Staking Your Claim; Claiming Your Stakes

I want to start out with this powerful picture this morning:

I am in a green valley. It's warm. You are sitting on a chair, and I have crawled up into Your lap. I've laid my head on Your chest, I've closed my eyes, and I'm now listening to the steady...

Beat. Beat. Beat.

That consistent thud beneath my eardrum is rhythmic, calm, tympanic. Your arms hold me close; You press my head nearer Your heart. There is no give in Your arms, no weakness, no relaxing of Your hold. 

Beat. Beat. Beat.

A memory glows brightly of sitting on my mother's lap as a toddler. We are in our church on Haywood Road in Asheville, NC. We're singing, or at least my mother is. I can hear her voice vibrating through her chest as I press my head against it, and amid the praise, I listen to her heartbeat. There is calm assurance in the love of a dedicated parent. There is safety, refuge.

Beat. Beat. Beat.

Even as I sit here on my couch just a few years later and type, my own heart trip-hammers into the arrhythmia that happens periodically. It reminds me that I am weak... but You are strong. My world is chaotic and out of control... but You never change. My world is temporary... but You are eternal. I am a mist that appears for a time and then vanishes... You are solid, real, unshakeable, and eternal. 

Beat. Beat. Beat.

As a baby grows and develops inside his mother's womb next to her heart, as he hears that steady beat in his very formation, I hear the tempo of Your Spirit echoing all around me as I grow and develop in You. 

Help me find Your heartbeat, God. Help me listen intently to hear what You want. Help me keep in step with Your Spirit, Who aligns me with You and Your spoken word, Your rhema.

Jacob, now called Israel: Wrestles with God, has spent the whole 32nd chapter of Genesis preparing in fear and trembling to meet his wronged brother Esau, who is traveling north to see him. Now, in Genesis 33, we finally reach that climactic meeting. 

For protection's sake, just in case, Jacob ranks his wives and children. He puts his concubines and their sons in front of a line, then behind them, he puts Leah and her children, and then behind Leah, he puts Rachel and Joseph. If Esau is truly still angry and decides to obliterate Jacob's wives and children, Rachel and Joseph have the greatest chance of escaping.

Here again are the consequences of sin, in this case, the sin of polygamy: there should be no ranking order of wives. There should only be protection. 

Sin has consequences, even after you've claimed your new name. The main difference is: God walks with you through those consequences.

Jacob limps ahead to meet Esau. The limp is a constant, steady reminder of his wrestling match with God the night before. I won't let You go until you bless me. Tenacity. God has walked faithfully with me through everything. Now I will take Him with me as I go to meet my wronged brother. I won't let You go. Rootedness.

When Jacob finally sees Esau, he bows down in greeting. He gets up, walks a few steps, bows again. And then again. Again, again, again, again. Seven times, complete deference, complete repentance. We see here again that grand gesture, that absolute hospitality that Abraham showed to God and the two angels when they visited him under the trees of Mamre.

Has my brother forgiven me?

Esau runs forward, throws his arms around Jacob, and kisses him.

Forgiveness and relief flow in the boisterous sobs that both men display. For Esau, this is a twenty year culmination of the work of forgiveness in his heart. For Jacob, it's the twenty year period on a sentence that had begun with his own treachery. 

Jacob had been so afraid of Esau's reaction, that he'd sent ahead of him large portions of his own flocks and herds as a gift to Esau. Now, when Esau greets Jacob, he tells his brother... "Thanks, but no thanks. I've got what I need."

Here's what stands out to me about this whole passage: "'No, please!' said Jacob. "If I have found favor in your eyes, accept this gift from me. For to see your face is like seeing the face of God, now that you have received me favorably. Please accept the present that was brought to you, for God has been gracious to me and I have all I need.' And because Jacob insisted, Esau accepted it" (Genesis 33:10-11).

My footnotes say that the word "gift" here is equally well-interpreted as "blessing." So in a way, Jacob's narrative comes full-circle. As Jacob, he stole Esau's blessing from their father Isaac, and in so doing, stripped Esau of his inheritance. Twenty years pass, and God, the One Who Transforms Hearts, does a major work of forgiveness and transformation in the hearts of these twin brothers. Now, as Israel, he offers Esau a generous gift, a blessing, in a sense symbolically giving back the blessing that he'd stolen from his brother years before. Transformation.

I've talked about my love of "bookends," where a story begins with a concept and ends with the same concept, but it's a renewed, revitalized, transformed twist of that concept. That's what I see here.

Brothers estranged over a blessing, brothers reunited over a blessing.

Esau offers to accompany Jacob down to his home, the hill country of Seir directly south of them. Jacob demurs; he has to travel slowly. He's got a lot of flocks and herds with suckling lambs. He's got wives and children. Esau has 400 men used to traveling the road. 

Esau says: "Let me leave some of my men with you, then." Again, Jacob demurs. "What's the point? Just let's... you know... keep this peaceful feeling between us."

So Esau heads back south, and Jacob... instead of following his brother to Seir, turns north to Succoth instead.

Y'all... I don't know. I have no idea what either Jacob or Esau were thinking here. The Bible is silent on their motivations. There are two narratives that present themselves to me: 

1.) Esau's warm greeting of his brother is a pretense. He's suspicious of his brother Jacob, who... notoriously... is deceitful. Perhaps he has his own ends to meet, and so this whole conversation between him and Jacob is a false front, and his proposal to stay with Jacob is a proposal to keep his eye on someone who he has no reason to trust. His secondary proposal to leave some men with his brother is again an effort to "watch his back." Jacob's refusal and subsequent turning in the opposite direction the moment his brother is out of sight is an acknowledgment that Esau is plotting revenge and treachery.

The second narrative is completely opposite:

2.) Esau's warm greeting of his brother is genuine. He has forgiven him his treachery of twenty years past, and invites him to see his home. He'll accompany Jacob to provide protection (it's evident that Jacob is fearful of attack by the way he's ranked his wives when meeting Esau). Jacob perhaps intends to take his brother up on his offer. The way the map lays out the journey, if Jacob continues south with his brother to Seir, he can round the southern point of the Dead Sea and then head west to his father's home without crossing the Jordan River. It's slightly out of the way, but possibly less hazardous. There is no record of what actually changed Jacob's mind here. It's possible that he initially agreed, and then decided he owed loyalty to his aging father and would rather take a more direct route. It's possible that he truly meant to visit Esau in Seir, but not immediately. It's possible he did eventually visit Esau in Seir, but whatever the course of events, that visit did not take place right away.

I don't know. I read several commentaries on Genesis 33:14: "So let my lord go on ahead of his servant, while I move along slowly at the pace of the droves before me and that of the children, until I come to my lord in Seir." 

There is decisive disagreement among the authors of the commentaries. Some go along with the first narrative: that Jacob/Israel (One who Wrestles with God and Man) is wrestling with his sinful nature, and they claim that he dips back into deception here. Others say this is highly unlikely, given the redemptive nature of his story; such an outlier doesn't fall into line with the transformative work that God has done in his life.

I have a stockpile of questions that I want to ask the Lord when I reach heaven, and I'm putting this one on the list. What really happened there, Jesus?

If we look two chapters ahead, Jacob and Esau apparently have come together over the death of their father Isaac (Genesis 35:29: "And his sons Esau and Jacob buried him"), and then have been living near each other, but the combination of their flocks and herds together is too much, so like Abraham and Lot when they split up, Esau moves back to Seir (Genesis 36:6-8). 

So, whatever happens here in chapter 33, whether through deceit and treachery or through truly brotherly and glad motivations, the brothers themselves have a happy ending. The consequences of sin, though... continue through the generations, as we see examples throughout Scripture of the enmity that carries on years and years later between the Israelites (Jacob's descendants) and the Edomites (Esau's descendants). Psalm 137:7 throws out a vivid reminder of this enmity when Babylon conquers Jerusalem. "Remember, oh Lord, what the Edomites did on the day Jerusalem fell. 'Tear it down,' they cried, 'tear it down to its foundations!'"

So... big picture: Whatever happened between Jacob and Esau in chapter 33, they each have a journey to walk, and the Lord, the One Who Transforms Hearts, shows them His heartbeat in His leading of their paths. 

We continue on with Jacob's story. In the last paragraph of the chapter, he enters the Promised Land, the land promised to his grandfather Abraham. He moves to Succoth and builds some shelters there, and then moves again to Shechem and sets up camp within sight of the city. He buys the property on which he pitches his tents from the father of Shechem (man or city is unclear).

There, on that property, he sets up an altar, and he names it El Elohe Israel, or Mighty is the God of Israel.

Stage 1: Jacob, twenty years previously, deceitfully enters his father's tent with food and tells Isaac: "The Lord your God provided the game."

Stage 2: When Jacob flees the scene of his deception and the Lord appears to him at Bethel, the House of God, Jacob conditionally claims to follow God: "If God will be with me and watch over me on this journey I am taking... then the Lord will be my God..."

Stage 3: Now Jacob stakes a definitive claim: "Mighty is the God of Israel." Mighty is the God of my new name. Mighty is my God!

Mighty is my God who walks with me, Who shows me His heartbeat, Who lays out the path before me, Who carries me through hostile and uncertain territory, and Who leads me into the Promised Land.