So let's read here in Genesis 25, verse 21.
And Isaac entreated the Lord for his wife, because she was barren.
And the Lord was entreated of him, and Rebekah his wife conceived.
And the children struggled together within her.
And she said, If it be so, why am I thus?
And she went to inquire of the Lord.
So she's pregnant with twins.
And the children are like fighting within the womb.
And she's feeling like mom's feel, you know, mom can always feel the movements of the babies.
And I have no idea what that feels like because I'm not a woman,
but I know that they do because I have a wife who's had plenty of babies.
So they're able to feel what's going on.
You could feel them kick and stuff.
You put your hand on the belly, especially as they get older.
You know, it's really neat.
But here there's like this this brawl going on inside the womb
between Jacob and Esau, and she's just like, What is going on?
You're like, What is this?
And she goes to inquire of the Lord and gets an answer.
The Bible says this.
Verse 23, And the Lord said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb,
and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels,
and the one people shall be stronger than the other people.
And the elder shall serve the younger.
Now, this prophecy was not just about Jacob and Esau, the people themselves,
like the individual Jacob and the individual Esau.
And it's just saying that Esau was going to serve Jacob, like just the men,
because he's bringing up the fact that there's going to be two nations
that come out of both of these.
These people are going to be the parents, the progenitors of whole nations
of people underneath them.
Esau is going to be the father of the Edomites, and he's going to live in Edom.
So there's a land that's called Edom.
There's a people that are called Edom, and they all stem from Esau.
And of course, Jacob then is renamed Israel,
which we all know became a nation of their own and had 12 tribes.
And all that became this other great nation.
The Bible's teaching here is that, well, the
one people shall be stronger than the other people,
and the elder shall serve the younger. And just
based on the biblical evidence alone, we don't see anywhere in scripture
where the individual Esau is serving Jacob.
And if anything, what we see is the exact opposite.
If you remember, Esau gets really angry at Jacob because first
he sells his birthright to him for a bowl of soup, basically for some pottage.
And then later on, he steals the blessing from his brother
when he goes in and pretends to be Esau.
And then Isaac blesses him, thinking that it's Esau and not Jacob.
And then Jacob receives that blessing.
And Esau is really upset by this to the point where he just wants to kill him.
So Rebecca doesn't want that to happen, so she sends Jacob
away and goes off on to
Laban and ends up working for him and that whole story.
But then when he comes back, so God's saying, OK, it's time for you to go back.
He has no idea what Esau is going to be like, because he basically left
just in time to avoid being killed by his brother.
Because that's how much he hated him then.
And then when he comes back, he's like giving him all these gifts,
these droves of gifts, because he's trying to appease his anger
and hoping that by the time he actually catches up with him,
he's going to already have received all this stuff.
And he's not going to feel like killing him anymore
when he sees that his brother is repentant, he's sorry.
He wants him to have all the stuff and is really just kind of begging for mercy.
In sending all of those gifts.
So we don't see Esau giving all the gifts to Jacob.
We see Jacob giving all the gifts to Esau.
OK, and then from there on, they just kind of part ways
and they just sort of live their own lives
and do their own thing from what we can see in the scripture.
So we clearly don't see the person being the focal point,
not to mention that it obviously says it's two manners of people, two nations.
That's what this is talking about.