Bible in 365 Days

Genesis 35-37

Genesis 35

God never abandons His children to the forces of evil circumstances resulting from their own folly. The fourth direct communication to Jacob was that which called him back to Beth-el. Again the evidence of his faith in God is found in the fact that his response was immediate. Moreover, its genuineness is evidenced by his destruction of the foreign gods, the quick movement to Beth-el, and the immediate erection there of an altar.

This obedience was followed immediately by the fifth divine communication; only the name Israel was again pronounced. It would seem almost as though Jacob had not entered into the experience of the blessing won by the Jabbok until now. In that night the vision had come to him, and his crippling was evidence of the reality of the divine action. All this, however, had not been translated into victory in the details of his life.

How often this is so. In some great crisis of revelation a larger life is seen, its laws appreciated, and its claims intellectually yielded to. Yet it is not wrought out into the details of life, and so oftentimes its greatest value is gained only through some subsequent experience of failure.

In this fifth of God's direct appearances to Jacob, God not only again declared the new name of the man, but gave him His own name with a new significance. It was the name El-Shaddai, which He had first used to Abraham on the occasion when his name was changed from Abram to Abraham. Its supreme value is its declaration of the all-sufficiency of God.

In this chapter we have also the account of the sorrows following on this experience: the death of Rachel, the sin of Reuben, the death of Isaac. All which things played their part in the final making of the man.

Genesis 36

This is one of the sections of the biblical literature which all of us are tempted to hurry over, because it appears to be almost exclusively a list of names. We may allow that it appears uninteresting, nevertheless it is of great importance, having a very definite place and value in the highways of history.

The story of the prolific progeny of "that profane person Esau" is at once startling and solemn. The sons of the flesh would seem to have multiplied far faster than the seed of promise. The relationship between these two lines is revealed in a brief and pregnant sentence in the first verse, "Esau...is Edom," which is repeated in verse 19, and the fact is emphasized in the closing statement, "This is Esau, the father of the Edomites." These references are evidently intended to draw attention to the origins of the people who through long centuries were antagonistic to Israel.

Though, personally, Jacob escaped the anger of his brother, the harvests resulting from his deceit were reaped in after years. These harvests of the centuries are full of suggestiveness. They reveal the awful and stupendous greatness of life. The deed of good or evil, of truth or falsehood, done today is not ended, though it is done. There is indeed nothing small.

Genesis 37

From this point in the sacred narrative, though Jacob appears more than once, for a time the history centers around Joseph, and it is certainly safe to say that in many aspects no more remarkable figure appears on the pages of Old Testament history.

Joseph is seen here, first as the object of his father's love, a love which may surely be accounted for by the fact that he was the first-born of Rachel, and also to the ingenuous simplicity of his disposition and the strong integrity of his character.

If the marginal reading of the Revised Version be correct, and in all probability it is, that his father made him "a long garment with sleeves," this probably suggests his appointment to a position of trust and oversight, for such a garment was the garment of a prince. Naturally imaginative and romantic and given to day dreams, through this avenue God suggested his coming position and power. With simple artlessness he told his dreams to his brethren. The character of the man as subsequently revealed makes it impossible to believe that he had any ulterior motive in this telling of his dreams. The construction his brethren placed on the dreams was undoubtedly the true one; but was most likely arrived at as the result of the position he occupied among them by appointment of his father, and by their interpretation of his feeling by their own jealousies.

The story of his betrayal is at once a revelation of their malice and of the divine determined counsel to move forward to ultimate realization of purpose.