Clough Genesis Lesson 74
The frustrations in Jacob’s home and on the job – Genesis 30
Before we continue with out Genesis studies
I have two feedback cards: (1) In reference to languages on the Sunday morning
special, please consider 1 Corinthians
Another feedback card: in Genesis 29 how could Jacob not know it was Leah until morning? Some people are interested in language and other people are interested in other things. All I can say in response to that is the words of a professor at seminary who was asked the very same question and he gave basically three answers: one was the women in those days wore lots of robes; two, they had a real good party before the wedding night; and three, there were no nightlights in those days. In all seriousness, the Scripture simply doesn’t say; we leave that to your sanctified, or unsanctified, imagination.
Let’s turn to Genesis 30. As we have stated in previous times in this
section on Genesis, we’re looking at a section of Scripture that must be viewed
in the overall context of the progress of revelation and in so doing we have to
plug the details of the story together into a coherent theme that lasts for
some time and get a big picture on it; otherwise we just get lost in the
details. The basic thing to do is to
realize that all these stories we’re reading about, with the problems and the
sins of the people and this, that and the other thing, all this that we’re
reading about basically has to do, to show us of what kind of people will the
kingdom of God be made. Now always it’s
our human desire to say well, we need perfect people for a perfect
kingdom. Only one problem—the only kinds
of people that don’t make mistakes today are dead ones. So therefore we don’t have perfect
people. Well, obviously what God is
trying to tell us loudly and clearly is that to have His kingdom He’s got to
work with imperfect sinners and this is why we have in these stories all kinds
of very much real life problems, rebellion, hassles and all the rest. It’s to be real. And before God can make the
We said that throughout this long period of time, from Genesis 12 through Genesis 50, three themes come up again and again and again and again and again. One theme is the theme of God’s election, that God sovereignly chooses what kind of a kingdom He is going to have and He sovereignly chooses who He is going to have in the kingdom. Why is that? We can say because God it designed it the way he wants it, not the way we want it. It is not up to us. God does not sit down and sort of negotiate a kingdom with us; He rather tells us first what the kingdom will be and then He works with us to get that kind of kingdom. So the first thing, it is God’s design, not man’s design.
A second theme that occurs again and again and again and again in all these stories is the theme of justification. And what does that mean? It means the moral basis of the kingdom is God’s own righteousness. It’s not human good; human good isn’t strong enough, it isn’t deeply rooted enough to carry the force necessary to keep the kingdom together and so therefore God gives His own righteousness. Nothing else would allow us to have fellowship with Him.
The third theme that runs through all of these stories again and again and again is the theme of faith; the kind of people that wind up in the people are the kind of people not perfect people, not sinless people, but people who are at least willing to look to God and look to Him for solutions to their problems. Those are the kind of people God wants, grace oriented believers.
Now if you turn back to Genesis 28:12-15 we’ll review again because verses 12-15 form the theological groundwork underneath these stories. All the stories and everything that happens in the stories must be understood in the light of these basic critical promises. What are these promises? Verse 12, “And he dreamed, and behold…” a stone stairway; that stone stairway shows accessibility between heaven and earth; mediation; “the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God constantly,” it’s a participle, “constantly ascending and constantly descending on it. [13] And, behold, the LORD stood above it, and said, I am the LORD, the God of Abraham and Isaac,” and He reaffirms the Abrahamic Covenant as the groundwork for His whole kingdom. Then in verse 15 He gives s promise, “I am with thee, and I will keep thee in all places where you go, and I will bring you again into this land,” so what He does, He takes the large scale kingdom promise and because it’s such a large scale promise it’s comprehensive enough so that it can be applied to particular things in their lives and one of the particular things is if Jacob leaves the land and he goes somewhere else, what guarantee does he have that he’s ever going to get back? What guarantee does he have that God is going to do His thing and keep him secure and bless him? The ground he has is because Jacob figures in a bigger plan and if the bigger plan is secure than all the parts in the smaller sub plan are also secure. This is reasoning from the greater to the lesser.
We said last week in Genesis 29, which is a follow on story to 28:12-15, 29 and 30 are the two major stories. There are more but these are the two we are studying. In Genesis 29 we found a story that was addressed mainly to women because it was a story that showed women how, in the middle of very, very great pressure, looked at from the female point of view, this is how God works. Today in Genesis 30 we’re going to see the opposite; Genesis 30 is primarily directed to men and the kinds of pressures a man faces. In Genesis 29 we saw Leah trapped in a bad family situation, trapped in a bad marriage situation, and what did God do? Did He do like 20th century people, because we have a bad situation we bust the situation, break out, divorce, smash the home and so on. No! That’s not the way God handled it. We saw, much to our amazement, in Genesis 29:35 that when Leah had her fourth son and she finally came to the point of calling Judah, for Judah, apparently comes from the word “Yahweh I praise,” when she finally got down to this point we have affirmed God’s program in sanctifying that woman. And it was to keep her within, what even today is called, the family circle. Her location was here, not outside. The solution wasn’t to leave the family circle, the solution was to stay in the family circle and therein be sanctified.
Now the reason that is so hard, one of the reasons that this is so hard for a
modern woman to take is because it’s so easy to leave the family circle. So that one understands what I’m trying to
say here, let’s visualize a totally different society than the one we live in
and then let’s test the principle. Let’s
suppose we live in a very pioneer type situation; the kind of situation that
existed in these parts of the country 150-200 years ago. Let’s visualize in that kind of society, or
in the Alaskan oil rush type situation, up in the far, far northern area, or
maybe Israel in 1948, 47, 46, in these great pioneer areas is there any room
for women? Really, basically only one
kind of woman—the prostitute. There is
no room for any other kind of woman for the simple reason there is no stability
in the society to protect that woman. There’s no kind of a structured
environment in which she can have her children and raise the family and improve
the home. In other words, the woman,
when we get right down to the basic of all basics, physical survival, eating
and surviving the next 24 hours, that’s not the environment for the woman. The environment in which the woman lives and
flourishes and is nourished is when the family is able to exist. And that involves more than just a simply
pioneer situation. Women cannot live out
in a real truly pioneer situation the victim of gangs of men. That’s just not the place for the woman. So basically when looked at from the most
elementary level, physical survival, even though it may be bad inside the
family circle it’s a lot better bad inside the family circle than being a lone
woman outside the family circle with no order whatsoever. So if one were to take that choice one can
see why it is that God reverts and keeps the woman in the situation.
This is hard because in our own day there is a demand, legitimately in some areas, for recognition of human rights for women. However, this kind of situation is making the male/female roles identical and there’s a certain fallout. Just two weeks ago the Supreme Court knocked out in 21 states alimony; certain states in the union had the law that when a divorce occurs, not only does the husband give child support payments to his exwife, but also he must support her. This has been knocked out as discriminating against the individual male. And so as we come more and more into the identity role, some of those who championed the feminist movement are going to discover what kind of a monster they’ve been championing; it’s not going to turn out to be the nice thing they thought; it’s going to turn out to be a little education in some basic realities of life.
God knows those basic realities and though
it seems bad that Leah had to stay inside the family circle where she wasn’t
appreciated, nevertheless, it was better than throwing her outside the family
circle. Genesis 29:35 tells us God’s
sanctification program to that kind of a frustrated woman and that is He will
bring, miraculously if necessary, means, purpose and happiness into her life in
the situation, not out of the situation.
Moreover, in verse 35 this woman, who is truly suffering, who is truly
up against it, the worst, emotionally speaking, that a woman could face, as she
is up against it notice what else; she is the mother of the Messianic line,
Judah. No other woman in that household,
and today we meet a few others, no other woman in that household bore the role
of being mother to the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of the
Lord. In heaven Leah at least can look
back on her life on earth and say yes, my marriage was a hell; yes, the home in
which I lived was a hell, but one thing, I had the privilege and the
opportunity of being mother to one of the forerunners of the Lord Jesus Christ;
for that I give thanks and that alone made my life worth living. That’s how God works in that kind of a bad
situation.
Now let’s go to Genesis 30 and watch how God works in the life of a frustrated man. When we go from chapter 29 to chapter 30 we go from the female role to the male role and we have to shift gears and go into some different imagery so that we do so let’s review a few things. What is the basic male image in the Scripture? The basic male image in the Scripture is dominion man. The man, as he is seen in the Scriptures, is always ruler; he is never the fawning, whimpering little thing of poetry. He is always dominion. That is God’s model, dominion man. It comes from Genesis 1:26-30; that is the basic male model of Scripture. That breaks down into certain associated models. One on the associated models or images is patriarchal man; this is very, very strong at this point in Genesis. Patriarchal man means patre, father, arche, rules. Daddy ruler, father ruler, and this is elementary as far as it is understood in the Scripture, that for a man his role is to rule his home in a godly way.
Another sub image associated with this is the productive man, the laboring man. As I said in the earlier service the tragedy is that the laboring man today, his imagery was stolen from the Christian system by the communist party. It’s sad to say but the idea of the cycle and the hammer that we associate with communism; those are the two basic tools of man. Look at it again; the cycle, that’s the basic tool of agriculture, it’s dominion man. Look at the hammer, that’s the basic symbol of man building his buildings and his cities. And so it’s the communists who have been quite sensitive to this while the Christians have ignored it, and here the communists are right; that does define, the hammer and the cycle are profound symbols and if a person was a sincere communist they would understand this. They would understand they don’t see conspiracy in that set of symbols; that set of symbols connotes labor, it connotes what they would consider godly labor, though they don’t believe in God but profound high class labor; labor in other words itself is something profound.
These are biblical basic images of man and no man, and here’s the corollary to all this introduction; no man can be a happy man unless this takes place. The sexual playboy, the sex athlete who hops from bed to bed from night to night is not basically a happy man and never will be simply because he’s not fulfilling this role, the role of being a patriarch and the role of being a laboring man. Those lesser things simply don’t satisfy the male at his deepest level. At his deepest level he satisfies this way and only this way because this is the way the man was designed.
What else do we know about men and their roles in the Scripture? We know the way the fall affects the man; the fall affects the man in a profoundly different way than it affects the woman. The woman is affected chiefly in childbearing and child-rearing. The man is affected most with his labor, that’s what Genesis 3 says, in the sweat of his brow shall a man be affected in his labor. As he tries to subdue, as dominion man, the rebellious earth that rebels under his feet as he rebelled against God under whom he is, that man is a frustrated man and he constantly works to develop against this pressure and this frustration. It’s interesting in looking at men, where their marriages tend to be weak, or where their marriages are falling apart, or where you begin to see a family crumble, I would say nine times out of ten if you look very carefully you will see the crumbling process began at an earlier point, not in the home, it began outside of the home in that man’s inability or lack of ability or something to generally rule his environment, to generally conduct his labor correctly. Frustrated out there, perhaps defeated in many, many areas out there, these were brought back into the home and gradually, like a bomb, blew up inside the home situation too. There’s an intimate connection between a male and his labor and what’s going on everywhere else in his life.
What are some prominent male models of the Scripture that we’ve looked at so far in Genesis, because Jacob is going to be one of those models. Adam is one the great male models of all time. If we could look at Adam an instant after his creation we’d see a male in all of his glory; that was Adam. He was the perfect man; and Adam was the dominion man, domino par excellence, because Adam was the head of all the family of man. Adam was over all others; Adam was father of every single member of the human race. There is a patriarch that beats all patriarchs—that was Adam. So Adam summarizes in his person the fatherhood of man; the male is the father.
Another man in the Scriptures that we studied in Genesis is Cain. Cain is also an important male model because it teaches a lot about the sin nature of the male. Cain was the man who defied and rebelled against God in the area… notice, not of his marriage, of his labor. Cain did not want to do what God wanted him to do. He would not bring what God wanted him to bring; he would not cooperate with God’s authority over his labor and therefore he was a rebellious man. And as a rebellious man how did the fallout affect him? Cain is the male model of a nomad, he’s a wanderer and the male who hops from this place to that place, unsettled in one job after another, never can settle into anything, just constantly hopping from one place to the next, could be a son of Cain, a person who carries “the mark of Cain” as it were; one who because he defies what God wants him to do in the central core of his life never can get it together at any other point in his life. And when finally he does get it together, what does he do? Like Cain he builds an autonomous city, builds walls around it and says here God, You come and You get me because I’ve built my own autonomous platform of security and I dare you… I dare you to intervene and influence my life. That’s Cain, it’s awesome but it’s man’s, the male particularly and his streak of rebelliousness and how it shows up.
Then another male model from this portion of the text is Noah. Noah forms another male model because Noah so adequately ruled; not perfectly, but he adequately ruled that out of his family an entire civilization could be born. Out of Noah and his home God built this world so Noah is a patriarchal man also.
Now we come to Genesis 30 and Jacob. And of what male model is Jacob? Jacob is the model of a male who is the hard persevering worker in the face of adversity. That’s something that isn’t often used because it’s not glamorous; he’s not the big championing hero like David, marching under a crown, marching before the troops. That’s not Jacob. Jacob has less glory but nevertheless is as much a male model as David because he’s the man that keeps on keeping on when he has all sorts of problems.
Genesis 30 is divided into two parts; verses 1-24 deals with the frustrations of Jacob in his home. And Genesis 30:25 through the end of the chapter deals with Jacob’s frustration on the job, the two chief areas of frustration: one at home, two, on the job. Let’s look at his struggle at home.
Genesis 30:1, “And when Rachel saw that she bore no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die. [2] And Jacob’s anger was kindled against Rachel: and he said, Am I in God’s place, God who has withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? [3] And she said, Behold my maid, Bilhah; to in unto her, and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her. [4] And she gave him Bilhah, her handmaid, as his wife; and Jacob went in unto her. [5] And Bilhah conceived, and bore Jacob a son.” And it goes on to the various sons that were born. [6] And Rachel said, God hath judged me, and hath also heard my voice, and hath given me a son: therefore she called his name Dan. [7] And Bilhah, Rachel’s maid, conceived again, and bore Jacob a second son. [8] And Rachel said, With great wrestlings have I wrestled with my sister, and I have prevailed: and she called his name Naphtali.”]
In verse 9, “When Leah saw that she had ceased bearing, she took Zilpah, her maid, maid, and gave her Jacob as his wife. [10] And Zilpah, Leah’s maid, bore Jacob a son,” and so on. [11, “And Leah said, Good fortune! And she called his name Gad. [12] And Zilpah, Leah’s maid, bore Jacob a second son. [13] And Leah said, Happy am I, for the daughters will call me blessed: and she called his name Asher.”]
And it goes on to the war of the two sisters. Now this war that has been going on in this home, this is one area that’s deeply frustrating to Jacob. Here’s the real male; here’s not the Sunday School sugar-coated image of a man, not that fakey pious image of a man. Here is a man in a real life situation. And what he thought was a good home hasn’t turned into a very good home. And now he has the two sisters; he has Leah, the elder sister and he has Rachel, the younger sister. And we have a sister/sister rivalry that’s tearing this home apart, and Jacob, frankly, as we look at this chapter and watch his actions, he is passive to the sister/sister rivalry. He allows himself to be maneuvered by the sister/sister rivalry. The women are the ones who are in the driver’s seat and Jacob just simply can’t get control of the situation in his own home, and that very frequently happens. So watch him, men; here’s a man facing a real living situation.
In verse 1 we notice that the situation of chapter 29 has not been resolved. The sisters still are going at each other’s throat. The rivalry that was built up all during the time when they were little girls, growing up together, now continues because they’re married and in the same house together. And where is that rivalry? The rivalry here. Here’s Leah, the older one and because she couldn’t married in her earlier life, so she blocked Rachel; Rachel was always seeing herself as being blocked by her older sister and so she began to resent her older sister; mental attitude sin crept in and they were nourished and nourished and became extremely strong. And so you had this great, great sister/sister rivalry. And so finally Leah is married off, as we saw, in some sort of a scheme and then Rachel comes in and they’re still together. Now, interesting, at the end of this struggle that Leah had, Genesis 29:35, God had gotten her to a place, spiritually, where she was looking only at Him. Leah, in other words, had made spiritual progress in chapter 29; sadly in this chapter she falls back. Sadly, there’s a backsliding that goes on here and why? Because the same situation has not been drastically dealt with, the sisters go at it again and the +R learned behavior pattern that was just beginning to get started in Leah’s life now is destroyed and she reverts back to her old pattern of rivalry.
And then Genesis 30:1 says something else. We have the second woman come on scene, Rachel and chapter 30 features her in a stronger way than Leah. In verse 1 Rachel comes and she’s angry and she’s mad and she comes up to Jacob and she calls out, “Give me children, or I die.” Now it’s interesting that that’s attack against Jacob because I want you to see chapter 30 from the male’s eye. We were very careful to view chapter 29 from the female’s eye, but try to visualize this from the man’s point of view. Here he is, he walks in, and bang, he gets hit with Rachel.
Now what does she hit him with? As women often do when they’re angry, she does two things; basically irrational, and two, she exaggerates. Let’s watch. Verse 1, “give me children,” now that’s interesting. It’s as though Jacob is the one who’s infertile. Wait a minute, that can’t be; he’s already produced four sons. So Jacob is not the problem Hon, it’s Rachel that’s got the problem. But because she reacts, she’s angry, she says you, you’re the fault, give me children. Wrong! And then the second thing, “or I die;” now apart from self-inflicted injury, women had died from many things but I have yet to hear one die because they didn’t have a baby. And so this is a little exaggeration. What she’s saying is she’s mad, but she’s not going to die tomorrow if she doesn’t have a baby tomorrow; no way unless, as I say, this is an implication of suicide. So here she is, angry, irrational, and she exaggerates.
And so what does Jacob do? Like all men, he gets mad; this is the counter reaction; a very realistic text. When the woman is out of control, he gets out of control and so he reacts, “Am I in God’s place, who has withheld from thee the fruit of the womb?” Now Jacob does one thing good and one thing bad in verse 2. We obviously see the one thing bad, he’s mad and he says it in such a way that he turns her off and she doesn’t pay attention to what he’s trying to say. And it’s true that men seem to have more problems in communicating these kinds of situations than women; the classical picture of the man at the supper table behind the newspaper. Well what happened today honey? Um, hmm, ah, um, and he’s trying to say something but it just doesn’t seem to come across and so he has an inordinately poor skill at communicating what he really wants to communicate. Well, that’s Jacob. He knows what he wants to say. Do you know what he really wants to say in verse 2? We can’t be dogmatic but yet it seems to be clear; he’s trying to lead her spiritually because what he’s trying to say in verse 2, I am not in God’s place and God is the One who has withheld you from bearing, now lady get your spiritual stuff together and get straightened out with the Lord. Your problem isn’t with me, it’s with God. Now that’s what he’s trying to say but because of the way he says it, because he’s so mad and because he yells at her, a little thing comes down and he could tell that Christ died for her sins and everything else on down the theological spectrum from A to Z and she has no longer ears to hear because she’s shut off her hearing device. She’s turned it off, because her husband’s mad at her today and she’s not going to listen to anything he says; that’s jus the way it’s going to be.
So she doesn’t listen to anything he says and she’s still not listening at the end of verse 24 to what he’s trying to say. She does not follow his spiritual lead; his spiritual lead is potentially in verse 2 but it’s executed poorly; she fails to grab it and the result is a disaster. And I’ll show you, at point after point in this marriage where, if she only followed what Jacob was trying to tell her in verse 2, she’d be much happier and so would he. But here, these first 24 verses, is a biography of a man facing struggle in his home situation.
We go on and she comes up with this maid
idea; same brilliant scheme cooked up by Sarah that generated a nation hostile
to the nation
So now we have the maids get involved and before it’s all over, here’s one man, Jacob and he’s hopping from one bed to another bed to another bed, he’s got four of them he’s got to keep satisfied. Gentlemen, you have problems with one, how’d you like to have four? Multiply your troubles four times, now can you sympathize with Jacob. So he’s catching it, by the end of verse 24, from four different women; squabbling all among themselves of who’s going to do what, when and how and where, and where our position is, all competing against him. Do you see how this saps his energy in this situation? Then in verse 25 he goes out and he’s got a worse problem on the job. I just point this out to you so you can identify with Jacob.
Let’s look at some details; it gets down to Genesis 30:14 and Rachel comes up
with another cute one. This involves the
mandrakes. Let’s look at this. “And Reuben went in the days of wheat
harvest, and found mandrakes in the field, and brought them unto his mother
Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah, Give me,
I pray thee, of thy son’s mandrakes.
[15] And she said unto her, Is it a small matter that you have taken my
husband? And would you take away my
son’s mandrakes also? And Rachel said,
Therefore he shall lie with you tonight for your son’s mandrakes.” She makes a deal. [16] “Then Jacob comes in out of the field in
the evening,” just to face the latest conspiracy of what the women are
planning, “and Leah went out to meet him, and said, Thou must come in unto me;
for surely I have hired thee with my son’s mandrakes. And he lay with her that night. [17] And God
hearkened unto Leah, and she conceived, and bore Jacob the fifth son. [18] And Leah said, God has given me my hire
because I have given my maiden to my husband: and she called his name
Issachar. [19] And Leah conceived again,
and bore Jacob his sixth son. [20] And
Leah said, God hath endued me with a good dowry; now will my husband dwell with
me,” see, she’s right back with the insecurity problem that she had back in
chapter 29, “because I have born him six sons: and she called his name
Zebulun. [21] And afterwards she bore a
daughter, and called her name Dinah.
[22] And God remembered Rachel, and God hearkened to her, and opened her
womb. [23] And she conceived, and bore a
son: and said, God has taken away my reproach: [24] And she called his name
Joseph; and said, The LORD shall add to me another son.”
What’s all this talking about? How do mandrakes get involved in this? Mandrakes are supposedly a fertility inducing gimmick of the ancient world; not only was it an aphrodisiac, it was also to increase fertility. And it was one of these little sexual gimmicks and she used it because she thought that was the solution. She’s still not tracking with verse 2 yet; she never does, she gets all the way down to verse 24 and she’s still out of it, but God is gracious. But at this point she thinks she’s going to do her little thing. What happened? She makes the deal at the end of verse 15 and to get hold of the mandrakes she has to say okay, you can make love to Leah tonight. All right, so who’s conceiving all during these verses? Notice in verse 17, notice in verse 19, so if you keep the scorecard at the nursery, it’s running 8 to 2 in favor of Leah. And this is the story of that home, keeping a scorecard on the number of points we’ve got.
And finally, on down toward the end, verse 22, “God remembered Rachel, and He hearkened to her, and opened her womb.” And the way the text is written hearkened means he listens to her complaining but you never really find in the text itself any pause where Rachel said, well Lord, what is the trouble, where she finally took the spiritual initiative to try to resolve the problem. You don’t find that in the text so we conclude in verse 22, though she may have griped to God, she basically never really got it straight with God and what you have is God being super gracious to this woman. Her husband has tried to say something, he mumbled something in verse 2 and she turned him off, and then she tried her mandrake gimmick in verse 14, that didn’t work, all it happened was that the other girl increased her score by two and she was still back to zero basically. Nothing’s worked yet so God says all right, this poor girl down here is really having a problem so we’ll give her one. And then as soon as God gives her one son what does she do? She names him Joseph, which comes from the Hebrew word “give me another one.” So still she’s out of it at the end of verse 24. Both of these women, because of this age-long sister rivalry that’s going on are creating war in Jacob’s house, right under his nose.
Now God is so concerned about this matter in polygamous marriages of sister/sister that He takes steps to stop it once and for all. Turn to Leviticus 18:18 and you’ll see a provision in the Mosaic Law Code that forbade, under a polygamous society of a man marrying two sisters. “Neither shall thou take a wife to her sister, to vex her, to uncover her nakedness, beside the other in her lifetime.” So this caused so much turmoil in that house that God was not going to have this happen again. And so He decreed in the Mosaic Law that this would never occur again; and that’s the arising of part of the list from Leviticus 18.
Now, how are we to summarize the first 24 verses of chapter 30? Here we’ve got the frustrated man who can’t get control of his house and he’s angry, he’s frustrated, he’s got four women here all going after him for something. And in the situation we see painted very realistically the kind of clod God uses to grow His vineyard on. And that’s the story. You see, this can’t come except by election; this can’t come except by God’s grace. How else do you work with people like this? Only if you’ve got a very, very good plan and lots and lots of patience, and that’s the story of how the kingdom gets started. People very pietistically like to tut-tut and a condescend attitude to passages of Scripture like this, look at these jerks in the Old Testament. Are they really any different from us? Not at all. This is exactly the kind of people we are and so therefore the reason I think people like to tut-tut and tee-hee about passages of Scripture like this is because they don’t like it; they don’t like what it’s really saying, that God uses these kinds of awful situations and doesn’t always rescue people out of them. You see, in Genesis 29 Leah was left in the situation and in this chapter the man is left in the situation. Not only one situation but two situations, because now after getting this at the front door, four women boom, boom, boom, boom, just the moment he walks through the door, now what has he got to do? He goes out to the job and he’s got a worse situation there, beginning in verse 25.
Now he works for a company, a ranching outfit, and the president is Laban. And Laban’s one of these guys that’s a very efficient manager in the sense that he will squeeze the last ounce of work out of his workers, and if they are paid that’s incidental. So in Genesis 30:25, “And it came to pass, when Rachel had borne Joseph, that Jacob said unto Laban, Send me away, that I may go unto my own place, and to my own country. [26] Give me my wives and my children, for whom I have served you, and let me go; for you know my service which I have done to you.” Now this shows something interesting about the life production cycle of the man and it’s one that’s being interfered with in our society. But watch. Jacob here is 95, don’t let that [can’t understand word], that’s equivalent to, say 55 today, under the longevity curve problem; all this time, for 20 years, seven years he was working as a single man, generating some capital, enough to get married on, then he got married and so far he’s been living there close to 13 years. During those 13 years he’s had 11 kids so somebody was pregnant all the time. But the whole thing was that for those 20 years he really wasn’t a full-scale producing man.
I think since Jacob’s a model of the productive male we can learn something about it. All these years of living you’re basically forming your family unit and you’re basically getting some wealth together to make that unit go, but the real production doesn’t come until the children themselves get to productive age, hence the idea of the patriarchal image. So under that society here’s the man and he has his sons and his sons get to the age where they’re producing. And this is where the man, then, gets his wealth. He gets it because of his son’s production that expand on him. Now you say well what right is that because we think so much after the individualistic autonomous Greek idea of the democracy, this is very hard stuff to digest. So that’s why I’m spending a lot of time trying to go through some of these texts with you so you’ll wash out a lot of this individualistic human viewpoint you’ve acquired and you think it’s Christian. It’s not. It’s soundly anti-Christian. The reason the patriarchal society works and why it is right for the father to live off the wealth of his sons in this way, partly at least, is because who is the one who gave wisdom to the son? You see, the capital was given to the sons in intangible things as well as tangible things. And if the father did his job correctly, he not only would give his sons physical monetary wealth but he would also input character into his sons and he would input wisdom into his sons. Character and wisdom and money make more money. And so the wealth that is happening out off in the future actually is built on the investment of daddy in his son.
So here’s a man today in our own age who really isn’t mass producing until he’s 45 or 50. Only when a man gets that age does he really begin to see the fruits of long-term investment. Only at that age does he see the results of 20 years of slugging it out on a day by day basis, working with the home, working with all the frustrations, and so forth. So what happens in our society? When do most divorces happen? 45-50. So we fracture the family unit right smack dab at the place where the wealth ought to be maxing out. And so we have a tremendous destruction of production in our particular American culture. And that’s why you can look at the statistics today, everybody’s worried about inflation, and one of the corollaries is in an inflating economy one of the ways to put a brake on it is increased production per unit individual, and ours is dropping. The average production in our society today is not even what it was 9 years ago. We are losing the battle because each one of us is producing less and less proportionally speaking. Why? That has something to do with it. Unless you have patriarchal type families you do not have high production. And there are many reasons which I’ve mentioned from the pulpit, inheritance taxes and so on, that produce this.
Now what Jacob does is he wants to go in
verses 25-26 and break out, now that he’s at this kind of equivalent age, he’s
getting his clan together and he wants to do his own thing. So he requests independence. This begins the economic basis of the
So Jacob wants to negotiate the contract in Genesis 30:27, Jacob incidentally, the King James says [And Laban said unto him, I pray thee, if I have found favor in thine eyes, tarry], for I have learned by experience,” it’s not really experience, the Hebrew word there means for divination. So not only is he bad boss, not only is he kind of a rip off artist, but he’s also into occultism, demonism. So Jacob would have, from the human point of view, lots of reasons for not working with this guy. And yet… and yet verse 28-30, Jacob works within the system. Now that takes a lot of dedication. You don’t find Jacob throwing the whole thing out and going somewhere else as though his happiness as a man depended completely on his employment situation. His happiness as a man depended on his appropriation of Genesis 28:15, a promise I showed you when we started today, “I will be with you wherever you are,” even if you’ve hired underneath that nitwit Laban. Even there, God says, I will be with you.
So Jacob says all right, I’ll work with the situation, I’ll work within the form. That doesn’t mean a guy can’t walk off and change jobs. I’m just saying the emphasis in the Scripture is the continuity principle; stay where you are as much as possible. Make the solution as conservative as possible. Notice again as the negotiations for wages takes place in Genesis 30:28-30 you don’t find him running out to the nearest independent shepherds union to see if we can call a strike to bring pressure to bear on labor. It is an individually negotiated contract with Laban, not a group negotiated contract. [And he said, Appoint me thy wages, and I will give it. [29] And he said unto him, You know how I have served you, and how thy cattle was with me. [30] For it was little which you had before I came, and it is now increased unto a multitude; and the LORD has blessed thee since my coming: and now when shall I provide for my own house also?”]
Moreover, in verse 31 Laban asks a critical
question of Jacob. This is the key to
everything else when we’re talking about spotted goats and we’re talking about
sticks in the water and everything else and it does get kind of complicated on
down through here, but I’ll try to get
you through because I want you to see there’s some fantastic principles
for men in this passage. In verse 31 it
starts out by saying what am I going to give you? This is a patronizing attitude, what am I going to give you. And here Jacob is a believer and he knows God
has called him to produce and so therefore his point is not pride but his point
if my life is a testimony to the Lord, then God is going to clearly bless me in
certain ways and it’s not going to be a clear testimony to have my life
dependent upon the setup of an unbeliever.
And so Jacob cuts off the suggestion of verse 31 and he rejects it in
the negotiating process; he refuses to accept a gift from a non-Christian. Now he borrows things from the non-Christian
and he does other things in the relationship but he does not accept gifts from
the non-Christian. Same principle
observed in church history; this business of religious organizations dunning
people for money through the mail and they don’t even know whether the people who
are asking are Christians is blasphemous.
It’s a religious con game that goes on and thousands and millions of
people are being sucked off billions of dollars in this country. And of course the IRS and other people are
into and it’s going to create a big problem on down in the future. But here Jacob rejects charity from
non-Christian. And Jacob said you will
not give me anything because this is the founding capital of the
I think I can speed things up here if I tell you what he proposes. Here’s Laban’s flock. In that flock he has various kinds of animals. The two kinds that concern us in this story are the ones with a clear colored skin, that means they’re all black, they’re all brown, they’re all white, and those that were spotted. Now why this is so and what the problem is, it apparently has something to do with the market value of the skins, that is, the goatskins and others were used for clothes and it would have cost more, these head here would have gotten more on the market because not only the meat but because the skins were used, so they’d command a higher price. So what Jacob proposes to do is he is going to develop a herd of the spotted, less valuable cattle. In other words, he sets himself clearly at an economic disadvantage because of his faith in the overpowering omnipotence of God. So he sits here and he says look Laban, I’ll make a deal with you; I want to start my own herd. Now I’m going to start the herd with you having all the advantages because what I’m going to do is I want you to take your cruise through the herd and you get rid of all these and that’s where this thing is where they take them and they move them off three days journey away. So he takes out, cuts out of the herd all the cattle that have spotted coats, spotted skins, moves them out, puts a three day barrier between them so there can’t be any interbreeding, leaving only the clear herd left. Well Laban thinks that’s a pretty cool idea, that stupid jerk, he’s going to try to build a herd out of clear cattle; now that’s really smart, that’s a deal I like. And so he thinks that’s pretty good and agrees to it.
But Jacob, I said, was the picture of the man who was an excellent productive persevering male. Turn to 1 Kings 4 and I’ll show you another one; I take you to this place because this is critical that you notice what’s going on with these men. This, I am convinced, is where a man has his most deep relationships with God. If it is true that the male is designed to be dominion man and to reign in the creation and he is a shepherd or he’s a professor or he’s a scientist or he’s an artist or he’s something somewhere in the creation, then he’s got a hunk of the universe that’s his domain, that God has asked him to rule. It may be repairing stuff, it may be building stuff, it may be creating stuff, it may be taking stuff down, but that’s his turf, that’s his place, his niche. Now if God has called a man to do that, doesn’t it follow that that’s the place where the man is going to develop his relationship to God most?
Now observe 1 Kings 4:29, here’s Solomon,
the picture of the male wise man, and in verse 29, “And God gave Solomon wisdom
and understanding exceedingly much, largeness of heart, [even as the sand that
is on the seashore. [30] And Solomon’s wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the
children of the east country, and all the wisdom of
In other words, where Solomon had a profound relationship to God as a man was he was over here and he says God, now You’ve taught me to reign, now You show me God everything there is to know about this area of the universe; this is my area of the universe and I want You to be my teacher and I want You to show me all the things that are there because I’m excited about this, the creation shows Your handiwork. And so he gets really into his job because there are lots of things to learn on that job and Solomon learns it so well that in the Song of Songs what happens when he dates the future queen? He takes her out and she’s amazed that Solomon can say do you see that bird, the [sounds like: zoo mere] bird, let me tell you about the [?] bird and there’s a big long thing about the [?] bird, and then he takes her over to the tree, let me explain this cedar and how it’s built and what it does and works and so on. That’s the man, that’s the man having his profound relationship to his God in a masculine way. He’s looking at God and how God made things.
What do little boys do versus little girls when they play? The little girls are always, with their blocks they’re always building something because it’s part of the male character. He’s interested in how things work, how things are… he’s always tearing something apart just to see how it works, often to the frustration of everyone else in the home. But the point is that’s a built-in thing about men, why those teenage boys like to take the carburetor apart and take the engine apart; because it’s neat. It’s neat to see how the thing works. Well, that is the man working, in a larger scale the universe is the car and he likes to take it apart to see how God built it. That’s how the man has his relationship with God. He visualizes God much more as a constructor and an engineer than, say, a woman does in her relationship to God.
Let’s come back to this chapter. Here’s the situation. Jacob proposes that they strip out all the animals that are very clearly spotted, leaving only the clear. But although Laban thinks that’s a nice deal, Laban forgets something. Here’s Jacob and he’s been working in this situation for… he’s 95, you pick up a few things in 95 years, and Jacob has watched and he’s been around shepherds for at least 90 years; he started out as a very young boy under his dad. And so he knows everything there is to know in that age about shepherding and animal breeding, and he’s watched and he probably is a much more profound observer of God’s design than Laban is because everything else being equal, you men who are believers ought to be much more incisive in observing your field than your non-Christian associate, everything else being equal. And so Laban here, he’s busy doing thing, trying to fake out this customer and work a deal on this relationship; nah, Jacob’s not bothered with that, Jacob says I’m a believer, I’m a man, God wants me to do my job as unto Him and so I’m going to sit here, I’m not going to worry about all that chaotic stuff and I just want to do a good job, in my case doing a good job meaning shepherding. In my case doing a good job means produce the best, most lucrative herd and that means not only taking the right pasture, it means not only scouting for good land and irrigation, it means watching the systems of breeding good stock.
So Jacob says okay, I’ve got to build a stock of my own and here’s how I’m going to do it. He realizes that while he cuts out of the herd those animals that have spotted skins, he knows that after breeding occurs within this group some spotted genes will emerge. Now he doesn’t, maybe, know all about genes and all the rest of it but he’s a good observer, so he knows after a while those characteristics will emerge from this herd so all he’s going to do is sit there and he’s going to max out the number of new calves that he can get over per unit time and he’s going to statistically favor, every time he gets a spotted one he’s going to keep those and then he’s going to build his herd out of those and the clear ones he just turns back to Jacob. But he knows the genes are there.
Said another way, what he knows is, we would say it today in biology terms, as homozygous and heterozygous, that is the homozygous animals, there are some clear animals that have all clear genes and they’re going to breed clear calves; but there’s some of those clear that aren’t, they carry genes of the spotted nature and if you breed them enough they’re going to come out in the calf. So this is what he starts to do. So Laban mixes the herd, he thinks he’s got it all aced here by taking the three day journey, verse 36. That’s one observer; you already get a feel, men, that Jacob, as a godly man, isn’t stupid. Jacob as a godly man is Solomon-like in his ability to work with the herds.
What does he next do? He takes rods, in verse 37, of green poplar, hazel and chestnut, and rods in verse 38 which he peeled before the flocks. Now all the Bible critics like to ha-ha and tee-hee about verse 37-38 and this is some little silly device he has, after all they say, can’t you just see it, these cattle come up to this trough of water and he put these sticks up here and he peels the bark off and the cattle come here and he’s looking up and he sees this stick and it’s got bark on it, it’s got white on it, he says oh, I’m supposed to mate and have something like that, okay, and he goes over here and does something. And that’s the way the critic paints the text of the Scripture. Well, that’s not what’s going on; it may be that this is useless because there’s another factor that comes in here but I suggest and I follow Dr. Morris’ suggestion here that this is a very clever thing that he’s doing. The sticks that he’s sticking in the trough of water have the bark peeled off so the sap in that particular stick mixes with the water and it’s very conceivable there may be a chemical he just observed, he didn’t know about the chemistry of it, but he just observed that if you mixed that with the water you get a higher rate of conception, or higher rate of mating; this is not some prenatal influence generating a certain selection. It’s just that he was increasing the frequency of conception. This is why it says in verse 39 “And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth rings [striped]” except in the Hebrew it talks about they come into heat and breed before this. So obviously what it is is some stimulant that he must have put in the water and Morris points out that one of the particular pieces of wood here that’s involved has a chemical that’s being used in animal husbandry today for that very purpose. So Jacob wasn’t just being an idiot about this.
So two ways, he sorts the herd out and then he watches, and this is a profound operation of breeding, modern breeding techniques that he’s using here. Then he does a third thing. In Genesis 30:41, he separates out the stronger ones. So he’s put wisdom to his job as he tries to do his job as unto the Lord. But that isn’t the whole story. The neat thing about this whole operation of breeding that you see him doing is not found in Genesis 30; it’s found in Genesis 31:10, now he lets you in on a little secret. Here’s a man and his God, and this man, I think, shows us a lot about Jacob as a male model because what it shows you is that he prayed about his job and he expected God to be a partner in the details of his job.
Look at verse 10, “And it came to pass at the time that the cattle conceived,” so he evidently had been praying about this and then the Lord gave him a dream, and he lifted up “mine eyes, and saw in a dream,” so there you have God intervening in his life with guidance, “and, behold, the rams,” so the male breeding stock “leaped upon the cattle were the spotted kind, [11] And the angel of God s poke unto me in a dream, saying, Jacob: And I said, Here I am. [12] And he said, Lift up now your eyes, and observe,” the idea of “see” there means observe, look carefully, “all the rams that are breeding are spotted,” now you lose this if you don’t realize that that’s not so. What was happening is that they were all clear colored animals coming up to that trough because all the breeding stock of the spotted had been removed; right? Chapter 30 said he had removed all the colored breeders. Well, what’s the angel of God telling him no, those clear animals actually are spotted? Did Jacob have the wrong pair of glasses on? Not at all.
What this is is a very profound insight; the angel of God knows about this stuff and what he’s saying is Jacob, you’ve done a very fine job as a believing male; you want to do a good job, you’ve got these four women at home and they’re giving you a problem, you’ve got this ugly boss and he’s giving you a problem but through all these trials you as a man have looked to Me to do your job as unto Me, now I’m going to help you. You’ve put together as much wisdom as you can, you’ve noticed this little deal about if you breed enough animals that I’ve designed it such that these genes are recessive and so on, so I’ll tell you what we’ll do. He says when those animals, the male breeding stock, comes up to that pen, I’m going to separate the homozygous from the heterozygous male stock so that the homozygous males will not mate and only those males carrying that recessive gene will mate with your cattle, so you’re not only going to increase the frequency of your herd by your little stick deal, but I’m going to see to it that the right genes get bred into your herd.
Now what more help can a guy expect than this? God for your shepherd. You see, men, this is his relationship with God and it’s one of those rare glimpses that you get in the Scriptures of how interested God is in the intimate details of your business. Or said another way, if you’re tying to fix your car and you know how the nut goes on this particular bolt, God knows all about it. The idea of the nut and bolt was in His mind for all eternity and He knows a lot more about nuts and bolds than you do. So try praying about it and bring Him into the shop too. The angel of the Lord can be a mechanic; the angel of the Lord can be a man in your profession, just like here Jacob was a shepherd, but the angel of the Lord was standing there… it must have been a neat scene if you had the right pair of glasses to see this, here are all these cattle here and Jacob’s sitting here with his sticks, down there working away, he’s peeling this one, putting it in the water, when they come up, and unseen to him is this angel and these two cattle coming up, go on now, get out of here, and put this one over here, and he was sorting them out for him. And this went on and on and on and Jacob would look at this and that animal would just drift off and this one would come and they’d breed. He had help from an unseen friend as a result of the fact that he was a godly man praying for godly help on his job.
Now having seen all this, now you appreciate verse 43. Jacob, the man, the male model of a productive persevering believer, a man who faced pressure in the home and on the job, but who did one thing right, and that was he did his job as unto the Lord day after day after day, month after month, year after year. And he did it over and over and over and over and over and over again, when a lot of men would have flaked out; a lot of men would have quit. Not Jacob. Jacob knew that his God would be with him, he knew that if he stayed at this, this is God’s universe, he is going to learn something about this universe and when he gets through he’s going to be more equipped at ruling this part of the universe than even his boss.
Now on the secular level this is demonstrated time and time again. I mentioned two Sunday’s ago H. Ross Perot; I wonder how many of us realize that H. Ross Perot went as a young man, as a salesman, to IBM, and IBM gave him a year’s quote to sell computing equipment. H. Ross Perot met his company’s quota in one month and he stayed with IBM and he learned everything he could about computers and went out and started his own company and became a key competitor. Why? Because he stayed within the system to learn everything he possibly could. There’s the attitude of the godly man.
Now come to the New Testament, we’re closing with two principles: (1) Ephesians 6, this is that passage we all read and it’s a nice little Sunday School memory verse, but I hope for the men here this morning this will now be more than just a memory verse. Ephesians 6:5-6, “Servants, obey them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ. [6] Not with eyeservice, as men-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from [the heart] life, literally, [7] with good will doing service as to the Lord, and not to men, [8] Knowing that whatever good thing any man does,” and in context where is the doing? On his job, “Knowing that whatsoever good any man does, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free.” In other words, whether he be in oppression or whether he be on his own, if he will just stay with it and do his job God will bless. You’ve seen this morning a spectacular way God blessed. That angel actually got down there and got his feet in the manure to help Jacob built a flock; that’s how involved God was, he got his feet dirty doing work for Jacob because Jacob did work for him.
Now we said that Jacob is the male model of perseverance and I don’t want to conclude without drawing it back to Jesus Christ Himself. Let’s go back to John 4 because all of this particular kind of maleness that we’ve examined with Jacob, I said at the very beginning, was a more mundane kind of maleness, it’s not the power, it’s not the glory, it’s not the great commander at the head of his troops; it’s that just common thing. In John 4:6, I want to take you to two New Testament passages to show that Jesus Christ had a lot of very mundane things happen to him. And so there’s part of His character that is shown here too.
In John 4:6 a little statement, but now in the light of Jacob working day after day after day under the oppressive conditions, think of Jesus here in verse 6. “Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus, therefore, being wearied with His journey,” … being worried with His journey, did you ever think of Jesus getting tired. Look at the text, that’s exactly what He was, He was full man and He had the same temptation in all points as we are and one of those temptations must have been to say the hell with it, and for those of you with the language feedback cards that is expressive, at least to the men here today. That’s exactly the way you feel. And so the point of John 4 is that Jesus Christ was wearied and He kept on. Here He kept on day after day after day. It doesn’t say in verse 6 that Jesus, therefore being wearied with His journey was suddenly conveyed upon a cloud and swoop and He came down and He was all happy and joyful the next moment. No, He was tired and He sat down to rest and then He couldn’t have peace because the Lord added another job; the woman at the well thing and all that went on, and then he had to argue about hamburgers with the disciples to figure out who was going to bring the lunch. So while He was sitting here at the well He was tired and didn’t even then have peace in His life.
Matthew
Today we’re going to tie this together by singing…