Clough Genesis Lesson 77

Jacob is forgiven by Esau – Genesis 33

We’ve been looking at the series of chapters dealing with Jacob. Jacob is one of the male models of the Old Testament, he is a man who is very productive, he was disciplined, he was persevering and he did this under the pressures of suffering in his home, suffering in his marriage, suffering on the job. In spite of all those pressures Jacob kept on. He was basically obedient; he is a man that was creative, innovative, he applied principles of wisdom, he saw the structure of the created world around him and he used this in the breeding of his flocks and so on.

We saw too how God worked Jacob in his area of needed sanctification, that he had what we call a –R or unrighteous learned behavior pattern, and this behavior pattern he had been taught in his home. He’d been taught in his home by his poor relationship to his father, that when you’re here as the position of an inferior to a superior, the best thing to do is wheedle your way around but don’t ever clarify the issue, apparently because his father would never sit down and clarify the issue with him. But nevertheless, Jacob picked up this pattern of behavior somewhere in his life and as a result God had given Jacob, as the son in this relationship, He had given him an aggressive nature. Remember, Jacob’s nature will be communicated to all of Jacob’s sons, Israel, and this will become a character trait of that nation. But by itself unsanctified it can be a very obnoxious and dangerous character trait and Jacob was already developing propensities in that direction through this training he was unconsciously receiving in his home. So God said all right, what I’ll do Jacob is I’ll arrange, under My supervision, three incidents and when we get through with these incidents, that pattern will be corrected, but it will be corrected without destroying… without destroying your aggressive nature.

Now this is an example of what we call the fine-tuning ability of God to sanctify. He can sanctify and at the same time He does the sanctifying He can do it without destroying. Now had God been us He probably would have gone in there and tried to change Jacob up and the result would have been not only would Jacob have been changed but Jacob would have been crushed. God is gentle and God at the same time is very powerful; discipline, use, and application of power in a right direction.

So here we have God protecting him, He arranges a confrontation with Laban, that at least gets Jacob cooking in the right direction, and says okay, now you’ve got to be able to do it this way. And you’ve got to be able… Jacob, you’ve got to handle these situations or you’re sowing seed for your own future destruction. Then along comes the preincarnate Lord Jesus Christ in the wrestling match that we saw last week and next comes Esau. Actually Esau came here first but he’s going to get the full confrontation later. Now these were sovereignly arranged reproofs or situations put into Jacob’s path by God, put there for the purpose of sanctifying him. And there’s a model of how God works with men; it works with women that way too but the subject here is to watch how God works in sanctifying a man. He’ll put these situations in, again protecting the guy, not crushing him, but putting on enough pressure so he may think he’s being crushed but objectively he’s not been.

If you turn to Hosea 12:3, here is the Old Testament commentary on this passage of Scripture, and this is how we can control our interpretation. When in doubt, and you don’t know how to handle a passage of Scripture, find where other Bible authors handle that passage of Scripture. Hosea 12:3-6, a little excerpt in the preaching of Hosea, the prophet, to the nation Israel later in history to mimic the correct nature of Jacob. So in verse 3 it talks about his aggressive spirit. “He took his brother by the heel in the womb, and by his strength he had power with God. [4] Yea, he had power over the angel, and prevailed; he wept, and made supplication unto him;” now if we look at verse 4, just the first part, you’d get the wrong interpretation of the whole incident because the first part of verse 4 says he prevailed over the angel. Now if you look at that you’d say why? He prevails because he got a full nelson on and broke his neck or something. Well, no, that’s not the point.

The point is down in verse 4, it says “he wept and made supplication to him,” so all during that wrestling match it was more than just physical wrestling, it was a spiritual demanding, and something happened, as always happens in these divinely arranged trials in our lives; something happened very rapidly during that eight hour wrestling match. The Bible doesn’t describe how it happened, it just narrates, in fact, his soul was changed. His body was crippled but his soul was edified and part of the edification was that this aggressive nature that he had, which was just kind of hanging loose and being just floating all over in a carnal direction, wasn’t destroyed. That aggressive nature that God had given to him was now focused, not upon another man, in this case it would be Laban or Esau, it wasn’t focused upon a man but the aggressive nature was focused way up here at God. And that was the primary lesson. In other words, the Lord Jesus Christ stood in for Esau and said Jacob, you come here and I want you to wrestle Me, and I’m going to show you how to do it, and I’m going to play your adversary; now try it on Me first, then go and handle it with Esau. And that’s exactly the learning procedure that God applied in the situation.

So we find Jacob in an analogous relationship to God that he is going to be shortly with Esau. So let’s look at these two relationships and see the parallels. The relationship to God, this supplication relationship, we would define as he prays to God; the relationship to Esau is very similar, he appeals to him. Our word “pray” in the English language is a word that, if I say this, 99 out of 100 people will associate praying with talking to God but that’s not really true. If you look up the word “pray” in the dictionary you’ll discover that the word “pray” is still used in legal terminology to refer to an inferior appealing to a superior. We pray such and such—well, you look at a legal document and it says “we pray such and such,” hey, I’m not praying; yes you are, because praying has not necessarily to do with the object of the prayer, it has to do with the fact that it’s simply a petition, an appeal, and that’s a good thing that that’s been preserved, although most people today don’t realize what it’s there for. The word “pray” and the word “appeal” are synonymous.

So there are certain parallels that take place in chapter 32, Jacob is praying and appealing to God for the blessing. In chapter 33 he’s appealing to Esau for a blessing. He is going to be trained first here, on safe turf, where he can get all the training done with; then he’s going to go over here and he’s going to apply it with Esau. Now that’s the big picture of this. After we get through chapter 33 this week, next week we’ll come back to make sure everybody gets all this and we’ll outline some of the principles that you can use to appeal and to pray, they are parallel principles.

However, before we get to that point and before we can even work with Genesis 33 we’ve got to overcome a certain problem that we just seem to be plagued with in our generation in Christian circles; a little piece of human viewpoint that intrudes itself into our minds, totally renders us impotent in prayer, destroys the concept of biblical prophecy, wipes out the significance of history, and that is a latent fatalism, the idea that because you know here’s the beginning of history and here’s the end and we have this pattern and God is sovereign over it all, therefore we can disregard what goes on in-between here.

For example, if we had an advertisement for somebody that is going to have a hot little series of sermons on Matthew 24-25 or the book of Revelation and everybody come out to the latest prophecy conference. Now why? There’s nothing wrong with prophecy but I consider that… if a person is not interested in areas of the Scripture that deal with praying, areas of Scripture that deals with home, areas of Scripture that deals with their employer/employee relationship, but then all of a sudden get vastly interested in prophecy, there’s something screwed up. And it leads me to suspect that they’re not being biblical over here in the area of their so-called interests, because if the Spirit of God were really working it would be generally the areas close at hand for application that God is placing the emphasis. And so we go to a prophecy conference and we hear so and so’s views of the tribulation, somebody else’s views of the tribulation, somebody’s else’s views of the tribulation and so on, and you walk out and what have you got? You’ve been titillated for an hour and a half about what will take place beyond your domain.

That’s what I’m talking about, that is a fatalism that is being used here because it is of no consequence right here in the present moment. You see this in certain extreme forms of Calvinism; it does the same thing, because God has guaranteed the future, therefore we can kind of just pass over lightly, all this is just an appearance, it’s not the real thing, this is the real thing here. No-no, so to cut that out we’re going to go to a series of passages in the Scriptures, all of which share one thing in common. All of these Scriptures we’re now going to go to show hypothetical options in history; that is, what could have happened had somebody done something different, the “what if?”

Let’s turn to Exodus 32, I’ve studied Biblical theology for 12-15 years and I assure you that this is one area of the Bible that’s a very, very important and repeated area. And my observation of systematic theologians is because they’re not biblical theologians they overlook this; I’ve never yet seen this principle systematized, in any system. Exodus 32:9, this is a very, very famous incident, we’ve been through it before but I want you to see some elements of it. “And the LORD said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiff-necked people. [10] Now therefore let Me alone, that My wrath may burn against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation.” Now, “I will make of thee a great nation?” Just a minute God, wait a minute, in your sovereignty you said in Genesis 49, of all the tribes of Jacob, the tribe of Judah would continue until the Messiah came, what are you saying here? You are saying “I will consume them,” all the tribes, “and I will make of thee,” Moses, who is not of the tribe of Judah, he’s of the tribe of Levi, “I will make of Moses a great nation.” Wait a minute God, you can’t be serious in verse 10, Your sovereignty says You’re not going to do that, so I’m not going to respond to the threat. Wrong? You’d better respond to the threat, God is hacked in verse 10 and you don’t sit there and don’t respond when He’s mad. He’s a personal God, not just a stone statue on somebody’s theological cabinet.

And so therefore in verse 11 Moses immediately begins to beseech God. “[And Moses besought the LORD his God,] God, he said, why does your anger wax hot [burn] against Your people, whom You have brought forth out of the land of Egypt [with great power and with a mighty hand?] [12] Why should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did He bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from Thy fierce wrath, and chance your mind [repent of this evil against thy people.] Verse 14, and God changed His mind [“And the LORD repented of the evil which He thought to do unto His people.”] He changed His mind! Now the word “changed” the mind means exactly that—change the mind. And if you were there and you had observed the scene you would have observed God changed His mind, and you would have been convinced that it was just as real as any prophecy of some future event, namely, that Judah would survive. In other words, that changing of God is equally significant as knowing the future beforehand.

Moses did not respond in verse 11 like a fatalist would have responded. A fatalist would have recognized immediately, verse 10, it can’t happen, so therefore he would have done nothing. Wrong application! Verse 10 never did happen but why didn’t verse 10 happen? Verse 10 didn’t happen because of verse 11 and 12. So down here we’ll put minus verse 10, that’s the end of history. We know verse 10 is a falsehood; we know verse 10 can’t possibly occur because prophecy says it can’t. But to get to verse 10 you have to have verses 11-13; those become the means for seeing to it that verse 10 doesn’t take place. Do you see what I mean? A fatalist sits back and says what’s going to happen is going to happen automatically, independently of means. But that is not biblical; that is a sub-biblical view of history; it’s a reductionist view of history, it extracts one quality from God, lifts it up and then builds everything around this abstracted separated quality, and that’s not the way Moses does it. Verse 10 is identical to minus verse 10. And verse 14 implements verse 10 by means of this appeal or this prayer. So the appeal, the pitch, the prayer, whatever you want to call it, in verses 11-13 had to be powerful enough to change God’s mind. Now try that one on for size and go home and think about it for four or five days. It’s a tremendous statement, a tremendously powerful statement!

That’s not the only one in Scripture; let’s turn to another situation, Numbers 14:11. We’ve got the situation in Old Testament history where Israel is being offered immediate conquest, so two things; element number one, immediate conquest of the land after the Exodus, and two, the southern approach. Two elements are being offered the nation in Numbers. You know what happened: they sent the spies in the land, they came back and bellyaching about this problem and that problem and so therefore God, in verse 11 reacted; notice He reacted to man. “And the LORD said unto Moses, How long will this people provoke me? And how long will it be before they believe Me, for all the signs which I have shown among them? [12] I will smite them with the pestilence, and disinherit them, and will make of thee a greater nation and mightier than they.” Oh-oh, back to the same problem again.

And then verse 13-14, Moses has to crank it out again, hold it God, just hold it, now don’t do that. [“And Moses said unto the LORD, Then the Egyptians shall hear it (for Thou broughtest up this people in Thy might from among them), [14] And they will tell it to the inhabitants of this land; for they have heard that Thou, LORD, are among this people, that Thou, Lord, are seen face to face, and that Thy cloud stands over them, and that Thou goes before them, by daytime in a pillar of a cloud, and in a pillar of fire by night. [15] Now if Thou shalt kill all this people as one man, then the nations which have heard the fame of Thee will speak, saying, [16] Because the LORD was not able to bring this people into the land which He swore to give unto them, therefore he has slain them in the wilderness. [17] And now, I beseech thee, let the power of my Lord be great according as Thou has spoken, saying, [18] The LORD is long-suffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression….]”

Now you can imagine, this shows you the greatness of Moses. You just think of this; I think it’s a big problem when I have problems and everybody that’s around me is having problems, that’s verse 1, the whole congregation tubed out at that point. Now stop and think what it would be like if you got surrounded by the nitwit group in verse 1, then add to it God’s hacked off and you’re in the middle. How’d you like that role? The God of the universe is mad and that group that you’re with, they’re out of it, and here you are, and you have to go back and say hold it God, while I know they’re clucks, just hold it, because of Your plan’s sake. Now Moses keeps on doing this.

Do you know why this takes place in history? Do you know what the big theology is that’s being taught here by Moses role in changing the mind of God at these points that we’ve shown, showing you key points? He is typifying the intercessory ministry of Christ who will do the same thing to keep us saved. Moses is an adumbration of Jesus Christ; that’s what He’s doing for you and for me right now. Hold it God; I know the guy’s a cluck but…. So that ought to straighten some of you out.

Numbers 14 is the southern approach and although Moses talked God out of destroying the nation, those two were changed; history was changed that moment and it wasn’t until later they would come in on an eastern approach which would be forty years later and the elements would shift. There’s no way to handle this passage other than saying, to be intellectually honest, history was changed because a man prayed.

Now what I’m trying to show you is how open history is. Don’t lock history down to a plan; it is not a computer output. I’ll give you an example of what I am walking about. I’ve given biblical examples but right now I’ll give you one that comes to my mind; back in 1972 Frances Schaeffer gave a series of lectures at Dallas Seminary. I attended those lectures and in the course of the lectures Dr. Schaeffer was dealing with the problem of the biblical view of man and the fall and he was trying to communicate into the 20^th century generation against the world of B. F. Skinner and the world of behaviorists and the world of determinists, that man had moral choice. He happened to use the word “man is an un-programmed creature,” perfectly good terminology. But after he used it we had some extreme Calvinists at Dallas Seminary that were climbing off the wall, oh heresy, heresy, Calvin wouldn’t say it that way. Well of course he wouldn’t; Calvin lived in the 16^th century, Frances Schaeffer lived in the 20^th. The point was, had Schaeffer lived in Geneva of the 16^th century and said it yeah, there would have been a problem with that word. But he wasn’t saying it in that historic context; what he was trying to say was that man is not materialistically determined, and he was right. And it was the people in the monastery that don’t know what the language is out there in the street that couldn’t understand what he was saying. He was simply fighting for a biblical view of history, that is, that history is open to man changing it.

Let’s look further; in Judges 2 we have this monotonous chapter about the nation Israel sinning, tubing out, God sends them pestilences and sends them discipline and they get sorry and they confess and then God takes the discipline away, and then they go down again and it’s just round and round and round until finally God’s had it. And in Judges 2:20 history is changed again: “And the anger of Jehovah was hot against Israel; and he said, Because this people has transgressed My covenant which I commanded their fathers, and have not hearkened unto My voice, [21] I also will not henceforth drive out any from before them of the nations which Joshua left when he died, [22] That through them I may test Israel, [whether they will keep the way of the LORD to walk therein, as their fathers did keep it, or not.]” Verse 23, “Therefore the LORD left those nations….” Do you know what chapter 2 is saying? That the conquest of Joshua’s day, which theologically if we were to diagram it in a prophecy chart, would look like this: here’s the Exodus, here’s the conquest, and the millennial kingdom could have begun at that moment; that’s their prophecy chart… that’s their prophecy chart! And in Judges 2 that prophecy chart is changed and now it looks like this: the Exodus, the conquest, and an indeterminate period of history before the kingdom age. Now that changed. In the mind of God it didn’t from eternity to eternity; no, but we’re not living in the mind of God, at least I’m not and I don’t think any other creature is living in the mind of God. We’re living in space/time history and in space/time history that was changed.

Let’s look at another incident, Daniel 9:2. In Dan 9:2 Daniel is a young man and he’s in the exile and he prays, and he says that [Daniel 9:1] “In the first year of Darius, of the seed of the Medes,” in that first year of his reign, “I Daniel, understood [by books] the number of the years, whereas the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah, the prophet, that he would accomplish seventy ears in the desolations of Jerusalem.” Daniel, because he had studied Jeremiah 25 and Jeremiah 29, his prophecy chart looked like this: here’s the kingdom of the Old Testament, here’s the exile; Jeremiah said for seventy years this nation will be in exile and based on Deuteronomy 30 Jeremiah said there will be restoration and then there will be the kingdom. That’s their prophecy chart; that’s the way it looked in Daniel’s day. So Daniel, thinking that’s the way it is he starts well great, seventy years are up, Lord, let it rip, let’s get this kingdom story on the road. I want restoration for my country, I confess the sins of my nation and I want restoration and the full kingdom. And then what is God’s answer. Daniel 9:24, the angel comes and tells him, “Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and make an end of sins….” Seventy weeks means seventy sevens Daniel, not seventy years, seventy sevens. Oh-oh, now what happens? Well now Daniel has to take an eraser and erase his little prophecy chart and adjust it. Now he has to put in 490 years there, then he’s going to have his kingdom.

What happened? The plan of God was amended, and it was amended because of sin of the nation Israel at that time. So as prophecy unrolls it expands and gets gradually more and more complex. This is where some of our dear friends who are amillennialists and postribulationists are in for a very severe surprise when it finally unrolls because if there’s anything that happens in prophecy it gets complicated, more and more complicated with time; it doesn’t get simpler, and all these people that want posttribulationalism and amillennialism, they want to simplify the scheme; under the rationalism of their minds they have got to get it in a simple scheme, and they’re going to ram, cram and jam it until they can get it in a simple scheme, whereas what ought to take place is hey, we don’t even have a finished prophecy chart today.

For example, dispensational premillennialism always likes to say here’s the church age, here’s the rapture of the Church, here’s the seven years of tribulation, there’s the return of Christ and a thousand years. Huh-un, that is not the prophecy chart. All we know is there’s the church age and the rapture, one event. We know the signing of the covenant, seven years, and the return of Christ, and a gap there and the millennial kingdom. Now there’s a gap, and there’s a gap and we have no idea what those gaps are; they’re just there in the prophesies, nobody can fill them in at this time, it is God’s elbow room to move in the future. He can put a thousand years in there if He wanted to, perfect openness to history. And this is why you cannot lock things down in a simple fixed prophecy chart. And most of all, you can’t ram, cram and jam into one simple event. See, the amill loves to erase all this difficulty and then jam it all together and say this is the Second Advent of Christ so history looks like this: go here, Second Advent of Christ, the game’s over. It’s too simple, too simplistic; it just doesn’t fit the Scriptures.

Another example, really a mind-blowing is this one, is Matthew 26:53. Here Jesus Christ tells Peter to just cool it, Peter’s got his sword out and he’s busy carving one of the troops up, and Jesus, in verse 53 tells Peter, now look Peter, don’t think I’m a victim of this whole plot. He says… and just look at this amazing statement, “Do you think that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He will presently” or “immediately give Me more than twelve legions of angels?” Now a legion, even minimally staffed, would be 3,000. That’s 36,000 angels and I can have them here in a few seconds. Now Peter, put up your little pen knife and just relax; you’re not going to defend anybody with that thing, but I, if I but ask My father, can have 36,000 angels here in a few seconds. Now there’s a hypothetical option Jesus could have exercised. But notice what He then says… notice what he then says, verse 54, “But how, then, shall the Scriptures be fulfilled, [that thus it must be?]” In other words, if I did that I’d invalidate the cross.

But the point I’m making about verse 53 is do you see how rich the hypothetical options are. And for everyone I’ve showed you this morning I could show you ten more; the flow of history is open and it’s open to change based upon your present relationship to your Savior. What are you telling him today to a degree determines tomorrow. You can sit there and you can say well, my eternal destiny, I’m in Christ, once saved, always saved, tra-la, tra-la. And here we are, fine, but the details of your eternal destiny you can’t find in the Scriptures. Yes, you can find that to be absent from the body is to be face to face with the Lord, but the details of your exact position out here in the future, what you will be doing, that information is not revealed in Scripture. Do you know why? Because you’re writing your own book right now; you’re filing in those details by what you’re doing and what you’re not doing. So you, in effect, are given, under God, the authority to determine details there. And you can change those details.

Today you can change your eternal status. If you’re here as a non-Christian there is a change that can take place based upon your response to God’s call. As a Christian, there’s a change that can take place in the future based upon your response to God’s gracious work in your life. These changes can occur and they’re all open before you; the land is opened, the question is, what do we do with it?

All right, Jacob operated in that frame of reference. He operated in the frame of reference where it meant something to appeal to God because he could change history by appealing to God and hence he grabbed hold of God and said I’m not letting you got until You give me a blessing, and you can cripple me but I am still going to hold onto You. Now does that make sense if history is closed? No, it doesn’t; that makes no more sense than going over here and sticking your finger in a light socket and getting a charge, no sense at all. The only way that scene makes sense is if something could happen as a result of him working on God.

Turn back to Genesis 33. Now he sees Esau; he’s had his wrestling match with God, conceivably now he’s oriented. We’re not going to spend too much time on the details of chapter 33 but I’m going to read through it, just pointing to several things, just skipping around in the text; you’ve already heard it read once so you get the flow of the passage.

What I would like you to look at now is following the way this author writes, that is the author of Genesis writes with a certain style, and it’s part of his style to communicate to you through the use of repetitious phrases and clauses. As we go through here watch for where he repeats himself and that’ll be the key to what he’s emphasizing. So the scene opens, Esau is approaching him with 400 men, verse 1. Jacob prepares his first group, group B remember he’s shipped off half of his assets so in case he gets cratered here with the assets of group A, he’s still got group B but this is group A. [3] “He put the handmaids and their children in the front; Leah and her children after them, and Rachel and Joseph in the back. [4] And he passed over before them, and bowed himself to the ground seven times, until he came near his brother.” This is not worshiping or doing obeisance, the bowing seven times is a practice that men have seen in archeological findings, a standard for a salute or something like that.

Between verse 3 and verse 4 something happens. At the point of verse 3 Jacob is not sure what the response is going to be. Remember his response back in chapter 32 is one of fear and the fear we said was based on guilt and the guilt was there because basically he knew he was out of line. So he still doesn’t know where he stands except he’s got confidence God’s with him and that’s straightened out, so now he makes everything open and vulnerable, quite frankly, to Esau.

Now at verse 4, “Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him; and they wept.” God had changed Esau. In other words, because Jacob was willing to change his relationship to God, then God was willing to change Jacob’s relationship with Esau. See how it works; first the vertical relationship with God, then the horizontal relationship with men. So the conversation goes one. Esau [5] “lifted up his eyes, and saw the women and the children; and said, Whose are these with thee?” Now notice the phrase, notice the clause. Jacob says, “The children which God has graciously given thy servant. [6] Then the handmaidens came near, they and their children, and they bowed themselves. [7] And Leah also with her children came near, and bowed themselves: and after came Joseph near and Rachel, and they bowed themselves.”

And then in verse 8, “And he said, What do you mean by all this drove which I met?” all the birthday presents he sent forward, remember. “And Jacob said, These are to find grace in the sight of my lord.” We’ll come back to that in a moment. Esau says go ahead and keep it. [9, “And Esau said, I have enough, my brother; keep that thou hast unto thyself.”] “No says Jacob” in verse 10, “[I pray thee,] if now I have found grace in thy sight, then receive my present at my hand;” and he urges him to take it and so on, [“for therefore I have seen thy face, as though I had seen the face of God, and thou was pleased with me. [11] Take, I pray thee, my blessing that is brought to thee; because God hath dealt graciously with me, and because I have enough. And he urged him, and he took it.”]

Then verse 12, Esau says, “Let us take our journey, and let us go, and I will go before thee.” Jacob says no,” [13] “My lord knows that the children are tender, and the flocks and herds with young are with me, they’re nursing and they can’t over drive them you see, [“and if men should overdrive them one day, all the flock will die.”] [14] “Let my lord, I pray thee, pass over before his servant; and I will lead on softly, according as the cattle that goes before me and the children be able to endure, until I come unto my lord unto Seir. [15] And Esau said, Let me now leave with thee some of the folk that are with me.” And Jacob says at the end of verse 15, “[What needeth it?] Let me find grace in the sight of my lord. [16] So Esau returned that day on his way unto Seir. [17] And Jacob journeyed to Succoth, [and built him an house, and made booths for his cattle: therefore the name of the place is called Succoth. [18] And Jacob came to Shalem, a city of Shechem, which is in the land of Canaan, when he came from Padan-aram; and pitched his tent before the city. [19] And he bought a parcel of a field, where he had spread his tent, at the hand of the children of Hamor, Shechem’s father, for an hundred pieces of money. [20] And he erected there an altar, and called it El-elohe-Israel.”]

Now you notice the interplay in that conversation? What was the conversation really about? Look at it carefully. In verse 5 Jacob is giving a testimony, and he’s saying you see all these things here brother; these are here, not because I earned them but because God was gracious to me. So he’s confessing in verse 5 his relationship with God; God graciously blessed me. Verse 11, God graciously dealt with me; the emphasis is on the word “grace,” because he didn’t earn it and he didn’t deserve it, God blessed him anyway. And so again, because he has fixed up this relationship, because of this man’s relationship to God therefore his relationship to his human superiors, and remember he addresses Esau as lord which means Adonai which means older brother, maybe by only a few minutes because they were twins but in the family structure Esau was number one, Jacob was number two, it doesn’t make any difference about how God was blessing them, in that family still physically and socially Esau was number one. So when you see this word, “Adonai,” all Jacob is doing, he’s recognizing the superior authority of his brother. Even though his brother is a clod spiritually, he still respects the position of his brother and he says all right, you’re my older brother, I recognize this, I recognize I’ve been a stinker and I recognize that God has graced me out.

Now what else do we notice. Verse 8, verse 10, verse 15, what is the phrase that you see repeated three times throughout this conversation? “May I find grace in the sight of my lord; may I find grace in the sight of my lord; may I find grace in the sight of my lord?” What’s he asking for? Forgiveness. He’s asking to be accepted by his older brother just as he was accepted by God. That’s what the process is and that’s what you’ve got; you’ve got reconciliation going on in Genesis 33, and that’s the significance of why, in verse 18, when the story ends Jacob does not immediately go to Seir, although he probably vacationed down there periodically later, it says he’s going to go down there, but his flocks and his herds stayed here at a place called Succoth, which is just south of the Jabbok River across Jordan.

Then it says in verse 18 he comes to a city of Shechem, which means he crosses the Jordan and comes over to Mount Ebal and Gerizim which carries significance later in the Old Testament. What does this represent? It represents the entrance into the land. This is, so to speak, an early Exodus and conquest that you’ve just seen here. Now do you notice the principle? Jacob can’t enjoy the land until what has happened first? He’s got to get straight with God and he’s got to get straight with his brother. He’s got to get straight with his relationship to God and with his family, and when that is straight and not until that is straight does he enjoy the blessings of God. See the priorities; first [can’t understand word] is straightened out, then the blessing starts. And interestingly he comes in the east side, which is a favorite invasion route, to the nation.

Now most of us, when we think of Jacob we think of a man. When I use the word “Israel” you think of a nation. We’ve got it a little bit too compartmentalized. The word “Jacob” can mean the nation or the man; the word “Israel” can mean Jacob or the man. Today the nation Israel faces an analogous situation to Genesis 31, 32 and 33. Jacob, and now I’m using the word “Jacob” not for the man; I now use the word “Jacob” for the nation. Jacob and Esau are at it again. Jacob, you can say may be innocent, maybe not, it still takes two to start a disagreement. And anyway, Esau today still lives and he lives in the blood of the Arabs. Israel and Esau are at it again.

Recently you’ve read in your papers about the Camp David accord and you’ve read about the peace agreements that have been signed. Now I want to read a little jarring reminder that you are seeing history reenacted before your eyes on the front pages of newspapers and here’s why. The principle that you’ve just learned in Genesis 31, 32 and 33, that there will be no peace with men until Jacob is right with God, he just can’t be at peace, holds true for modern history. The Camp David accords represent sincere motivation on the part of many people for peace, but you can’t cry “peace, peace” when there is no peace and basic issues haven’t been settled, and to remind you of that I read the following except from a paper presented at the conference of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy in Washington by former Air Force Major General George Keegan, former head of Air Force intelligence. Here are some very sobering remarks made about what you’re reading in the newspapers; remarks which incidentally you’ll never see in AP and UPI for some strange reason which we’ll leave unspoken.

“From a strictly military point of view it seems to me,” says General Keegan, “that the Camp David Accord, if fulfills a treaty status, will shift the military balance in the Middle East decisively in favor of the Arab camp. The Accords, in my judgment, will be extremely destabilizing over the long pull unless the Unites States become principle, not just third country player, in assuring their outcome,” and by principle Keegan says we’ve got no excuse now or we have no other option that ground troops in Israel. Full, total commitment of America to Israel is the only way those peace agreements are going to work. “It seems to me,” says General Keegan, “that from a military, economic, and political point of view, the next ten years are going to be the most difficult, demanding and dangerous in Israel’s history, just as they will be for the United States.” And he goes on and he describes that “for the past fifteen years the intelligence community has found the following ratios: Arab manpower outweighing that of Israel ten to one; armor outweighing that of Israel five to one; assault weapon and artillery, five to one; combat aircraft, three to one; munitions stocks and military production ratios, one hundred to one; yet by some mysterious waving of the wand the intelligence community says that in this ratio the Israel is still superior.”

“Now it seems to me,” Keegan continues, “that the Israelis have pressed their luck beyond all mathematical probability,” we would more biblically say that they have had unusual grace displayed to them, “given the accumulating power ratios and odds for continuing success.” And here a sobering reminder of history; “It is still not appreciated that the so-called superior military forces of the state of Israel were, in fact, almost crushed and neutralized in 1973, the Yom Kippur War. If Assyrian tank division commanders, going through the Golan Heights,” which is the area northeast of the Sea of Galilee, that invasion, remember they hit them with 800 tanks and the Israelis had 100 on the line, “If the Assyrian tank division commanders, going through the Golan Heights, had merely coordinated their attack, as helicopters with Russian advisors flying over the columns at that time in 1973 were attempting to get them to do, those tank forces would have been in occupation of Tel Aviv,” that’s the coast, “in 24 to 36 hours. I know of no senior Israeli officer today who is directly involved who does not agree with me on that question. That’s how close it came.”

And I might add that historically it was two Jewish boys, aged 17, in two tanks, that held that column; one of those boys was severely wounded with second degree burns and he drove his tank back and forth all night, firing from one hill to the next hill to the next hill, the Assyrian tank commander got so confused he thought there was a whole bunch of tanks up ahead. But that’s how history is run on a shoe lace; two 17 year old boys, one with second degree burns because of napalm, and he continued to drive his tank all night, tired, exhausted. He held the line.

“Overlooked is another sobering reality. By 1985 the Arab nations will have more troops under military weapons than all of NATO combined,” and yet for some strange thing we’re very concerned that the Arabs have enough weapons. Another awful thing: “In return for such a treaty, Israel has promised to give up the most important defensible buffer, the Sinai. The settlements in north Sinai are to be abandoned; the settlements which provide warning of an attack along an invasion route used by many dynasties over several thousand years to invade the area that is now Israel. Israel gives up three air fields that may not seem very important to the uninitiated, but as one of the few privileged to examine those air fields I know they are among the most important air fields in the world.” What he’s talking about is down here in the Sinai there are three secret air bases that Israel has built. One of those air bases is virtually indestructible by air attack because of certain secret ways the Israelis have built it. Underneath they have built warning centers; all of this is being given up under American pressure.

“It will cost the United States at least 4 billion dollars to replicate those defensive air bases with America’s limited promise of aid in building two new air bases further west in the Negev. With modern jet air power and Egyptian missiles,” equipped incidentally with Soviet provided nerve gas warheads, “seven minutes warning time now constitutes the life and death of a small nation the size of Israel.”

Going on further to describe how history hinges on fine decisions: “Back in 1973 when the Israelis crossed the canal and had trapped the Egyptian third army” and we went in and stopped them, listen to how close we came to war; now it comes out, none of us knew at that time. “A careful reading of these texts leaves a strong suggestion that Soviet troops are available,” he’s talking about the telephone conversations that went on, “going back to 1973 when Mr. Sadat was on the telephone to Mr. Brezhnev, pleading hysterically for Russian troops to save Egypt. I shudder to think what would have been the outcome had it not been for the perception of our Secretary of State at the time. As a chief of Air Force intelligence at the time, I know that there were 1200 Soviet aircraft loaded with seven airborne divisions of equipment and troops waiting the eagerly anticipated decision to establish a permanent Russian military presence in the Middle East.”

To give some of you an idea of seven divisions, our entire Marine Corps is four divisions; they had seven divisions ready to go to establish a foothold in the Middle East. “It seems to me that Israel,” and this is another thing to remember about this problem of premature peace; “It seems to me now that Israel is forced to basic security, not upon defensible borders which are stable, but upon the doctrine of preemptive attack.” Preemptive attack is the doctrine that you strike your enemy if you think he’s going to hit you; you don’t wait until he hits you first. Why this is de-stable is if somebody [can’t understand word] you go ahead and attack; maybe he didn’t intend to attack you. You see, the doctrine of preemptive attack is a very unstable thing because it can be triggered by wrong information and then Keegan soberly reminds us, “Let’s not forget that the 1967 War started because the Soviets gave false information to NASA and in 1973 the Israelis were hurt badly because the CIA gave false information to them. What happens when the Israelis have no way to defend themselves except by preemptive strike? Has the situation really stabilized as a result of so-called peace agreements? No, it hasn’t.

Now even worse than that, and this gets connected to our story, you see this red line; this red line shows Israel today is vulnerable. The shady area that I’ve patched in here with my pen is the area that will be left to Israel after she gets through giving up all the territory that our country wants her to give up. And particularly the West Bank area, when that is given up there remains only 11 miles separating this area from the coast line. You can see in the scale of miles how small that is.

“It is the military aspect of the new strategy is possibly aided and abetted by the Soviets which privately concerns the Israeli defense [can’t understand word]. Recognizing the impenetrability of the Golan,” which is the area up here, they tried that in 73 and got wiped out, “Recognizing the impenetrability of the Golan, the Arabs now foresee the need, as well as the opportunity, to destroy Israel by thrusting Iraqi, Syrian, Jordanian and Saudi tank divisions, supported by jet fighters into one giant assault across the Jordan through the West Bank,” exactly the passage we see in Genesis 33, “to the Mediterranean by Israel’s narrow fifteen kilometer waste. The Arabs are now already working toward this end; the Iraqi’s have constructed major supply depots on Jordan’s eastern border. These are being stockpiled every day with Soviet tanks, artillery and munitions. Not far away the Saudis have built, with U.S. help, several giant munitions depots in their bases for staging fighters through Jordan. A 280 million dollar command and control communication system is being built in Jordan and Syria, with Saudi financing and U. S. supplying technical assistance, to permit an integration of these military forces.” And then he goes on to point out, “what we have is a threat of 15 divisions coming in on a land only eleven miles wide. As a military professional I know, as the Israeli professionals know, that two brigades, which constitutes only part of one division, just “two brigades of armor, well led and well manned, can cut Israel in two in one night’s surprise attack.” They have fifteen divisions coordinated and controlled.

Now that’s the status of Jacob today; once again we come down to a modern lesson back here. What Israel has got to do and we ought to pray that she do, that she call upon her Messiah, that she straighten herself nationally out, which she didn’t do 2,000 years ago, and get this matter straightened.

And then turning finally this morning to Proverbs 16:7 we have this principle, a principle that applies to Jacob; it applies to the nation and it applies to each one of us as individual believers. “When a man’s ways please Jehovah, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him.” Remember Esau and that moment of tension; he comes up to Jacob with 400 armed men, Jacob doesn’t know what he’s going to do but he has done one thing; he’s made his ways pleasing to God. What happens to Esau? He comes forward and welcomes him. It’s the same principle, verse 7, “When a man’s ways please Jehovah, he’s made even his enemies to be at peace with him,” a very wise principle of life.

We’ll conclude by singing a hymn that reiterates that principle….