Hebrews 11:20 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Hebrews 11:20

Comments

Isaac is passing on the family blessing, headship of the family. The blessing concerned, the future of that family and particularly the coming into the world of the great descendant, who would be the Messiah, through whom all the nations of the earth would be blessed. This is the great covenant promise that Isaac possesses and there is to be a head of the family following him. Who would it be? Jacob is named first because the great spiritual blessing went to Jacob, the leadership of the family, and that is the line of the royal seed through whom the Messiah would come. Now naturally speaking, Esau was the elder of the twins and he should have had the headship of the family, and that is evidently what Isaac felt. He concluded that Esau would be the one since he was the older of the two, and in their culture he had the right to be head of the family and to be lord over his younger brother. We know how it happened. Isaac was old and blind, and he called for Esau to confer the covenant blessing. Everybody realised what was going to happen, and Rebecca, Isaac’s wife, panicked, and she and Jacob decided the only way to avert this tragedy was to construct a fraud. Isaac was deceived into blessing Jacob instead of his elder brother, Esau. Isaac, when he discovered what had happened, trembled exceedingly. He had been delivered from foolishness, and he had in fact given the blessing to the right person. He would not now reverse or revise the blessing. He gave a blessing to Esau who wept and pleaded for a reversal of everything. He gave him an earthly blessing, and it was so that Esau became the father of the Edomites, but it was Jacob who received the spiritual promises. Now here is the faith of Isaac: when he knew he was wrong, he succumbed and humbled himself because he knew it was right, and by faith he stood by what had happened. By faith he correctly blessed Jacob chiefly, and Esau less so. We see Isaac in faith recognising the purpose of God.

Application

We have to judge spiritually today in all things. Think of God's will for the churches, and how churches should be ordered and organised. We are Baptists, and we stand in that great tradition of independency, believing that every individual congregation is accountable directly to God, and should seek the will of God through his word. There should be no such thing as a denomination with a hierarchy and a rule from above over all the churches. But if you think humanly, rather as Isaac was tempted to do, you might say, ‘But surely things are more secure if you have got a strong national organisation, if you have got a strong leadership to direct the churches. Then individuals cannot go wrong; they cannot stray. Human judgement would be much in favour of strong denominational rule among the churches and very much against independency, which sounds like a recipe for disaster: people wandering off doing what is right in their own eyes. Failing churches receiving no support from stronger churches and so on; that would be disastrous. According to the wisdom of the world you have got to have a big organisation, but what may make sense in the world is not necessarily the same as God's instructions. God's instructions for churches are independency. Individual churches are accountable to him, not denominations. The evidence of history, is that contrary to everything we would think, churches are stronger and survive for longer in the truth as independent entities rather than within denominations. Associations become conduits for error, a means of mass infection of the churches. Furthermore, if an independent church does go liberal, there is nobody to hold it up so that it can perpetuate error, and it dies away of its own accord.

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Hebrews 11:20 Commentary and Bible Study