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Good morning to you my “Walking with Jesus” friends,
This week, in the shadow of Father’s Day weekend, we’re looking into God’s Word to find some God given principles for God honoring Fatherhood.
Have you noticed how personality traits or habits or hobbies or attitudes are often passed from fathers to their sons? All you men reading this today, have you noticed how similar you are becoming to your father as you grow older, especially after you pass age 40 or so? Fathers are by God’s design extremely influential in the lives of their children, especially their sons. God’s intention is that fathers will pass on to their sons very high standards of work ethic, integrity, morality, deep spiritual values, and a strong respect for God. Sadly, our children seem to naturally inherit our dysfunctional traits as well. What can we do about that?
Yesterday we considered Abraham and his remarkable relationship with God. But we also considered a weakness in Abraham, he was sometimes impatient. You’ll recall Abraham had two sons, Ishmael, born of Hagar, and Isaac, born 13 years later to Sarah. Discord, jealousy, resentment, bitterness and even anger between these two mothers and their sons, caused Abraham to split his family. He sent Hagar and Ishmael away. A broken family. Oh what a terribly sad reality in a family, which God had intended to bless in such remarkable ways. But impatience and jealousy corrupted God’s great plan.
Years passed. Both Ishmael and Isaac grew into manhood, evidently far apart from one another both geographically and emotionally. We have several chapters in Genesis which tell us the story of Isaac and his special relationship with his father Abraham. (Gen. 21-25) But only one long paragraph which speaks of Ishmael, who evidently grew up distant from Abraham, and as far as we know, without a resident father. (Gen. 25:12-18) How very sad.
Abraham lived 100 years after he began his journey with God, dying at the age of 175. Word of his death somehow came to both Isaac and Ishmael, and after all these years, the brothers came together for the sad task of burying their dad. Genesis 25:9 says “His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, near Mamre…there Abraham was buried with his wife Sarah.” That’s all the description we have. It leads me to believe it was a brief return just for the task of burial. It was probably a very tense few days, made even more difficult because of how Abraham had distributed his very large estate. Genesis 25:5 says “Abraham left everything he owned to Isaac.”
You’ve probably seen large family plots in cemeteries with several generations of one family buried next to one another. That is what happened in this place, for if you’ll look ahead to Genesis 50:31, Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, gives these burial instructions to his son Joseph who was Prime Minister of Egypt at that time: “Bury me with my fathers in the cave in the field of Machpelah, near Mamre in Canaan…There Abraham and his wife Sarah were buried, there Isaac and his wife Rebekah were buried, and there I buried Leah.”
Genesis 25 tells us Ishmael had 12 sons, each became a leader of Arab tribes and notice vs. 18 “And they lived in hostility toward their brothers.” The harsh rejection that young Ishmael and his mother Hagar had received from Abraham, and being totally cut out of the family inheritance, bred deep resentment and hostility in Ishmael, and it was passed to all 12 of his sons, who passed it to their descendants! Remember, Ishmael is the father of the Arab nations today.
Isaac had two sons, twins, Jacob and Esau. Sometimes twins are inseparable and love each other deeply. Not these twins…in fact it was exactly the opposite. Resentment and competition defined their relationship, even from before birth for Gen. 25:22 says “The babies jostled each other within their mother…” These boys could not have been more different in personality, interests, and even physical attributes.
As sometimes happens with parents, Isaac and Rebekah chose sides. Isaac had watched it happen in his family when he was a boy. Daddy Isaac felt drawn to Esau, Rebekah to Jacob, and the tension reached such an extreme, especially following some deceitful scheming by Jacob, that Rebekah had to urge her son to leave the home and run for his life, for his brother Esau resented him so much he was looking to kill him. And so in Genesis 28, Jacob leaves home, fleeing for his life. As Isaac said farewell to his son Jacob, I wonder if he was haunted by the memory of watching his father Abraham saying farewell to his 1/2 brother Ishmael, as he sent away Ishmael and his mother Hagar. Oh the pain of broken families. In this case, do you see this horrible family pain was repeated both in Ishmael and Isaac and their families?
Perhaps you know it was also repeated in the third generation, with even greater intensity. Jacob had cheated his brother Esau and deceived his father Isaac. He had fled for his life, to his mother’s family in far away Haran, where his uncle Laben took him in, allowing him to work seven years to earn the hand of his daughter Rachel, with whom Jacob had fallen in love.
Do you remember that saying…’what goes around comes around’? After 7 years of hard work, Jacob found himself cheated by his uncle, deceived, being given daughter Leah to be his wife rather than her sister Rachel! 7 more years of work, and finally Jacob had both sisters as his wives, but oh what a tangled mess of jealousy and bitterness.
Eventually, as you may know, Jacob ended up having children by both Leah and Rachel, and two of their servant girls. As Jacob’s grandmother Sarah had done, his two wives each sought to build their families and their influence with Jacob, through their servant girls, as surrogate mothers. Genesis 29 & 30 gives us the remarkable story-line and finally Jacob ends up with 12 sons and 1 daughter…a complicated, conflicted, blended family. For while Jacob was father of all of them, they had four different mothers and the discord among these 12 sons was just like Isaac & Ishmael; Jacob & Esau, reaching its zenith in the sale of their young brother Joseph as a slave, to a traveling caravan which took young Joseph to Egypt!
You know there are many more details in this remarkable story, my friends, but I’ve tried to show you the thread of dysfunctional influence from generation to generation, even in the original God designed family. So may I invite you to pause now and look at your own family tree, especially the generational influence of father to son. While I hope you see some wonderful traits, look closely, do you also see some family dysfunction that was passed father to son? It could be anger, a short temper, deceitfulness, pride, unforgiveness. It could be lust, coveting things which others have, manipulation of people or information.
Here’s my question. . . in your generation did you simply pass on the dysfunction you inherited, or are you the chain breaker? Have you decided the dysfunction stops in your generation with God’s help? Has the Holy Spirit helped you see the generational dysfunction and awakened in you a deep desire to NOT pass it on to your children and grandchildren?
Joseph shows us how! In Genesis 45, after nearly 20 years had passed during most of which Joseph was a slave, Joseph miraculously becomes Prime Minister of Egypt, responsible for famine management. With his starving, deceitful brothers standing before him, hoping to buy enough food to keep their families alive, Joseph makes himself known to them and forgives them by saying: “I am your brother Joseph, the one you sold into slavery in Egypt! Do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you. For two years now there has been famine in the land, and for the next five years there will be neither plowing nor reaping. But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance…” (Gen. 45:4-8)
Two powerful things break the generational dysfunction of Abraham’s family after three generations: Joseph’s willingness to forgive in the face of complete trust in God’s Sovereignty over all, and Joseph’s confidence that God was working a much larger purpose and was including his family in that purpose! My fellow men… are you willing to consider the power of forgiveness and the power of joining with God in a willing participant in His larger purposes? What might God want to do in your family if you become a chain breaker of generational, dysfunction influence?
Bible images provided with attribution to www.LumoProject.com.
Click to read today’s chapter: Genesis 25; Genesis 45. (At the top you can choose a different translation.)
Have a comment or question about today’s chapter? I’m ready to hear from you, contact me here.
Pastor Doug Anderson 262.441.8785
“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, with our eyes fixed on Jesus…” (Heb. 12:1,2)
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