Maybe we should have named him Harry

Genesis 26: 1-40
This is a very familiar story, but I have a hard time finding many moral lessons from it. There's a whole lot of lying going on.

Isaac is getting ready to pass on and tells Esau to go and kill him some food so he can have a great meal and in exchange he'll give him his blessing. In addition to his eyesight, it seems like maybe Isaac has lost a little more, because when Jacob deceives him, he can't tell goat's fur from Esau's hands. Esau must have been some kind of hairy.

Jacob doesn't work alone, Rebekah helps him plot, in fact this whole deception is her idea. It seems sad that she is so willing to thwart her husband's last wishes. Maybe the sister/wife incident started her down the path of rationalizing her actions.

Jacob is right there ready to rationalize too. When he asks Rebekah about the differences in skin between he and his brother, his language (at least in the NIV) is less than critical of his own proposed actions. He doesn't say, this is a bad thing to do- he says "I would appear to be tricking him" (emphasis mine).Have they lived amongst deception so long that they are oblivious to it?

Sin does work that way. When we get deeper and deeper, what was hard to swallow at first becomes second nature until we have a hard time ever resisting things we at one time would have never thought possible.

The heartbreak comes later. Esau comes back having followed his father's instructions and once again, Jacob has done him wrong. In my mind, Esau, at least up to this point, has acted more like the man of God, but his reward is not found in Isaac's words.

"Your dwelling will be away from the earth's richness, away from the dew of heaven above.
40 You will live by the sword and you will serve your brother. But when you grow restless, you will throw his yoke from off your neck." (NIV)

And would this encounter have made Isaac realize his own frailty? I'm at the point where I can't even differentiate between my sons- and it's not like they're real similar.

Pain caused by a conniving wife and dishonest son.

I don't understand why Isaac could only give one blessing. I don't know how Jacob could keep the blessing and hurt his brother. I don't know how Rebekah could turn on her husband and dupe him. I do know that we are all capable of evil and sin beyond our realization- and maybe this is the point here.

Even good people have moments, days, years, of great sin- we become blinded by lusts and pride and suddenly before we realize what we've done, we've acted in ways that are too horrible to accept. And the only hope we have is turning to God.

Thankfully, it's more than enough.