An enlightening insight into both Laban and his daughter Rachel pops out in Genesis 31:19, because “When Laban had gone to shear his sheep, Rachel stole her father’s household gods.”

When Laban found out he was furious. On catching up with the fleeing Jacob, he demanded to know “why did you steal my gods?” (30). And Jacob respected how important that was to Laban, because in reply he said, “if you find anyone who has your gods, he shall not live” (32).

So these little carved figurines (of gods or ancestors) were like a lifeline to those who had them. And for several reasons too – the first of which is mentioned in Genesis 30:27, when Laban said he “learned by divination.” So these little household gods were looked to for guidance and insight, like an oracle they could consult. They could ask and get an answer. How they got an answer isn’t mentioned, but to Laban what he understood his little god to be telling him was the absolute truth. 

But maybe it’s Rachel who gives the game away as to why these household gods were so important, when she asks in Genesis 31:14, “Do we still have any share in the inheritance of our father’s estate?” And her answer to that was stealing her father’s household gods, which suggests that possession of these gods also gave her legal title to Laban’s estate. Those who had the gods got the family property, which Rachel also felt she rightfully deserved (16) – and as a way getting back at her father for treating them all so badly (15).

That being the case, it’s no wonder Laban desperately wanted his household gods back. And especially, as was done back then, these figurines were made out of valuable metals. With all these reasons for having these gods, then, it’s not surprising that people felt a person was worthy of death for stealing them.

In his own household, though, Jacob told everyone to “Get rid of the foreign gods you have with you” by turning them in to him, and he then “buried them under the oak at Shechem” (35:2-4). To Jacob there were no other gods – and wisely so, because Zechariah 10:2 states: “Household gods give worthless advice, fortune-tellers predict only lies, and interpreters of dreams pronounce falsehoods that give no comfort.” 

Jacob’s experience, however, was with a real God, “who answered me when I was in trouble and has stuck with me everywhere I’ve gone since” (35:3), which would now become “The definition of a true Israelite”….(next blog) 

The “leopard” in the title is Jacob’s uncle Laban, whose “spots” show up in the first mention of him in Genesis 24:29. Abraham had sent his servant in search of a wife for his son Isaac, and on finding Rebekah, who was obviously the right choice, the servant gave her several jewels – and that, verse 30, was the first thing that caught Laban’s eye. 

The camels likely caught his eye too (32), because only wealthy people had camels, so Laban could see he was on to a good thing. And he was right, because on agreeing to let Rebekah become Isaac’s wife, the servant “gave costly gifts” to Laban and his mother (53).

Imagine Laban’s delight, therefore, when his sister’s son Jacob turns up on his doorstep as well in Genesis 29. Laban “hurried to meet him” and welcomed Jacob into his home as his “own flesh and blood” (13-14), and offered him a job and wages (15). For the next fourteen years under Jacob’s care, Laban’s flocks (and wealth) “increased greatly” (30:29-30). And Jacob stuck it out for another six years too, despite Laban “cheating him” by changing “his wages ten times” (31:7).  

But in that time, Jacob had cleverly bred Laban’s animals so that “the weak animals went to Laban and the strong ones” to himself (30:42), and “In this way Jacob grew exceedingly prosperous” (43), which did not go down well with Laban or his sons (31:1-2). They accused Jacob of shady tactics (the pot calling the kettle black), despite Laban having agreed to Jacob’s terms (30:31-34). In a dream, then, God told Jacob it was time to “leave this land at once and go back to your native land” (31:13). So when Laban was elsewhere, Jacob gathered his family, livestock and goods and they took off (31:17-18). 

Seven days later Laban caught up with them, and played the victim card to a tee, accusing Jacob of “carrying off my daughters like captives in war” (31:26), and being denied the chance to kiss his children and grandchildren goodbye, etc. But Jacob was having none on it, and accused Laban of harsh tactics that God himself had noticed (31:38-42). And that’s when the leopard’s spots changed, because out of the blue Laban suggested that he and Jacob bury the hatchet and in Laban’s own words, “remember that God is a witness between you and me” (31:50). 

So even a dedicated cheat and deceiver like Laban could have a change of heart, and even call on God as a witness. Which is encouraging. But could Laban fully change his spots and have “No other gods” too?….(next blog)

Jacob and his uncle Laban were peas in the same pod. They shared the same thread of using their own considerable wits to work things out to their own benefit. It wasn’t all Jacob’s fault, though, because his mother Rebekah was Laban’s sister, so she too was cut from the same cloth.

And it was Rebekah’s conniving that had put Jacob into Laban’s clutches (Genesis 27:42-45), a situation that Laban was quick to exploit. It was all so easy though, because Jacob was swept up in love with Laban’s lovely daughter Rachel, and so much in love that he offered to work seven years in Laban’s employ to win her.

Come the wedding night seven years later, however, Laban managed to slip his older daughter Leah into Jacob’s bed, claiming it wasn’t their custom “to give the younger daughter in marriage before the older one,” Genesis 29:26. But Jacob could have Rachel too, if he did another seven years work for Laban, which Jacob did (30). So that’s now fourteen years of work Laban has squeezed out of Jacob. And it didn’t bother Laban if he messed up his own daughters’ lives to pull it off either.

How do you deal with such a man? Well, by some cunning of his own, Jacob offered to keep looking after Laban’s flocks so long as he could have all the speckled and spotted sheep and goats and the dark coloured lambs for wages (30:31-32). And Laban agreed – but he immediately shot off and gave all the spotted and speckled animals Jacob wanted to his sons to look after instead (35).  

It was obvious by now, therefore, there was no way of dealing with this man, not by human means. Laban’s interest was only in himself, and his agile mind would always find a way of benefiting himself – and not a twinge of conscience when cheating and deceiving someone either. 

What Laban had not reckoned with, however, was God, and God letting Jacob know in a dream that he’d “seen all that Laban has been doing to you,” Genesis 31:12, the result of which was God telling Laban, also in a dream, that he’d better not “say anything to Jacob, good or bad” (24). And Laban got the point too (29), which becomes a strong hint in the annals of Israel’s history that if there are impossible people like the Labans of life we cannot deal with, God can. He sees and he knows, and his advice is: “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you,” Isaiah 41:10. Which God did for Jacob, by showing in Laban that “A leopard’s spots can change”….(next blog)

When Jacob was faced with what could well be a ‘life and death’ situation he was all for praising the Lord for all his years of “kindness and faithfulness,” Genesis 32:10. That was Jacob’s starting point. And not surprising too, because the brother he’d deeply offended twenty years ago was fast approaching with four hundred men, possibly armed and out for blood.

And Jacob’s ‘troops’ were meager by comparison. All he had were a few messengers (3), plus his two wives and their children and their two maidservants (33:1). Not exactly a great fighting force. So with the odds heavily stacked against him, Jacob did the obvious: he looked back into his past and all the impossible things God had got him through, and prayed that God would do the same again.

But he also made plans of his own by “dividing the people who were with him into two groups,” so if Esau attacked one group, the other group could escape (7-8). Jacob’s approach to this impossible situation, then, was to start off with “Praise the Lord” for all the help he’d always given, but he included the “pass the ammunition” bit too, by doing what was in his own power for self-defence as well, in case things turned nasty.  

To Jacob, then, there was no problem taking steps of his own as well. Trusting God didn’t mean just sit back, put brain to sleep, and let God work everything out. He took the approach that God would want him to do what he could, so put brain to work and God would guide.

It was all a bit humbling for Jacob, though, being faced with a situation that the best workings of his agile brain and cleverness – that had served him so well in the past – couldn’t resolve. And to his credit he accepted that. So he prayed, “Lord, help me.” But believing that the Lord would help him freed his mind from fear and panic to think about what he could do in partnership with God. What ‘ammunition’ of his own could he provide for God’s use as well? 

So he wasn’t thinking “I deserved this mess,” and off he shuffled to whimper under a cactus. Trust had given Jacob energy and ideas. It had also made him fearless, so when he spied Esau “coming with his four hundred men” (33:1), he boldly went out to meet him, leaving himself wide open to whatever Esau decided to do (3). So that’s what trust can do – updated for us very nicely by Paul too in Romans 8:28. Which helps when “Reconciling with the likes of Laban”….(next blog)

God told Jacob in Genesis 31:3 to “Go back to the land of your fathers and to your relatives.” Go on, go back home, face the music with Esau, and make up with him. Not the most pleasant thought for Jacob who, twenty or so years previously, had upset Esau so badly that Esau had wanted to kill him. 

But God’s in the business of reconciliation, because it’s one great way of God making himself real to us, by enabling us to reconcile with people in what might seem to us as “impossible to reconcile” situations. Because that’s exactly what he does here with Jacob.  

And it starts with God giving Jacob a reconciling spirit, because reconciling hadn’t come naturally to Jacob. He’d deeply upset his brother and with no remorse, no apology, and no desire to resolve the hurt he’d caused Esau either. How on earth, then, could Jacob go back home? 

Amazingly, the old conniving Jacob did not try to get out of it. Instead, he found himself sending messengers to Esau (32:3) in the hope “that I may find favour in your eyes” (32:5). To Jacob it must’ve seemed he was asking the impossible, which God obviously knew because as Jacob headed out on the dreaded journey, angels met him on the way to encourage him (32:1). So God not only provided Jacob with a reconciling spirit, he also provided encouragement along the way. 

And it certainly made God real to Jacob, because he cries out, “This is the camp of God!” (2) – hey, God’s camped out here with me, I’m not heading into this alone. So, petrified though he was at the thought of having to face his brother, Jacob was given the spirit nudge he needed to see this through. 

Which he really did need, because his messengers reported back that Esau was setting out to meet him with four hundred of his men in tow. It sounded like Esau was spoiling for a fight, and now Jacob was really scared (6-7). 

But instead of high tailing it into the hills, Jacob prayed to God to save their lives (11). So God had made himself real to Jacob, by asking the impossible of him and then providing the spirit help and encouragement to get the job done. Just as he promises to do in our impossible situations too (2 Corinthians 12:8-10). But was there still a bit of “Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition” in Jacob still?….(next blog)

Jacob’s awareness of God in his own life came one night in a dream. In the dream he saw a stairway stretching up to heaven, at the top of which “stood the Lord,” who then spoke to him (Genesis 28:12-13). 

So this was God’s doing, choosing a time when Jacob is scared, alone, and running for his life. His brother Esau is out for his blood and maybe catching up fast, so Jacob has likely stayed off the main roads and stuck to the rocky hill country to not be noticed. After a hot day’s slog up and down rock strewn hills he’s ready for sleep as soon as the sun sets. 

For Jacob this was like a hell on earth; in his own words “the day of my distress,” Genesis 35:3 – “the day,” note, meaning no other day like it in his life so far. But that night, according to verse 7, “God revealed himself to him.” Or in Jacob’s own words in verse 3, he “answered me.” 

But answered in a way that gave Jacob a glimpse of this other world in operation, in the form of a stairway connecting heaven and earth, with angels travelling up and down it, and God at the top fully aware of Jacob’s demise. And in the worst state Jacob’s ever been in, that’s when God passes on the promise he made to Abraham to Jacob (28:13-14). 

It’s enough for Jacob to realize “the Lord is in this place” (16), so he calls that spot Bethel (19) meaning “house of God,” or when used of deity it meant “temple” – the place where heaven and earth come together, the place where God dwells, granting us humans access to him for all our needs, which is exactly what God promised Jacob, that “I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go” (15).

So God did this for Jacob at the lowest point in Jacob’s life, when his abysmal behaviour with Esau had caught up with him, and Jacob was a dead man in waiting. But here in Genesis 35:3 Jacob’s back in Bethel to build an altar to the God “who has been with me wherever I have gone.” God was now that real to him. 

Does God do the same for us, then? Yes, in Jesus. Jesus came down the stairway from heaven to earth to reveal God to us (John 17:6). He’s now the temple where heaven and earth come together (John 2:21), so it’s in him we have open access to God (Ephesians 3:12) and all the help we need in our “day of distress” too (Hebrews 4:16). So God’s still in the business of revealing himself to us humans, so in time he can become real to us too. Especially in “The reconciling spirit God gives us”….(next blog) 

God is mentioned many times as the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” so Jacob played a major part in God’s great scheme of things – but what did God do in Jacob’s life that means anything to us today? 

Well, for me, Jacob is an illuminating example of God making himself real gradually, because trust in God came slowly to Jacob. There were great swathes in his life spanning many years when it seemed as though God didn’t rate much at all in his mind. Like the fourteen years Jacob spent working for his uncle to finally “get Rachel” (Genesis 29:20, 27). No mention of God at all during those years, and no trusting God to sort out the mess with Laban either.  

Which is odd, because one chapter earlier God had made himself real to Jacob in a dream, and in it a wonderful promise that “I (God) am with you and will watch over you wherever you go….I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you,” Genesis 28:10-15.

And was God ever real to Jacob then, because on waking up “he thought, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place and I was not aware of it’” (16). “Not aware,” note, suggesting God really hadn’t been that real to Jacob so far. But he certainly was aware now, because “Jacob was afraid,” verse 17, “and said, ‘How awesome is this place. This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.’” It was suddenly very real to Jacob that God’s right here with us, and we can be with him. And he vowed there and then that “the Lord will be my God” (21). 

But how much did he then trust God to sort out his family woes, with his two wives competing for bearing his children (29:31 to 30:24) and each of them believing God was with them (Leah 30:20, and Rachel 30:23), while Jacob just bumbled along not involving God at all? 

Or so it seemed, because on his escape from Laban, Jacob tells his family that God “has been with me wherever I have gone” (35:3). So he did believe that God was involved.

His trust in God took on three forms, then: times when God wasn’t real at all, times when God was very real, and times when he knew God was always bubbling away in the background looking after him. Did God give us Jacob, then, to show us that growing in trust involves all three for us too? But also taking into account that “God revealed himself to Jacob” too….(next blog) 

What a mixture Jacob was. He knew, for instance, that contacting his brother Esau was highly risky because Esau had wanted to kill him back in Genesis 27:41-45. But Jacob was willing to take that risk, which was remarkably different for him, because so much of his life was about conniving for his own benefit. 

But Esau was coming to meet him with four hundred men, which filled Jacob with “fear and distress,” Genesis 32:6-7. And Esau himself was no pushover either. He’d fit in very nicely at a Scottish Highland games – and look the red hairy part too – flinging telephone poles and hammers around. 

But Jacob did a very different thing again, because instead of depending on his own wits to wrestle his way through a difficult situation, this time he cried out to God in verse 11, “Save me, I pray, from the hand of my brother, for I am afraid he will come and attack me, and also the mothers with their children.”  

At this point in his life, then – “Wrestle or rest – which was it to be?” – he’d chosen “rest.” He was going to trust God. 

But, being Jacob, it would include a strategy of his own too. He came up with the idea of “pacifying” Esau (20) by sending him a sizeable gift of “two hundred female goats and twenty males, two hundred ewes and twenty rams, thirty female camels and their young, forty cows and ten bulls, and twenty female donkeys and ten males” (14). 

But not all at once. Jacob instructed his servants to keep each of the five large herds separate from the others, so as Esau got closer each herd would be introduced to him in waves as a gift from Jacob, each wave designed to soften Esau up (17-21). It was an elaborate operation involving a lot of mental wrestling. 

Imagine Jacob’s embarrassment, then, when “Esau ran up to meet him and threw his arms round Jacob’s neck” –  not to throttle him, but in a happy and emotional embrace (33:4). So Jacob could have totally rested in God, spared himself all that worry – and not given away five hundred of his animals too. 

But in difficult situations what do any of us do? When it comes to wrestling or resting, perhaps Jacob’s story is ours too? Taking note too, though, that in these situations “Jacob’s trust in God grew”….(next blog)

Every time an Israelite rested on the Sabbath Day it pictured GOD doing all the work of making him holy (Exodus 31:13). But instead of trusting God to make them holy, the Israelites ‘did a Jacob’ and “sought to establish their own righteousness” by their own means and effort (Romans 10:3). We learn from the story of Israel, then, that keeping the Sabbath-rest – by trusting GOD to fulfill his purpose in us – isn’t easy, and the writer of Hebrews 4:11 echoes that when he writes, “Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest.” 

So that’s where our human struggle lies: It’s putting our entire life in trust to God, rather than taking things into our own hands like Jacob. And it’s a struggle all right, because situations keep cropping up that tempt us to ‘do a Jacob’ – even when we know God is always here to help us (Philippians 4:13, 19). 

It wasn’t easy for Jacob later in his life either, because even after he realized he’d actually seen “God face to face” in his wrestling match (Genesis 32:30), he still got anxious fourteen chapters later in Genesis 46:3 when faced with uprooting his entire family of 70 people and heading off to Egypt. But God promised to be with him, verse 4, and this time Jacob trusted him. 

But even though God promises to be with us, it can still be a real struggle believing it. It was a struggle for much of Jacob’s life too, just as it was for Ephraim in Hosea 12, and for the entire nation of Israel all through its history. They all resorted to prevailing with God and man by their own ways and means, rather than trusting God to sort things out. They preferred wrestling to resting.

According to the writer of Hebrews, though, there’s only one wrestling match we’re involved in, and that’s the one in our own heads. When we “make every effort” to enter God’s rest, it’s by steeling our minds to trust our great high priest to help us in our time of need (Hebrews 4:14-16). When tempted to take things into our own hands in scary situations, or in our upsets with people, or being anxious about anything, it’s to him that we turn. 

Because that’s the moral of the story of Jacob and Israel. It was written for our sakes too, and the choice is still the same: “Wrestle or rest – which is to be?”….(next blog) 

So here was Stephen in Acts 6:8, “a man full of God’s grace and power,” about to be stoned to death by members of a Jewish synagogue, with the approval of a top-ranking Jewish religious leader called Saul (8:1). So, what began with Jacob centuries ago had created a monster like Saul, who could justify killing a man who was so obviously sent by God.  

But how was that possible? Well, according to the writer of Hebrews 3:12 it was Israel’s “unbelieving heart” that did it; that’s what “turned them away from the living God” and made them constantly resist him. 

Unlike Abraham – who simply “believed the Lord” (Genesis 15:6) – Jacob’s descendants relied instead on their own ways and means of solving their problems. But look where it got them: Ephraim (descendant of Jacob) was “multiplying lies and violence” in Hosea 12, just like the Jewish synagogue was doing against Stephen, and now we’ve got Saul condoning the murder of a godly man. Seventeen hundred years down the road from Jacob the Jews were a fearful, angry, confused mess.  

Clearly, then, God orchestrated this entire story of Israel and its endless wrestling match with him to show us ALL where it takes us. It takes us to the same place it took Israel, Hebrews 3:11, where God “declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest’” – which is obviously something really bad, but what does it mean?       

Well, in Hebrews 4:3, it’s those “who have believed who enter that rest.” Belief is the key. Belief in what, though? It is the belief, verse 4, that “on the seventh day God rested from all his work,” because, verse 10, “anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his.”  

To enter God’s rest it involves resting like God rested on the seventh day of creation, in clear contrast to wrestling against him, which began with Jacob and continued all through Israel’s history. But it identified what a struggle it is for us humans to trust (or rest in) God. Our human history, pictured by Israel, has always been about wrestling versus resting.

Fortunately, Hebrews 4:9, “There remains a Sabbath-rest for the people of God,” so the opportunity is still open for us to rest and not wrestle. But, verse 11, “It takes every effort to enter God’s rest”….(next blog)