Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

Jacob Tricks Isaac

27 Isaac grew old, and his eyes became so weak that he could not see clearly. One day he called his older son Esau to him and said, “Son!”

Esau answered, “Here I am.”

² Isaac said, “I am old. Maybe I will die soon. ³ So take your bow and arrows and go hunting. Kill an animal for me to eat. ⁴ Prepare the food that I love. Bring it to me, and I will eat it. Then I will bless you before I die.” ⁵ So Esau went hunting.

Rebekah was listening when Isaac told this to his son Esau. ⁶ Rebekah said to her son Jacob, “Listen, I heard your father talking to your brother Esau. ⁷ Your father said, ‘Kill an animal for me to eat. Prepare the food for me, and I will eat it. Then, with the Lord as witness, I will bless you before I die.’ ⁸ So listen, son, and do what I tell you. ⁹ Go out to our goats and bring me two young ones. I will prepare them the way your father loves them. ¹⁰ Then you will carry the food to your father, and he will bless you before he dies.”

¹¹ But Jacob told his mother Rebekah, “My brother Esau is a hairy man. I am not hairy like him. ¹² If my father touches me, he will know that I am not Esau. Then he will not bless me—he will curse me because I tried to trick him.”

¹³ So Rebekah said to him, “I will accept the blame if there is trouble. Do what I said. Go get the goats for me.”

¹⁴ So Jacob went out and got two goats and brought them to his mother. His mother cooked the goats in the special way that Isaac loved. ¹⁵ Then Rebekah took the clothes that her older son Esau loved to wear. She put these clothes on the younger son Jacob. ¹⁶ She took the skins of the goats and put them on Jacob’s hands and on his neck. ¹⁷ Then she got the food she had cooked and gave it to Jacob.

Our Fight Against Sin

⁷ You might think I am saying that sin and the law are the same. That is not true. But the law was the only way I could learn what sin means. I would never have known it is wrong to want something that is not mine. But the law said, “You must not want what belongs to someone else.”^{[a] 8} And sin found a way to use that command and make me want all kinds of things that weren’t mine. So sin came to me because of the command. But without the law, sin has no power. ⁹ Before I knew the law, I was alive. But when I heard the law’s command, sin began to live, ¹⁰ and I died spiritually. The command was meant to bring life, but for me it brought death. ¹¹ Sin found a way to fool me by using the command to make me die.

¹² Now the law is holy, and the command is holy and right and good. ¹³ Does this mean that something that is good brought death to me? No, it was sin that used the good command to bring me death. This shows how terrible sin really is. It can use a good command to produce a result that shows sin at its very worst.

The War Inside Us

¹⁴ We know that the law is spiritual, but I am not. I am so human. Sin rules me as if I were its slave. ¹⁵ I don’t understand why I act the way I do. I don’t do the good I want to do, and I do the evil I hate. ¹⁶ And if I don’t want to do what I do, that means I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷ But I am not really the one doing the evil. It is sin living in me that does it. ¹⁸ Yes, I know that nothing good lives in me—I mean nothing good lives in the part of me that is not spiritual. I want to do what is good, but I don’t do it. ¹⁹ I don’t do the good that I want to do. I do the evil that I don’t want to do. ²⁰ So if I do what I don’t want to do, then I am not really the one doing it. It is the sin living in me that does it.