Genesis 31:42 “If the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac, had not been with me, you would surely have sent me away empty-handed. But God has seen my hardship and the toil of my hands, and last night he rebuked you.”
Yes and no! Some people live in a yes and no world. There are only two options in their world, either you get it or you don’t. There is only so much, and if you don’t seize the opportunity right now, there won’t be any left for me and mine.
We see this in the discussions about the insane wealth of some members of our world. Some seem to have so much, and some so little. And those of us in between get caught in the pulls. But we have little to no power to actually make any appreciable change to the way things are.
We can work in our local sphere, but we can’t do much to change the global dynamics of wealth. That is because greed is part of the wrong order of things. Greed is a part of the Fall of humanity and this world. One day it will be made right.
Jacob, the man speaking in the text, is not the most upright person. His name even means “deceiver” and he came out of the womb in a struggle with his brother, a call back to Cain and Able. Sibling rivalries have been here as long as siblings have been here.
This rivalry led to Jacob leaving his family and moving back in with relatives in a distant land, distant before airplanes flew the skies. It took him twenty years to break free from his father-in-law’s grip. The story is worth the read. In it you will again see the outworking of Genesis 3:15, the results of the Fall on the gentler sex.
In our text today, Jacob has a bit of a colored view of his own dealings with his father-in-law. Yes, his father-in-law did a bait and switch with his wife on their wedding night, enough to make any man furious! He continued to work another seven years to be able to marry the woman he really wanted to marry.
And he walked through the battle of the babies, slave women and mandrake bribes. He turned from being an honored member of his household into a sperm carrying injection machine. He was devalued by his wives, their slave girls, and his father-in-law. Talk about an ego deflater!
The final six years Jacob had spent listening to the LORD’s instructions on selective breeding and using that knowledge to gain his wealth. Here is his yes or no, yours and mine type of thinking. In his mind, there isn’t enough for the both of us, just for him. The LORD only has so much blessing. He can’t provide for both of us.
But Jacob’s heart was still not in the right place. Notice how he names the LORD. He is the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac. He isn’t named as his own God. He is simply the God of my father. This will get corrected in the next chapter, but right now, Jacob is still distant from the LORD because of his own sin.
There is a solution to this problem of viewing the resources as limited. It was a radical solution give to the people of God as a way to equalize the world and provide enough for everyone. It happened every fifty years, although there is no evidence that it actually was ever done by Israel. That solution was the Year of Jubilee. In that year, all property, land specifically, was returned to the original owners.
This returning of the most fundamental of wealth gathering institution was radical. It kept people from hoarding, leveling the field between all people. It was a restoration, or at least a foreshadowing of the coming restoration of all things in the new heaven and new earth. It was the Garden, the Sabbath, the invitation for intimacy and dependence on the LORD.
The Arnold Journey 