Genesis 31 Devotional
By Pastor Lawrence

A number of years have passed with Jacob living in the land of Haran and now he has four wives, eleven children and a large slew of livestock, all at Laban’s expense. And no matter how much and how often Laban tried to cheat Jacob, somehow Jacob bested him. Ten times Laban changed Jacob’s wages to cheat him and ten times Jacob thrived in the midst of those unfavorable terms. And now Laban is irate, his sons are bitter and there is much tension in the air.

Although Jacob gained all of these things honestly, when he decided to leave surreptitiously, in a sense he was cheating Laban, for his act of deception was cheating him of the opportunity to bless and bid his family goodbye. But since Jacob thought that Laban would not let him go, he decided to go behind his back and run away instead. And this shows that Jacob still did not fully trust the Lord. He still did not believe that the Lord would protect him from Laban. Even though the Lord promised to be with him and go with him on his journey, he didn’t believe that the Lord could overrule Laban or soften his heart in any way.

So instead of confronting the man, Jacob fled in fear across the Euphrates River journeying towards the Promised Land. But running away from his fears doesn’t help Jacob, for he will have to confront them eventually anyway. But isn’t that like us. We naturally want to avoid conflict as much as possible, but often God wants us to experience the conflict so that we will learn to trust the Lord and that we will learn to wait patiently upon the Lord and learn to love our neighbor as ourselves and even to learn to love our enemies. Jacob didn’t love his uncle enough to confront him. For the apostle John tells us in his first epistle that “there is no fear in love…and the one who fears is not made perfect in love.” The reason we run away from conflict is not because we love our enemies, but rather because we are afraid of them. We are afraid of what might happen if we speak the truth. We’re afraid things might get worse. We’re afraid that we might lose the argument or that we might even lose a friend. We’re afraid of revealing our own hurts and weaknesses, our own pride and grudges. When we run away from conflict it’s because we do not love God enough to obey him and we do not love our neighbor enough to speak the truth in love. But no matter how much we may pretend that everything is fine and no matter how often we flee, conflict eventually catches up with us.

In Jacob’s case, conflict literally chases him. For when Laban heard the news of Jacob’s sudden departure, he was furious, setting off on what seems to be a military expedition to take back what he thought belonged to him. Yet the Lord appeared to this angry man in a dream in the middle of the night warning him against crossing Jacob. And we see in in v.26 Laban says to Jacob, ironically, “what have you done?” These were the exact same words that Jacob had said to Laban the morning after his father-in-law had switched Leah for Rachel during the wedding feast. Now, Jacob is returning the favor and stealing away with both his daughters and all his grandchildren; poetic justice if you will. But apparently, he is also running away with his gods.

Whether or not Rachel was in fact having her period we don’t know for sure, but what we do know is Rachel’s attitude toward her father’s gods. No devout pagan during that time would have sat on her father’s gods like that, especially if she were bleeding in some way. And it seems likely that Moses wants us to see how worthless these gods are as well. If a woman can sit on her gods and not only hide them, but soil them in some way, then they must not be true gods worthy of worship. On the other hand, the one true and living God not only has revealed himself to Israel but also to Israel’s enemies warning them not to lay a hand on the Lord’s anointed ones and in fact preventing them from doing so. Our God is not a god you could hide in your pocket or put in a box. He is the God over all the nations, the God who sees and the God who intervenes in the affairs of men blessing those He has promised to bless, even turning the curses of men to naught.