Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #2 of Genesis, chapter 28, and we going to be reading Genesis 28:2-5:

Arise, go to Padanaram, to the house of Bethuel thy mother's father; and take thee a wife from thence of the daughters of Laban thy mother's brother. And God Almighty bless thee, and make thee fruitful, and multiply thee, that thou mayest be a multitude of people; And give thee the blessing of Abraham, to thee, and to thy seed with thee; that thou mayest inherit the land wherein thou art a stranger, which God gave unto Abraham. And Isaac sent away Jacob: and he went to Padanaram unto Laban, son of Bethuel the Syrian, the brother of Rebekah, Jacob's and Esau's mother.

In our last study, we were looking at the spiritual meaning of this, and so far, we have seen that in chapter 27, Rebekah was used as a figure of the Word of God, or of God Himself, as the Lord Jesus is the Word.  She possessed information in advance concerning which of her sons was to be blessed, and then she acted and orchestrated events to make sure Jacob received the blessing, as God told her he would, and it worked.  Jacob did obtain the blessing, and then she took action to protect Jacob from the harm his brother Esau intended to do as he plotted to kill him. 

Remember, we discussed that Jacob was obedient to his father and his mother, and now in chapter 28, Isaac is taking the forefront in telling Jacob to go.  But it was Rebekah that had gone to her husband Isaac and told him she was “weary of her life” due to the daughters of the land.  So it worked out that they both together decided to send Jacob to the land of Haran to Laban.

In our last study, we saw how it was a repeat, in a way, of what happened when Abraham sent his servant to Haran to find a bride for his son Isaac, but he did not send Isaac himself.  He sent a servant.  And when we went through that chapter, we did a great number of studies in Genesis 24, which you can find on our website at ebiblefellowship.org, and if you go through them, you will see how that servant was a type of Christ and also a type of the elect.  So there are many parallels and strong similarities between Genesis 24 and Genesis 28 where we see that Jacob is being sent.  And the difference is that Jacob was the son of his father Isaac, whereas Abraham did not send his son Isaac, in Genesis 24, but he sent his best servant. 

That is a difference, but the timeline is also different, as it will show as we go along that Jacob would be in Haran for 40 years.  We have to ask a question: “Why is God doing this again?”  It is true that we are slow learners, and a good portion of the Bible are things that God goes over, repeatedly, in order to penetrate the “thick skulls” of His people, as we are still in the flesh and we can struggle with retaining information, and we need to be constantly reminded.  That is true.  But it is not as though God is giving us an exact duplicate teaching in this, but He has made some changes, and a big change is the timeline, a much longer period of time for Jacob than the servant in Genesis 24, and it being the son himself that was sent.  Jacob, in pretending to be his brother, we have seen is a type of Christ, and we suspect he is a type of Christ here, and also of the elect.  It is a dual picture, and God can call upon it to paint a picture of the elect, but if He needs to paint a picture of Christ, He can also do that with Jacob.

And, here, Jacob is being sent to get His wife, and it is the second time that the Bible is indicating that for one of the sons in the families of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the patriarchs, there is a mission that does very strongly tie in with the Great Commission that the Lord Jesus established in chapters like Matthew 28:19: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”  And we have seen how that Great Commission was the task to go forth and find the elect, “the nations of them which are saved,” and they would be baptized in salvation by the Holy Spirit.  But in order for God to obtain His bride, the Lord arranged and developed “times and seasons,” especially as it relates to two particular periods of time in which the Holy Ghost would be poured out.  The first time was at the conclusion of Christ’s first coming, and shortly after His resurrection on the Day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit was poured out the first time.  It was at the time of the beginning of the church age, and the season of “firstfruits.”  The early rain can be tied or linked to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit the first time, beginning in 33 A. D. and continuing over the church age for 1,955 years, until it ended on May 21, 1988, the day before Pentecost of that year, and the day before the Holy Spirit’s activity within the congregations would have been “renewed,” as it were.  God ended the task because all the “firstfruits,” as typified by the 144,000 in the book of Revelation, had been brought in, and all those to be saved within the churches were saved, and they had accomplished that mission.  So God ended the church age, and then came the 2,300 evening mornings, the “famine” that separated the first season of rain from the next period of rain, from May 21, 1988 to September 7, 1994.  Then the season turned, and it was the time of the Latter Rain when God sent forth His Word outside of the churches and congregations to save the great multitude.  He would bring in the fruits and it would identify with the Feast of Ingathering, and joined together with the Feast of Tabernacles.  For the last about 17 years, that Latter Rain would fall, and it was the time of the second outpouring of the Holy Spirit as God’s doctrine dropped as the dew or the rain.  And He saved those He intended to save, a great multitude of people. 

These two seasons or these two periods of the sending forth of the Holy Spirit can be seen as God has illustrated them in the book of Jonah.  Jonah’s name in the Hebrew means “dove,” and the Lord identified the Holy Spirit as “descending like a dove,” in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ baptism.  And in that way, He is providing the Biblical definition or a definition of the spiritual picture, as we must always search the Bible to find the deeper spiritual truth.  So we see Jonah, whose name is “dove,” and he was sent, was he not?  That was the whole issue.  In Jonah 1, God came to him and sent him to Nineveh, but Jonah fled, and he got on a ship going to Tarshish.   That fits in with the first coming of Christ, as Christ was born in the Jubilee year of 7 B. C., and his birth and life up until his ministry, crucifixion and resurrection all tie in with this “first coming,” and ties in with the Holy Spirit, the dove.  We will not go through the whole historical parable, but God sent Jonah the first time to Nineveh and he fled to Tarshish.  There was a storm at sea and the mariners cast him overboard, and then in chapter 2 he was in the belly of the whale.  And the Lord does relate his death and being three days and three nights in the heart of the earth to Jonah’s experience and, therefore, we know that Jonah coming out of the belly of the whale when the whale vomited him out on dry land would relate to Jesus coming out of the heart of the earth that early Sunday morning when He rose from the dead.  It is tied with the resurrection and the year 33 A. D.   We could identify the first sending forth of Jonah with the birth of Christ in 7 B. C.  So the first two chapters of Jonah would cover the span of 40 calendar years from 7 B. C. to 33 A. D. and the time of the resurrection. 

Then after he came out of the belly of the whale, what happened?  He went back to Israel, and was that all there was to it?  No – there was a second time, in Jonah chapter 3, that God sent Jonah, once again, to Nineveh.  The second time, He sent the “dove,” representing the second outpouring of the Holy Spirit.  And what is the timeline?  The timeline is specifically stated by God when he instructed Noah, “Go unto Nineveh…and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.”  Noah went and he preached the very words of God, which included a timeline for destruction: “Yet forty days.”  So chapter 3 is the preaching and the reaction, where the whole city sat in sackcloth and ashes.  Then in chapter 4, we see Jonah building a “booth,” a continuing picture of the Feast of Tabernacles at the time of the end.  It is the fulfilling, really, and it is helping us to understand how the Feast of Tabernacles is spiritually fulfilled, the last feast that must be fulfilled in a spiritual manner.  He sat in a booth, waiting to see what would happen to the city.  How long did he sit in the booth?  Can we say?  Yes, we can, it is obvious and apparent that he waited in the booth until the timeline was expired.  Would you not do so, if you had received this information from God?  Of course!  It is as plain as anything could be – he sat in the booth for the fulfillment of the forty days.  And that is extremely significant and important because the Feast of Tabernacles is a feast that God instituted to commemorate the people of Israel wandering in the wilderness for forty years.  For forty years they dwelled in booths.  They had no houses.  They were in the wilderness, and they dwelled in booths from the point of coming out of Egypt in that great deliverance until the point of crossing Jordan.  Jordan and its crossing can picture entering into the kingdom of God.  Again, 1994 was a Jubilee Year and a time of great deliverance during the second outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and we have understood this for quite a while.  If we go 40 inclusive years, we come to a date that the Bible is presenting much evidence to be the year of the end of the world, 2033 A. D.

So we find these things taking shape – the two outpourings of the Holy Spirit.  And now a second time where a figure of Christ is seeking a bride, a picture of the elect, and is sent by His Father, a picture of God.  He goes forth in obedience to find a wife.  And in order to find a wife, He kept sheep, and I will read it again because this is a very helpful verse to us.  It says in Hosea 12:12:

And Jacob fled into the country of Syria, and Israel served for a wife, and for a wife he kept sheep.

The Gospel went forth over the course of the church age for nearly two thousand years or an actual 1,955 years.  What was the purpose?  It was to find a “wife,” and all to be saved in that time and season were saved.  But, of course, that was not the completion of God’s salvation program, so there was a second outpouring of the Holy Spirit in 1994.  And what was the purpose?  Again, to find the Lord Jesus a “wife,” and to get the proper bride for the bridegroom.  Then God saved everyone whose names were written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, and they did become saved.  And now the sum total is the whole company of the elect.  They have been found and brought safely into the fold.  So the figure of seeking a wife two times can, indeed, tie in with the two outpourings of the Holy Spirit.

Now I mentioned one main difference in our last study, and that was that Abraham sent his most faithful servant to find a bride and bring her back, and Isaac stayed home.  But this time Jacob is going.  He must go.  He cannot stay behind because his brother wanted to kill him, and these circumstances fit the time of the end, where two brothers that can be likened to wheat and tares have finally been separated by God, as God makes it known to both that one He has loved and the other He has hated.  One received the blessing of the firstborn, and the other did not get that blessing, although he could have earthly blessings.  And that only fits with the end of time, the time of the Great Tribulation and Judgment Day because during the church age the command of God was to let both grow together until the harvest.  Let us turn to Matthew 13 where the Lord gave a parable, in Matthew 13:25-30:

But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also. So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? From whence then hath it tares? He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.

Here is the Law of God.  It was not God’s plan and it was never His intention to come at any point during the church age because that was the time that “men slept,” the time over these many centuries that the wheat and the tares grew together.  When we look back, we only have to look back twenty or thirty years when we were a part of the churches.  It was well known that there were people in the churches with very little understanding of the true Gospel, including pastors and elders and deacons.  And, yet, we were in the churches with them and that seemed normal and proper.  And it was proper, as we were not to say, “Well, this individual over here may not be truly saved and is a tare.”  No – that was not our business.  God would take care of that in the proper time, and the way God has taken care of it is that at the time of the end, He opened up His Word and brought forth information that had been sealed up, which included an incredible amount of Scripture showing the apostacy in the churches, the infiltration of Satan into the congregations, and the terrible truth that Satan was loosed and had entered in and taken his seat as the man of sin, and that God’s people had to come out.  When we saw all this, the Scripture worked as the mechanism, like some high-tech farm equipment that was perfectly able to separate the wheat from the tares.  It was perfect in the sense that all that stayed in the churches were tares, but imperfect in the sense that not everyone that came out was saved.  But everyone that remained behind was unsaved and were bundled as tares for burning.  And that is why they are listed first in the parable.  Then another process would get under way in Judgment Day, our present time, when God makes further separation regarding those that came out of the churches and congregations, and that continues to be accomplished through the Scriptures and the doctrines that come forth from a right understanding of the Bible. 

So we see in this account regarding Jacob and Esau that there are no longer two brothers living together in harmony as they had until this point.  They can no longer dwell together, once the blessing had been bestowed upon the younger brother.  Once Jacob, the elect, had received the blessing and it became known, it was no longer possible for them to continue to dwell together.  Therefore, Isaac gave the command, in full agreement with his wife Rebekah.  Remember Rebekah is like the Scriptures, and we are born by the Word, and then the Word gives us milk.  So it was our Father and our Mother, the counsel of God and His Word in unison.  In harmony, they concur for the benefit of Jacob and his welfare and his safety for him to leave this place where Esau dwells, and to go to Padanaram unto Laban.

And we see the end of the church age and the separation of the wheat and tares.  And we see another timeline which we can link to the official end of the church age in 1994, where Jacob will be in the land of Syria for 40 years, just as Jonah’s timeline was 40 days from the second sending forth of Jonah, the dove, to Nineveh.  And how many times have we read in the Bible “a year for a day”?  The Lord mentions that several times, and it is often in association with the number “40.”  When the spies searched out the land for 40 days, then they had to spend 40 years in the wilderness, because they returned with an evil report.  So it was 40 days of the spies searching the land that turned into 40 years wandering in the wilderness and dwelling in booths.  Jonah dwelt in a booth for 40 days – actually, 39 days, because he had gone into the city a day’s journey, and then came out.  So we have that interesting breakdown of 39/40, as we find that from 1994 to 2033 is an actual 39 years, but 40 inclusive.  And this all beings to fit together, and it all begins to gel and come together.  When we find that happening, we see that this is truth.  This is what the Bible is teaching.