Genesis 31:1-21

Hey everybody, and welcome back as we jump into the 31st chapter here of Genesis.
Yeah,
kind of
in some ways an extension of some themes that we introduced yesterday.
Tension between Laban and Jacob,
and to some extent
today even that crosses over into some family tension.
But here we have these two men,
they’re both doing well.
Jacob
to some degree no longer works for Laban and has become very wealthy himself and is fiercely independent.
And so,
interesting today,
Jacob decides maybe it’s time to relocate.
So let me,
I’ll read for a while here,
I’ll try to go quickly and then we can unpack some of it.
Chapter 31,
Jacob heard that the sons of Laban were saying Jacob has taken all that was ours,
our fathers, he’s gained all his wealth from what belonged to us.
Then Jacob saw that Laban did not
regard him as favorably as he did before.
And then the Lord said to Jacob,
return to the land
of your ancestors and your kindred and I will be with you.
So Jacob sent and called Rachel and Leah
into the field where his flock was.
And he said to them,
I see your father doesn’t regard me as
favorably as he did before,
but the God of my father has been with me.
You know I’ve served
your father with all my strength,
but your father’s cheated me,
changed my wages 10 times,
but God did not permit him to harm me.
If he said the speckled shall be your wages,
then all the flock
were speckled.
If he said the stripes shall be your wages,
all the flock bore stripes.
Thus God has taken away the livestock of your father and given them to me.
During the mating of the flock, I once had a dream,
I looked up, I saw that the male goats,
we probably don’t need to
cover the dream here.
Let me skip down verse,
well let’s go in here,
verse 11.
The angel of God said
to me in a dream,
Jacob, and I said, here I am.
And he said, look up and see all the goats leap on the,
that leap in the flock are stripes speckled and modeled.
I have seen all that Laban is doing to you.
I’m the God of Bethel where you anointed a pillar and made a vow.
Leave behind this land
at once and return to the land of your birth.
Then Rachel and Leah answered him,
is there any portion of inheritance left to us in our father’s house?
Are we not regarded by him as foreigners?
For he has sold us,
he’s been using us,
he’s been using up the money given for us.
All the property that God has taken away from our father belongs to us and to our children.
Now then do whatever
God has said to you.
So Jacob arose and set his children and his wives on camels.
He drove away all the livestock, all the property that he gained and all the livestock in his possession
that he had acquired in Penderum to go down to his father Isaac
in the land of Canaan.
Let’s stop there.
There’s one little piece at the end,
but we’ll leave it there.
Very interesting today if we consider this story in connection to what we’ve already seen.
Once again,
Jacob is fleeing from a tense relationship with a male family figure.
We saw that when he got to Laban’s house running from Esau,
he now decides to leave.
Now in fairness, this one is divinely
driven.
God has told him to leave,
but we get here more backstory.
This changing my way just 10 times and he wasn’t allowed to harm me.
But we get the sense that now
perhaps there is some real hard feelings,
maybe even some animosity between these two men.
And Jacob has decided with God’s encouragement that it’s time to get out.
Yeah, and a notice here also the reality that we’ve seen a little bit of a change of narrative.
Yesterday we saw how he was putting things in front of these animals as they were breeding,
and he attributed that to whether they would have stripes or whether they’d be speckled.
And here we’ve seen explicitly that this is attributed to God,
that God is blessing him in spite of his
father-in-law’s best attempts.
And the narrative here is very clearly setting up not only a division
between Jacob and his father-in-law,
but also the father-in-law and God.
Because ultimately, to whatever extent we have seen him working against Jacob,
Laban has been working against
the blessing of God,
the blessing that we saw that began in Abraham and the blessing that we
saw ratified once again at Bethel,
this important turning point,
or at least a chapter point in Jacob’s story.
And now we see,
as this continues on here,
that the pressure here is not only
heating up between son-in-law,
father-in-law, but really there’s beginning to be a standoff
between someone trying to get the better of God’s blessed one,
and that’s not going to pan out for
him.
Yeah, not to interrupt here,
Michael, but also there’s
not great things that his daughters
are saying about him as well.
There’s tension in those relationships as well as they say he’s
squandered some of the property and anything God has taken and given to you,
also now because we’re
your wives, belongs to us and our children.
And so Jacob leaves,
and we’re going to find out later
in the story that Jacob leaves
without really telling Laban.
In fact, in this next verse,
it says Laban had gone to shear his sheep and Jacob flees.
I’m not quite ready to get there.
Let’s continue unpacking this part of the story a little bit.
So if we have this here
in front of us,
I think we see some familiar themes.
I do think we see Jacob now.
And notice again,
Jacob has taken something from someone.
Listen to the language here.
God said,
“God has taken,” verse 9,
“God has taken away the livestock of your father and given them to me.”
This is the second time we’ve seen Jacob receive things that weren’t his to start with.
And I won’t go so far as to say that he doesn’t deserve them because in this story,
I think maybe the implication is that he does.
In the Esau story,
I think it’s fairly neutral on that question.
But we see that Jacob has outwitted or at least has been the beneficiary of someone else’s losing.
Laban has lost out on something and he has come to Jacob as prophet,
just as Esau lost things
that came to Jacob as blessing.
And that has created attention that once again leads him to believe
with God’s insight as well that it’s time to separate and now return to the very place that
he left the first time this happened.
So I’m importing this a little bit into the text,
Clint, but I’ll be interested to hear how you respond to this.
There’s a sense in which we see some real
wrestling with what we see in the New Testament called election,
this idea that God elects those for his purposes.
And here,
God has clearly chosen Jacob.
There’s a kind of election in that God has picked this one.
There’s some room here for some causality,
right?
Because the whole Jacob in the
Esau story is riddled with this idea that Esau is the one who deserved the blessing,
but Jacob is the one who found a way to usurp it.
But yet,
very clearly, God has fully gotten behind Jacob.
It’s clear that God is going to use Jacob as the vessel of his promise.
And as this story continues,
the more and more that Laban fights against that choosing by God,
the more and more that it’s going
to be met with ultimate disaster.
It’s not going to succeed.
That said,
it’s also clear that there
is some level of cumulative damage being done here in the midst of the family relationships.
I mean, the section that we saved to the end here is going to make it clear that even father and
daughter have in some ways lost trust in one another,
or there’s been at least some breach of
that kind of family relationship.
And so, you know,
things aren’t all rosy.
I mean, I guess it’s my point that fundamentally, yes,
God is behind Jacob.
The blessing is certainly present.
God continues to monetarily or through wealth bless Jacob.
But we sometimes stop reading the
text there and say,
well, I wish that that’s what was happening to me.
But it’s clear that there’s
a whole host of things that are happening here.
That’s a part of it.
But there’s also some real
trudging through some mess and muck of life right here.
It’s not all positive.
Right.
And what’s today’s Tuesday.
So I think we’ll see this culminate in Thursday.
And I don’t want
to jump ahead, but I’ll just tell you that I think we see the prime example of this in one of the most misunderstood and misused,
I’ll say, verses in Genesis.
I won’t say in the Bible, but I think
if you can be with us Thursday,
because where this takes us is a place that is surprising to people
who know a part of the story,
but don’t know how they know it or why they know it.
Let me read this last bit here,
because this does need a little bit of unpacking verse 19.
Now Laban had gone to shear his sheep and Rachel stole her father’s household gods.
And Jacob deceived Laban the Aromian in that he did not tell him he intended to leave.
So he fled with
all that he had.
Starting out, he crossed the Euphrates and set his face toward the hill country of Gilead.
So imagine if you can,
that Laban is gone doing work and is going to come home and
find that his daughters,
his grandchildren,
his son-in-law,
not his flocks, but a good bit of the
property and wealth that were under his umbrella are all gone, that they’ve left.
And whether or not
Jacob needs to do this,
I think the text is unclear.
It’s very interesting.
We get a kind of some assumptions made about Laban,
but the Bible doesn’t take the trouble to
tell us Laban was dangerous or Laban intended to hurt Jacob.
There’s none of that language in the text,
though it’s clear that God has said,
“This is the time for you to return.” And so Jacob does.
He packs up and leaves,
maybe to avoid confrontation.
Remember that one of the first
things we learned about Jacob is that he was a quiet man who dwelt among the tents.
And it’s possible that he’s just not a person who wants to be around when
people are upset with him or when
tense things happen.
Maybe he just decides to be easier to just not be here when Laban gets back.
That’s certainly possible.
Then, Michael, we probably just should say a word here.
There’s a very weird detail dropped into the text,
and we wouldn’t do much with it,
except it’s going to come up again and be part of the story.
Rachel takes something from Laban’s
house, and the traditional translation is “household gods.” Now,
whether these are statues
or whether these are relics of some kind,
we’re not sure what this is.
Some translations actually
go so far as to
say they’re household goods,
but that doesn’t work in Hebrew,
because goods and gods,
it’s not like English,
we’re just add and oh,
they’re completely separate words.
So these are religious materials of some kind.
It’s not clear that they’re idols,
it’s not clear that they’re not,
and
they become,
like I said, we probably wouldn’t mention them,
except they’re going to come up again.
Yeah, my commentary makes no the fact that whatever these are would be handed on to Laban’s own son,
the one who would inherit the estate.
And so the idea that Rachel is taking that may
have some connection to the fact that as Jacob stole from his brother,
here Rachel is stealing
from her brother, from the one who would have inherited Laban’s entire estate.
You know, there’s maybe some parallel trickery,
if you let me use that language here.
It’s clear,
Clint, it is so clear, the implication isn’t clear,
but the circumstance is obvious,
how these characters are embroiled in a tit for tat kind of game of one-upsmanship.
And even in the leaving,
we see that there’s some things happening under the table,
right?
There’s some things disappearing,
even as they leave in the night.
It’s not enough to just go for whatever reason that is safety or expediency or whatever.
But you also take with you resources that didn’t belong to you from your
father’s house.
The text is making it very clear that these characters are trapped and caught in
this kind of this wrestling.
Yeah,
wrestling is a very interesting word given where the text is
going to take us ultimately in a chapter or two,
Michael.
But I think ultimately these are complex
relationships.
There’s a lot at play here and the strain between them is borne out in some of the
details of the story.
So we will have an occasion to talk about this again tomorrow as it comes back up.
And again, I would say in a very interesting way.
Again, one of the surprising
things about the book of Genesis is that it’s very hard to moralize it.
It’s very hard to take
the sort of do’s and don’ts that we all know as Christians and apply them to the Old Testament
characters because there are times when those characters clearly do things that are don’ts.
And it doesn’t seem to be bothersome in the bigger picture.
God doesn’t get upset.
In fact,
often in those cases,
it’s not mentioned.
God doesn’t seem to be reflected in that story at
all.
And we’ll see an instance of that tomorrow.
So I hope you get a chance to be with us.
Another interesting thing to note here is that when Laban is named in verse 20 here,
it’s notice Laban the Aramean.
We haven’t had that tacked on very often in the text here.
It’s another example and a reminder that the people who received the texts were ones who attributed these characters
to more than just a character.
They attributed them to entire nation states,
entire groups of people.
So the idea that this person did this would make sense.
You know,
in Northwest Iowa, we sometimes joke about like,
oh, South Dakota drivers, as I’m sure they say about Iowan drivers
or Minnesota drivers or whatever you create these stereotypes.
It’s an interesting thing to see the
many layers of meaning built into text like this.
It’s more than just a Genesis kind of account of how things went.
It’s also interpretive and helping you understand why things might also
today be that way.
And, you know, what this exactly meant to them,
you know, I can’t tell you,
I’m not a scholar,
and I certainly don’t know that original context, like some do.
But when you see
in the text things like that,
I think those are little hook points that you can know,
there’s probably more happening there than just naming him the Aramean.
That likely has meaning that
if you’re interested, you can dig deeper and learn what that might be.
Tomorrow we’ll see,
I think,
probably the tip of the iceberg in terms of the conflict of these
two men.
It kind of comes to the forefront in tomorrow’s text.
So if you can join us,
we’ll continue this story and appreciate that you’ve been with us today.
Hope you can be with us again.
Thanks, everybody.