v.4 Isaac here seems to be chastened and behaving finally as he should. Recognizing that his son, whom God blessed in spite of Isaac's own efforts, is the carrier of the covenant seed and promise, he knows he must not marry a Canaanite woman. So, he sends him off to find a wife from the extended family, using words very much like the words his father, Abraham, had used concerning him and his marriage (24:3). And, he now fully aware and in agreement once again extends to Jacob the blessing reserved for the son who was to carry the blessing of God's covenant with Abraham on into the future. This is the first time that Jacob is explicitly designated as the heir of the promise to Abraham.

v.5 A summary statement. The actual journey to Paddan Aram will be described in detail in the following paragraph.

v.8 Esau, to Isaac's immense discredit, apparently learned only at this point that his father was displeased with his having married Canaanite women. It is quite possible that Esau was pretty slow-witted in spiritual things, but that would not excuse Isaac. What is more, the fact that Esau cares about his father's opinion but not, apparently, about his mother's, is further evidence of the division in the family. But we have already said enough about that.

v.9 Esau loved his father and wanted to please him. He wanted his father to admire him. In this sense he was a person whom we can have sympathy for, even admire. But he had no spiritual sense; no taste for the things of God, and, as a result, he chose exactly the wrong remedy. "Oh, you want me to marry in the family. I'll marry an Ishmaelite, take another wife from there." But Ishmael was the rejected son of Abraham and a daughter from his family was unlikely to be someone committed to God's covenant with Abraham. How many folk are like this. Sympathetic figures to us, even admirable in some ways, but utterly lacking in spiritual understanding.

I have said that these chapters are rich with the teaching, by illustration, of some of the most fundamental themes and perspectives of the Bible. This material is a primer in the Bible's philosophy of history and human life and salvation. We have, over the past Lord's Days, seen how, in this history, salvation is presented as a triumph of divine grace and mercy in the teeth of human sinfulness and unworthiness. It is magnificently clear in this history that Isaac and Jacob received God's favor in defiance of their many ugly sins.

Last Lord's Day we saw that, this grace and mercy notwithstanding, God continues to exercise his moral government in the life of the world, and of his own children, punishing their misdeeds and requiring them, to a degree, to reap what they have sown. Even in the world of grace and salvation there is reciprocity.

But there is another large piece of the biblical view of reality and human affairs, of salvation and the history of the world and of every human life that is prominently on display in this history. I am speaking, this morning, of the sovereignty of God. Even more, I am speaking of the absolute sovereignty of God, a rule, a control so complete, so entire, that it extends even to the sinful choices and actions of human beings, taking them up into the divine plan and will and accomplishing the divine purpose with them.

Ordinarily, sermons on this theme from Genesis are preached from the last chapters of the book, the account of Joseph in Egypt. For we have in 50:20 a statement to this precise effect. Joseph, you remember, there tells his brothers, speaking of their mistreatment of him when he was young, of their kidnapping him and selling him into slavery in Egypt: "you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good." It was your act, your sinfulness, your envy, your cruelty, your selfishness, but it was also God's will. You chose to sin against me freely, no one coercing you. But, at the same time, you were accomplishing, even by your sin, the will and the plan and the purpose of God. He had long before promised Abraham, in Genesis 15, that his descendants would sojourn in Egypt for four hundred years, and the sin of Joseph's brothers proved to the means by which that sojourn would begin. It was also the means by which Jacob and his family would be preserved in days of famine in the promised land. "You meant it for evil but God meant it for God." It is possible, you see, to say that an event such as Joseph's betrayal by his brothers had two causes: it was caused by the sinful envy of the sons of Jacob, but it was also caused by the will of God, who used the sinfulness of these men to bring about his perfect will.

Now, this is not a simple doctrine, I readily admit. There is a great mystery here, as always when we are considering, from the vantage point of our so small and limited perspective and understanding, the mind, the purposes, and the works of Almighty God. But that God is sovereign over all the affairs of men and that this sovereignty extends even to the sinful thoughts and deeds of men, is something the Bible teaches in the most unmistakable and categorical terms.

How many times and in how many ways do we find Holy Scripture teaching that, as Paul puts it in Ephesians 1:11, "everything falls out according to the plan of God who works out everything according to the purpose of his will." Of even the absurdly minute and inconsequential details of life this is true: the death of little birds, the number of hairs on our head, and so on. It is so because God willed it. So says our Lord Jesus. And, it is also true even of the sinful acts of men. Even the Lord's betrayal by Judas, even the supreme wickedness of those men who put Christ to death, all of this was also God's doing. As we read in Acts 4:27-28:

"Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen."

In the supreme and most vicious rebellion against God in all of human history, sinful men succeeded only in accomplishing God's eternal purpose. And long before those events the Scripture has shown us the same reality: divine sovereignty accomplishing its will even through the rebellious acts of God's creatures.

For example, Israel had sinful motivations in seeking to have a king. She was, the Scripture makes clear, rejecting God when she demanded a king like the other nations round about. She cared more for an earthly ruler than for her heavenly King and she trusted herself more to an earthly king than to God himself. But God used those sinful desires to accomplish his own will, to have a king in Israel whose name, whose office, whose line would be a foreshadowing of the coming King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He used Israel's sin, sinlessly.

And so, here, in the middle of the patriarchal history in Genesis. Now, remember, Moses is the author of Genesis and the history that is being recorded in this first book of the Bible is written from the perspective of one who lives at the end of Israel's long sojourn in Egypt. Look for a moment at this history from Moses' viewpoint, from the perspective of a faithful covenant partner of the Lord God living in the days of Moses.

There are, by that time, of course, twelve tribes of Israel, the descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob. Indeed, together they are called "Israel," a name that the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob does not yet have and won't have until Jacob's encounter with the angel of the Lord in chapter 32. An encounter that takes place as he returned to the promised land after twenty years in Paddan Aram. They are, the people of Israel, the object of God's great love and saving interest. It is for them that the plagues descended upon Egypt, for them that the waters of the Red Sea parted, for them the pillar of fire in the wilderness.

And how did all of that come to be? Well, it all came to be because Rebekah and Jacob her favorite son deceived Isaac and stole Esau's blessing; because Jacob had to flee the promised land to escape the wrath of his brother, because there, in Paddan Aram, the deceiver was himself deceived by his Uncle Laban and made to marry Leah, the mother of a number of those twelve sons, and because of the ancient hatred, when Jacob finally decided to return home to face Esau, in his desperation he found himself alone with God and struggled with the Lord and was given the name "Israel." And, then, later, because of the bitterness that existed between the sons of Leah and the sons of Rachel, and because of the incompetence of Jacob as a father, Joseph, Rachel's oldest son, was kidnapped by his brothers and sold as a slave to some Ishmaelite traders heading to Egypt on business.

We could go on and on like this. Why were there twelve disciples and twelve apostles after all? Because they constituted the renewed Israel and Israel, of course had twelve tribes -- the tribes that were the descendants of Jacob's twelve sons. And there never would have been those twelve sons had it not been for Rebekah and Jacob's deceit and Laban's deceit. Just as there never would have been a Solomon had David not committed adultery with Bathsheba and murdered her husband, Uriah the Hittite.

The history of salvation is shot through with God taking up into his plan for his people and for the world, the sins, the crimes of mankind, and, especially, of his own people. Anyone thinking about the history of Israel from the vantage point of the days of Moses could not help but be struck by this. It was sin that brought Jacob to his inheritance in the covenant, sin -- and the ugliest kind of sin -- that made him the father of twelve sons by four different women -- we'll get to that -- his own sin that paralyzed him with fear before his encounter with the Lord at Peniel, the sins of his sons that brought the family down to Egypt during the famine to find a home there under Joseph's protection.

Now, I read an essay this week, by Clark Pinnock, the erstwhile evangelical theologian and student of Francis Schaeffer, taking exception most emphatically to this conclusion -- that even the sins of men lie in the plan and purpose of God -- however responsible and accountable for those sins, men and women may be themselves.

"No, no, a thousand times no," says Pinnock. "The very notion is an outrage. God's will is not, is never done in the sin of man." ["Responsible Freedom and the Flow of Biblical History," Grace Unlimited, 108] To say otherwise, he argues, would be to make God responsible for our sins and, especially, to destroy the real freedom and liberty of human beings. What is interesting is that, in this particular essay, Pinnock seeks to make this case from the history of Genesis. But his biblical argument is utterly unconvincing for he ignores the burden of all of the facts that the biblical narrative sets before us, these facts we have just considered. He never even mentions Genesis 50:20. His argument amounts to his observation that people in Genesis seem to be acting on their own without any coercion by God.

But no one denies that! No one denies that men and women are free moral agents, that they choose and act as they please, and that they are entirely responsible for the choices they make. We made that point explicitly from this same material last Lord's Day. God holds responsible and will, to some degree punish even his own beloved people, for the sins they commit against him and others.

But we cannot deny either what the Bible so often and so explicitly says, that even when men sin against God, they do not escape the control of his sovereign will; even in their rebelling against him, they do not undo, but rather perform his purpose in the world.

As Benjamin Warfield, many times the biblical theologian that Clark Pinnock is, once wrote:

"Throughout the Old Testament, behind the processes of nature, the march of history and the fortunes of each individual life alike, there is steadily kept in view the governing hand of God working out his preconceived plan -- a plan broad enough to embrace the whole universe of things, minute enough to concern itself with the smallest details, and actualizing itself with inevitable certainty in every event that comes to pass." [Biblical and Theological Studies, 276]

The reason Pinnock's argument does not satisfy us is because it is not faithful to the Bible, that over and over again rocks us back on our heels with statements to the effect that the sins of men were, in some way, the will of God. Sihon, King of Heshbon refused to let Israel pass through his territory, because God himself had made his spirit stubborn and his heart obstinate in order to give him and his nation into Israel's hands, so we read in Deuteronomy 2:30. The people at the end of the world, so we read in 2 Thessalonians 2:11, will believe lies because God will send them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that they will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness. Judas, in betraying the Lord, accomplished the divine will; so did those who, in their cruel hatred, crucified the Lord of glory. And, there is a large number of statements like that!

Is there a great mystery here? Absolutely! How God remains entirely pure while taking up human sin into his plan as the Bible says he does; how man remains entirely responsible and accountable for his sinful actions, as the Bible says he does; is not easy for us to see. That should not surprise us. We are very small and our minds are very limited. We see and understand so little of the ways of the Eternal and Almighty God. We can grasp so little of what he does and how his rule, his purpose, his will is brought to pass in this world, with all of its infinite complexity. Think of how many millions of things contribute to every step you take, every decision you make -- things you have some knowledge of and things you know nothing about; things from the distant past and things of the immediate present. God knows all, he rules over all, he weaves it all into the tapestry of life and human history so that everything falls out according to the counsel of his will, and, yet, human beings themselves, both Christians and non-Christians are all the while doing what they please, acting as responsible moral agents. It is incomprehensible to us -- all of it is. What is truly ridiculous is the notion that we could understand, or pass judgment on the ways of Almighty God.

No, we must rest content in what he tells us. And he tells us that we are responsible for the choices we make -- we know that; it is the conviction of our own consciences that we are responsible -- but, that even when we disobey him, even when we rebel against him, even when we are at our worst, our lives are never any less entirely and completely in his hands!

There is much here for our contemplation. How comforting and how humbling for Christians who hate their sins to know that, even when they do what they would not do and do not do what they want to do, even when they are at their worst, they cannot frustrate the plan, the will of their all-wise and good and just heavenly father. Even the sins for which they are rightly punished, sometimes very severely -- as we said last week-- even those sins do not frustrate, but rather fulfill the plan and purpose of God. And it is a great comfort to know that the enemies of God, in all of their ranting and ravings against him, those who seek to do the greatest harm to God's truth and name and people, finally are doing nothing but his will, and achieving nothing but his purpose. How humbling to man, how exalting to God!

And, especially comforting and encouraging is this perspective from Genesis, that God, precisely because he is sovereign, because man never escapes his control or his will or purpose, can bring untold good out of the worst evil, as he did in the case of Rebekah and Jacob's deceit. Out of those lies and that treachery, and Laban's treachery later, came Israel and the exodus and the Lord Christ -- a descendant of Leah, after all -- and his twelve disciples. It is so because it is all his will and purpose, from beginning to end!

I have told some of you what remains my favorite illustration of this theme. It concerns a major in the royalist army during the English civil war, who was also a doctor. He was captured in one of the fiercest of the battles of that war and because of his conduct during the battle, which was lost by the royalists, he was not released like most of the other prisoners, but with eleven others of his fellows, was condemned to the gallows. The victorious Puritans made better soldiers than jailers, and the night before he was to be executed, with the help of his sister, he escaped from prison. The guards, she had found, were asleep. It was a great blow to the Puritan party and they searched high and low to recapture him, but to no avail. Friends had spirited him to London and to the homes of various royalist sympathizers and then eventually out of the city to the country town of Bedford. There he hid himself as the doctor of the town and lived what by all accounts was a profligate and contemptible life. He gambled, he drank, he swore to everyone notice in a day when everyone swore. He was mean and, in particular, he hated the serious-minded Christians, most of whom, in those days, were of the Puritan stripe. They were afraid of him, on several occasions, apparently, he had made it known that he had in mind to kill the leader of their little church. He was a man eaten up by hatred.

But in the providence of God, this man was brought to despair and to the end of himself by drink and losses suffered at gambling and, while contemplating suicide, found a book by the Puritan master of the wounded conscience, Robert Bolton. For some unaccountable reason he began to read that book and, after some time, he confessed his sins to God and believed in Christ for his salvation. His life was immediately transformed, but the Christians were slow to accept it. They couldn't help suspect a convert who had been their declared enemy in the town.

But in a short while it became clear to everyone that this man was a new creature in Christ. And within a matter of months he was, if you can believe it, the minister of that little Bedford Church, and soon the minister of the parish church, because in Cromwell's day, parish churches could be Independent, Congregational churches as well as Anglican. And it was in the year that this man, whose name was John Gifford, became the minister of the Bedford parish church that a young new Christian by the name of John Bunyan come to sit under Gifford's ministry. "At this time I sat under the ministry of holy Mr. Gifford, whose [teaching], by God's grace, was much for my stability." So says Bunyan in his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. "Holy Mr. Gifford" is how Bunyan refers to the man that he would immortalize as "Evangelist" in Pilgrim's Progress.

Shame on that sleeping jailer who let John Gifford escape before he was to be executed. That jailer should have been punished most severely -- I wonder if he were. But praise be to the Sovereign God whose will it was to use a jailer's dereliction of duty to rescue a man from the fate he richly deserved, so that some years later, he could transform that man and make him instrumental in the transformation of another man, still greater by far, perhaps one of the most influential Christians of all history, John Bunyan.

"Oh the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Who has ever given to God that God should repay him? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen."

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