Genesis 29-31
“Transforming Grace”

A couple of weeks ago on Australian Story, which is a documentary series on the ABC, they did an interview with Brian and Bobbi Houston, who are the pastors of Hillsong Church out in Castle Hill. I was out in a meeting that night so I didn’t see it at the time, but Nicole taped it for me, because I was keen to see what they would say. So I watched it a few days later and it set me thinking all over again about the grace and the blessing of God and how we can expect to experience it in this life. You may have watched it too, and perhaps it generated similar questions for you.

They interviewed Brian Houston particularly, at some length, and he told the story of how he came to be where he is today - how he grew up quite poor in New Zealand, and how step by step God kept adding to his life.

So, for example, he told the story of how he met his wife: he was at the beach one day with some mates when he was 20, and he saw a pretty 17 year old called Bobbie and he said to his mates, “I bags that one”, and he got her. He came to Australia and he saw an advertisement on the TV with Tony Packard selling used cars and saying, “Up the Windsor Road from Baulkham Hills and let me do it right for you” - he saw the advertisement and he was inspired by Tony Packard and he said to himself: “ if you can [go to Baulkham Hills and] build a Holden dealer like that, the largest Holden dealership in Australia, surely it must be somewhere where you could build a church.” So he went to the Hills district and he planted a church there, and it just kept increasing. It started on the first week with 70 people, and 20 years later there were 18,000 and a staff of several hundred. And as the church grew, his own fortunes grew, so we saw the big house and the Harley Davidson and the watch worth several thousand dollars, and so on.

And underlying it all, he told us at the start of the show, was his view of God: “I believe in God as a personal being who cares about our everyday lives. I see God as full of mercy and full of grace, and wanting to build people’s lives for the better.”

And so that story has been running through my mind over the last couple of weeks as I’ve been reading this other story, the story of Jacob recorded here in Genesis. And I’ve been asking myself, what does it look like to live a life under the blessing of God? Is God a gracious, giving, blessing, generous God, wanting to build our lives for the better? And if he is, what will it look like for us to experience that grace, and to live under his blessing? And what about all the experiences of struggle and hardship and failure and deprivation that we go through in life? Is God in those things too, or are they just the obstacles that he has to overcome in order to bless us?

Those are the sorts of questions that have been running through my mind as I’ve read this story of Jacob back here in Genesis that we’re looking at together this morning. The reading that we heard a moment ago was just the first half of Genesis chapter 29, but the part of the story that we’ll be looking at together now is actually chapters 29 and 30 and 31 - the whole section of Jacob’s life where he is over in Mesopotamia, back in Paddan Aram, staying with his uncle Laban.

The story
Increase
The first thing that you notice about these chapters, at a basic, structural level, is that the story is a story of increase. Jacob leaves his home at the beginning of chapter 28, and he has nothing - nothing at all except the staff in his hand, and he stops at Bethel on the first night of his journey and he’s sleeping out alone, under the stars, with a rock for a pillow. That’s how he leaves his father’s house in chapter 28.

Marriage (x2) (29:1-30)
And then, chapter 29 verses 1-30, he gains a wife - in fact, he gains two wives.

Children (x12) (29:31 - 30:24)
The next stage in the story tells us about how God gave him not only wives but children. By chapter 30 verse 24 there are twelve of them - eleven sons and one daughter, and when the eleventh son is born, in verse 24, there’s a hint that even that may not be the end of the story, because when Rachael finally has her son she calls him Joseph, which is the Hebrew word meaning ‘Add’ or ‘Increase’, and she says, “May the LORD add to me another son.”

Flocks (x lots) (30:25-43)
God gives him wives; God gives him children; and then finally, verses 25-43, God gives him flocks and herds, to the point where we get to the end of the chapter and the writer sums up: “In this way the man grew exceedingly prosperous and came to own large flocks, and maidservants and menservants, and camels and donkeys.”

Departure (31:1-54)
And then, chapter 31, having accumulated all these blessings, Jacob senses that Laban’s sons are becoming jealous of him, because he now owns half the stuff that they had thought they were going to inherit. So the time comes for Jacob to depart and come home. There’s a kind of humorous ending to the story, where unbeknownst to Jacob, Rachael nicks her father’s household gods - the family idols - so that when Jacob leaves, Laban is losing not only his two daughters and half his flocks and herds, but even his gods are going as well. And then he comes looking for them and Rachael stashes them away in her camel seat, and when he comes looking she says, “I can’t get up, I’m having my period.”

So there’s that strange little episode with the household gods, but then Jacob and Laban shake hands, and they sign a kind of non-aggression treaty, and they say good-bye, and Jacob who had left Canaan alone and completely empty handed, comes home with two wives, twelve kids, countless flocks and herds, and even - though he doesn’t realise it yet - his uncle’s household gods still hidden way in Rachael’s luggage. It’s a remarkable story of increase.

Grace
31:42
And in Jacob’s mind, clearly, this is increase that he puts down not to his own cleverness, and certainly nt to his uncle’s generosity, but to the grace and the blessing of God. So, chapter 31 verse 42, he says to Laban: “If the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac, had not been with me, you would surely have sent me away empty-handed.”

32:10
And then in the next chapter, in chapter 32, he’s praying and he says to God - and I take it he means what he is saying - he says to God: “O God of my father Abraham, God of my father Isaac, O LORD, who said to me, ‘Go back to your country and your relatives, and I will make you prosper,’ 10 I am unworthy of all the kindness and faithfulness you have shown your servant. I had only my staff when I crossed this Jordan, but now I have become two groups.”

Jacob is very conscious of the increase that he has experienced during the time at his uncle Laban’s place, and he is in no doubt that this is increase that has come to him from the hand of God, as undeserved kindness and grace, because of the promises that God made to Jacob’s grandfather Abraham.

That’s the basic outline of the story in these chapters of Genesis - a story of grace and increase, of God in his kindness adding to Jacob wives and sons and a daughter and flocks and herds and possessions.

Transformation
But that’s only the surface level of the story really, isn’t it. Because when you step up close, something much more complicated and much more significant is taking place in Jacob’s life, as part of God’s purposes for Jacob as one of Abraham’s descendants. When you step up close and look at the details and not just at the numbers and the tangible, visible outcomes - when you step up close it becomse cleare that this is not just a story about grace in the form of increase, but also a story about grace in the form of transformation. This is not just a story about God at work in adding stuff into Jacob’s life, but also a story about God at work in bringing about change in Jacob himself, mainly through hard and painful experiences. In many ways, these chapters are as much chapters about jacob’s struggles and trials as they are about his triumphs and blessings - or rather, they’re about those indirect sorts of blessings that come in the form of struggles and trials.

Deception (29:25, 31:5-9)
So - chapter 29, in the story that we heard from earlier, there’s the first in a string of experiences where Jacob’s character as the deceiver begins to bounce back on him, and God orchestrates things so that he starts to experience the same sorts of deceptions perpetrated on him as the ones that he has perpetrated on others. There’s a real sense of poetic justice in the way that Jacob gets conned by his uncle into marrying the first-born Leah instead of the younger sister Rachael. Just as Jacob had deceived Isaac, through a trick played in the darkness of Isaac’s blindness, so that one sibling was substituted for another, in the same way, Laban deceives Jacob through a trick played in the darkness of Jacob’s tent at night, so that one sibling is substituted for another. And Jacob wakes up in the morning, and he sees what Laban and Leah have done to him, and he says, “What is this you have done to me? I served you for Rachel, didn’t I? Why have you deceived me?”

And that becomes the first in a string of attempts that Laban makes to deceive Jacob - Jacob whose very name means ‘deceiver’ - so Jacob says to his wives in chapter 31: “You know that I’ve worked for your father with all my strength, 7 yet your father has cheated me by changing my wages ten times. However, God has not allowed him to harm me. 8 If he said, ‘The speckled ones will be your wages,’ then all the flocks gave birth to speckled young; and if he said, ‘The streaked ones will be your wages,’ then all the flocks bore streaked young. 9 So God has taken away your father’s livestock and has given them to me.” The outcome is a good one in the end for Jacob, but the process is a frustrating and difficult one where step by step he is continually experiencing cheating and deception.

Discord (30:1, 8, 14-16)
There’s another way in which we see Jacob’s past coming back to haunt him in these chapters, and that is in the continuous discord between Jacob’s wives, the two sisters Leah and Rachael. Having emerged from the womb as the difficult younger brother, grabbing at his older brother Esau’s heel, having continually been at strife with his older brother to the misery of his parents, now Jacob begins to experience what it is like to live in a household of two warring siblings. So chapter 30, with all the accounts of Jacob’s children being born, is not just a story of a growing family and lots of little kids - it’s also this sad, angry, desparate struggle between two sisters to compete with each other as wives and as childbearers. So, chapter 30 verse 1: When Rachel saw that she was not bearing Jacob any children, she became jealous of her sister. So she said to Jacob, “Give me children, or I’ll die!” Verse 2: Jacob became angry with her and said, “Am I in the place of God, who has kept you from having children?”

Then, verse 8, Rachael comes up with the scheme of imitating her husband’s grandmother Sarah, and she gets jacob to sleep with her maidservant Bilhah so that she can be a surrogate mother on Rachael’s behalf, and Bilhah conceives and gives birth, and Rachael names the boy Naphtali, saying: “I have had a great struggle with my sister, and I have won.”

And then, most bizarrely of all, down in verse 14 to 16, Leah’s son Reuben goes down into the fields and finds some mandrakes, which were an aphrodisiac and a fertility herb, and he brings them back to his mum Leah, and she ends up making a deal with Rachael where Rachael gets to have the aphrodisiacs in exchange for Leah getting to spend the night with Jacob. So when Jacob comes in from the fields that evening - verse 16, Leah goes out to meet him and says: “You must sleep with me; I have hired you with my son’s mandrakes.”

Labour (29:8-10, 29:20, 31:38-42)
There’s deception; there’s discord; and most of all, perhaps, there’s hard, unending labour. Jacob, the soft brother, the schemer, the one who had always thought that he could get what he wanted by clever conspiracies and a bit of help from his mum - Jacob is suddenly finding out that he has to struggle and to labour and to sweat for the things that God is going to give him. So he turns up at the well in chapter 29, and the scene is a whole lot like the experience with his father Isaac finding a wife, except this time it’s not daddy’s servant going off and getting a wife for him but Jacob himself making the long journey; and it’s not Rebekah turning up and drawing out the water for Abraham’s servant’s camels - it’s Jacob rolling away the big boulder across the top of the well and drawing out the water for Rachael. And then, chapter 29 verse 20, it’s Jacob labouring for seven years because he thought he was going to be able to marry Rachael at the end of it, and ‘because of his love for her they seemed like only a few days to him’. And then he finds out that he’s married the wrong sister and he has to work for seven more years.

And so it goes, and so it goes, and so when he finally leaves to come home, he says to Laban - chapter 31 verse 38: “I have been with you for twenty years now. Your sheep and goats have not miscarried, nor have I eaten rams from your flocks. 39 I did not bring you animals torn by wild beasts; I bore the loss myself. And you demanded payment from me for whatever was stolen by day or night. 40 This was my situation: The heat consumed me in the daytime and the cold at night, and sleep fled from my eyes. 41 It was like this for the twenty years I was in your household. I worked for you fourteen years for your two daughters and six years for your flocks, and you changed my wages ten times. 42 If the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac, had not been with me, you would surely have sent me away empty-handed. But God has seen my hardship and the toil of my hands, and last night he rebuked you.”

Prayer (ch.32)
It’s not just labour and struggle and difficulty - it’s transformative labour and struggle and difficulty; you don’t see that so much in these chapters; you see that when you get to the next chapter, to chapter 32, when Jacob is on his own again, praying to God at the ford at Jabbock, where God comes to him in the form of man who attacks him and makes him wrestle with him for the blessing. We won’t do it now, because that’s next week’s passage, but when you look at the events and the words and the prayers of chapter 32, it’s clear that these things that Jacob has endured on the road to all this prosperity - these setbacks and difficulties and struggles have not just been bad luck - they have been the hand of GOd, and they have been the hand of the God who wants to bless Jacob, and they have been transformative in the effect that they have had.

Transforming Grace
Do you see the point that God is making here in these chapters of Genesis? Again and again we’re seeing that God is a God of grace - a God who loves to bless his children with good gifts, who delights to do good to Jacob for the sake of the promises that he made to Jacob’s grandfather Abraham. But we’re also seeing that this grace and kindness of God comes not only in the form of increase and manifest, obvious material blessing, but also in the struggles and the difficulties - the transformative struggles and difficulties that Jacob passes through along the way.

1 Peter 1:3-9
The New Testament writers describe the same reality , and they point it out with crystal clarity. Listen for example to Peter’s words in 1 Peter chapter 1.

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To God’s elect, strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia, 2 who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood: Grace and peace be yours in abundance.

Verse 3: Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade — kept in heaven for you, 5 who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.”

Do you notice, by the way, how the ‘inheritance’ imagery form the Old Testament gets used here - this side of Jesus, it’s not about flocks and herds and land in Canaan - even for the patriarchs back in Genesis that was never the ultimate issue, but this side of Jesus, it’s a thousand times clearer that the real treasure we have is not about cars and houses and money in the bank - it’s not that stuff really. If God blesses us with material blessings in this life, that’s wonderful, and we should thank him for them and enjoy them and be generous with them; but those things are not our real treasure. Our real treasure; our real treasure is ‘imperishable, unspoiled and unfading’; it’s the treasure of knowing Jesus and being sons and daughters of God in him, and the prospect of one day spending eternity with him and seeing him face to face.

That is why Peter can go on to say what he does in verse 6 and following. Verse 6: “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7 These have come so that your faith — of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire — may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8 Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9 for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”

Where do I see the hand of God at work in my life today? Certainly, I see it in the increase, in the gifts, in the abundance, in the possessions, in sunshine and rain and family and friendship - in all of those good things that God is the maker of, that he gives us richly to enjoy; but not only there; I also see the hand of God at work in the haard things; in the struggles and the trials as well; in the things that refine my faith and purify my joy; the things that teach me to value Jesus more than anything else; in the things that make no sense at all when I’m going through them at the time, and only begin to make a tiny bit of sense when I look back after a year or ten years or twenty years - in those things the hand of God is at work too, and it’s not a vindictive hand, or a malevolent hand; it’s the hand of a good God who loves me, nad who is at work in all things in my life to make me more like Jesus.

And so gradually, slowly, in the midst of inexplicable things and struggles and failures and disappointments, I learn to say with Paul the Apostle: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. 29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers”.