"He has not beheld iniquity in Jacob, neither has He seen
perverseness in Israel--the Lord his God is with him."--Numbers 23:21.
"And I will bring forth a seed out of Jacob, and out of
Judah an inheritor of My mountains; and My elect shall inherit it, and My
servants shall dwell there."--Isaiah 65:9.
"The ground you are lying on belongs to you. I will give
it to you and your descendants. Your descendants will be as numerous as the
dust of the earth! They will cover the land from east to west and from north
to south. All the families of the earth will be blessed through you and your
descendants." Genesis 28:13-14
The voice of Jehovah having been heard at the summit of
the bright stairs, announcing His Name as the God of faithful Abraham, we
wonder what will form the tone and subject of further communication! It
cannot surely be, that language of unqualified encouragement and heart-cheer
is to be addressed to one, whose past life has so abundantly
evidenced that neither natural nobility of character, nor spiritual grace
are hereditary; on the contrary, who has proved himself all unworthy of his
illustrious pedigree. Can these words of the Almighty fail to be mingled at
least, with merited reproof, answering and echoing the thoughts and
accusings which must have haunted the dreamer himself, when he laid his head
on his pillow? Indeed, could we be greatly astonished, (after the tale of
previous falsehood and treachery, plotting and counterplotting) had the
Being he had dishonored now been heard canceling, by one righteous sentence,
every covenant blessing hitherto promised; reversing the oracle of the
younger son's predicted greatness, and reinstating the wronged and injured
Esau in his right of first-born?
"I am the Lord, I change not, therefore (JACOB and) you
sons of Jacob are not consumed!" (Mal. 3:6.) "My counsel shall stand, and I
will do all my pleasure" (Is. 46:10). "I will have mercy on whom I will have
mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion" (Rom.
9:15). All the unworthy past of that unpromising, and unlovable wayfarer is
to be consigned to oblivion; and without a word of reproach he is to be
reclaimed, strengthened, cheered, comforted. The words of the Prophet,
descriptive elsewhere of the retributive dealings of Jehovah, are in his
case reversed--"For all this, His anger" is turned away, "and His hand (of
mercy and loving-kindness) is stretched out still!"
Although the lesson has run, like a golden thread,
throughout the whole preceding narrative; this may be a befitting place for
us to pause, and more specially to admire and magnify the Sovereignty of
God's Grace.
Many other sleepers there were that night in the Holy
Land, who could have asserted a better claim on the divine regard than the
wanderer from a home which he had embittered and disgraced--a home in which,
as we now know well, he had left passions smouldering, which deceit and
treachery had kindled, along with stifled purposes of revenge. We might have
expected, therefore, the Keeper of Israel, in His universal watch, to have
piled the Angelic stair over some worthier recipient alike of His temporal
and spiritual blessings--leaving the wayward fugitive of Beersheba--(the
"Underminer" as his name has been literally rendered)--to be haunted in
the night with visions of anguish and terror; in which, prominent
would be, a duped father, an incensed brother, and, worse than all, the
alienated face of the Infinite Being he had offended.
But here, as in manifold other cases, the Lord would show
that the divine and the human methods are often in conflict. "It is not of
him that wills, nor of him that runs, but of God who shows mercy." The
Patriarch dreamer's is the old, old story, that "where sin abounded, grace
did much more abound." At that hour, this man of like passions is
pronounced, by the lips of Jehovah Himself, to be the chosen recipient and
inheritor of honors such as no mortal ever shared before or since. We have
vividly recalled to us the story of the erring sheep in the New Testament
parable. Instead of that truant of the fold being left to its own
estrangement, to plunge ever deeper into the thorny thicket of its
wanderings, the unwearying shepherd follows after it "until he finds it;"
and, "when he has found it," there is no anger in his look, no displeasure
in his voice. In silent love "he lays it on his shoulders rejoicing." Such,
in the later Gospel delineation, was a picture of God's present dealings
with this exile on the bleak wilds of Bethel. He rehearses nothing in his
ear, but the wondrous favors he had for him in future possession and
enjoyment; anew proclaiming that he was the appointed heir to the Abrahamic
covenant; recognized as the representative of the chosen seed--above all,
that he was the selected ancestor of the Messiah of Israel, the Savior of
mankind. The promise itself is so far couched in the same terms previously
employed to Abraham and Isaac. But it embraces also a wider sweep. It tells
of the cosmopolitan character of the wondrous race that was to spring from
his loins, as stretching "westward, and eastward, and northward, and
southward."
Strange destiny, for that lonely wanderer on that lonely
moorland! to be father of the multitudinous people, who, in addition to past
annals of peerless interest, are at this hour found by the banks of every
river, and within the walls of every city in either hemisphere; unmingled
and unassimilated with Gentile blood and Gentile customs, and with a proud
and noble destiny still to be unfolded for their children's children. "The
land you are lying on belongs to you. I will give it to you and your
descendants. Your descendants will be as numerous as the dust of the earth!
They will cover the land from east to west and from north to south. All the
families of the earth will be blessed through you and your descendants."
(Gen. 28:13, 14).
It has been well noted, God accommodates the very words
in which the promise is couched to the condition of His servant. Not only
does He say, 'I will give you the land;' but, "The land you are lying
on." 'The land, all of which you can tonight claim as your own, is
the stony pillow on which your head reclines--this land, as far as eye can
reach, is your predestined and covenanted heritage. That stone you are about
to leave behind you will remain a pledge of My word--"I am the Shepherd of
the stone of Israel!"' In the words of Matthew Henry, "He seemed to be
plucked off as a withered branch, yet he is to become a flourishing tree
that shall send out his boughs unto the sea." "Who can count the dust of
JACOB?" (Num. 23:10.)
On leaving the Beersheba tent, his own father had
pronounced on him a similar blessing, almost indeed in identical words (Gen.
28:3, 4). It is now endorsed by his father's God, and has put upon it the
sign and signature of Heaven. Although, therefore, he had neither by
priority of birth nor elevation of character any title to so magnificent a
spiritual possession, yet Jehovah seems literally to address to him the
after-words of the Great Prophet--"But now thus says the Lord that created
you, O Jacob, and He that formed you, O Israel, Fear not--for I have
redeemed you, I have called you by your name; you are Mine" (Isa. 43:1). And
well might he have responded in the words used by himself at a later
period--"I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies, and of all the
truth, which You have showed unto your servant" (Gen. 32:10).
It is specially deserving of still farther note, that
whatever were the vicissitudes and trials of his subsequent life--the name
of this erring fugitive, far more frequently than in the case even of the
nobler and saintlier Abraham, is identified with that of Jehovah--"the God
of Jacob"--"the mighty God of Jacob." He lives, through long
subsequent years, the chartered inheritor of unparalleled blessings. He
dies, at last, "the Soldier of God." This was the distinctive name by which
the Jewish nation were to be known--"You seed of Israel His servant, you
children of JACOB, His chosen" (1 Chron. 16:13). "All you seed of JACOB
glorify Him and fear Him" (Ps. 22:23). The beatitude, not of the Hebrew
people alone, but of 'the Church throughout all the world,' runs
thus--"Happy is he that has the God of JACOB for his help, whose hope is in
the Lord his God" (Ps. 146:5).
How continually in the inspired pages are we reminded of
God's absolute sovereignty in the calling and election of His people--a
truth so contrary and antagonistic to human dealings and experience!
Limiting ourselves to New Testament examples, is it not the woman of
Samaria, the despised tax-gatherer of Jericho, the fierce demoniac of Gadara,
the felon on the cross, the fiery Cilician bigot and persecutor, who form
the conspicuous trophies and monuments of the Redeemer's love and power and
compassion? "The chief of sinners," they "obtained mercy."
Such, also, are God's dealings with multitudes still. "I
loved Jacob" (Mal. 1:2), is the strange legend written under many a name
conscious in itself of having forfeited all claim to the divine favor. Still
He meets the exile in the far country--the prodigal at a distance from his
Father's house, when character is blighted, principle shaken, purity
lost--the soul apparently surrendered hopelessly to some demon power. Oh,
even then, at times, a voice is heard amid the maddening hurricane of
passion--it is the lullaby of Everlasting love--"Come unto Me, you weary and
heavy-laden one, and I will give you rest!" The Lord above the ladder
suddenly reveals Himself; the closed heavens seem mysteriously to open; the
dreamer has suddenly flashed upon him the long-deadened--the almost
extinguished sense of his high original destiny. He feels within him, in a
moment, the yearnings after a nobler, truer, diviner life--wakes up to the
consciousness of the irresistible presence of some divine Influence or Power
hitherto evaded, fought against, resisted; which, as with the grasp of a
giant, has now "apprehended him." It is the veritable touch of the Invisible
God. The wandering star is reclaimed from its devious orbits, and set within
the sphere of the divine regards. The loaded cloud breaks, not in storm, but
in a shower of benedictions!
And what is the avowal and confession accompanying such
visions of the Almighty? whether it be in rousing the sinner from his sleep
of indifference and death, or awakening the backslider from his season of
torpor and lethargy; when faith and hope have been burning with a feebler
flame, and the consciousness of God's presence has been forfeited by
indulged sin or omitted duty--whether, also, the means employed be by
startling providences or by feeble instrumentalities? "This is the Lord's
doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes." "Not unto us, O Lord, not unto
us, but unto Your name we would give glory." "By the grace of God
I am what I am." "So slow is He to anger," says an earnest believer of
the past generation, in speaking of this wondrous theme--"so ready to
forgive, that when His prophets lost all patience with the people so as to
make intercession against them; yet even then, He could not be made to cast
off His people whom He foreknew, for His great name's sake." (Lady
Powerscourt's Letters.)
The beautiful words which inaugurated the Gospel era, may
well be written as the motto and superscription over many a life-history
from that of the Patriarch-dreamer to the present hour--"Through the
tender mercy of our God, whereby the Day-Spring from on high has visited
us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace" (Luke 1:78, 79).
Yes, here is the only possible solution and explanation
of these mysteries of grace in the case of each individual soul--"The Lord
has appeared of old unto me, saying, Yes, I have loved you with an
everlasting love--therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn you" (Jer.
31:3). Listen to one, not of life's dreamers, but of her noblest workers,
when laid indeed on his pillow of outward darkness, but irradiated and
encircled with a diviner light than the constellations above the Bethel
Pilgrim--"The text, 'God is love,' has kept me thinking for the last
twenty-four hours; and the more I think of it the more wondrous and
marvelous it grows. In some of our clear northern nights, the heavens above
sparkle with countless numbers of bright and beautiful stars. The pages of
the Bible sparkle with countless numbers of bright and beautiful texts. But
I fancy, for the future, I shall deem the text "God is Love" as the greatest
and grandest in the great and grand skies of texts; a kind of pole-star,
around which, as around the pole star in our heavens, the other starry
messengers and sayings of the Bible revolve." (Sir James Simpson's Life, p.
416.)
The Hebrew of future ages, in bringing to the Tabernacle
or Temple his offering of first-fruits, was to accompany the dedication with
words which kept in perpetual remembrance the sovereign grace of Jehovah to
Jacob--"You must then say in the presence of the Lord your God, 'My ancestor
Jacob was a wandering Aramean who went to live in Egypt. His family
was few in number, but in Egypt they became a mighty and numerous nation.'"
(Deut. 26:5). How many, in bringing their eternal thank-offering into the
heavenly Temple above, will accompany it with the confession and
ascription--"Unless the Lord had been my help, my soul had almost dwelt in
silence." "I will praise You, O Lord my God, with all my heart; and I will
glorify Your name for evermore; for great is Your mercy toward me; and You
have delivered my soul from the lowest hell" (Ps. 86:12, 13).
The magnificent promise God here given to the Patriarch,
is delivered in a grander and more enduring form to us. There is a better
Canaan in reserve for those who are spiritually "the seed of Jacob." As
believers in Christ, we have already partaken of the closing portion of the
Bethel blessing, the blessing promised through the Divine Messiah to all
earth's families; and with this in present possession, we have the other in
future promise.
There is a solemn exhortation addressed, in the Epistle
to the Hebrews, to "look diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God."
And the special example of warning is taken from another member of the
Beersheba tent with whose name we are already familiar. It is the case of
one who made light of temporal advantages, and suffered by their rejection
irremediable and irreparable loss. Let us see to it that ours be not the
self-forfeiture of Esau. His is the picture of those who dally and trifle
with their soul's best interests--who, in the absorbing love of the present,
are willing to barter their immortal felicity, for a bowl of earthly
pottage; degraded votaries of the Epicurean creed, "Who snatch the pleasures
of the passing hour."
How vividly are such characters reflected, in the brief
but most graphic delineation of the elder brother, by the inspired
pen--"Then Jacob gave Esau some bread and lentil stew. Esau ate and drank
and went on about his business, indifferent to the fact that he had given up
his birthright!" Genesis 25:34
Young pilgrims on the way to Zion! seek to be ready with
the reply to all earthly solicitations, "If they had been thinking of the
country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead,
they were longing for a better country--a heavenly one. Therefore God
is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them."
(Heb. 11:15, 16). As from this outset hour at Bethel, onwards through the
future years of his pilgrimage, the promised birthright blessings are ever
before the mind of Jacob, stimulating him in all his efforts, raising him
superior to his sorrows, cheering him in his exile, sustaining him in his
bereavements, softening the harshness of his character, bracing him to noble
endurance--So be it with you. Take, as your watchword and motto, "We look
for a city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God;"
remembering that "what He has spoken He is able also to perform."
And, whether young or old, let us ever seek joyfully to
recall and rehearse the ground of our title-deed to "the Better
Country"--"the smiling fields" beyond Jordan. It is ours alone through Him
who is "the Way, and the Truth, and the Life." "If you be Christ's
(if you have found the true antitypical ladder of the Patriarch, by which
you can to the Gates of the city) then are you Abraham's seed, and heirs
according to the promise" (Gal.3:29). Striking and beautiful are the words
of the psalmist as he invokes the blessing of "the God of Jacob," and names
Him as such. On what does he found and urge his plea at the mercy-seat? He
supplicates that the eye of the great Jehovah, averted and repelled by his
unworthiness, may rest on the alone All-worthy ONE. "O Lord
God of Hosts, hear my prayer--give ear, O God of JACOB. Behold, O God, our
shield, and look upon the face of Your Anointed" (Ps. 84:8, 9).
As we hear the God of the Patriarch saying from the
ladder-summit, "To you will I give it," let us lay hold of the promise in
all the grandeur and magnificence of its spiritual meaning. Be it ours as
the children of Jacob (the inheritors of that great covenant of grace
ratified on the heights of Bethel), in reverent faith to say, "I will hear
what God the Lord will speak--for He will speak peace unto His people and to
His saints" (Ps. 85:8).