Jacob

Hey friends, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
It’s good to be seen.
Thank you for tuning in to listen today as we discuss another real person of the faith,
one of the foundational Bible characters.
Many would argue possibly the fundamental character of the Israelite story,
or at least in some ways certainly their namesake.
You may notice we’re coming to you from kind of a new location.
We want to thank the Presbyterian of Prospect Hill for a grant to buy some new technology
and to utilize some of these things as we live into this digital age,
both now during the pandemic and beyond.
And we are grateful for a chance to have this equipment,
which is definitely an upgrade.
We are doing our best to figure it all out.
And so if there are hiccups, we apologize,
but we are grateful for that chance.
So let’s jump in.
Today, we are looking at the character Jacob.
And Michael,
a varied story, a big story, covers a lot of ground in terms of the literature
and in terms of the history.
And in many ways,
though we certainly trace the covenant to Abraham,
in many ways, given the 12 sons and the tribes and the story of Jacob,
you could argue that these are the roots,
that his story really provides some of the roots of what follows in the rest of the Old Testament.
You could absolutely make that case, Clint.
And if you look at not just the amount of literature,
which you’ve already mentioned,
and by that we mean just the sheer number of chapters,
Jacob takes a lot of the rest
of the story of Genesis.
But if you continue on even beyond that,
the characters that follow really still get folded
into his story.
And this is what I mean by that.
You might remember that story of Joseph with the multicolored coat and the time with Egypt
and Pharaoh and all of those stories.
That actually happens in the midst of Jacob’s story.
Jacob is still alive in this time.
So you have all of this happening with the brothers,
and then Jacob moves to Egypt.
And so he actually dies there and is buried.
So this story is not just a lot of words,
but it also incorporates a lot of these really foundational biblical characters.
Yeah, and I’ll start with a true confession.
I’ll be 100% honest.
Jacob is not one of my favorite biblical characters.
I certainly understand his importance.
He,
in some ways, is a challenge for the reader,
because particularly in the early part of his story,
the Bible seems to suggest,
if not outright claim,
that he has a real tendency
to take care of himself,
that he’s—I might even go so far as to say he’s a little bit
of a weasel.
And he does some things.
He acts in some ways that are very selfish, very self-centered.
And Jacob,
though he has great ambition,
I think is one of those characters that is a
little hard—it is a little hard to root for him sometimes.
Yeah, we’re going to jump into his story in just a moment.
But, Clint, I don’t want to rush forward there,
because I think that you’re right.
There’s a real sense as you read Jacob’s story that there’s going to be some times that you cringe.
You cringe because he takes a shortcut that cuts somebody else off,
or he takes the advice
of someone that wasn’t the better advice,
or,
quite frankly,
he gets the bad end of
a deal that turns out to be a good end of a deal,
that turns out to be a bad end,
that turns out good.
I mean, he’s the kind of guy who always lands on his feet,
and it really,
if we’re going to be honest,
he doesn’t deserve to.
Yeah, he certainly has some skills.
He has some talents.
He has a knack for getting out of situations in the best way possible.
But he’s a struggle,
I think.
One danger that presents for us,
I think, in his whole narrative is to read the story
with some modern psychological sensitivities.
It’s easy to use parts of his story as a springboard and wonder how they impact him.
And generally speaking, the Bible isn’t real interested in that kind of diagnosing.
But for instance, his family is messy.
He has this situation where he has a brother,
mom has a favorite,
dad has a favorite,
then he has this very strange relationship with two wives who are sisters and an uncle.
And it is easy to look into some of that with modern eyes and think,
“Oh, this guy’s a mess.”
But I think what we miss in that is some of the ways in which the text landed on the people
who knew it and told it and shared it.
And in other words,
he looks like a schemer to us.
But in the Middle Eastern culture,
there was this kind of tendency to pull for the trickster
in literature,
in culture,
that the swindler who kind of bargains his way out of things
and takes advantage of others or at least successfully gets on the best end of the deal,
that’s an important character in the Middle East.
And so even while we can sort of question the morality from our standpoint,
the Bible doesn’t seem too upset by Jacob’s antics.
The Scripture doesn’t seem troubled by some of the things he does that cause us some heartburn. Very much, and I think maybe the best way into that is just a few of those pivotal moments
in his life.
I think you start in the very beginning of the text with this idea that his older brother
is born, and in that moment,
he’s sort of holding on to his older brother’s heel,
sort of like, “No,
get back here, I want to be the firstborn,” because that’s a significant
thing in that culture,
the firstborn to the one who inherits the family riches,
the land, if there is land,
the servants, the flocks.
And so there’s real benefit to being the first.
So he’s a twin,
and he’s sort of kind of holding back that brother,
sort of like him resisting
even before he’s born Yeah, in fact, his name means heel grabber,
or in Hebrew, the word,
like, he supplants or he replaces,
which turns out to be exactly what unfolds in the narrative.
Esau comes home,
he’s hungry,
Jacob takes advantage of that,
buys his birthright, trades for his birthright.
Then later, with his mother’s help,
he tricks his father,
and Jacob is blessed by Isaac
instead of Esau.
He takes the family blessing,
so he then flees from home,
but he does so with the birthright and the blessing.
And in the story,
those are tangible things.
Those sound like kind of vague things to us,
but in the story,
those are real things.
Those are marks of actual blessing and actual rights,
and he essentially steals them from
his brother and his father Right, and by the way,
he’s not doing that completely alone.
His mother’s actually implicated this part of that.
It’s told from the advantage that she gives him sort of the process by which,
“Hey, this is what you’re gonna do to steal the birthright,” and it just continues to,
we began this conversation
with Abraham.
Abraham has a complicated relationship with family and with wives and all of this kind
of thing, but when you get to Jacob,
you have a brother,
you have mother, father.
As that story continues,
you have wives,
two wives, then you have father-in-law,
and as this all spins out,
somehow in the middle of this,
you also have him literally grappling
with God.
So the characters that come in and out,
and oh, I should have not ended too soon,
you also have Joseph and his brothers,
and we all know that that relationship wasn’t great
when you get thrown in a pit and sold away as a slave.
So,
yeah,
clearly if you look at this story from the vantage of 21st century psychotherapy,
this would be a therapist’s full-time job,
would be this family unit on one hand.
On the other hand,
if you do that,
you’re gonna be missing really some of the central
movements, characters, and purposes of Jacob’s story,
because the authors of this weren’t
interested in us trying to psychoanalyze why things didn’t go well relationally,
or what we would define as going well relationally.
What they were interested in is how this guy finds a place on God’s map to his people finding
a place in the world,
how he is one of those key characters in the Israelites coming to
inherit God’s covenantal promise.
And if we can be attentive to that,
we can find that there’s a lot in his story.
I think as you read the Jacob story,
it’s interesting when God shows up.
So early on in the text,
Rebecca is pregnant with these twins,
and she’s having a difficult
pregnancy and she seeks out a word about that,
and the discernment is there are these two
nations in her womb, these two people,
and that the older will serve the younger,
the younger will replace the older.
And she engineers that.
She takes a part in actively seeing that that happens.
And as we’ve talked before in some of these Old Testament stories,
what is curious about
that whole part of the story is that there’s really no mention of God.
God doesn’t weigh in on the morality of disrespecting your father,
of tricking your brother, of family dynamics.
That is all sort of left to play itself out,
but it happens as the word of God said it
would, that Jacob replaces Esau.
Now how that happens seems to just unfold.
The first place that God really shows up,
Jacob is on the run,
Esau has said he’s going
to seek his life as soon as their father passes,
and he’s on his way to his uncle’s
house, Laban’s house, and he stops along the way and he lays down to sleep,
says he has a stone for a pillow,
and he has this very vivid dream.
There’s a staircase or a temple,
angels are ascending and descending,
and he wakes up
and says surely God was in this place and I didn’t know it,
which is a wonderful story.
But Jacob is still Jacob here,
so when God says I’m going to bless you,
Jacob says well, I tell you what,
if you protect me and if you give me land and if,
if, if, then I will claim you as my God.
So he’s still asking what’s in it for him.
He’s always working that angle,
and even in this instance with the almighty God who pronounces
on him a blessing,
and Jacob says yeah,
that’s great, as long as I get the good end of the deal,
that’d be fine.
Yeah, and it would be worth pausing here and noting that when Esau says he wants to go
kill his brother, the story makes it clear,
Esau is the one in this relationship who’s
capable of killing his brother,
Esau’s the man’s man,
I mean he’s the guy who goes and
kills the food, he can hunt and track,
he can do the stuff that you think of the first
born eldest being able to do.
So when Jacob sneaks in,
steals the birthright and starts running for his life,
the story’s not presenting that like it’s a foregone conclusion,
it’s if Esau finds him,
Jacob doesn’t stand a chance.
And so here you’ve got the guy who’s kind of the runt,
that’s probably not a fair statement,
but he’s certainly the weaker,
and he’s the one wrestling with God in this moment of the
dream, right?
He sees this beautiful thing,
this connection to the heavens,
and he’s negotiating his way through it.
This guy is not afraid to try to take what he can get,
even if it’s not owed to him.
Yeah, and I think there’s a lesson in there,
though not a positive one.
You know, we often are tempted to treat God as a kind of dispenser of what we want to
pray,
to think we deserve because we’ve either suffered or because we’ve done well,
or for whatever reason we come up with for ourselves,
that God owes us some good things.
And these “if then” prayers certainly didn’t die out in the Old Testament.
They continue to be used.
We’ve all probably tried to use them,
and it is an important marker,
I think, in Jacob’s story that he begins there in terms of his relationship with God.
Yeah, and there is,
strangely,
once again, that seems to be a theme in today’s conversation,
there’s strangely good news in that, Clint,
because how many of us have offered the dispensary
kind of prayer?
“God, if you will,
then this.” And it’s good news because God is faithful to Jacob,
not even just in spite of these kinds of prayers,
but really God is faithful because when God makes a promise,
God is true to it.
And when we try to sort of nudge out the best out of God,
you know, as parents we know when
we get sort of pushed to the edge of our limits,
when we lose our patience, we snap.
God here holds with Jacob through the whole way.
He continues to be faithful to Jacob,
even though Jacob says what seems to be objectively
the wrong prayer.
So, for anyone who’s ever prayed the wrong prayer,
I count myself in that number,
that’s good news because God’s gracious and faithful,
regardless of what we say or what heart we bring to it.
And so, maybe in that there’s an opportunity to recognize the goodness of God’s faithfulness.
Yeah, God is good to Jacob,
but then we move into another one of those chapters where perhaps
God is good from afar.
Although,
I will say that as we make the transition to Uncle Laban’s house,
the text helps us
a little bit by turning the tables on Jacob.
So Jacob sees Rachel, falls in love,
tells Laban, “I will spend seven years working for
you if I can marry your daughter,
Rachel,
two daughters, Rachel,
Leah.” The wedding comes,
Jacob is apparently pretty drunk at some point,
gets up the next morning,
and Uncle Laban has been the one who pulled the fast one this time,
and it’s Leah in the tent with him.
And he goes to complain,
and Laban says,
“Well, you know, that’s the way we do things around here.
You can’t marry the youngest daughter first.
I guess if you want to marry her too,
we could do that.
We’ll just have you work for another seven years.”
And so, it is,
the not very gracious part of me says,
“Good, somebody, you know, stuck it to Jacob a little bit.
He got on the other side of being tricked.”
And I don’t know if that’s the Bible’s sense of justice or if it’s just kind of a funny
thing that happens in the story.
But the short version of it is Jacob ends up ironically given the family that he grew
up in with two wives,
one that he loves deeply,
and one that there’s no indication he wasn’t good to,
and really through no fault of his own,
he didn’t desire her.
He didn’t seek her out.
He never asked to be married to her.
And Leah’s story is very sad to me,
but it overlaps with Jacob.
And that’s the situation Jacob then finds himself as we move into that kind of next chapter.
Yeah, I was going to say,
Clint, that for anybody who’s joining this conversation,
especially a modern American who has some idea of what we think about relationships and romantic love,
this is just ice water in the face.
Because it says here in chapter 29,
verse 31, “When the Lord saw that Leah was not loved,”
and just comes straight out and says it,
and God is good to her.
In fact,
God enables her to conceive,
and some good things happen to Leah in spite of
the fact that even as the text says, she wasn’t loved.
And it’s worth saying,
the text doesn’t give us reason to believe that she was harmed.
But it’s important to note here that not just Jacob goes through these major troughs.
It’s the people in his life go through it with him.
And as he’s tricked and as Leah feels this cold shoulder through much of her entire life,
I think we recognize here that our individual brokenness,
the stuff that we bring to our lives,
unfortunately,
will by definition affect the people around us.
Yeah, this is by any standard a very strange and troubling story.
Ironically, just before that, there’s one of the Bible’s great expressions of romantic
love when it says that Jacob worked for seven years for Rachel,
and they seemed to him but a few days.
And that we do have the sense that Jacob was sort of head over heels to play on his name
for Rachel,
but for whatever reason,
not for Leah.
Leah’s, if you read the text,
the names that Leah gives her children are very interesting.
She starts off with this language about,
“Now my husband will love me.
Then my husband will accept me.”
And she ends up with a name that means,
“Now I will praise God.”
And there’s a very interesting study,
I think, in Leah’s character.
But the family grows,
as is often the case in the New Testament.
There is an inability for Rachel to bear a child.
Baroness is one of the great themes of Genesis,
and Rachel is barren,
unable to conceive.
And so here we go back to some ground we’ve seen before.
She gives a maid to Jacob.
The maid has children.
Leah sees that happening.
She gives a maid to Jacob.
So he ends up essentially with two wives and two concubines and begins to have multiple children very quickly.
And as his story continues,
God blesses him.
In fact, it makes it very clear that he becomes a very wealthy man.
And as part of that,
he makes his father-in-law a very wealthy man.
And so as the story progresses,
there’s this whole family relational struggle that begins
to come because Jacob decides that it’s time to part company,
and that’s not something that’s welcomed.
Right.
He takes his part of the farm, essentially,
and he begins to move Rachel and Leah.
The children are with him.
Laban chases him down.
There’s some drama there.
And then they part ways somewhat amicably,
but especially the Presbyterian women who
are listening may know this verse, the Mizpah.
People have heard this verse,
“May the Lord watch between us while we are absent from
one another.” Or in the old translation,
“May the Lord watch between me and thee while we are absent from
one another.” It’s a beautiful verse.
Sometimes it’s on crosses or key chains that are broken in half.
I think, though, a lot of people don’t understand.
The context of that verse is Laban saying, “Look,
when I can’t keep an eye on you, Jacob,
God is going to.
May the Lord watch between us while we’re absent because you’ve got my grandchildren,
you’ve got my daughters,
and if I can’t be there to hold you accountable,
may God do it.” And it’s not quite the warm,
fuzzy verse that we have used it in the ways we have used
it in the American church.
Yeah, and to continue the not-so-warm-and-fuzzies,
we have two brothers coming to be reunited.
And this isn’t the family long separated at the airport holding up signs, welcome home.
We have Jacob, who is terrified of meeting his brother because he’s concerned that the
death threats his brother made are threats his brother will still continue to act upon.
In fact, he’s so concerned about that,
that he divides his family into two groups and
says if one group gets attacked by a brother,
at least the other group can continue to survive.
He sends waves after waves of messengers with gifts and praises.
So here you have continuing in the story this narrative,
Esau is stronger,
Esau is a real
threat and Jacob is sort of playing a little bit more of a diplomatic game.
How can I sort of hedge my losses?
How can I sort of convince him to be okay with me?
And it is remarkable then when we get to the end of that story that Esau is with open arms ready for reconciliation.
Yeah, so there’s a fascinating transition that happens in there where in the first instance,
Jacob is sending out everyone in front of him and he’s staying in the back.
And you have the sense that part of that is if this goes sour,
I’m the first guy out of
here, I’ll be able to turn and run.
He keeps Rachel with him and you know,
but it looks very much like he’s trying to put
a buffer of everyone else between himself and Esau.
And then in that separation,
he spends the night near a creek,
a small river,
and he’s attacked by what the text calls a man,
and they wrestle through the night.
And when the man sees that he can’t overpower Jacob,
he says, “Let me go.” And Jacob’s got a hold of him and he says,
“I won’t let you go,” and it says the man
touches him in the thigh and the bone is dislocated or the socket is something catastrophic,
very painful happens, but Jacob holds on.
And then there’s this beautiful part in the text where he says,
“I won’t let you go unless
you bless me.” And he says, “Okay,
then you are no longer Jacob.
You are Israel because you have striven with God and man and prevailed.”
And lots of thoughts about that story.
Historically, it has always been understood that that’s some sort of angelic host or
God himself that Jacob is struggling with.
Others have wondered about the possibility of Esau sneaking back and fighting with Jacob
because the next day when Jacob limps out to see Esau,
he said, the first thing he says
to him is, “Seeing your face is like the face of God.”
And exactly what happens there is open to lots of interpretation and some guessing.
But one thing is certain,
it changes Jacob because he’s now the one who has battled
but limps.
There’s no running when you limp.
And he limps out.
He goes first the next day.
He goes to face Esau.
And from this moment on,
you get a little bit of sense in the story,
I think, that Jacob is a different person.
And that image of one who has encountered God and been both wounded and strengthened
in the encounter is a really profound image.
Someone who’s had to come to face the real consequences of his own choices and his own
faith, really.
I mean,
fundamentally, as this story continues,
we see that God is faithful to the entire
length of Jacob’s story.
So a guy who steals his birthright,
a guy who goes and gets really wealthy and all of
this stuff that happens with his wives,
and now here he comes face to face with this
heavenly angelic host, and then he has this fight.
There’s a significance in the fact that he loses something here,
that he feels the pain
personally in a way that maybe hasn’t happened already in his story.
Yeah, and if we could use that as a sort of metaphorical springboard,
I think it’s a
fascinating thought that sometimes what hurts us also heals us,
or what heals us also wounds us.
There is a sense in which when you encounter God,
it both breaks you and then builds you.
Because whatever you stand before God with of your own strength,
that’s going to melt.
That’s going to fade.
That’s going to be erased.
And this whole idea that the heel grabber wrestles this midnight opponent and will not
let him go and finally prevails,
having strived with God and man,
and then goes out to meet
Esau is a very powerful story, very rich imagery,
tons of sermons to preach in that,
and I think lots of lessons for us.
And then the next day he meets Esau,
and Esau’s a great character in the scripture because
Esau seems to carry no animosity.
He grabs him, he hugs his brother.
Now if there’s any possibility that they fought it out the night before,
maybe he’s done with
that or maybe he was done with it already.
But Esau is a wonderful example for a very kind of background character,
that he doesn’t hold a grudge,
he doesn’t seek any harm,
he seems genuinely and affectionately pleased
to meet Jacob’s family,
to see his niece and nephews,
and I think it really is a reunion.
There’s this thing that’s happening now repeatedly that’s worth naming,
Clint,
and that’s that these major characters we see these incredibly unexpected reversals,
where the younger is
stealing the birthright of the older,
where the way that things should be is being upended.
And it’s worth noting that God is faithful to the person who didn’t get what was expected.
Esau should have gotten all of the blessing,
he should have gotten all of this material benefit,
and not only does he not hold a grudge,
but God has been good to him,
we have this entire list of his descendants,
he continues to live fruitfully.
That’s going to happen again in the next
chapter of the story,
where we have the next section of the story going on,
and once again it doesn’t go like what we expect,
and yet God is faithful to the people.
We had that with Abraham,
and we had that once again here with Jacob.
So I just feel like it’s
worth noting that when we talk about God’s faithfulness,
it’s not just to the major character
of the moment, it’s also to these unexpected characters who get sort of shot off and that
don’t expect what happens.
God is faithful to them in his own way.
Yeah, there’s a really interesting interplay here,
the whole older, younger thing, you have it with Jacob and Esau,
you have it with Rachel and Leah,
and now you do have the sense that if
Esau were so inclined,
he has probably the capacity,
aside from divine protection,
he could do Jacob harm,
but instead he seems to choose grace,
and there’s a wonderful challenge
in that for all of us.
They reunite,
then they part,
Jacob goes,
settles,
as you would expect, things go well,
the family’s together,
lots of wealth, lots of land,
builds a vast
is empire too strong of words,
certainly a vast fortune,
and doing extremely well,
and things are rolling along pretty well,
and it’s hard to get into the rest of the story
without jumping into our next character,
but the next thing that unfolds is, of course,
family drama, which is where so much of our drama lives,
and this is true in the Old Testament as well.
Yeah, we won’t belabor the story,
you know it well,
you have the 12 brothers,
and the 11 brothers are doing well,
and then the younger comes and gets a lot of praise and favor,
and
for lots of reasons,
and then you have those brothers get jealous,
and they ship off the younger brother,
they really,
at first the plan is to kill him,
then they decide to sell him into
slavery, and that choice really is,
in some ways,
a happenstance, in other ways, God’s plan,
as he goes to Egypt,
and a long period of imprisonment there,
and then there’s visions
that he gets brought up into the court,
he becomes a very significant person,
and ironically, he becomes a savior to the family,
as he helps Egypt prepare for famine,
his family is not
prepared for famine, so they come seeking food from him,
and there’s some more twists and turns
that come in that story.
Yeah, the Joseph story,
much of it,
really almost all of it,
biblically speaking, overlaps the end of the Jacob story,
so we will get a chance to unpack
some of that again as we look at those relationships.
Joseph is a fascinating character
for his own set of reasons,
which we’ll talk about in a podcast down the road,
but eventually Jacob does end up relocated,
he dies full of years,
full of sons,
and bearing the name Israel, the father of the 12 tribes,
it’ll be a tribe essentially named for each son,
and
he becomes really, I think you’d have to say,
the founding father of what we’re going to see in the
Old Testament as the nation of Israel.
That’s not all of Jacob’s story,
there’s some other ins and
outs there, we’d invite you to read those,
but I think we’ve hit most of the high points,
and as we kind of pivot, then we start thinking,
Michael, about what do we learn from Jacob’s story,
what do we see in it that we think is of value,
and where do we think that he missed?
Yeah, we got those two questions,
what did Jacob get right,
and where is God in Jacob’s story,
and I think what’s interesting here is we’re not doing this chronologically in terms of how it was laid out,
so we did Moses already in the previous podcast,
and what’s ironic is the context of Moses is
Egypt persecuting the Israelites.
Jacob’s story ends with him going to Egypt and prospering,
it being good for him there,
and that’s in some ways a microcosm of his story.
He makes a choice,
good,
bad,
otherwise,
and it tends to pan out okay for him.
He tends to flourish,
he tends to grow,
God’s blessing works out,
but with Jacob, it’s pretty easy to go back into
his story and start nitpicking how he does it.
In answering the question,
what does Jacob get wrong?
He gets a lot wrong.
I mean, when Jesus says, you know, it’s not just what you do,
but the thought and intent of the heart, you think,
whoa, Jacob, you’ve got a long list.
Yeah, yeah,
to my knowledge, I’m not, like I said, I’m not the biggest fan of Jacob,
so it’s very possible I’m missing something,
but there are not a lot of texts that come to mind that
give good examples of Jacob’s deep faith and spirituality,
and yet,
you know, there he is
on,
at the bottom of the patriarch totem pole,
or near the bottom of the patriarch totem pole,
and really in some ways the place where the story of Israel really begins,
and there he is, which,
as we’ve said before,
isn’t really him at all,
but the God who is behind him,
the God who has
made a promise, the God who is keeping the promise,
even through these messy human circumstances and
relationships and starts and stops and successes and errors,
and that I think is,
for me at least,
one of the pillars of Jacob’s story is that faithfulness of God, that if God
finds a way to use even the ambition and the drivenness and the questionable ethics
of a man like Jacob,
it’s a wonderful testament to God’s willingness to partner with us
and work within our stuff.
Yeah, and another frame here is that Jacob is a story of God’s plan being worked out,
but what’s really interesting is that I’m sure that we both had this experience,
Clint, of someone who comes and wants to talk with a pastor about what’s God’s plan,
what’s God’s will for this moment in my life,
and Jacob’s a really helpful lens because when you start talking about
God’s plan for our lives,
you recognize that God’s plan is not an easily quantifiable thing.
You can’t pull out a map and say,
“Well, God wants you to go here,
here, here, make sure you take this
left turn at this point,” because, fundamentally,
God allows us to have agency,
and he works with
who we actually are and not some image of who we wish that we were,
and I guess I bring that up
to point out here that, quite frankly,
God was faithful to Jacob,
but that’s the strangest road
possible to continue the story of God’s people.
I mean,
if you were going to sort of sit down and
write out a fictional account of the best way for God’s plan to be done,
this isn’t the roadmap
for how you do it.
It’s not all this family brokenness and all of this sort of self-centered,
self-seeking sort of stuff,
and yet God works through this pathway,
and I think it does
illuminate God’s faithfulness to us,
of course, but I think it also has something to say about,
as we try to understand God’s plan,
God’s plan is bigger than our ability to derail it.
Even our brokenness in its greatest extent is unable to curtail God’s providential plan.
That’s what we mean as Reformed people when we talk about God’s will being worked out,
that God’s strength overrules our ability to break it.
Now, it doesn’t mean that we don’t seek to follow God’s
will, but we should be less concerned with getting everything perfect and more concerned
about relationship with the person who goes with us.
Yeah, it’s interesting in some of the stories of the Old Testament,
the Moses story,
the Abraham story, we’ve seen moments where God says,
“If the people do this,
then I will do it.” Jacob,
I think, is the first character we’ve seen reverse that.
God, if you will do this,
then I will do that,
and I don’t think that’s a helpful
lesson for us, but it is maybe a moment that invites us to grace when we have been tempted to do that.
The other takeaway that I think we have to mention,
Michael, is that moment in the
dark, that metaphor of wrestling with God,
of that place of having nowhere left to run.
Jacob is in the corner.
He’s between rock, hard place.
His charm,
all of his scheming,
it has all come back
to bite him, and all he can do is stand before God,
stand before Esau, and to his credit,
he does it.
And then that idea that having done it,
he proceeds but with a limp.
He will forever be marked by that encounter,
even though he has succeeded in it.
It cost him something.
And many of those moments in our life have a certain cost.
That is,
we would generally say worth it,
but that kind of awareness,
that kind of growth,
that kind of strength, are not free.
They demand something of us,
and I think there’s power in that story.
It’s also important to really just pause and recognize.
It is Jacob’s sons who become the
12 forebearers of the tribes of Israel,
as you’ve already mentioned.
And at that juncture,
the image and picture that we’re given of even those 12 sons is a foreshadowing of what’s to come.
There is throughout all of Israel’s history contention among these tribes,
and you’re going to see
there’s infighting and bickering and there’s political maneuvering.
And what you need to
recognize is that goes all the way back to the beginning.
It is just absolutely genetically
coded into the story of the Old Testament,
and that is a significant telling because the biblical
authors aren’t about creating a beautiful portrait that you hang on your living room
wall that is an image of what you wish your family was,
of what your lineage could have been.
This is a telling of people who quite frankly have some stuff that you would want to hide,
and that’s the stuff that makes the scriptures.
And I think it’s significant in its truth telling,
not just for its
authenticity as ancient texts,
but I think it’s important for those who seek to be followers of
Jesus Christ to recognize that brokenness isn’t something that we need to be ashamed of or hide
as if that we’re the first ones in that lineage.
No,
these tribes which will go out and live out
brokenness in many ways harken back to the very beginning,
which is a story of brokenness, and
God is faithful even in the midst of that.
Yeah, I think two things about that,
Michael, in response.
The first is that once we get to Moses,
once we get to Exodus,
it’s easy to think
of the Old Testament story as a people story,
the people of Israel.
I think what we sometimes
underestimate is that prior to that,
it’s a family story.
The entire book of Genesis is a family narrative.
Yes, everything that comes after is about a nation and a people and a temple and kings
and priests and prophets,
but their origin,
their root is a family story to the extent that keep in
mind that the names of those tribes happen essentially just preceding and during a time
of slavery.
And yet we still talk about Jacob’s sons as the tribes,
though they probably didn’t
really get the experience of living in their own.
They live under Egyptian power and under Egyptian
real estate, really, at the very time that those tribes are being formed.
And yet,
when Israel talks about itself initially,
it talks about itself through the lens of Jacob’s sons.
And that’s a wonderful tribute and testament to a guy who’s hard to understand and even a little
bit hard to like if I’m going to be 100% honest.
But it’s certainly, it is certainly high praise to him.
And like you said,
Clint, we’re going to trace the ground that is Joseph’s story in a
future conversation, so I’m not going to dig into it.
But I think it’s worth noting here
that when we think about God being faithful,
we tend to think about the good things that God
brings into our life,
the things that we would name as praise,
and just remind us all that God
is faithful to Jacob,
even in the midst of a famine,
right,
a family that was struggling to find food.
So the fact that God is with us,
that you’re the blessed one,
as Jacob was called,
as you have all of this that’s been granted to you,
that’s not in any way to cover up the fact
that life is hard and difficult and brings unexpected turns.
That we should not, as Christians,
be ones who question God’s presence because of adversity.
In fact, the biblical witness is
that we know God’s presence because he’s with us in adversity.
Yeah, and maybe that’s a good final word, Michael.
Essentially,
what faithfulness means is that in
spite of our messiness and the world’s messiness and the difficulties we find ourselves in,
some of our own making,
God never gives up on us.
God never quits coming to us to bring blessing,
to bring hope, to bring peace,
to bring change of direction, to bring repentance,
to bring
maybe even a moment of wrestling in the dark and the opportunity to struggle that goes with it.
But what faithful means,
essentially,
is not what we receive,
but the fact that God never quits pursuing us.
Friends, we’re not going to do much better than that today.
That’s the good news,
and we are thrilled that you’ve joined us for the conversation as we continue to explore these biblical characters.
We are committed to releasing these every week on Wednesday.
We’ve started premiering them on Facebook at 9 o’clock a.m.
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So, if you would like to watch this with other people,
Clint and I will be there on that feed there.
And if you’ve got questions or thoughts that you want to throw out as we continue this series,
we would love to engage with you there.
Absolutely.
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