CHAPTER IX
Jacob
Gen. 27 to 33
Agnes M. Lawson
Hints
to Bible Study
The Colorado College of Divine
Science
Denver, 1920.
Jacob is
more than a character in Biblical
history, he is an epoch. In the history
of Jacob, for the first time in Bible
narrative, we touch Cosmic Vision. It is
this Vision which, by common consent of
civilized man, designates this series of
books as The Book, the supreme book of
all time.
If we read
the story of Jacob in its outer
significance, we have a peculiar Hebraic
story. It traces the origin of the name
Israel to this distinct ancestor, it
casts a curious interest about two
otherwise insignificant villages, Bethel
and Peniel. This is national, narrow and
of merely local interest. To read in this
way, however, will not give the meaning
of the character, it will hide it. This
character is of far more symbolic
interest than historic. It is the record
of an experience common to all
mankind.
Put aside
the form of this narrative and look into
the heart and meaning of it. It will
instantly be seen that it is no longer
anything local or Hebraic, but a great
truth, wide as human nature. We have
before us the record of an inward
spiritual struggle, as real now in the
twentieth century as then; as real in
every earnest soul, as it was in the soul
of Jacob. It reveals to us two things, on
which all religion must ever stand, the
soul’s search for the inner
reality, God, and God’s revelation
of this secret reality to the soul. It
reveals that there can be no such thing
as an outward church; that the Church of
Christ is, as Jesus so definitely tells
Peter in Matthew 16:14-19, the
consciousness that can receive its
revelation direct from God. The gates of
hell will and can prevail against every
one who has not received the new name
Israel, one who has wrestled and
prevailed with God.
In his early
life and with the connivance of his
mother, Jacob committed a deliberate sin.
He deceived his father, he overreached
his open, free-handed, careless brother,
Esau. This alone is the excuse for
Rebecca and Jacob; Esau neither
appreciated nor valued his birthright,
nor would he have valued the blessing had
he received it. Jacob gains both by
craft, and must flee from his
father’s house to escape the wrath
of his brother.
In youth the
conviction of sin does not press home to
us; Jacob, when he flees from his
brother’s wrath, does not yet
realize that he has sinned. Fresh from
his sin, he has the wonderful vision of
youth; the vision of a ladder reared
against the sky and the angels are
ascending and descending upon it. His
aspirations reach God, the vision tells
him; and messages of reciprocal love are
sent back to him. Leaving his
father’s home a banished man, this
first meeting takes place. Fresh from his
sin, God meets him in forgiveness and
tenderness. The line between heaven and
earth has not been severed, the divine
Love watches over him and the way between
God and his sinful child is clear and
unimpeded still.
Then Jacob
makes a covenant with his father’s
God. Note this, Jacob has no religion of
his own, nor does this first vision of
youth give him one. He covenants with
this God of his fathers, and bargains
with Him for hire. “If God will be
with me, and will keep me in this way
that I go, and will give me bread to eat
and raiment to put on; so that I come
again to my father’s house in
peace; then shall the Lord be my
God.” This is not religion--it is
the first law of nature,
self-preservation.
Twenty years
pass. In all of this time Jacob is Jacob,
the crafty supplanter, still. He is under
the law of action and reaction. He had
deceived his father and Esau; Laban
deceives him. He in turn deceives Laban
and is again justified by his own
conscience. Our father’s God
is never the redemptive God, He leaves
our characters unchanged. After a score
of years he turns homeward. Never in all
of that time had he seen his brother. As
he journeys homeward, word is brought him
of the approach of his brother Esau,
which makes a meeting inevitable. Jacob
makes all provision to conciliate his
brother. He prepares presents, he sends
his flocks, servants and family over the
brook Jabbok to meet him, and to soften
his heart towards him. Then he alone is
left in the still dark night on the eve
of the meeting.
There are
moments when we stand face to face with a
crisis to which great issues are linked;
when we have done all that foresight can
devise, and the hour of action being
passed, the hour of reaction is at hand.
The soul at this time is passive and
helpless, gazing toward the anticipated
event which is moving toward it. We go
over again and again the whole circle of
our own resources, and find them nothing,
and we feel ourselves powerless in the
grasp of destiny. In this feeling of
insecurity the consciousness of a need of
something greater than ourselves, greater
than the combined power of all that we
know as mankind, forces itself upon us.
We reach out into the great Vastness for
something to lean upon, something greater
than human power or intelligence.
At this
crisis there came into the soul of Jacob
a conflict so violent that it seemed an
actual struggle with a living man. In the
darkness he hears a Voice, and comes into
contact with a Form, and feels a
Presence, the reality of which there is
no mistaking. We know that this is not a
form of flesh and blood, but something
infinitely more real than flesh and blood
can ever be. The realities of life are
not those which the eye sees or the hand
touches. Jacob here discovers the secret
and mystery of existence. This is not the
God whom he met twenty years before. That
was the Father, but this is the Judge;
and this meeting is the dread day of
judgment, and no flesh can stand in it.
No longer is it the protecting presence,
the covenanting love; it is the power
that pierces into the intent of the
heart. It is that searching inward gaze
in which the soul stands revealed to
itself. One knows then how utterly
hopeless it is for one to try to live the
life of love and truth, except as he
yields himself without reservation to the
Divine Love. In and of ourselves we are
nothing, only as we lose our lives do we
gain them. We learn in this experience
the helplessness and impotency of the
soul that is not allied to God.
From our
human point of view we should have
expected the reverse of this. We should
have expected the darker vision first,
and the vision of peace to follow it.
However, spiritual experiences are always
the exact reverse of what the mortal
expects them to be. This is the true
account by tried experience. God allows
the wheat and the tares to grow together
until the harvest; it is in the
separation time that the tares must be
cast out and thrown into the consuming
flame.
The end and
aim of Jacob’s struggle is to know
God. “Tell me, I pray thee, thy
name.” A very unimportant demand
this looks at first sight. By whatever
name He is sought in sincerity, He is
found of us. What signifies a name? There
is a deeper truth here. We have a name
for God before we have been to Peniel;
after we have met Him there, He is
nameless, too vast to be limited by
one.
In this
second meeting of Jacob with God, he has
no petition to make, he makes no
promises. He is on the eve of meeting
Esau, who had sought to kill him, but he
asks no protection from Him. Deeper
things are grappling the soul of Jacob,
to know God’s character, to know
Him and what He is, for that he struggles
from sunset to sunrise. We move through a
world of mystery and the soul is not
satisfied until it knows the real meaning
of life. What is this haunting Presence
that fills the universe? What is the name
of this Being that floods us with light
in our highest moments, that presses in
heaviest weight when we are under a
conviction of sin, crippling us in the
sinews of the thighs, our tenderest
points on which we lean, no longer
leaving us the old prop of materiality?
Who are you? Tell me, I pray thee, thy
name? This is the struggle of all earnest
lives.
“Wherefore is it that thou dost ask
after my name?” This is worthy of
the nameless One. God when He visits us
gives us truths of feeling. Words change
their meaning and lose their
significance. A witty Frenchman once
said, “We invented language when we
wished to conceal our thoughts.”
Language is valuable for the things of
this life, but for the things of the
Spirit we should be better off perhaps
without it. If religion were always based
on truths of feeling, the world would be
full of love and light.
Words often
hide from us our ignorance even of
earthly things. How often the child asks
for information and we satiate his
curiosity with words. Who does not know
that we satisfy ourselves when we learn
the name of a law of God, even as we do
of natural things. We learn the name of a
bird or a plant and fancy we know all
about it. We are more hopelessly ignorant
than we were before, for thinking we know
all about it because we have the name we
investigate no more, and the name covers
over the abyss of our ignorance. If God
had given Jacob a name, that might have
satisfied him, but God impressed on him
in that strange scene, His own character
which would develop and change the man
into the same character. Jacob felt the
Infinite, who is more truly known when
the least named. Words would have reduced
Him to the finite; to know all about God
is one thing, to know the living God is
another.
Very
significantly we are told that the divine
Antagonist seemed anxious to depart as
the day was about to dawn; but Jacob held
fast to Him, as if aware that the
daybreak would deprive him of his
blessing. Again we have the distinctions
of the religion of our childhood and our
manhood. A little girl who was very
willing to say her evening prayers,
objected to saying them in the morning,
“I can take care of myself in the
light.” But it is in the daylight
that we need God the most. God is
approached more nearly in that which is
indefinite, than in that which is
definite and distinct. He is felt in awe
and wonder and worship, rather than in
clear conceptions. There is a sense in
which darkness has more of God than light
has. “He dwells in the thick
darkness.” When the day breaks and
distinctions come, the great thoughts
that surged through us in the night time
evaporate. We are then facing the cares
and joys and distractions of our earth
life. It is at this time we must cling to
Him and not let Him go.
Literally
more of infinity is revealed in the night
time than in the light. Every morning God
draws the curtain of His garish light
across His Infinity. We look down upon
earth instead of up to heaven. “We
lay aside the telescope and take up the
microscope and see smallness instead of
Vastness.” But in the blessed
evening we again “blend” into
Infinity, and are changed into the same
Image.
The
forgiveness and tenderness of God twenty
years before had not altered the
character of Jacob. “Man goeth
forth unto his work and to his labor
until the evening.” [Jacob] is but
half sincere; but when he comes into
contact with the God of his manhood, the
God who weighs him in the balance and
takes his measure according to the
strength of his soul, he becomes Real at
once. Every insincere habit of thought
shrivels up in the face of God. One clear
glance into the depths of Being, and the
whole man in altered. No longer Jacob the
supplanter, but Israel the Prince of God,
the champion of the Lord who has fought
the mortal and conquered it.
N.B. I am
indebted to Robinson’s sermons for
much of this chapter.
* * * * *
Hints to Bible Study
Table
of Contents
