Clough Genesis Lesson 81

Jacob restored to fellowship, Deborah, Rachel, Isaac die – Genesis 35

We have two questions regarding Genesis, one is: If God is not seen in Scripture as initiating unbelief to what does Proverbs 16:4 refer [“The LORD has made all things for Himself; yea, even the wicked, for the day of evil”]. I think I’ve said this about 85 times but we’ll try it again. God is comprehensively sovereign which means that He is over good and over evil. That’s the kind of thing that you see in Proverbs 16:4 and it’s obviously a corollary to the fact that God is our Creator. However, Proverbs 16:4 says nothing about unbelief and when I spoke Wednesday night on unbelief my point was that God is sovereign over good in a different way than He’s sovereign over evil and you’ve got to say this, as all real professional Reformed people have said, or else you make God the author of evil. Now if you don’t like what I’m saying then you’re going to have to make God the author of evil.

Now you have your choice: make God simultaneously sovereign over good and evil in the same way, in the same form, and make Him the author of evil and destroy the whole Christian system, or preserve the sovereignty of God over good and evil and show that He is responsible for the good but not for the evil. There’s only two possibilities and you might as well take your pick and learn the difference between ultimate cause, which means God’s comprehensive sovereignty over good and evil, and proximate cause or responsible cause. Now the last 500 years these words have been used and if you’re going to start studying theology seriously, at least, before you go too far, master the basic tools of the profession which is a standard vocabulary and these are the vocabulary words involved. So instead of nitpicking me every time I make a statement about the sovereignty of God pay attention to your own vocabulary and it’ll straighten you out. When I teach something I generally teach it in a very balanced way. I’m not going to sit up here and say something and qualify it 105 ways after I’ve said the sentence.

This is why we have documents written to qualify that; if you want the position I have written it very clearly in the Framework pamphlet, page after page after page of this and it was carefully thought out and carefully worded. It’s all in there, so when you hear me say something like Proverbs 16:4, Isaiah 45:7, I was the one that brought those verses up, not you. I brought them up in this service earlier about God being comprehensively sovereign over good and evil and I spent hours showing you why there was an asymmetry here. Why this should be unclear at this late date I don’t know; if it is, come to me and I’ll run through it with you the 86^th time and we’ll go through all the verses again but I can’t spend any more time from the pulpit answering the question because I think I’ve answered it, I don’t know how many times so far this spring and last fall.

Let’s turn to Genesis 35. We had a further question on what Simeon and Levi were supposed to do in chapter 34, other than go destroy an entire village because they raped their sister. And the answer is found in the Mosaic Law, there were options, godly options that they could have followed. One of the options in the Mosaic Law, when a boy gets involved in this situation he can marry the girl but then he gives up all right to further divorce. Another option given in the Mosaic Law is that he pays the girl’s father a price and the price is the price that is pictured in the Scripture to emphasize that virginity has value and therefore can’t be taken away without destroying the value of the girl. And so this is a second godly option that could be. And then there’s possibly a third and a fourth option but it just would be a product of the godly alternatives enumerated in the Mosaic Law. So Simeon and Levi did not have to do the kind of thing they did.

Today we’re going to finish a major section in Genesis. Genesis 35 is the end of what we call the tolédotes, or the generations of Isaac; it just stops right here. Chapter 36 is a separate section and then from chapter 37 on we have the rest of the book of Genesis; so we are at a major dividing point and you want to look at some of the flow here and I’ll introduce this to you to sort out the big picture and get the little one together.

We said that from this point forward in Genesis you’re going to see one basic theme; it’s going to be thrown to you in maybe 15 or 20 different ways but it’s the same theme, same basic idea, just learn to see it; it reappears with a different set of clothes but it’s always the same idea. The idea is that God has called forth this family, the family of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and it’s this family from which he will form the kingdom of the Old Testament. Everything will flow out of this family; that’s the basic idea.

Now, since the family has been called out of the world what’s the danger? The danger is that the family will sink back into the world from which it was called, so we can say that the major theme of Genesis, chapter after chapter after chapter is trying to maintain the separate purity of this family unit. In fact, when we go into this last section on Joseph, the whole argument of the Joseph story is to show why it was necessary for Israel to go into captivity in Egypt and be extracted by a miraculous exit; that’s an unanswered question without the Joseph stories. Why? Why did God all of a sudden start a plan with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and then kind of dump them in Egypt and leave them there for four centuries; that’s a long time. Four centuries; do you realize our country isn’t even four centuries old? Israel and the Jews spent a longer time in Egypt than our entire nation has existed. So why, why did that happen? Genesis is giving you the why. It’s telling you this reason, this reason, this reason; it’s to keep that family sufficiently pure in order to carry on the foundation of the kingdom.

The minor theme of Genesis 34 is the forsaking of the father of his parental leadership. And the reason this was so critical was because in the situation of Jacob, when he abdicated his leadership as a father over his home, the culture surrounding the family, all this pressure, like water against the hull of a submarine, just suddenly crushed in and we saw the degeneration of the family unit in chapter 34. Now we at Lubbock Bible Church take family structure seriously. This is why we’ve designed a family training program that operates during the year in which we urge parents to do the teaching in the home. There are those who think they can do it better on their own, fine for them, but I find actually most Christians need some sort of support, some sort of a program to help them do this, and during this summer we’re going to have a special reading program involving Bill Gothard’s character sketches, volume 1, and each person or each family unit in the reading program will, for one supper each week, in their house, doing their own thing, the head of the home will read the section in Gothard, a particular schedule that we’ll have so everybody’s in the same chapter, then we’ll discuss about it and after this has gone on for a while tying spiritual character to various teachers in the animal kingdom we hope to arrange a visit over at Tech to the biology department and talk about the animals, maybe some of them that we’ve actually talked about in the character sketches, and actually see them and study their habits; it’ll be kind of interesting. So our summer plan is to carry on with this scriptural wisdom about the leading of the father in the home.

Now you see this further in the way Genesis is made. We’ve said that we’ve come to the end of a section, by the end of chapter 35, and if you notice Genesis 36:1, looking ahead, begins as we’ve seen so many of these sections begin in Genesis, “These are the generations of Esau,” these are the generations of Edom. Then if you turn to Genesis 37:32 you see the same statement, “These are the generations of Jacob.” Now as I said earlier when I dealt with this kind of a phrase, we don’t know exactly how Genesis was compiled. We know apparently Moses did it; Genesis doesn’t say it but we infer it, that Moses basically compiled it. Well, the question is, where did Moses get his information? He didn’t talk to Adam directly. Apparently what had happened was that records were left so that there were these individual books available to Moses that he then synthesized into what we call the book of Genesis, much like the individual books of the Bible have been synthesized into what we call the Bible. But what we call “the Bible” is actually a set of books, and we stop and think so much in terms of the unity of the Bible we forget the diversity of it. It’s like carrying around an encyclopedia set is what you’re doing every time you’re carrying a Bible; you’re not just carrying a book, you’re carrying sections. So it is in each book. I can go back through some of these and recall, hopefully, your memory.

Genesis 1:1 was the creation of the world and then Genesis 2:4 it said, “And these are the generations of heaven and earth. It meant that from Genesis 2:4 on through Genesis 2, 3 and so on, this is the outcome of the heavens and the earth. Then in Genesis 5:1 it said “And these are the generations,” or in the Hebrew the tolédote, these are the tolédotes of Adam. So we have the tolédote of the heavens and the earth, the toledotes of Adam. Then we had in Genesis 6:9, “These are the generations of Noah.” Now notice that each one of these “these are the generations of” doesn’t start with the creation of the man; for example, Noah preexisted Genesis 6:9. Adam preexisted Genesis 5:1. So whatever the tolédote of X, where X is the name of a patriarch, whatever that formula means it can’t mean the creation of the person. It means the progeny of the person, the results, the historical effects of that person in history. Genesis 10:1, “These are the generations of the sons of Noah.” In Genesis 11:10, “These are the generations of Shem.” Continuing, Genesis 11:27, “These are the generations of Terah.” Then a strange thing; Genesis 25:12, “These are the generations of Ishmael.”

Now the question: why is it that Abraham’s left out? Of all the Biblical characters, who is the center stage of this portion of the book of the Bible? And that is Abraham. Now isn’t that interesting; Abraham’s left out of the tolédote, he doesn’t have one of his own. How do we explain this? Again, the Bible is very, very carefully designed. Abraham married his half-sister; moreover, his son, Isaac, got his bride from Laban who was also a family relative. So actually what you have is the family of Terah supplying all the characters, not just Abraham. So Abraham doesn’t have a tolédote all his own because it’s not all the progeny of Abraham; the story is complicated and it goes back to all of Terah’s home.

Then we have Genesis 25:12, Ishmael, and Genesis 25:19, Isaac. Now notice something and notice this pattern because we’re going to see it this Sunday. Here’s how you get doctrine out of sections of Scripture; you don’t just go in and yank a verse out and study it out of its context. You’ve got to see the argument of the book and the argument of the book is that you have the development of the Messianic line, and where you have the non-elect these are simply left off. For example, Ishmael is spoken of in just these two verses, in Genesis 25:12 and Genesis 25:19 you have a section, “These are the generations of Ishmael…” dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, and he’s left. Then we go back and we start talking about and “These are the generations of Isaac,” and vast amounts of time are spent on the generations of Isaac; very little time on Ishmael. And sure enough, we come to the same thing; Genesis 36:1, “Now these are the generations of Esau,” and then Genesis 37:2, “These are the generations of Jacob” and that lasts for the whole Bible whereas the generations of Esau last for one chapter.

Again you see the pattern; the Messianic seed is the one that gets the attention. Now here again you have the asymmetry of God’s interests. First you have God saying that I am in control of everything. I am in control of the elect; I am in control of the non-elect. I am in control of the Messianic seed and I am in control of those who are not in the Messianic seed. But having said that, that is the comprehensive statement, now we come to the asymmetric interests of God, that he’s much more concerned with the Messianic seed than he is the non-Messianic seed. So therefore these passages on Ishmael and the passages on Esau are quickly passed over for the reason that they don’t figure prominently in the center of God’s plan and interests. So watching this overall scheme, this is developing real theology by looking carefully at the movement of the text; now when you look at the movement of the text you begin to see this grand scheme that repeats itself a thousand times in the Scriptures, that God is comprehensively sovereign, but that is not to say that He’s simply sovereign or He’s symmetrically sovereign; He has skewed interests.

What else do we notice about these? If you look back at Genesis 25:11, let’s go back to that last tolédote section. Genesis is put together with a pattern and since we study it verse by verse Sunday morning after Sunday morning the tendency is to lose the big picture and we get absorbed in all the details and miss out the grand structure. Let’s turn back to Genesis 25:11, notice the centers that immediately precede the tolédote section. Genesis 25:12 is the tolédote of Ishmael, but before that what is the verse talking about? It’s a death announcement, the death of Abraham. Now come to Genesis 35, look at the last verse of chapter 35 which is the verse immediately preceding the next tolédote section. What do you read? It’s a death announcement. So you see the form and the structure of the book; the tolédotes are sections where the patriarch exists as influential until the point of his death. When he dies that tolédote ends.

So, for example, Isaac lived through the end of Genesis 35 and although Jacob exists, Esau exists, they are adult men, they are married, they have their own families, it doesn’t make a particle of difference as far as God is concerned, until Isaac dies. In other words, there seems to be a philosophy of God’s viewpoint of a family embedded in this structure, and the philosophy is this: that until a man’s father dies he really isn’t seen by God as really independently functioning. As long as his father lives, when God looks down he sees that man, adult whether he has children, marriage, nothing, it doesn’t enter in, if He looks down and He sees the man’s father is still alive, to God that older man is the head of that family unit; he’s the grand patriarch. Then when that older man dies, then the man is said to have his own production and his own progeny, and you see it here. Only after Isaac dies does Esau and Jacob [can’t understand word] and these are the progeny, in other words, this is the historical record of Jacob and Esau. They were existing historically before that point; it’s just that they were not emphasized in their production until that point.

Now there’s a struggle between these two cultures, the culture of Jacob and the culture of the world and Esau. So in Genesis 35:1 we have a feature in the text that is characteristic of all good literature and it is characteristic, really, of any good piece of art, music, and that is it comes to a resolution. Before it ends it cleans up loose ends. So since Genesis 35 is the end chapter of this tolédote you would expect chapter 35 to clean up some themes that have been just mentioned briefly and just kind of left hanging there. One of the themes that was mentioned and left hanging there, going back to Genesis 28, was at Bethel.

In Genesis 28, remember, when Jacob was fleeing Esau a little incident occurred; one that we explained but one which was left hanging back in chapter 28 and never dealt with completely. Remember earlier in Jacob’s life, after he had his little thing with mamma and they together tried to outwit the father, broke the chain of authority in the home and destroyed it, then Jacob had to leave; modern vernacular he split. And he moved north at a place called Bethel, and at this place he had the famous ladder dream which isn’t a ladder, it’s a stone stairway. And in Genesis 28 there are some features to that ladder dream that we want to look at.

Genesis 28:12, remember he stayed there and he used stones for his pillow; “And he dreamed, and beheld a stone stairway,” not a ladder, “a stone stairway set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God kept on” because it’s a Hebrew participle, “kept on ascending and descending upon it. [13] And, behold, the LORD stood above it, and said, I am the LORD God of Abraham, thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed.” You’ll notice God giving His covenant, not the covenant of covenant theology but I mean biblically the covenant of Abraham, verse 13. [14] “And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt break out” literally “to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the famines of the earth be blessed.” So it’s just a repeat of Genesis 12:1-3. Notice verse 15 because you’re going to see it quoted in today’s passage, “Behold, I am with you, and will keep you in all place where you go, and I will bring you again into this land; for I will not leave you, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.”

Now obviously you have God promising that the kingdom is going to come through Jacob. At this point the stones, which are used later on in the Bible to refer to the 5^th kingdom, the kingdom of God, the fifth kingdom of Daniel that is, the kingdom of God is symbolized by stones, and the angel goes up and down the stone stairway, showing that heaven and earth have mediation. The significance of that I pointed out to you the Sunday I dealt with chapter 28 by showing you the materials in the ancient near east which show very clearly that in the ancient near east kingdoms were looked upon as mediatorial. That is, Pharaoh looked upon himself as the integrator between heaven and earth, and if you tried to revolt against Pharaoh, it was a convenient doctrine, you can see why; if you try to revolt against Pharaoh who are you revolting against? Heaven; this is why Pharaoh could rule for… what was it, 3,000 years and only have one revolt. Do you know what the one revolt was that was successful from Egypt, the only revolt successful from Egypt? It was the Jew. So you had this tremendous continuity and history has never seen this; never have we ever in the history of our race seen a kingdom as strong for thousands of years as the kingdom of Egypt. It’s just amazing. We think in terms of the United States history, 200 years, the United States is just a blink compared to the long, long duration of Egypt. We have this tendency in the ancient world to make these kingdoms mediatorial; simple stated it means that the leaders of state are also the spiritual leaders of the nation and this was rejected in Israel because the king was a very secular king in Israel compared to the nations round about, division of power.

This is the significance of the angels ascending and descending; God is simply announcing that His ultimate mediatorial kingdom will one day come through the progeny of Jacob; it’s not here yet, it will one day come. And then you remember in Genesis 28:18, after Jacob lies on the stones, after he dreams of the stones, then in verse 18 he builds a tower of stone, and after he gets through building this monolith or this tower of stones then he takes oil and he pours it over the stone pillar. And what’s the oil? The word to anoint with oil is the word from which we get Messiah or Christ. So again we have this Messianic mediatorial element that colors this whole Genesis 28 section.

Well, if that was a promise, because verse 15 clearly shows you it’s a promise, if that’s a promise then it’s left hanging, unless the author finishes the story in chapter 35 that we’re on this morning. So if you turn back to chapter 35, now to finish this section of Genesis he’s going to take us back to the theology of Genesis 28. Again to look at the terrain features, fixing in our mind some of the characteristics of the story because there’s going to be a New Testament passage I want to take you to and it’s not going to make any sense to you without looking at some maps so let’s get oriented. Looking once again at our map, the major route of traffic is called a trunk route and it runs north/south on this ridge of land. Here in the south you have Beersheba, you have Hebron, down here is where Isaac is living; here you have what will become Jerusalem, you have Jacob leaving, going north, coming back down, crossing over, stopping at Shechem and now he’s coming down and he’s going to Bethel. This shows you a little detail that you must appreciate and the only way I know how to get you to appreciate it is to look at a map because the authors of the Bible are writing to people who lived in the land and they didn’t need maps because they walked this place so man times they knew it cold.

If you look there are three cities here that play a feature in the story of Genesis 35. One is up here, it’s now the little village of Beitin, but it’s actually on the Biblical site of Bethel or the house of God. Bethel is where Jacob is going to go to; he’s up here to the north, he’s going to come down the road, this main route, and then cut over here to Bethel and stop. That’s where he is at the beginning of the chapter. However, before Genesis 35 ends, Jacob is going to trace a route from Bethel south, along the main trunk route, through what will become Jerusalem, to a little place five miles south of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, or Ephrata, as it is called in this text. Now as I trace this route, the route which you’ll see later on in the text, is the route of a pregnant woman who gives birth to her baby in Bethlehem. It is that motif that is picked up by the Gospel writers and reused to shows something about Jesus Christ and His birth. Here is Bethel as it exists today, it is denuded but that’s the Arab section of the land. Here is Beitin, again running down the main route through Jerusalem to Bethlehem.

Now let’s watch what happens in the story. Genesis 35:1, “And God said unto Jacob, Arise, go up to Bethel, and dwell there: and make there an altar unto God, that appeared unto thee when thou fled from the face of Esau thy brother.” So quite obviously we have direct reference to chapter 28. Now one of the things to notice about this, one of the great lessons of encouragement, in fact these five verses that start chapter 35 ought to be great verses of encouragement, particularly to Christians who feel like because they’ve sinned one way or another, and because they’ve blown it and they’ve let loose forces in their life which are tearing them apart, they get looking at this and they get so discouraged they say to themselves well, what the heck, there’s no sense continuing. In other words, I have so screwed up my life as a Christian there’s no way out of the mess; absolutely no way out so let’s just kiss it off and forget it, it’s a lost cause. Now Jacob could have done this; remember the mess we were in in chapter 34; he had abdicated his parental responsibility, the family started shredding and he just kind of took a passive role.

Now look what you see; in these five verses here is the sovereign grace of God that doesn’t wait for Jacob to clean up his act. What God does is reach down unasked and uninvited to straighten this boy up. Jacob is an older man at this point and he has a tendency that a lot of older people have and that is they’re simply tired and they don’t want to be hassled any more, they just kind of want to go into a premature retirement. God, in verse 1 is calling to Jacob and says hey buddy, I didn’t give you permission to retire, you have a job to do. Remember chapter 28 it said I will be with you and I’m not going to leave you until I perform that which I promised to do through you. Aside from the grand historical meaning that verse means that God is not going to stop messing around with Jacob’s life until Jacob finishes his tour of duty and after he finishes his tour of duty then he can retire, but not until. From chapter 37 on Jacob is in a state of semi-retirement, but not in Genesis 35. God is not going to permit this man, who was out of it in chapter 34, down and out, by the time chapter 35 comes out God says Jacob, I want you back with it and I’m going to reach down, I’m going to pull you up and I’m going to straighten you up.

And you’ll notice in verse 1 the initiative comes from God; it doesn’t come from Jacob and that’s a picture of sovereign grace because it’s not dependent on who and what we are. It’s dependent on the plan of God and who and what God is and what He wants with our lives. Now watch the response; this is the tricky part of these first five verses because as God initiates the triggering device, in verse 2 watch how Jacob responds.

Genesis 35:2, “Then Jacob said unto his household, and to all that were with him, Put away the strange gods that are among you, and be clean, and change your garments. [3] And let us arise, and go up to Bethel; and I will make there an altar unto God, who answered me in the day of my distress, and was with me in the way which I went.” The end part of verse 3, I hope you remember, is almost a word for word quotation out of chapter 28, the passage I just got through showing you.

Now what is the meaning of this: where in chapter 34 had Jacob failed? He had failed as head of the household; he had failed because had become passive. So therefore when he begins to be restored what first takes place in verse 2? He reestablishes his authority in his household; that’s one of the signs that he’s being restored. He takes leadership reigns once again and begins to do things. And the first thing he begins to do, integrate this with the big theme, I told you the big theme of Genesis which was the cultural purity of the family. So you see what he’s doing in verse 2, the very first thing he does? He gets rid of the paganist intrusions into his family life. He gets rid of all these false gods which were among you; apparently there were idols that had been picked up in the previous chapter and other places. Why are the idols or these foreign gods so dangerous? They’re dangerous because in idolatry, and by the way, we still have idolatry except we just don’t have a little idol that you put in your pocket and carry around, you just put it in your head and carry it around.

But idolatry always features autonomy. You can have some idol; visualize some statue, all the people in the community gathering around the statue. You say gosh, those people are afraid of that statute, they have fear of the idol, don’t they, good lord, mothers take their little month old babies and they fried them right in front of the idols, that’s giving their babies to Moloch. They used to have big drums beating so that the people wouldn’t go crazy hearing the screams of the infants as they fried. So this is what was going on in idolatry. And you can say well, gee, that doesn’t look very autonomous to me, it looks like fear. But yet it was autonomy because these people thought they could manipulate the idols by these means. All the rituals, whether it was frying a baby or whether it was giving money, stabbing one’s self and cutting one’s self, like the prophets did in Elijah’s time, whatever and the appeal is not moral based, it is based on complete amoral power; can we influence it, can I influence the idol through my ritual. It doesn’t make any difference how righteous I am, all that’s set aside in idolatry; it is whether I know how to manipulate my way through life. That is human autonomy and it’s a deep, deep feature of idolatry.

A second feature of idolatry that you’ll see down through history and here is the tremendous reliance upon nature forces to solve problems. Nature is closed to divine influence from outside, just nature forces themselves are the source of our blessing. It’s as though, like for example all of us have been raised in school just on a diet of evolution, have been taught that we are here today without tails and bananas because of sheer natural forces that have operated; marvelous what nature forces do. As one creationist/scientist said when you go from a mouse to a prince instantly it’s a fairy story but when you go from a mouse to a prince and put millions of years it’s scientific evolution. Time becomes the magic god that is able to do what chance can’t do. So we have this reliance upon nature forces and don’t think it’s not embedded in modern thought. It’s just today we dress it up scientifically with four syllable words and with great equations. It makes every body think we know what we’re talking about, but basically it’s still idolatry, and this idolatry was what’s so dangerous. So in verse 2 Jacob purges his house.

Then notice what else he does, he says “be clean, and change your clothes.” Now you’ve often heard the expression: cleanliness is next to godliness. In the Old Testament, in the Mosaic Law, cleanliness was godliness. There is not one ritual of purification in the Bible that doesn’t basically involve cleansing the body or the clothes. And it’s interesting the close juxtaposition of physical cleanliness and spiritual cleanliness. This has been observed many, many times by missionaries operating in a field where they haven’t even made the point; they preach the gospel to this native group and all of a sudden they find the people suddenly clean their bodies like they never cleaned them before; they find them using sanitation precautions in the village and they never did that before, almost automatically in response to the news of the gospel. Now what is it that links spiritual and physical cleanliness? It’s because the sphere of the physical and the sphere of the spiritual aren’t that different; they’re very, very close together.

So Jacob asked them to bathe and change their clothes, and then in verse 3 he goes to worship God. You see what has to happen, there has to be a cleansing first before there is a fellowship and a worship. “And let us arise, and go up to Bethel” and there he builds his altar; [“and I will make there an altar unto God, who answered me in the day of my distress, and was with me in the way which I went. [4] And they gave unto Jacob all the strange gods which were in their hand, and all their earrings which were in their ears; and Jacob hid them under the oak which was by Shechem. [5] And they journeyed: and the terror of God was upon the cities that were round about them, and they did not pursue after the sons of Jacob.”]

Verse 6-7 the altar is built and you have the first public testimony to the Word of God in that time; in other words, when he gets back in fellowship what does he do? He cleanses himself, he assumes family leadership in verse 2, gets back with the program and then there is produced a public testimony. [6, “So Jacob came to Luz, which is in the land of Canaan, that is, Bethel, he and all the people that were with him. [7] And he built there an altar, and called the place El-bethel: because there God appeared unto him, when he fled from the face of his brother.”]

Verse 8, speaks very briefly about one of the great women of Scripture. It’s a verse that quite a bit is packed into if you just stop a moment. “But Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, died, and she was buried beneath Bethel under an oak: and the name of it was called Allon-bachuth.” And the word means intense mourning; it means they cried and cried over the death of this beloved old lady, Deborah. Now who is Deborah? Deborah goes back a generation; Deborah was the young nursemaid that came with Rebekah when Abraham sent his servant up north to get a bride for Isaac. And when the bride was brought back, being of upper middle class wealth, she had her own handmaids with her; her handmaiden was her hair dresser, was her seamstress, was her dishwasher, was her cook and so on. So instead of a GE dishwasher or something they had a handmaid and this is what was standard operating equipment for a fairly wealthy girl when she was given in marriage. Well, Deborah came. Now since we know there was heartache and tension in the home of Isaac, and since we know there was this playing off of daddy against one son and mamma and the other son, don’t you suspect that Deborah might have played a motherly role, and apparently she did.

And it’s significant that she appears in verse 8 without any introduction because if you look on a map this really shouldn’t be, because Jacob, according to the map of the story, hasn’t gotten that far south yet. Isaac is still down here in Hebron, that’s the furthest north he ever came, probably Beersheba. If he’s down here and Jacob is still heading down, how did Deborah get there? Presumably on a visit. Why? Why would Jacob want Deborah? I suspect, though the men are very, very prominent in these stories, the women had powerful, powerful influence in the home and here is one of the women who has a very odd relationship in that home situation. She’s a sort of pseudo grandmother; she came into the family not by marriage nor by blood; she came in sheerly as a hired hand, and yet because she stayed with that family day after day after day, year after year after year, Jacob thought so much of Deborah that he evidently sent down, got her, brought her back to his house. It sort of suggests, we can’t be dogmatic, but the way you read in the end, that “Alon-bacuth,” it sort of suggests that Jacob still considered Deborah more of a mother than his own mother. In the final years of his life he began to see, perhaps that that old woman was just a source of tremendous wisdom and stability in the household and he respected her and brought her home.

Now we continue, verses 9-15, with God’s vision to Jacob. Basically verses 9-15 recapitulate Genesis 28 and it does so so clearly that liberal scholars assert that this is a doublet; they say that this is an event that the guy who edited Genesis was so stupid he didn’t know any better so he put the same story in twice. Well, I tend to give Moses a little bit more credit than that. Verses 9-15 are in there not because Moses is so stupid, the liberals are the ones that are stupid; the point is that you have the end of a tolédote here, an end of a section of Genesis and you’ve got to resolve all that potential promise, promise, promise business back in chapter 28; you’ve got to pull it back. Jacob, before he passes off the scene into retirement, has got to get right with God and there’s go to be some clearing of the air that what had been promised to Jacob finally before he retires will have come to pass, and this is why it’s repeated. [9, “And God appeared unto Jacob again, when he came out of Padan-aram, and blessed him. [10] And God said unto him, Thy name is Jacob: thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name: and he called his name Israel.”

Verse 11 is clearly the language of the Abrahamic Covenant. [“And God said unto him, I am God Almighty: be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee, and kings shall come out of thy loins;”] Verse 12, clearly the language of the Abrahamic Covenant, [“And the land which I gave Abraham and Isaac, to thee I will give it, and to thy seed after thee will I give the land.”] And verse 13, an interesting little verse to look at, if you look at it very carefully, tells you this wasn’t a dream. Notice what it says, “And God went up from him [in the place where he talked with him.]” Apparently here is Jesus Christ again appearing in preincarnate form and He just went right up in the air, sort of ascended into heaven after this point.

And then verse 14, you have a repeat of chapter 28, “And Jacob set up a pillar in the place where he talked with him, even a pillar of stone:” and once again he anoints it with oil [“he poured a drink offering thereon, and he poured oil thereon,”] showing the Messianic flavor of this whole atmosphere, this whole story. And once again he calls the place Bethel. [15, “And Jacob called the name of the place where God spoke with him, Bethel.”]

Now the next increment in the story as we wind down and conclude this section, concern Jacob’s wife. [16’ “And they journeyed from Bethel;” and this is where that map that I showed you, I wanted you to see that little Arab village called Beitin, you drive down the road through Jerusalem, five miles south of Jerusalem is Bethlehem; that’s the background for verse 16. “And they journeyed from Bethel and there was but a little way to come to Ephrath,” now Ephrath is Bethlehem, “and Rachel travailed, and she had hard labor. [17] And it came to pass, when she was in hard labor, that the midwife said unto her, Fear not; thou shalt have this son also.” That’s an answer to Rachel’s plea before to have more sons. [18] “And it came to pass, as her soul was in departing, (for she died) that she called his name Ben-oni:” which means in the Hebrew, son of my affliction, or son of my pain, “but his father called him Benjamin. [19] And Rachel died, and was buried in the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem. [20] And Jacob set a pillar upon her grave: that is the pillar of Rachel’s grave unto this day,” that is the day of Moses.

Now there’s a complex of stories come in here and this is one of those very, very rich sections of Genesis, that you stand back and you see one thing after another, obviously designed by God showing the intricacy of history. For example, here’s a baby boy, he’s born. His mother, while she’s dying, her last breath is to name her son, and she names him Ben-oni, son of my pain. Well, obviously no boy would like go through life with the name, son of my mother’s pain. That’s a real start in life; I killed my mother when I was born. So Jacob comes in and he renames the son quickly, and Benjamin, but the name Benjamin, it has a complex of meanings but one meaning is the son of the right hand… the son of the right hand. Now here is an intriguing thing.

Turn to Micah 5:2, toward the end of the period just prior to the exile, the prophet Micah gave Israel a lasting series of prophesies. In 5:2 one of these prophesies is one of the most spectacular prophesies in all of the Bible about the Lord Jesus Christ. In verse 2 it says: “But thou, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel,” now look at the last, “whose goings forth has been from eternity [old, from everlasting].” In other words, here is the prophecy hundreds of years before it occurred of the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ in that little village five miles south of Jerusalem.

Now here’s the intriguing thing. Let’s recapitulate and see the parallelism. In the year, or close to the year 1800 BC compared to the year say 7 BC, in 1800 we have a pregnant woman laboring as she travels from Ramah south on that trunk route to Bethlehem. She gives birth in Bethlehem to a boy that is called the son of the right hand. 1800 years later another pregnant woman goes down and has her baby in Bethlehem too, and he comes to be called the son who sits on the right hand of the Father. And so we have this tremendous typology in history; events repeat themselves in different times but in the same places in the same sequence. This is not overlooked by the writers of the Gospels; they remember this.

And Matthew in particular remembers it so let’s turn to the Gospel of Matthew and see what he does with it. Matthew, remember, was a government bureaucrat; he liked records and this is why there’s a characteristic style of the Gospel of Matthew that only a bureaucrat could have written it because he’s always emphasizing some kingdom thing. Now he is the one who also says, in Matthew 2:6; remember, after Jesus is born the wise men show up. Wise men come to Herod and they say Herod, where is the Messiah? Well, Herod doesn’t know exactly where the Messiah is but it shows you Herod had studied the Scriptures enough, or had scholars who studied the Scriptures enough to know very well where the Messiah was going to be born, and sure enough, in verse 6 what does he quote: “And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, art not the least among the princes of Judah; for out of thee shall come a Governor that shall rule my people, Israel.” Now much of the language of verse 6 is similar to Micah 5:2. So you have these men thinking actively in terms of Bethlehem, Bethlehem, Bethlehem.

Now notice, after Jesus lived, Herod sends the wise men down, they never come back. What’s the next thing that Herod does? He orders one of history’s worst genocides, slaughter of the innocent’s it’s called, the destruction of every baby in that town and village of Bethlehem because I am going to destroy, says Herod, I am going to destroy, no competitors to my throne will be tolerated, and if necessary I’ll wipe out every male child to do it but there’s not going to be any royal seed left in this nation. So we have the genocide of the innocent. Now Matthew, in the same chapter, Matthew 2:17-18, look what he does: “Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah, the prophet, saying,” and Jeremiah, the prophet, of course was talking, because Jeremiah used it in the days of the exile for another reason, [18] “In Ramah there was a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and they would not be comforted, because they are not.” Now why Ramah and Bethlehem? Because if you looked at the map what did you see? The place prior… the journey, one day’s journey was basically from Ramah, because Bethel is just off from this, remember the map, past Jerusalem down to Bethlehem. That was a day’s journey and it’s a picture of this pregnant woman and she’s weeping through the pain of her labor, and this would even suggest that perhaps she had already had some labor pains prior to her journey down to Bethlehem. But there’s this motif of the weeping woman, Rachel, dying and her last breath is to give birth to the son of the right hand, which is then reflected in Jeremiah and Matthew very intimately to the Messiah.

Back to Genesis 35 again. In Genesis 35:18 there’s an interesting observation about death. “And it came to pass, as her soul was departing (for she died), that she called his name Ben-oni.” Now one of the features of the Bible describing death is that it is defined by the last breath taken. Now here in Lubbock Bible Church we have some Christian medical students and one of them a while ago asked me about a problem that medical students are having. And it’s a very, very real problem that they have to sweat through as Christian students, and here’s the problem: how do we as Christians define death, in our day, when the heat professionally is on you to declare death quickly so that what may take place? Harvesting of organs. In other words, if a person is thought to be dead we want to get in there and cut him up quick because we’ve got to get organs out before they decay, you know, someone might want a kidney, cannibalize them, take some spare parts. And there’s this tendency in modern medicine to do this. Well, obviously it puts the pressure on the attending physician to declare death quickly because if you sit there and let the corpse be there for any length of time these organs start decaying and then they can’t be used for transplants. So the pressure the modern Christian faces in the medical profession is he wants to be conservative and slow down the declaration of death to make sure that you’ve got genuine death, and yet at the same time he’s got the pressure over him that we need these organs so we can fix up broken down bodies out there that have some chance of survival. The pressure is on.

How did they define death in the Bible times? In the Bible times, apparently, we can’t be dogmatic but apparently there was a rule that was practically applied to make sure that when somebody breathed their last it was their last and it was to wait three days. Well, you know today if somebody dies in three days we have them embalmed and they’re buried. But in the Bible times they left them that way, and this is why, I believe is why Jesus Christ had his body stay in the grave for three days. In other words, it showed to civilization that here was a case of genuine death; it wasn’t just resuscitation, it was a genuine death and a genuine resurrection. You see the same sensitivity in John 11 to the raising of Lazarus. Why is it when Jesus hears of Lazarus dying He just kind of takes His time, and you say come on. Remember, Mary and Martha come out to Him and say Lord, if you had been here, why did You take so long getting here, if You’d been here he would have not died. And Jesus said just relax woman, just relax. And He goes and He calls him forth from the dead. Now why did Jesus wait? I suggest once again it was to prove that Lazarus had genuinely died in order that the miracle could be genuinely clear. So you have this conservative nature to death in the Bible.

Now another passage in this same section about death is verse 29, dropping down, past some of the details, to the very end of this chapter, where you have Isaac dying, and it says “And Isaac died and he was gathered unto his people,” “… he was gathered to his people,” now the Bible takes that quite literally. In fact we know from the way that, at least wealthy people, bury their dead is that the person’s body was put inside a cave or like a sepulcher, and Jesus body was in a sepulcher, and they lay them out on a flat area, and the body is laid out there to decay. Then when the flesh is all decayed the bones are scooped up and put in a bag and put next to the ancestor’s bones, and you had this one pile of bones after another but they are all together and it was very important that these piles of bones all be together. For some reason, even though we know they knew about Sheol, the place of the dead, they also had very great reverence for the location of the body. I have seen, I haven’t had a chance to study it that much but I’ve seen some Christians now are beginning to reconsider the question of cremation on the basis of the fact does this violate reverence of the body that has been discarded in some way. And this is becoming a topic of discussion in some circles. As I say, I haven’t got anything to say about it except to note that it comes off of these verses like verse 29.

One other feature to notice in chapter 35 before leaving is the incident of verse 22. “And it came to pass, when Israel dwelt in that land, that Reuben went and lay with Bilhah his father’s concubine: and Israel heard it. [Now the sons of Jacob were twelve:]” And we know he heard it and we know that he remembered it because in Genesis 49:4 he curses Reuben for it. So now we have three sons of this chosen family, Levi, Simeon and Reuben, all really bear a cursing almost by their father for their lifestyle and their behavior. What does this show? It shows that God and His grace works with sinful people. Obviously you’ve got sinful people who, left to themselves, will just simply crater out; you will have them lose their separation from the world, they get sucked back into the system, and they’re gone, were it not for one thing. And that is God’s hand, reaching down, pulling them back out of it.

Genesis 36, as we explained earlier in the tolédote section is simply very… it’s just an account of Esau to let you know that the promise of Genesis 27:39-40 has come to pass. Chapter 26 is to chapter 36 what chapter 28 is to chapter 35. It’s just, as we wind down this section of Genesis, the author wants us to get all the loose ends back together, God promised this, I want you to see, God answered it, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. God promised this, I want you to see God answered it, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, and he finishes it off.

Let’s summarize by going back to the doctrine of election and seeing how this applies. We won’t go through all the doctrine this morning but we can go through at least some of the principles. Visualizing the call of Abraham, this whole series against which you must see doctrine, doctrine can’t be viewed apart from biblical history. One of the things about the doctrine of election is that it’s revelation of God’s irresistible will. In other words, what’s happening, in spite of the fact that Jacob cratered in Genesis 34, who reaches down and gets Him back up again? Genesis 35, God does.

In other words, all we’re saying is that God is sovereign over history and in particular over the Messianic line; the seed, though it comes very, very close to getting tubed out, God will let it crater and He’ll let it crater and He’ll let it crater and it’ll just comes within a thousandth of an inch of being destroyed and then God reaches down He grabs it up, and that’s the story that you’ll see repeated again and again. You wonder sometimes, it’s like He’s playing a game of chicken with us just to see how low we can go without crashing and then He gets us down there where we think everything is lost and He yanks it up again. I suspect why He does this is to simply show us who’s boss, that once again he gets the credit, we don’t.

Another application or doctrine of election that we can see from this is how do you observe election in history. It’s not quite so simple as some people like to view it. You observe election, I observe election when Christ-like relationships sprout and grow. I don’t know anything else about election unless I see that. The Bible nowhere talks about unsaved elect. It only talks about the elect who are “in Christ” now, who will be in Christ, but who are “in Christ” now. I observe election, that’s the only place I can ever see election. If you’re looking at Genesis 36 and 35 you’re observing election. Do you know how? Because chapter 36 shows what happens to the non-elect; they face out. Chapter 35 shows you the elect person who is Jacob, he’s preserved; in chapter 37 carries this story on and on and on and on down into the New Testament.

A third application of the doctrine of election and that is election has a very practical incentive power for the Christian. It’s our incentive to face adversities in faith. If you know that God’s hand is capable of doing with you what His hand was capable of doing with Jacob, and did, then you can face all kinds of adversities in faith. How? Because you’ve got something under your faith; it’s not your subjective feeling. If you rely upon your feelings, today you feel good, tomorrow you feel bad; up and down, up and down. Who wants to be on that roller coaster? You want something that is going to be with you day after day no matter what crisis occurs. And some of you have lived very sheltered lives and haven’t seen death very close. Or you haven’t seen suffering very close. As a country we’ve lived a sheltered life. We haven’t seen thousands of enemy soldiers pouring through the streets, killing the men and raping the women; that’s a horrible sight that this country, apart from the Civil War and somewhat during the American Revolution, has never seen on our soil; not that we won’t see it in the future someday but we haven’t seen it yet. Now that’s what I mean; can you personally cope with those worst case scenarios?

You ought to ask yourself as a Christian, can you, or have you just lived a sheltered life and you’ve never been exposed to this. Think through what you would do if the closest one to you were to die a horrible death, right today starting. Now can you cope with this situation? Suppose you were to face death today? Can you cope with that kind of situation? And the only way I see that you could possibly cope with it is to know that there’s a plan, that God is the author of the plan and the plan is directly concerning you. Now apart from that I have no idea how you’d ever cope with the situation. And that’s why we say that election is our incentive to face adversities in faith.

We’re going to close by singing….