WordLive - Year OneSample

Prepare: Everything on earth has its own time and its own season: birth, death, planting, reaping (Ecclesiastes 3:1–8). What season are you in?

Promise in jeopardy
Halfway through Genesis is this pivotal moment in the story of God’s people. No ordinary love story, the union of Isaac and Rebekah is key to the fulfilment of God’s promise (22:16–18). Yet 20 years after Rebekah left home, confidently hoping for a large family (24:60), the promise appears in jeopardy.

Then Isaac’s prayers are answered with a smashing set of twins – the Hebrew for ‘fighting’ (v 22) literally means ‘smashing’. When Rebekah asks God to speak she gets a prenatal scan with a difference, giving a cryptic glimpse of what’s in store (v 23)!

Missing out
I wonder how Rebekah viewed God’s words and whether she shared them with her husband or sons. Did she see them as a prophecy to be acted upon, like Shakespeare’s Macbeth? Or were they an inevitable, unstoppable pronouncement from heaven – the issue at the heart of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex?

Consider the difference it might have made to your family life if you had received such a word from God. Whether or not Esau is aware of this prophecy, he clearly hasn’t bought into God’s promise. He doesn’t value the role of elder son, leading the family, providing descendants down to God’s Messiah, no less. What an opportunity to miss for the sake of some beans!

Respond: ‘Lord, give me a sense of the part I can play in the unravelling story of your people.’

http://www.wordlive.org/Session/Classic/2012-05-09