You would think if you were going to choose a people to make yourself known, who would be a blessing to the whole world, and who would be the ones to guard your name and reputation, you'd be pretty picky. If you were God, you'd probably engineer things so that this people was THE best. I mean, there's a lot at stake.
Then you read Genesis 29 thru 31. What a train wreck of a family that this people is going to come from.
Laban tricks Jacob into marrying the "wrong" sister. The wrong sister is unloved (by the 'godly' Jacob) and she hopes having a kid will cause him to love her. Nope. OK, maybe another kid will make him love her. Or another... Then the loved sister doesn't have any children and is now jeolous so she gives Jacob her servant to have kids. That way she can catch up to her unloved sister. So then the unloved sister gives Jacob her servant. Back and forth, wives and babies and jelousy and trickery.
And from those kids are God's chosen people. The 12 tribes of Israel. Guardians of God's word and reputation and blessing to the world. And you know what, they never improve on their start -- their families continue on pretty messed up. But they stayed God's chosen ones.
There was never a sense of godliness during that whole thing as Jacob's family started in Genesis 29-31. But then at the end, we see that God really was in there, somehow, and had not abandoned Jacob. He and his family prosper, even though it looked like it was all Jacob's winning battle of deception with Laban that did it.
But it wasn't. The whole thing was all about God's faithfulness. And Jacob knew it.
You end up thinking that Jacob was a messed up guy, but that he never forgot his God or the commitment he had made to him twenty years earlier back in chapter 28. His way of remembering God was pretty feeble and imperfect, but he never totally went his own way.
How messed up are you? How dysfunctional is your family, or the family you came from?
So be encouraged. I am.
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