From Adam to Malachi
6. THE LIFE OF JACOB- THE MAN WHO FOUGHT GOD
Gen. 25-49
"The God before whom my fathers, Abraham and Isaac walked, the God who has led me all my life long to this very day, the angel who has re¬deemed me from all evil, bless the lads"
(Gen. 48:15-16).
Jacob was telling his grandsons, I hope God will be with you as he has been with me. Jacob was not a good person. He was a scoundrel all the way. He was a miserable young person who became a mature man of God
He saw God's hand in the UPS AND DOWNS of life. He ran and fought all of his life. He fought with and ran from Esau. He fought with and ran from Laban. He fought with and ran from God.
Jacob said God "led" him, but the deeper truth is that God chased him. J. Oswald Sanders says Jacob gives us a glowing example of God's "undiscouraged perseverance with an unlovely character."
In Jacob we see the persistent REFUSAL of God to give up on us. God COMES TO US in sin as He did to Adam and Eve. He is the shepherd who looks for every lost sheep. (Luke 15). Aren't you glad God didn't give up on Jacob and on you? In his life we see him:
A. LEARNING TO LIE (25:19-28:22)
The Clutch
Chapter one covers forty years, which in our life span would be our first twenty years. The second-born of twins, he came out of Rebecca’s womb holding the heel of his brother Esau as though to say, "You are not the firstborn. I want those rights and privileges."
The name "Jacob" means "deceiver”. We would call him "a heel." This is probably were that derogatory term comes from. His philosophy was "what's yours is mine and I'll take it.”
When his brother was famished and asked him for food Jacob sold it to him for his birthright as the firstborn (25:29-34). Years later, his father Isaac, sick, blind and thinking he was dying, was preparing to bless Esau with the rights of the firstborn, Jacob dressed up like him and told his father he was Esau and stole the blessing.
The Cost
After the sin comes the FEAR. Esau, in vengeance, planned to kill him, so his mother sent Jacob to live with her brother Laban. He started out all alone and never saw his mother again. Sin brought LONELINESS. On his first night away from home, in the rugged mountains at Bethel, near Jerusalem, the frightened fugitive lay down beneath the stars and put his head on a rock for a pillow.
Sin always drives us out, away from our home, away from our friends and away from our joy. Adam and Eve were driven out from the Garden. Cain killed Abel and was driven out from the presence of the Lord. Peter denied Jesus and went out and wept bitterly. Judas betrayed Christ and went out and hanged himself. Sin drives husbands and wives and parents and children further apart in the home. It also drives us away from our true self. The Prodigal came home when he “came to himself”. (Luke 15)
The Contact
Jacob found more than loneliness that night. He found the LORD. He saw a ladder going up to heaven and God was talking to him from the top of it. He told the frightened cheater He would build a huge nation out of his descendants - as He promised Abraham. (Gen. 12) But the greatest thing He said was, “I will be with you wherever you go and bring you back home safely. (28:10-15).
What a God! Here we have a low-down man in the lowest time of his life and what does God do? He says He will take this pile of scrap lumber and use it to build His church. There is little to like about Jacob. He is a sneak, a cheat, a liar and a mama's boy. If we were going to select someone to be the head of a nation or a religion, the last person we would choose would be him. Yet Jacob was the one God chose. That give hope to all of us.
The Apostle Paul told the church members at Corinth, not many of you are wise and learned. (1 Cor. 1:26, 27 NIV) It is not that God doesn’t choose the wise and learned. Men like C.S. Lewis have blessed the church in ways most of us cannot. The wise and learned, all too often, are too proud to admit their need of God
Salvation is simple and purely and completely a matter of undeserved grace - WHAT WE NEED BUT DON'T DESERVE. It is one of the few things in life we cannot seize with our strength, appropriate with our intelligence, or earn with our best efforts. The millionaire who owns the franchise must stand side by side, as a fellow sinner and a Christian brother, with the illiterate janitor who sweeps the peanut shells and cigarette butts out of his stadium.
The Conversion?
Did Jacob find God at Bethel? Was he converted? I don't think so. God came to him but he didn't come to God. He did make a vow that if God would bring him back he would give him a tenth of all he owned.
I think Jacob found RELIGION that night. For the next twenty years he does not say one thing about God. We hear no prayers from his lips. We see him build no altars. Only at the end of the period, when he looks back, do we hear him say anything about the Lord. I think it took God twenty years to convert Jacob. Let's look then at these years, Jacob's adult years, where he is. . .
B. LEARNING TO LIVE (GEN. 29-31)
Jacob went on his way and came to Haran where he spent the next twenty years (31:41). Here, cut off from his mother's apron strings, building his family and his business, he relied on his own resources – a hallmark of the Jewish people to this day.
God was on the shelf of his life, He was like a spare tire, to be used in emergencies, as Jacob was learning to be another dog in a dog-eat-dog world. Here he received two things - RICHES and RETRIBUTION. The riches came because God loved him and had not forgotten him. The retribution came because God loved him and had not forgotten what he had done to Esau and Isaac.
1. Jacob's Retribution (29-31).
Laban made life hard and bitter and unpleasant. He cheated him out of his wife Rachael after he had worked seven years for her (29:25). He worked him like a stave (29:40). He changed his wages time after time (29:41). He cheated him (30:35) and when God blessed Jacob materially, Laban disliked him (31:2).
He was learning the hard way the irrevocable law of retribution. What we do to others will eventually be done to us. Jesus said, "The measure you give will be used to measure you" (Matt. 7:1). Numbers 32 says, "Be sure, your sin will find you out” (Nu. 32:23).
The law of life is "take what you want and pay for it." We may cheat a dying old man but one day we will lift a veil and look upon our Leah. The sins of youth come back to haunt us as do the sins of every era.
2. Jacob's Riches (29:31)
1) Jacob and His Brides (29:3)
At a well he sees Rachael and it is love at first sight. Her father made him work for him seven years to marry her. He did it and when he lifted the veil at their wedding, it was not her, it was her sister Leah.
This is retribution. This was “payday”. Laban was a bigger scoundrel than Jacob. Jacob was un-daunted, he worked seven more years for his beloved Rachael.
2) Jacob and His Babies (29:31-30:24)
Jacob was also blessed with babies. He had six sons and a daughter by Leah and one son, Joseph, by Rachael. He had two sons by Leah's servant girl and two sons by Rachael's servant girl. God was building his nation, and from his sons came the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
3) Jacob and His Business (30:25-31:55)
Jacob worked hard for Laban night and day and in the heat and the cold. He got very little for it (31:39-42) buthe found a way to breed animals with stripes that Laban didn’t want and grew more wealthy than Laban.
Laban resented this. Money almost always divides and splinters people in homes and business. Hostility festered, until finally, Jacob with all his family and flocks left the land and headed back toward Canaan (Ch. 31). Laban tried to stop him but was warned by God in a dream (31:22-24) to let him leave. God was there with Jacob even though he did not know it.
C. LEARNING TO LEAN (Gen. 32-49)
It had been twenty years since Jacob cheated Esau but when he came into the land near his home, it seemed like yesterday and the old fear of Esau returned.
When he heard that Esau was coming toward him with four hundred men he just knew he and his family were dead. He had no idea he was coming to welcome him. And what did he do? He turned to Go, his spare tire and to his own ingenuity.
After a beautiful prayer (32:9-12) where he reminded God of His promise to protect him, he sent wave after wave of gifts and people toward Esau to appease his anger (32:13-2!). Then he sent his family, across the brook. He is still a coward – hiding behind his wife and children.
In the dark of night, as he had done twenty years before, he went to Bethel and was alone beneath the stars. But just as before, he was not alone. God came to him. To show him how he had been fighting Him all his life, God sent the “angel of the Lord” to wrestle with him
Showing His wonderful patience with all of us who fight Him, God let the battle last all night, but as the sun rose, the Lord crippled Jacob's hip and defeated him.
But in defeat he won, because when we give up our proud defiant, self reliant ways and submit to God we always win. As the hymn writer put it, “Make me a captive, Lord, and then I will be free."
God changed Jacob's name to "Israel" (Prince with God) and changed his nature like He does ours in the new birth. From now on Jacob was a man of God, not perfect, but living more and more for the Lord and talking more and more about the Lord.
God does not shelter you and me from pain and Jacob’s later years were marked by much SORROW (Ch. 35-49). He lived to see the death of Rachael (35:16-21). And Isaac, his son lay with one of his concubines.
His ten sons sold Joseph into slavery; told him he had been killed by an animal; and to add more pain, they handed him his bloody coat (with animal’s blood on it). The old man went into a grief that refused to be comforted and said, "I will go to my grave mourning”. (37:35).
Life wasn’t all bad. He held two of his grandsons, told them God had been with him all his life with the hope He would do the same for them.
In old age, Jacob lost his health; he lost his loved ones; and he watched his children go wrong. How can God be in this? How can this make us better instead of bitter? Departing health and graves can remind us that this world is not our home. We are made not for earth but for eternity.
A dear, elderly lady in my first church was on her death bed. When she saw the sadness in my eyes she said, "Brother Bob, don't feel sorry for me. A few years ago I realized that I had more friends and loved ones in heaven than I have on earth. From that day on I have wanted to go home."
In hard times we learn what is truly important are the things time cannot take away and the main is the loving, patient god who never gives up on us.
Charles Allen says we can be sure of three things about God. He will never let us OFF – we pay for what we do. He will never let us DOWN – we cannot do enough to stop Him from loving us. And He will never let us GO - in the valley of death we find the “Lilly” of the valley.
