Sermon for January 7, 2007

Jacob: The Cheater Who Wrestled with God
1st in a Sermon Series on Learning Character from Some Bible Characters

by

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Scripture:  Genesis 32:9-24

⁹ And Jacob said, "O God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac, O Lord who said to me, "Return to your country and to your kindred, and I will do you good,' ¹⁰ I am not worthy of the least of all the steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan; and now I have become two companies. ¹¹ Deliver me, please, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I am afraid of him; he may come and kill us all, the mothers with the children. ¹² Yet you have said, "I will surely do you good, and make your offspring as the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted because of their number.' "  ¹³ So he spent that night there, and from what he had with him he took a present for his brother Esau, ¹⁴ two hundred female goats and twenty male goats, two hundred ewes and twenty rams, ¹⁵ thirty milch camels and their colts, forty cows and ten bulls, twenty female donkeys and ten male donkeys. ¹⁶ These he delivered into the hand of his servants, every drove by itself, and said to his servants, "Pass on ahead of me, and put a space between drove and drove." ¹⁷ He instructed the foremost, "When Esau my brother meets you, and asks you, "To whom do you belong? Where are you going? And whose are these ahead of you?' ¹⁸ then you shall say, "They belong to your servant Jacob; they are a present sent to my lord Esau; and moreover he is behind us.' "

¹⁹ He likewise instructed the second and the third and all who followed the droves, "You shall say the same thing to Esau when you meet him, 20 and you shall say, "Moreover your servant Jacob is behind us.' " For he thought, "I may appease him with the present that goes ahead of me, and afterwards I shall see his face; perhaps he will accept me." ²¹ So the present passed on ahead of him; and he himself spent that night in the camp. ²² The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. ²³ He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had.  ²⁴ Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.

We are looking at a story today about the person in the Bible who is the father of the Israelites. His name is today the most popular boy’s name in our country for the last few years. He will teach us some negative lessons about character and some positive lessons about character.

His father and mother were Isaac and Rebekah. They had no children and were old, and then Rebekah became pregnant—with twins. And before the twins were born she could feel them wrestling with each other in the womb! She was apparently glad to finally give birth. When the first twin emerged he was covered with hair and was very red. They named him Esau which sounds like the Hebrew word for hairy. His brother was born immediately and was holding on to the heel of his twin Esau, so they named the second twin with the Hebrew word that sounds like grabber or one who cheats or supplants another person—Jacob.

So one scholar calls them Hairy and Grabby. As Hairy and Grabby grow up, their poor old father becomes blind. Hairy seems to be his father’s favorite; he is a very skilled hunter and brings his father good things to eat. Grabby seems to feel closer to their mother—or at least she seems to take his side more often.

Isaac, the old father is nearing the end of his life, and he sends Esau the older twin to hunt down some game and prepare it for him so the father can give Esau the blessing that is due to the older son. Rebekah, the mother, overhears this conversation and conspires with Jacob or Grabby to grab that blessing from his older brother. They prepare a tasty stew from goat’s meat, she puts some of the goat skins on Grabby so that blind Isaac will think this is Esau, the hairy twin, and he takes the delicious dish to his father and deceptively obtains the blessing. It really works because Esau has already told his brother on another occasion that he would trade his birthright as first born for a bowl of lentil soup that Jacob/Grabby has prepared. 

When Esau comes back and learns that his twin brother has deceived their poor blind old father and stolen the blessing that should be his, he is outraged and promises to kill this no good grabber of a brother.

The mother wisely advises Jacob to leave town and go north to visit her brother Laban in a different region until Esau cools off a bit and then he can return.

Jacob rides out of town and winds up meeting an uncle who is just as shrewd a cheater as Jacob is. The first person Jacob meets in his uncle’s daughter Rachel and as he goes to work for her father Laban, he asks to marry Rachel. Is the story sounding familiar to you?  Jacob works for his uncle for seven years to obtain Rachel’s hand in marriage and then at the wedding the woman behind the heavy veil turns out to be not Rachel but Leah, the older sister.  Jacob, the scoundrel, has been outfoxed by his uncle. He works for seven more years and then is able to marry Rachel.

Over some years, Jacob and his wives and their handmaidens give birth to twelve sons who become the founders of—the twelve tribes of Israel. Jacob becomes restless and decides to go back to his native land. He makes an agreement with his father-in-law that Jacob will be able to take all the spotted sheep with him, and then Jacob, through a trick of animal husbandry, causes most of the new born sheep to be spotted instead of all black or all white.

Jacob flees with his wives and children and sheep without saying goodbye to anyone. His father-in-law catches him and they agree to remain adversaries, coming up with a benediction that some of you have learned in Sunday School as the Mizpah benediction: May the Lord keep an eye on each of us while we are apart and can’t keep an eye on each other. It was not a nicey nice blessing; it was hostile! May God watch over us so we don’t kill each other!

Jacob or Grabby goes on to his homeland and he is frightened because the last time he saw his brother twenty years earlier, his brother was promising to kill him. Jacob sends his wives and children and flocks ahead of him: he camps out beside the river Jabbok, and during the night he is confronted by a mysterious stranger or angel and Jacob wrestles all night. In desperation he asks for a blessing from the stranger and the stranger gives him a new name: Israel, which means one who struggles with God. He goes away from there limping for the rest of his life—with a new name.

The meeting with his brother Esau goes better than Jacob had hoped. Esau is willing to reconcile with his deceptive grabby brother and they both go their own ways—even though, as I read the story, Jacob never sees it necessary to apologize to his brother. And one of Jacob’s sons—in fact, his favorite son whose name is Joseph, becomes the hero of the rest of the book of Genesis and is the example for us to learn from in the sermon two weeks from now.

That was a too brief summary of one of the longest stories in all of the book of Genesis—some twelve chapters long, and the only story in Genesis that is longer is the one for next week abut Joseph—thirteen chapters long.

The story of Jacob or Grabby is discouraging and encouraging, distasteful and delightful. Jacob gives us many bad examples as we think about what character is: he takes advantage of his tired and hungry brother and trades a bowl of soup for a birthright; he and his mother deceive his poor old blind father. He has to flee for his life. He is deceived by a shrewd father-in-law and then uses trickery to gain most of the sheep for himself. When he is about to meet his long alienated brother, he sends his livestock and other gifts ahead to try and bribe Esau and buy his favor.

On the other hand, when Jacob is on his way to meet his mother’s brother Laban he stops at a place called Beth El and has a dream about God and makes some promises to God after he has a vision of a stairway or a ladder reaching from earth to heaven—that is where we get the song, “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder”. And Jacob makes a promise to God that he will honor God and will return to God ten percent of his resources.

Jacob is seen, along with Abraham, for the rest of Hebrew history as the father of the Israelites. The anthem our choir sometimes sings about a star coming out of Jacob is based in this story and in the promise God makes to Jacob that Jacob’s descendants will be as numerous as the grains of sand.

Jacob is like many of the other Bible characters we will look at in this sermon series. He is flawed, he is self-absorbed, he is deceptive, and like his name says, he is grabby. And in spite of this, he wrestles all night with God or with an angel and persists for a blessing. And despite his failures, he has the courage to go back and face his brother with the risk that his brother will still be angry enough to kill him.

What I think is unclear in the Jacob story is whether Jacob ever apologizes to his brother for deceiving him and their father. When I read the story of Jacob’s return to his home land, he is relieved that his brother does not attack him, but I don’t think Jacob ever says that he is sorry or that he apologizes or shows any remorse or contrition for his actions. 

I think that ability to admit that one when one has been wrong or done something wrong is an important ingredient for character. We have had a lot of discussion the past ten days about what makes up character as our nation has remembered President Gerald Ford. In the eulogy that President Bush offered for Ford, Bush said that what the nation needed when Ford became president was a leader with character and humility. Gerald Ford provided that. He was not arrogant or overly impressed with himself. He was willing to take the risk of pardoning Richard Nixon and helping the nation move forward even though he knew that pardon might hurt his own political future. He exhibited traits of modesty and humility.

Other writers I have looked at in my reading for this sermon series have said that a major ingredient in defining character is the ability to apologize and mean it, and one person cited the example of Abraham Lincoln who in a letter to General Grant after the battle of Vicksburg said to Grant that he had doubted the general’s strategy and that he wanted to acknowledge that he Lincoln had been wrong and that Grant had been right.

One other author says that the unfortunate practice too often in American business or American politics is to never explain, never apologize, never admit that you did anything wrong.

I don’t see in the story of Jacob that Jacob is able or willing to admit that he did anything wrong or even to feel remorse or contrition for lying to his father and stealing his brother’s rightful blessing, and in this, Jacob is a negative example of what we might consider a person of good character.

We will see in the rest of our sermon series others in the Hebrew Bible who gives us some positive lessons and some negative lessons about character, and we will contrast this example of Jacob’s lack of remorse with King David after he is confronted by the prophet Nathan for his very bad behavior.

I encourage you to use the study questions that will be available each Sunday and to think with some others about what goes into your ideas of good character and bad character. And I encourage you to join us each Sunday as we look at Moses, Joseph, David, Deborah, Hagar, Jeremiah, Job and Koheleth and as we use their stories to let God instill good character traits in us.

Study Questions

  Sermon Library