Clough Genesis Lesson 80

The fracture in Jacob’s family – Genesis 34

Reading a letter which I think is very excellently composed by a pastor of a church in Tucson, Arizona; this letter was written, as many of you this week wrote your letters to the IRS concerning their intrusion into the administration of Christian schools, and I thought this letter was very unusual in its dignity and also in its Biblicism of approach. And since we talked about appeals here’s an example, I think, of a very well worded appeal.

“Dear Mr. ?, We would like again to express our views as to your ruling on private Christian schools. The Constitution of this great land of ours, which you and I both are pledged to uphold, states very clearly that no law shall be passed which seeks to control religion or the free exercise thereof. If Congress cannot do this, I do not see how you could set yourself above the Congress of the United States and seek to do something they cannot do. The daily training of students is as much a part of the churches duty as its holding services on Sunday; to attack one is to attack both. Our schools are open to all on the same equal basis; we do not show preference to any. If a child cannot afford to come here we still pay public taxes to support a free school for him; either way he is not being denied an education. If you argue that a poor child is being denied a quality education by being regulated to a public school I would agree with you but remember who is in charge of that; the government who has not been known for its wisdom in this area for years. Please be advised that we oppose your proposal with all of our constitutional rights.” An excellently worded letter.

This morning we are going to continue our study of the patriarchal narrative by turning to Genesis 34. We’ve been looking at the age of the patriarchs, the age of the call of Abraham, and the age in which God was founding the kingdom of the Old Testament. And because we stopped for a while and dealt with the problem of summarizing some of the Scriptures that we’ve studied into areas of application, and since we’re starting to exegete again verse by verse, we want to recall some background, so that the stories, starting with chapter 34 and going on in time don’t become fractured and disconnected in your mind. These are all like beads on a necklace and I want to give you the main string right now so you can get these stories together. Each story is very, very interesting and because in fact it’s so interesting it’s going to [can’t understand word] your big picture, focus.

The big picture from Genesis 34 on through the rest of Genesis, all the way up to chapter 50, basically is this: that God has called forth a divine viewpoint counterculture and He’s concerned about preserving that counterculture from contamination of pagan culture round about. That’s the big picture. Every story from this point on has that as a background scene: how does God keep the new culture that He’s building through this one family, which later on will spread out, how does He keep that culture from getting contaminated by the infiltration of pagan ideas? So as we watch these stories we want to realize the theme of separation is what we’re looking at. The theme of separation is expressed in the Bible in many places. You can read about it in Romans 12:2 where it says “Be not conformed to this world but be ye transformed.” You can read about it in John 17 where Jesus in His high priestly prayer says be in the world but still be of the world.

And then you can read about it in the Old Testament where David expresses it very unusually. When David, as you remember, was driven because of Saul, he was wandering as a leader of basically a guerilla force; he had to go down into Gath, into the area of the Philistine culture, in fact the very center of the Philistine culture. When he went down there he later on, when he complained to Saul, he described that sojourn, and it’s the language David uses in describing the sojourn that is unusual. He says Saul, you’ve made me go down there and serve other gods. Now what can David mean by going down in another place and serving other gods? Well, we know what it can’t mean; David certainly didn’t go to worship other gods down in the area of Gath; he didn’t bow down to Dagon. So if it doesn’t mean that what does it mean to serve other gods? Now here’s an insightful comment on culture. By going down in another land that had another culture with another set of dos and don’ts, and with another set of cultural values, he was serving the god of that culture. Remember the definition of culture, I think Henry Van Til gives and it is that culture equals faith expressed. Every culture shows some faith expressed. Communist cultures show a faith expressed. The Bible-belt culture shows a faith expressed. Every culture you want to name, whether it’s the northeastern culture, it shows a faith expressed. And when David went into Gath it showed the pagan faith expressed, expressed in innumerable ways; expressed in social customs, expressed in moral values put into their laws, expressed all sorts of ways. But culture is faith expressed.

Now in this passage we’re going to see, because this is the theme from this point forward, it opens with a bang; it opens with a tremendous war going on. Before this chapter is finished, not only is there a rape that occurred but there’s a wholesale massacre of a city, a destruction, this time by believers of unbelievers, a slaughter that is frankly uncalled for. The theme of Genesis 34 is the opening shot of the cultural holy war of the Bible. And the tensions that you see exhibited in this story that blow up into this tremendous massacre are tensions that are seething below the surface everywhere you have believers seeking to put the Scriptural principles in operation over against the community that they live in. It’s always there, the tension is merely whether it’s suppressed or whether it’s really expressed.

The background for the story is the place of Shechem and if you look at the last three verses of chapter 33 there are a few notices of what Jacob was doing at Shechem. Verse 18, “And Jacob came to Shalem, a city of Shechem, which is in the land of Canaan, when he came from Paddan-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 silver. [20] And he erected there an altar, and called it El-el ohe-Israe,” El the God of Israel.” He produces a public testimony in Shechem. Shechem is located at the center of the land of Israel. If we are to survey the land of Israel we notice they are two mountains, very famous later in Old Testament history, Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim. It was on those mountains that when the Jews conquered the land a few centuries after Jacob that a group of Levites got on the south mountain, Mount Gerizim, and on the north mountain, Mount Ebal. And one would shout out the cursings of the law and then from the other mountain the others would respond with the blessings of the law and it was there in Joshua 9 that the covenant was renewed.

Also at Shechem, to show you how entrenched the paganism was, that years later, Judges in fact, Judges 9, there’s the story of the coalescence of the Bible culture and the pagan culture coming together into a mishmash, because the God that was worshiped in Judge 9 at this place was called Baal-berith, and it means Baal, which is the pagan word for lord, the lord of berith, which is the lord of the covenant. And it shows you what they had done is they took the idea of the biblical covenant, took their pagan theology and tried to combine them. This was always a tendency at Shechem. Shechem seemed not only at the center of the land but it always seemed to be a place where we had a mishmash of culture.

Now when you have a growing divine viewpoint culture, as you do at this point in Old Testament history where you have Jacob and his family eventually on their way to develop a nation and this nation is going to radiate divine viewpoint in every area; where this takes place, if we really are serious people, where this takes place is in Satan’s domain. Now what has Satan already done in the culture round about? He’s already brought it under his dominion. Do you think Satan is going to naively stand back and let the light of a nation guided by God’s Spirit just permeate the environment without some sort of resistance? Absolutely not. And so it’s not unexpected to see there’s going to be a collision or a battle here.

Now Genesis 34 is a critical chapter for those of us in this area of the country called the Bible-belt because we are heirs to pieces of a Christian culture that has been handed down from grandparents and before that great-grandparents, and in our time this is the last time we’re going to have a choice and it’s this generation that’s got it. Either we capitulate to the humanist invaders coming in from the west and the east, either we capitulate to their ideas, their values, their standards, or if we don’t then we must fight them but it’s one or the other. There is no neutrality, there is no way we can handle the situation without some sort of a scene.

Genesis 34 is how the scene in the Scripture starts. By the way, since it does occur at Shechem, let’s look at Shechem and get some idea of the geographical surroundings of the story. [He shows slides] Looking on our map, locating Mount Ebal and Gerizim, we can see the two mountains; the red line passes through these areas and then there’s a highway now that goes between the mountains; here’s the Mediterranean Sea, here’s the Jordan River. Looking closer we can pick out some details; the road that runs north/south along this area is the road that runs right by another thing; remember, Genesis 34, Jacob is on scene and obviously if he has a lot of flocks he wants to be at a place where he can get water and we have there the well of Jacob; that’s where the well of Jacob was and that shows you what Jacob is doing here in Genesis 34. Off to the west was the city of Shechem, it’s actually known by its modern name, Nablus. Nablus, the modern city is probably just to the west of the ancient city. But you all know from reading the New Testament another incident happened right here on the same ground with a woman and it was the woman at the well, John 4. Here is what those two mountains look like, one to the south, we’re standing on that one, is Gerizim; looking north to Mount Ebal and in between there’s Jacob’s well. So this is the place where the story took place. The residential area right near the well of Jacob and Nablus, looking up from where the picture was taken, here’s Mount Gerizim; it’s not too big, just really over-sized hills but nevertheless, this is the place where covenant renewal was conducted and you can almost to this day shout across those two mountains and hear the reverberation. So it was a natural sound area and hence probably picked because of that for a covenant renewal ceremony later. There’s the scene, now the details.

Genesis 34:1, “And Dinah the daughter of Leah, which she bare unto Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land.” Now the story of how this holy war got started is one of small beginnings. And as usually happens in the Scripture, cosmic issues start in a very mundane way. And verse 1 starts with a girl, probably in her teenage years, somewhere between 13 and 15 who is simply looking around for some playmates, just as innocent as that. Notice verse 1 does not say she went out to see the boys of the land; she went out to see the girls of the land, and if you read the story of Jacob you can understand very well, probably she’s the only girl in the household and so it’s nice playing with your brothers all day long but finally you like, I guess, if you’re a girl, you like to see a few other girls around once in a while. So verse 1, here the child seeks playmates.

Now you say that’s a strange introduction to Old Testament holy war. I say not at all, this is exactly the way it recurs today. You see, you can have older Christians and they get married and so on and begin to have children and they’re not really too concerned about biblical issues; that is, until they suddenly realize oh-oh, where’s our son and daughter going; who are they playing with today, this afternoon? Who are they going to have fellowship with? Are the children that play with our children going to influence our children with their values? You bet they are. Well now you see we’re right back to parental responsibility to direct where the playing and the fellowshipping takes place. And so the story starts precisely there. There’s deep wisdom in the Holy Spirit in arranging this historical event that begins with a little girl looking for playmates.

Turn to Proverbs 1 and I’ll show you the major passage in the Old Testament on parental responsibilities to guide children in their selection of playmates. The Old Testament and the proverbial literature calls children fools, not because they’re immoral, not because they’re stupid IQ wise; the word “fool” or p^ethiy as it occurs in the Old Testament means just simply untrained without discernment, and a child does not have discernment and so he’s called a fool, and because he is a fool his parents are not to abdicate leadership but to assume leadership responsibility and make those decisions while the child can’t make them for himself, even though he may think so. So in verse 10-19 this is the father talking to his son.

Proverbs 1:10-19, “My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not,” to go along with them. [11] “If they say, Come with us, let us lay wait for blood, let us lurk secretly for the innocent without cause, [12] Let us swallow them up alive…” and so on. Verse 15, “My son, walk not thou in the way with them;” in other words, don’t get around the wrong crowd, and I am your father and I’m telling you, don’t do this! I don’t care what, they may be real hotshots, or what, but you’ll notice the admonition in verses 10-19 is son, if you play games with those groups and you’re going to get burned and here’s where you’re going to get burned and if you look carefully you’ll see that the father here is enumerating point after point after point after point after point to his teenage son to watch out for the wrong crowd; they have deep, deep influence.

And this is something that parents today sometimes feel bludgeoned into retreating from. You’ve been told, perhaps, by self-appointed authorities that really you don’t know what’s best for your own child; you let the park supervisor or you let the neighborhood leaders or somebody, you let them assume responsibility because we know more than you parents about where your children are supposed to be. It was about two or three weeks ago I got a call from a local radio station and they wanted to know why I was against some Texas legislation that allowed the state of Texas to license Christian daycare centers and they said we’ve talked to the hierarchy in the Southern Baptist Convention and we’ve talked to the Methodist people and we’ve talked to this group and that group and they think it’s all right; now why are you the odd one out. Well, it’s not the first time I’ve been accused of being that but nevertheless, the interview went on and they asked me on what basis do you do this, don’t you think, for example, that if we had licensing of these daycare centers it would protect those children; how can you be against protecting the children. I said well, right now in the city of Lubbock we have a case in court involving a daycare center that was licensed and child molestation is accused to have taken place. Did the licensing, if this charge is true, did the licensing prevent it? Of course not. And if it did occur is the prosecutor going to prosecute them on the basis of licensing regulations? No, he’s going to prosecute them on the basis of criminal law proceedings.

So now you tell me, what does licensing have to do with physical protection of children. It has nothing to do with it because they’re already covered under criminal law. Well, it may be for health or fire protection. Ah, but we have health and fire ordinances; the city health department, the city fire department are charged with that responsibility. You see, there’s no need for those licenses, except one need, the need for the state bureaucrats to stick in and control every area of life; that’s why we have licensing, not to protect anybody because the people, by definition, are already protected, they live inside the domain and the law operates in the domain so how can you have more protection by licensing. Well, the man said, how would you feel if you were a parent, how would you feel to have your child go down to a place like this, uninspected for maybe two or three years. And I said well I happen to be the father of four sons and I don’t let my sons go anywhere without me personally checking on where they’re going; this is my responsibility as a parent and frankly I resent any government official butting into my sphere of responsibility. There was silence on the other end. Radical new statement, parents are responsible for their children; never heard this before.

Proverbs 1:10-19 outlines parental responsibility. Now that’s not what’s happening back in Genesis 34. Right from the very start of this story we see a naïve girl going out, trapped by the overwhelming pressure of a hostile culture, unable to cope with it, and she gets raped, verse 2. [“And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her.”] And that’s the result.

Now in this story the growing animosity between the two cultures, the culture of Jacob and his nation to be and the pagan surroundings is shown by various omissions in the way this story develops. For example, if you skip down to verse 6, after the rape has occurred, the father of the boy comes to Jacob and he starts to talk with him. Verse 8, the negotiation continues; verse 11 and 12, the boy himself negotiates. Notice what is missing in verse 6, verse 8, verse 11, and verse 12. What is missing is any moral judgment. Neither the father nor the boy in this regard see that there’s anything immoral that’s been done; this is common standard operating procedures in the pagan environment. And because it’s standard all that needs to take place, basically is negotiation; he wanted the girl to marry. That’s the issue, there’s no acknowledgment of any kind of moral protection for the woman’s virginity—none!

Now the very fact that that is omitted and that that is the theme is enforced by the last verse. You can’t explain why the story ends with a question unless you look at the last verse and you see that it was precisely this absence of any kind of moral judgment that angered the sons for their massacre. Genesis 34:31, “And they said, Should he deal with our sister as with a whore?” Now the point the boys are making is how come there’s not an acknowledgment of anything immoral done? You’re just negotiating, how much is her price; there’s nothing immoral. There’s no recognition that the values of Jacob are different from the values of the pagans. And this angers the sons and so we find this cultural underlying theme. You’ve got see this or you misunderstand the whole point of the story.

Let’s go back and look at Genesis 34:3, the boy does love the girl, it’s not love her and leave her. This is a case where he genuinely loves her which makes this all the more intriguing. It’s not the case of the quick rip-off; this is a case where the guy really wants the girl for his wife, but he’s so embedded with the paganization he doesn’t realize there’s anything wrong. He lives out in the dark zone here on the chart; for him and his standards that’s fine, no problem. In fact, verse 3 is a compliment to Shechem; verse 3 tells you that Shechem indeed is a fellow that’s with the program, he’s considered to be an outstanding young man in the community. [“And his soul clave unto Dinah the daughter of Jacob, and he loved the damsel, and spoke kindly unto the damsel.] Verse 19 says that he “was more honor able than any in the house of his father.” So from the point of view of the Canaanites this fellow was not immoral.

If you look further, back in the early part of the story you see in verse 4 he goes to his father to get arrangements made for the marriage, [“And Shechem spoke unto his father Hamor, saying, Get me this damsel to wife.”] So there he recognizes the authority of the family and the authority of his father. So with all these things going for him it’s doubly intriguing that Shechem is picked out; it’s not a case of a simple crime. The kind of wrong that is done in verse 2 is a wrong that is put there by the Holy Spirit when He arranged the thing to take place, is put there to show that you cannot have two cultures sitting together side by side without tremendous friction; one is going to dominate one, or the other one is going to dominate.

Genesis 34:5, the second indicator in the text that the father is not giving parental direction; in verse 1 he let his daughter pick out her own playmates by herself. A child is not responsible enough to do this in spite of all the child advocacy. They are called fools for a reason, not to demean them but to put them in their proper place. Verse 5, “And Jacob heard that he had defiled Dinah his daughter: now his sons were with his cattle in the field: and Jacob held his peace until they were come.” In other words, there’s some sort of paralysis in Jacob’s activity; he’s passive. The word “he held his peace” or that phrase is used elsewhere in the Scriptures in a good sense. Let me give you an example. Some of you saw, I guess, the film the Ten Commandments, and the parting of the Red Sea. Well, the phraseology in Exodus 14, when they stand at the bank and they watch the Egyptians coming through and the water comes over them; the phraseology that is used is this: “they held their peace.” Now in that context it was good to do that; that was faith-resting properly. In verse 5 we have the parent faith-resting wrongly. At this point he isn’t supposed to be faith-resting; he’s supposed to be faith-doing something, namely getting out there and giving some on scene instruction and guidance. But he’s not, he takes a passive role, and we’ll see this at point after point after point after point in the story. Jacob abdicates his parental responsibility; he’s not active, he’s passive.

So the negotiations begin, and by the way, this abdication of parental responsibility shows you the theme that Jesus points to in Matthew 12 where He says no one can invade a home without first taking the strong man, then having secured the strong man he invades the house. The principle is spiritually if Satan can destroy, undercut, somehow immobilize spiritually the husband of the home, then the wife and the children are just a piece of cake… just a piece of cake. They can be gotten to very easily, very quickly, very rapidly once the authority structure has collapsed. See, that’s where the authority structure is important. I’ll show you something else about authority and leadership as time goes on here. But Jacob is taking a passive role, so passive in fact that liberal scholars who have commented on the passage say that this passage as well as others they take out of context shows that in the ancient world there was what we call fratriarchy, that is, rule of the oldest brother, and they use various passages to try to prove this. I reject that scholarship because of it’s presuppositions but I accept their observation that in fact we do have a strange kind of older brother type rule here when you ask yourself where’s the father in all this.

Genesis 34:6, “And Hamor the father of Shechem went out unto Jacob [to commune with him].” He starts to talk with him. And as the discussion proceeds in verse 7, there’s a biblical first. There’s an expression here that is used for the first time in the Bible and I want you to look at it because it’s a key to understanding the story. [7, “And the sons of Jacob came out of the field when they heard it: and the men were grieved, and they were very wroth, because he had wrought folly in Israel in lying with Jacob’s daughter; which thing ought not to be done.”] “… in Israel.” Up until this verse every time the noun “Israel” occurs it refers to a man; this is the first time it occurs to a cultural group. Notice the last part in verse 7, “which thing ought not to be done.” It talks about a norm and a standard that is articulated through a culture. So verse 7, by its language shows you that what is on the author’s mind is a cultural collision that now takes place. It’s not that they’ve done something personally to Jacob; they’ve done that, yes, but it’s more. That is not what is to be done in this growing divine viewpoint counterculture of the Old Testament; it’s just unacceptable.

So Hamor communed with him [8, “And Hamor communed with them, saying, The soul of my son Shechem longs for your daughter: I pray you give her him to wife”] and as the negotiations proceed you’ll notice something else, verses 9-10, the satanic nature of this negotiation process. Not only is no moral acknowledgement made but in verse 9 and 10 you very quickly see that there’s another agenda that operates in this meeting. The agenda quickly shifts from simply getting Dinah married off to Shechem to a more general agenda, that is, let’s have wholesale intermarriage; let’s have wholesale cultural intermingling, let’s amalgamate the divine viewpoint culture of Israel with the pagan culture of Canaan. Let’s all pull it together into one mixing pot. We might say, paraphrasing what happens today, let’s get our children together in a neutral classroom where they can have values clarification, where it doesn’t matter what this child believed or that child believes, we just sort of stir them around and mix them up and come up with some sort of neutral goo. Values clarification—it’s the same sort of thing. But you notice the Holy Spirit doesn’t do that. Just at the point when verse 9 and 10 take place we notice something happen. The call of verses 9-10 is the call to come, let’s be neutral; let not one man’s religion be placed above another, it’s better for society that we all come together. [9, “And make ye marriages with us, and give your daughters unto us, and take our daughters unto you. [10] And ye shall dwell with us: and the land shall be before you; dwell and trade ye therein, and get you possessions therein.”

Now something takes place; the third time in the story that the father abdicates his responsibility; it’s very clear. Verse 11, “And Shechem said unto her father and unto her brethren, Let me find grace in your eyes, and what ye shall say unto me I will give. [12] Ask me never so much dowry and gift, and I will give according as ye shall say unto me: but give me the damsel to wife.” Notice verse 13, who responds, Daddy? Huh-un, only the brothers, [“And the sons of Jacob answered Shechem and Hamor his father deceitfully, and said, because he had defiled Dinah their sister.”] Why doesn’t Jacob respond in verse 13? He’s being addressed because he’s there in verse 11. Once again, the third time, he abdicates. Some scholars have suggested by the time of verse 13 Jacob has got angry or just hacked off or he’s tired and he leaves the room and he leaves it to his sons. Big mistake! Leaving it to his sons causes the first massacre in Palestine and it’s the Jews who start it. And it’s a sad story of young men who have a good motive but do not have the wisdom to carry out their good motive, overthrow, so to speak, or because the elders vacate their sphere of responsibility, they leave a power vacuum, the young men move in with impatience, take over and destroy the thing because now in verse 13 we have the introduction of another word, deceitful. Now the sons begin to talk deceit.

For those of you who have been here watching the patriarchal stories, that word should ring a bell; you’ve heard it before. Yes, it’s the learned behavior pattern of the family of Jacob; Jacob’s –R learned behavior pattern. Remember what it was? Jacob had positively a good aggressive nature, but what did he have besides that aggressive nature. He had the tendency to be deceitful and that deceit God had to work in his life to sanctify him. Now as it always turns out, the hardest thing I think about being a parent is to discipline out of your children your sin nature. First of all it’s embarrassing to see the things that you daily have to struggle with and you know this because you’re daily working with it, and then what do you see? You see version 2, 3, 4, 5, looking right at your face and of course you’re reluctant to do it because it’s just embarrassing to start with. Now the Bible knows it’s embarrassing and very difficult for parents to do this and this is why there’s another story in the Bible very similar, winds up almost the same way—David. David has certain tendencies in his sin nature and he fails to discipline those out of his sons and what do his sons do? They do the sins of their father but more intensely. Now what do Simeon and Levi do but the sins of their father more intently because their father apparently has taken a passive role in his son’s sanctification. He’s been passive, he’s sit back and he’s let these patterns grow. He’s dealt with them himself perhaps, Jacob we know dealt with his, but he just didn’t transmit that wisdom on to his sons with the result that his sons shows this deceit, anger and aggressiveness in a way and on a scale Jacob never showed. Let’s look at how the story continues.

We might summarize verses 13 by saying that the two sons are right in their aggressive motive because they see a moral collision of cultural values; they’re right there. They’re wrong in the means that they seek resolution of that tension and the first wrong-ness about their means is seen in verses 14-17 when they’re dealing with the circumcision issue. They say we can’t do this thing, [14, “And they said unto them,] We cannot do this thing, to give our sister to one that is uncircumcised; for that were a reproach unto us; [15]: But in this will we consent unto you: If ye will be as we be, that every male of you be circumcised; [16] Then will we give our daughters unto you, and we will take your daughters to us, and we will dwell with you, and we will become one people. [17] But if ye will not hearken unto us, to be circumcised; then will we take our daughter, and we will be gone.]”

Circumcision was never intended to be a mere outward ceremony; circumcision was intended to indicate in a physical way the subordination of the heads of the home, notice please in the Old Testament God deliberately picked a sign of spiritual authority that could only be applied to the male; that’s not accidental, that shows you the structure that’s implicit in the Old Testament. And so in this situation we have circumcision being used as a gimmick. They had no intention of buckling under to the laws of Yahweh. You don’t see anything moral that’s resolved before verse 14 so how can the proposal of verse 14 indicate in good faith, that these people really are submitting to the law of Yahweh. No way! It’s being used as a gimmick; it’s being used as Roman Catholicism used baptism in the last 200 years in Latin America, to go in as priest after priest did, instead of teaching the Word of God and securing individual conversions to the Word of God, what did they do in Latin America? Baptize whole villages, village after village after village. And what do we have now? We have the bastard Latin American culture that’s neither Christian nor pagan. How did that take place? It was erroneous evangelism in missionary work that did it and so many, many people would just simply take the Indian gods and goddesses, become baptized in the Roman Catholic church and then we have Joseph and Mary and somebody else; they’re the same old gods and goddesses from their Indian pagan days just reworked into Christian statues and saints. How else do we explain the tremendously superstitious nature of Latin American (quote) “Christianity” (end quote). That’s because of this system. Same thing here, using some outward ritual without the spirit of the thing.

Verses 18-24 show another development in this collision of culture. Verses 18-24 give us what went on on the other side; you’ve seen the negotiation process from the Jewish side; from their side it was a gimmickry in deceit; now in verses 18-24 we see the other side and what really was on the pagan’s mind. [18, “And their words pleased Hamor, and Shechem Hamor’s son. [19] And the young man deferred not to do the thing, because he had delight in Jacob's daughter: and he was more honorable than all the house of his father. [20] And Hamor and Shechem his son came unto the gate of their city, and communed with the men of their city, saying,”]

Notice the words in verse 21, this is what they tell the inhabitants of the land, “These men are peaceable with us; therefore let them dwell in the land, and trade therein; for the land, behold, it is large enough for them; let us take their daughters to us for wives, and let us give them our daughters.” Now look at the motive… now look at the motive. [22] “Only herein will the men consent unto us for to dwell with us, to be one people, if every male among us be circumcised, as they are circumcised. [23] Shall not their cattle and their substance and every beast of theirs be ours?” Amalgamation, an eclectic gathering together, ripping off the believers and their culture. “Only let us consent unto them, and they will dwell with us.
[24] And unto Hamor and unto Shechem his son hearkened all that went out of the gate of his city; and every male was circumcised, all that went out of the gate of his city.”

So now we have the entire population under some sort of a contract agreement. And then verses 25-29 we have the slaughter, a tremendous slaughter here. “And it came to pass on the third day, when they were sore, that two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’ brethren, took each man his sword, and came upon the city boldly, and slew all the males. [26] And they slew Hamor and Shechem his son with the edge of the sword, and took Dinah out of Shechem’s house, and went out. [27] The sons of Jacob came upon the slain, and spoiled the city, because they had defiled their sister. [28] They took their sheep, and their oxen, and their asses, and that which was in the city, and that which was in the field,
[29] And all their wealth, and all their little ones, and their wives took they captive, and spoiled even all that was in the house.” You did it to our sister and we do it back to you, the cultural war.

Now in this slaughter and in this massacre, here is an example of the other side of the coin. Up to this time we’ve emphasized Jacob, the older man, who abdicated his parental responsibility. Now we see what young men do when they’re not guided and they’re not directed by older men. We see that impetuosity, their impatience, they go out and they seek to resolve an issue and they bring down the whole house by the issue. To show you how disastrous this was, turn to Genesis 49 we’ll see that Simeon and Levi doomed their whole tribes; each of the sons of Jacob is a father or a head of a tribe and in Genesis 49:5 we have each of those sons blessed or cursed by their father. And when Jacob, the old man, prior to his death, lays his hands on the son’s heads and gives them blessing or cursing, when he comes to Simeon and Levi, notice what he says: “Simeon and Levi are brethren; instruments of cruelty are in their habitations. [6] O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honor be not thou united; for in their anger they slew a man, and in their self-will they dug down a wall [hamstrung oxen].” That’s the reference, it’s singular because of poetry, but it’s a reference to Shechem and the massacre there. [7] “Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce; cursed be their wrath, for it was cruel: I will divide them in Jacob, and I will scatter them in Israel.”

Now that was the result, the long-term result of young impetuous men who had a good cause, went about it foolishly and destroyed their future. They were both scattered and it took place this way. In Joshua 19, when they’re going into the land and everybody gets their inheritance, you will read that the place where Simeon was given to occupy, this is hundreds of years later, the tribe coming out of Simeon, was down here around Beersheba. Now it turns out that that isn’t their land; it’s Judah’s land. The entire tribe of Simeon was absorbed by Judah. From the human point of view the tribe of Simeon disappeared from history because of this; it was a curse upon them. The other tribe, Levi, also was given no land, and they, because they did obey God later, were blessed but the blessing kind of undid part of the cursing and you know what happened to Levi; they became the priests but they never occupied any land; it was taken away from them, they had no special inheritance. So Simeon and Levi, what have they done as young men? They’ve destroyed their futures; they’ve destroyed their futures by an impetuous act, but the impetuous act, on one hand, was out of good motive; on the other hand imperfectly executed.

The story, however, can’t be appreciated until you get to the last two verses. Here in the last two verses the author weaves together the minor theme of this chapter with the general theme of Genesis. The general theme of Genesis I said is the fear of cultural eclecticism, cultural destruction because the standards of the world become infiltrating the standards of believers. That’s the big theme. The minor theme of this particular chapter is who is the one that must take the lead in the holy war of culture? Not the pastors, it’s not the educator, it’s the parents, and particularly it’s the father who must know this. It’s therefore interesting that the story terminates with two viewpoints. Genesis 34:30 is the viewpoint of the older believing man; verse 31 is the viewpoint of the younger believing male. Both verse 30 and 31 show you something about men and the way they think and they both show the story of the difference of how older men think from younger men, oftentimes, not necessarily but often.

Verse 30, “And Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, Ye have troubled me to make me to stink among the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites and the Perizzites: and I being few in number, they shall gather themselves together against me, and slay me; and I shall be destroyed, I and my house.” Now could we summarize verse 30 in sort of an easy to understand colloquial expression? I think we can. We could summarize the whole spirit of verse 30 and this older man’s attitude was please sons, I don’t want to be hassled any more. Please sons, I don’t want to be hassled any more! I know God has called me to this cause but I am tired of having to fight, fight, fight, fight, fight.

Now you can see this in some of the older Christians in charge of leadership in various Christian organizations of our day; you can see them when you mention the problem of this legal battle and by the way, I hope those of you who signed up will get your copy of the Texas Tech law review, this legal battle that’s going on, the creation/evolution controversy, the fight over Christian schools, don’t hassle me say some of the leaders of the Christian organizations. We’ve tried to teach the Word, we’ve tried to teach the Word and all we get is static and flack, static and flack; I am tired of being hassled. Now it’s understandable that an older Christian can act this way, men like Jacob; after all if you wrestled with Jesus Christ you’d be tired too. But they’ve gone through many battles and they’re simply tired. You see this oftentimes develop; you wonder what happens to these men when they get in high positions of administrations in Christian organizations; the fight goes out of them. Why? I think tiredness.

And this leads me to comment on something else. People who have come here in the morning service will think that what is being taught from the pulpit is some sort of a male chauvinism, that basically what we’re saying is the males here and the women are just doormats. Now if you say that I think you’d have to review the tapes more carefully because that’s not what has been said. Moreover, verse 30 tells you something else about the price… about the price a man pays for having to play the role of leader. One of the worst things about being a leader is the problem that you’re in bondage to your office. People who aren’t leaders never seem to understand that, but when you’re given a position of responsibility it doesn’t make any difference how tired you may be; it doesn’t make any difference of how many people don’t like it, how much pressure you’re getting or any other excuse, you have got to go on leading.

In the early service we had a man who had been in the service and he was telling a story about World War II, he was out with a group of men and they were in the front lines and his friend was the officer in charge, he was a First Lieutenant, had one bar on his shoulder and he was in charge of a whole group of people and he’d been day and night trying to get this perimeter defense established because they were expecting a German attack during the night. And all night the first night they worked, and all day they worked and he had to do this, that and the other thing and he just was exhausted at the end of the day and one of the enlisted people came up and said hey, you just go to sleep and I’ll look after it during the night. And he said no, I’m wearing the bar and the responsibility is on me and I’ve got to do it. Now there’s an example of almost the blight of a leader. You see it’s not all the majesty and the glory; that’s what the follower often thinks, is that being a leader is just the majesty and the glory; oh no, it’s this verse 30 stuff, this is also part of being a leader, the tiredness that comes on.

I would imagine this, more than any other feature, must have weighed on Jacob’s mind. He is an old man by this point; he has gone through some awful sanctifying procedures and he simply is exhausted, but we can tell by the spirit of this chapter God holds him still responsible; he abdicated and he shouldn’t have here and the result is they paid an awful price; two of his sons lost their heritage.

But now verse 31, the young men’s position; if verse 30 is an apologetic for the old man’s position, verse 31 is an apologetic to justify the young men in their actions. “And they said, Should he deal with our sister as with a whore?” Now their position is they see there is a moral collision between the culture of Israel and the culture of Shechem. They see there is a moral issue between it and they say you’ve done nothing about it and we did, and you can argue and you can criticize about what we did and say it’s wrong but we did something and you didn’t; you let our sister be treated like a whore and that’s wrong. So there’s the apologetic for the young men.

So what do we have as we terminate Genesis 34? What we have is the first family, with the first tribe of Israel, the first tribal organization forming, and we’ve got a fractured family unit. Do you see how sin has already crept into the process and it crept into the process because it all went out to coping with pagan surroundings, failure, casualties in trying to cope with it, the attitudes invaded the home, the home collapsed. Now we have the young men set against the old man instead of having them united and set together as a team against the pagans outside of the home; we’ve got the holy war going on in the family instead of the holy war going on against the pagans around about. So what can we say? I think those of us who are older Christian men, those of us who are younger Christian men, have a series of questions to ask ourselves about this text.

I think if we’re older Christian men here’s some questions that I would have to ask myself, looking honestly at this text with Jacob. I’d have to ask myself, do I honestly understand where the cultural collision is? At least do I understand enough so I could give guidance to my children, so that when I come to a very practical example, like Dinah in verse 1, when it comes to picking out their playmates, do I have the discernment to read this one, not this one; this one, not this one? Do I have that ability to decide and discern? If I don’t, then I am abdicating God’s responsibility that He places on me.

Another question, if I were an older Christian man I’d ask myself, am I going to sit back and allow the cherished traditions of a biblical culture to get ripped off, raped if you want to use the word metaphorically; do you want to allow what we Christians have invested time and effort over centuries in church history, you’ll stand by while this gets raped and ripped off by the humanists, and just sit passively by and let them take over one institution after another, one community after another, one piece of legislation after another, and still like Jacob we’re absent from the negotiating table? These are questions that older Christians have to ask. And always while we’re doing this do we say to ourselves, well yes, but I just don’t want to be hassled. Are you whining about being jeopardized personally while your heritage gets raped?

If I’m a younger Christian man what would I ask myself; looking at Levi and Simeon here what things can I learn about myself. I’d have to say do I see honestly the need for an older man’s advice? Do I see the need that my zeal be guided by wisdom that’s born of experience of years or do I see that I’m such a master of my future that I’ll go ahead and risk it like Simeon and Levi, destroy and tear down instead of build up because I launched off and did something and then sooner or later, then I thought about what I was doing? In other words, what about the impetuosity of the young?

We’re going to conclude by singing….