Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #8 of Genesis, chapter 27, and we are going to read Genesis 27:30-33:

And it came to pass, as soon as Isaac had made an end of blessing Jacob, and Jacob was yet scarce gone out from the presence of Isaac his father, that Esau his brother came in from his hunting. And he also had made savoury meat, and brought it unto his father, and said unto his father, Let my father arise, and eat of his son's venison, that thy soul may bless me. And Isaac his father said unto him, Who art thou? And he said, I am thy son, thy firstborn Esau. And Isaac trembled very exceedingly, and said, Who? where is he that hath taken venison, and brought it me, and I have eaten of all before thou camest, and have blessed him? yea, and he shall be blessed.

We have been spending some time looking at this historical event in the lives of the family of Isaac when he determined it was time to give his blessing to his firstborn.  He intended to give it to Esau, but due to Rebekah having overheard that he was about to give the blessing to Esau, she quickly went to Jacob and they worked out a plan where Jacob pretended to be his brother.  He would put on his brother’s clothing, so he would have his smell, and he put the skin of goats on his hands, so Isaac would not be able to tell the difference, because Esau was a hairy man.

So Jacob went into his father, and even though his father was suspicious because the voice was different, the smell of his raiment and the feel of the skins of the goats on his hands (helped convince him).  Plus, the fact that he had bought venison and was aware that he was to receive the blessing of his father (as Isaac had thought he said this only to Esau, not knowing that he had been overheard), finally convinced Isaac, and he did give Jacob the blessing, and Jacob was blessed.  Then it says in Genesis 27:30:

And it came to pass, as soon as Isaac had made an end of blessing Jacob, and Jacob was yet scarce gone out from the presence of Isaac his father, that Esau his brother came in from his hunting.

It is like some of those stories where one individual goes out one door, and another individual comes in the other door.  And, of course, this all in the timing of God.  God controls all circumstances, all situations, and He is the one that is behind the scenes of everything that takes place in this world.  So it was nothing for the Lord to arrange this.  If there had been a delay of just a minute and if Jacob had tarried a minute longer, or if Esau had walked slightly faster, then Esau would have come in and Jacob would have still been there, and a big scene would have erupted.  I do not know what would have happened because that did not happen.  God arranged it so Jacob would go out, and in the next instant Esau would come in, and Jacob was gone with the blessing. 

And now Esau has come, seeking the blessing of God.  We spent some time going over how Jacob’s action to imposture his brother Esau is a spiritual picture of the Lord Jesus who took the form of a man and entered into the human race.  We always have to keep in mind that Esau is called “Edom,” a name that identifies with Adam and mankind.   If you look at the Hebrew, you will see the close relationship between the words for “man,” for “Adam,” and for “Edom.”  So Jacob pretending to be Esau or Edom (man) is a spiritual picture of Christ who became man.  We covered this regarding the way Isaac brought Jacob near and smelled the smell of his raiment.  He smelled the savour, and we saw how that relates to some verses that identify with offerings to God, a “sweet savour unto the Lord.”  So Isaac accepted the venison at the hands of who he thought was Esau, but it was actually Jacob.  On the deeper spiritual level, it is the Lord Jesus Christ coming in place of mankind as the substitute or as the “second Adam” to bear the sins of His people, and His offering was acceptable unto God the Father.  And Isaac represents God, and was the father to both Jacob and Esau.  It was acceptable to Isaac, so he gave the blessing to who he thought was his firstborn son, but it was actually his second-born son, Jacob, the supplanter.  It is not the “first Adam,” but the “second Adam,” the Lord Jesus Christ who obtained the blessing from the Father, rather than mankind.

So that is one level of understanding.  The Lord Jesus did take upon Himself a human body.  He became man at the foundation of the world.  He had to have done so, because 1Peter tells us that He bore our sins in His own body on the tree.  Any statement that would say that Christ is bearing sin cannot apply to 33 A. D.  It can only be the point of the foundation of the world, before time, when Jesus had a body, according to that Scripture, and bore the sins of His people in that body.  In doing so, He died for them, satisfying the Law’s demand, and then rising from the dead.  He became that acceptable sacrifice that was a sweet smelling savour unto God, thus obtaining the blessing as “the elect,” as Christ is called in the Bible, along with all those that were in Him.

I think this would also relate to the whole idea of the statement made about the twins sons, Jacob and Esau, that says that before either had done good or evil, God made the choice and determination: “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.”   That determination was made as result of the atoning work of the Lord Jesus Christ performed at the foundation of the world.

So, in one sense, the Lord Jesus obtained the blessing when He offered up Himself, and his offering was acceptable and complete.  Upon His rising from the dead, there was justification, and the blessing was available. 

But in another sense, the blessing of Jacob that we are reading about was not complete until it had been applied to all those chosen and elect children that would be born into the world in their generations throughout the history of the world.  And that is what leads us to what has happened recently, as the Bible has revealed that God had a grand plan to save a great multitude during the second part of the Great Tribulation period, during the last (about) seventeen years starting in 1994, when the Latter Rain period began, and lasted through the date of May 21, 2011.  Then the Latter Rain ceased to fall, and the Great Tribulation concluded, and God had saved the great multitude.  In saving the great multitude, it also meant that all the elect whose names had been recorded in the Lamb’s Book of Life and whose sins had been laid upon Christ at the foundation of the world were now all saved.  Everyone that was to be saved had become saved, and they had received the blessing.

Remember what the blessing ultimately points to.  God blesses His people in numerous ways, but there is no ultimate blessing of the people of God without this one thing, which we read in Psalm 133:3.  And this is the Bible’s definition of the rich blessing that the elect of God receive.  It says in Psalm 133:3:

As the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended upon the mountains of Zion: for there JEHOVAH commanded the blessing, even life for evermore.

That is the blessing that God gave that was applied through the Word of God, which Jesus had wrought for His people.  He had done all the work that the Bible says was finished at the foundation of the world.  But there was the matter of its application, and that is where the sending forth of the Gospel into the world came in, and that is when the Word of God was the “applicator.”  (You can picture it as the hyssop that was dipped into the basin of the lamb’s blood and applied to the doorpost.)  But the way God worked it out was that it would be the Word of God that came into the lives of a sinners during the boundaries of the day of salvation.  Faith would come by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.  And since they were one of the elect and Christ had already paid for their sins, the blood was applied through the Word, and they became born again and received new resurrected souls, and life for evermore.  Eternal life.  God went on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one, until the grand finale when during the second part of the Great Tribulation, the great multitude was saved.  It could have been scores of millions of people.  We do not know the actual number, but we know that it was more than during any past time in history.  More could have been saved in that little season of Great Tribulation than had been previously saved in the whole history of the world.  That is basically what the language of the Bible would allow.  And then God completed His salvation program.  In other words, He had just meted out the blessing to Jacob by that date of May 21, 2011.  Jacob was blessed – he had received the blessing.  Of course, we are speaking of Jacob in a general sense as a figurehead for everyone God had chosen, the few out of the whole of mankind.  But those few are chosen.  They were elect and predestinated to receive it and, therefore, that blessing is now accomplished.

You know, there is a parable in Matthew 25 that fits in with this.  Jesus spoke a parable concerning His own coming, and we read in Matthew 25:31-34:

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

These are the blessed, the sheep set on the right.  Also, if we continued reading, we would find that the goats on the left are cursed.  There are two peoples, just as it was said to Rebekah when the twins were in her womb that two manner of people were in her womb – two nations.  They were the nations of God’s elect and the nations of the world, those that are saved and those that are unsaved.  And, finally, it becomes known or evident that those sheep on the right are blessed, and the goats on the left are cursed.  That is what has been happening since May 21, 2011.  God is carrying out the thing that He has long declared, going all the way back to the book of Genesis, as we are seeing. 

This has been God’s plan to conclude the blessing to Jacob, but notice that once the end of blessing had been accomplished for Jacob, in comes Esau.  Let us go back there, in Genesis 27:30-31:

And it came to pass, as soon as Isaac had made an end of blessing Jacob, and Jacob was yet scarce gone out from the presence of Isaac his father, that Esau his brother came in from his hunting. And he also had made savoury meat, and brought it unto his father, and said unto his father, Let my father arise, and eat of his son's venison, that thy soul may bless me.

What is Esau after?  The blessing.  From the verses we are looking at, like Psalm 133:3 , the idea of “blessing” is eternal life.  And what does the blessing identify with in Matthew 25?  It identifies with salvation.  And that means when we read that Isaac, a type of God, has made an end of blessing, we can understand that to mean it is now the end of God’s salvation program.  It is what we have learned from the Bible over the course of these last several years.  It is, in fact, a time when God has shut the door of heaven, and He no longer gives blessing to sinners; that is, there is no more salvation available, for the simple reason that God has a set number of people that were predetermined, the elect, who He always intended to bless.  Again, this is typified by Jacob and by the Lord Jesus, who was the original “elect” One.  That is all the blessing He can give.  He cannot give any further blessing to anyone else once those that were chosen to receive the blessing of eternal life have received it.

You see, this is the insurmountable problem of those who are fighting against what God has done in shutting the door of heaven, and when the Bible has locked in the date of May 21, 2011, with that 7,000-year timeline.  Remember one of the major ways God locked it in was to reveal that after 23 exact years to the selfsame day (8,400 exact days) of Great Tribulation, the date of May 21, 2011 came, and that date had the underlying Hebrew calendar date of the seventeenth day of the second month, the very day that Genesis 7 revealed as the day God shut the door of the ark, and the rain (judgment) began to fall.  No one else could enter into the ark after the seventeenth day of the second month because the door had shut.  And the door was shut because everyone God had chosen to be in the ark was in the ark.  We saw that in Genesis 6, when long before the flood ever came, God told Noah exactly who would go into the ark.  I will just go back there quickly, where the Lord was speaking to Noah, in Genesis 6:18:

But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives with thee.

That was said 120 years before the flood.  Who did we find that did come into the ark?  Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives – exactly the people that God said would enter in, because it is a picture of the elect and how God accomplishes His salvation program.  Nobody else was qualified because nobody else had been chosen by God.  God is God, and He will have mercy upon whom He will have mercy.  And when the door was shut, there were many people outside.  There were young people, old people, little children and babies, and some children in their mothers’ wombs.  None of them were permitted inside the ark.  The door was shut.  Never again would it open, until the flood had ended. 

And that is how it is at this time in the Day of Judgment.  God has found the lost sheep of the house of Israel, everyone whose names had been written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, and whose sins Christ bore.  He found them.  He saved them.  He delivered them, and they entered into the spiritual ark into the safety of the kingdom of God with Christ Himself.  All were safe and secure.  “Shut the door,” was the commandment from above.  It was not any man’s command.  It was not my command.  It was not Mr. Camping’s command.  It was not the command of any of the lowly elect.  It was God’s command.  He is the one in control of the door’s position, whether it be open or whether it be shut.  And when He opens it, none can shut.  Likewise, when He shuts,  none can open.

And, again, this is the “sticking point” and the troubling doctrine for so many.  There are some out there that recognize that EBible is faithful to the Word of God.  They know we hold to the King James Bible, and we would not countenance the thought for a second of adding or subtracting from the Word of God.  They know we have correct understanding in doctrine, after doctrine, after doctrine.  They know that we compare Scripture with Scripture in order to come to doctrines and to make sure these conclusions harmonize with the Bible as a whole.  In other words, they know we are faithful, but it troubles them regarding the teaching that there is no more salvation and the door is shut.  Therefore, they draw back and even go back to other doctrines because of this teaching. 

But, you see, this is the will of God, and He has laid it out here in this historical parable in Genesis 27, and we will see just how well this historical parable lines up with a New Testament passage that totally identifies with the shut door of heaven in the Day of Judgment, and with the blessing that Esau is now seeking after; and how well that aligns with what God tells us will be the desire of the ungodly and the unsaved in this time of the world’s final judgment.

That is as far as we are going to get in this study, but, Lord willing, we will look more at this in our next Bible study in the book of Genesis.