If the strong-willed child is the greatest challenge for
parents, the strong-willed adult is the greatest challenge for
God. The greatest obstacle to God's will being done on earth
as it is in heaven is the strong stubborn self-will of man. All of
the judgments of God through the Bible and through history
are due to man's stubborn will. Over and over the story is
repeated of Jesus in sorrow saying, "I would but you would
not." Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let God's people go, and
the result was that Egypt suffered great judgement. Then the
people of God stubbornly refused to take the land God
provided for them, and they were condemned to wonder in
the wilderness until all the stubborn people died. One of the
Proverbs most often illustrated in the Bible and history is
Proverbs 29:1. "A man who remains stiff-necked after many
rebukes will suddenly be destroyed without remedy."
The stubbornness of men is the primary cause of the
judgment of war. Stubborn dictators have forced us into
many costly wars, but Christians have their share of guilt as
well. DeWitt Talmage, one of the great preachers in
American history during the Civil War, tells of how Christian
leaders came up with a plan to avoid that tragic war. The
plan was for the North to pay for the slaves and set them free.
This way the South would not suffer the economic loss and
slavery could be ended without great instability in the
economy. The leaders of the North laughed and said they
would not pay, and the leaders of the South said they would
not sell. The result of their stubborn refusal to except this
Christian compromise was the worst war in our history. The
North ended up paying not only all it would have taken to
buy the slaves, but it paid in the blood of half a million of its
men. The South paid even more in blood and money, and the
end result was far greater instability. Everybody lost because
of stubbornness, and many of these leaders were Christians.
There are wars that are necessary, but this worst one was
total folly due to the stubborn refusal of men to listen to
Christian advisers. Their plan could have prevented it all,
and made both sides winners without a war. In our text we
are focusing on one of the most stubborn men in the Bible,
but one whom God used greatly. He illustrates that godly
people can still be obstacles to the will of God. Good and
godly people are often part of the problem. It is good to see
this so we do not pretend that it could not be us who are
hindering the will of God. We have the biographical accounts
in the Bible to challenge us to look at ourselves in the light of
their lives, and learn to avoid their mistakes. Jacob's life is
loaded with lessons, for he made so many mistakes.
Jacob had lost his favorite son Joseph and thought he was
dead. This loss had an impact on his emotions, and it was still
affecting him 21 years later. It made him over protective of
his younger son Benjamin. He is not little Benji any more.
He is a grown man with a good size family of his own, but he
is the only son left which was born to him by his first love
Rachel. Jacob will not let Benjamin out of his sight. He sent
his other 10 sons off to Egypt to face the dangers of thieves,
war, and the unknown, but not his baby Benjamin.
The older boys have apparently adjusted to their father's
favoritism by now. They hated Joseph for being his favorite,
and they got rid of him by selling him into slavery. But there
is no hint that they had any hostility toward Benjamin. He is
still alive and well and being treated royally. Dad says that
the rest of you guys can go and risk being lost or killed, but
not my boy Benjamin. If you are a child of Rachel, you are
exempt from risk from this family. As the story unfolds the
brothers go to Egypt and encounter their long lost brother
Joseph, but they do not recognize him.
Joseph, however, knows them, but he does not
know what has happened over the last two decades. He does
not know if they have found a way to eliminate his brother
Benjamin as they did him, or if he really is safe at home.
Joseph has to find out if his brother is alive before he reveals
himself, and so he demands that they bring their youngest
brother to Egypt to prove they are not spies. Simeon is kept in
prison until they return with Benjamin.
When the boys get home and report this to Jacob he
builds his own private wailing wall. He laments that life is
rotten and everything is against him. The chapter ends with
Jacob saying in his stubborn determination, "My son will not
go down there with you. His brother is dead and he is the
only one left. I'll die in agony if anything happens to
Benjamin." Everyone knows it is inevitable that Benjamin
will have to go, for the whole family will die of starvation if he
doesn't. Jacob is trapped, but he will not give in. He is
obstinate old man and will resist reality as long as he possibly
can. With bulldog tenacity he holds on to his self-will saying,
"No way-never." Like Peter saying to Jesus, "You will never
wash my feet," in his pig-headed stubbornness he has no idea
that going to Egypt is the will of God for the salvation of his
whole family.
He is blind to all but his own agenda. He does not
consider the possibility of God providently controlling the
events of his life. This is the life of fear rather than the life of
faith. Faith says, "Who knows-maybe God is leading this
way for my good." Fear says, "I don't like it, and I'm not
going to cooperate with what seems inevitable." It is easy to
understand why Jacob's ten boys are not great men of faith
with the example he gave them. He created so much friction
for his family by his radical favoritism. He said that
Benjamin is the only one left. Ten boys stand there as his
sons, but Benjamin is all he has left. You can see why there is
no chapter on Jacob about how to win friends and influence
people. He didn't even have the courtesy to pretend that his
kids were all equally loved.
God loves them all, however, and has a plan by which all
the tribes of Israel can be saved from the famine. Jacob has
to be dragged kicking and screaming into this plan of God.
He hated it and resisted it. He, no doubt, prayed that God
would help him get his way. He did not know it, but his
prayer was saying, "Not thy will but mine be done." He
could not conceive that God's will was for him to cooperate
with this unknown authority down in Egypt, who was, in fact,
the so he so much loved and missed.
God is trying to save Jacob and his family, and Jacob is
trying to fight it every step of the way. In this case his
ignorance was not bliss, but the basis for his blindness. We
have to be somewhat sympathetic with Jacob. We can see the
whole picture of God's providence at work, but all he could
see is that he was losing control of his life and family. He is
being a stubborn neurotic, but he is doing it because he
cannot stand the pain of even thinking about losing his only
son left from his first love. We have to feel some of the pain
he is feeling and recognize it is understandable that he is
being so mulish on this issue. Most of us are in the same boat
when life does not go as we plan, and we feel forced to go a
way we don't want to go.
The problem is that we tend to see life from the
perspective of fear rather than faith. This is what makes the
difference between the pessimist and the optimist. The
pessimist says, "Look at all the things that can go wrong."
He lives in fear and tends to pull into his shell. He refuses to
stick his neck out and take a risk. This was Jacob, for he
feared to let Benjamin go to Egypt because there were two
many negative possibilities. He never dreamed of the positive
possibilities, but was guided by a pessimistic attitude toward
the future. The optimist knows life is risky too, but he refuses
to live in a shell. You have to give God a chance to use your
life for good and greater things, and so you take a chance and
walk into the unknown future in faith believing that He will
guide you.
Faith goes beyond what is seen and trusts in the unseen
hand of God working in history. Poor Jacob did not know it
was his son Joseph down in Egypt that was putting him
through such a dilemma. If he had known there would be no
need for faith. Someone said, "Faith is a willingness to trust
God when questions cannot be answered by the knowledge
that is available to us." Nobody in the family but Joseph
knew what was going on, and how God had made the
salvation of Jacob's family possible by the position God had
lead him to possess. Joseph did not need faith at this point,
for he had knowledge, but Jacob needed faith, and that is
where he was weak.
All of us live by fear or faith in everyday life. Which one
dominates us determines whether we are optimists or
pessimists. When we walk by faith we believe that even if
things are going wrong from our point of view God has a plan
for the future and we can press on in hope.
Faith is more than just a word,
It is a feeling, deep and true
That with every passing hour
Hope is born anew.
Faith means having courage
To know as days go by
That just as long as faith lives on,
Then hope can never die.
Author Unknown
Faith is not believing a creed. Faith is trusting God and
believing that we don't have to fear the future just because it
looks so scary and so contrary to our own plan. We can go
with the flow of events and accept the inevitable that we can't
change or control, and believe that God is working in it for
our good. That is exactly what God was doing in Jacob's life,
but in fear he fought it and missed the joy and peace of
walking forward in faith.
What we need to learn from Jacob's loss of joy in his
journey with God is that even virtues can be vices when they
hinder our faith in God's providence. Jacob had a lot of
tough times in life. He had to leave home young and never see
his mother again because his brother Esau wanted to kill him.
He got ripped off by his uncle Laban who gave him Leah on
his wedding night rather than Rachel. He also robbed him of
his just wages. He had plenty of tension with the four
mothers of his 12 sons. There was jealously, envy, sibling
rivalry, and rivalry between Rachel and Leah. Joseph is
taken away and presumed dead. One by one his wives all die
before him, and by the time of our text he is a widower with a
large family of children and grandchildren.
It can actually be seen as a virtue that he wants to
preserve the special son of his special wife. He has had so
many problems in life, and so why not work like crazy to keep
one of the good things he had keep going for him? You can
call it selfish, but it seem like a justified selfishness. He at
least feels justified, and even feels noble that he is so
protective of his son Benjamin. It seems like a virtue to him,
and if we didn't know the will of God, it might seem like a
virtue to us as well. That is the problem with virtues-they can
be so extreme, or so persistent, that they become a hindrance
rather than a help to our walk with God.
I think of the testimony of the great American
mathematician Ernst Straus who worked with Einstein. One
day when they finished a document they had written together
they looked for a paper clip to hold the paper together. They
found one, but it was twisted, and so they then looked for a
tool to straighten it. In their search they found a whole box of
good paper clips. Einstein took a good one and began to use
it to straighten out the twisted one. When Straus pointed out
that it was no longer necessary to do this, Einstein replied
that once he set his mind to a certain goal nothing could
deflect him.
It is a noble attitude to press on to your goals, and this was
a virtue in Einstein, but when you press on even when the
goal is meaningless you have let a virtue become a handicap
and a nuisance. This is what Jacob did, and his love for
Benjamin became a hindrance to pressing on to experience
the joy of God's guidance in his life. From God's point of
view everything was going just right. Joseph was now in
position to save the whole family. All that had to be done now
was to get Jacob to stop being such a stubborn pessimist.
It only he had the faith of Paul who could say, "If God is
for me, who can be against me?" But instead he cries out in
verse 36, "Everything is against me." Jacob is the father of
the whole history of Jewish pessimism. Abraham Ibn Ezra in
the 17th century lamented,
My labor's vain,
No wealth I gain.
My fate since birth
Is gloom on earth.
If I sold shrouds
No one would die.
If I sold lamps, Then in sky,
The sun for spite
Would shine by night.
This is the spirit that was gripping Jacob. Everything is
against me he is saying, when the fact is, everything was
working for his good. He is crying that his son Joseph is
dead, but the fact is, his son Joseph was the Prime Minister of
Egypt with the power to save his whole family. He is
lamenting that Simeon is gone, and in fact he is under the
protection of the most powerful man in Egypt, which
happened to be his brother. He fears Benjamin may be
harmed when the fact is, he is the key to all their happiness.
His sky was bright with stars of hope, but he saw none of
them, for he covered them all with a dark cloud of gloom
because he stubbornly refused to believe that life can be going
God's way even if it is not going the way that seemed best
from his perspective.
Jacob is one of the great Bible examples of how godly
people can live lives of non-faith. Jacob spent years of his life
and much of his emotional energy grieving and worrying
about things that never happened. Studies show that the vast
majority of things people worry about never happen. It is
wise to be cautious and not take unnecessary risks, but to fret
and worry and be an emotional cripple over potential dangers
is folly. Jacob lived on the negative side of life and wasted so
much of the joy of life. Everything turned out better than he
could have ever dreamed. He lived in peace and prosperity
with his entire family in the best part of Egypt. He had the
best of everything, and he died in luxury with the love of his
large family surrounding him. The same of it is, he wasted so
much of his God guided life because he refused to believe that
God was guiding.
Joseph lived in great contrast to Jacob. He never said,
"Woe is me, for everything is against me." No one had more
right to see life through pessimistic eyes, for he really had a lot
of awful things to endure. He was rejected by his own
brothers, sold into slavery, falsely accused and unjustly sent
to prison. Yet, with all of these negative events, Joseph was a
man of faith who believed that God would guide and use his
life to make dreams come true.
Here is a father and son with two different ideas about
God. Jacob could only believe God was in his life when their
were good times. He had a sunshine concept of God. It is the
concept that God loves me because I never get sick, my car
always starts on the coldest mornings, and I can always find a
good parking place. This is a popular concept of God, but
the problem with it, in a fallen world where Murphy's Law is
as persistent as gravity, is that it leads to a lot of pessimism.
Where is your God when things do go wrong, and everything
seems to be against you? Jacob feels God forsaken,
pessimistic, and in despair.
In contrast, Joseph has an all season God. He is a God you
can trust even when life is not easy, but one trial after another
with no apparent meaningful purpose. Joseph does not have
a theology that says, if clouds darken your sunshine and life
gets hard, and you suffer injustice, then you are forsaken by
God. Joseph lives a faith life that says, God will work in
everything for good for those who love Him. When I can't
see it I trust Him and press on. Meanwhile I will do my best
to enjoy the detour and use my gifts to serve others.
Now keep in mind that both Jacob and Joseph are God's
men. The contrast here is not between the believer and the
unbeliever. It is between two different kinds of believers.
Christians tend to fall into these two categories. The Jacobs
who are fear conditioned and the Josephs who are faith
conditioned. The Jacobs are the pessimists and the Josephs
are the optimists. This duel perspective will never change
until we all become like Jesus. Some Christians will take the
low road and some the high road. The good news is that both
Jacob and Joseph fulfilled the will of God. God can and does
use even the pessimist to accomplish His purpose. But the
Jacobs cannot enjoy the journey of life as much as the
Josephs. They cannot in everything give thanks because they
do not believe God is at work even when it seems meaningless.
Since Jesus had the Joseph spirit, and we are to become
like Jesus, it follows that God's goal is for us to develop the
Joseph spirit and overcome the tendencies to be like Jacob.
Instead of, "Everything is against me," it should always be,
"If God is for me who can be against me?"
