And so we being our message today with Jacob on the run again fleeing from a family member, but this time he is fleeing not so much from the consequences of his own sin, but from this worldly exploitation back to God, back to God’s call, back to God’s land, back to God’s promise. So how would I describe Jacob’s spiritual life at this point? I’d say he’s a follower of God, who has some understanding of how God has blessed and protected him over the years, but who has sadly spent most of his life as a follower of God more captivated to the world’s values and conflicts than the life God offers and provides. Maybe many of you can identify with Jacob in that way. And so this is a message on how to break free.
This is what I’m most interested in this story of Jacob and Laban, for there are principles and a paradigm here that extends beyond a simple blow-by-blow account of these two men. God is doing something spiritually in Jacob’s life through these years, and God may similarly be doing something in your life, that you my find encouragement and hope and courage this morning. Courage to break free from the bondage to sin and to conflict that has robbed you these years.
Scammers and conmen. The reason hardly any of us pick up our phones anymore if we don’t recognize the number. Its the reason that a lot of us have spam folders in our email that keep growing and growing. Some of us work for people like this - bosses who change job descriptions or hours on us, or promise promotions and raises that never come. Some of us are married to them. Some of us are them.
Jacob and Laban were like two professional boxers. Heavyweights in the world of scams and cons. In this corner we have Jacob, the heel grabber, jockeying for position. Here he is scamming his brother Esau into selling his birthright for a pot of stew. Here he is posing as Esau to deceive his father and steal his blessing. He had quite a resume before he encountered Laban, but in Laban, he had met his match - his equal in equivocation, his competitor in con. Laban was no amateur. Jacob fell in love with his younger daughter and pledged to serve Laban for seven years for her. Well, Laban perceived Jacob’s infatuation with Rachel as weakness and gave him the surprise of his life by substituting his older daughter, Leah, on the wedding night. In doing so he was able to manipulate Jacob into working fro him seven more years. During which Jacob’s family has grown, with at least 12 sons and daughters born to him. And that’s where we pick up the story in Genesis 29:25: “As soon as Rachel had borne Joseph, Jacob said to Laban, “Send me away, that I may go to my own home and country. 26 Give me my wives and my children for whom I have served you, that I may go, for you know the service that I have given you.” If the wedding night switch was Round #1 between these two professional conmen, we’ve got another few rounds to go.
In the U.S., the average divorce comes after eight years of marriage. Celebrity’s are notorious for having shorter marriage. Kim Kardashian was once married for 72 days, Pop singer Brittany Spears for 55 hours. 55 hours is quite amazing, as nearly everyone is still in honeymoon phase for much longer than that. Yet perhaps the record for the shortest honeymoon phase ever is recorded for us in Genesis 29, when Jacob woke up, and as the Bible so concisely and eloquently puts it - “behold, it was Leah.” That honeymoon was over.
The honeymoon always ends. We can be talking about marriage, or that new job, or that new phone you bought, or that new course you’re taking, it don’t matter, the honeymoon ends. Today we will be considering three questions:
How the honeymoon ends for some people
Why the honeymoon ends for most people
What to do when the honeymoon ends?
I just returned from Colorado. Now some of you know that the reason for my trip was to help my brother out, but the beauty of the place still was stunning. I’ve had amazing experiences of God in Colorado.
Thin Places: A recent article in the New York times described these places as “thin places”:
“locales where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine”… “Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter.”
Spiritual Tourism is a $40 billion industry. That’s as big an industry as laundry, and legalized marijuana. The Mecca, Christian pilgrimages, yoga retreats, etc.
Is there anything to this thin place idea? At first glance, this seems to be an emphasis of the passage: notice how often the place is referred to.
When you watch the movie Thor, its called Thor, because Thor is the hero. When Loki uses deceit to usurp Thor’s position as heir to the throne, we understand that Loki is the villain. And we know that while Loki may steal the throne for a period of time, he can’t remain king, because that wouldn’t be fair. It would violate everything we’ve been taught about the morality of storytelling and heroes and villains. Loki can’t win. Thor must win. Yet in this story, Jacob wins. And not just in this episode with the soup, but he actually is the chosen son through whom God will execute his purposes. God not only chooses Jacob in spite of his deceitful character, but brings about his purposes through Jacob’s deceit.
Some preachers seem embarrassed by this passage, that it would be this superfluous love story in the middle of such a serious theological work, and so the labour hard to imagine that this text is some sort of allegory for evangelism - and such it might be! However, it is first and foremost the story of Abraham securing a wife for his son. So before we get into any more fanciful interpretation, let’s not despise this passage as it speaks of marriage. As John Calvin writes in his commentary on this text, it is precisely because we do not hold marriage in honour, that Moses would insist on giving us a detailed picture of the marriage of Issac.
Now when we say this is a text about marriage, and an important text about marriage, and we can take some principles from this text without getting absorbed into the details and say, this is the key to finding a wife - first, get a really rich dad; second, have him send his servant back to his people and find a wife for you; third, there’s a lot of camels involved for some reason. Right, so we want to listen to the text, and what it might teach about marriage, but not get overwhelmed by the particulars.
Abraham’s faith and obedience is tested by the providing, promise-keeping God.
At the end of Genesis 21 Abraham plants a tree, calls on the name of the Lord, and gives the Lord a new nickname. He does these things as an act of worship in response to the events of the chapter, which contains three seemingly loosely related stories of the life of Abraham. At first glance the stories don’t seem to have all that much of a common theme to them, except that the first two deal with two women and two sons and the last two stories deal with two wells, tying the stories together in theme. And to get at that theme this morning I want to tell you these three stories in full, so that you can appreciate what drive Abraham to worship in such a curious way of planting a tree and giving God a new name.
Some people wish the world were simple. That we could easily divide the world up into good people and bad people, and maybe it would be nice if people of our faith were always good, and people outside the faith were always bad. That would be simple wouldn’t it? And wouldn’t it be great is once a person came to faith, they continually walked forward into greater measures of obedience and maturity and never took a step back or failed or let others down, or struggled. That would be a simple world.
But that’s not the world the Bible describes. That is not the world we live in. We live in a world of moral complexity, a world in which good people do bad things, and bad people surprise us, a world in which people of faith are also people of deep failing, and a world in which our progress toward maturity often takes great detours. this reality underscores the fact that in the Bible, no one is truly good, but God alone. He is the only hero, the only one who does not fail. Our pride does not like to hear that reminder, but the reality is that sin has affected and infect every part of our being, every aspect of our human experience, and therefore the simple work of right and wrong, good and evil, faith and failing becomes infinitely more complex.
Genesis 20 is one of these reminders. Nearly everything in this chapter challenges our desire to keep morally and humanity in simple little boxes.
We don’t know why Abraham leaves Mamre to end up in Gerar. Some think he left out of grief over Lot, whom he assumed was swept away in Sodom. Some think that the destruction of the cities in the valley would have caused environmental damage to the air or soil quality in the region, and so he had to leave for some time for the sake of his herds. Whatever the reason of his departure, we have already observed a pattern in the life of Abraham that is true here as well, Abraham’s proximity to Canaan seems to be tied to Abraham’s spiritual vitality. And we’ll see in this chapter that Abraham is at one of his lowest points spiritually.
Genesis chapter 19 is the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. However, as I was reading this week, I was surprised that it not so much about Sodom, its about Lot and to a lesser extant his wife and two daughters. As I’ve said before, while Abraham is presented in Scripture as the porto-typical man of faith, the friend of God who walks before him, even though he fails from time to time, Lot is presented as and has been understood in the history of interpretation as a wayward believer, a believer who has strayed from the path of walking with God to dwell among the lost. In that sense Lot is a complex character. The apostle Peter, in the New Testament confirms that Lot was a righteous man, who was “greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked … tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard”, and indeed that seems to be the reason he is warned to flee Sodom as God visited His judgement upon it.
However, while being described as “righteous” Lot is also depicted as wayward. Ever since his departure from Abraham in chapter 13, the city of Sodom and its inhabitants have latched on to his soul and drawn him ever tighter in its snare. Remember, Lot was first attracted to the Jordan Valley because it was well-watered and prosperous - he was seeking after the things of the world. However, he quickly travelled through the valley and moved his tents as far as Sodom, approaching the place where the text already tells us, “the men of Sodom were wicked, great sinners against the LORD”. In chapter 13, we find that Lot was dwelling in Sodom, associating with the people there, and he was driven away with the inhabitants of the city by the invading armies. The disheartening thing is that even after Abraham pursues those armies and delivers Lot, Lot does not change his ways at all, but resettled in Sodom, so that by the time we get to chapter 19, at least 15 years later, Lot now has built a permanent residence there (no longer in tents but in a house within the city), and is respected enough among the inhabitants of the city that he conducts his business at the city gate. He’s been completely assimilated into the lifestyle of Sodom.
And so here is a man who, though he is called righteous, has routinely and insistently refused fellowship with the righteous for association with the wicked. And therefore this is a much stronger warning to us as a church in this chapter. It is very easy to read this chapter as an indictment on the men of Sodom around us, it is much more uncomfortable and challenging to see in Lot a warning to ourselves and to our brothers and sisters in those times when we walk waywardly in the valley of sin.
