Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #15 of Genesis, chapter 27, and we are reading Genesis 27:42-46:

And these words of Esau her elder son were told to Rebekah: and she sent and called Jacob her younger son, and said unto him, Behold, thy brother Esau, as touching thee, doth comfort himself, purposing to kill thee. Now therefore, my son, obey my voice; and arise, flee thou to Laban my brother to Haran; And tarry with him a few days, until thy brother's fury turn away; Until thy brother's anger turn away from thee, and he forget that which thou hast done to him: then I will send, and fetch thee from thence: why should I be deprived also of you both in one day? And Rebekah said to Isaac, I am weary of my life because of the daughters of Heth: if Jacob take a wife of the daughters of Heth, such as these which are of the daughters of the land, what good shall my life do me?

That brings us to the end of the chapter.  In our last study, we were looking at this Biblical teaching that when we get to the time of the end, there would arise hostility between “brothers” that had previously been close.  We saw this regarding Cain and Abel and the language used in Genesis 3, where it said, “And in the process of time,” the Hebrew should be translated, “And in the end of days,” and that has to do with the time of the end of the world.  Also, here in Genesis 27, I did not read it, but it had said in Genesis 27:41:

And Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing wherewith his father blessed him: and Esau said in his heart, The days of mourning for my father are at hand; then will I slay my brother Jacob.

He was still convinced his father Isaac was about to die.  Isaac was 120, and Jacob and Esau were 60 years old at that point in time.  As we discussed, the number “120” is “10 x 12,” or the complete fulness of what is in view, which is Isaac’s age or time, and that fits in with “the fulness of time,” as the Bible lays out evidence that the entire history of the earth should be 12,000 years, but it is actually 13,000 years.  We will not get into an explanation of all that, except to say you can also see that when you look at the tribes of Israel.  There were said to be 12 tribes, but actually there were 13.  And God does speak of the bounds of man’s inheritance in relationship to the tribes of Israel, in Deuteronomy 32:8:

When the most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel.

There were 12 tribes – 12,000 years.  But it turns out to be 13 tribes – 13,000 years, and that brought us to the (beginning of) the end of the world in the year 1988.  When we arrived at the point of that end of the world, then God began to open up the understanding of His people to parables such as the wheat and tares: “Let both grow together until the harvest.”  Then in the time of harvest He would bring about the separation, and we actually lived through the fulfillment of that parable as the Lord revealed to His elect the end of the church age and the command for the people of God to come out of the churches and congregations, and that command served as a mechanism (like a sifting machine) to separate the wheat and the tares.  Everyone who stayed behind and remained in the churches until May 21, 2011 were the tares.  There could have been unsaved among the people who came out of the churches, and God has another program of trial and severe testing during the Day of Judgment to (further) separate sheep from goats.  But we can say that all the elect that were in the churches did come out, even though not everyone that came out was elect.  All the people that stayed behind are the tares, and this brought about great tension, and people in the churches were very critical and spoke evil, oftentimes, of their “brothers.”  This is mentioned in various places.  For example, in Mark 13, which is the parallel chapter to Matthew 24 where the disciples asked Christ what the sign of His is coming and the end of the world, it says in Mark 13:9-11:

But take heed to yourselves: for they shall deliver you up to councils; and in the synagogues ye shall be beaten: and ye shall be brought before rulers and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them. And the gospel must first be published among all nations. But when they shall lead you, and deliver you up, take no thought beforehand what ye shall speak, neither do ye premeditate: but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye: for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost.

(“That hour” refers to the hour of Great Tribulation.)  And how is the Holy Ghost able to speak at the time of the end?  He cannot speak (audibly) from heaven.  He cannot break the barrier of the supernatural because God has obligated Himself to no longer bring divine revelation in that manner once the Bible was completed, and the time during the Great Tribulation was not yet the final end and destruction of the world.  So how is the Holy Ghost going to speak?  It tells us in 1Corinthians 2:11-14 that when we compare spiritual things with spiritual, the Holy Ghost teaches.  And to teach, you must “speak,” so the information derived is coming forth from the Holy Spirit.  That is God’s methodology for arriving at truth and bringing forth truth from His Word, so the people of God have been taught to do this for quite some time.  However, when it came to the time of the end, whatever partial “blinders” God had on His people were lifted, and at that point we were able to see and understand many things, especially things related to “time and judgment.”  So that is the manner in which the Holy Ghost “speaks.”  Actually, it says, “that speak ye,” so it is the people of God that are mouthing these things, but it is not we who speak, but the Holy Ghost.  Again, going back to the Biblical hermeneutic of comparing Scripture with Scripture and harmonizing all conclusions, then doctrines develop and there is teaching of the Word of God, and this is the voice of Christ or the voice of the Holy Ghost.

It goes on to say in Mark 13:12-13:

Now the brother shall betray the brother to death, and the father the son; and children shall rise up against their parents, and shall cause them to be put to death. And ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake: but he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

Brother shall betray the brother to death.  Esau hated his brother, and purposed in his heart to kill him.  Cain rose up and slew his brother.  “Wherefore slew he him?” 1John 3:12 asked.  “Because his own works were evil, but his brother’s righteous.”  That is, at the time of the end, God opened up the Scriptures to reveal that we are saved by the faith of Christ and not by our own faith.  And what do you think that does?  It exposes a great number of individuals that are following in the way of Cain and trusting in their “offering” or in their works. 

Even the Reformed part of Christianity that followed the teachings of the Reformation gave lip service to the doctrine of election: “Oh, yes, we are saved by grace.  It is all God’s doing.  Predestination.  It is all by election of God.  God gets the glory.”  They say that out of one side of their mouth, and then they turn to their congregation and say, “But you have to believe, and when you believe, God predestinated you to believe.”  And they add many other things that do not go along with pure grace and with the pure teaching of predestination and election, where God truly gets the glory.  But these churches were robbing God of His glory, which was His rightful due.  They were sneaking in a little bit of their own effort – just a little bit, and barely noticeable.   During the church age, people could not tell because it was all clouded in “mystery.”  It was information that had been sealed up, so back then there was an excuse because you cannot know something if it is sealed up (and God was the one that had sealed it.)  But at the time of the end, the Lord has opened it up and, yet, they fight their brothers and they fight against the Word of God.  They deny these (purer) teachings, and they say, “Oh, that is hyper-Calvinism.”  That is their theological accusation.  But we are not referring to Calvin or to his commentaries, or to any theologian or commentary.  We are referring to the Bible, like Galatians 2:16, where it says we are not justified by the works of man, but by the faith of Jesus Christ.  And that verse does not stand alone.  It is repeated several times in the New Testament.  It is by the faith of Christ, and God purified the Gospel, and this was the Gospel that was sent forth outside the churches and congregations during the period of the Latter Rain, and God saved the great multitude without their assistance.  (Some assistants they would be.  They would have been of no assistance, because they would have worked in opposition.)  It is not surprising at all that God ended His relationship with the churches because they had built numerous “high places.”  They had taken the Gospel of grace and perverted it, as the word “pervert” means to “change” by adding works.  They would add just a little bit of  (man’s) works to the faith of Christ.  But if you add a little bit of man’s work, then you pollute it, and it is like a stinking fly in the ointment of the apothecary.  So God would not have that.  It was time to “observe the Sabbath rest,” and in order to properly observe the spiritual teaching that the Bible puts forth of “Sabbath rest,” there had to be the Gospel where man gets no credit and no glory.  All credit and all glory goes to the Lord Jesus Christ, who is God.  And that is the wonderful Gospel that went forth (during the Latter Rain).

You know, sometimes we do not understand, and sometimes we think, “Well, the churches were mad because they heard it was the end of the church age.”  But it was much more than that.  A great many of the churches are free will-type churches and congregations, and the teaching of the Bible was against them.  Likewise, it even hit the Reformers because they were trying to add that little bit of work to the grace of God.  And it (the truth of the Bible) “smacked their hand” away.  No – you cannot do that.  And natural man does not like to be corrected.  Those in the churches and congregations operated under the assumption that they were the “pillar and ground of truth,” and that they had been given the “keys to the kingdom,” wherein whosoever they bound would be bound, and whosoever they loosed, would be loosed.  They thought they had full control and they were the special people, just like the Jews before them thought they were the special people of God.  So these (natural men) entered into the congregations, just like the Jews that were born descendants of Abraham and they thought that by right of birth, they were special in the eyes of God.  And this happened in the churches and congregations where people thought that by the right of their “profession of faith,” and by right of calling themselves Christians, they had the right to lord it over the Bible and to lord it over the doctrines of the Bible.  And, in doing so, they lorded it over the true elect children of God, the true spiritual Israel, those few that were also in the churches and congregations of the world.  And these elect suffered under this oppression throughout the church age, to varying degrees. 

And at the time of the end, God had had enough, and He caused the shepherds to cease from feeding the flock, and He took over full responsibility: “I will feed them…upon the high mountains of Israel,” as we read in Ezekiel 34:14.  And in Matthew 24, when the abomination of desolation is “seen” (through eyes of understanding or spiritual sight), standing in the holy place and Satan was loosed and entered into the churches and took his seat in the temple as the man of sin to rule in the congregations after the Spirit of Christ had departed out, then the command in the following verse would be activated: “Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains.”  Leave the corporate church and go to God and the Word of God, as God is round about His people as the mountains are round about Jerusalem.  And the elect people of God fled to the Word of God, the Bible, and there we were spiritually nourished by the Word of God.  And how did God nourish us?  By comparing spiritual things with spiritual, then we would speak.  That is, it was through people like Mr. Camping during the Great Tribulation, and the elect who shared these things outside of the churches.  We spoke the words regarding what we learned from the Bible, with tracts, and so forth.  And, yet, it is the Holy Ghost that takes responsibility for that, and in doing so, Christ fed His sheep upon the mountains of Israel, and He continues to do so as we entered into the final stage of earth’s history, the judgment of all the unsaved inhabitants of the world.

But, again, brother will betray brother, as we read there.  Also, let us turn back to Obadiah, which we read earlier, and it specifically names Esau, and we read in Obadiah 1:10-12:

For thy violence against thy brother Jacob shame shall cover thee, and thou shalt be cut off for ever. In the day that thou stoodest on the other side, in the day that the strangers carried away captive his forces, and foreigners entered into his gates, and cast lots upon Jerusalem, even thou wast as one of them. But thou shouldest not have looked on the day of thy brother in the day that he became a stranger; neither shouldest thou have rejoiced over the children of Judah in the day of their destruction; neither shouldest thou have spoken proudly in the day of distress.

So God held Esau (Edom) responsible.  On one hand, Esau is a picture of all unsaved people: “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.”  But, on the other hand, he was the twin brother of Jacob, born into the household of Isaac and Rebekah, who were children of God and his parents.  And we know that both (brothers) heard the Gospel because it says in Hebrews 11:20:

By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau concerning things to come.

Esau heard truth regarding things to come.  That is, (things like) the salvation and judgment plans of God, and he heard the Bible’s teachings that we are sinners and need a Saviour, and much more that his father would have taught him.  For example, his father would have taught him what his own father Abraham had done when he was commanded by God to take his only son Isaac up to mount Moriah and lay him upon the altar and offer him as a burnt offering.  And when he was ready to plunge the knife into him, God stopped him from heaven, and it was said, “God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.”  Of course, we should realize that Isaac (being the one who experienced this) would have told it over, and over, and over again.  “Come, my, son.  Let me tell you a true story.”  He would tell them about that day.  There he was lying on the altar.  But not only that, he could tell them of the promise to Abraham and Sarah that they would have a son, and how Sarah was an old woman with a barren womb and Abraham was 100 and, yet, Isaac was conceived and born.  He was the promised son and, yet, it was not him that was really in view.  God was painting picture and giving illustrations through Abraham and Isaac.  They may not have known fully, but they would have known (along with the saints before them) that there was the Messiah, the One who paid for sins, as represented by the sacrifices they offered.  They would have had some understanding of these things, so Esau grew up hearing the Gospel and, yet, he despised it and sold his birthright.  He married heathen wives.  Then when it came to the time of receiving the blessing, he sought it carefully with tears, but was rejected.  God rejected him, so he began to hate his brother and seek to kill him.  He was planning to kill him, once his father died.

Well, we can see how all that fits with the time of the end, the time we have been living in and will continue to go through for a few more years.  So the things we are reading here certainly have application to our time.

We will close with this, and spend a little bit of time thinking about Rebekah.  Rebekah played a key role in this chapter.  She was the wife of Isaac, and Isaac was a type of Christ.  We have looked at Rebekah previously when the servant went to Haran seeking a wife for Isaac, as Abraham, his master, had sent him.  And we saw that Rebekah was a type of the elect, the bride of Christ.  But what is the picture here?  She is the wife of Isaac, but she is also the mother of Jacob and the mother of Esau.  She is the mother of these twins, and she had received divine revelation from God before they were born, telling her that the elder would serve the younger, and that the younger was preferred.  We can see how that fits in.  She believed that Jacob should get the blessing of the firstborn – not Esau – and that is why she acted in the way she did.  So before they were born, Rebekah had knowledge that one son was preferred over the other son.  Is that not unusual?  In other words, she knew that Jacob was chosen, and that Esau was not chosen.  Now that is normally information reserved for God, as God tells us in Romans 9 that before either was born, “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.”  God is the one who makes determination before individuals are born, and He is the one that knows their spiritual condition.  But Rebekah had this information.  And she is also,  primarily, the one who arranged for Jacob to receive the blessing.  She found out (this was going to happen), so she knew, and she seemed to know a lot of things.  She knew that Isaac was about to give the blessing to Esau, and she quickly made preparation and plans, and she had to talk Jacob into it.  Then, at this point after it was all over, she was telling him to flee.

Well, we do not have any more time in this study, but we will pick up here in our next Bible study.