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Our Christian formation classes are taught by the clergy of Church of the Incarnation (Dallas, TX). Journey with us as each season unfolds.
Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this new day. We thank you for, just opportunity to open up your scriptures again. I thank you for, just constantly showing us your love, your grace, your mercy. I pray that we would see that in these texts, texts that can be sometimes difficult to understand at first glance.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And I pray that we would rest in your love, Lord, your grace, and your mercy. We pray these things in Christ's name and by the spirit, amen. Okay, well we'll go ahead and keep going with our narrative here. We, I think, left off kind of as the end of the Abraham narrative last time and we're gonna see this sort of Abraham and even the Isaac narrative sort of come to a close in these next few chapters, and we're gonna see the kind of the introduction of the Jacob narrative. By the way, I should say the Sunday school recordings are online now, So at least for the first month, the first four.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:So I can give you the link if you come up to me afterwards, you send me an email, I can forward it to you. The URL is like a 100 different letters or something, so it's one of those type URL podcast type things. So but yeah, so what we're gonna be looking at today is largely the Jacob, what I would call the Jacob narrative. These like about 10 chapters in the middle of Genesis that sort of introduce us to this figure of Jacob, and so what I want to sort of set our minds on right now is this idea that there's various themes that are emerging in the book of Genesis. Of course we talked about promise being the main theme of the book of Genesis.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Conflict is a theme that runs through the book, we're gonna see that a lot in the Jacob narrative obviously, but also all throughout the book of Genesis. And I kind of wanted to go on a theme, besides promise, of sort of sticking with Cs or thinking through themes related to Cs, so I thought of this, counterintuitive. I think I spelled that right, long word. Counterintuitive, That the plan of God throughout Genesis and even throughout the Bible as we see it is often very counterintuitive. It goes against the way we tend to think, and we're gonna see that definitely in the Jacob narrative as we go forward, is that God tends to side with the lesser.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:He tends to side with the marginalized. He tends to side with the poor, the needy, those who are outcast in society and so the Jacob narrative really brings that to the surface very clearly in our story today in these 10 chapters or so. The last one I want to look at, which runs through Genesis and runs through the Bible as a whole, is a principle called coherence. And I want to explain this principle of coherence. This idea of coherence really comes to me by way of the fourth century church father Gregory of Nyssa and others and it's the idea that we talked several weeks ago about there's two creation narratives in Genesis.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:You have the creation narrative in Genesis one, creation narrative in Genesis two. We talked about that first creation narrative in Genesis one being a very majestic, top down, authority kind of creation there. The Genesis two creation narrative was different in what way? Do you recall? It was more what?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:It was more horizontal. Yeah, I kinda called it more horizontal, because you got this vertical one kind of top down, this more intimate, horizontal if you will, of creation of the man and woman. Yeah, so what you have here is, what I'm talking about with coherence is the idea, and I may have touched on this several weeks ago, is that in the first creation account in Genesis one twenty six and twenty seven, you have the creation of all of humanity. You have the whole of humanity created. Right there, in God's foreknowledge.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:All humans were created in total, in a lump. In Genesis two, you have more of the individual creation of man and woman. Okay? So if we stop to think about what does it mean for God to create all of humanity at once? I think a theological implication of that is this idea of coherence, that we cohere with each other.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We are interconnected with each other from our very creation by God as seen in Genesis one. We are interconnected. We are interdependent. And notice what is said by the author of Genesis in Genesis one twenty six and twenty seven. God created man, then he uses the plural pronoun them, so we see that all of creation was included in that first creation, and he was given the image of God.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Humanity was given the image of God. So an implication of this idea of coherence is that the image of God is best and most beautifully realized and understood and seen in the whole, not necessarily in the individual parts or expressions. That the image of God is beautifully realized only when the whole is taken into consideration. That's what it says in Genesis one. And so I want to explore here in the next few minutes this idea of what it means to be a person.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:What is a person? I think a lot of us, when we think about a person or personhood, we tend to think about a thing, like, oh, that's a person or that's a person, some sort of noun or thing, that's a person. A person is not a thing. A person is an act. A person is not a thing.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:A person is an act. This is critically important to understanding our theology in general, but also this Jacob narrative as we explore it. A person is a set of relations. Okay? When I think about personhood or your personhood or anybody's personhood or the idea that they are a person, they are a set of relations.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Personhood is not a static thing, it's a dynamic act, okay? That is that we are always evolving, we are always changing, we are always in flux, as it were, as persons, okay? And an implication of this is that if we are not in relations with each other, we are not a person, right? We lose our personhood because it's a dynamic quality to it. And so, we are always moving as persons, evolving.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We are either progressing or regressing, moving into fuller life or more diminished life. But when we think about who we are as a person, who you are as a person, who all of us are as persons, it must be understood in its dynamic quality, in its set of relations itself, okay? So there is no such thing as an autonomous person, Okay, the idea of an autonomous person is an oxymoron. Okay, an autonomous individual or an individual person is an oxymoron. We are persons only insofar as the relations impinge upon us.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We are affected, we are changed, we grow, we diminish, we do all these things in relation to the people in our lives. Okay? Maybe this is obvious to you, maybe it's not, but it was very obvious, I think, this notion of personhood for thousands of years, up until maybe the eighteenth century with the enlightenment. Then you get this idea of the person as some sort of individual autonomous thing, right? You get this idea that there somehow can be extracted from society and still function and even flourish.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And we've inherited that enlightenment mentality oftentimes over the last three hundred or so years. Remember the book Robinson Crusoe? Anybody read it? It's considered the first novel. And the reason it's considered the first novel is because it focuses on particularities, not the whole.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:It's all about extracting the particularities. And what's more particular than a man who's shipwrecked on an island, right? And he falls on that island and he ends up being very discouraged on that island, but what happens later in that story of Robinson Crusoe? Anybody remember from your or your kid's readings in high school? He ends up being happy.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:He ends up being fine. He ends up being content. And that spoke to the age in which this book was written, 1719, the enlightenment. This idea, this myth that we can extract ourselves from others. You see this even in Walden, perhaps, Thoreau, and these kind of authors kind of in the modern period, just different iterations of the same theme, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:That somehow you can thrive and be a person absent others. And it's a total myth, you see? And so there is no sense of autonomy in the person. We can strive for autonomy. We can seek autonomy, just like Eve and Adam were striving for autonomy.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We can certainly strive for it, but it's not something we ever really are. And so when I'm emphasizing this, it's not one of those talks that I'm giving that's like, yeah, we should be in more community. You know, we should really get together and be in community, one of those talks. It's more of a fact. We are interconnected.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We have a shared humanity. It's not just some great notion that we talk about, oh, our shared humanity, gotta, you know. In other words, there is no such thing as an autonomous random individual in Uzbekistan or in Gaza or in Guatemala or in Canada or in America, anywhere. We are all created together as a whole at the same time. Does that make sense?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And so I think that helps us, if we can understand that, understand this Jacob narrative. Because the Jacob narrative really kind of exemplifies this for me. When I read the Jacob narrative, I think about this idea of coherence. I think that Jacob himself is not an individual person. You know his story, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:You know the kind of the flow of the story. We're kind of gonna assume a certain amount of knowledge here. Jacob is a set of relations. His whole life is a set of relations for good or bad, alright, for up and down, the whole thing. He was, to use kind of a modern term, he was kind of this larger than life figure, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:He was this very strong personality who really showed himself in a lot of different ways, and so what he does is for me really exemplifies this notion of personhood. Who are some of the people who relate to Jacob, who impinge upon his life, who make him who he is? Esau, right? Esau in chapter 20 Who else is a figure that kind of impinges upon his life? His mother Rebecca, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Let's see, you put Rebecca here. Okay, chapter 27 and elsewhere. What does Esau do, by the way, to impinge upon Jacob's life? At the very least, yeah, yeah. So it's conflict, Yeah, conflict.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay. Well, God would have something to do with it too. Well, we're gonna get to that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so who else is impinging upon his life?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Isaac, yep. In chapter 27. I mean, are kind of multiple chapters often, you see it most clearly perhaps in 27. Who else is coming in on him? Laban, Laban, what's that, 28?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:At least for starters, chapter 28? Who else is involved in Jacob's life? Because he's the dominant figure in this narrative, right? Everything seems to like swirl around him, right? Everything does.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Who else is coming in on his life here? Okay, Rachel, yeah, yep, absolutely. Leah and Rachel, right? Both, two wives. What chapter was that, I forgot.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Is that 29? Yeah, 29. Okay. There's a bonus one here. How about Laban again?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:31. He has two disputes with Laban, right? Remember that? Not just one? He has two different conflicts with Laban over the course of this narrative.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay, and then Mark said one here. Right? God, right? Yeah, like there's this sense at the end of our narrative here, you know, we could say God or this angel or this man, whatever this figure, whoever this figure is, God man, pre incarnate appearance of Christ, we'll talk about that. You know, we'll see what that, who that is perhaps.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And so as I see the Jacob narrative, it's a set of relations that are affecting him in various ways and shaping him to who he is throughout this entire story. And so if you look at your sheet, the back of your sheet there, to the very first part of our narrative here, you see Genesis 25. I think I have it on your sheet. Right? Genesis 25?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Yeah. And so at the very beginning of this narrative, if we kind of pick it up from here, I'm skipping over a couple chapters that we didn't aren't we able to get to from last week. Genesis 25, starting with verse 21. Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife because she was barren, and the Lord granted his prayer, and his wife Rebecca conceived. The children struggled together within her.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay, conflict. And she said, if it is to be this way, why do I live or how could I go on living or some sort of translation like that. So she went on to inquire of the Lord and the Lord said to her, two nations are in your womb and two peoples born of you shall be divided. The one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger. Counterintuitive, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Since when does the elder serve the younger in society? When her time to give birth was at hand, there were twins in her womb. The first came out red, all his body like a hairy mantle, so they named him Esau. Afterward, his brother came out and with his hand gripping Esau's heel, so he was named Jacob. Isaac was 60 years old when she bore them.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay. When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man living in tents. Isaac loved Esau because he was fond of game, but Rebecca loved Jacob. Okay. So these relationships with each other are going to are going to shape Jacob in profound ways as we know the Rebecca narrative being more favorable towards Jacob is going to stand in his favor when it comes to these kinds of relationships with his dad and so forth.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:So yeah, the children struggled within her, this idea of conflict. Okay, Jacob's name itself means supplanter. Okay, that's his name meaning. So it sort of anticipates this life of conflict that you're going to see. He's one of these guys that just seems to have his elbows out of it, right, and just gonna go through life in such a way.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And so this idea of conflict, as we talked about, is a very dominant theme. Some people say one of the main themes of Genesis this idea of grasping too, you know, and I think grasping and conflict could be very similar in many ways. You have Eve grasping the fruit, you know, you have Jacob grasping the heel of his brother out of the womb. You have obviously Cain and Abel. I mean, Cain must have grasped his brother, you know, in order to kill him and so forth.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:There's this idea that there's this intensity and there's this kind of conflict or grasping that occurs throughout the book of Genesis. And you get this idea too that God's plans are not the way we would lay out plans, right? And so the elder Esau is going to serve the younger, okay? It's this idea called primogenitor. Firstborn is the heir, okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:But God is gonna turn this upside down. He's going to change this whole thing, and what he does by doing this is that God commits himself to the outsider throughout the scriptures. If you think about the stories of scripture, you think about some of the major figures like Gideon, David, think about the followers of Jesus, fishermen, even tax collectors or outsiders, the women who followed him, all these different people who didn't have societal value as much as the others did. This is going to be the pattern that we see throughout the scriptures themselves. And so by the time we get to Jesus and we talk and we see this theme rolling out, you know, lot of people talk about Jesus' kingdom being an upside down kingdom.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:It's very counterintuitive to the way we think of kingdom, this notion of kingdom, but this is all throughout the scriptures. I used to think that you had to sort of read the Bible with one eye closed not to see God's love and God's care for the poor. Now I think you have to read the Bible with two eyes closed not to see that, okay. It's on almost every single page of the Old Testament and of course the New Testament as well. And so you're gonna see and Paul's even gonna say this in first Corinthians one, he's gonna say that God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not to abolish things that are so that no one might boast in the presence of God.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And so this kind of sets up our story here of Jacob, how he's going to be understood or seen in this narrative. And so we keep going. I'm just gonna walk through the stories a little bit and just real briefly and just show you these different themes and how they emerge in the actual narrative. If you skip over to chapter 26, you see in 20 six:two, I don't if you have your Bibles with you, I don't know if it's on your sheet or not. It says, the Lord appeared to Isaac and said, and of course the Isaac narrative is kind of winding down during this time as well.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:The Lord appeared to Isaac and said, do not go down to Egypt, settle in the land that I will show you. Reside in this land as an alien, and I will be with you and will bless you. For to you and to your descendants I will give all these lands, and I will fulfill the oath that I swore to your father Abraham. Okay, so there's a linking happening there. And then critically in verse four, I will make your offspring as the stars of heaven and will give to your offspring all these lands, and all the nations of the earth shall gain blessing for themselves through your offspring because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statues, my laws.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay. So that's almost like verbatim from what we read in Genesis 15. There's that reminder of the promise, that promise, even the specificity of this being like the stars of heaven, you know, being reiterated to Isaac in this narrative. And of course, know, Isaac goes down to another country. He goes to where Abimelech is the king.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And you read this in chapter 26 and you say to yourselves perhaps, haven't we been there before? Doesn't this sound familiar? Does it sound familiar to you? This idea that Isaac is going down to this other land. He's got his wife with him.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:He's scared that his wife is going to be taken from him because of her beauty and that he's going to be killed in the process. Does that sound familiar? If it does, it's because it happens three times in the book of Genesis. Three times Genesis 12 Abraham and Sarah went down to Egypt and the exact same thing came out of their mouths. Genesis 20 Abraham does it again with Abimelech, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And then in 26 it happens with Abraham's son and his wife with Abimelech. The exact same pattern emerges of I don't want to die. So you're gonna be my wife, you're gonna pass off as my wife, we're gonna see how this goes. And what happens all three times of these narratives that they go down into another land and try to like deceive the ruler? Do you remember?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Yeah, yeah, they get caught, right? I mean, all of sudden the leader's like, what have you done to me? You know, you brought this terrible thing upon me. What? Get out, get out, get out.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:But to me, it communicates again this whole idea that if you're a first time reader of Genesis and if you don't know the story, you've been told in Genesis twelve and fifteen that this family in this nation is going to be a blessing to all the nations. It's going be a blessing. And yet here we are again with this conflict happening with these other nations. So you kind of wonder, like, are they going to be a blessing? It doesn't look like they're going to be that blessing that is promised.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And yet they will as we see throughout the Old Testament and especially in the New Testament. And so you see this pattern emerge throughout that time. If you skip down to chapter 27 here, we've got Rebecca here entering the picture. Jacob and Rebecca, of course his mom, they trick Isaac into blessing Jacob and not Esau. Verse 41, twenty seven forty one, now Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing with which his father had blessed him and Esau said to himself the days of mourning for my father are approaching, then I will kill my brother Jacob.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay, so conflict again and so this is gonna be one of the dominant aspects of our narrative is this idea of Esau's pursuit of Jacob and Jacob on the run. Throughout this narrative, Jacob is basically a sojourner. He's just moving around constantly. It even says he's a sojourner at one point, I think in 31. He's just moving around trying to avoid his brother and avoid death from his brother.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And of course, Jacob then is sent to Laban, chapter 28, okay. And Jacob enters into this relationship with Laban and Laban owns the land and Jacob's there sort of as a some sort of a tenant or something and, you know, Jacob wants to marry one of his daughters and he said, you gotta work seven years for this. And then he works seven years and he's given Leah and then he works seven more years and he's given Rachel as a wife. And, you know, this whole time, you know, Jacob's kind of this trickster figure. He's kind of this guy you don't totally trust.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Of course, he's entering into sometimes relationships with other people you don't totally trust as well. And so you try to figure out who is the person in this narrative that I should be kind of hanging on to, you know, in this whole process. For whatever reason, Esau's kind of seen as a certain, you know, figure. Isaac has had, you know, kind of different things. Rebecca, obviously kind of in cahoots with Jacob trying to deceive.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Laban, not sure he can be trusted, you know, he's like, well, you know, it seems like putting Jacob through quite a bit here and then maybe exploiting Jacob in the process. And then of course you have Leah and Rachel come in as wives to Jacob during this time. And, you know, one commentator said, you know, really interestingly, I think it's like there's this notion that I'll go ahead and quote him. He says, it is the wonder, it is the mystery and shock that this God would be present in such a decisive way to this exiled one. The miracle is the way this sovereign God binds himself to this treacherous fugitive.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay, and so obviously Jacob hadn't done anything wrong in the womb. It wasn't Jacob's fault, you know, that he was going to be chosen or elected. There wasn't anything like wrong in that sense, but there is a sense in which he does enter into certain relationships with certain motives, it seems like, in order to gain certain advantages, and yet God sticks with him. God sticks with Jacob through this. And to me it seems like there's a sense in which we have to be realistic about ourselves too.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We have to be honest about it with ourselves and about ourselves in terms of it's easy to sort of see Jacob as this sort of figure that is like, well, how could someone like that receive God's grace? How could someone like that be loved by God? How could someone like that find any favor in God's eyes? And yet we must be honest with ourselves and think God sticks with us through all of our faults, through all of our sins, through all of our trials. He sticks with us and never abandons us because he is the God of promise.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And so to me it's just sort of a reminder that the God that we worship is the God of promise as we see in creation itself, as we see in Genesis twelve, fifteen, 17 and beyond. And so you have this kind of narrative with Laban and everything, and of course, it happens two different times, by the way. You got Laban here with the wives, with Jacob's wives, Leah and Rachel. Later on, it's gonna be a dispute over property. There's a long section on sheep, spotted or striped sheep.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Anyone knows this? And you're kind of like, why am I reading so much about sheep? But it has to do with his possessions, who he is, like you're not just extracted from your possessions necessarily, it's kind of your, it's your livelihood. And so you see this emerge in there. And so as we go through here, I'm gonna erase this if that's okay, or at least Does everybody have this?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:I wanna talk about Rachel briefly. Now Rachel is Jacob's wife, right? His second wife? We see in the narrative that Rachel is barren, right? She can't have children.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:So we're constantly confronted with this as well. There's this idea that there's this promise of the seed that's gonna go forward, and yet Sarah was barren. Yet Rachel was barren. How is this going to move forward in our narrative? There are six women in the Old Testament that are described as barren.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Do you know who they are? Okay, I said one already, here right. Sarah. Sarah? Rebecca, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Rachel? Hannah. Okay, Hannah. Yes. Oh, wow.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:You get bonus points. Who said that? Yeah. We'll call Manoah's wife. She didn't even have a name in scripture.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay. No, I don't think so. This is a hard one too. Shunammite woman. Okay.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Those are the six women in the Old Testament who are described as barren. Okay. Who are their children? Jacob and Esau. Joseph.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Someone already said it, Samson. Samuel. Samuel. The son whom Elisha raised from the dead. Remember that story?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Yes. I mentioned in week two or something? To prove Elisha's prophetic ministry. Okay. So look at this line.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:In many ways, this is the story of the Old Testament. Right? It's not a genealogy, strictly speaking, but it's a story of how this is gonna unfold. This whole story of the Old Testament is going to unfold from Isaac to Jacob to Joseph to Samson during the period of the judges, to Samuel. Samuel was the last judge.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:He was also a priest. He was also the one that said that Israel could have a king enter into the kingdom phase of Israel's life. And of course during the kingdom phase of Israel's life, you have Elisha ministering to the Northern Kingdom as a prophet, and one of the proofs of his prophetic ministry and the validity of it were these miracles that he performed, and one of them was the raising of the Shunammite's son. And of course, there's one in the New Testament as well. Who's that?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Elizabeth, right? Okay, so you have seven barren women, but all have a critical role in God's story here throughout the scriptures. And so it's sort of like for me when I see this in the Bible, this idea of barrenness, it's like all of sudden I need to pay attention. This is a big story that's unfolding as part of this narrative itself. Okay, so Jacob, I don't have my little, whatever this was, a chart, picture, thing anymore.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Very visual person, I can't even think without visual something. Jacob has been on the run, right? Esau sells him his birthright in chapter 25. Jacob works with his mom to receive the blessing from Isaac a few chapters later. This trickery they engage in.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:He has this dispute with Laban. He has to flee from that. He's on the run. He's afraid for his life. And so by the time we get to Genesis 32, which is on your sheet, I think Genesis 32 marks a watershed in the book of Genesis.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:By the time we get to 32, Jacob is spent. He's at the end of his rope. And what you see in 32 is him, I think, entering into a very contrite posture. In our terms, he sort of comes terms with his faith, as it were. He gets very serious.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And what you see in Genesis 30 two:nine through 12 is actually the only extended prayer in the book of Genesis. And what does he say here in this prayer? He says, and Jacob said, oh God of my father Abraham, God of my father Isaac, oh Lord, who said to me, return to your country and to your kindred and I will do you good. I'm not worthy of the least of the steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you've shown to your servant, for with for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan, and now I've become two companies. Okay.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Verse 11, underline this. Deliver me, please, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I am afraid of him. He may come and kill us all, the mothers with the children. Yet you have said, I will surely do you good and make your offspring as the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted because of their number. There's this notion, again, of conflict, and we even saw the previous thing with the barrenness.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:There's a literary conflict with that story, but here you see this conflict even in his prayer and his soul, right? There's this idea that he's afraid, and what I love about Jacob is that he's real. He's honest. He's raw. It is not the only time he says he's afraid in this narrative either.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:He's utterly real with God. Remember we talked last week about entering into vigorous dialogue with God, entering into real dialogue, and we saw this in the last week's lesson, is that God wants us, this idea of lament, that's what you see in Job as well, this idea of entering into real dialogue with God, laying it out there for God. And this is exactly what he does. And he talks about, oh, of my father Abraham, God of my father Isaac. He's not only recounting the promise there, but he's also exemplifying, I think, coherence.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:This idea that he's connected. His story and his life and his being are all connected to Abraham and Isaac and all of that. He can't think of himself without thinking of those who shaped him. And so, he is someone who is going to things are going to come to a head here in the next chapter and a half over the course of our narrative. And they certainly do here, as you see the end of look at the end of 32, I'd say about middle way through 32.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Start with verse 20. I think it's on your sheet there. Okay. And I did something sort of like try to do something here to kind of highlight what's going on in this text. Know, famously, we're going to get to that story about Panayel where, you know, he says he sees the face of God, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:But this story of wrestling with this man or something and seeing the face of God is set up right here in 2020 '1, and it's set up beautifully. And so I'm going to read this twenty and twenty one for you, but I'm going to read it as the Hebrew would have originally had it. Okay? Because you lose some aspect of it in the trans not the translation is bad, translation is trying to make it smooth. But I'm gonna show you how the Hebrew would have had this pretty much.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:So this is Jacob instructing his servant about Esau approaching. Is coming close. He's telling the servant like, okay, this is all is all happening. This is coming to a head here. And Jacob says, and you shall say, he's telling the servant, and you shall say, moreover, your servant Jacob is behind us.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:For he thought, I may appease his face with the present that goes ahead of my face, and afterwards I shall see his face. Perhaps he will accept my face. So the present passed on ahead of his face, and he himself spent that night in the camp. Okay. So if you're reading this as a native Hebrew speaker or reader, you're gonna see this like language of face just emerging over and over and over and it's gonna set us up to this face that he is going to see in the next few verses and I'll wrap up with this here.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:You see him then move into, in verse 22, him wrestling with God or this figure. What is this? Who is this figure? Who is this man? Again, we don't fully know, some may be a pre incarnate appearance of Christ.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:What is this wrestling? What does it even mean? One church father called it Jacob's struggle for virtue. It represents his struggle for virtue. It's this idea of another church father says like struggling to hold on to Christ, to love your enemy, and he's loving his enemy, Esau, by this sort of struggle he's entering into with this mysterious man, this figure.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And of course a lot of theologians over the centuries have seized on this idea that this wound, idea of overcoming this figure, you know, Augustine says this overcoming of this figure represents the passion of the Christ and the blessing that comes out of that represents the blessing we receive as a result of Christ's death for us. And so there's this idea that, you know, this lasted all the way till daybreak, and this idea of light that appears in the story so prominently spoke to a lot of theologians over the centuries that this may be some sort of reference to Christ, the appearance of Christ, this idea of light. Of course, for centuries, people have interpreted the verse in Malachi that this idea of the Son of Righteousness, S U N, Son of Righteousness, I think it's Malachi four:two, as a reference to Christ. This idea of the sun emerges, it comes up right at the end, you see this light appear. Could this be a reference to Jesus?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And of course, the anticipation, the anticipation not only for Jacob, but for all of us of ultimately seeing God face to face, the beatific vision. So there's this sort of pattern we're seeing here in Genesis emerge of where the story of scripture is going. Alright, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks for your time.