Faithful People Still Have Trials
How do you handle complaining?
There is a famine in the land.
God tells Isaac not to go the Egypt
but to live in the land where I tell you,
but stay a while in Gerar.
With that command,
God reassures him of the promise to his dad
and the increased blessing He would give him.
Isaac has the same fears as his dad;
we see this when he says to Rebekah,
“Say you are my sister in order to save
my life.”
When Abraham told Sarah, this was a half truth;
but no truth when Isaac said it.
Abimelech catches Isaac in the lie and rebukes him;
demonstrating God’s ability to protect him even when
he doubts.
God shows Isaac how quickly He can bless him.
Isaac’s first crop increases 100 times
and that was the start of his great wealth.
With the
blessing comes trials.
The Philistines were envious
and filled in all the wells his father had dug.
Abimelech out of fear asks Isaac to move.
Disputing and quarreling followed Isaac
until he had moved three times.
When he arrives at Beer-sheba,
God tells him not to be afraid because He is with him.
Abimelech comes to make a treaty with Isaac
and they left in peace.
The same day
Abimelech leaves,
God blesses Isaac with a new well.
Isaac’s life of God’s blessing
brought disputes and quarreling into his life
and became God’s method to move him.
It was all part of God’s plan,
but it seemed to be a mixed bag of blessing and
cursing;
until God moved him to a place of peace.
A place large enough to hold the blessings God had in
store for him.
Maybe God will use rejection in your life
to move you into a larger place
so you will have more room for His blessings.
The way we handle disputes
reveals our ability to handle
more blessings and responsibility.
1 Corinthians
11:18-20 NIV
18 In the first place, I hear that when you come together as a church,
there are divisions among you,
and to some extent I believe it.
19 No doubt there have to be differences among you
to show which of you have God's approval.
Scripture Reading
Genesis 26:1-27:1 NIV
26:1 Now there was a
famine in the land
— besides the earlier
famine of Abraham's time
— and Isaac went to
Abimelech king of the Philistines in Gerar.
2 The LORD appeared
to Isaac and said,
"Do not go down
to Egypt;
live in the land where I tell you to live.
3 Stay in this land
for a while, and I will be with you and will bless you.
For to you and your
descendants I will give all these lands
and will confirm the
oath I swore to your father Abraham.
4 I will make your
descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky
and will give them
all these lands,
and through your
offspring all nations on earth will be blessed,
5 because Abraham
obeyed me and kept my requirements,
my commands, my
decrees and my laws."
6 So Isaac stayed in
Gerar.
7 When the men of
that place asked him about his wife,
he said, "She is
my sister," because he was afraid to say, "She is my wife." He
thought,
"The men of this
place might kill me on account of Rebekah, because she is beautiful."
8 When Isaac had been
there a long time,
Abimelech king of the
Philistines looked down from a window
and saw Isaac
caressing his wife Rebekah.
9 So Abimelech
summoned Isaac and said, "She is really your wife!
Why did you say, 'She
is my sister'?"
Isaac answered him,
"Because I thought I might lose my life on account of her."
10 Then Abimelech
said, "What is this you have done to us?
One of the men might
well have slept with your wife,
and you would have
brought guilt upon us."
11 So Abimelech gave
orders to all the people:
"Anyone who
molests this man or his wife shall surely be put to death."
12 Isaac planted
crops in that land
and the same year
reaped a hundredfold,
because the LORD
blessed him.
13 The man became
rich, and his wealth continued to grow until he became very wealthy.
14 He had so many
flocks and herds and servants that the Philistines envied him.
15 So all the wells
that his father's servants had dug in the time of his father Abraham,
the Philistines
stopped up, filling them with earth.
16 Then Abimelech
said to Isaac,
"Move away from
us; you have become too powerful for us."
17 So Isaac moved
away from there
and encamped in the Valley of Gerar and settled there.
18 Isaac reopened the
wells that had been dug in the time of his father Abraham,
which the Philistines
had stopped up after Abraham died,
and he gave them the
same names his father had given them.
19 Isaac's servants
dug in the valley and discovered a well of fresh water there.
20 But the herdsmen
of Gerar quarreled with Isaac's herdsmen and said,
"The water is
ours!"
So he named the well
Esek, because they disputed with him.
21 Then they dug
another well, but they quarreled over that one also;
so he named it
Sitnah.
22 He moved on from
there and dug another well,
and no one quarreled
over it.
He named it Rehoboth,
saying,
"Now the LORD
has given us room and we will flourish in the land."
23 From there he went
up to Beersheba.
24 That night the
LORD appeared to him and said,
"I am the God of
your father Abraham.
Do not be afraid, for
I am with you;
I will bless you and
will increase the number of your descendants
for the sake of my
servant Abraham."
25 Isaac built an
altar there and called on the name of the LORD.
There he pitched his
tent, and there his servants dug a well.
26 Meanwhile,
Abimelech had come to him from Gerar,
with Ahuzzath his
personal adviser and Phicol the commander of his forces.
27 Isaac asked them,
"Why have you come to me,
since you were
hostile to me and sent me away?"
28 They answered,
"We saw clearly that the LORD was with you; so we said,
'There ought to be a
sworn agreement between us'
— between us and you.
Let us make a treaty
with you
29 that you will do
us no harm,
just as we did not
molest you but always treated you well and sent you away in peace. And now you
are blessed by the LORD."
30 Isaac then made a
feast for them, and they ate and drank.
31 Early the next
morning the men swore an oath to each other.
Then Isaac sent them
on their way, and they left him in peace.
32 That day Isaac's
servants came and told him about the well they had dug.
They said,
"We've found water!"
33 He called it
Shibah,
and to this day the
name of the town has been Beersheba.
34 When Esau was
forty years old,
he married Judith
daughter of Beeri the Hittite,
and also Basemath
daughter of Elon the Hittite.
35 They were a source of grief to Isaac and Rebekah.
