The Patriarchs / Being Meditations upon Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Job; The Canticles, Heaven and Earth.

by J. G. Bellett

Now it is the son, the child at home, the child in the privileges of relationship, that we get in Isaac. It is such an one that he represents--this is what Isaac, mystically, is. Isaac was kept at home, waited on by the household, nourished and endowed; and the wealth as well as the comfort of his father's house was his; as we read, "And Abraham gave all that he had unto Isaac. But unto the sons of the concubines which Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts, and sent them away from Isaac his son, while he yet lived, eastward, unto the east country."

Mystically looked at, Isaac is thus before us, a son, born of the free woman, born of promise, born of God, as it is said, "I will come and Sarah shall have a son." Isaac represents that adopted family who are made "accepted in the Beloved," who have put on Christ, who stand in His joy, and breathe His spirit.

We have, however, to consider him morally as well as mystically; that is, in his character, as well as in his person. The elements, however, are but few. There is but little history connected with him. There are but few incidents in his life, and but little disclosure of character. And this is to our comfort. At times we find among the elect of God very fine natural materials, a noble bearing of soul, or a delicate, attractive form of human virtue; and again, at other times, either poor, or even very bad, human materials. And this becomes a relief to our poor hearts. Because we find it (from a better acquaintance with ourselves than with others) easy to own the poor and wretched materials that go to make up what we ourselves are; and then it is our comfort (comfort of a certain sort) to find like samples of nature in others of God's people.

Isaac was wanting in character. He was neither of fine nor of bad natural materials. There was much in him that, as we say, was amiable, and which, after a human estimate, would have been attractive. But he was wanting in character. The style of his education may go far to account for this. He had been reared tenderly. He had never been away from the side of his mother, the child of whose old age he was--her only child; and these habits had relaxed him, and kept a naturally amiable temper in its common softness. Quietness and retirement, the temper that rather submits than resents, and this allied to the relaxing indulgence of domestic, if not animal, life, appear in him. He was blameless, we may quite assume, pious and strict in the observance of relative duties, as a child and as a husband, and would have engaged the good-will and good wishes of his neighbours; but he was wanting in that energy which would have made him a witness among them, at least, beyond the separation which attended his circumcision, his altar, and his tent. And such a life is always a poor one. To his tent and his altar he was true, to a common measure; but he pitched the one and raised the other with too feeble a hand.

Isaac was forty years old when he received Rebecca to wife. For twenty years they were childless; but under this trial they behaved themselves even better than Abraham and Sarah had done. Abraham and Sarah had no child, and Sarah gave her bondmaid to her husband. Isaac and Rebecca had no child; but they entreated the Lord, and waited for His mercy. This was a difference, and for a moment, the last are first, and the first are last; and such moral variety do we find among the people of God to this day. But the two sets of children suggest different divine mysteries, as the way of the parents of each thus afford different moral teaching.

There were the two sons of Abraham--Isaac and Ishmael; but they were by two wives: there are now the two sons of Isaac--Jacob and Esau; but they are by the same wife.

The enmity between the sons of Abraham began when Ishmael, a lad of fourteen years of age, mocked the weaned Isaac. But the struggle between the sons of Isaac was in the womb. Two nations were there, as the Lord had told Rebecca, "Two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels." And so it came to pass. The man of God was found in Jacob, the man of the world in Esau; the principle of faith was in the one, the principle of nature in the other. Two manner of people were indeed separated from her bowels, and had struggled in her womb. "The friendship of the world is enmity against God." And this was Esau. Accordingly, Esau made the earth the scene of his energies, of his enjoyments, and of his expectations. He was "a man of the field," and "a cunning hunter." He prospered in his generation. He loved the field, and he knew how to use the field. He set his heart on the present life, and knew how to turn its capabilities to the account of his enjoyments. His sons quickly became dukes, nay kings, and had their cities; as Ishmael's children had become princes, and had their castles. Their dignity and their greatness proceeded from themselves; and the world witnessed them in their magnificence.

But Jacob was "a plain man," a man of the tent. He took after his fathers. Like Abraham and Isaac, he was a stranger here, sojourning as on the surface of the earth for a season, with his eye upon the promise. His children--while Esau's were dukes, settled in their domains, in the sunshine of their dignities and wealth--had to wander from one nation to another people, to suffer the hardships and wrongs of injurious Egypt, or to traverse, as pilgrims, the trackless, wasted desert.

Esau was the "profane" one. His hope and his heart were linked with life in this world, and with that only; for he would say, "I am at the point to die, and what profit shall this birthright do to me?" Like the Gadarenes, and like Judas, Esau would sell his title to Christ. But Jacob had faith, and was ready to buy what Esau was ready to sell.

Two manner of people were, after this manner, separated from Rebecca's bowels, as all this tells us. They are no sooner brought forth than this is seen; and their earliest habits, their first activities, are characteristic. It was not merely the bondwoman and the free, or the children of the two covenants, as Ishmael and Isaac had been; in Esau and Jacob we get a fuller expression of the same natures; the one, that reprobate thing, had from Adam, profane or worldly, which takes a portion in the earth and not in God; the other, that divine thing, had from Christ, which is believing, hopeful, looking to God's provisions, and waiting for the kingdom.