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The Ups and Downs of Life. [Genesis 35:1-29]

(Part 1 of 2)

Some people seem to suggest that if you are deeply spiritual Christian you will live on a spiritual mountaintop. God will constantly be blessing you and you will not have any problems, or at least you won’t have the same problems as other people have. I want to ask a very simple question, is that true? I want to do that by looking at the next episode in the life of Jacob. We’ve been tracing his life through the Book of Genesis for quite a while now. We’ve seen him born and grow up. We’ve seen him deceive his father and his brother. We’ve seen him  literally flee out of the land and spend 20 years away from his homeland. Then after 20 years he came back with his family and reconciled with his brother. What we’re looking at in the next episode is what happened after he got back into the land after he’d been there for some time.

This is Genesis chapter 35 and things that happen to Jacob are the sort of thing I believe can happen to anyone, so this is a good illustration of what the ups and downs of life can be like and what we might have to look forward to. Let’s begin chapter 35, with verse one. 

“Then God said to Jacob, “Go up to Bethel and settle there, and build an altar there to God, who appeared to you when you were fleeing from your brother Esau”.

(Genesis 35: 1)

Let’s pause for just a second. I said this minute ago that Jacob had come back to the land, and he had. It’s important to know where he’s as a matter of fact this whole chapter will turn out to be a bit of a travel log. He goes from one place to the other, but he starts out at Shechem and verse one says that God tells him to go to Bethel. Now he has been back in the land for about 10 years at this point and he was supposed to go to Bethel before this. What really is interesting to me is that Shechem is only 15 miles from Bethel. So, in all this time, when he should have gone back to Bethel, but he has camped and stayed very near Shechem, only 15 miles away. So, the Lord finally comes to him and says I want you to go back to Bethel and I want you to build an altar there to the God who appeared to you when you fled from Esau your brother. Bethel was the last place he had met with God before he fled the land and now God calls him back there. So, the Lord appears to him and says get out of Shechem and go to Bethel, pack up and travel 15 miles down the road, 

“So, Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, “Get rid of the foreign gods you have with you, and purify yourselves and change your clothes. Then come, let us go up to Bethel, where I will build an altar to God, who answered me in the day of my distress and who has been with me wherever I have gone.” So they gave Jacob all the foreign gods they had and the rings in their ears, and Jacob buried them under the oak at Shechem”.

(Genesis 35: 2-4)

What is surprising to me about this story is that they still got idols. They weren’t supposed to have idols, and if you remember a few chapters back when they left the land they were in, Rachel had taken her father’s idols. So maybe this is where that came from, maybe some others had brought idols with them as well. Notice, its “idols”, plural, at any rate, they’re going to go back to meet the Lord, and God tells them to do is get rid of all the items that would have been linked to worship of other false God’s. They’re going to go back, and worship so get rid of all this stuff that God does not approve off. The text suggest they do appear to give it all up. So, the story so far is really simple, God says, Jacob, you and your family, go to Bethel, build an altar to the Lord there, but get rid of all your idols before you come to the altar. 

When we are going to have fellowship with the Lord there are things we need to throw out as well. We think of idols as little statues that we bow down to them and I am sure most of us don’t have those kinds of things in our houses. Maybe we don’t think we’re idolaters, but several passages in the New Testament seems to indicate that we are. But the Book of Hebrews says that we are to run the race that is set before us, laying aside the sin and the weight that so easily besets us that. The passage in Colossian says put away covetousness, which it also says is a type pf idolatry. The little book of First John closes with, Get rid of your idols. Apparently, it’s possible for believers to have idols both in the New Testament today, maybe not little carved statues, but nevertheless those things that we spend our time, energy, money on and put in the place of God. This passage tells me if your going to worship the Lord in Spirit and in truth then you are going to have to get rid of the idols in your life otherwise you’re simply not going to grow spiritually. That’s the problem, you cannot serve God and mammon. If you’re going to serve the Lord, then you have got to make some priority choices.

Some once described worshipping the Lord as a bit’s like going up in a hot air balloon. I’ve never done that, but from what I understand, you got to throw some of weight out of the basket to rise up. The idea being, the more you toss out, the higher the balloon goes. That, I believe, is a useful picture of spiritual growth. The more you get off, the more baggage, the more sin that weighs you down you get rid off, the higher you go spiritually. So, if we’re going to approach the Lord the first thing, we have to do is we have to get rid of all this stuff that weighs us down. So let’s pick up the story in verse 5

“Then they set out, and the terror of God fell on the towns all around them so that no one pursued them”.

(Genesis 35: 5)

Now it’s an interesting little observation, if we remember that verse 3 has Jacob saying, “, let us go up to Bethel, where I will build an altar to God, who answered me in the day of my distress and who has been with me wherever I have gone”. So, in the midst of this, in the midst of all of Jacobs slip up, let’s tell it like it is, his sin. God speaks to him. Yes, he has practiced deception, and he had all kinds of problems, but God was faithful to him. And he said verse three, God answered me in the days of my distress, he’s been with me all the way. Jacob knows God had been faithful to Jacob, even when Jacob had not been faithful to Him. As the word spread of his exploits, the fear of God falls upon the cities he is travelling near to. The people probably heard of some of the exploits of Simeon and Levi, which we saw in an earlier chapter and they feared the Lord, meaning they didn’t want to mess with Jacob and his entourage in case they responded in the same way.

“Jacob and all the people with him came to Luz (that is, Bethel) in the land of Canaan. There he built an altar, and he called the place El Bethel, because it was there that God revealed himself to him when he was fleeing from his brother.

(Genesis 35: 6-7)

So, he names it the city of God because God had appeared to him there when he first fled the land. He remembered that this is the place where God had met with him. He had vowed to come back there on day when he returned to the land, and these verses simply tell us that he at last gets back there, and he builds an altar there. He is finally get’s back to where he was supposed to be.

“Now Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, died and was buried under the oak outside Bethel. So it was named Allon Bakuth.”

(Genesis 35: 8)

He finally gets there and one of the first things that happens is the maid of Rebecca dies. This would have been a sad day for Jacob. This lady would have been what we would today have called a nanny and she no doubt had a hand in raising him, so this was a sad day in his life. s a matter of fact, he renamed the place and the name in Hebrew means the oak of weeping. So this was a sorrowful moment for him, somebody he had known for a long, long time somebody that was near and dear to him died and he had to bury her. Then God appeared to Jacob again in verse 9.

“After Jacob returned from Paddan Aram, God appeared to him again and blessed him. God said to him, “Your name is Jacob, but you will no longer be called Jacob; your name will be Israel. ” So he named him Israel”.

(Genesis 35: 9-10)

So God reminds him of his name change to Israel and he reminds him of his blessing again. Now listen to all these promises God reminds him of.

“And God said to him, “I am God Almighty]; be fruitful and increase in number. A nation and a community of nations will come from you, and kings will be among your descendants.  The land I gave to Abraham, and Isaac I also give to you, and I will give this land to your descendants after you”.

(Genesis 35: 11-12)

God wants us to underscore the fact that the land is his and that great nations are going to come out of him.

“Then God went up from him at the place where he had talked with him. Jacob set up a stone pillar at the place where God had talked with him, and he poured out a drink offering on it; he also poured oil on it. Jacob called the place where God had talked with him Bethel.”

(Genesis 35: 13-15)

What I want us to focus on in this part of the passage is two things. In verse 11 God said you’re going to be a nation. A community of nations shall proceed from you and kings shall come from you. In verse 12 it says the land which I gave to Abraham, and Isaac, I give to you also. 

This is a critical issue in the Book of Genesis. If you’ve been following me as we’ve been going through this book, you’ve heard me say this before, but it needs to be repeated. The seed plot of the Book of Genesis which becomes the seed plot of the whole Old Testament and to some degree the Bible is that God appeared to Abraham and said to him, I’m going to make your name great and I’m going to give you descendants as numerous as the sand on the seashore and the stars in the heaven. Remember all that and you’re going to multiply and become great throughout the earth. And I, the Lord, am going to give you this. It’s called the Abrahamic covenant and embedded in that is the idea that God would not only give all of that to Abraham, but then to his son Isaac, and then to his son Jacob, but then that promise would be completed on behalf of the whole world through the Messiah. The future seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. So, this is the Abrahamic covenant and the core of it is that God gives to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob the land of Israel. The promise that they’re going to become a great nation, is only because ultimately the Messiah is going to come out of them. And that, of course, that is exactly what will happened.

So that’s the end of part one of this travelogue of Jacob. We shall look at part two of his journeying in the next episode.