Today’s Scripture Reading

⁷When 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.”GEN.26.7

Today’s Devotional Reading

Isaac: An Extraordinary Purpose

Isaac was an ordinary man with ordinary fears, weaknesses, and even sins. But God used him for an extraordinary purpose—to be a father of God’s chosen people.

Isaac certainly had his faults. When he feared that his Philistine neighbors would kill him in order to take his beautiful wife, Rebekah, he lied and said she was his sister. It was a pathetic sin, one that ran in the family: his father, Abraham, had told the same lie about his own wife, Sarah, years earlier (Genesis 12:10–20, 20:1–5). Only the rebuke of a pagan king ended Isaac’s charade. This sort of behavior doesn’t help a marriage, and though Isaac and Rebekah began their lives together deeply in love, their relationship became problematic over the years. And then there were tensions over raising their twin sons: Isaac proved to be a poor judge of character, misreading both Jacob and Esau, each of whom had their own substantial faults.

Nevertheless, although not exemplary as a husband or a father, Isaac was the son of God’s promise. Indeed, the Lord had opened Sarah’s barren womb to keep His word to Abraham. Then God intervened to save Isaac when, as a youth, he was about to be sacrificed by Abraham in a test of faith. Isaac would have perished that day had God not stopped his father and provided a ram as a substitute.

Later, as an adult, Isaac enjoyed so much agricultural success that the pagans recognized that the Lord was with him (Genesis 26:12–14). The son of the promise received regular reminders of the Lord’s overarching purpose for him and all of history, “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” (Genesis 26:4).

How could God give privilege and honor to a man as uninspiring as Isaac—or indeed to any of us? Well, the truth of the matter is, it is not our goodness, but God’s gracious purposes that make any life momentous.

Today’s devotional reading is pulled from: NIV Storyline Bible