains a pilgrim!

v. 27 Isaac is suspicious at first.

v. 28 Even the peoples round about can see that Isaac is being blessed by God.

v. 29 "sent you away in peace" is a bit of a euphemism -- they drove Isaac out and took wells that belonged to him by a treaty Abimilech had made with Abraham. But Abimilech is trying to put the best face on their past dealings because he wants a non-aggression pact.

v. 31 As we read in Proverbs 16:7: "When a man's ways please the Lord, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him."

v. 33 As before he gives the place the same name as his father had, who had, in this same place, made a treaty with Abimilech (21:31). The water implies security for the future.

Liberal scholarship is sure that we have in Genesis 26 a doublet, a second telling of the same story, viz. the story of Abraham's trip to Egypt because of a famine, his lying about Sarah and saying she was his sister, his subsequent blessing by God, his return to his homeland much wealthier a man than he was when he left it, and so on. We find that history in Genesis 12:10-20. In the providence of God, this is a doublet, but a historical doublet, not a literary doublet. In fact the chapter begins by drawing our attention to this fact: this was not the same famine as happened in Abraham's time. But, that only alerts us to the many similarities between that history and this. What God has done is to repeat Abraham's personal history in Isaac's own life and to show Isaac and us that the promise and blessing that God gave to Abraham is now the possession of his son Isaac.

The whole chapter is repetitive in this way. And the extent of the repetition is a demonstration of how important this point is. So, listen carefully and soak it in.

There is a famine in Isaac's time, just as there was in Abraham's and it necessitated a move for him as it had for his father. So the chapter begins. Then comes the promise God makes to Isaac, an almost exact repetition of the promise God had made to Abraham after his faithfulness in the matter of God's command to sacrifice his son. This is followed by Isaac's stumble, his lie about Rebekah, an imitation of his father's similar lie, on not one but two occasions. But God spared Isaac, Rebekah, and the covenant seed, just as he had done twice before for Abraham. Then the blessing of God descends upon Isaac in a most striking way. Having protected him from harm, he now grants him a hundred-fold return of his crops; his flocks and herds grow very large, the number of servants he employs grows as well, and very soon he is an extraordinarily wealthy man. So wealthy, indeed, that his prosperity became a provocation to the people among whom he was living -- as it had in Abraham's case -- a sure demonstration of just how prosperous a man Isaac had become.

And then comes a kind of climactic demonstration of the point. Driven out of one place after another because of his prosperity, and the jealousy of the people of that land, the Lord provided for him everywhere he went until finally he came to Beersheba, where he built an altar and called upon the Lord, giving thanks to God for his provision, just as Abraham had done at the same place some years before (21:22-34). He made a treaty with the very same men -- Abimilech and Philcol -- with whom Abraham had made a treaty, and another well made it possible for Isaac to settle there as it had, before, for Abraham.

All of this is to show that Isaac has inherited the blessings God promised to his father and, lest we might miss that point, the promise itself that was made to Abraham is repeated twice to Isaac in this chapter: in vv. 3-4 and v. 24.

Now, we are to see this blessing that Isaac received and then, by God's promise, was to pass on to the next generation and eventually to the whole world as an image of salvation and eternal life. The Bible surely teaches us that we are to see this blessing in these terms. And, if so, we have a most complete picture of salvation here: of the way of God's grace in human life, of the experience of God's people, and of a true understanding of the life of Christ in the souls of men and women. In other words, in this account of Isaac receiving the blessing, we learn what the blessing is and how it comes to men.

Both men, Abraham and Isaac, stumbled badly because of weak faith, they even stumbled in the same way, but God blessed them anyway: a demonstration that the covenant blessings are not earned but freely given by a merciful God. As I have said before, it is characteristic in the history of salvation, as it is recorded in the Bible, that soon after God confirms his covenant in a new way, with a new generation, those who have been so favored fall into sin. When the covenant is nevertheless kept on God's part, we are taught that this covenant depends finally not on our deserving but on God's mercy. God makes his covenant with Noah and then Noah gets drunk and his son Ham sins against him. He makes the covenant with Abraham and Abraham goes down to Egypt, deserts the promised land, threatens the covenant seed, lies to Pharaoh, and yet God preserves and blesses him in spite of his sins. So here with Isaac. And it will be so with Jacob and with Judah and with David. And so with Peter the night of his betrayal. The Lord Christ has no sooner renewed his covenant with his church and people, represented by the twelve gathered around the first Lord's Table, than Peter denied him three times. This is a fundamental perspective on salvation enshrined in the history of God's covenant with his people -- God must keep this covenant because we do not. God must be merciful, because we are undeserving. And that is what we have here. Isaac no sooner hears God making his great promise to him in vv. 3-4, than he is lying to Abimilech and placing the covenant seed in jeopardy. Isaac wasn't worthy of this blessing. That is the point. God gave it to him anyway!

Here in this chapter we see this too: Isaac being faithful. We see it in his obeying God's command not to go down to Egypt. It took faith to stay in the promised land during a famine when all the world went to Egypt for food because the never-failing waters of the Nile meant that Egypt had food when no one else did. And we see Isaac's faith also in his building an altar and calling upon the Lord. Abraham's faithfulness is also mentioned, even said to be the reason for Isaac's blessing.

The reason the covenant is all of grace in the Bible and not of works is not because our faith, our response to God, our obedience is not necessary. It is and God says here explicitly that it is -- especially in v. 5 where he plainly says that Isaac's blessing is the reward of Abraham's obedience. The reason our faithfulness does not make salvation to some degree our doing, does not turn the covenant into a bargain, and does not destroy the principle of "salvation by grace alone" is twofold.

First the faith that God accepts and rewards is, in every case, a weak, an intermittent, and very imperfect faith, often a beggarly faith. Isaac does some things right in this narrative, but all around are his failures. He sins much better than he believes and the former chapter we have already considered and the chapter to come are the dismal proof of that. We have already explained that Isaac was "gapped" in this narrative, he was not treated as the other patriarchs, because of the disobedience of his later life. Even Isaac's faith -- necessary as it was -- must be forgiven. Christ must make up by his righteousness what is wanting even in what Isaac does right in his relationship with his God.

Then, in the second place, this faith is part of salvation by grace, our faith as it is and necessary as it is, because God himself gives the faith; even our faith is his doing. As Paul will later say: "faith is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast." Faith is necessary as the means that God has appointed by which to place his blessings in our hand. But left to ourselves, Isaac left to himself, there would be no faith. God must give the faith and then the blessings that come to faith. Faith is essential, but it is God's gift to us.

We are dealing with the most fundamental of all perspectives here. This is the Bible's philosophy of life and salvation. Salvation is utterly and completely a matter of God's grace to us; but it also absolutely requires our faith in God and our living by faith.

Isaac is blessed, on both occasions, explicitly and emphatically in v. 5 and in v. 24, because of what his father Abraham did, not because of what he did, though it is not denied but assumed that Isaac's own faithfulness was also required.

There is an emphatic particularity and individuality in salvation as the Bible teaches it. Each and every individual stands before God alone. Each must believe. Each must come to Christ and follow Christ -- at least those old enough to do so. The Bible will have none of this human penchant for blaming others for our sins, these thousands of ways we have to say "The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge." The soul that sins shall die, and the soul that believes shall live.

But all of that notwithstanding, there is this equal and equally emphatic emphasis on the connection between parents and children in both grace and judgment. Here is Isaac being blessed with the blessing of God, the blessings that stood for eternal life and heaven itself as the entire Scripture testifies, and what is the reason for that: "because Abraham obeyed me and kept my requirements, my commands, my decrees, and my laws." To be sure, he didn't keep them all that well -- but he really, genuinely kept them, as God measures the faithfulness of his children.

And all through the Bible we read the very same thing with the very same emphasis.

"...from everlasting to everlasting the Lord's love is with those who fear him, and his righteousness with their children's children -- with those who keep his covenant and remember to obey his precepts." (Psalm 103:17-18)

This glorious mercy of our most merciful God, the promise of the grace we have received also to be given to our children -- so long as parents are faithful to God in raising their children and keeping God's covenant. Grace and mystery here aplenty. But who can read the Bible and not admit that this is a very large part of what the Bible means by salvation -- a knowledge of God, peace with God, a life transformed by the love of God, and the presence of God in the soul -- not for ourselves only, but also for our children.

There is a corporate character, an organic character to God's blessing. It extends as a living thing to the rising generations, and, eventually, it will extend to the whole world -- being passed from heart to heart, mind to mind, mouth to mouth -- with God making a particular promise regarding parents and children and issuing a particular summons to parents regarding the spiritual nurture of their children.

There is an emphasis in this chapter on the largesse the Lord bestowed upon Isaac: all the wealth that mattered most in those days, in that part of the world -- flocks, crops, servants, and, especially water. And, much more than those things, the Lord's promise to be with his servant and with his children and descendants for generations to come; to make Isaac a means to the blessing of the entire world. There is no doubt that Isaac understood how generous God had been to him, how much he had been given. And, if he might otherwise have failed to notice, the people who lived around him noticed it for him!

But, at the same time, the blessing is not complete. Isaac does not get everything at once. Indeed, in at least two ways Isaac's life, even blessed as it was, was profoundly incomplete. First, many of the blessings God gave and promised were explicitly things that were to come in the future. The land was promised to him and to his descendants, as it had been to Abraham, though it was to be centuries before his descendants actually occupied Canaan as their very own. His impact on the entire world, which the Lord twice promises him in this chapter, was to come to pass only in the distant future, especially through the birth, nearly 2,000 years later, of Isaac's greatest descendant, Jesus of Nazareth. And, of course, insofar as the land is a sign and symbol of heaven itself, as all the patriarchs knew it was, Isaac wouldn't himself receive that final blessing until his life was over, and, in the fullest sense, until human history had run its entire course.

But, there is more. In a second way the blessing is incomplete. There is mixed together with all of these good things that God pours out on Isaac, difficulty and trouble. There is a famine -- true, God uses it to produce good, but famine it is. And there is Isaac's fear of the consequences. Sure, God overcomes that fear, but Isaac lived with it for some time. And then there is all the forced moving about -- from one place to another because of conflicts with the people round about; conflicts that are actually the result of God's blessing. And, then there is Esau and his foreign wives, and all the heartbreak that that rebellious son brought upon his parents. And this will not be the end of Isaac's sorrows. There is more of that to come. Chiaroscuro -- light and shadow. That is the Christian life. Blessings more than can be numbered; promises for the future that take the breath away. Above all, the immeasurable privilege of knowing God and knowing that God is gracious and merciful to you. But, meantime, having to bear many sorrows, to face many difficulties, sometimes even to stagger under the burden of life.

Is this not the true picture of the Christian life taught here in Isaac's personal history, as it is taught everywhere else in the Bible? A life that begins and ends in the grace of God, a salvation that is his free gift, a gift we do not and cannot earn. At the same time a life of faith in God and faithfulness to him, else it is not a Christian life at all. A life, a blessing, a salvation that is experienced not in isolation, but in the wholeness of family life, that embraces us in our dearest and deepest relationships. And, finally a life, a salvation, a blessing from God that is now -- so much we already have, so much we already enjoy in Christ Jesus our Savior and walking with him -- but also not yet -- so much we still must suffer and so much that requires that we struggle and strive to be faithful to the Lord, and so much that is for us and every Christian still in the future, to be known and grasped only by faith.

I suppose that you cannot find a single issue in your own lives this Sabbath Day, a single thing that you are not thinking deeply about, a single problem that you are struggling with, a single pleasure and encouragement that has just now lifted your spirits, that is not in one way or another explained in this four part description of our lives as Christians.

How happy God has made all of us in some ways and some of us right now. How rich his blessing. All his gift. How many good things in this life he pours out on us as a foretaste of still better things to come! Yet, our faith so paltry, so weak, so intermittent. Why through many days, God forgive us, we hardly believe, really believe at all. But the blessings come anyway. It was not, after all, our faith that was crucified for us, it was Jesus Christ. And it is not faith that saves us but a gracious God and a suffering and dying Redeemer.

Yet, in how many ways the Lord has shown us and proved to us that he will reward our faithfulness to him and punish our lack of faith, because he has made that faith, and the practice of our faith, fundamental to our life before him.

And in this church, among us, how mightily has the Lord shown himself a God to our children and how marvelously has this enriched our experience of his love, to have it given also to our children and to see them come to believe in Christ as we do and to follow him as Lord and Savior as we do. Is there a greater gift in all the world? Are there not parents here who would say with Paul that they could wish themselves accursed for the sake of the salvation of their children?

And, yet, among all the blessings of life in Christ today, all the hope and love and sense of sins forgiven, all the knowledge of the glory of Christ that sometimes fills up our souls to overflowing, there is still, in this world, in our lives, much sorrow and loss and defeat and struggle. We have so much, but we have by no means everything that is to come to us from our heavenly Father's hand. We must wait and persevere and be patient for the promises that are yet to be fulfilled. Every believer has had to do that and every believer will until Christ comes again.

But, the fact that God made these promises to Abraham and then fulfilled them for Isaac, is proof positive that everything he ever promised his people, every good thing he ever said would finally come to those who trust in him, we will someday awake to find in our hands and in our hearts, and, God willing, our children beside us grinning outlandishly at the same marvels. And Christ will be there! And, as he promised, so too Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven!

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