Genesis Day 46: The Bible doesn’t sugarcoat life and the knuckleheads that fill it
There are days in our lives when people act out in the craziest of ways.
There were those days, those people, in the Bible, too. The amazing thing about the Bible, though, is that it communicates, rather than sugarcoats, those kinds of stories.
Today, in Genesis 27, I find one of these situations.
The situations in the Bible often give me pause. I find myself thinking that this is the inerrant Word of God, and yet it is simultaneously communicating a real event in real people’s lives, people who are part of God amazing plan. And today, those people seem to be—at best—knuckleheads.
Consider Genesis 27. Isaac is basically about to carry out his “last will and testament”. Please note: he is doing it in secret. He is keeping his wife and his other son at a distance. Rebekah, his wife, gets wind of it. She sets out a plan to outsmart him at his own game, and Jacob goes along with it. The entire situation escalates to where one brother is literally biding his time before he kills the other brother.
As I am reading the story, I want to stop and shout, “Knock it off! You folks are God’s chosen family, through whom the entire world is to be blessed!”
I find myself getting frustrated with them, and then of course I judge them—and then it happens—I find myself looking in the mirror.
When I look in the mirror, what do I see? A knucklehead.
I wrote earlier, “There are days in our lives, when people act out in the craziest of ways.” There are days I am one of those people.
Perhaps that is the point God’s Word is trying to make to us.
Let me explain. If you are a person who is trying to follow Jesus, then you understand that you are part of God’s family. You understand, in fact are overjoyed, that you are a son or daughter of Almighty God. You actually call God, abba, which literally translates as dad.
So, followers of Jesus, are God’s people. The Bible tells us that God’s people are part of God’s plan to the restore the world back to God—and there are days that I, this “son of the Father”, am a knucklehead.
Not in a silly, Three Stooges sort of way. But in a way where I do things that are gravely wrong. I hurt people.
Yet God doesn’t give up on me, nor does He allow my behavior to thwart His plan to redeem His world. To be sure, He grieves when I hurt others, and He desires for me to turn back, to change. But His plan marches on.
Perhaps that is the lesson from this chapter. Perhaps this is exactly why the Bible doesn’t sugarcoat the stories of the these very real human beings that God is working through.