How is that fair? - by Elizabeth Reynolds

I’ve just been going through a mini series of devotions a group of children and lately we have been reading about Jacob and Esau. We read right through the story of when Jacob dressed up as his brother Esau and tricked his father into giving him the first-born blessing. (You can find this story in Genesis 27 onwards.) The children were basically on the edge of their seats wondering what would happen when Esau returned home from his hunting…

And we discovered that there are no real dramatic twists. Jacob gets his father’s blessing and Esau doesn’t. And not only that, but Jacob is blessed immensely by God being told that his descendants will be like the dust of the earth that no one will be able to count! I told them that he becomes the father of the twelve tribes of Israel and therefore an ancestor of Jesus!

There is a great deal of injustice that we see in this story where it appears that Jacob is rewarded by God for being a liar and a deceiver. He got what he wanted, and he also got to play a massive part in God’s big eternal plan.

But Jacob did also receive a consequence. He had to flee to a different land while Esau’s anger subsided or he would be in danger. And because of this, Esau didn’t suffer much, for he got Jacob’s portion of Isaac’s wealth. And, to be honest, Esau was a bit of a boofhead. The way he lost his birthright initially was that he’d come home from hunting and claimed to be dying of starvation and he valued the red lentil stew more highly than his birthright. The story suggests that Esau had very little spiritual desire and perhaps even saw this whole birthright thing as a bit of nonsense. But Jacob on the other hand knew the value of the birthright and the father’s blessing, and Rebekah, their mother knew that because of this, Jacob was more deserving of it.

But does this really make it okay for Jacob to lie, deceive and steal from his brother? Of course not! But as I was thinking ‘on the fly’ with my students, (I hadn’t planned this lesson, I usually just read the story and hope I can think of a message we can pull from it somewhere), what came out of my mouth was, “God makes good things come out of bad,” and “Even though we may do wrong things sometimes, it doesn’t mean God can’t use us in His amazing plan.” Not only that, but we can feel like Esau sometimes and see good things happening to people who make the wrong choices – people getting rewarded for scheming and lying their way to the top.

It goes back to that same message. God uses imperfect people for His perfect plan. Go figure. But He does. And it gives us all hope and it’s what makes our adventures with Him so colourful.