After Jacob got rid of all “the foreign gods” from his home and he and his family returned to Canaan, “God appeared to him again and blessed him,” Genesis 35:9.
The “blessing” God had for Jacob was officially changing his unfortunate name of ‘deceptive heel grabber’ to the name Israel – ‘he struggles with God’ (10) – in recognition of Jacob’s long struggle with trusting him. So many times in the past Jacob had resorted to his own cleverness to get what he wanted, or to get out of a sticky situation. Trust in himself had been his god, but now, looking back over his life, he realized it was God who’d got him through and been with him all along (3). At long last, Jacob, now Israel the struggler with God, understood that the long struggle in life he’d been through was to teach him to trust.
Being able to trust God was a wonderful revelation for him – like entering a whole new world – and he built an altar to commemorate it (3, 7).
And that’s when, a little later, God promised Jacob that “A nation and a community of nations will come from you, and kings will come from your body. The land I gave to Abraham and Isaac I also give to you, and I will give this land to your descendants after you” (11-12). God just needed Jacob’s trust to pass on to him the great promise to Abraham.
And that would set the pattern for all those who would carry the name of Israel in the future too, either as a direct descendant of Jacob, or as “the Israel of God” in the New Testament – referring to the Church (Galatians 6:16). Trust in any age would define a true Israelite, because it’s in trusting Israelites – past and present – that God’s promise to create a new world through Abraham’s descendants would continue.
The author of Hebrews made that clear when he wrote, “For we also have had the gospel preached to us, just as they (the Israelites) had it preached to them” (Hebrews 4:2). So it’s the same message all through Scripture, same promise to Abraham being fulfilled, and the same people it’s being fulfilled through. And that included Jesus himself, because it was through him, a perfectly true and trusting Israelite, that threw open the doors to entering this new world God was creating, that he’d promised to Abraham back in Genesis 12:3.
And Jacob got a taste of this new world that God gifts to those who trust him, as did his son Joseph, when he was faced with “When life isn’t fair”….(next blog)
