Today in God’s Word

November 14, Genesis 28

“Arise, go to Paddan-aram to the house of Bethuel your mother's father, and take as your wife from there one of the daughters of Laban your mother's brother.” - Genesis 28:2

The Bible is a book of startling honesty. The sad portrait of Isaac's family from chapter 27 reminds us that the Bible does not shy away from revealing the failures and faults of its heroes. If we learn positive examples from their faith and obedience, we can also learn important lessons about behaviors and attitudes to avoid from their faithless failures.

Let's start with Rebekah. The eavesdropping author of Jacob's goat meat deception handled her husband in a skillful way to set the stage for Jacob's departure. She didn't mention the death threat; she didn't say that Jacob needed to flee for his life. Instead she told her husband they needed to get Jacob out of the area to find a suitable wife before he married a Canaanite woman as his brother had done. She and Isaac knew the story quite well of how Abraham had sent his servant on just such a mission to find her to become his wife. She knew the heartache Esau’s Canaanite women had caused them, and she knew Isaac would agree to the plan to send Jacob to Laban to get a wife.

Old Isaac made some progress, too. He sent Jacob away with a full blessing, much more than he said the day he blessed him before, thinking he was talking to Esau. This time, he used the language that God had used with Abraham and with him.

Even Esau seemed to try a little harder to respect his parents’ wishes about his marriage. He saw them send Jacob away to marry a niece. So he went to Ishmael’s people and got a niece from that branch of Abraham's family. That was not exactly the same thing that Jacob had done, and he probably didn't understand that Ishmael's people were outside the line of the covenant promises. It's also not ideal that he simply added Mahalath (Ishmael's daughter) to his already polygamous household of Canaanite wives.

But Jacob becomes the central figure in the Genesis narrative at this point, and he's doing much better than the last time we saw him. After he had traveled probably three days or about fifty miles of the 500 mile journey to Haran, he camped one night near the city of Luz. As he slept on a stone pillow, God spoke to him in a dream. (Hebrews 1:1 says God spoke in various ways in past time to the patriarchs. A dream was one such way.) In the dream Jacob saw a ladder reaching from the ground up into heaven with angels going up and down the ladder. God spoke from the top of the ladder and identified himself as his grandfather Abraham’s and his father Isaac’s God. Centuries later, Jesus referred to Jacob’s dream and applied it to himself as the way to God (John 1:51; 14:6).

The Lord renewed the promise he made to Abraham and Isaac to give their descendants the land. He restated the promise that through his offspring all the families of the earth would be blessed. He promised to go with Jacob on his journey, to keep him safe and bring him back home.

When Jacob woke up, he realized he had been in the presence of God. He sat his pillow rock upright and poured oil on it as a sacrifice on an altar, and called the place Beth-El, "house of God." He vowed to give God a tenth of all the blessings God had promised him. (Remember his grandfather Abraham also tithed to Melchizedek.)

Abraham's servant had gone with an entourage and rich treasures when he went on his mission to find Isaac’s wife. But Jacob seems to have left in something of a hurry, and without many provisions for the journey. He only asked God for bread to eat and clothing to wear and a safe return to his father's house. When he came home twenty years later, he described how he crossed the Jordan on his way to Haran with only his staff (his walking stick, not his assistants.) Jacob had been humbled. He still faced some hard times and troubles, but God was molding him to be the father of the nation of Israel.

So please don't take the ugly snapshot of Isaac's family in chapter 27 as your only impression of these people. Realize they were works in progress, just as we are. By God's grace and through his patience and mercy, they had opportunities to overcome their failures and become useful in God's plan. That's good to know about our own lives, isn't it?

Copyright © 2021 by Michael B. McElroy. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Today in God's Word—November 2024

East Tallassee Church of Christ