(Genesis) Genesis 28 Introduction

Now you find in chapter 28, and I'm reading now verse 1 of chapter 28, "...And Isaac called Jacob, and blessed him, and charged him, and said unto him, Thou shalt not take a wife of the daughters of Canaan." All the way through the Old Testament, you find that God does not want the godly to marry the ungodly. And that again is my reason for believing that in the 6th of Genesis that all you have, when the sons of God looked upon the daughters of man, is the godly line marrying with the godless line of Canaan, which finally brought the judgment of the flood and only one man left. Now, that in a marriage always leads to godlessness.

And I'd say this word just of caution. I recognize we're living in a day when young people are not apt to take advice from certainly an old preacher. They say, my, what does he know? And if you really want to know the truth, I know a whole lot about this particular matter.

I have seen case after case where some little girl or some little boy, they come to counsel, well, I've met a fellow, he's not a Christian, I'm going with him, and he's proposed to me, and I think I'm going to marry him, and I can win him for the Lord. And little girl, if you can't win him before you get married, you'll never win him after you get married, you can be sure of that. Same thing that holds for the young man, and God forbids it.

It always entails sorrow. I have seen literally hundreds of cases, and I've never yet seen a case where it works. Never yet.

You can't beat God. God is put down too indelibly all the way through the word. When the godly marry the godless, what happens? Look at Ahab and Jezebel, and in the New Testament, it's strictly told Christians that they are not to be unequally yoked, and that's the way you get unequally yoked, not by just sitting on the platform of somebody, but by intermarrying.

That's the way you join up with them, by the way, and that is the thing that is going to happen. Now, Isaac sends Jacob away. He says, Arise, go to Padan-Aram, to the house of Bethuel, thy mother's father, and take thee a wife from Thance, of the daughters of Laban, thy mother's brother.

Now, he sends him back to Laban, and believe me, old Laban is quite a trickster himself, and Jacob is in for it. I can tell him that right now, but he doesn't know it, but he's sure going to find out about it. Now, last time, we saw one of the most despicable and ornery things that any man could do, and that's what Jacob did, and he did it at the behest of his mother, and this is not a case where I think that we can say, well, the reason I'm such an oddball or I do certain things and am so mean is because my mother didn't love me when I was a boy.

Well, believe me, Jacob couldn't say that. Jacob was loved and spoiled and asked to do something that is not quite the honorable thing to do, and so he did it. He stole the birthright from his brother.

It was already his. The formality of his father giving the blessing wasn't necessary at all. Abraham hadn't given it to Isaac.

God had, and it's God that gave it to Jacob, and this thing that he's done was not necessary, but God will deal with him because of it. You can be sure of that. Now, the thing Rebecca's thought up, and it's very plausible, logical.

In fact, it was the thing to do in this case was to send him back to her brother so that he'd get away from the wrath of his brother Esau, which Rebecca didn't mention to Isaac, but she did mention the fact that he could choose a wife back there in her family, and so Jacob now is going to be sent away from home.