The Lifelong Search for the Blessing

The search for the Blessing is not just a modern-day phenomenon. It is actually centuries old. In fact, we can find a graphic picture of a person who missed out on his family’s blessing in the Old Testament.

Esau was beside himself. Just hours before, his father, Isaac, had called him to his side and made a special request. If Esau, the older son, would go and bring in fresh game for a savory meal, Isaac’s long-awaited blessing would be given to him.

What was this blessing that Esau had waited for over the years? For sons or daughters in biblical times, receiving their father’s blessing was a momentous event. At a specific point in their lives, they could expect to feel a loving parent’s touch and to hear words of encouragement, love, and acceptance—words that gave them a tremendous sense of being highly valued and that even pictured a special future for them.

Esau’s time of blessing was supposed to begin as soon as he could catch and prepare the special meal.

He had gone about his work quickly and efficiently. In almost no time Esau had whipped up a delicious stew as only one familiar with the art of cooking in the field could do.

Esau had done just as he was told. Why, then, was Isaac acting so strangely? Esau had just entered his father’s tent and greeted him:

“Let my father arise and eat of his son’s game, that your soul may bless me.” And his father Isaac said to him, “Who are you?” So he said, “I am your son, your firstborn, Esau.”

Then Isaac trembled exceedingly, and said, “Who? Where is the one who hunted game and brought it to me? I ate all of it before you came, and I have blessed him—and indeed he shall be blessed.”

When Esau heard the words of his father, he cried with an exceedingly great and bitter cry, and said to his father, “Bless me—me also, O my father!” (Genesis 27:31–34)

Little did Esau know that when his aged and nearly blind father called him to his side, another had been listening. Rebekah, the mother of Esau and his twin brother, Jacob, had also been in the tent. As soon as Esau went out into the fields to hunt fresh game, she had run to her favorite son, Jacob, with a cunning plan.

Jacob should not have had to trick his way into receiving the blessing. God himself had told Isaac, regarding his twin sons, that the “older shall serve the younger” (Genesis 25:23). Yet Esau had grown up expecting the blessing to be his. No wonder he was devastated when he came back from hunting to find that an even more cunning hunter had stolen into his father’s tent and taken what he thought would be his.

Can you feel the anguish in Esau’s cry, “Bless me, me as well, O my father”? This same painful cry and unfulfilled longing are being echoed today by many people who are searching for their family’s blessing, men and women whose parents, for whatever reason, have failed to bless them with words of love and acceptance. People with whom you rub shoulders every day. Perhaps even you.

Respond

• Share a time in your life when an expected “blessing” did not happen.
• How did you react?

Pray

Lord Jesus, show me someone in my circle of family and friends who needs to hear about the blessing You have for them.