Page 52 - The Divine Unfolding of God's Plan of Redemption

be the seed of the serpent, and then having lost his birthright and his blessing, he
turned and tried to kill his brother Jacob who had taken his place in the highway of the
seed.

Man looketh on the outward appearance but God looketh on the heart. Without
excusing the outward conduct or the methods employed by Jacob in his early life, it
should be pointed out that he possessed one thing that was of inestimable value. He

attached deep significance to the promises of God. He believed them and coveted
them for himself while his brother flaunted and despised them. The attitude that a man
assumes to the words and revelation of the living God will eventually be reflected in
his outward conduct. So when the tale was told, Jacob became Israel, a prince with

God, and Esau a potential murderer, and his seed among the most bitter antagonists of
the chosen seed. Amalek, particularly, is used in Scripture as the type of the flesh,
whose desires and demands contest the believer‟s progress into full spiritual blessing
as stubbornly as his armies hindered Israel‟s advance through the wilderness to their

Canaan inheritance. “And the Lord said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a
book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly put out the remembrance
of Amalek from under heaven. And Moses built an altar…for he said, because the
Lord hath sworn that the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to

generation” (Exod. 17:14-16).

To recapitulate for a moment we find that the failures of God‟s testimony people
produced boomerangs to this very testimony in the persons and seed of Moab,

Ammon, Ishmael, Midian, and Amalek. How careful, then, should the believer be in
his earthly walk because the same principles operate now as then! We have frequently
heard it said that the sons or daughters of ministers of the gospel are the worst young
people in the community. When the parents are true to the Lord and bring their

children up in His nurture and admonition, when they stand steadfastly against
permitting the children to engage in worldly and sinful pleasures, while under the
parental roof, when they do not permit earthly ambitions and desires for worldly
preferment for their children to consume them, living themselves as pilgrims and

strangers in this wicked world and instructing their children so, it will be found that
the results in the children are almost uniformly good, and there will be with them a
quality of spiritual understanding and life that is above the average.

But let the Christian worker lower his or her standards of pilgrim separation and
allow the standards and practices of the present cosmic order even in a partial measure
to become his, or let him desire for his children educational or intellectual prestige
that demands placing them under godless teachers in pagan institutions, or let him

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