Road Trippin With Rachael

Who

Jacob is the grandson of Abraham, the son of Isaac, and the younger of a set of twins. He is the last of the three men who are classified as being the patriarchs of the Hebrew people, and is the one patriarch to have a wife with multiple pregnancies – he had two wives, and two concubines resulting in thirteen children.

If Abraham was an example of being a sinful man who was faithful, Jacob is an example of how poorly the outcome is when you try to manipulate God. Jacob capitalizes on his brother’s weakness, deceives his father under the direction of his mother, he allows himself to be manipulated by his uncle, takes for himself not only the wife he wanted but her sister and two hand-maidens, and caused disunity in his family by either failing to take action or showing blatant favoritism. 

What Can We Learn From Jacob?

 When we look back on the life of Jacob, we see a man who was always trying to get ahead, and tried to take the blessings that God would have just given him. Jacob would have been the son to be blessed, but instead of letting God work in the heart of Isaac to bring that to pass, Jacob bartered stew for Esau’s birthright – there was little convincing needed of Esau. When Isaac would have given Esau a blessing, instead he tricks his father into blessing him rather than his brother, exploiting his father’s blindness. Even when the trickster is tricked into marrying Leah over Rachel, rather than see the blessing of having a wife who loved him and who gave him children, he wanted the sister who was pleasing to the eye, and he consistently failed to stand his ground. 

Many of his actions and choices led to the fun in dysfunction for his family: He openly showed favoritism to Rachel’s first born, Joseph (and we all know how that eventually turned out). His obvious deference to Rachel caused loneliness in his wife, Leah. He had children with concubines who were his wives’ maidservants -which was a whole nother level of awkward. Although he matured enough while his children were still growing to know that he couldn’t make an immediate decision, his lack of urgency in addressing the rape of his daughter led some of his sons to committing a grievous sin of killing an entire town’s men. (This sin firmly rests with Simeon and Levi, however, we do need to recognize that they were spurred on by their father’s lack of response to the sexual abuse of his child.)

In short: Jacob is not the example we want to emulate.

However….What we also learn is that God isn’t done with us because of our sin. As we see Jacob mature, despite his numerous screw ups, he eventually learned to turn to God. He learned through the consequences of his actions to love his children, to seek first God’s will, and when he felt the most defeated to trust God. At the end of his life, he got to see his family reunited, he got to see healing, he learned how to love Leah – and would later be buried with her. There is always the opportunity. God isn’t done when we screw up – we can still turn to him no matter where we are in life.