You wouldn’t believe how the nation of Israel got it’s start….I doubt they are bragging about it.
No so hidden among the details about who gave birth to Jacob’s children is the number of kids that he had. 11 so far, to four different women. His wives, Rachel and Leah as well as their maid servants have all slept with Jacob and borne him sons. In fact, the two wives seem to consider themselves blessed to have sons via their maids. It really must have been a strange time…I don’t see that happening around here.
The one thing that really connects with me in these last few days of reading is the humanness of the key players. Laban is cheating Jacob out of his wages, and Jacob is deceiving Laban by manipulating the sheep to give birth to striped young. Even still, God is working his perfect plan out in the midst of it.
I relax a little as I consider that God isn’t hindered at all by my inability. My occasional mistake doesn’t derail His plans…because He knew my propensity for error before I knew it. It would be nice to look back on the “founding fathers of our faith” and celebrate their perfect character….but we can’t. Maybe that’s the point of this whole passage…to help us to understand that these were common ordinary people who didn’t always get it right, and yet God worked through them anyway. In fact, God not only works through Jacob, he blesses him. When I look at Jacob up to this point I don’t see anything that makes him stand out as a noble guy. He seems more like an ordinary guy who is being a little underhanded about what he is doing. Maybe he felt like he had to, because if he didn’t his uncle Laban would kill him. Thinking of that I grieve as I hear how Laban cheated Jacob for so many years. How sad when one generation preys on the next, and yet we see that very same thing happening now. You would hope that every subsequent generation would receive help from the one before, and then pass along help to the next…but occasionally the system breaks down and parents end up raising grandchildren, and children take advantage of parents… what a mess.
Any way, the main point here is that Jacob now has 11 of his 12 children. These children will become the basis for the 12 tribes of Israel, and Jacob himself will soon be renamed “Israel”. As you read these chapters, you are becoming familiar with Jacob and his family (the nation of Israel). From this point on, everything we read will refer back to one or several of Jacob’s kids. But there is a long way to go before they actually become a nation.
I sometimes wonder why the story about Rachel stealing the household gods is included. Maybe it’s to show us how difficult it is to remain spiritually pure. Jacob is trying, and a member of his household (the wife he loves the most) is sneaking idols into the home. Remember, this whole event is hundreds of years before the 10 commandments, so Rachael didn’t have a little plaque on the wall that said “do not fashion an idol in the form of anything in heaven or on earth”. But I still think that she would have understood it was wrong. Like I said earlier….these were common, ordinary people who made lots of mistakes. I don’t know why God chose to use them and bless them as the founders.
But I’m glad that He did. It encourages me to keep moving forward and not be discouraged when I do something wrong.
Faithfully,
PR