Isaac was seventy-five years old at the death of his father. He was married at forty years of age. His two sons, Esau and Jacob, were born in his sixtieth year, and they were at the age of fifteen at the death of Abraham.
In reviewing the history of Isaac and Jacob in order to ascertain the testimony sustained by them, we must bear in mind that they are rather the continuation of the testimony committed to Abraham, each in a distinct way, than the leaders of any new or advanced line.
We are to learn in and by them how the testimony committed to Abraham fails in the hands of those who are called to support it; but in their history also is presented to us all the difficulties with which one set in their place is beset; and therefore we shall find therein disclosures of the grace of God peculiar and blessed to meet and sustain His people, hindered and embarrassed by nature in the maintenance of His truth (for that is always His testimony). In a word, we shall find in Isaac how feeble mere nature is to sustain the path in which the testimony sets him; and in Jacob we shall find that not only nature, but all the powers which affect nature, and can use it against God, are brought to bear on him, How willful he is, and how he yields. How God delivers in both cases, exemplifying to us the nature of the difficulties in the way, but at the same time also the greatness of the resource that there is in God when one looks simply to Him.
In Abraham I have the difficulties which a man of faith has to encounter always; namely, bye-paths to the ways of faith. In Isaac, I have the trials and weakness of one who would keep the path of faith appointed, without any of the exercises of soul which leads into it. In Jacob I have one who trusts to his nature and his own devices more than to God; who seeks to secure the blessings of the path more than the path itself, and who discovers in the end that what he leant on was but a broken reed, which had pierced him through when he leant on it.
Isaac does not come prominently before us until after the birth of Esau and Jacob. He presents to us characteristically man in nature, supporting the testimony of God. He has little to contend with except what attracts his nature. His first trial as heir and maintainer of the testimony is that he has no children. For twenty years he was without an heir, and he entreated the Lord, and the Lord was entreated of by him. The patient continuance year after year in a country where one is a stranger, without any prospect or clue to inheritance, is the character of faith exemplified by Isaac. Before the birth of Esau and Jacob the Lord communicates to Rebecca the grand outline of their history; the patient maintenance of the testimony being that which devolves on Isaac. His trials are of the order to disturb and contravene patience. They are the ordinary ones of daily life, and his failures are always in giving way to his nature. Isaac's history is given us in order to present to us how a man in nature, however amiable, is tried when set as God's witness in the earth, and called to walk in dependence on Him in a strange land, where as yet he had no inheritance. The feebleness of nature to support this testimony is disclosed, and then God establishes His servant in the line committed to him.
Isaac and Jacob, as we have said, properly, only follow up the testimony given to Abraham, and therefore in Heb. 11, and in other places, they are classed together. We are to look at Isaac as occupying the place of testimony to which his father had been called, and in which he has grown up without learning any of the difficulties or exercises of reaching it, which peculiarly and singularly belonged to his father. But his history presents to us how God leads and deals with him, a man like unto ourselves in it; and yet all his hindrances are of himself and natural. He does not cease to be God's witness, but the indulgence of nature hinders and obstructs his testimony. There is an absence of self-denial in him, and therefore he must learn that all his troubles mainly spring from his own weakness. However, notwithstanding all his failure, he was a witness, for as such the Holy Ghost owns him; he " confessed that he was a stranger and a pilgrim;" he had no hope on earth but from God. For twenty years he, the promised seed, had no heir: but then God hears his prayers and Esau and Jacob are born unto him. It is important for us to note the difference of trials according to the order of testimony. Abraham, we have seen, had to contend with bye-paths, which proposed to him an issue similar to what faith proposed. Isaac, on the other hand, is seduced from the position of faith which he occupies, to consider for himself and his own ease therein. The one has to suffer in gaining the position, the other in maintaining what is gained. The art of the adversary, with regard to the first, must be to divert him from the true line; while to the latter, it would be to engross him with his own interests, and thus lead him through self-gratification to compromise his position as the witness of God.
Into this snare Isaac falls. Esau's hunting and acquisitions warp Isaac's mind and judgment because they minister to himself. He loved Esau because he did eat of his venison; and the witness for God on earth, the one whose history in connection with his testimony He has seen fit to record for us, while maintaining the place he was set in, is hindered, and attempts to run counter to the mind of God, because he had yielded himself to his own self-pleasing, and, as a consequence the testimony suffers.
flow little we contemplate or take into account the responsibility of being God's witness on the earth, and how impressed we are with the purpose and grace of God, when we begin to note the way in which He makes His chosen vessels to fulfill His pleasure and do His will. We may be God's witness on earth, and in the very position to which faith has called us, and yet like Isaac, be diverted from the support and resource which faith always gives by that which addresses our nature and gratifies it.
The land is the scene of this testimony. There is another famine in the land (Gen. 26), beside the first famine that was in the days of Abraham, and Isaac went unto Abimelech, king of the Philistines, into Gerar. Thus the pressure of circumstances induces him to go down where man could afford him succor. God in His mercy appears to him and warns him not to go down into Egypt. The Philistines typified the support of man. This Isaac sought, for he was going " south," bordering on Egypt: but the Lord appears unto him, and tells him not to go to Egypt, but to " dwell in the land which I will tell thee of." This word of the Lord is but a renewal of the call to Abraham, and, with it, a confirming of all the promises made to Abraham. Isaac is now instructed in the mind of God, and how, as His witness, he ought to comport himself; but he must not trust in man. He does not go down into Egypt, but he dwells in Gerar, which was within the precincts of the land but in the hands of the Philistines, and hence the Philistines represent to us the flesh obtaining a place in the sphere entirely belonging to God. Isaac learns here not to trust in the flesh; he denies his wife; and afterward suffers at the hands of the Philistines because of the prosperity given him of God. This suffering was in order to separate him from them, for he was God's witness; but it is slowly he does so from Esek (contention) to Sitnah (hatred) and then to Rehoboth (room); and when he obtains the sense of room, the true liberty, he goes entirely outside the land of the Philistines unto Beersheba, a place already recording how the servant of God can stand outside and apart from all human support; and in doing so is owned by man as having God on his side. When Isaac, in the energy of faith revived, reaches this spot, the Lord appears to him " that night," and renews to him the promises made to Abraham; and there Isaac builded an altar and called upon the name of the Lord. The separation from the Philistine obtains for him true ground where God can appear to him, and where Isaac, in his own soul, can know that he is on God's side and for God on the earth. " Then Abimelech went to him from Gerar; and Ahuzzath one of his friends, and Phichol the chief captain of his army; and Isaac said, Wherefore come ye to me, seeing ye hate me, and have sent me away from you? And they said, We saw certainly that the Lord was with thee."
The testimony we see is confined to the land. Esau had already sold his birthright. His natural engagements which were so pleasing to Isaac had brought forth bitter fruit, but their own proper fruit, for Esau, hungry (destitute of natural resources) had despised openly what was of God even his birthright; and had sold it for a mess of pottage to his brother Jacob; and now in his fortieth year, when Isaac was an hundred years old, Esau marries two wives of the people of the country, both Hittites, which were a " grief of mind to Isaac and to Rebecca his wife." And such it must have been to see their firstborn son in this close affinity with the people of the land. Nevertheless, Isaac does not investigate the course and the habit of life which had led to this crisis; and because he fails to see the spring of it all, he becomes implicated in it himself. He grieves at Esau's marriage, but he gratifies himself with the result of Esau's works. Surely this is recorded for us that we may see what can spoil the testimony of God, and how subtle the snare by which we can be allured from the simple path of testimony. Isaac, failing in time to stay and correct this evil working, actually paves the way for the declension and suspension of testimony in the land. His expressed wishes to Esau, marked as they are with that vein of self-gratification which had led him astray, being overheard by Rebecca, cause her also to work carnally, and to counterplot in order to secure the blessing for Jacob. " Make me," he says, " savory meat, such as I love, and bring it to me that I may eat, and that my soul may bless thee before I die." Deceived by his natural partiality for Esau, he fails as God's witness, loses his power and due influence, and is inapprehensive of the mind of God; for he would have conferred the blessing on the son of his choice instead of on the one for whom God had designed it. Thus he falls from the place of testimony and Jacob henceforth comes before us as the one on whom it has devolved, because of the blessing conferred on him in spite of all the intentions of Isaac.
The manner, however, in which this blessing was obtained was not of God; and therefore demanded because of God's holiness, distinct and peculiar discipline. The working of nature in Isaac had led to the working of nature in Rebecca; and because of it, the testimony is passing away from Isaac; but as the way in which it devolves on Jacob is polluted by the same working of nature, he must be subjected to discipline before he can fully be the witness of God on the earth according to the place of blessing now from the lips of Jacob conferred on him. How interesting and momentous it is for us to note and grasp the patience of God in continuing through all opposition and failure one line of testimony. Varied and different is the opposition urged and leveled against it in the histories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The frailty and feebleness of man are exposed in the witnesses, yet God in His mercy and patience bears His witness above all, though (necessarily, because of His holiness) in a reduced condition or state of things which only marks the unfaithfulness which led into it.
Jacob now blessed is God's witness on the earth, but he must fly from the land, which was the proper sphere of his testimony. The manner in which he had obtained the blessing which set him in the place of testimony being by natural device, he must now learn that he cannot maintain the divine position without first in practical confession, declaring the end and weakness of himself-of that nature by which he had obtained it. In a word, he must be humbled first. At this juncture, Jacob was seventy-six years old (about one year older than Abram when he first entered the land), and at the counsel and instigation of his mother, he flies from the land for. fear of his brother Esau. Isaac renews the blessing to him and sends him away, directing him to take a wife of the daughters of Laban; and adds to the blessing these words, " That thou mayest inherit the land wherein thou art a stranger." Peculiarly interesting is it to grasp and comprehend the nature of the testimony at this moment l The failure of the witnesses to maintain the truth committed to them subjects them to the most humiliating trials. Jacob has to abandon the land, and Isaac to endure the double trial of seeing his son Esau openly and avowedly departing from the position to which he was called of God, and to be obliged with his own lips to consent and approve of Jacob's retiring from the land, a consent forced upon him on account of the unhallowed marriage of Esau. The testimony, once bright in the land (how bright in the day of Abraham I) has gradually declined in the hands of Isaac, and is now, we may say, for a time suspended. True, Isaac survived and lived for forty years more, even to see Jacob again renewing the testimony-a lovely and touching instance of the grace and faithfulness of God 1 The stock of the old tree of testimony is not removed until the new one is fitted to replace it.
Jacob then leaves the land. (Chapter 28) He went out from Beersheba, and went towards Haran. When he reached Luz the sun did set and he tarried there all night. Then and there God appears to him and thus in his exit from the land, and in this moment of the declension and almost suspension of the testimony God spews him that in the land is the place where He will display Himself, and that there is the house of God, and He sees therefore the gate of heaven.
After a period of twenty years (Gen. 31:11-1211And the angel of God spake unto me in a dream, saying, Jacob: And I said, Here am I. 12And he said, Lift up now thine eyes, and see, all the rams which leap upon the cattle are ringstraked, speckled, and grisled: for I have seen all that Laban doeth unto thee. (Genesis 31:11‑12)), the history of which I pass over, our subject being that of testimony and not Jacob's personal history, God in His infinite mercy releases His servant from obscurity and calls him to resume his place of testimony for Him. " The angel of God spake to Jacob in a dream, saying, I am the God of Bethel, where thou anointedst the pillar, and where thou vowedst a vow unto me. Now arise get thee out from this land and return to the land of thy kindred." How holy and patient and faithful is His mercy! The testimony for twenty years, one might say, was under a cloud; Isaac in the shade; Jacob subjected to discipline before he could be permitted to occupy the place.
(To be continued)