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Welcome to today’s Daily Scripture Reading and Meditation covering Genesis 25:21-23 wherein we see the Lord teaching his children patience and revealing His goodness in ways hard for us to understand.
And Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife, because she was barren. And the Lord granted his prayer, and Rebekah his wife conceived. The children struggled together within her, and she said, “If it is thus, why is this happening to me?” So she went to inquire of the Lord. And the Lord said to her, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the older shall serve the younger.”
God’s methods in keeping his promises so often seem very strange! Abraham and Sarah didn’t even have Isaac until they were about the age of great grandparents and now, though God was to build a great nation through Isaac, his wife Rebekah had been barren for the first 20 years of their marriage. Talk about the need for patience and faith…this would have been a real test for anyone. But notice how Isaac deals with the situation. He has seen the issues that arise from trying to help God out with His plans (remember Hagar and Ishmael), likely talking with his dad often about the need to wait on the Lord to fulfill his promises. And actually, from Abraham’s perspective, he may have been figuring that God very well may make Isaac and Rebekah wait another 40 years until He provided children; this would after all put them around the same age that He and Sarah were when the Lord got things going for them! But again, what does Isaac do? He prayed…and God provided.
The fun didn’t end there, however. Rebekah had waited and waited, probably dreaming of what it would be like to carry a child and then hold him/her in her arms only to find out that there’s a war happening inside her once that dream begins to be fulfilled! “This is the start of motherhood?!” she had to be thinking? And then the revelation as she sought the Lord: “These two are always and forever going to be against one another in some way.” My goodness yes, God has an interesting way of bringing things about. One of the perplexing details about this time is that we don’t really see any big flaws in the way that these parents have gone about things. In other words, we can’t point to a specific issue in which we see them rebelling against God, something that we would expect might yield difficulty in the future. This of course would lead many to say, “Bad things happen to good people.” I’m not going to say that even though I understand what people are getting at when they do. The reality is that bad or hard things happen…period. Difficulty is a reality for all who are a part of the sin issue that this world is full of. In other words, we’re all the problem and we all become the recipients of the problem we’ve helped to perpetuate. We’re born into it, born with it, and willingly keep it going. God’s discipline then gives us the opportunity to fight against it, yearn for and submit to a Lord and Savior, and long for the day when Jesus will return and eliminate the problem completely. Don’t put your hope in an easy life ahead but in the One who is preparing a glorious place for each of His own to enjoy forever.
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