How God Woos Jacob

I am finding Genesis totally fascinating, so much so that I want to stop and reflect more, and yet I need to keep moving. I love the stories of Jacob and the way that God seeks him out and appears to him in such personal and profound ways, about which I'll say more below.

One way to read Genesis is to look at the curses that follow the snake's deception and human disobedience and then see how the consequences play out. Here in the stories of Jacob, I see those consequences in the ongoing acts of deception that he and Laban carry out. (Seems like they took a parseltongue lesson from the snake :)) I see them in Leah's "desire for her husband" (Gen. 3:16b), which is so sadly obvious in the way she names her sons (Gen 29:32, 34). I see them in Jacob's fear about meeting his brother Esau - once again brothers divided, as with Cain and Abel, and Ishmael and Isaac.

The story of Jacob and Esau's reunion just about killed me, it was so touching. For the first time I noticed echoes of Jesus' parable of the prodigal son.  Jacob comes humbling himself, saying he will be Esau's servant, and instead Esau "ran to meet him, hugged him, threw his arms around him, and kissed him. Then they wept." (Gen 33:4) The angry and shortsighted young man we knew Esau to be has now become generous and open-hearted. When Esau says in response to Jacob's offer of gifts, "I have enough, my brother," I just about fell out of my chair. Is this not the answer to so many of the problems in Genesis and in our world today, that we feel we do not have enough - enough power, enough money, enough blessing - and so we feel we need to take it from others? If Adam and Eve had stopped and said this to each other before eating from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, how differently this story would have turned out. Esau seems to have stumbled upon some font of wisdom down there in Seir.

As we trace the consequences of sin, we also trace the ongoing faithfulness of God to redeem the mess. If there's one thing these stories of Genesis make clear, it is that God's presence and work does not mean that all problems are instantly resolved. (On the flip side, it also means that just because everything isn't perfect and hunky-dory does not mean that God doesn't exist or is powerless to fix things. God takes the long view on this whole redemption business.) God really is writing an ongoing story, and he's going to work with the characters as they are and yet also transform them. Jacob is not a saint by any definition, and yet God pursues Jacob until God can be known as Jacob's God.

I've been noticing how God's faithfulness shows up in his persistence to claim the next generation as his own when the older generation of covenant-partners dies. The transition from Abraham to Isaac goes pretty smoothly; God shows up to Isaac twice in Genesis 26 telling him he will make the same covenant with him that he made with Isaac's father Abraham, and Isaac is down with that. He builds an altar, calls on the name of Yahweh in 26:25, and things are good. Jacob, however, is a trickier case. It takes Jacob 20 years from his encounter with God at Bethel before he will claim God as "his God." At Bethel Jacob, ever the bargainer, says,

“IF God will be with me and watch over me on this journey, if He provides me with food to eat and clothing to wear, and if I return safely to my father’s house, THEN the LORD will be my God." (Gen 28:20)

Jacob tells God that if God fulfills all of these conditions, then Jacob will enter into a full covenant with God. This is completely backwards from the way covenants were made in that time - Jacob is definitely the vassal party here, not the feudal lord! Yet he is defining his participation in the covenant according to God's faithfulness to the conditions Jacob has set forth. This is pretty obnoxious negotiating on Jacob's part. But what does God do? God does not pull rank on Jacob, though he has every right to do so. instead God sets out to "woo" Jacob and to prove his faithfulness to him by doing exactly what Jacob asks - keeping him safe, blessing him with wives and children and livestock, and bringing him back safely to his father's house. Despite this, for years Jacob refers to God as his father's god, not his own. In Genesis 31:5, at the end of his 20 years with Laban, Jacob is still saying to his wives, "the God of my father has been with me." Note then the importance of Genesis 33:18-20:

After Jacob came from Paddan-aram, he arrived safely at Shechem in the land of Canaan and camped in front of the city. He purchased a section of the field where he had pitched his tent from the sons of Hamor, Shechem’s father, for 100 qesitahs. And he set up an altar there and called it “God, the God of Israel.”

Jacob is a changed man after his wrestling with God by the river Jabbok, and this change is memorialized in his new name, Israel. This is the first time that we see Jacob making an altar. Earlier at Bethel he set up a stone as a marker of the place where God appeared to him. Here he sets up an altar as an an act of worship, acknowledging God as his own God, "the God of Israel."

I truly believe that God is still in the same line of work, claiming the next generation as his own. God is not content to have grandchildren :) We learn from our parents' faith in God, but then we must have our own encounters with God, so that we can respond along with Jacob: "Surely God is in this place; surely God wants to be my God."

Gustave Dore's "Jacob Wrestling with The Angel"