The Thread That Holds
This sermon was preached at Sherwood Community Friends Church on Sunday, May 3. You can watch the video in full by clicking below.
Jesse and Lindsay Applegate left western Missouri in the spring of 1843 as part of the first large organized wagon train on the Oregon Trail— what history now calls the Great Migration. About a thousand people, mostly farmers who had sold everything, packed wagons, and pointed west.
The Applegate brothers brought over a hundred head of livestock, across two thousand miles of prairie, mountain, and high desert.
By November they were nearly there. They had abandoned their wagons at Fort Walla Walla and built flatboats to float the Columbia River down into the Willamette Valley. Oregon was at their fingertips, but the hardest part was supposed to be behind them.
On November 6, near The Dalles, one of the boats drifted into a whirlpool. It upended in the current and Jesse's nine-year-old son Edward and Lindsay's nine-year-old son Warren went into the river. Their bodies were never found.
The families arrived at Fort Vancouver a few days later grief-stricken, exhausted, and half-starved from the winter that had already settled in. But they arrived. They built homes. They planted crops. They stayed. Jesse eventually became one of the most significant founding figures in Oregon history. And because of what happened on the Columbia River that November, he and Lindsay later surveyed and opened what became the Applegate Trail— a safer southern route into Oregon so other families wouldn't have to face those same rapids.
The obstacle didn't end the journey. The tragedy didn't stop what they had come to do. And what came out of the loss made room for thousands who would follow.
That’s the shape of what we’re opening our Bibles to today in Genesis chapters 24 through 26. We see God’s promise advancing toward its destination, but we also see obstacles appearing in different forms, in different generations, and the covenant’s thread stretching until it looks like it might finally break. But God’s promise keeps moving forward.
If you remember nothing else, remember this:
God's covenant carries through despite obstacles.
Not because the people carrying it were impressive, but because what God holds, he carries through, and his thread does not break.
Okay Here’s The Story So Far
Let me first say, we’re glad you’re with us today as we continue our teaching series GENESIS: The Promise learning from the first book of the Bible, specifically chapters 12-50.
Genesis is not primarily a book about people. It’s God's story told through a narrator whose purpose is to reveal what God is doing in the world. (Dr. John Walton says), every chapter is curated with covenant themed questions in mind:
How is the covenant advancing?
What obstacles are threatening it?
And how does God carry it forward anyway?
In Genesis chapters 1 through 11, God establishes order. Humanity disrupts it by choosing allegiance other than God to make a name for themselves rather than partner with him to steward his created world.
So God responds by scattering the nations, not in judgment, but in the movement of a covenant. God calls one man— Abraham— to leave all that was familiar and comfortable and makes a covenant with a three-part promise: I’ll give you land, family, and blessing. Through your offspring, all the nations of the earth— the same ones who turned their backs on me— will be blessed.
God gives Abraham a child he thought he would never be able to have and then his loyalty is put to the test.
In today’s reading we find Abraham is now 175 years old and dying. The handoff from Abraham to his son Isaac is happening. And the question is not so much about Abraham or Isaac, but in seeing what God does with the covenant when the generation that received it is gone?
That’s merely an obstacle. What does God do? He carries it through.
The Family Must Move Forward
Genesis 24 is the longest chapter in Genesis having sixty-seven verses. Don’t worry— I won’t read them all to you, but I will give you the important highlights in the story. We see the narrator move throughout this chapter carefully because something significant is at stake. What’s happening is about moving Abraham’s family forward, which moves the covenant forward. That's the only frame we need.
The chapter opens with us stepping into a conversation Abraham is having with his most trusted servant about finding a wife for his son Isaac, not in the land they are living in among the Canaanites.
Genesis 24:6-7 CSB
"Abraham answered [his servant], 'Make sure that you don't take my son [Isaac] back there. The Lord, the God of heaven, who took me from my father's house and from my native land, who spoke to me and swore to me, I will give this land to your offspring — he will send his angel (messenger) before you, and you can take a wife for my son from there.'"
Abraham calls his servant and gives him one assignment: go back to Haran (the place where his father died) and find a wife for Isaac from among his own people. Then bring her back to this land. As you go, don’t take Isaac with you. Abraham knew the importance of staying put in the land God gave him because in it, God is always moving forward, not backward.
Notice what Abraham does with his servant before sending him. He confirms the covenant and frames it into the forefront of his mind. Abraham tells the servant who God is, what God did, and why he can be trusted— because what he did before he will do again. Amen?!
That’s the definition of sharing the Gospel. That's how simple it is. That’s evangelism.
Now, before we go further, I want to name something right out of the gate that might make some of you uncomfortable.
What we see happen in this chapter with Isaac being found a wife by his father, through the servant, is an arranged marriage. In our culture, that feels strange at best and wrong at worst. We marry someone because we love them, because we've spent time together, and made a choice— together. That's our culture. This was not their culture. In the ancient Near East, arranged marriages were the norm as a recognized social mechanism, not a violation of freedom. What was distinctive about Abraham's version was what he was specifically looking for in a wife for his son.
The text gives us insight that the sort of woman they wanted to be Isaac’s wife was who mirrored the values of his household— generosity, kindness, and sacrificial hospitality. That wasn't a random sign. It was a character test.
So Abraham’s servant goes and arrives at a well near Haran in the evening and prays:
Genesis 24:12-15a CSB
“Lord, God of my master Abraham,” he prayed, “make this happen for me today, and show kindness to my master Abraham. I am standing here at the spring where the daughters of the men of the town are coming out to draw water. Let the girl to whom I say, ‘Please lower your water jug so that I may drink,’ and who responds, ‘Drink, and I’ll water your camels also’—let her be the one you have appointed for your servant Isaac. By this I will know that you have shown kindness to my master.”
Before he had finished speaking, there was Rebekah…”
Before the servant even finished praying, Rebekah arrives.
She draws water for him. And then— [can you guess what happen…?] without being asked— she offers to water his camels. This was not only a gesture of sacrificial hospitality, but the exact answer to his prayer that he asked for and what he asked for wasn’t a normal thing.
Have you ever watered a camel?
Fun Fact: A typical camel, after a long journey, can drink up to 20 gallons of water. With the ten camels there and the size of a typical water jug, this would have been over 100 trips to the well. Several hours of work. Rebekah was a beast! She was jacked!
This is exactly what God was looking for. Well maybe not the jacked part being on her prematrimonial resume, but her heart posture. In today's terms, she was the kind of woman who ran toward the need, not away from it. Sacrificial hospitality was a core value of Abraham’s family that he personally modeled. And sacrificial hospitality is a core value of God’s family that Jesus modeled for us, the Church, to model in our lives for the world to see. Amen?!
We also see, in this particular story, the Hebrew word “hesed” (pronounced KHE-sed) appear for the very first time in all of Genesis to describe God. Hesed = God's faithful, loyal love; his never-ending, always-prevailing love. That one word means all of that. Four times the word is used in this chapter in relation to God.
Would you like a Bible study pro tip?
Bible Study Pro Tip: When you see a repeated word in scripture, it’s not there by accident. The narrator is telling us: what is happening at this well is not just logistics. It is hesed. It’s God's relentless, faithful covenant-keeping loyal love on display, working through a servant's errand and a woman's hospitality.
God's faithfulness can be seen by Rebekah's ‘yes’.
The servant then gives her gifts, asks who she is, and finds out she’s Abraham's grandniece (Bethuel's daughter). Five hundred miles from home, the right person at the right well, at the right time, and from the exact family they wanted.
Negotiations then happen to progress the marriage arrangement, but Rebekah’s scheming brother Laban— who as we will see later in the Genesis story has a very consistent pattern of holding tightly to things that don't belong to him— he tries to control and delay everything. The servant pushes back and then the moment the whole chapter has been building toward arrives.
They ask Rebekah an important question.
Genesis 24:58 CSB
"They called Rebekah and said to her, 'Will you go with this man?' She replied, 'I will go.'"
Three words. She had never met Isaac. She was leaving her entire family and everything familiar to go with a stranger into a strange land to marry a strange man. Rebekah was vulnerable and had agency, but she responded to the movement of God even though she didn't understand all of it.
Isaac and Rebekah's marriage is the carrier of moving the covenant promise forward through their family.
When Character Is the Obstacle
Turning into chapter 25 we read Abraham dies at age 175. And in a quietly moving detail, Isaac and his estranged half brother Ishmael come together to bury their father— revealing some fractures can be set aside in grief.
At Abraham’s death, God gives everything to Isaac and the covenant transfers cleanly. Even though the people change, God does not. He sustained the promise with Abraham and now it carried through into the hands of his promised son.
But there’s an obstacle in the family. Rebekah is barren and cannot have children.
And yet, we already know: God's covenant carries through despite obstacles. [say that again with me]
If you've been tracking during this story, we saw Abraham’s wife Sarah was barren. Now Rebekah is barren. Two obstacles. One promise. And the covenant keeps running into the same wall of human inability to produce what God promised— and it keeps advancing anyway. The narrator intentionally wants us to see that the life of this covenant has never depended on human capacity. It depends on God's.
Isaac prays for his wife. It works— I mean it really worked because Rebekah did get pregnant with twins— two sons. But it took twenty years to pass before God answered Isaac’s prayer.
God tells Rebekah: two nations are in your womb, and the older will serve the younger. Esau comes out first. Jacob follows, gripping his brother's heel— Ya'akov (Jacob) in Hebrew means heel-grabber. He was reaching for control from the very first moment of his life.
Chapter 25 ends with this interesting exchange between the brothers, Jacob and Esau. We see Esau, a hunter, come in from a hunt and he must've struck out because he returns exhausted, hungry, and on the brink of death. Jacob happened to be cooking stew. Esau asks for some. Jacob seizes the opportunity, reaching for control, and says to his brother, I’ll give you some stew if you sell me your birthright first.
For Jacob, the birthright meant one day he would be the head of the family, as their patriarch, and financially inherit his father's entire estate. For Esau, it meant he was abandoning the covenant blessing.
Genesis 25:32 CSB
"Esau replied, 'I'm about to die, so what good is a birthright to me?'"
He ate and left without understanding the depth of what he had done. The writer of Hebrews (12:16) called him irreverent or godless— treating what was sacred as if it were disposable. What is eternal cannot be recovered by running back for it after you've sold it. That’s the warning the narrator is placing in front of us, but he’s also revealing another obstacle for the covenant.
When the Land Pushes Back
Chapter 26 takes a sharp pivot from the twins to bring us deeper into the ordinary life of their father Isaac as just a man navigating a famine, dealing with conflict, and digging wells to settle in the land and provide for his family.
This famine is pretty bad and Isaac's first instinct is to go to Egypt which is exactly what his father Abraham had done decades earlier. But God shows up before he gets there.
Genesis 26:2-3 CSB
"The Lord appeared to him and said, 'Do not go down to Egypt. Live in the land that I tell you about; stay in this land as an alien, and I will be with you and bless you. For I will give all these lands to you and your offspring, and I will confirm the oath that I swore to your father Abraham.'"
Even though the people change, God does not. The famine poses an obstacle in the land, but God keeps moving the covenant through.
He affirms the covenant promised to Abraham and now to Isaac directly— land, offspring, blessing to all nations. And then he says: I am doing this because your father Abraham obeyed my commands. Abraham's faithfulness had generational reach. What he did in the ordinary, unseen decisions of his life were still producing blessing for his son long after Abraham was gone.
So Isaac stays. Even despite the obstacle of famine, God keeps his covenant promise moving forward.
Genesis 26:12-13 CSB
"Isaac sowed seed in that land, and in that year he reaped a hundred times what was sown. The Lord blessed him, and the man became rich and kept getting richer until he was very wealthy."
Some of Isaac’s neighbors were watching how abundant his blessings were and the Philistines became envious. The Philistine king Abimelech tells him to leave that area so they could have it all to themselves. Isaac does leave. And then he starts digging wells in the new area he tried to settle.
His father Abraham had dug wells in this same region, but the rowdy bunch of Philistines had filled them in. So Isaac reopens them and digs new ones. Every time he did, he was faced with conflict— more obstacles— as the local herdsmen quarrel with him and claim the water as their own. So he kept moving and every time he did, he dug another well. They quarrel again. He moves again. He digs again.
Obstacle after obstacle showed up for Isaac as he tried to settle in the land God promised his father and promised him in the covenant they had together.
After all that, he finally digs one nobody fights over and names it “Rehoboth” which in Hebrew means wide open spaces with room to spread out.
Genesis 26:22 CSB
He says, "For now the Lord has made room for us, and we will be fruitful in the land."
At last, Isaac finally got the promised land! Even though the obstacles seemed hectic, and I’m sure pretty darn annoying, the covenant advanced through the land, one dig at a time. God makes room when we keep going faithfully.
I see this also as the narrator giving us a throwback to Genesis chapter 1, where God said to be fruitful and multiply, fill the Earth, and subdue it. Isaac is able to fulfill that command.
After Isaac settled, God appeared to him at a spot named Beer-sheba and said:
Genesis 26:24 CSB
“I am the God of your father Abraham. Do not be afraid, for I am with you. I will bless you and multiply your offspring because of my servant Abraham.”
Isaac builds an altar— dedicating that land to God. Same as his father did. He then pitches his tent and digs another well.
What we're seeing is nothing spectacular but a lot of ordinary things that happened in Isaac's life.
We also experience ordinary things like this. We may not dig wells and have quarrels about them, but don’t we certainly experience conflict? Don’t we experience obstacles?
God’s covenant carried through not in spectacular moments, but because one man kept showing up.
God's covenant carries through despite obstacles.
The Thread Was Always Heading Somewhere
Turning back to Genesis chapter 24 there’s something beautiful there that most people read right past it.
Genesis 24:1-2 CSB
“Abraham was now old, getting on in years, and the Lord had blessed him in everything. Abraham said to his servant, the elder of his household who managed all he owned, “Place your hand under my thigh,
[In the ancient Near East, swearing an oath by placing a hand under someone's thigh— which may or may not have been the genitals— was the equivalent of signing a legal contract. It was their way of saying, “I am binding myself to this completely.”]
and I will have you swear by the Lord, God of heaven and God of earth, that you will not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites among whom I live, but will go to my land and my family to take a wife for my son Isaac.”
Let me ask you this question: How does the father in this story find a bride for his son?
The Father sends his servant to find the bride for his Son.
Let’s read it again with that in mind.
Genesis 24:1-2 CSB
“Abraham was now old, getting on in years, and the Lord had blessed him in everything. Abraham said to his servant, the elder of his household who managed all he owned, “Place your hand under my thigh, and I will have you swear by the Lord, God of heaven and God of earth, that you will not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites among whom I live, but will go to my land and my family to take a wife for my son Isaac.”
The Father sends his servant on a mission to find the bride. The servant goes, is guided providentially by God, finds the bride, and brings her to the son. And the bride says ‘yes’.
The narrator of Genesis is most definitely not thinking of this in a New Testament sort of way, but we could extract a truth from this passage that points far beyond Abraham, his servant, Isaac, and Rebekah.
This is a picture of the Holy Spirit— sent by Father God— going into the world to call together a bride for the Son. The bride is the church. The Son is Jesus. And the invitation being extended to every person in every generation is the same one Rebekah heard: Will you go with this man?
The thread that we see running Biblically from Abraham to Isaac— and eventually— to Jacob to Joseph to Moses to David— it runs straight to a manger in Bethlehem. Apostle Paul makes this clear in his letter to the Galatian church:
Galatians 3:16 NLT
“God gave the promises to Abraham and his child. And notice that the Scripture doesn’t say “to his children,” as if it meant many descendants. Rather, it says “to his child”—and that, of course, means Christ.”
Every obstacle the covenant survived was one more stretch of the thread on its way to Christ. The barren wombs. The stolen birthright. The famine. The filled wells. The quarreling. All of it pointing forward to the One in whom the covenant was finally divinely destined to fulfill.
And then came the ultimate obstacle. Death itself. On a hill outside Jerusalem, Jesus went to the cross. The obstacle that should have ended everything… BUT… on the third day, the covenant carried through even the obstacle of death.
God's covenant carries through despite obstacles.
He did this through Abraham. He did this through Isaac. He did it through Jesus. And he still does this through you and me— through his Church.
Your Turn: Go
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working through the seven basic commands Jesus gave his followers. Last week we practiced “hineni” which is a heart posture praying to God, Here I am Lord, I am entirely yours, my hands and arms are wide open, and I hold nothing back.
This week the command that flows naturally out of everything we've seen in these chapters, is Go.
Rebekah said, “I will go.” And she went. Isaac also went when God told him to go.
Matthew 28:19-20 CSB
Jesus said to us, "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe (or obey) everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age."
Have we reached the end of the age yet?
He said, Go. And when you are going, “I am with you always.” Him being with us is what blesses the nations when we go.
That's the same promise God gave Abraham when he first called him.
Genesis 12:1-3 CSB
“Go from your land,
your relatives,
and your father’s house
to the land that I will show you.
I will make you into a great nation,
I will bless you,
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
I will curse anyone who treats you with contempt,
and all the peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”
It’s the same promise God gave Isaac. The same promise he said to every generation that carried the covenant forward. And this is the same promise Jesus gave his disciples to pass on through generations to us his Church. We are to go bring Jesus to everyone we meet and that brings God’s covenant blessing through.
Go does not require a dramatic story. Abraham’s servant went to find Isaac a wife without knowing if he would succeed. Rebekah went without knowing what lay ahead with the man she would marry. Isaac stayed in the land and didn’t go to Egypt during the famine when every instinct said otherwise. None of these characters were impressive. They just said, ‘yes’ to God. And through all of them, God moved the covenant forward.
Here’s our question to sit with this week: Where is God asking you to carry the covenant forward, and what obstacle is in the way?
Is it in your neighborhood?
In your workplace
In a relationship
In a conversation you have been avoiding
In your bank account
In your own head
Is it your shame? The thing you've done, or that was done to you, that still haunts you to this day. The thing that makes you feel disqualified from carrying anything forward for God.
Is it your past? The version of yourself from before that keeps telling you you're not the right person for this— the lie that God couldn't possibly use what's already happened.
Is it a spirit of rebellion or apathy within you?
Where or what is your obstacle?
My encouragement to you is to name it— spend time in prayer with God to help you name your obstacle.
The obstacle in front of you is not evidence God has abandoned the mission or won’t or couldn’t use you. It’s the same pattern we see in Genesis: Obstacle to the covenant. Someone says ‘yes’ even if they don’t understand the path forward. And God carries it through. The question is simply: will you say “yes” and go with him?
The Thread Holds
In the story of the Bible, we’ll see the thread of the covenant running through Abraham to Isaac.
From Isaac to Jacob.
Jacob to Joseph.
Joseph to Moses.
Moses to David.
David to a manger.
From a manger to a cross.
From a cross to an empty tomb.
The covenant thread holds because he holds it.
God's covenant carries through despite obstacles.
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