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Whatever his reasons were, Isaac raised his two sons differently.  Scripture tells us that Esau, the first-born of the twin sons, was a man whose proclivities led him to love the outdoors.  He was a hunter and a man of the “fields.”  This made him temperamentally like his father, and Isaac seems to have loved that about him.  The other twin, Jacob, was apparently not of similar kind.  Scripture cryptically describes him as a man who hung around among the tents.  It is likely this information was given to enable us to view the contrast between the two of them. Now it turns out that Rebekah had been instructed by the Lord concerning the twins.  It was not a vague prophecy at all.  Without doubt, Jacob was to be ascendant over his older brother.  Rebekah apparently took the word of the Lord seriously.  It is not reasonable that she would have hidden such important matters from her husband Isaac.  There can be but very little doubt that from before the twins were born, Isaac was fully aware of the prophesied distinction between his two sons.  He would have known from before they were born that the second son would be ascendant over the first and that the first-born son would be secondary to his brother in the eyes of [...]

Father Abraham.  I remember a children’s tune called just that; “Father Abraham.”  Certainly in the Jewish mind this man is supremely important.  Even though the Jewish people were called Israelites in ancient times, they still thought of themselves in terms of their origin in the seed of Abraham. But who was this man?  That is a central question in the new book, “Birth of The Holy Nation” coming out in early 2015.  Of course, we cannot know everything about Abraham, separated as we are from him by thousands of years of history.  But we can know a lot about him by a careful examination of his life and legacy in scripture.  Usually our discussions of Abraham and his life are fairly superficial.  In “Birth of The Holy Nation” we will take a much more careful look.  In particular we will examine his life as a son of God as the starting point to his life as the father of the nation of God’s own choosing. But, he was a bloody man.  The shedding of blood marked his life.  Not only did it mark his life, it was a prominent feature of his relationship with God – even to the point that shedding his own blood by circumcision was a major hallmark of that life-determining relationship.  Abraham did not shrink [...]

The function performed by “Elijah’s ravens” was to take food to him while he was in hiding in the Cherith Ravine.  This was a regular activity.  They brought to Elijah bread and meat twice a day every day for a prolonged period of time.  Somewhere these ravens had a source of food.  Wherever that source was, the ravens were able to go to the source twice a day for the allotment of food for Elijah.  Assuming the meat was cooked that means the ravens “took” it from humans who probably knew nothing about what was going on.  The ravens, under the influence of some guiding power, went to various places and took adequate portions of bread and meat from those places to Elijah to keep him fed.  The loss of bread and meat in those places was not so significant as to be noticed by the people there as far as we can tell.  Otherwise, they would have taken precautions to avoid the thefts by the pesky ravens.  Therefore there must have been quite a few of these sources but the single destination. What a remarkable thing!  These birds are noteworthy for their intelligence but it is not likely they understood who Elijah was or why they were providing for him.  They just did what the Spirit of [...]