Speaker 1: God's strategy here is not to scold Jacob back onto the right path. It's actually to free him from the compulsion to think that grasping and grabbing it more will get him to where he wants to go. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad you're here and we hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Welcome today. If you and I haven't had a chance to meet in real life, my name is Jeremy. I get the privilege of helping to lead our team here at Commons, and I also get the honor of getting up here and talking most weekends. And it's really great to have you here. We don't take it for granted that you would come and join us and worship together with us in this space.
So thank you for being here today because we find ourselves in the midst of an extended series this fall working our way through the life of Jacob. And Jacob is this really fascinating character in the book of Genesis. He is one of the patriarchs. He was the early fathers of the Jewish story. And so Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is who we talk about a lot.
And we're taking two months this fall to work our way through his life, all the ups and the downs and the twists and the turns in order to see if we can find something of ourselves in this story. However, this is the fourth week in the series. And after today, we have four more weeks to go with Jacob. But next week, we're actually gonna pause this series to have a guest with us. And George Schneiman is the founder of Hands at Work in Africa, this incredible organization that we have partnered with since the founding of Commons.
And George is actually gonna be here next Sunday at all four services teaching, but then also sharing about what is happening in the communities that we are partnered with in Zambia. Now, international development is a very difficult and delicate thing to engage, and there are countless examples of good intent gone very wrong. To be very fair, we have made some of those mistakes as well. But, Hands at Work is this fantastic organization founded and run by African leaders who are doing really good holistic work through community based models all across Sub Saharan Africa. And so if possible, be with us here next Sunday.
And if you're interested in more of what you hear, then next Monday, there's actually gonna be a more informal meet and greet with George here at the church so you can ask questions. You can sign up for that at commons.church/events. And then, we are also putting together a team that is gonna travel to Zambia in April 2018, and you can head to commons.life for more info about that. Now, all that said, we are in Jacob today, and we have yet another fascinating moment in his life to explore. But before that, let's look back at last week quickly here.
Because there, we looked at a story where Jacob and his mother, Rebecca, conspired together to trick his father Isaac into giving a blessing to Jacob that was meant for Esau. So lots of dysfunctional family dynamics at play here. And let's be honest, a lot of us here can relate to that. If you have ever got a sense that your family of origin distances you from God, or that it somehow separates you from the text of scripture, as if all of this that we read was written for those of us with squeaky clean family back stories. Understand that most of the Bible is far messier than we often give it credit for.
And so if you notice some of the dynamics at play in your family here in this story, just know that God is not afraid of that. God is present in the midst of our blessing and dysfunction equally. Now, you can catch up with any of the teaching online. All the audio and video are made available every week, but here's how the story has played out so far. God has promised Rebecca that of her two twin sons, the younger Jacob will eventually rule over his older sibling Esau.
And we're told very early in the story, Genesis twenty five twenty eight, in fact, that the father Isaac loved Esau, but the mother Rebecca loved Jacob. And so when Isaac wants to give his blessing to Esau, Jacob and Rebecca conspired to trick him into giving it to Jacob. So dysfunction abounds here. But here's the question that we wrestled with last week. If Jacob is meant to be the one the story follows, and if God wants him to excel past his brother, does that retroactively absolve Jacob and Rebecca for anything that they do here in the story?
And for me, the answer is no. Now, I do think that there are times when God does speak to us about something, a direction or an idea. As we talked about in September, that unique creative flame that each of us has inside, that that thing that we have to work very hard to protect and guard lest anyone snuff it out. And yet, I think that sometimes once we discover that calling, the thing that we were meant to do, it can be really easy at times to talk ourselves in to all kinds of shortcuts to get there. I mean, do I really think that God's plan for Jacob depended on him getting a hold of Isaac's blessing by any means necessary?
Of course not. If Isaac had gone ahead and blessed Esau, would God have been sitting up in heaven going, oh man, what am I gonna do now? My plans are ruined. No. Of course not.
First of all, because God is not actually some old man up in the sky to begin with. But second, because however God works in the world, it is not simplistically confined by cause and effect. There's this famous passage from Isaiah where God speaks through the prophet and says, my thoughts are not your thoughts. My ways are not your ways. What that passage is really about, if you go and you read Isaiah 55, is that God is saying to the people of Israel, I am interested in saving everyone, not just you.
And, yes, I know that they're your enemies, and I know that you hate them, but I don't. And what I take from that here is that God says Jacob will be blessed. And Rebecca hears, well, then I guess we better gather up whatever blessing we can get our hands on. But for God, blessing Jacob never had anything to do with taking away from Esau. In fact, we're gonna see that despite everything that happens to him, Esau is incredibly blessed by God in his life as well.
God loves him too. But the problem is where God sees blessing and abundance in the world, we sometimes tend to see competition and scarcity. As if whatever you have or whatever you achieve, this is something that is somehow no longer available to me. And when that's our worldview, that everything's a competition, we misread what God's promises are about, and all of a sudden, all of the shortcuts seem to look like the only option. Here's the thing.
The way you get to where you're going is just as important as the fact that you get there. And Jacob will end up exactly where God always imagined, but it will be in spite of his deceptions, not because of them. God's ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts because life is not actually a race, and blessing is not competition. Now today, we have another fascinating little story, And surely, God will be in this place as we read.
But first, let's pray. God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, would you help us to see through something more like your eyes this morning? To sense the blessing that is in and through and around us daily, to marvel at your grace as it surrounds us. May we see life as gift, not competition. And for those of us who have felt lost or alone in that race, maybe those of us here in this space who have felt abandoned or in some way very distant from you right now.
Maybe we feel like we have banged our heads on doors looking for your blessing. We pray that we might know what it means to settle our hearts, And that even when the way forward is unclear, our hearts and our minds might be. As we watch Jacob run today, and as we watch you chase him down in the text, we ask that we might begin to know what it means to slow ourselves long enough to notice you. And so, Lord, we slow our breathing, and we listen for the sound of our heartbeat, And, we clear the clutter from our minds as best we can. And, we ask that you would open our eyes so that we could say with Jacob, surely God, you are in this space.
In the strong name of the risen Christ, pray. Amen. Okay. Last week, we left off at this climactic moment where the family of Abraham is about to fall apart. Isaac has been tricked, and Esau is out for revenge, and Rebecca tells Jacob to run and flee and go and hide with her brother Laban in Haran.
And we'll pick up the story of Jacob in Genesis chapter 28 verse 10 in a moment here. But before that, I want us to notice something in the opening of chapter 28. Before the text follows Jacob to Haran, it tells us in verses eight and nine that Esau realized how displeasing Canaanite women were to his father Isaac. And so he went to Ishmael and he married Mahalath, a daughter of Ishmael, son of Abraham. Now, sort of a quick moment in the story before the writer jumps back to focus on Jacob, but I wanna notice here that Esau, who sold the gift of his father's birthright for a bowl of stew, is now making some frankly considered life choices.
He goes and he marries a woman his father would approve of. Now, I'm certainly not saying this is how we should do marriages anymore, so please don't hear that. But I do think that the writer wants us to notice that Esau is trying. He's growing as a human being. He's maturing as a man.
And I think when Esau comes back into the story in a few weeks, and we come to realize just how successful Esau has been in his life, we're meant to think back to this moment and realize that he was working it out. And he was trying to do better. He was growing up. And even though the story follows Jacob, Esau is on his journey as well. And sometimes, it might not feel like the story is focused on us, but that doesn't mean that God isn't working on something inside of us.
Sometimes our best work happens off stage. Now, that's it. Let's pick up with Jacob in verse 10. Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Haran. When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set.
Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and he lay down to sleep. Now, I know that there are those kinds of people who can sleep anywhere. Apparently, Jacob is one of those. I have a son. I know you know this because I tell a lot of stories, but here's one.
He is four, and he also can sleep anywhere. My son has this special blanket that he carries around the house. We don't let him take it out of the house, but when he has that blanket at home anywhere is a bed. And this week, he was sick. And so I stayed home with him for a half day, so that we would not have to send this little germ ridden monstrosity into a room of otherwise healthy children.
But he's coughing and sneezing, and I feel bad, but it's also, like, very disgusting. And so I remind him, please cover your mouth when you cough directly into my face as you like to do. And he says to me, mommy says, when I cough into my blanket, it will catch my dreams. And I said, nobody, germs, it will catch your germs. And he says, no, I don't want those.
And I said, yeah, neither do I. So that's why you gotta cover your mouth. You're back to sleep. Anyway, regardless, Jacob can sleep anywhere just like my son. And in verse 12, we read that Jacob had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth with its top reaching to heaven.
And the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And there above it stood the Lord and he said, I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. And your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the West and to the East and the North and the South. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offs pring.
That is a repeat of the promise that was made to his grandfather Abraham in chapter 12. Everything that is meant for Jacob is meant for the world. I am with you, and I will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you. When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.
He was afraid, and he said, how awesome is this place? This is none other than the house of God. This is the gate of heaven. Now, there's a lot packed into this story. A couple things to quickly hear.
First of all, this story starts by telling us that Jacob reached a certain place. And the Hebrew construction here is which comes from the word paga. The idea here is not simply that he came to a certain place the way the NIV says it. The idea is more like he stumbled upon a certain place. So this isn't a designated rest stop or place that he's planned to reach.
This is somewhere that he just sort of happens into. And this is actually gonna be important because the whole point of this story is that God shows up where we least expect him to. Except even more than that, some scholars read another layer here. Because there is another form of this verb that means to meet with someone or to even go and plead with someone. Now, the form of the verb here means to happen onto something or to stumble into something randomly.
But because there is this other more intentional form of the verb, some scholars think that this is meant to function almost like a pun. As if Jacob thinks he stumbled into the moment, but really what's happening here is that he has come to meet with God. And I don't know about you, but that describes so much of my spiritual journey. It's almost uncanny. The moments where I have encountered the divine, The places where I have met with God, those have rarely been the spaces or the places or the moments I might have expected them to be.
And I think that intellectually we get that. Right? You know, God is not confined to religious moments or sacred spaces. But dive into this a little bit here. Because the point isn't just that Jacob isn't in church.
The point is that Jacob is on the run from a mess that he himself helped to create. Not only is the divine not contingent on the spaces we enter, God is not confined by the circumstances we create. And sometimes, just when you think that you could be no farther from God than you are right now, this is where you stumble into an encounter with grace. And for some of us here, maybe that is all that we need to know today, that the divine is nearer than you imagine. Once again, what we're seeing here is that this is really literary stuff that we're reading.
These stories are constructed with a lot of care and creativity. They are put together delicately, and we're just getting started. Because in the opening section, the story goes into a bit of straightforward recounting of what has happened. Jacob left Beersheba. He set out for Haran.
He reached a certain place. He stopped for the night. He took a stone. He put it under his head. He lay down to sleep.
And what we're reading here is a straightforward Hebrew narrative in a form called Vav consecutive. Now, without getting too deep into the weeds of Hebrew grammar, vav consecutive is roughly analogous to our past tense in English. These are all very concrete completed actions, And that is the normal form that a narrative takes in Hebrew. But once Jacob falls asleep and the story moves into Jacob's dream, something really fascinating happens in the grammar. It's all of a sudden, all of the verbs change to participles in the next section.
Now, participles symbols are similar to what we might think of as I n g words in English. As what happens is you read, Jacob reached a certain place. He stopped for the night. He took a stone. He put it under his head.
He laid down to sleep, and then dreaming he was seeing a stairway resting, its top reaching, angels ascending and descending, above it standing the Lord saying, I am the Lord. Now, unless you're really into verb tenses like I am, that might not seem all that exciting to you. But imagine for a second that you are around an ancient campfire, and you are being told this story not by a white guy with long hair and a microphone, but by a master Hebrew storyteller. And she starts, Jacob did this, and then Jacob did that, and he stumbled into this place, and then he went to sleep. And then all of a sudden, she gets very small.
And she lowers her voice, and she leans in, and almost in a whisper she says, now dreaming we are seeing, angels ascending and descending. The Lord is standing and he is saying to us. You see how the way that you tell a story, and the way you write it, and the way you read it makes it. Everything else in the Jacob story, are seeing at a distance from ourselves, and we can step back and analyze and critique. We can make sense of it.
But this dream, we are experiencing alongside Jacob, and that's the point. This guy who is the scrappy underdog, who doesn't look like the hero, and who acts like the villain sometimes is now our entry point into this encounter with something divine. And all of that is facilitated by verb tenses. So take a moment and thank God for all those English classes you took in high school because they're important. What this means is that we need to leave literal behind so that we can begin to read literarily.
And there is so much here to discover in the text when we do. Example, the NIV here says that God stood above it all. And this is actually pretty universally understood to be a bad translation. In fact, in the newest update to the new international version and by the way, when you see me quote the bible on the screens and it says NIV 11 at the end, that means the 2011 edition, which happens to be the latest update to the NIV. So just for fun, that's what that means.
But in that latest version, they have a footnote here saying, or God stood beside Jacob. And most scholars agree that that's actually what's going on in the Hebrew story. That God is standing beside Jacob and watching the scene unfold with him. And that draws me even more deeply into the image. Because what is it that God first says to Jacob as he stands beside him here?
God says, I am the Lord, the God of Abraham, the God of your father, Isaac. Now, what has just happened in the story? Jacob has just tricked his father Isaac, stolen his blessing, and fled to the desert. He stumbles into a certain place. He falls asleep and God shows up and stands beside him and says, oh, by the way, I'm the God of your father Isaac.
Have you ever mistreated someone or hurt someone or maybe even brush someone off unintentionally. And then later that day or the next day or maybe a week later, all of a sudden, that moment somehow works its way back into the front of your mind. And maybe you walk past a homeless person and their face doesn't even register with you, and yet later that day, out of nowhere, you can't get their face out of your mind. Can I suggest that sometimes, perhaps, what God does is he comes and he stands beside us and he says, listen, I love you, but don't forget? I am also the God of all those people you have walked past or over or through to get to where you are right now.
Sometimes, having God stand beside us is uncomfortable, but at least God is with us in that moment. Now, our time is running short, and there are still a couple important pieces here. So first, what's with all these angels climbing up and down this ladder? And this is actually kind of a tough one to answer. For one, the word angels is the word malach in Hebrew, And really what that means is messenger.
Angel comes in because these are presumably messengers from God. But because we're not told about what message they are carrying here, most commentators suggest that we not get too caught up on this, and that the bigger point is God's presence in the world. The idea is that God is moving through the world, that God is sending his message in and through and to his people, and that God shows up to communicate in the places we least expected God to be. That's what the image is about. Now, one ancient rabbi named Rashi claimed that the descending angels represented where Jacob had come from, and the ascending angels represented where he was going to.
Sort of a wherever you go, God is already there kind of idea, and I like that. But regardless of the specifics of any interpretation, I think the motif of unexpected presence in the world, that makes sense. Because when Jacob wakes up from his dream, the first thing he says is, surely the Lord was in this place and I I did not know. So something about this dream is about the unexpectedness of God. But if you are paying attention there, you may have noticed that I added something to the version we read earlier from the NIV.
And that was the superfluous I. You see, what Jacob actually says in Hebrew here is that the Lord was in this place and I I did not know. And this little strange grammatical oddity has been part of rabbinic speculation for thousands of years. What does this mean? In fact, there's a fascinating little book by Rabbi Kushner that deals with just this one verse.
And it explores how seven different rabbis over the past two thousand years have wrestled with these eyes. Suffice to say, there is no simple solution here, and I am not going to settle millennia of speculation today. And yet, in all the variations of all the readings I have done on this passage, there is a consistent thread that emerges in the commentary. And it flows from the fact that Jacob has been entirely Jacob centric in the story thus far. Jacob has a destiny, and Jacob has a plan, and Jacob has wishes and desires and hopes for his future, and everything Jacob has done has been for Jacob so far.
And yet somehow, Jacob has found himself on the run-in the desert, sleeping on a rock, no more aware of himself than when he started. And yet, what is it that God really wants to communicate to Jacob when he appears to him? God says, I will give to you and I will bless you. I am with you and I will watch over you. I will bring you back because I will not leave you.
See, as Jacob centric as Jacob has been, the thing that God wants to say to Jacob to snap him back into a realization of his true self is a reminder of everything that Jacob already has. You see, sometimes, I think we fall into this trap of believing that the only way we can ever come to know our true selves or to understand our deepest longings is to pursue everything we think we want with reckless abandon. As if the only thing that will ever make us happy is more. But here's the thing. Oftentimes, the only way to discover the truest version of ourselves and who we really are is to have something like God show up and remind us of everything we already have.
That we are actually truly loved even when we're the villain, that we are actually already blessed even when we think we want more, that we are fully welcome because we are never alone. And sometimes, what we really need is simply to be reminded that life is not a competition, and we cannot win by taking anything away from anyone else. I mean, think about this. When God finally catches up with Jacob after all he has done and everyone he has wronged, all that God wants to say is essentially, Jacob, stop trying so hard. Let me give you everything I always imagined for you.
God's strategy here is not to scold Jacob back onto the right path. It's actually to free him from the compulsion to think that grasping and grabbing it more will get him to where he wants to go. And some of us here have been trying so hard for so long that we have almost lost ourselves to it. And maybe all that God wants to say today through the story of Jacob after he has chased you down and finally gotten your attention. Simply this, my precious child, stop trying so hard to prove yourself to yourself.
And know that you are loved because once you get that, I promise it will change everything for you. May you come to know today that ambition is good, and drive is healthy, and passion is holy, but more is not the solution you think it will be. Because everything that you have been grasping and grabbing for, it is already right here standing beside you in this moment. And when you notice that, when you can say to yourself, surely the Lord was in this place and I I didn't know it. That will change everything for you.
Let's pray. God, as we attempt to place ourselves into the story, and maybe we see parts of ourselves in Jacob where we have grabbed at things that weren't ours, and we have taken shortcuts that weren't right. God, would we see through all of that to see your presence standing beside us the same way you did for Jacob. Not scolding us, not pointing down at us, but reminding us of everything that we already have. That we are loved and blessed, we are welcomed, we are embraced.
And that all the ways that we have been trying to prove ourselves to ourselves or to our parents or to the people we look up to or to the people who are around us, all of that is an illusion. Because more success and more stuff and more money and more adulation will never satisfy us. It will never help us to understand our true selves the way that you will. So God, may we work hard and have big dreams and pursue them with everything that we have. But in the midst of that, where we know that our identity, who we are, who I am, is grounded and founded in the fact that I am loved as your child.
In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.