Great Moments in Bible History
Number 39
Time to Quit Procrastinating
I assume those who are reading this paper have good intentions. I know I do. But good intentions don’t always translate into good actions. How many times have we intended to do something that we knew we should do, yet have put it off and put it off? Sometimes we put it off for so long that it is no longer possible to do. The opportunity is gone. Jacob certainly had that problem. When he originally left home to go get a wife, he spent the night in a place called Luz. That night he had a dream of a ladder up to heaven. God appeared to him in that dream and gave him the great promise that “in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 28:14). Jacob was so awed by the vision that he set a stone up as a pillar and renamed the place Bethel, which means “house of God.” He made a solemn promise that if God would take care of him and bring him back safely, then that stone would be God’s house and he would give God a tenth of all God gave him.
As we begin chapter 35, many years have gone by since Jacob made that promise—more than two decades and perhaps even three. After 20 years living with his uncle, God had appeared to him and told him, “ I am the God of Bethel, where you anointed a pillar and made a vow to me. Now arise, go out from this land and return to the land of your kindred” (Genesis 31:13). Jacob had returned to the land, but he still had not fulfilled the vow he made at Bethel. For some reason, instead of going straight to Bethel, he had set up camp at the town of Shechem. In fact, he bought land there (Genesis 33:19), so he apparently intended to stay a while. That did not work out well at all. In the last issue of this paper we studied the sad story told in chapter 34. His daughter Dinah was raped by the prince of the city. His sons avenged her rape by killing all the men of Shechem. And instead of leading his family to do what was right, Jacob appeared more as a weak bystander.
Finally, God reminded Jacob of what he was supposed to be doing. “Arise, go up to Bethel and dwell there. Make an altar there to the God who appeared to you when you fled from your brother Esau” (Genesis 35:1). So Jacob quit procrastinating and proceeded to do what he had promised so many years earlier.
The first thing Jacob did was to get everyone prepared to worship God. He understood that God is awesome (which means He is someone we must fear). We cannot just come sauntering into His presence like we would with one of our coworkers. “Put away the foreign gods that are among you and purify yourselves and change your garments” (verse 2). Practically everyone worshipped idols back then, but it was an offense to God. Changing their garments was like putting on their Sunday best. Worshipping God was a serious responsibility.
Jacob continued, “Then let us arise and go up to Bethel, so that I may make there an altar to the God who answers me in the day of my distress and has been with me wherever I have gone” (verse 3). As Jacob looked back on his life, he saw that through all of his difficulties (which were many), God had always been with him. Truly, God was worthy of being worshipped.
When Jacob got to Bethel, he built the altar God had told him to build. God appeared to him there and repeated the promises He had earlier made to him, especially the promise that He would give his descendants that land (verses 11-12).
This chapter wraps up the story of Jacob’s life. He is far from dead. In fact, he will continue to be mentioned in the story all the way to the end of the book, but the stories that follow are really the stories of his children. There are, however, two brief stories left in this chapter that will have a strong effect on what follows. We will look at them in the next article.
Hard Times Come to Good People
People sometimes have the mistaken belief that the life of a true believer will be smooth and comfortable. There are preachers today who encourage that kind of thinking. The health-and-wealth preachers certainly do this. “God wants to bless you!” they will say. All you need to receive that blessing is “seed” faith (by which they mean giving to the preacher’s ministry). On the outside, those preachers certainly look like they are living smooth and comfortable lives. Some of them are even millionaires. But the Bible calls such people false teachers (1 Timothy 6:3-5). Whether they live comfortable lives or not tells us nothing about what a true believer should expect. A better measure are the stories of God’s chosen people in the book of Genesis. Though God certainly guided them and blessed them, they all had their full share of pain and trials. Two stories at the end of Genesis 35 illustrate that in the case of Jacob.
Jacob’s favorite wife had always been Rachel. In fact, she was the only wife he ever wanted. Because his other wife Leah was unloved, God had blessed her with children (Genesis 29:31). Rachel, on the other hand, went over ten years before she had her first child. She named that child Joseph, which means, “may he add,” explaining, “May the Lord add to me another son” (Genesis 30:24). It was several more years before the Lord gave her another son, and when He did, it came with great sorrow. It happened as the family was journeying south from Bethel. “When they were still some distance from Ephrath, Rachel went into labor, and she had hard labor” (Genesis 35:16). Up until the mid-20th century, death during childbirth was hundreds of times as common as it is today. Rachel was able to give birth to her second son, but she was already dying by the time the birth was over.
Jacob never really recovered from the loss. Over a decade later he told his sons, “You know that my wife bore me two sons” (Genesis 44:27). The sons he was talking to were not even Rachel’s sons, yet in Jacob’s mind there was only one wife who mattered and she was not their mother.
Jacob’s favoritism for Rachel and her sons over his other wife and her children did a lot of damage to his family. It is the driving force behind the story of Joseph that we will look at in our next issue.
The other sad story at the end of this chapter is told in less than one verse. “While Israel lived in that land, Reuben went and lay with Bilhah his father’s concubine. And Israel heard of it” (Genesis 35:22). Reuben was Jacob’s firstborn—the son of Leah. Bilhah was the servant of Jacob’s favorite wife Rachel. Rachel had given Bilhah to Jacob to have children by, because at the time she was unable to have any herself. The sin Reuben committed showed extreme disrespect for his father. Later, when the Law of Moses was given, that sin carried the death penalty. I suspect that Jacob’s disrespect for Reuben’s mother Leah encouraged Reuben’s own disrespect for his father. We are not told in this story what Jacob thought of Reuben’s sin (though it is not hard to guess). Years later, though, when Jacob was on his deathbed, he reminded Reuben of this sin. “Reuben, you are my firstborn, my might, and the firstfruits of my strength, preeminent in dignity and preeminent in power. Unstable as water, you shall not have preeminence, because you went up to your father’s bed; then you defiled it—he went up to my couch!” (Genesis 49:3)
With this background, we are not surprised to find in the next story that there was a lot of animosity on the part of Leah’s sons against Rachel’s.
Ten Chapters
As you probably know, there are 50 chapters in the book of Genesis. What is less well-known, though, is that when Moses wrote the book he did not include chapters or verses. The chapter divisions were not added until thousands of years later (over 1100 years after the time of Jesus). The verse divisions were not added until the 1500s.
But Genesis is actually one of the few Bible books in which the author marked out chapters when he wrote it. If we understand Moses’ method, the book of Genesis consists of a prologue followed by ten chapters. (That seems appropriate, coming from the man who received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.) Each chapter in Moses’ divisions begins with the phrase, “These are the generations of...” The first of these is found in Genesis 2:4, right after the story of the creation. The eighth chapter starts in Genesis 25:19, “These are the generations of Isaac, Abraham’s son.” We have been in that chapter for the last few issues of this paper. It comes to an end in Genesis 35 when Isaac dies and Jacob and Esau bury him (verse 29). Most of Genesis 25-35 concerns Isaac’s sons, rather than Isaac himself. The same will be true of the last chapter, which starts in Genesis 37:2, “These are the generations of Jacob.” The story is really about Jacob’s children.
In between is a chapter about Esau and his descendants (Genesis 36). They became the Edomites, who were generally a thorn in the side of Israel. But, since Esau was a son of Isaac, Moses devotes a chapter (though a small one) to his descendants. He did this earlier with Ishmael, Abraham’s first son (Genesis 25:12-18).
In our next issue we will begin Moses’ last chapter in the book, which is mostly the story of Joseph, Rachel’s firstborn son, and Judah, who will become the ancestor of Jesus.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible.