Deserved?

Genesis 26:12 Isaac planted crops in that land and the same year reaped a hundredfold, because the LORD blessed him.

One of the common ways to think about life is this: if you do some good stuff, good stuff will come your direction. It is almost like a math equation. Good stuff in, good stuff out. If the equal sign is in the middle, both sides must be of the same value. 2 + 2 = 4.

But that isn’t how life works. At least that isn’t what I have observed during my brief sojourn here. Plenty of not so nice people seem to get away with all sorts of bad things. They seem to have received a “get out of jail free” card early on in life.

Others seem to get stuck in every mud pit that is along their path. They never seem to catch a break. If someone is going to get caught, they are the ones, even if everyone else was also involved.

Now I am not discounting the role that human choices play in the outcomes. Some people make really poor choices consistently, while others seem to make choices that bring better outcomes. It is not that the one set of people or the other is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ that their counterpart, it is the fact we live in a broken world and things don’t go according to plan.

Isaac, the favored son of Abraham, the hero of the Hebrew Scriptures, needs a wife. His dear old dad Abraham, wants to help with the process. He wants to help his son live a life as free from challenge as possible. One of the sources of greatest challenge is the culture in which they live.

Abraham works a plan, and the LORD blesses that plan and a wife is secured from his relatives back on the homestead. Isaac & Rebecca are married. You would think after the way the LORD intervened in the finding of Rebecca that Isaac would have great trust in the LORD. Not so!

Isaac tries to pass Rebecca off as his sister in order to protect his own skin with the chieftain. He can’t even trust the LORD in this. He has his own plan which fails miserably.

And right after this failure, the LORD blesses Isaac. That isn’t fair! Shouldn’t Isaac have to pay for his failure of faith? Shouldn’t he have to earn his way back into the good graces of the LORD!

If you can’t earn your way in initially, you certainly can’t earn your way back in after a failure. Abraham trusted. Isaac is called to trust. But even in the absence of trust, the LORD blesses whom he will. His blessing is not based on our level of obedience.

It is called grace and mercy, not earnings and wages.