Day 023 (Genesis 32-34) - Year 7
08:30 Share

Hey, Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap. Yesterday, Jacob and his family fled from Laban to head back toward Canaan, which is where his brother Esau lives, the one who wanted to kill him. Obviously, Jacob has no idea how things will go if and when he encounters Esau, which would make most people a little bit nervous.

By the way, Esau lives in an area called Edom, which is why the descendants of Esau are called Edomites. We'll see that term a lot in the future. Jacob sent some messengers ahead of him to smooth things over if they encountered Esau. And the messengers came back saying, he's coming and he's got 400 guys with him. Uh-oh.

So Jacob divided every one and everything in half so that if Esau attacked, he couldn't take it all. He's strategic. He's maybe driven by fear, but there's also this really beautiful moment where he's humbled and he praises God for his provision. He acknowledges his reality.

In 32.9, we see the first time Jacob addresses God by his name. And in 32.10, he says, And in the midst of fearing the worst, Jacob remembered God's words and appealed to him with reminders of his specific promises to their family.

Then he sent a present ahead to Esau to appease him. If someone sent me 550 farm animals in the mail, I would not view that as a gift, but these are different times. Then he sent his wives and kids ahead of him and spent the night alone. During the night, he wrestled with God. Doesn't most of your wrestling with God happen when you're alone and even at night?

Jacob is literally wrestling, though. He doesn't appear to be having a vision. This doesn't appear to be a metaphor, mainly because he leaves with an injury. This instance is another theophany, an appearance of God on earth. And more specifically, since the Hebrew word here is Elohim, that implies creator and judge, I'm inclined to believe this is another encounter with God the Father, like the encounter Abraham had in chapter 18.

They wrestled all night, and as the sun is rising, Jacob tells him that he won't let go until he blesses him. The man replies, What is your name? Don't let this fool you. God often asks questions he knows the answers to. Those are literally the only kinds of questions God can ask. That's one of the perks of being omniscient. Omniscient means he knows everything.

Jacob tells him his name, and the man's response clues us into the fact that he's God. First, he affirms that Jacob had not only wrestled with men, but that he'd also wrestled with God. And second, he changes his name, which you may recall is a big God move. Sometimes when God is about to reveal a new assignment or direction in someone's life, he renames them. Here, he calls Jacob Israel. It's the first time we see this word in Scripture.

The name will eventually come to refer not only to this one man, but also to all of his descendants as well. So Jacob left renamed and limping. This was Jacob's moment of transformation, encountering God face to face like this, like his father and grandfather had. Finally, his faith is starting to become his own. Then Jacob slash Israel continues on his journey.

He stacks up his people in order from least loved to most loved, and they eventually run into Esau, who actually seems excited to see him. They have a nice little chat, and then it becomes hard to tell if they're actually being humble and kind or if they still don't trust each other. But then it becomes clear where Jacob stands at least. He agrees to follow Esau, but after Esau leaves and heads south, Jacob goes west. He was heading toward the land of Canaan, where God had called him.

He bought some land, and he erects something on it to commemorate the occasion. But for the first time, it isn't a pillar. For the first time, it's an altar. Not a Canaanite memorial, not a pagan ritual, but an altar. And he names it El Elohe Israel, which means God, the God of Israel, his name.

He's honoring the God who drew near to him, who wrestled with him, who injured him and protected him all at once. An altar. I love it. I do not love what happens next in chapter 34. Here, Dinah, the one daughter among the dozen kids of Jacob, is the new girl in the new land that they've moved to, Shechem. In Shechem, there's a guy named Shechem, and his dad is a man of status in the land.

Shechem falls in love with Dinah, or at least Dinah's appearance, and he rapes her. After that, he wants to marry her, so he tries to get his dad to negotiate an arrangement with Jacob. Jacob and his sons are outraged, and rightly so. The text makes it clear that rape is taken seriously among their people. But Jacob sits passively by while his sons make the plan. They do it in much the same way Jacob always makes plans, which is to say, in a sneaky way.

They plan to kill all the men of the land in retaliation for what Shechem did to Dinah. They tell them that they all have to be circumcised, a kind of forced false conversion. So Shechem and his dad agree on behalf of everyone in town. I can't imagine how the other men of the land felt about this.

Shechem is a man of status and caliber in town, but his actions and attitude reveal that he has a grand sense of entitlement. He may have had power, but in my opinion, when it came down to it, he didn't have character. On the third day, after all the men in the town were circumcised, Simeon and Levi, who were two of Dinah's full brothers in their blended family, entered the town, killed all the males, and rescued Dinah. Then they captured and plundered everything.

Jacob disapproved, but mostly because he was afraid of retaliation. This is also a good place to mention that God himself never endorsed their actions. The Bible is just describing what happened. And in fact, later in scripture, we'll see more about God's response to their response to Shechem's sin. Sit tight. What was your God shot today?

I loved seeing how God changes hearts. Even though difficult circumstances are often his tool of choice, but that's possibly because they seem to be the most effective. He used a scary situation to humble Jacob when he was about to see Esau. Then, when Jacob was humbled and alone, God drew near to him, wrestled with him, renamed him, changed him. Jacob went from being the man who erects pillars to the man who builds altars.

But rest assured, Jacob is still a work in progress. He still lies and manipulates. And even his response to the slaughter of Shechem was still self-focused. But God never gives up on him because God knows that he will complete the work he started in him.

And I think Jacob is starting to feel the desire to grow in that direction of becoming the new man with the new name, the man whose actions reveal his trust in God, the man who knows that he's where the joy is.

We don't want to just help you read the Bible. We want to help you study the Bible, and we want to help you engage with others about what you're reading. So we've built out two tools that we hope will help you, and they work together perfectly. The first tool is a daily study guide. This is designed for you to do on your own. There are roughly five questions a day to help you dig into the text and learn more on your own while you're reading. These questions tend to focus more on research and study, and we've left a space for you to write in the guide itself.

The second tool is the weekly discussion guide. It has about 10 questions per week, and they're totally different questions from the daily study guide. But again, they work together perfectly. The weekly discussion questions are more reflective, and they'll help guide your group through a conversation that will build relationships as you work through Scripture together. To get your copies of these or see sample pages of each, check out the store link at thebiblerecap.com or click the link in the show notes.