Chrono read: Gen 25-28
So, Jacob.
For 25:26 my ESV study note says this:
The name “Jacob” (cf. esv footnote) not only resembles the Hebrew term for “heel” (‘aqeb) but also has the connotation of “deceiver.” To grasp someone by the heel was apparently a figure of speech meaning “to deceive.” The motif of deception appears in a number of episodes associated with Jacob.
So, Jacob was a bit of a schemer, a weasel.
And boy does he live up to his name. If you haven’t ever read Genesis 27 – the account of him putting on his brother Esau’s clothes (so that he’d smell like him), putting on goat fur (“my brother Esau was a hairy man”…), so that he can trick his blind, dying father into giving him all the blessings that are due his hairy brother — you really SHOULD.
What I didn’t put together the last time I read this account is that Jacob gets double crossed. In chap 29 he is with his uncle Laban and wants to marry one of his daughters, Rachel. They even strike a deal where Jacob will work for Laban for 7 years to pay the ‘bride price’ for Rachel. However, old Laban totally fools Jacob and when the 7 years are up, the night of the wedding in the dark he slips in Rachel’s sister Leah to the bedroom on their wedding night! YIKES! Jacob then stays there another 7 years to re-earn Rachel…while married to Leah and having 4 kids.
Besides this kinda sounding like a bad TV reality show or an episode of Jerry Springer…Jacob has gotten a taste of his own medicine.
One might even smugly say “Good. He got what he deserved.”
But what about me?
I have to thank God that he has not treated me as my sins deserve. If he treated me as I have treated him for years, even daily sometimes now – remember our BEST works are as filthy rags to Him – it would be an awful scene for me.
One of the miracles of the cross is the miracle of grace – that he took my sin, paid for it with his life, and gave me his purity in return- AND allows me to live every day and grow and fall and struggle and mature – all without really treating me as my sins deserved.
Mike Ruel 