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Do the ends justify the means? Now, if I phrase the question that way, you're all pre-prime to say, no, of course not, unless you're a pragmatist, in which case you say, yeah, maybe. So I'll rephrase the question a little bit. If the end of something is God's blessing, does that endorse everything that happened beforehand? If God pours out his blessing, does everything that came before that blessing represent things that are endorsed by God?

We're about to look at a familiar story here in the 27th chapter of Genesis. And that question is a big question that is raised by this passage. Does God endorse the means by which Jacob acquires blessing from his father?

Now, before we get going, I'm going to do something I don't normally do. Normally, I would read the passage, and then if I had comments on how it was structured, I would spell them out there. But because this is a familiar story for many of us, I'm going to talk about the structure ahead of time, just so you can kind of see what's happening here, and it's not just a familiar story washing past your ears and being ignored.

This chapter, actually starting at the end of chapter 26, we're going to look at chapter 26, beginning in verse 34, and read all the way through the end of chapter 27. And this story is bracketed by two references to Hittite women. And that technique of bracketing the story is a common one in all storytelling, but especially ancient storytelling where they were mostly oral cultures not like he's writing down a final product here but this story has been passed along by means of speech for years and years and years and years and inside of those brackets i think what we actually have is also a chiasm which is if you're looking at a piece of paper a story that kind of does this it comes down to a point and then it comes back out and if you're reading things outside of biblical studies, they'll call this a ring composition because it circles down to the story and then circles back out. It works in rings.

And I just want to point out a couple of these things to you. If I'm wrong about this, blame me. I didn't find this in any of the commentaries. I just noticed it as I was reading. I think the... Like I said, the brackets we have there. So if you were writing out a chiasm, I'm gonna nerd out here for a minute, okay? If you're writing out a chiasm, you would write out, here's section A, here's section B, and then in this case, you go C, and D is the center. And part of what the storyteller is doing when he comes down to the center is he's emphasizing that thing that's in the middle of the story it's not that everything else doesn't matter but this thing is the focal point and so this argument goes a or the story goes a b c d and then it comes out c prime matches up with c b prime matches up with b a prime matches up with a and so a and a prime are The reference to Esau's wives at the end of chapter 26, who are Hittites. And then at the end of chapter 27, Rebecca tells Jacob she doesn't want, or she tells Isaac that she doesn't want Jacob to marry Hittite women. So that's bracketing this story.

Then in between, we have what happens where Isaac is an old man. And he is concerned about the fact that he needs to pass on his blessing to his son. But instead of blessing the son who is chosen by God, he instead wants to bless his preferred son, his favorite son, Esau. And we see references to his age in verse 1, his death approaching in verse 2, the fact that he wants Esau to use weapons in verse 3, and that he's going to bless him in verse 4. And down in verses 41 to 45 We see Isaac's death approaching. Esau planning probably to use weapons to kill his brother Jacob. Esau lamenting over the fact that his blessing has been stolen. And in both of those sections, verses 1 to 13 and verses 41 to 45, Rebe