Now, if you have your Bibles, I hope
you will turn with me to Genesis, chapter
35.
Our Scripture reading will be of the entire
chapter.
Genesis, chapter 35.
You remember now that Jacob has been told
by the Lord that he is to return
to the land.
He has returned to the land, but instead
of going to Bethel, he has made his
way to Succoth, and then to the city
of Shechem, and there he camped before the
city.
And while camped before the city, Dana, the
daughter of Leah, went out into the city
of Shechem, and there was seduced by Hemor,
by Shechem, the son of Hemor the Hivite.
And the result of that was the slaughter
of the men of Shechem, by Simeon and
Levi, and the looting of the city by
the brothers.
And consequently, Jacob had said in the concluding
words of the chapter, you have brought trouble
on me by making me odious among the
inhabitants of the land.
And it is at this point that God
speaks to Jacob and calls him back to
Bethel.
So in verse 1 we read, Then God
said to Jacob, Arise, go up to Bethel,
and live there, and make an altar there
to God, who appeared to you when you
fled from your brother Esau.
So Jacob said to his household and to
all who were with him, Put away the
foreign gods which are among you, and purify
yourselves, and change your garments, and let us
arise and go up to Bethel.
And I will make an altar there to
God, who answered me in the day of
my distress, and has been with me wherever
I have gone.
So they gave to Jacob all the foreign
gods which they had, and the rings which
were in their ears, and Jacob hid them,
or buried them, under the oak which was
near Shechem.
As they journeyed, there was a great terror
upon the cities which were around them, and
they did not pursue the sons of Jacob.
You might have expected, incidentally, that they would
because of the slaughter that took place.
And they had been made hateful or odious.
I think the authorized version says that Jacob
said, You have made my name to stink
among the inhabitants of the land.
And the fact that there was a great
terror upon the cities as Jacob and his
company passed through them was a testimony to
the power of God in their behalf.
Verse 6, So Jacob came to Luz, that
is Bethel, which is in the land of
Canaan, he and all the people who were
with him.
And he built an altar there and called
the place El Bethel, or the God of
Bethel, because there God had revealed himself to
him when he fled from his brother, the
reference being to the fleeing from Esau when
he made his way to the east thirty
years before this.
Now Deborah, Rebekah's nurse, died, and she was
buried below Bethel under the oak.
It was named Alon Bakuth, or the Oak
of Weeping.
Then God appeared to Jacob again when he
came from Paten Arim, and he blessed him.
And God said to him, Your name is
Jacob.
You shall no longer be called Jacob, but
Israel shall be your name.
Thus he called him Israel.
God also said to him, I am God
Almighty.
Be fruitful and multiply a nation, and a
company of nations shall come from you.
That incidentally is a peculiar promise given to
Jacob.
A company of nations shall come from you.
That was not said to Abraham, though it
is in harmony with the promises to Abraham.
The next line was repeated to, it was
said to Abraham first and repeated here.
And kings shall come forth from you.
And this is a reference to ultimately the
Davidic covenant.
The Davidic covenant being an expansion of that
statement.
Kings shall come forth from you.
And we learn in the Davidic covenant that
the king who is to come will be
a son of David.
That of course was our Lord.
And the land which I gave to Abraham
and Isaac I will give to you, and
I will give the land to your descendants
after you.
Then God went up from him in the
place where he had spoken with him.
And Jacob set up a pillar in the
place where he had spoken with him, a
pillar of stone, and he poured out a
libation on it.
He also poured oil on it.
That is the first reference to a drink
offering in the Bible.
He poured out a libation on it.
So Jacob named the place where God had
spoken with him, Bethel.
Then they journeyed from Bethel and when there
was still some distance to go to Ephrath,
Rachel began to give birth and she suffered
severe labor.
And it came about when she was in
severe labor that the midwife said to her,
do not fear for now you have another
son.
And it came about as her soul was
departing, for she died, that she named him
Ben-Oni, or son of my sorrow.
But in an act of faith, Jacob says,
we shall call him Benjamin, son of the
right hand.
That is the place of honor, the place
of authority, the place of skill.
It is interesting that these two names, Ben
-Oni, son of my sorrow, and son of
the right hand reflect the two states of
our Lord Jesus Christ.
The state of humiliation, the state of exaltation.
When you study systematic theology, one of the
things that you study is the states of
Christ.
The state of humiliation, the state of exaltation.
These two names, Ben-Oni, Ben-Yamin, or
Benjamin, reflect those two states and the fact
that he was born of Rachel, the mother
of Israel, reflects again the fact that the
Messiah shall come from Israel, but he will
be a son of suffering as well as
a son of exaltation.
The one being the outgrowth of the other.
So Rachel died and was buried on the
way to Ephrath, that is, Jerusalem.
You know, it's interesting in the promise in
Matthew, in Micah chapter 5, thou Bethlehem Ephratah
out of thee shall he come forth unto
me that shall be ruler in Israel.
There were two Bethlehems, Bethlehem Ephratah and another
Bethlehem.
When God prophesies, he doesn't prophesy like the
Delphic Oracle.
He doesn't say statements that may be interpreted
in two or three different ways.
He might have said simply thou Bethlehem.
Well, since there were two Bethlehems, it would
be possible to have a double chance of
the prophecy coming to pass, but God does
not even allow that.
He says thou Bethlehem Ephratah, this particular Bethlehem,
not the other.
That's the difference between biblical prophecy and the
prophecy of men.
Now in verse 20, we read, and Jacob
set up a pillar over her grave.
That is the pillar of Rachel's grave to
this day.
Rachel's grave was a well-known place in
the land.
Then Israel journeyed on and pitched his tent
beyond the tower of Eder.
And it came about while Israel was dwelling
in that land that Reuben went and lay
with Bilhah, his father's concubine, and Israel heard
of it.
Now there were 12 sons of Jacob, the
sons of Leah, Reuben, Jacob's firstborn, then Simeon
and Levi and Judah and Issachar and Zebulun.
The sons of Rachel, Joseph and Benjamin.
And the sons of Bilhah, Rachel's maid, Dan
and Naphtali.
And the sons of Zilpah, Leah's maid, Gad
and Asher.
These are the sons of Jacob who were
born to him in Paddan Aram.
And Jacob came to his father Isaac at
Mamre of Kiriath Arbor, that is Hebron, where
Abraham and Isaac had sojourned.
Now the days of Isaac were 180 years.
And Isaac breathed his last and died and
was gathered to his people, an old man
of ripe age.
And his sons Esau and Jacob buried him.
May the Lord bless this reading of his
word.
The subject for the exposition of the word
this morning is back to Bethel.
I have been from time to time making
reference in the messages to Professor H.C.
Leupold's commentary on the book of Genesis.
Sometimes without mentioning his name, other times mentioning
his name.
Professor Leupold was a very fine Lutheran commentator
on the word of God and that two
volume book on the book of Genesis is
a very good commentary.
He has a section at the end of
the chapter in which he gives homiletical hints.
That is helps for preachers in preaching a
chapter.
And I have alluded several times to the
fact that at certain points through the book
of Genesis, quite a few for that matter,
he suggests that one should not preach on
a particular chapter.
Well obviously in Believer's Chapel since we are
committed to the practice of preaching through the
Bible as a general practice, that does not
sit too well with most of us here.
I did not mention that last week on
chapter 34 he had said in his homiletical
hints, we may well wonder if any man
who had proper discernment ever drew a text
from this chapter.
Which of course indicates not only that I
do not have proper discernment, but worse than
that because I not only drew a text
from it, but preached on all of the
passages from the chapter.
Well when we come to chapter 35 we
do not have to worry about that because
this is a chapter upon which one may
preach, though Professor Leupold has some questions about
some parts of even that.
Jacob you will remember had come back to
the land, but instead of coming back to
Bethel, as evidently it was the divine will,
he had made his way down to Succoth
and then had encamped before the city of
Shechem.
There in contact with the pagan world about
him, worldliness began to take its toll.
And chapter 34 and its portrayal of the
seduction of Dana and the tragedy and catastrophe
that occurred as a result of it, illustrates
how worldliness had taken its toll.
But now evidently in the divine plan it
is time for restoration and so back to
Bethel becomes the order of the day.
Now Bethel was not much of a place
physically.
It was just a little community that was
sitting on the top of a hill and
then down to the west and to the
east were the places that meant something in
the land.
But it was a very sacred place for
Jacob for the simple reason that it was
there that God had appeared to him for
the first time when he was fleeing from
Esau.
And he had seen that wonderful vision of
the mystic ladder, the bottom of the ladder
upon the earth, the top of the ladder
in heaven and the angels of God ascending
and descending upon it.
And then God stood by the ladder and
spoke to him and said, I am Yahweh.
I am the Lord, the God of your
father Abraham and the God of Isaac and
I'm going to give you the land on
which you're standing Jacob.
Your descendants shall be like the dust of
the earth.
You shall spread out to the west and
the north and the east and the south
and through you shall all the families of
the earth be blessed.
The promises made to Abraham were then reiterated
to him.
But further God said, I am with you
and I'm going to keep you wherever you
go and I'm going to bring you back
into this land for I will not leave
you until I have done what I have
promised you.
I've said several times in the exposition that
is the Old Testament equivalent of the New
Testament, Philippians 1.6, being confident of this
very thing that he which has begun a
good work in you will perform it until
the day of Jesus Christ.
That is a great promise.
That means that whatever God intends to do
with us, and he's already told us in
the Bible what he intends to do with
us, he's going to conform us to Jesus
Christ.
He will accomplish it.
Now Jacob is told the same thing.
He said, I will not leave you until
I've done what I've promised you.
Well, Jacob awakened from the sleep in which
he had seen this wonderful dream vision and
he said, surely the Lord is in this
place and I didn't know it.
How awesome is this place.
It is none other than the house of
God.
This is the gate of heaven.
And he made a vow.
He said, if God will be with me
and will keep me on this journey that
I take and will give me food to
eat and garments to wear and I return
to my father's house in safety, then the
Lord will be my God.
And this stone which I have set up
as a pillow will be God's house and
of all that thou dost give me I
will surely give a tenth to thee.
Those were great early vows that Jacob had
vowed to the Lord.
But in the meantime, things had happened.
He had come back to the land.
That's true.
God had incidentally cared for him, had done
everything that he said he was going, that
God, that Jacob wanted him to do.
And he had come back into the land
and at Succoth, there, finally down to Shechem.
He has bought a home in the land.
He has barns for his cattle.
He now is camped before a pagan city.
And the worst thing of all, there are
now idols that have been brought into the
very household of Jacob.
And so consequently, Jacob's vows have not been
paid.
In addition, he is now in trouble because
of the activities of the two sons, Simeon
and Levi, in Shechem and the destruction of
the city and the slaughter of the males
of that city.
Jacob's name is not a very good name
in the land.
Someone has said a drying well often will
lead the spirit to a river that flows
from the throne of God.
Jacob's in trouble.
He needs reassurance as a human being from
his standpoint.
And so God is going to give him
that.
But there are some other things that need
transformation in Jacob's life.
Chapter 34 is a chapter that is almost
godless, while chapter 35 is a chapter that
is full of God.
In chapter 34, in the incident with Dana,
we see the Shechem life of the children
of Israel.
But in chapter 35, we see the Bethel
life of Jacob and his family.
You know, restoration is very important in the
Christian life, of course.
But restoration is not enough for maturity.
And so if we are to be brought
to maturity, we often must be put through
trials.
And so some have called chapter 35 the
school of sorrow.
Sometimes that's what we have to go through.
And if God wishes us to go through
it, there is no way that you and
I may escape it, because he will put
us through it.
And so Jacob in this chapter is restored,
but he's also now enrolled in the school
of sorrow.
And we'll talk about that later on.
It's something that every one of us as
a general rule must pass through, the school
of sorrow.
Sooner or later, it will be part of
your discipline to prepare you for eternal life.
So we face it with confidence and with
assurance that God will be with us in
it.
Well, a command came to Jacob, arise, go
up to Bethel and live there and make
an altar there to God who appeared to
you when you fled from your brother Esau.
I've often wondered how God spoke to the
men of the Old Testament.
Sometimes we know.
Sometimes it's clear he spoke in an audible
voice.
I've often felt that today when people say
that God spoke to me in an audible
voice, that they're dwelling in spiritual cookland or
something like that, because it's been the universal
testimony of the believers in the present age
that God does not speak in an audible
voice.
And I suggest that when someone says that,
that you too regard them as not altogether
there spiritually.
How does God speak to us?
Well, sometimes he speaks to us in what
may seem to be simply an impulse of
the moment.
Many Christians have testified to the fact that
as they were getting ready to follow a
certain path, there came to them some impulse
on the spur of the moment, an apparent
impulse to move another way.
And then some tragedy took place from which
they were spared by that impulse that came
to them.
Many a Christian has sought to board an
airline and then is told of the experience,
do not do it.
And afterwards, after the plane has gone down,
they've learned the reason for that.
We are sometimes led that way, I would
not doubt that.
We are also led more frequently by the
daily experiences of our lives.
We remember that the Bible says he works
all things according to the counsel of his
own will.
And consequently, everything that happens to us in
our daily life is part of the divine
plan and program for us.
And we should look at those experiences as
if they were experiences in which we see
the hand of God.
And one of the things that we learn
as a Christian is how to decipher the
hieroglyphics, someone has said, of our daily experiences.
It's not easy and we are learning as
long as we're in the flesh.
That's another way that God leads us, through
the daily experiences of our lives.
And then he also leads us as we
meditate upon the Word of God and seek
for the conviction of the Holy Spirit regarding
the path that we are to take.
Now how God spoke to Jacob here, the
Scriptures do not say.
When I finished saying what I've just said
to you this morning, a seminary student came
up to me and said, one of my
professors said that evidently in a passage like
this God spoke through an angel to Jacob.
That, of course, is possible.
The text does not say that.
It simply says God said to Jacob.
How he spoke to him we are not
sure, but he did definitely speak to him
and he made his will known to Jacob.
It is even more important to realize that
this was an invitation to Jacob to return
to the fervor of the early days, to
return to the spirit of those vows that
he made, the things that made Bethel that
mountain pass, the gate of heaven for him.
So Jacob, get up, go back to Bethel,
there make an altar to the Lord God
who appeared to you when you fled from
your brother Esau.
To Jacob's credit, he follows divine directions.
Bethel, that must have meant something special to
him.
There are certain things from our experience that
mean things to us.
Occasionally when we hear a bar of a
piece of music, we remember certain things in
our experience in the past.
Or it's even possible that there is some
fragrant odor that reminds us of some experience
in the past.
There are many things like that.
Bethel must have been a word that conjured
up in Jacob's mind all of the wonderful
experiences that he had on that night when
God spoke to him in the beginning.
And so it was a thing that excited
his emotions.
And consequently he said to his household and
to all who were with him, put away
the foreign gods which are among you, purify
yourselves and change your garments and let's go
to Bethel.
And there I'm going to make an altar
to God who answered me in the day
of my distress and has been with me
wherever I have gone.
Bethel was 30 miles from Shechem.
It's 10 years that Jacob has been back
in the land now and he still has
not come to Bethel.
So his vows, as I mentioned a minute
ago, were unpaid.
He's not done what he should have done.
Now he did build an altar in Shechem,
but you see it's possible to build an
altar and to have it a meaningless kind
of altar.
Isaiah and the prophets speak about the children
of Israel in their apostasy trampling the temple
courts because it's possible to do that in
unbelief.
As you well know, it's possible to trample
the courts of believers' chapel in unbelief.
It's possible to be here Sunday after Sunday
and to hear the ministry of the Word
of God from the various teachers, but never
to have really yourself entered into an experience
of salvation through Jesus Christ.
And it's also possible for believers to sit
here and listen to the ministry of the
Word of God and not be touched by
it at all.
It seems strange, but nevertheless it's true.
Looking at you from the outwards you might
say, well, he treads the courts of attendants
at the meetings and all of the other
things that go along with the outward identification
with an orthodox church, but inwardly there is
really nothing there at all.
So the building of an altar is not
of significance unless it is an altar that
is built in faith.
That's what God means when he says build
an altar there to the God who appeared
to you when you came out of the
land in the first place.
Now you can see that Jacob's response reveals
that there has been declension in the midst
of the family of God.
And think of it, after the exalted fellowship
of Bethel in the beginning and the exalted
fellowship of that night in Pinal when he
wrestled with God and wept and prayed and
finally was blessed by the Lord God, in
spite of all of that we read that
there were foreign gods in the midst of
the tents of Jacob and his family.
Put away the foreign gods which are among
you and purify yourselves and change your garments.
Declension after the most exalted fellowship.
Is it possible that we have that in
believers' chapel?
Is it possible that in a congregation in
which you listen to the Word of God
expounded Sunday after Sunday, is it possible that
there is declension in your own spiritual life?
Is it possible that you do not really
pray as you formerly prayed?
Is it possible that the freshness of the
teaching of the Word of God is no
longer there with you?
Is it possible that you regard the reading
of the Bible as really a labor and
something you do simply because you feel you
must do it but your mind is not
even there when you're reading the words.
See I know exactly how you feel because
that's the way I feel at times.
I read the Bible and read the words
but my mind and my heart are not
there.
Declension.
Perhaps the Lord has that in mind when
he says, if your right eye offends you,
pluck it out, throw it from you.
It's better to enter into life maimed than
to lose one soul.
If your right hand offends you, cut it
off, throw it from you.
In Acts chapter 19 when the Word of
God was preached and there was response, one
of the outgrowths of the response was that
they threw away their books of magic.
And there comes a time when it is
proper in the Christian life for us to
throw away the things that hinder our fellowship
with the Lord God.
There are more important things than things in
this life.
Much more important things.
Well now we read in verse 5, and
as they journeyed there was a great terror
upon the cities that were around them and
they did not pursue the sons of Jacob.
There is a very striking verse in Proverbs
chapter 16 and verse 7 where the writer
of the Proverbs says, when a man's ways
are pleasing to the Lord he makes even
his enemies to be at peace with him.
You might have expected the people of the
land to attack Jacob because of the way
they had treated the Shechemites.
But when Jacob and his company journeyed down
toward Bethel there was a terror of them
upon the cities that were around about them
and they did not even bother with them.
Well now let me just make a few
comments about this section right here.
I think some observations are in order.
After the Bethels and the Panals, Jacob is
in decline.
Bethel, if you could put your finger on
one place where Jacob came into touch with
the Lord God in the fullest sense of
reality, it was at Bethel when he saw
the vision of the latter and heard God
make those wonderful promises to him and responded
in those vows.
And then at Panal, a few years before
this, he had wrestled with God himself, thinking
that he was probably a representative of Esau
for a while, but when finally that mystical
unknown combatant touched him on the hip and
his hip was immediately dislocated, Jacob realized that
he was wrestling with a superhuman being and
he began to cling to him and exclaimed
that he would not let him go until
he had been blessed.
And God blessed him there.
And he called the place the face of
God.
He had been in Bethel, the house of
God, and in Panal, the face of God,
and now in spiritual decline.
It's amazing isn't it?
I think one of the most terrifying verses
in the Bible is Hosea chapter 7 and
verse 9.
The prophet speaking about Ephraim says, gray hairs
are here and there among him, yet he
knows it not.
It is possible for us to be in
spiritual decline and as you hear a message
like this or ponder a chapter like this,
think, well that has beautiful application to so
and so, when really we're the object of
the Spirit's application of the text.
Gray hairs are here and there among him,
yet he knoweth it not.
So I ask you about your spiritual life.
Are the gray hairs here and there on
the head of your spiritual life and is
it possible that you do not even realize
that you have retrogressed in spiritual living?
Is it possible that you do not even
recognize that you have become lethargic and indifferent
in the things of the Lord?
That you do not read the Bible with
the same fervor that you did and find
the same things in it that you formerly
did even though you know more about spiritual
things?
The idols are the evidences of decay.
One of the saddest things, I think, in
the Christian life and unfortunately it has often
happened in believer's chapel.
I hope less than in other churches, but
I'm not the one to ultimately judge.
But I have observed many times through the
years, couples that seem to be getting along
very well and then suddenly the shocking news
that they're separating, getting a divorce.
And that even individuals who have been attending
the services of a local church, an Orthodox
church, now are giving evidence in an outward
way of the fact that there has been
declension all along in the midst of the
family.
Preachers of the Word of God, teachers of
the Word of God who have after long
periods of apparent fruitfulness been shown to be
and who have confessed to be individuals who
were adulterous in their relationships all the time
over a lengthy period of time in which
they were teaching the Word of God.
The idols that are in the midst of
our personal lives, what are they?
What is the idol of our lives?
Now notice that when God called Jacob to
go back to Bethel, He said, I want
you to prepare an altar there for me.
And Jacob, in order to carry out the
injunction, put away those foreign gods.
It almost suggests that the idols must go
before he comes because he will appear to
Jacob again in a moment and reaffirm those
promises.
But we remember that it is God who
has initiated this command to go back to
Bethel.
But He has asked Jacob to go now
and involved in that is the putting away
of the foreign gods.
So those idols must go.
God's not going to escort a pack of
idols back to Bethel, evidently.
He's just not going to be party to
that.
And so consequently, Jacob asks them to put
away the idols.
Now perhaps some of you in the audience
are thinking, well, Dr. Johnson, I surely would
like to put away my idols, but please
tell me how.
One of the commentators says, what you need
to do is to ransack the camel baggage
of your life and take those idols out
just as Rachel's teraphim were in the camel
baggage, and then bury them just as Jacob
did in this chapter.
Bury them.
And some people, no doubt having the same
experience that I've often had, I recognize that
that's an idol, but I do not seem
to be able to get rid of it.
Well, then it's good to pray, O God,
make me willing to give up these idols.
And then if you have difficulty with that,
you can say, O God, make me willing
to pray to be willing to give up
these idols.
But you will find that the Lord will
answer your prayers, even when you find yourself
unable to overcome in your own strength, he'll
give you the strength.
When the Lord Jesus many centuries later spoke
to the church at Ephesus, a vital church
that Paul commended for its faith and love,
he said to that church, you've left your
first love.
And then, do you remember the instructions he
gave?
He said, do the first works.
Repent, do the first works.
What are the first works?
Well, what did we do when we were
first converted?
The first place we were thrilled.
We thanked the Lord for the forgiveness of
sins that we had, the relationship that we
had, the assurance of eternal life.
We didn't know anything about justification or reconciliation
or propitiation or the doctrine of the atonement
in its deeper aspects.
But we knew we'd been saved.
And so we thanked God for it.
We got down on our knees by ourselves,
by our bedsides, and we gave grateful thanks
to the Lord God for what he's done.
That's one of the first works.
And then the Bible.
We began to read the Bible.
I can still remember when I was in
the insurance business that one of the first
things that I wanted to do was to
read through the whole of the scriptures.
And Dr. Barnhouse gave me some instructions.
He said, begin in John.
Read from John through Revelation.
Come back and read Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
And then go over to Genesis and read
Genesis to Malachi.
And I didn't know enough to know that
that was even a good method of reading
the Bible.
So I started, and I did it.
And the Bible was like a fresh book
to me.
Chapter after chapter, I learned things concerning the
Lord God who had saved me.
And I read the Scofield notes.
They're still good notes to read.
There are some Arminian errors in the volume,
of course, but we're intelligent enough and perceptive
enough to be able to read with some
discernment, are we not?
But that's a good Bible, and those notes
are good notes to read.
And I read those Scofield notes, and I
learned a great deal of good theology from
them.
And I learned to pray.
I'd get down by my bedside in Alabama
and pray by myself, the first works.
And I began to make some Christian friends.
I didn't have any.
I made some Christian friends and companions, and
I loved them.
I grew to enjoy their fellowship.
I grew to be unhappy in some of
the other relationships.
I didn't like spending my Saturday nights at
the club and the dance.
At the Birmingham Country Club, as I'd spent
many a Saturday before that.
And my life was transformed.
Those were some of the first works.
And when the Lord Jesus says, do the
first works, that's what he means.
He means, go back to praying.
Go back to reading the Scriptures.
Go back to the Christian fellowship, which is
edifying and instructive.
Now we read of the return to Bethel
and the verses that follow.
Bethel is a kind of focal place just
for Jacob, as Mount Moriah was the climactic
place for Abraham.
They arrived in Bethel, and there he built
the altar, and he called the place El
Bethel, the God of Bethel, because God had
revealed himself to him there.
And there Deborah died.
Deborah was Rebekah's maid, or Rebekah's nurse, and
no doubt had been the nurse of Jacob
himself.
And so she was a very dear person
to Jacob, and there they buried her and
called the place the Oak of Weeping, for
it was evidently like burying his own mother.
This is the first, incidentally, of four burials
in the chapter.
You see Jacob is entering the school of
sorrow now, and it's by the school of
sorrow that he will ultimately become Israel truly,
or God's fighter.
And after this, God appears to him and
reaffirms the promises to him, changes his name
to Israel, and by the way, in verse
21 we'll read that his name is called
Israel.
Then Israel journeyed on and pitched his tent
beyond the tower of Eder.
So Israel as a name will begin to
appear, but still in Jacob's life he's called
Jacob and he's called Israel to the end
of his days, because there is something of
Jacob in every one of us until the
end of our days, and there is something
of Israel in us until the end of
our days as well.
I confess I don't have a whole lot
of sympathy with people who interpret the perseverance
of the saints as meaning that the saints
do not have any frailties and flaws.
They do.
And if you will look at Abraham and
Isaac and Jacob and see the kinds of
life that they lived, you will notice progress,
development, but you will notice that there is
always frailty and there is always flaw as
long as we are in the flesh.
He reiterates that he's God Almighty, stresses by
using that term the fact that the power
of God is undergirding the saint of God
who is frail.
This word is always used when men need
reassurance and encouragement.
And Jacob responds by setting up the pillar
in the place where he had spoken with
him, a pillar of stone, and pouring out
a drink offering and oil upon it.
Gratitude.
Jacob does not forget the grace of God
manifested to him.
The latter part of the chapter contains the
account of the death of his beloved wife,
the one that he loved and wished to
be his only wife, so far as we
can tell.
This is the second of the burials, Rachel.
One thing you can say about Jacob, he
was a man who had his flaws and
his failings.
He's a man who is up like this
and then down like this, but there is
one thing that is persistent, his love for
Rachel.
And a man who can love as Jacob
loved is a man who can love God
too.
And in these two states, Ben-Oni and
Benjamin, we have reflected the two states of
the Lord Jesus, as I mentioned in the
scripture reading.
The sin of Reuben is referred to in
just a stanza or so.
It's a laconic report, leaving the shock of
the breach in the family to the imagination.
That too illustrates how true it is that
the Bible is the word of God because
it so beautifully understands man.
Incest.
A kind of man who has incest in
the family of Jacob.
The prevalence of incest in our society is
one of the great troubles of our society
in the United States today, as you well
know.
And here it is a long time ago.
Well, I say the chapter concludes with a
reference to the family of Jacob.
He has a complete family now, twelve sons,
and these twelve sons of the Old Testament
corresponding with the twelve apostles of the New
Testament marking in the ideal sense the completion
of the two elections of God.
The election of Israel and the election of
the church of Jesus Christ.
And finally, the death of Isaac and reunited
at the bedside are Jacob and Esau.
Esau evidently has matured considerably, and Jacob and
he are reconciled on the deathbed of their
grand old father who enters into fellowship and
communion with his own people in death.
He was gathered to his people.
That's an evidence that the Old Testament does
know of the doctrine of life after death.
Let me say this just in conclusion.
The school of restoration is suggested by the
command to go back to Bethel, and Jacob's
going back to Bethel and discarding the idols
that had been obstructing fellowship with the Lord
God.
But the school of restoration does not exempt
us from the school of sorrow.
One of the commentators reminds us that in
the making of chinaware there is a process
that illustrates with startling force and beauty the
way that God often brings us to perfection.
For after the chinaware has been made and
then the paint and the pictures have been
painted upon it, it's necessary for that ware
to be put into a furnace and there
extreme heat is applied to it in order
that that which has been painted on the
side may be burned into the china itself.
That's the way God brings us to perfection.
Very often through the sorrows of life, fruitfulness
and possession of the land is only for
those who pass through the school of suffering.
The Apostle Paul and was it Salus
at Antioch in the preaching of the ministry
or Barnabas in the preaching of the ministry
and it's Barnabas who preached and Barnabas told
the believers there that it was through many
tribulations that we must enter into the kingdom
of God.
You see what you got yourself into when
you became a Christian?
That's what you got yourself into.
You got yourself into relationship to a father
who disciplines.
He loves enough to discipline and he does
discipline and he passes us through the experiences
of life so that we may become what
he wants us to become.
And it may be tribulations, not the tribulation
but tribulations.
If we suffer with him we shall also
reign with him and we shall not reign
if we do not suffer with him.
So Jacob's path is draped in the gathering
shadows of outward sorrow from now on.
There is Deborah who dies.
There is Rachel who dies.
There is Reuben who destroys the happy relationship
of the family in his sin.
There is the story of Joseph and the
elder brethren who take advantage of him, sell
him into captivity and as far as Jacob
is concerned, Jacob thought he was dead.
His partiality no doubt helped in that situation.
We'll talk about that later.
Then there is Isaac's death, the death of
his beloved father.
Simeon is finally separated from him and then
when that strange fellow in Egypt asks for
Benjamin, he says, all these things are against
me.
A few chapters later he says, I've not
attained to the years of my other patriarchal
companions.
But you know the interesting thing about it
is that when Jacob said all these things
are against me, actually everything was working for
his good.
Joseph was in Egypt, his own son, prime
minister.
Joseph, by the grace of God, had all
of the provisions necessary for their maintenance.
Often at the very time that we think
all of these things are against us as
we're under the hand of divine discipline, it's
then that God is really working in our
behalf.
So we need to remember, we don't judge
in the things of the Lord by appearances.
We know God has a purpose in sorrow.
We know also that nothing can separate us
from the love of God and Jesus Christ
if we know him.
And we remember, as the writer of the
epistle to the Hebrews says, that after the
time of discipline there is an afterwards in
which we inherit the blessings of that experience.
So I say to you this morning, you
who are Christians, you who are believers in
the Lord Jesus Christ, take heart.
You're just a bit of heaven's chanaware.
And he's putting you in the furnace in
order to make those permanent, those colors permanent,
so that you'll be of joy and a
glory and a thing of beauty for the
Lord God throughout eternity.
Now, from now on, Jacob fades from the
scene.
It's Joseph and the others who come into
the limelight.
Jacob will appear from time to time, but
the story shifts now.
Jacob's back in Bethel where he should have
been, and God is now prepared to go
on with the program which is bigger than
Abraham and bigger than Isaac and bigger than
a Jacob and bigger than one of us,
too.
If you're here today and you have never
believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, of course,
you do not have a Father who will
love you enough to discipline you.
What you need is to recognize that the
Lord God has offered his own Son, the
Lord Jesus Christ, as an atoning sacrifice by
which you may have everlasting life.
Forgiveness of sins is offered to all who
recognize that they're sinners and are willing to
come as beggars and receive as a gift
eternal life.
So if you're here this morning and you've
never believed in the Lord Jesus, we remind
you of the blood that was shed and
the forgiveness of sins that is available.
Come to Christ.
Put your trust in him.
Lean upon him who loved sinners and gave
himself for them.
By the grace of God, join the company
of sinners who've been saved by grace.
If you're a Christian, remember, when degeneration and
declension set in, do the first works.
Cast away the idols.
If you find it difficult, ask God to
make you willing to cast away the idols
and resume the relationship that meant so much
to you in the beginning.
You know, I often find that this is
my particular problem.
Having been in the Lord's work for many
years now, the biggest problem I have is
the fact that I am often so busy
doing things in the Lord's work that I
neglect the scriptures, that I neglect the prayer
life, neglect the other things that must minister
to me spiritually.
And one thing that disturbs me very much
about Believer's Chapel, not especially Believer's Chapel, but
any group to whom the ministry of the
Word of God has come, is that it
seems so easy for us to find the
ministry of God, that which we accept and
take for granted.
Day after day, Sunday after Sunday, we hear
the ministry of the Word of God, and
it does not really affect us very much
after a time.
I remember that God said, through the writer
of the Epistle to the Hebrews, that I
am going to be held accountable as an
elder for the ministry given to an elder.
That's a terrifying thing.
That's as terrifying as gray hairs are here
and there among him, yet he knoweth it
not.
And it disturbs me.
I would love for those of you who
have been in the chapel for many years
to do the first works, that there would
be the freshness of the reading of the
Word of God, the freshness of the prayer
life, and the freshness of the communication of
the gospel of Jesus Christ.
May God deliver us from a humdrum kind
of Christian existence, taking things for granted in
the things of God.
May he give us the freshness, delivering us
from lethargy and indifference.
May the Lord Jesus be exalted and honored
in our lives.
Wouldn't it be great, really, if we just
went home, every one of us, and had
a little time of prayer over our own
spiritual relationship and the relationship of the chapel
to the Lord God.
Back to Bethel is not a bad word.
It's a good one.
Let's stand for the benediction and bow in
a word of prayer.
Father, we are so grateful to Thee for
these words of encouragement and exhortation that have
come to us.
We remember the patriarch and his problems and
his difficulties, his weaknesses and his faults and
flaws.
But we thank Thee for the grace that
was manifested in that Thou didst appear to
him, encourage him, enable him to do His
work.
Amen.
To go back to Bethel, to cast away
the idols, change their garments, purify themselves, and
resume the kind of life that Thou wouldst
have them to live.
Oh God, touch our lives.
Make us different.
Give us the freshness of those first days.
Lord God, deliver us from the condemnation of
the church at Ephesus that we've left our
first love.
Oh God, may that never be.
We worship Thee.
We desire to glorify Thy name.
Undertake for us.
Make us willing to give Thee first place
in our lives as an individual and as
an assembly of believers.
May grace and mercy go with us to
that end, for Jesus' sake.
Amen.