Jacob’s first night away from home as he fled from Esau was not very restful. Of course, when your pillow is a rock, you might not expect to hit a solid REM phase. It isn’t so much the rock that disturbed his night’s rest, though, it is the heavenly vision.
And he had a dream, and behold a ladder was set on the earth with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And behold, Yahweh stood above it and said: I am Yahweh, the God of your father Abraham, and of Isaac. The Land on which you lie I will give to you and your descendants. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth. They shall spread out west, east, north, and south, and in you and your descendants all the families of the earth will be blessed. And behold, I am with you, and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land, and I will not leave you until I accomplish all I have promised you. Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely Yahweh is in this place and I didn’t know it.” Genesis 28:12-16
Jacob, on the run from deceiving his father and cheating his brother, has certainly not earned the renewal of Abraham’s covenant he receives from God that night. But, God tells him that He is going to be Jacob’s constant companion, “keeping him” until all is accomplished God as has promised – until they possess the land, and Jacob becomes a blessing. Jacob’s life is God’s project.
God has made a similar promise to all his children. I am confident of this very thing – that He who began a good work in you will complete it until the day of Christ Jesus, (Philippians 1.6). Until we reach the promised land we are, each of us, God’s project.
If we consider some of the methods God used to improve Jacob, the prospect of God working on us is a bit frightening. God said he would “keep” Jacob wherever he went. This didn’t keep his wives from lying to him, his children from committing acts of mass violence, a son from being sold into slavery by his brothers, and the privations of famine. In fact Jacob spent the last half of his life with a permanent, debilitating injury – inflicted by God himself.
The first person God connected Jacob with – his uncle/father-in-law, Laban- cheated and exploited Jacob for 21 years. The ways Laban used to cheat and deceive Jacob are not unlike the ways Jacob took advantage of Esau and Isaac. The first thing God did to “keep” Jacob seems to be to give him a heavy dose of his own medicine. It seems clear to me that God’s promise to “keep” Jacob was not a promise to make life easy for him. It was a promise to mold Jacob into a man who would be a blessing, a man worthy of the covenant, and the promises it entailed. It took an entire lifetime for God to produce the wise, spiritual man we meet in Genesis 48-49, the man mentioned in Hebrews 11:21. But that moment was achieved. That man was matured.
A song I used to sing with the kids in Rome, Ohio, was “He’s Still Workin’ on Me.” The first verse is:
There really ought to be a sign upon my heart,
Don’t judge him yet, there’s an unfinished part.
But I’ll be better just according to his plan,
Fashioned by the Master’s loving hand.
It is a sweet song, and a true statement. But the sculptor of marble doesn’t create the perfect image of a human by rubbing the rock with calf-skin gloves. He uses a hammer and chisel. God’s promise to perfect us won’t always be pleasant for us (maybe not even often).
The difficult times, and difficult people we pray to God for deliverance from may be the very instruments of God. Maybe that person making things difficult is our own Laban. Perhaps the first thing we should do when enduring such challenges is to examine ourselves, looking for the immaturities, and the sin God is working to eliminate. Perhaps during those times when we begin to be bitter towards God because certain hardships persist, despite our persistent prayer, we should consider that God is not absent but present and persistent Himself – continuing to work on us, just as He promised to do, until the day of Christ Jesus.
