January 11

January 11

Genesis 32–34

Scripture Text: Genesis 32:1–34:31

Series: Read the Bible in a Year

Go to January 12

Jacob is traveling home with his family, and that means facing Esau, his estranged and angry brother. So, this also means the possibility of death. Jacob asks God to deliver him, recalling to God his promise to do good to him. Still, promises and all, Jacob spends a night by himself and wrestles or strives with God. Who do you think this "man" was whom Jacob wrestled?

If he was alone yet God promised to be with him and if the story says that in this striving Jacob saw God face to face, then Luther's position is supported. He wrote, "The wrestler is the Lord of glory, God Himself, or God’s Son, who was to become incarnate and who appeared and spoke to the fathers."

Jacob humbles himself before his brother, and Esau forgives him. In this family reconciliation God turns Jacob's fear into joy. Jacob is a model for us of facing family fears and striving for reconciliation. Esau is a model of forgiveness. Both are models of humiity.

For all this humility and familial forgiveness, the larger family breaks down in the final chapter of our reading today. Perhaps Dinah should have stayed home instead of going among the foreign women. Nonetheless, a Hivite rapes her, and her brothers use the holy ordinance of circumcision as a way to trick the Hivites. They do not stop with one part of their bodies but go on to slay them all. Jacob is then concerned with politics, how he will lokk to the Hivites, while his sons are astonished that he did not seem to care for their sister, Dinah. 

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