Between Deceiving and Being Deceived

Sorry it's taken me so long to get my next story done. When I first thought I was done with it, I realized that if I was going to tell the story of all that happened between the two Bible Stories I was working between, then I was going to have to include more than I had at first. So essentially I had to start again doing research, and this was discouraging, so procrastinated for a little while. I guess I could have done a part I and part II, but that didn't occur to me until just now as I was typing this paragraph. So anyway, here it is.

Between Deceiving and Being Deceived

Okay, now after only one Isaac story (or three mashed into one), I’m going to leave Isaac and move to his son Jacob. I’m guessing that my imaginary audience knows the story of Jacob stealing the blessing Isaac intended to give to Esau. And I’m guessing that you know the story of Jacob working for his Uncle Laban for seven years for his younger daughter Rachel, only to be tricked into marrying Leah first, and then allowed to marry Rachel in exchange for another seven years labor.

This story is about what happened between those two stories, between the time Jacob deceived and the time that he was deceived; how he got from Canaan, where he lived with his father, to Paddan Aram, many miles away, where he worked as a shepherd and his wages were wives.

When Isaac didn’t give Esau as good a blessing as he’d hoped to receive, it didn’t set very well with Esau. At least one commentary said that Esau probably would have been okay with what Jacob did—he really didn’t care about God’s promises of a future nation, or he wouldn’t have married Hittites—but Isaac in his blessing of Jacob made Jacob Esau’s master, and he didn’t take it back after he realized Jacob had tricked him. Instead, Isaac declared that Jacob would indeed be the one who was blessed. Isaac did give Esau a blessing, but it wasn’t as good as Jacob’s blessing.

The fact of the matter was that God intended all along to bless Jacob. How Jacob went about it wasn’t exactly right, but it brought about God’s will. The Bible says that does happen. One of the clearest examples of this was when Babylon took over the southern kingdom of Judah. There is a passage of Scripture where God explains clearly through a prophet that the king of Babylon wasn’t seeking to do God’s will at all. He was only seeking to conquer territory. He was a pagan king and he worshipped idols and had no knowledge of the true God. Yet God used what he did to accomplish His purposes in Israel. So it was with Jacob. He stole what God had declared before he was born was rightly his.

And Esau was livid.

And Esau came up with a plan to do something about it. He decided that when Isaac died, Jacob would, too. Then he’d be the only son left and all the inheritance would be his.

Now if a person is stupid and evil enough to plan a murder, one would think he at least be smart enough not to tell anyone about it. But Esau told somebody and somebody told Rebekah. One of the commentaries suggested that actually, because God knows our thoughts, it was He who told Rebekah. But it certainly wouldn’t have to be that way. Esau could have bragged about it for all we know, and I don’t think I’d put it past him.

Rebekah warned Jacob and told him to flee to Paddan Aram, where her brother Laban lived. She told him it wouldn’t have to be for long, because Esau would forget all about it and there would no longer be any danger. Then, she said, she’d send for him. Somehow, this never occurred. Perhaps Esau was less forgiving than his mother believed him to be.

Next she set about getting permission from Isaac for Jacob to go to Paddan Aram. She went to Isaac about something that should have been settled a long, long time ago, if some people are right.

I once read a book that made a shocking assertion here, and one of the commentaries I consulted for this blog said the same thing. It said that Jacob and Esau were, at this time, seventy-seven years old! It didn’t exactly explain why this was, but somehow, this was said to be the case.

And if it was, then something really wrong had been happening in Isaac’s family. Or rather something right wasn’t happening there.

God had said that specific blessings were to come to Abraham’s offspring, and He was clearly directing which of Abraham’s offspring these blessings were to come through. Now Abraham clearly understood that the blessed son could not marry a pagan. He had to marry someone who knew about the true God. Abraham’s relatives were, in fact, idolaters, but they did know about God. Terah had worshipped Him, I think, and since few, if any others on earth actually did, it was decreed that the blessed descendant could not marry outside that clan. But the clan lived very far away.
Abraham not only decreed this, but he made sure Isaac got a descendant of his grandfather Terah to marry. As a book I read years ago (The Genesis Record by Henry Morris, I believe. I don’t remember the title for sure.) stated, Isaac would have, or should have, understood that he should make the same arrangement for Jacob, since God had said before they had been born that Jacob would be the blessed son.

But Isaac’s servants were too busy digging wells to go dig up a female cousin from Paddan Aram, I guess.

Nobody had gone, and the women around there Jacob was not allowed to marry. The result was that he was unable to marry at all. So here he was, seventy-seven years old, if the commentary and Henry Morris are correct, unmarried, with no children, yet his descendants were supposed to become as numerous as the sand on the seashore or the stars in the sky.

And now his own brother wanted to kill him.

Rebekah wasn’t about to let that happen. She wasn’t about to let him die of old age without descendants, either.

She wasn’t straightforward when she went to talk to Isaac about the problem. She never said, “Esau’s so upset with Jacob about that blessing thing that he wants to kill him. We need to get him out of the way for awhile.” Instead, she went in talking about what rotten daughters-in-law Esau’s two wives were, and how she’d rather die than have Jacob be married to somebody like them.

Isaac must have decided that his servants couldn’t be spared. Or maybe the Esau’s and Rebekah’s plans to keep him from knowing the truth didn’t work and he figured out how important it was to get Jacob out of town. Anyway, he sent Jacob himself to Paddan Aram to find a wife. And as he sent him, he reiterated the blessing.

At least one of the commentaries made a big deal about this. This time, Jacob was getting the blessing he was supposed to have from God given to him by Isaac on purpose. This, the commentaries pointed out, had to have been an awesome comfort to Jacob. First, he knew that he was going to get to keep the blessing, that his father wasn’t going to revoke it because of how it was gotten. Second, Jacob was fleeing for his life, empty-handed and alone. But he went hearing a prophecy that he would one day return.

With Jacob out of the way, Esau proceeded to try to get himself reinstated as the Favorite Son. It finally got through his head that Isaac was none too pleased with his matrimonial choices, and set out to do something about it. He took a third wife, one of Ishmael’s daughters. This, one of the commentators I consulted suggested, was absolutely counterproductive. Ishmael had been sent away from Abraham’s house and was not to be a co-inheritor with Isaac. Ishmael had, when Isaac had been a very young child, tormented him. So Isaac’s marrying one of Ishmael’s daughters wasn’t going to do a whole lot for regaining him the inheritance he had lost. The only thing it did was give him three wives instead of two. He still didn’t have any more blessing than he had before.

Meanwhile, Jacob, on his way to Paddan Aram, slept in an open field, with rocks for a pillow. He had been told he had great blessing in Canaan, but here he was, with nothing to show for it.

He was, perhaps, at his lowest point when there came to him a dream. In it, he saw a huge ladder extending into heaven, and this ladder was being used extensively by angels. At the top of the ladder, God stood, and spoke to Jacob. He told Jacob that he really was going to be the one to inherit the blessing that had come from Abraham to his father, and now to him. God promised that He would bring him home again. And he promised Jacob something else, something He promises Christians today—a promise He reiterated when Jesus gave the Great Commission: He promised His presence. He Himself, the God Who made the entire universe from quarks to quasars, would be with Jacob and would absolutely do what He had promised.

Not, of course, that Jacob understood what either quarks are quasars were, but he did through that dream understand something of Who God is. He woke up in utter awe, and set up an altar, renaming the place Bethel. There was a city nearby called Luz, but this name vanished, and the name Bethel remained. Bethel means “House of God.” And he made a promise to God that if God would do for him what He had just said He would do, then he would make God his God, and would give Him tithes—ten percent of everything that came to him.

When Jacob declared that God would be his God, that was an awesome statement of commitment. But he did not ask God to do everything He had promised. God promised Jacob in this dream to give him the land of Canaan and to make his descendants “like the dust of the earth” spread out in all directions. Jacob only wanted God’s protection and provision and to one day be allowed to return home. I think perhaps Jacob could not envision all that about descendants. He was a single man, and all he could think about was what these promises meant to him, himself. And what they meant was nothing short of a watershed. Jacob went on his way, to all who saw him still alone, still empty-handed, and still fleeing for his life. But in reality, he was no longer any of those things. He was walking in the presence of the Lord his God.