Friday: Further Thought ~ Jacob the Supplanter
Further Thought:
God chose Jacob, not because he deserved it, but because of His grace. And yet, Jacob worked hard to try to deserve grace, which itself is a contradiction. If he deserved it, then it wouldn’t be grace; it would be works (see Romans 4:1-5), which is contrary to the gospel.
Image © Stan Myers from GoodSalt.com
Only later did Jacob start to understand the significance of God’s grace and what it meant to trust God, to live by faith, and to be completely dependent on the Lord. Jacob’s experience contains an important lesson for the ambitious person: do not strive to promote yourself at the expense of others.
“Jacob thought to gain a right to the birthright through deception, but he found himself disappointed. He thought he had lost everything, his connection with God, his home, and all, and there he was a disappointed fugitive. But what did God do? He looked upon him in his hopeless condition, He saw his disappointment, and He saw there was material there that would render back glory to God. No sooner does He see his condition than He presents the mystic ladder, which represents Jesus Christ. Here is man, who had lost all connection with God, and the God of heaven looks upon him and consents that Christ shall bridge the gulf which sin has made. We might have looked and said, I long for heaven but how can I reach it? I see no way. That is what Jacob thought, and so God shows him the vision of the ladder, and that ladder connects earth with heaven, with Jesus Christ. A man can climb it, for the base rests upon the earth and the top-most round reaches into heaven.” — Ellen G. White Comments, The SDA Bible Commentary, vol. 1, p. 1095.
Discussion Questions:
|
(20)
We sometimes paint a very sanitised picture of the Old Testament patriarchs and it is worth reading their unvarnished stories in the Bible where the bad bits and the good bits are equally recorded. The big picture lesson we can learn from this is that God does not give up easily. The fact that he continues to work will Jacob (and the others) when they have lied, cheated, practised polygamy, and murdered, should give us hope that God loves us, even when we are bad.
Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture) tells the story of his involvement in high school football. He was walking back to the change rooms rather dejectedly after one pretty brutal training session. The coach had been tough, yelling at him for not holding the ball, not running aggressively and so on, for the whole session. One of the assistant coaches fell in beside him as he walked.
Assist Coach: "Coach Jones was pretty rough on you out there today!"
Pausch: "Yeah!"
Assist Coach: "He yelled and shouted a lot!"
Pausch: "Yeah!"
Assist Coach: "You know that's a good sign. He thinks you will make it. When he stops yelling - that's when you have to worry!"
God worked with some really awful characters in the Bible and he never stopped yelling at them. That is encouraging for us>
For God's ways are not our ways.
Spiritual Leader
So far we have discovered that the LORD used the head of this family, the Patriarch, to be His messenger to reveal His Character to the world. So far He spoke to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. How successful were they in training their children? Or did they repeat similar mistakes?
Does that question apply to me? Did I train up my children in the way they should go? Does the fact that they are third or fourth generation SDA members mean anything?
Jacob wanted to take over the priesthood of the family after his father, he didn't realise that the most important aspect of being the priest was to surrender his will to the LORD and wait for His instructions.
The studies show "We are ALL the deceiver" we are *covered* by Jesus's mantle!