Jacob in Genesis

In our current series through Genesis, we have attempted to maintain a broad perspective, providing a wide-angle view of the book as a whole, at times at the expense of attending to all of the fascinating details. We have focused on the forest, not the trees, and have used the ten major divisions of the book as a guide to the big-picture argument of our inspired author Moses.

In the book of the generations of Jacob, the tenth and final volume in this multi-volume work, this approach to our material is tested to its limit. Firstly, this is because Jacob is such a towering presence in the book. He arrives on the scene in chapter 25, and he is buried in chapter 50. Secondly, the “Book of the Generations of Jacob” deals with his offspring, the twelve sons who will become the twelve tribes of Israel. The focus is on the career of Joseph in Egypt. Much of Jacob’s story is found in the preceding “book of Isaac.” So this week we will focus on Jacob, and next week, in a concluding message, we will look at Joseph’s career and the final resolution of the book as a whole.

Jacob’s Pilgrimage

Our Old Testament readings today, from chapter 28 and 46, draw upon his covenant dealings with the Lord at the beginning and end of Jacob’s expansive career, and stuffed between these two bookends is a vast amount of frenetic activity. Suffice it to say, Jacob lives up to his name; he is a striver, a wrestler. And the central event of his life, the all night wrestling bout with the Angel of the Lord, resulted in him receiving a new name, Israel, the one who strives with God. This is the transformation that is traced through the course of the second half of the book of Genesis, as Jacob becomes Israel, and the man Israel becomes the nation of Israel.

More than any other patriarch, Jacob is a pilgrim, and his pilgrimage is both literal, and metaphorical. First he leaves the holy land for Haran, living on the lamb in the land of Abraham’s ancestors for 20 years. He returns to the land of his inheritance, only to sojourn once again at the end of his life, as Israel, down to Egypt. These two journeys, these two ordeals, are meant to be thought of together. In both instances, which we read this morning, he departs from Beersheba. In both instances, the Lord meets him, and promises that he will be with him, and will bring him back home.

Jacob as pilgrim is in contrast to his father Isaac. We saw previously that Isaac was portrayed as the prototypical heir of the promise, residing in the land, receiving the blessings of the covenant. In his binding and near sacrifice, he endured an ordeal, the result being a resurrection as he was received back from the dead. Jacob’s ordeal is different, and it foreshadows the ordeal of Israel in Egypt. While Isaac passes under the knife in an instant, Jacob endures seven years, seven years, and another six years, 20 years in bound servitude to Laban.

This literal pilgrimage is important, but more important is the transformation that is worked in his life by the covenant grace of the Lord between these two journeys. The Jacob we met last week was a schemer. He dealt shrewdly with Esau to secure the birthright for a mess of pottage, and with his mother’s help he flat out deceived Father Isaac for Esau’s blessing. His sole virtue was his single-minded desire to secure the patriarchal blessing, which the Lord’s prophecy had foretold would be his. But in his pursuit, he was entirely reliant on his own abilities, cunning, and deceptions, much like Abraham’s attempt to secure an heir by the slave woman, according to the flesh. In the closing scenes of Genesis, a complete transformation has taken place. Jacob is a prophet, dispensing the blessings and curses of the Lord in foretelling the fortunes of the twelve tribes of Israel.

Jacob’s Conversion at the Foot of the Stairway

Jacob’s first meeting with the Lord is something like his own Damascus Road. Though Isaac has already delivered to him the Abrahamic promises, in Jacob’s dream of the stairway to heaven, he meets the Lord himself, standing over him in his sleep, and he is transformed. What is often called “Jacob’s Ladder” is described in the same language to describe the ziggurats, the proto-pyramids that were built as high holy places, where man might ascend up into the realm of the gods. This is an echo of the tower of Babel, built by wicked man in his effort to be like the gods. But this tower is different from Babel, and different from the ziggurats that Jacob might have seen on the horizon as he fell asleep. This stairway wasn’t so much built up from the earth to heaven, but suspended, reaching all the way up to the very heavens, and extending down to earth. It is a thoroughfare for holy messengers, messengers from above who come down to do the Lord’s bidding.

This is not so much a stairway to heaven, as it is a stairway from heaven; a way down, before it is a way up. And the heavenly stairway suggests a heavenly promise. Yes, the Lord will give Jacob the land on which he sleeps, but his offspring will be like the dust of the earth, going to the very corners of the globe; in his seed will all the families of the earth be blessed. “For Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

Jacob’s response — “Surely the Lord is in this place! And I did not know it.” — shows that he has learned something new. The Lord is at Bethel because Jacob is at Bethel, and he has promised to be with him wherever he goes. The inheritance he had struggled for, the inheritance he thought was merely tied to the land, is here shown to be universal, it is shown to be heavenly. All families will be blessed in Jacob’s seed, and wherever he goes, there the Lord will be, there will be the house of God and the Gate of heaven.

Because the House of God is not a structure built by man. Jacob did not build a temple for the deity to inhabit. The stone he raises at Bethel the next morning, the stone he blesses with oil as a permanent memorial, is a testimony to the Lord’s visitation; it is Jacob’s response to God’s act of visitation. Jacob has learned that God is with him, and he has gained a crucial new insight into God’s grace. On the eve of a dangerous journey, that will take him far from the mother who has protected him and guided him, Jacob now knows that the Lord himself will be his protector, will feed him, and clothe him, and return him to safety, and this awareness transforms him, as evidenced by the tithe he pledges in the following verses.

A Universal Promise

Though the land is still the symbol for the fulfillment of these promises, the truth of the heavenly stairway is profound. The Lord is not a national deity. He is God over all the earth, and will be with his people wherever they go. This profound truth is planted here like a seed, and will grow, such that the author to the Hebrews can truly say that by faith Abraham and Isaac and Jacob lived as aliens in the land of promise, as though it was a foreign land, for they were looking for the city, the heavenly city, which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. For the house of God is not built with human hands.

And Jesus, too, the seed of Jacob that would bless all the families of the earth, when he became flesh and dwelt among us, made reference to the dream of Jacob at the house of God. Indeed, he promised Nathanael that he would see the heavens opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man, putting himself in the place of Jacob’s stairway, the ramp coming down out of heaven. For he is the one who has come down from heaven, he is the way, and the truth, and the life. And he tabernacled, he built his dwelling place, his house, among us.

But grasping the universality of the promise of God — its heavenly nature — did not end Jacob’s pilgrimage. Rather, it began it. In the words of one commentator, it turned the circumcised son of the covenant from someone seeking salvation by works, to one who realized that it could only be grasped by the struggle of faith. After twenty years of faithful labor — and plenty of wrestling with his uncle Laban — Jacob returns to the Promised Land a different man, as attested by his humble prayer:

And Jacob said, "O God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac, O LORD who said to me, 'Return to your country and to your kindred, that I may do you good,' I am not worthy of the least of all the deeds of steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan, and now I have become two camps. Please deliver me from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I fear him, that he may come and attack me, the mothers with the children. But you said, 'I will surely do you good, and make your offspring as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude.'"

Jacob invokes the promise in all humility; he understands even now he is not worthy to demand anything of the Lord. Yet the Lord has promised, and he leans on that promise, and that promise alone, even when acting in obedience to the command.

The Wrestling of Faith

The following night, Jacob endured another ordeal, wrestling through the night with the Lord himself. And Jacob, who had grasped first at the heel of Esau, and wrestled with both him and Laban for the blessings of the world, grasped yet again, and would not let go. But he demanded the blessing — again, not out of deserving, or based on his performance in the ordeal, but out of persevering faith in the promise he had already received.

Jacob’s wrestling is yet another ordeal, a trial that brings about a verdict — and such trials are attested in the ancient world, as children might settle a dispute with rock, scissors, paper. But in this trial the promise is sealed to him once and for all, on the even of the possession of his inheritance. And the nature of this mysterious trial, and the wound that Jacob receives in his thigh, is symbolic of the ultimate source of his blessings. As in circumcision, the wound near the groin points to the seed, the offspring. Jacob’s descendant would be smitten by God, but through his wounds, we would be healed; a righteous verdict would be attained. And this is the moment at which Jacob receives his new name, Israel, the one who strives with God.

Jacob, now Israel, will return to bethel to receive again the covenant promises given to Abraham, and Isaac. And he will receive again the promise of a royal offspring, even as his son Joseph sojourns in Egypt and takes on royal powers second only to Pharaoh. But when the events of the famine, and Joseph’s prosperity, lead to a final departure from the Land of Canaan, not only for Jacob, but also indeed for Israel as a nation, the Lord appears to him one final time.

The Promised Resurrection from Egypt

And no doubt, Jacob knew of the promise of bondage in a foreign land that had come already to Abraham, no doubt Jacob knew intimately of his own trials for those twenty long years under the service of faithless Laban. Yet Jacob, the pilgrim, was not meant to die in the Promised Land. Jacob, who had lived in the land of his own inheritance in a tent, as though an alien in a foreign land, was not to die full of years, at peace, in possession of his rest. For the Lord’s promise to Jacob, the pilgrim, is not that he would not have to sojourn, not have to suffer, not have go down into bondage. No, the Lord’s promise was that he would go with him down to Egypt, and would bring him back again.

Yes, Joseph’s hand will close your eyes. Yes, you will die down there with Joseph. You will die down in Egypt, but I will bring you up again. For the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the God of the living, not the God of the dead.

This exchange — “Jacob, Jacob.” “Here I am” — is an exact parallel of the words exchanged when the Lord calls out to Abraham just before the binding of Isaac. The Lord calls Jacob, Israel, to go down into bondage, and tells him not to be afraid. For there he will make him great. This is not merely a matter of multiplication. How does God make Israel great through their suffering, through their bondage? The one who limped away from his wrestling match with the Lord knows. His wounds can heal. Israel will be made great through their suffering, Israel will be redeemed, delivered, out of their suffering, and the Exodus would be the calling card of their redeemer God until the greater deliverer might come.

Jacob, Jacob. Here I am. And the sons of Israel carried their father, a frail old man, away from the land of his inheritance, away from the place of his birth. But he was not afraid. And when he met with Pharaoh, Pharaoh asked him, “How many years have you lived?” And Jacob responded, “The years of my sojourning are one hundred and thirty; few and unpleasant have been the years of my life, nor have they attained the years that my fathers lived during the days of their sojourning.”

Jacob was not complaining. His days had been evil, unpleasant. His pilgrimage had not been an easy one, nor is ours. He had lived long outside the land of his inheritance, he would die outside it, and when there he lived as a foreigner, for his true home was heaven. Though troubled by his evil days, Jacob was yet faithful, and he was comforted, for he knew his suffering had not been in vain.

Sermon text as prepared for delivery; minor errors may remain. Please do not reprint or publish without the written permission of the author.