This past Sunday our pastor looked at the story of Jacob and Esau. This might be familiar even to those of you who don't know much about Christianity. Jacob's the younger of the twins, Esau the older, born to a family lineage that's been promised to be the household that God uses to bless all the nations.
Esau is described as the outdoorsmen. Jacob (whose name means grasper) is a homebody. But my pastor talked about the connotation of these descriptions being that Esau was somewhat ambivalent about his place in this very important family line. Whereas Jacob very much valued his family and the importance of what was happening in and around him.
So Esau sells his birthright for a bowl of stew to his grasping and coniving younger brother one day when he's come in from hunting and he's starving. Jacob then conspires with his mother (who liked him best) to steal the blessing from Esau upon his father's death bed. Jacob's life is more or less a record of conspiring, manipulating, and plotting.
Throughout the Scriptures, God refers to himself as God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But far and away, of these three OT patriarchs, God associates himself with Jacob. It seems like an odd choice for a holy God.
But one of the points from this past Sunday was that Jacob was ambitious to be a part of the blessings of God. He was always grasping and wrestling, yes, but often it was to be a part of God's work in the world. He was eager to be involved in God's story and he asserted and inserted himself time and time again.
God's work throughout the story of Jacob's life was a purification of this ambition. God constantly refined, humbled, stretched and rebuked Jacob. But his deep passion to be a part of the work of God in the world was a good thing. God can redeem even ambition, if it's ambition centered around the right things.
5 comments:
I am unsure if there is much we ought to emulate in the life of Jacob. Certainly he has moments of commendation in the Scriptures (Heb. 11:21, et al.), yet a reasonable conclusion from a reading of his life is not one of admiration of Jacob: The proper response is humble admiration of the God of such a despicable man.
Jacob's ambition nearly never aimed at godliness. The amazing part of his story, though, is that God apparently didn't NEED Jacob to want godliness for Him to use the bozo. God's plan was at work, and the younger brother--the lying mama's-boy known as Jacob--couldn't stop these plans. We might recall Joseph's words later in Genesis, where he notes that though his brothers intended evil, "God meant it for good." Surely Jacob's theft of the birthright had no noble motivations behind it; Jacob meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.
The humbling part of this story is that Jacob seems a whole lot more real to me than Esau, Isaac, or the rest of the gang. I can--with no qualms--call Jacob a two-timing sissy, because that's me. I'm the liar, the wimp, the one who hates his own brother. And yet...and yet, God has decided to work in my life, even in my periods of downright rebellion. Praise God! He is unstoppable.
chris,
I thought I had responded to this earlier, but apparently it didn't "take." I'll try again...
First off, thanks for posting! I certainly don't want myself or anyone to miss out on the fact/reality/central importance that God and His grace are the primary and great actors in this story. Jacob is pretty much a disaster throughout.
I think, however, that it's possible that we tend to absolutize our Bible characters and so miss out on what even the bad guys might have to show us.
Perhaps the key to Jacob's life comes at the pivotal moment of name-change. He wrestles all night long with God and then when day breaks and God demands to be let go, his reply I think sums up his personality: "not until you bless me!" Which, we should not miss, God does.
Again, this certainly has much more to do with God's grace than Jacob's character. But this deep desire to be blessed by God is a really good thing.
I am posting this during the mass craziness following the Duke game-- I'm the only student left in the dorms, I think, hehe.
Marshall had an interesting lesson about Jacob and redemption at GUPY, but more tied to God's renaming him and how that could be be related to God's redeeming our ethnic/cultural identity.
Happy to revisit the story. :o)
Hey Alex :)
I had some thoughts on Jacob's ambition. I agree with you that action and ambition can be noble, but it can also be a tragic flaw if that ambition is pointed towards the wrong things.
I think the big issue here is whether Jacob's ambition really was for the Lord or for the blessings themselves.
Our pastor also did a series on Jacob the past couple of Sundays where he talked about how we all seek to be blessed... by others and not by the Lord. We seek to be blessed by other people because of our beauty, our strength, or even merely our ambition itself and we will lie, steal, and cheat to have people us "bless us" or in other words, like us.
I think you are right that ambition is a key point to this story... but the point is that our ambition is only noble when what we are pursuing is noble. In Jacob's case, he may have wanted God's blessing, but he wanted it his way and he stole it from someone. That's wrong. We shouldn't be tricking God for a blessing, we should be learning how to accept his grace.
Ok that's my two cents.
Jenn Pappa
Jenn,
First off, thanks so much for your comment!
Secondly, maybe our two pastors should be the ones having it out about this conversation!
I 100% agree that ambition around all the wrong things (which it generally is) is tragically destructive--in the church, in the marketplace, everywhere. And Jacob's ambitions certainly didn't serve him or the people around him for much of his life.
I think the only thing about all of this is that even with God's grace clearly being the central player here, all of the Genesis heroes/failures are both heroes and failures. In other words, Jacob is not all bad, and he doesn't have to be all bad in order for God's grace to be front and center. Throughout Genesis particularly, God is not afraid to deal harshly with those whose hearts are set against him (see Flood, Massive and Gomorrah, and Soddom).
So while God's gracious activity towards Jacob is clearly undeserved, he is not altogether wicked and evil. He grasps his whole life, and he pays for it his whole life, as do the people around him. But might there not be something positive about his ambitions, buried underneath all his scheming? Clearly his methods were atrocious, and maybe ambition is such a loaded word it just can't be used in a faithful way at all. But the suggestion that there might be something good at work in Jacob even in the midst of how messed up he is, is, I think, at least worth considering.
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