Perhaps the saddest part of Stephen Ambrose's account of the heroic exploits of Lewis and Clark is the revelation of their views of and their treatment of their black slaves. These were, in many respects, very admirable men, with a developed sense of justice and fair play. But, in this one matter, they were utterly blind and disgustingly inhuman and unfair. You may remember that William Clark had a slave, a man named York, who made the journey to the Pacific with the rest of the Corps of Discovery, and, if the truth be told, was more valuable a member of the expedition than most. He was, of course, the only man who received no reward for his labors -- no pay and no free land, as were given to the rest and as Lewis and Clark made a large point of demanding for the rest.

After returning from the Pacific, York asked Clark to free him as his reward for his services on the expedition. Clark refused. York's wife belonged to someone else and lived in Louisville, Kentucky. York asked to be allowed to go to Louisville. Indeed, he asked that he be allowed to stay in Louisville, hire himself out and send his wages back to Clark, and so be able to remain with his wife. In a letter to his brother, who lived near Louisville, Clark said that he was unwilling to sell York and that if he tried to run off or refuse to perform his duty as a slave, Clark wanted him "sent to New Orleans, sold or hired out to some Severe Master, until he thinks better of such conduct." When York returned to St. Louis from a visit with his wife, he was, Clark said, "insolent and sulky" and so "I gave him a severe trouncing...and he has much mended."

Ambrose comments as follows: "York had helped pole Clark's keelboat, paddled his canoe, hunted for his meat, made his fire, had shown he was prepared to sacrifice his life to save Clark's, crossed the continent and returned with his childhood companion, only to be beaten because he was insolent and sulky and denied not only his freedom but his wife and, we may suppose, his children."

Thomas Jefferson, no friend of Christianity, and a man who also sold slaves and separated families, though a champion of freedom, was nevertheless a thoughtful hypocrite. His greatest fear, he confided to himself, was the dehumanizing effect of slavery on the slave-holders themselves. He wrote in regard to slavery, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." [Undaunted Courage, 447-449]

God is just! That Jefferson perceived was going to be the great problem for the country in the future, given its treatment of the slaves.

This was exactly President Lincoln's great point in his Second Inaugural Address, the greatest oration of American History.

"If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which having continued through his appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern there any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." [The World's Famous Orations, ix, 257-258]

There were many on both sides who died, who suffered the loss of loved ones, property, sight and limb, who earnestly professed their faith in Jesus Christ. Some of the slave holders were themselves real Christians. But, they paid eventually a terrible price for their participation in that institution. "The Lord will not be mocked; whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap." So the Bible says.

But, now, can we say that still, having seen in Genesis 27 to this point, how thoroughly sinful these people were upon whom, nevertheless, God bestowed his grace and favor -- Isaac and Jacob especially. These people did not reap what they sowed. Indeed, the whole message of the gospel is that it is possible for men and women to escape the punishment due for their sins. "God does not treat us as our sins deserve." Absolutely, and we tried to see how completely that is true last Lord's Day in our consideration of 27:1-40.

But, the grace and mercy of God does not entirely supplant the principle of reciprocity and justice, even for believers, even for those whose many sins are covered by God's mercy and who, for that reason, do not get the punishment they deserve. We do not want to take away from the glory and power of the divine grace one whit.

But, we must be true to Holy Scripture. And, it teaches us, unmistakably, that even in the world of grace, even in the life of believers who have been forgiven their sins, who have been justified and made perfectly right with God through the reckoning to them of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, even for them, in this life, sin pays a wage, and it remains the case that a man reaps what he sows. In other words, even the righteous, even the elect, even the forgiven and pardoned, even those who have been given an inheritance in heaven in defiance of their sin and guilt and ill-desert, must, in a certain way and to a certain degree, pay for their sins, suffer the consequences of their choices.

We can put this in various ways, we can account for it in various ways. God is our father and he cares for our welfare, and he does not, for that reason, allow his mighty love for us in any way to resemble an indifference to our behavior. Like any good father he punishes the children he loves and forces them to reckon with the connection between their behavior and its consequences. God is also the judge of this earth and its Sovereign. He is a kind and benevolent King, but that does not mean he does not care how his subjects live or that he does not act to ensure that his laws are acknowledged and enforced.

In fact, this reciprocity, this connection between behavior and consequences is a major theme of this material in the Isaac/Jacob/Joseph cycle of history in Genesis. We could stop to draw attention to this general point at any number of places along the way in this family history. But this place serves as well as any.

We saw grace and mercy abounding much more where sin had abounded in Isaac's case, in Rebekah's, and in Jacob's last Lord's Day morning. But, we can see this history, at the same time, as an outworking of the principle of reciprocity, of justice in the affairs of men, of God refusing to be mocked and requiring, even his children, to reap what they sow.

Rebekah lies behind the deceit that is practiced on Isaac as we read last week from chapter 27. It was her idea to deceive her blind husband; her idea to steal the patriarchal blessing for her favorite son. And now, in the text we have read this morning, she must spin another lie to her husband and spirit Jacob away to protect him from his brother's fury.

She seems to have succeeded in her plot, to have got what she wanted. But, at what price? She tells her son, in v. 44, to flee to her brother Laban and remain there for a little while. The text reads literally, to remain there "a few days." She tells him that after a short while, when it is safe again, she will send for him.

But the few days are to last twenty years. She never does send for Jacob; indeed, so far as we can tell, she never sees her favorite son again. So, despite what she says in v. 45, and in a bitter irony that the narrator fully intends us to feel, she really did lose both her sons on the same day.

More ominously still, at this point Rebekah disappears from the narrative, never to be heard from again. Apart from a single remark in 49:31, to the effect that she and Isaac were buried in the same place where Abraham and Sarah were buried, we hear nothing more of her. There is no notice of her death, of any memorial to her, of any grieving for her.

We have already pointed out that in the Genesis narrative he lost his place of honor when he was "gapped." His personal history (which would have been the "toledot" of Abraham) was left out of the patriarchal narrative because he was an embarrassment to it. After such a fine beginning, he allowed a creeping sensuality to distract him from that true devotion to God and God's covenant that would have made him a faithful son of his father, Abraham.

But think of what became of this man who so miserably failed to undertake his responsibilities before God. He lost both of his sons. Alienated from Esau on account of his being forced to bless the son that God had chosen, Esau eventually moved away and lived in Edom, and Jacob was to spend the next twenty years of his life far from home, and, when he finally returns home, in a striking silence, we hear almost nothing of Jacob's reunion with his father -- merely that he did in fact return to Isaac in 35:27, while we hear a great deal about his reunion with his brother, Esau. The fact is, Isaac's later life, about which we know nothing, indeed, the last half of his life, if not more, was lived in insignificance and Isaac died in insignificance, far from the promise that his life held when he was young. He had made a set of choices, had lived for many years permitting other things to matter to him more than the grace of God, and he paid his price for that!

Jacob took advantage of his brother's hunger and stole Esau's birthright. He agreed to be a participant, indeed, the primary participant in the deceiving of his father, in order to steal Esau's blessing. And now he must flee his brother's wrath and spend twenty long years trying to get home. But that is just the beginning.

Jacob, having got ahead by deceit and selfish unconcern for others, finds that everywhere he goes he alienates people. He who violated the most sacred relationships of life, now finds that all of his relationships are troubled. The pain and anguish he caused now comes back on him. Jacob, the deceiver, is cruelly deceived by his father-in-law, Laban, and finds himself married to a girl he didn't desire and wouldn't love. Eventually he alienated everyone in Laban's family and had to leave Paddan Aram in a hurry, not telling anyone. He never did accept Leah's children and the bitter tensions between them and Rachel's children would darken the rest of his life. [Wenham, 216] And his sons, to his great pain, learned from their father to practice the same deceit on him that he had committed against his father; theirs even worse than his, leaving him to mourn as dead for years a favorite son who was, in fact, very much alive.

Indeed, in a climactic scene, that God turns to Jacob's benefit to be sure, but which first illuminates the course of Jacob's life and its outcome, we find Jacob entirely alone. He alienated everyone -- his father, his brother, his uncle, his wife, his sons, until he is left finally only with himself at Peniel.

This entire narrative of Jacob leaves us with a striking juxtaposition of principles and perspectives. On the one hand, divine grace covering a multitude of vicious sins; on the other, God seeing to it that the sins of everyone of these ungrateful and disobedient children of his find them out. We cannot be faithful to the Bible unless we hold both to be true: the annihilation of guilt in the forgiveness that comes through faith in Jesus Christ and, at the same time, the expectation that God will require even his much loved and entirely pardoned children to face the consequences of their sins -- not all the consequences of their sins and, by no means, of all their sins (there is much grace even in the way in which God requires us to reap what we have sown) -- but, nevertheless, to face the consequences of their sins.

And we see the truth of this writ large over our Christian world every day.

The young man, the young woman who knows the wrong of promiscuity but commits fornication anyway, may repent most sincerely and be forgiven most completely, but still must face consequences: the disease, the pregnancy, the parenthood, the shame, the fear (and perhaps the fact) that people they would most want to have married and spent their lives with are now forever lost to them.

The Christian minister who is unfaithful to his wife, may well see with perfect clarity the evil of his ways, and furiously repent of his sin, to everyone's satisfaction, but still he must lose his pulpit, his life's work, his calling, and spend his days doing something that he will bitterly wish he did not have to do.

The Christian who mishandles his or her money, who does not pay his bills, may come to see the wrong of that, and repent of his irresponsibility, but often only when the hole that was dug is so deep that nothing, that is nothing but God's own intervention, could deliver him from the shame and the pain of foreclosure or bankruptcy, and God most often is not willing.

Or, there are the Christian parents whose own ignorance or indolence or cowardice or worldliness or whatever leads to their children's disinterest in the things of God or their positive rebellion, who then see very clearly what they ought to have done, and with the purest sorrow and penitence confess their failures to God, and are forgiven their sins-- wonderfully and completely forgiven -- but their children remain lost to them.

And, is there a believer in this room, who has not known the sting of the Lord's lash, applied to his or her back, on account of the sins we have committed against him?

Who can tell me that this is not the way God takes with his children? Gracious and merciful a heavenly Father, tender a Redeemer as he is, who can tell me that it is not today as it was in the days of the author of Psalm 99 who wrote:

"O Lord out God, you answered them;
You were to Israel a forgiving God,
though you punished their misdeeds. [99:8]

Why, this having to answer for one's deeds, having to bear the consequences of one's choices, is even true of the sins that a man or a woman commit against God before they believe in Christ and receive his full and perfect forgiveness. The man who destroyed his liver with alcohol and then becomes a Christian later in life, knows that it was a new heart that God gave him, not a new liver! He will still suffer the consequences of his sclerosis and he will still die too soon!

I have been a minister long enough to know that many Christians are very resistant to this teaching. Indeed, they resent it and will not believe it. They are sure that God's forgiveness means precisely that they will not have to face the music for what they have done or failed to do. And they will tell you that anyone who tells you differently has not really understood or accepted the grace of God, has not felt the full force of divine grace and is still thinking too much in terms of human effort and human merit.

But it is not the one who warns you that even in the life of his children God will not be mocked who is not being faithful to the Bible. For the Bible teaches this a thousand times and gives us more illustrations of it in real human life than we care to count. And, what is more, the life of Christians in the world, illustrates it again a thousand times a day.

The fact that God loves you does not mean he does not care how you live. The fact that God forgives you does not mean he is indifferent to your sins. The fact that God gives you eternal life when you deserve his wrath does not mean that he will not punish you for the offenses you commit against him and others. The fact that he has cast behind his back the multitude of your sins does not mean he will neglect the moral government of the world that he has made. Forgiveness and punishment can go hand in hand; they do, in fact, in any well ordered family; and they surely do in God's own family.

Listen, you and I need every motive, every motivation, every reason we can possibly find for living a godly, obedience life, difficult as it is for us who are still so sinful to live such a life. We need the motive of love, love for a God who has loved us beyond our power to conceive. We need the motive of gratitude, the obligation of a grateful heart to express in the most important way the sense of debt we owe to God's great love. We need the motive of manly duty. We need the motive of a future reward. And so on. And God gives us all of those motives together -- because we need them all. And, we need the motive of the fear of consequences if we do not obey. And God has given us this motive also. Don't let anyone reduce the number of reasons you have to honor God with your life and to obey all his commandments. You need every one of them. Including this one. That God promises even his dearly loved children that whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap.

Ask Isaac and Rebekah and Jacob if they are happy that they lived as they did, since, after all, God's grace so wonderfully overcame their sins! No! They will tell you, each one, that it is far, far better to obey and reap the rewards of obedience than to sin and have one's sins forgiven, but still to be made to answer for them in this world.

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