THE PATRIARCHS (continued 4)

This was but poor virtue in Isaac. It is but poor virtue in ourselves, when it appears--and some of us have to treat it as such, and confess it as such, at times. It is agreeable in a certain form of amiable human nature; but it is not service to God. We are humbled by reason of that in our own ways. It is poor, and our Isaac here gives us, in measure at least, a sample of this.

It was, however, otherwise with Abraham. The king of Gerar had sought Abraham in his day, and sought him for a like reason, and with a like desire. Abraham meets him in as noble a spirit of forgiveness as Isaac would have done, with an equal readiness of heart and hand to accept him, and to pledge him. But with all this, he rebukes him and makes him feel the rebukes. "Abraham reproved Abimelech," as we read, but as we do not read in the case of Isaac. Abraham will not send him away satisfied with himself, as Isaac did, with an unanswered boast in his mouth of his and his people's virtues. He will assure him, as fully as Isaac could have done, of his full forgiveness and reconciliation; but he will not hide it from him, that his conscience may have a question with him, though his neighbour may accept him and pardon him; that there are matters (as between him and the Lord) which Abraham's feast and Abraham's friendship could never settle.

This was real, real before God, where reality, beloved, ever puts us. May we know that secret better, and be upright before Him! This was beautiful--and by this Abraham was blessing Abimelech, and not merely gratifying him. But this was not so with Isaac; and we may leave him on this occasion, in chap. xxvi., with something of this inquiry in our hearts, Was it mere nature, or the renewed mind in the saint, that acted thus?--a question which still occurs.

Isaac was an elect one, as surely as Abraham; a stranger with God in the earth; one who used his altar as well as carried it. He was meditating in the field when he got his Rebecca, and he had prayed for the mercy, when Esau and Jacob were given to him. We speak of character in him only, when we thus contrast him with another. We speak of the living, practical ways of a saint; and we see in him what was below a witness for God abroad, though amiable and devout at home. This is found in Isaac; and kindred things are still found, again I may say, as many of us know to our humbling. As one once said to me, "There is much that goes with others for being spiritual, because it is done for the eye and taste of our fellow-Christians, and not, as in God's presence, with a single heart to Him."

This indeed is true; and this searches our hearts to their profit. Such notices of our common ways may convict, but they need by no means dishearten us. Quite otherwise; they may be welcomed as for blessing. The light that penetrates to scatter our darkness, leaves itself behind to gladden us, and has title to assert the place as all its own--so that we ought to be able, in spirit, to sing of present light and past darkness, to know what we were, and what we are, and still to sing--

"All that I was, my sin, my guilt,

My death was all my own--

All that I am I owe to Thee,

My gracious God, alone.

"The evil of my former state

Was mine and only mine--

The good in which I now rejoice

Is Thine and only Thine.

"The darkness of my former state,

The bondage, all was mine--

The light of life in which I walk,

The liberty is Thine."

This is standing, not attainment; this is what faith entitles us to celebrate. Faith takes up this language, and the soul surely hears it and understands it. But faith is the spring, in the inworking power of the Holy Ghost. As in Heb. xi., from beginning to end, it is faith that is celebrated. Enoch, and Moses, and David, and the prophets, and the martyrs of other days, may be presented there in their fruits and victories, but it is faith, and not the people of God, that the Spirit by the apostle is celebrating in that fine chapter.

But I must return to Isaac.

At the close of chapter xxvi. we read: "And Esau was forty years old when he took to wife Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Bashemath the daughter of Elon the Hittite: which were a grief of mind to Isaac and to Rebekah."

This has much for us in the way of admonition; but to use it aright, I must look to things connected with it, or like it, in the earlier history of Abraham, and then in the future histories of Jacob and his son Judah.

The command to the nation of Israel at the very beginning was to keep the way of the Lord very particularly as to marriage. They were by no means either to give their daughters to the sons of the Canaanites, or take the Canaanites' daughters for their sons. Deut. vii. 3. If they did so, it would be on the pain of being no longer owned of the Lord. Josh. xxiii. According to this, the apostate days of Solomon are marked by disobedience to this very thing (1 Kings xi.); and afterwards, no real recovery to God could be admitted, without a return to the observance of this principle in their marriages. Ezra x.; Neh. x.

Obedience, therefore, in this thing was a peculiar test of the state of the nation. And it is thus that I look at it in this earliest book of Genesis. For though divine law was not then published, divine principles were then understood. It may be regarded as the witness of the state of family religion then, as it was of the state of national religion afterwards.

Abraham, in this matter, eminently keeps "the way of the Lord;" and so Eliezer, one of his "household;" and so our Isaac, one of his "children." For Abraham sends a special embassy into a distant land, in order to get a wife "in the Lord" for his son--Eliezer goes on that embassy with a ready mind--and Isaac in patience waits for the fruit of it, not seeking any alliance with the nearer people; and, though sad and solitary, keeps himself for the Lord's appointed helpmeet. Like Adam, he waited for a helpmeet from the Lord's own hand, though it cost him patience and sore solitude. This his meditation in the field at eventide shows. He endured. He might have got a daughter of Canaan; but he endured. He will rather suffer the sickening of his heart from the deferring of his hope, than not marry "in the Lord," or take him a wife of any that he may choose. And all this was very beautiful in this first generation of this elect family. The father, the servant, and the child, each in his way, witnesses how Abraham had ordered his house according to God, teaching his children and his household the way of the Lord. See chap. xviii. 19.

But we notice a course of sad decline and departure from all this.

Isaac, in his turn and generation, becomes the head of the family. But he is grievously careless in this matter, compared with his father; as this scripture, the close of chapter xxvi., shows us. He does not watch over his children's ways, to anticipate mischief, as Abraham had done. Esau his son marries a daughter of the Hittites. Isaac and Rebecca are grieved at this, it is true; for they had righteous souls which knew how to be "vexed" with this; but then, it was their carelessness which had brought this vexation upon them.

This we cannot say was beautiful. But still there was a happy symptom in it. There was a righteous soul to be vexed, a mind sensitive of defilement. And this was well. Jacob, however, declines still further. He neither anticipates the mischief, like Abraham, nor does he, like Isaac, grieve over it when it occurs. But with an unconcerned heart, as far as the history tells us, he allows his children to form what alliances they please, and to take them wives of all whom they choose.

This is sad. There is no joy for the heart here, as in the obedience of Abraham; there is no relief for the heart here, as in the sorrow of Isaac and Rebecca.

But Judah afterwards goes beyond even all this in a very fearful way. He represents the fourth generation of this elect family. But he not only does not anticipate mischief, like Abraham, in the ordering of his family, nor grieve over mischief when brought into it, like Isaac, nor is he simply indifferent about it, whether it be brought in or not, like Jacob, but he actually brings it in himself! For he does nothing less than take a daughter of the Canaanites to be the wife of his son Er!

This exceeded. This was sinning with a high hand. And thus, in all this, in this history of the four generations of Genesis-patriarchs, we notice declension, gradual but solemn declension, till it reach complete apostasy from the way of the Lord.

But if this be serious and sad, as it really is, is it not profitable and seasonable? Can we not readily own, that it is "written for our learning"? How does it warn us of a tendency to decline from God's principles! What took place in the same elect family, generation after generation, may take place in the same elect person, year after year. The principles of God may be deserted by easy gradations. They may first be relaxed, then forgotten, then despised. They may pass from a firm hand into an easy one, from thence to an indifferent one, and find themselves at last flung away by a rebellious one. Many have at first stood for God's principles in the face of difficulties and fascinations, like Abraham--then, merely grieved over the loss of them, like Isaac--then, been careless about their loss or maintenance, like Jacob--and at last, with a high hand, broken them, like Judah.

This is suggested by the scene at the close of chap. xxvi. As we pursue the story of Isaac after this, we shall find that his soft and pliant nature allies him not only with weaknesses, but with defilement, with some of the low indulgences of mere animal nature. I mean in the closing action of his life, his blessing of Esau and Jacob.

This is a solemn scene indeed, full of warning and admonition.

Though Isaac had been grieved, as we have seen, by the marriage of Esau with a daughter of the Hittites, yet we learn immediately afterwards, that it is this very same Esau that draws and holds the strongest affections of his father's heart, to which that father would, if he could, have sacrificed everything. And this was very sad. It reminds me of Jehoshaphat. Jehoshaphat had godly sensibilities, but he was wanting in godly energies. Through vanity he sadly sinned; first joining in affinity with Ahab, king of Israel, and then with Ahab going to the battle. But still, he had sensibilities that were spiritual and of divine workmanship. For in the midst of the prophets of Baal, he was not at ease. He had a witness within, that this would not do; and he asked, "Is there not here a prophet of the Lord beside, that we might inquire of him?" But still, and in spite of all this, he went to Ramoth-Gilead to battle, and that, too, in alliance with that very Ahab, who had thus so painfully wounded the best affections of his soul, and who, under his own eye, and as they sat on the throne together, in the spirit of deep revolt from the God of Israel, had consulted the prophets of Baal.

This was strange, as well as terrible; but this was that king Jehoshaphat. And just after the same manner, our Isaac on this occasion had his sensibilities, but not his corresponding energies. With a godly mind he grieved over Esau's marriage with a daughter of Heth; and yet that very Esau, who thus wounded the witness within him, was the one to attract and hold and order the fondest sympathies of his heart, so as to hinder him from freeing himself to act for God.

It was not through vanity, as it was in Jehoshaphat, that Isaac thus sadly and strangely failed--it was rather, from the common pravity of his character, such as we have seen it to be, a general relaxed moral tone of soul. But whether it be through this or that, he is ensnared, I may say, by an earlier Ahab, though his soul had the sense of that Ahab's apostasy. He would help Esau to the blessing all he could, as Jehoshaphat would help the king of Israel all he could to the victory at Ramoth-Gilead.

What sights are these! what lessons and warnings!

But we must inspect this family scene, this family circle in chap. xxvii. a little more closely. There are others beside Isaac to be looked at.

Abraham's servant in chap. xxiv. had brought two different things with him out of the house of his master, when he visited the house of Bethuel. He brought a report of all that the Lord had done for Abraham, and gifts.

These different things become tests of that household in Mesopotamia. The report dealt with future and distant things, and had God necessarily connected with it--the gifts might have been independent of Him, and were a present gain. Rebecca was moved by the report. She takes the jewels, it is true; but the tidings which the servant brought are chief with her. The report of what awaited her among a distant people whom the Lord had blessed had power to detach her. It was not Isaac merely, or Abraham's wealth merely. Her father had wealth, and she need not go far to promise herself a home and its enjoyments. But the Lord had blessed Abraham, and had now prospered the journey of his servant. It was not a question with Rebecca whether she would take Isaac and a share in Abraham's wealth, or remain poor and lonely. The question was this--Would she take the portion the Lord was now bringing her, or that which her kindred and circumstances in the world had provided her?

And so it is with us, beloved. It is not a question between heaven and nothing, but between heaven and the world, between our taking the happiness which the Lord in His promises, or which human present circumstances, have for us. Are we desirous of divine joy and of heavenly riches? Can we say to the Lord Jesus, Thou shalt "choose our inheritance for us?" Is the distant land, of which we have received a report, our object? This was Rebecca; she could answer these questions. We should wrong her if we judged that with her it was Abraham's wealth and Isaac's hand or nothing. It was not so. As we said before, and surely the story warrants it, she had large expectations of every kind, if she remained at home. She need not take a long, untried journey with a stranger and to a strange people. But all became nothing to her, when in faith she received the report. She comes forth at the call of God.

Rebecca was a genuine daughter of Abraham. Abraham had crossed the desert at the call of the God of glory, and Rebecca now crosses the same desert at the report of what the God of glory had done for Abraham. They had the like "spirit of faith." The stronger expression of it we may find in Abraham, but it was the like "spirit of faith." Abraham had gone forth in the faith of an unattested call; Rebecca now goes forth on an accredited report. There was no Eshcol brought out of Canaan to Ur to embolden Abraham to take the journey; but "this is the fruit of it" was said to Rebecca in the servants and camels and gold and jewels--a branch with a cluster rich and abundant indeed. The report is now sealed to Rebecca, as it had not been to Abraham. Abraham tried an untried path; Rebecca did but walk in the footsteps of the flock. But they were on the same road, and reached the same place.

This is simple and beautiful in Rebecca, and the way of faith to this hour. But, beloved, there is more, and that, too, of another kind. Rebecca's character had been already formed--as, I may say, it is with all of us, before we are quickened of God. The moment of His power arrives--we are made alive with divine life then--the separating call is also answered; but it finds us of a certain character, a certain shape and complexion of mind. It finds us, it may be, Cretans (Titus i.), or brothers and sisters of Laban, or something that wears the strong stamp of a peculiar pravity of nature. And then character and mind, derived from nature or from family or from education and the like, we take with us after we have been born of the Spirit, and carry it in us across the desert from Padan-aram to the house of Abraham.

This is serious. It is serious, that with the quickening of the Spirit, nature or the force of early habits and education, or of family character, will cling to us still. "The Cretans are always liars."

Laban, with whom Rebecca had grown up, was a crafty, knowing, worldly man. It is plain that, on the occasion of Eliezer's visit, he had been moved only by the gifts. They made a ready way for Abraham's servant; as we read, A man's gift maketh room for him. Proverbs xviii. 16. Laban was evidently the stirring, active, important one in his father Bethuel's house. He had a taste for occasions which called for management. And all this is a very bad symptom. It is a bad symptom when one carries the bag. It is bad to find one prematurely managing and clever, or, at any period, fond of occasions where skill of that kind is to be exercised, having an aptness in conducting either state affairs or family interests. And just such an one was Laban; and Laban was the brother of Rebecca; and Rebecca had passed all her life, till her marriage, with him; and the family character, in this only great action in which she is called to take a part, sadly betrays itself.

If Abraham and Sarah had brought the foul, unclean compact between them, as they left their father's house to walk with God, so did Rebecca bring this family character, this Laban-leaven, with her. We have nature in its pravity with us after our conversion; and we have our own fleshly characteristics also, as well as the common pravity of nature. And we have to rebuke them sharply, that we may be sound, that is, morally healthful, in the faith. Tit. i. 13. And this lesson is afresh pressed upon us, from the story of this distinguished woman in this chapter.

But there is more of the same kind. Jacob, as well as his mother, Rebecca, got his mind formed by this same earliest influence. He was all his days--I mean, all his practical, active days--a slow-hearted, calculating man; and in this family scene, in chap. xxvii., we find him to be such an one--a ready, intelligent pupil of his mother, Laban's sister, and whose favourite child he had been from his birth. So that as Laban had been corrupting his sister Rebecca, Rebecca had been corrupting her son Jacob.

And further still, as this same chapter tells us, Isaac, whose mind and character, as we have seen, had been so remarkably formed by his early life in Sarah's tent, had sunk into the indulgence of some of the low desires of nature. He loved his son Esau, because he ate of his venison. This was poor indeed, and something worse than poor. And this love of venison, we may surely suggest, must have encouraged Esau in the chase; just as Rebecca's cleverness, got and brought from her brother's house in Padan, formed the mind and character of her favourite Jacob. And thus one parent was helping to corrupt one of the children, and the other the other.

What mischief, what sad defilement, is disclosed here, in all this family scene! But we may go on to expose it even more; for the heart is not only capable of such defilement, but it is daring enough, at times, to take its naughtiness into the sanctuary. "I was almost in all evil in the midst of the congregation and assembly." Proverbs v.

The word to Aaron, long after this, was, Do not drink wine nor strong drink, thou, nor thy son with thee, when ye go into the tabernacle of the congregation. Lev. x. Nature is not to be animated in order to wait on the service of God; it is not to be set in action by its provisions, for the discharge of the duties of the sanctuary. Strong drink may exhilarate, and give ebullition to animal spirits, but this is no qualification for a priest of the house of God.

But even into pollution such as this Isaac seems to have been betrayed. "Take, I pray thee," says he to Esau, "thy weapons, thy quiver and thy bow, and go to the field, and take me some venison: and make me savoury meat, such as I love, and bring it to me, that I may eat; that my soul may bless thee before I die." He was going to do the last religious act of a patriarchal priest, and he calls as for wine and strong drink, the food of mere animal life, to raise and endow him for the service!

This was sad indeed, thus to deliberate on the venison at such a moment. We may all be conscious how much of nature soils our holy things, how much of the mere animation of the flesh may be mistaken for the easy and strong current of the Spirit. We may be aware of this, in the place of communion. And this is to be our sorrow and our humbling--we are to confess it as evil, or at least as weakness, and to watch against it. But to prepare for it, carefully to mix the wine and strong drink, to take a full draught, after this manner, this exceeds in defilement.

And nothing comes of all this but dishonour and loss. The whole of this family pollution is judged in the holiness of God, because this was a family of God in the earth. "You only have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities." Isaac is laid aside, Rebecca never sees Jacob again, and the calculating supplanter finds himself in the midst of toils and wrongs and hardships, supplanted and deceived himself again and again; for twenty long years an alien from the house of his father. Nothing comes of all this, whether we look at the crooked policy of the one party, or at the fleshly favouritism of the other; all is disappointment and shame, under the rebuke of the holiness of the Lord.

There is, however, one relief, and it is a very important one, in the midst of this otherwise foul and gloomy scene. "By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau concerning things to come." This is the Holy Ghost's own reference to this chapter in Hebrews xi.

But ere I speak of the relief or comfort which this has for us when thinking of Isaac, I take occasion to inquire, What was the nature or character of this blessing by the patriarchs upon their children, which we find again and again in the Book of Genesis?

A blessing was in the hand of Melchizedek in chap. xiv.; as again, long after, there was a blessing in the hand of Aaron in Num. vi. These instances we may easily understand--these blessings were conferred or pronounced by reason of office. They were delivered through priesthood ordained of God. There was nothing prophetic or oracular in them. The words which these priests used were rather prepared than inspired; words already prescribed by divine provision, rather than communicated at the moment by divine illumination, at least in the case of Aaron.

With the patriarchal blessing, however, it was as clearly otherwise. There was a prophecy or an oracle in Isaac's words on Esau and Jacob here in chap. xxvii.; and so was there afterwards in Jacob's words on his children in chap. xlix., and in his words on Joseph's children in chap. xlviii.; and so was there before, in Noah's words, in chap. ix., on Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

But why, I inquire, was this great matter thus committed to the patriarchs?

If I mistake not, some of the secrets of patriarchal religion, patriarchal worship and ministry, are involved in the answer to this. Religion had, in these earliest days, the same great truths which it still has for its spirit and principle. The Fall and Recovery of man, or Ruin and Redemption, were then made known, and they were received by faith. The altars of the fathers, and the ordinance of clean and unclean, tell us of faith and of the apprehensions of faith in those days. The tent of the living patriarchs, and the Machpelah of the departed patriarchs, tell us that they understood the stranger's calling, and a coming resurrection; and Abraham's grove at Beersheba (chap. xxi.), and his alliance with the Gentile at the well of the oath, tell us likewise, in clear though symbolic language, that they understood some of the bright and happy secrets of the millennial age, or of "the world to come."

And worship and ministry, in those infant days, were in their simplest forms. I may say, nature suggested that the father or head of the house should be the prophet, priest, and king, there. In after times, when the condition of things spread out, and when, with enlargement and age, corruption came in, the holiness of God demanded a separated or circumcised people; and, connected with such, a separated or anointed priesthood. Now, in our day, in the day of the kingdom of God, which is, as we know, "not in word, but in power," it is required that ministry should be something more than nature would suggest, or than holiness would demand; there must be power, such as the Spirit Himself prepares and imparts. But in the early days of Genesis, those family days--those infant, earliest days--the voice of nature was listened to, and duly and seasonably so; and accordingly, the head of the family was the minister of God to the family, and both the dignities and the services of prophets, priests, and kings, within the range of the homestead, or in the family temple, centred in the father.

The blessing of the children seems to flow from this. It was an act performed in the combined virtues of a prophet and a priest, which, as we see, the fathers of the families carried in their own persons. They received a communication of the divine mind, and then uttered it, as "oracles of God;" and, being separated or priestly representatives of God to their children, they pronounced His blessing, God's blessing, upon them.

They seem to sustain this character through the Book of Genesis.

In our Isaac it is sad indeed to see how this character was exercised, or rather abused--as such like high endowments have constantly been, the priestly dignity, for instance, in the person of Eli (godly old man as he was), and the kingly authority, in one tremendous instance, even by such an one as the deeply-loved and honoured son of Jesse.

So Isaac would have made his office serve, not only his private partialities, but his very appetites. And this, too, in the face of solemn, divine warning. The word had gone before, upon Isaac's children (Esau the elder and Jacob the younger), "the elder shall serve the younger." But Isaac's fleshly favouritism and appetites had made him careless and forgetful of this, and he would fain have made the elder, Esau, the heir of the promise.

And here we may call to mind, that Caiaphas, in his day, was such an one as Isaac, combining the prophet and the priest in his own person. And Caiaphas would fain have abused his office and his gift to his own wretched purposes and desires. He delivered a true prophecy with a design on the life of the Lord Jesus. John xi. And in earlier days, the prophet Balaam was of the same generation. He sought, all he could, to use his gift in the service of his lusts. God, however, took him out of his own hand, and forced his lips to utter the sentence of righteousness, the judgment of truth. And, though it be sad to put such men together, even in a single action, yet so it is; for such was Isaac in Gen. xxvii. Though a sanctified and filled vessel, he would have served the wish of his own fond heart, in the use of the treasure which he carried; but God took him out of his own hand, and used him as the oracle of His settled, sovereign purpose. Again I say, it is sad thus to link such men as Isaac and Balaam in a common moral action. But we know that "that which is born of the flesh is flesh." As an old writer says, "The water that is foul in the well will not be clean in the bucket." The flesh in an Isaac is as the flesh in a Balaam; and the world in the heart of each of them is the same world.

But they are not one to the end. This is the comfort, the gracious comfort, of which I spoke before. Balaam is Balaam still, the man who loved the wages of unrighteousness, and ran greedily after his own error for reward; he goes on as Balaam, giving counsel to Balak to cast a stumbling-block before the people of God; and at last he fell, as Balaam, with the uncircumcised, slain with the sword, like those that go down to the pit. But Isaac repented with godly sorrow unto a repentance not to be repented of. When his eye is opened, and he discovers what he had been about, and how Jacob had got the blessing which he had prepared for Esau--when it thus confronts him to the face, that he had been withstanding God, but that he could not prevail, his soul seems to awaken as from sleep, and to get alive to all this, for we read of him, that he trembled with a great trembling greatly. v. 33. The sight, the moral sense, of the place that he was filling, startles his soul. He trembles in himself. The flesh which he had been nourishing could not stand him in such a moment--and he seeks it not--it has been exposed to him; and in the light and energy of the better life, he acts according to faith, and says, speaking now of Jacob, and no longer of Esau, "I have blessed him, yea, and he shall be blessed."

There was nothing of this in Balaam; Balaam was not turned back. When the angel withstood him in the narrow way, and his ass fell under him, there was none of this godly sorrow working repentance. But our Isaac is restored. He seeks another way, and takes up and follows after God's object from that moment. It is not "the madness of the prophet" that the Spirit records in Isaac, as He had to do in Balaam, but the faith of the prophet. For in this hour of happy restored fellowship with the mind of God, after his trembling, "with a great trembling greatly," the way of Isaac is sealed and signalized by the Spirit. "By faith Isaac blessed Esau and Jacob concerning things to come." And this is the only matter in the life of Isaac which is noticed by the Spirit in that chapter, Heb. xi.

But this had character in it, and the Spirit has distinguished it. The victories of faith which Moses gained were very fine. He answered both the attractions and the terrors of Egypt; refusing to be called the son of the king's daughter, and forsaking the country, not fearing the king's wrath. These were splendid victories; and are so to this day, when achieved in the saint. But there are conquests much less distinguished, which nevertheless are conquests, recorded in this chapter which celebrates the deeds of faith. They may be seen in Isaac and in Jacob. Each of these witnesses of faith, in his day, blessed the children or the sons before him according to God, though this was contrary to nature. Isaac would have preferred Esau, and Jacob would have preferred Manasseh; but Isaac persisted in his blessing of Jacob, and Jacob in his blessing of Ephraim, and in this, nature was conquered. It was not, we may allow, the world, in either its snares or its dangers, that stood out to try the strength of faith in the saint--but still it was an opposer. It was nature; the suggestions or sympathies or partialities of nature--and while we may admire the splendour of the victories of a Moses or an Abraham, let us remember and look to it, that we fight the fight of faith with nature, and gain the day in that field, with Isaac and Jacob.

As to Jacob's part in this family scene which we are looking at, we may certainly say, had he but left his matters in the Lord's hand, where they had been from the beginning, from before his birth, and not allowed his mother to take them into hers, he would have fared far better. How often has many and many a Jacob since the days of Gen. xxvii. proved the same! The Lord had promised him the blessing without any condition. "The elder shall serve the younger." But he could not, in the patience of faith, wait the Lord's time and method to make good His own promise. Therefore the promise gets laden with reserves and difficulties and burthens. It shall surely be made good. The promise of the Lord is certain, and "never was forfeited yet." He is able to make it stand. The elder shall serve the younger--but now, by reason of Jacob's own unbelief and policy, the elder shall give the younger some trouble: because the younger thinks well to deal with the promise in his own craft and skill, he shall be made to reach it after delay and sorrow and shame.

Accordingly, Esau himself gets a promise from the Lord, through his father Isaac, on this occasion, a promise which the divine purpose and grace towards Jacob, at the first, had never contemplated. "And Isaac his father answered and said unto him, Behold, thy dwelling shall be the fatness of the earth, and of the dew of heaven from above; and by thy sword shalt thou live, and shalt serve thy brother; and it shall come to pass when thou shalt have the dominion, thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck." vv. 39, 40.

All this comes to pass. David, who came of Jacob, sets garrisons in Edom, and the Edomites become his servants and bring gifts. Jehoram, who also comes of Jacob, afterwards loses the Edomites as his servants and tributaries; they revolt, and continue so to this day. 2 Sam. viii. 14; 2 Chron. xxi. 8.

Saviours by-and-by shall come to Zion and judge the mount of Esau. Obadiah 21. The tabernacle of David which is now fallen shall be raised up, and Israel shall possess Edom and the residue of the Gentiles. Amos ix. This shall be made good in its season, for the elder shall serve the younger--the promise is yea and amen. But now, and from the days of Jehoram the son of Jehoshaphat of the house of David of the lineage of Jacob, Esau or Edom has been in revolt; and the promise is thus delayed and complicated and burthened in ways such as the grace of God and the gift by grace had never designed, and such as Jacob had never passed through, had his faith been more simple.

And there is much like this in Christian experience. See the disciples on the sea of Galilee, in Mark iv. The Lord had said to them, "Let us go unto the other side." This was a pledge to them that they were sure to reach the other side. They need not fear. They may, if they please, lay them down to sleep with their Master. But no--they fear, and consult with flesh and blood. And therefore they reach the other side with tremblings and amazement and shame. Their fears loaded their spirit with these burdens, which, had they left the fulfilling of the word to Him who had given the word, would have been saved them. And so, the unbelief of Jacob in Gen. xxvii., his putting the promise of God into his mother's hand, has loaded the history of his house with those perplexities and contradictions and changes, which, as we have mentioned, were all strangers to the promise, as the simple gift of grace, at the beginning, had purposed it and made it.

Many like experiences the disciples had, through their unbelief, as they companied with the Lord Jesus all the time He went in and out among them--and many such are known to us His saints at this day. Our spirits gather amazement and shame, when we might have known only the calm and bright enjoyments of faith, looking, if it were so, at a sleeping Jesus, and knowing His sufficiency for all promises, though winds and waves oppose.

Thus was it with Jacob, according to the part he acted in this sad family scene. Esau was not the guilty one here. He was rather the injured party; and therefore, in the hand of Him by whom "actions are weighed," Esau is the only one who is a gainer. All the rest have to learn what the way of their own hearts shall end in. Isaac, Rebecca, and Jacob alike prove this. It is Esau, so far the injured one, who gains, as we have seen, anything by it all. By his sword he lives, and, in time and for a time, breaks the yoke of his younger brother off his neck.¹⁸

After all this, just at the end of his ways, though not of his days, at the desire of the suspicious and terrified Rebecca, Isaac sends away Jacob. And this action is done with an expression of sorrow and shame and disappointment, the bitter fruit which their own way had prepared for them. All would have been different indeed, had the spirit and obedience of faith kept them in the way of the Lord. xxvii. 42; xxviii. 5.

And here we reach, as we said, the end, the practical end, of the life of our patriarch. He lives, it is true, for forty years after this; it may be more--but he is lost to us. He is as if he were not.

At the close of chapter xxxv. we read, "And Jacob came unto Isaac his father unto Mamre, unto the city of Arbah, which is Hebron, where Abraham and Isaac sojourned. And the days of Isaac were an hundred and fourscore years. And Isaac gave up the ghost, and died, and was gathered unto his people, old and full of days: and his sons Esau and Jacob buried him."

Abraham had carefully possessed himself of Machpelah, on the occasion of Sarah's death; and there he had buried Sarah, and there Isaac and Ishmael had buried him; and there, at this time, Jacob and Esau bury Isaac; and there afterwards his twelve sons bury Jacob.

The purchase of this parcel of ground, and the care the patriarchs manifested in the matter of their burial there, tell us of their faith in their own happy resurrection and its attendant inheritance of the land. It tells us that hope was in their souls as surely as faith--that as they rested, without a doubt, in the certainty of their call and adoption, so did they, with like assurance, in the life and inheritance prepared for them in the world to come. They lived in faith, and they died in faith. They were a people in whose souls the life of faith and hope was known and enjoyed. They betray nature again and again; they err, they shift and contrive and play false with God at times through unbelief; they incur discipline and rebuke, and at times are humbled before men; but they seem never to doubt the blessed facts, that they were adopted and endowed by the God of glory. Faith and hope lived in their souls. I say not that they had what we have. There is now an unction, an earnest, and a witness, fruit of the given, indwelling Spirit, imparting not only the power but the character of this day of ours. But the patriarchs, in their infant age, seem never to doubt. And this is precious--that God, even in the earliest communications of Himself--communications of Himself to His elect even in their childhood, or, in the infant days of Genesis--would be known by them as One to be trusted both for the present and the future.

And again I say, this is precious. The Spirit forms hope in the soul of the elect, as surely as faith. Machpelah tells us this, as to the patriarchs. But it was found before them, and it has been found ever since. Adam was a hoping as well as a believing man. As soon as he had faith, he had hope. He walked as a stranger on earth, as well as in the consciousness of life. And with him, and like him, the antediluvian saints.

Israel afterwards celebrated the last night of their sojourn in Egypt with the staff in their hand and the shoe on their foot, as simply and as surely as they had put the blood on the lintel. They hoped for something beyond Egypt, as certainly as they counted on security in Egypt.

Moses witnessed this standing of Israel, this proper standing in the camp of God in the power of faith and hope, when afterwards he said to Hobab, "We are journeying to a place of which the Lord said, I will give it you." And so Paul, in his words before King Agrippa, "Unto which promise our twelve tribes instantly serving God day and night hope to come."

The oil in the vessels of the wise virgins is the expression of the power of hope. They provided against His delay for whose return alone they looked and waited, be that return far off or nigh.

And to give hope its highest, brightest moral glory, we are given to know, that the present heaven of Jesus is a heaven of hope. Though seated at the right hand of the Majesty on high, He is, we know, "expecting till His enemies be made His footstool." And the mind of the glorified Church will, by-and-by, be kindred with this mind of her glorified Lord; for the heaven of Rev. v. is also a heaven of hope. "Thou art worthy," say the living creatures and enthroned elders of that heaven, "to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; and hast made them unto our God kings and priests: and they shall reign over the earth."

In this life of faith and hope, the fathers of the Book of Genesis are seen to be one. Happy to know this. They illustrate different mysteries, and read us different moral lessons; but in this life of faith and hope they are one; and each in his day, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is alike gathered to his people (chaps. xxv., xxxv., xlix.)--each is "a handful of sacred dust" in the cave in the field of Ephron the Hittite, laid up there in sure and certain hope of a resurrection unto life and to the inheritance.

There is a common saying, "It is better to wear out than to rust out." But this better thing was not Isaac's. He rusts out. And such was the natural close of such a life.

Was Isaac, I ask, a vessel marred on the wheel? Was he a vessel laid aside as not fit for the Master's use? or at least not fit for it any longer? His history seems to tell us this. Abraham had not been such an one. All the distinguishing features of "the stranger here," all the proper fruits of that energy that quickened him at the outset, were borne in him and by him to the very end. We have looked at this already in the walk of Abraham. (See pp. 134-137.) Abraham's leaf did not wither. He brought forth fruit in old age. So was it with Moses, with David, and with Paul. They die with their harness on, at the plough or in the battle. Mistakes and more than mistakes they made by the way, or in their cause, or at their work; but they are never laid aside. Moses is counselling the camp near the banks of the Jordan; David is ordering the conditions of the kingdom, and putting it (in its beauty and strength) into the hand of Solomon; Paul has his armour on, his loins girded. When, as I may say, the time of their departure was at hand, the Master, as we read in Luke xii., found them "so doing," as servants should be found. But thus was it not with Isaac. Isaac is laid aside. For forty long years we know nothing of him; he had been, as it were, decaying away and wasting. The vessel was rusting till it rusted out.

There surely is meaning in all this, meaning for our admonition.

And yet--such is the fruitfulness and instruction of the testimonies of God--there are others, in Scripture, of other generations, who have still more solemn lessons and warnings for us. It is humbling to be laid aside as no longer fit for use; but it is sad to be left merely to recover ourselves, and it is terrible to remain to defile ourselves. And illustrations of all this moral variety we get in the testimonies of God. Jacob, in his closing days in Egypt, is not as a vessel laid aside, but he is there recovering himself. I know there are some truly precious things connected with him during those seventeen years that he spent in that land, and we could not spare the lesson which the Spirit reads to us out of the life of Jacob in Egypt. But still, the moral of it is this--a saint, who had been under holy discipline, recovering himself, and yielding fruit meet for recovery. And when we think of it a little, that is but a poor thing. But Solomon is a still worse case. He lives to defile himself; sad and terrible to tell it. This was neither Isaac nor Jacob--it was not a saint simply laid aside, nor a saint left to recover himself. Isaac was, in the great moral sense, blameless to the end, and Jacob's last days were his best days; but of Solomon we read, "It came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods," and this has made the writing over his name, the tablet to his memory, equivocal, and hard to be deciphered to this day.

Such lessons do Isaac and Jacob and Solomon, in these ways, read for us, beloved--such are the minute and various instructions left for our souls in the fruitful and living pages of the oracles of God. They give us to see, in the house of God, vessels fit for use and kept in use even to the end--vessels laid aside, to rust out rather than to wear out--vessels whose best service it is to get themselves clean again--and vessels whose dishonour it is, at the end of their service, to contract some fresh defilement.

Wondrous and various the lessons and the ways of grace, abounding grace! Quickly indeed does the soul entertain thoughts of God according to the suggestions of nature, instead of knowing Him according to faith. Nature holds Him before the soul as a judge, or as a lawgiver, or an exactor of righteousness, as One that carries balances in His hand to try every thought and work--One that is sensitive and resentful of the slightest touch of evil. But faith holds Him before a gazing, worshipping eye and heart, as the One who always loves us, do what He may, or speak as He will. For faith worketh by love (Gal. v. 6)--it worketh towards God as Love, and therefore it is a spirit of confidence and liberty. If we find our souls under pressure of the spirit of fear or bondage or uncertainty, we may be sure that they have let go the gentle hand of faith, and allowed themselves to be led by such tutors and governors as nature provides. This ought not so to be. We are to know that we have ever to do with love! When we read, when we pray, when we converse, when we confess, when we serve, when we sing, when we look at His hand in providence, or think of His name in secret, may faith's communion with God be ours! He loves us. The relationship in which we stand, and of which our Isaac was the expression, makes this a necessary truth.

It is "to Himself" that God has brought us and adopted us--having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will. Eph. i. 5. And these words "to Himself" bespeak God's own joy in the adoption of the elect, in making them children; as was Abraham's joy at the weaning of our Isaac. Christ presents the Church to Himself (Eph. v. 27), and the Father gathers the elect as children by adoption to Himself. Each has personal interest and personal delight in the mysteries of grace. And according to this, the Holy Ghost, in the Epistle to the Galatians, to which the story of Isaac so refers, pleads the cause of the Father as well as the cause of Christ with us. He teaches us that we are redeemed by Christ from the curse of the law, and, through the Spirit given to us by the Father, from the bondage of the law. All this is full of blessing to us; and all this, the mystery of Isaac, the son of the free-woman, suggests to us.

Faith is that principle in us which gives to the Lord Jesus the place or privilege (such a place indeed as God alone can fill) of sustaining the confidence of a sinner entirely by Himself, of being the immediate, the only object of the sinner's trust. But faith, in this dispensation, involves relationship. By faith we stand in the Person as well as on the work of Christ--and Christ being the Son, we are children, as we are saved sinners. We are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. Gal. iii. 26. And Ishmael is not to share the house with Isaac. The spirit of bondage gendered by the law or by the religion of ordinances, is to be put out, and the spirit of liberty alone is to fill it. For the house is now set in a child and not in a servant, in Isaac and not in Eliezer--and relationship is God's joy as it is ours. "The Father seeketh such to worship Him." Wondrous words of abounding grace, beloved! and Sarah's joy in our Isaac pledged this in patriarchal days.

JACOB.

GENESIS XXVIII.-XXXVI.

I have already followed the course of the Book of Genesis to the close of chapter xxvii. From that chapter to chapter xxxvi., Jacob is principal; and it is that portion which I now purpose to consider.

There is a very important era in the life of Jacob afterwards--his sojourn in Egypt for seventeen years, and his death there. But this is found in that part of the book in which Joseph becomes principal, so that I shall refer to it only so far as Jacob is concerned.

The life of Jacob is one of very large and varied action, quite of another character from that of his father Isaac. The wisdom of God readily accounts for this; because there is divine intention in the construction of these histories, as there is divine truthfulness in the record of them. By them we are instructed in mysteries, as surely as we are made acquainted with circumstances. It has been my desire to notice these mysteries, as well as to gather the moral of these earliest ages of the human family, and these first fathers of the elect of God.

Election, and the call of God, in the sovereign exercise of His grace, were exhibited in Abraham.

Sonship, to which election brings us, (for we are predestinated unto the adoption of children,) was then shown in Isaac.

Discipline, as of a son, (for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?) is now, in its season, to be exhibited in Jacob.

And thus, after this manner, these successive histories not only continue the orderly narrative of facts, but present us with a view of that course or conduct which the grace and wisdom of God is taking with His people.

Jacob was a son as well as Isaac. But he was a son at school, or under correction; not a son, like Isaac, in the care and nurture of the home of his father; not as one given to know the rights and dignities of son and heir, but as one made to know the love, the practical love, that chastens and corrects. This was the child Jacob. But we are never to forget that we are never more distinctly children than when under such discipline. Discipline assumes adoption. The exhortation or correction speaks to us as to children. The discipline may occupy the foreground, but the fatherly love is the secret.

But this notice of Jacob as a son under discipline I give here only as a general characteristic. As to the materials of his history, various and striking as they are, we may distinguish them into four eras:

1. His birth and early life in his father's house in the land of Canaan.

2. His journey to Padan-aram, and his residence there, in the house of Laban the Syrian, for twenty years.

3. His journey back from Padan-aram, and his second residence in Canaan.

4. His journey from Canaan to Egypt, and his residence and death there.

This may be read as a simple, natural table of contents, so to call it, and I would follow it out in its order.

Part I.--This earliest portion of Jacob's history, his birth, and his life in the house of his father in the land of Canaan till he was about seventy years of age,¹⁹ I have generally anticipated in the preceding paper, entitled "Isaac." And I may be allowed to say, necessarily so; because it is involved in those chapters of the Book of Genesis, where Isaac is principal. I must therefore refer to it.

Part II.--Jacob begins to be seen under discipline in chap. xxviii., and there it is where this second part of his history opens, and where also, in the Book of Genesis, he becomes the chief or leading character.

In his journey out towards Padan, but ere he left the borders of Canaan, at the place called Luz, the Lord meets him. This was not his father's bed-side, where he was sinning, but a lonely, dreary, distant spot where his sin had cast him, and where the discipline of his heavenly Father was dealing with him. In such a place God can meet us. He cannot appear to us in the scene of our iniquities, but He can in the place of His correction. And such was Luz to Jacob. It was a comfortless spot. The stones of the place were his pillow, and the sky over his head his covering; and he had no friend but his staff to accompany and cheer him. But the God of his fathers comes there to him. He does not alter his present circumstances or reverse the chastening. He lets him still pursue his way unfriended, to find, at the end of it, twenty years' hard service at the hand of a stranger, with many a wrong and injury. But he gives him heavenly pledges, that hosts on high should watch and wait around him.

The Lord had made, as we know, great promises to Abraham: the same were repeated to Isaac, and are now, at Bethel, given to Jacob. But, to Jacob, something very distinct from these common promises is added: "And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of." v. 15. This was a new promise, an added mercy; just because Jacob needed it, as Abraham and Isaac had not. Jacob was the only one of the three who needed that the Lord would be with him wherever he went, and bring him home again. Jacob, by his own naughtiness, had made this additional mercy necessary to himself, and, in abounding grace, he gets it; and the vision of the ladder pledges it. The promises to Abraham and to Isaac had not included this providential, angelic care. They had remained in the land; but Jacob had made himself an exile, that needed the care and watching of a special oversight from heaven, and he gets it. And it is to this, I believe, that Jacob alludes, when he says to Joseph, The blessings of thy father have prevailed above the blessings of my progenitors. Chap. xlix. 26. This angelic care, that watched over him, under direct commission from heaven, in his days of exile and drudgery, which his own error had incurred, distinguished him as an object of mercy, and gave him "blessings" above those of his "progenitors." And in this character he reached "the bounds of the everlasting hills." He was heir of the kingdom as a debtor to special mercy, through that abounding grace that had helped him and kept him amid the bitter fruits of his own naughtiness. As David, in his day, triumphed in "the everlasting covenant" made with him, though for the present his house was in ruins through his own sin. 2 Samuel xxiii.

This is God's way, excellent and perfect in the combination of grace and holiness. And upon this, let me observe, that in all circumstances there are two objects, and that nature eyes the one, and faith the other. Thus, in divine discipline, such as Jacob was now experiencing, there is the rod, and also the hand that is using it. Nature regards the first, faith recognizes the second. Job, in his day, broke down under the rod, because he concerned himself with it alone. Had he eyed the counsel, the heart, or the hand that was appointing it (as we are exhorted to do, Micah vi. 9), he would have stood. But nature prevailed in him, and he kept his eye upon the rod, and it was too much for him.

So in failures, as well as in circumstances, there are two objects. Conscience has its object, and faith again has its object. But conscience is not to be allowed to rob faith of its treasures, the treasures of restoring, pardoning grace, which the love of God in Christ has stored up for it.

There is great comfort in this. Nature is not to be over-busy with circumstances, nor conscience with failures. Nature is to feel that no affliction is for the present joyous, and conscience or heart may be broken; but in either case, faith is to be at its post and do its duty; and much of the gracious energy of the Spirit in the epistles is engaged in putting faith at its post, and encouraging it to do its duty. The Apostles, under the Holy Ghost, take knowledge of the danger and temptation we are under by nature; and while it is abundantly enforced, that conscience is to be quick and jealous, yet it is required that faith shall maintain itself in the very face of it.

To know God in grace is His praise and our joy. We naturally, or according to the instincts of a tainted nature, think of Him as one that exacts obedience and looks for service. But faith knows Him as one that communicates, that speaks to us of privileges, of the liberty and the blessing of our relationship to Him.

But Jacob's soul was not quite up to this way of grace. He found the place where the ladder and the angels were seen, and where the God of his fathers spoke to him, to be "dreadful." In some sense it was too much for him. As it was long afterwards with Peter on the holy hill. God is true to the aboundings of His grace. Jacob may say, "How dreadful is this place!" Peter and his companions may have their fear; but the ladder, nevertheless, reaches to heaven, and angels are up and down upon it in the sight of the patriarch; and the glory on the Mount still shines. For the grace of God is richer than the apprehensions of the soul about it. God shines in Himself above our experiences. And it is in Himself He is to be known, and not in the reflections of our experience.

Still, like Peter on the hill, Jacob, in some sense, found it good to be at Luz, and he called the place Bethel. It was the house of God to him, for God had there been with him, and spoken to him; it was the gate of heaven in his eye, for there the angels had appeared, as descending from their own place on high. "This is none other but the house of God," says he, "and this is the gate of heaven."

God both records His name and glorifies it. He records it or reveals it at first, and faith accepts Him. In due time He verifies that record or testimony, making it all good, and thus glorifies His name. And wherever He records His name there is His house. Ornan's threshing-floor got the same dignity long afterwards, which Luz now gets, and on the same title. "This is the house of the Lord God, and this is the altar of burnt-offering for Israel," says David of that spot of the Jebusite. 1 Chron. xxii. 1. For it was the place, like this Bethel of our patriarch, where mercy had rejoiced against judgment, where God was revealing Himself in the aboundings of His grace, and there faith descries the house of God. Jacob and David, each in his day, were saints under discipline; but the Lord met them in the rich provisions of His love, thus revealing Himself or recording His name; and this was His house to them. But it is easier thus to consecrate the house, than to learn the lesson that is taught there. Jacob rightly uttered his heart under force of the impressions which the vision could not but awaken; but there is something of old Jacob in his spirit still. The faulty way of his heart is at work still, and he seems to calculate, and to make bargains, and to enter into conditions, though the Lord had spoken to him there in the language of the promise, in free, sovereign, abounding goodness. For nature still stirs itself after many a rebuke and defeat, and outlives what for a moment may have appeared a death-blow. Jacob no more now leaves it behind him at Bethel, than before he had left it behind him in his mother's tent.

But he goes on. Grace sets the chastened saint on his journey, and with some alacrity too, till "he came to the land of the people of the east," till he reached Padan-aram, where his mother's counsel had appointed him, and, doubtless, where the hand of God had now conducted him.

His introduction to Rachel was at the well, and in the midst of the flock, like that of Eliezer to Rebecca; and Eliezer was but Isaac's representative. But Jacob was the poor man, Isaac the wealthy. Isaac could enrich Rebecca with earrings and bracelets of gold, pledges of the goodly estate he had for her. Jacob has but his toil and sweat of face. The one was as the son and heir, the other a man who had beggared himself, and must find his own way through the wear and tear of life as best he may, with God's help. Israel served for a wife, and for a wife he kept sheep. Hosea xii. 12. And a hard service he was about to find it. But he enters on it at once, and continues at it for twenty long years. Chap. xxix.-xxxi.

The scene is laid in the house of Laban his mother's brother, and a scene of various moral action it quickly becomes, and so continues. We have not only Jacob himself and Laban, but the two wives Leah and Rachel, and their two handmaids Zilpah and Bilhah.

Jacob had been but a little while under the trials and sorrows of his sojourn with Laban, ere he was visited after the very pattern of his own offence at home. He had deceived his father touching his brother and the blessing. Laban now deceives him touching Rachel and the marriage. But in much of his behaviour during the twenty years he spent with Laban, we see what was excellent in him. For the force and influence of knowing that we are under the hand of God for correction, is necessarily felt by a mind that has anything right towards God in it. It is not that nature will be changed or broken under such a pressure, but it must, in measure, more or less, be controlled. David when under rebuke, sore and humbling as ever saint had exposed himself to, carries himself beautifully. His words to Ittai, to Zadok, and to Hushai, his resentment of the motion of the sons of Zeruiah, his humiliations, his lamentations over Absalom, and his using his victory as if it had been a defeat, all this and more than this of the same kind, show us a blessed work of the Spirit in his soul. In Jacob at Padan-aram we get nothing so fine as this, I know; but, if I mistake not, we get a saint under discipline conscious of the discipline, well understanding the character of the moment under God's hand, and the righteousness of the rebuke of the Lord, carrying himself meekly and watchfully. He submits to the wrongs of an injurious master in silence. He serves patiently, and suffers without complaint. His wages were changed ten times, but he answers not again. In all this he is humbled under the mighty hand of God, as one who would fain remember his own past ways. And at the end of twenty years' hard drudgery and ill usage, he is able to testify of his fidelity, and God Himself seems to seal the testimony. By the providences of His hand, and the revelations in visitations of His Spirit, and also by direct interferences with Laban himself, the Lord shelters and blesses and vindicates Jacob.

There is beauty in this. I say not that nature was mortified, that the root of bitterness was judged. We shall find, I know, that after this, Jacob is old Jacob still, sadly betrayed by the same leaven that had been working in him from the beginning. But, while in the house of the Syrian, Jacob was as one who knew himself to be under the mighty hand of God as for correction, and carried himself accordingly, neither justifying himself against reproaches, nor contending for his rights in the face of wrongs and injustice.

Such a one I judge Jacob to have been in the house of Laban. As to Laban, he was a thorough man of the world when Jacob entered his house, and so he was when Jacob left it. In all his dealings, from first to last, he eyes his own advantage. He is constrained to own that the hand of God was with Jacob; but he would make that hand, through Jacob, minister to himself, and turn Jacob's interest in God to his own account. For twenty years he had the witness of the hand of the Lord, and the operation of His grace and power, under his eye and in his house, and that daily; but he continued a man of the world still. God came near to him, as afterwards to Bethsaida and Chorazin in the doing of His mighty works; but there was no repentance. And Jacob's departure from his house at the last, was like an escape out of the enemy's hand, or from the snare of the fowler. It was a kind of exodus. In a family way it was what was afterwards known by Israel in a national way. Laban was as Pharaoh, and Padan-aram as Egypt to our patriarch. He would fain have kept Jacob a drudge still, or at best have sent him away as a beggar; but the Lord pleaded for Jacob with Laban, as He afterwards pleaded for Israel with Pharaoh. Laban and Pharaoh had each in his day witnessed the operation of God, but neither of them became the subject of it.

A thorough lover of the world he surely was, and never anything better; a crafty one, and a hypocritical one too--common companions. At the end, when all his devices are broken to pieces, and no enchantment is allowed to prosper, as against Israel, he does what he can, according to the miserable, disgusting style of a crafty heart, to cover the purpose which had now failed, and to give himself a fair character. He pretends that Jacob's leaving him was mere fondness for home, while his conscience must have told him many a very different reason. He affects grief and indignation at not having an opportunity of kissing his daughters and grandchildren, and of sending them away honourably, while his conscience must have reminded him how he had sold them again and again. He seems to be concerned for them, now about to be in Jacob's hand, as if his own hand had been that of a father to them. He pretends to spare Jacob through religious fear of God's words, while he must have felt himself to be completely restrained by God, willing or unwilling, religious or profane; as Balaam afterwards. And he gives a serious air to the last bargain between him and Jacob, introducing the name of the God of Abraham, though he had just been searching for his idols, and was preparing to return to that land out of which God had called Abraham, and to continue there a thorough, heartless man of the world still, a worshipper of his own god.

Miserable man! pointing a holy, serious lesson for us.

But we have the women and the children of Padan-aram, as well as Laban the Syrian. The women and the children of the Book of Genesis are all mysteries. We see this in Eve and her three children--in Abraham's Sarah, and Abraham's Hagar, and Abraham's Keturah, and the seed of each of them. And we noticed in Isaac (see page 152) the same mystic character in Rebecca his wife, and Esau and Jacob his children. Each and all tell out parts and parcels of the purpose of God, as in figures. And now, in the women which become connected with Jacob in Padan, whether it be his wife the elder sister, or his wife the younger sister, or the handmaids given to them, and in the children of each of them, there are mysteries again.

In the children of Israel, that is, the nation, the seed of Abraham, we find three classes. 1. There has already been Israel after the flesh, set in the land under title of their fleshly alliance with Abraham. 2. There is now, at this time, the nation in bondage, made to know the service of the Gentiles. 3. There will be, by-and-by, the nation set in grace, Israel redeemed and accepted, established in the promises made to the fathers.

These are three generations in the nation of Israel, as that nation either has been, now is, or is to be hereafter. And the shadowing of this, I judge, we see in the families of Jacob in Padan; that is, in the children of Leah, who had her title in the flesh; in the children of the handmaids; and in the children of Rachel the beloved, who had no strength in nature, but whose seed was all of promise or of God.

The way of the wisdom of God is thus learnt in the women and children here, in chapters xxix.-xxxi., as it had been in the earlier family scenes of this wondrous book.

As soon as Joseph, the child of promise, the son of Rachel the beloved, is given to him, Jacob speaks of leaving Padan, the place of his exile and bondage. See xxx. 25, 26. And this, simple as it seems to be, has character in it. The condition of an alien and servant did not suit him, as soon as he got the seed that witnessed to him the power of God in his behalf. He may have felt somewhat instinctively, that it became him now to assert his freedom, and to bethink himself of his home and his inheritance. I say not whether Jacob really entered into this, or whether it was something of an inspiration that he breathed, and which, in its full meaning, was beyond him. But so it was that he said to Laban, immediately upon the birth of Joseph, "Send me away, that I may go to my own place and to my country."

It had been very much after this manner with Abraham in an earlier day. As soon as Isaac was weaned, the scene around Abraham immediately changed. The child of the bondwoman has to leave the house, and Abraham takes precedence of the Gentile. See chap. xxi. The weaning of Isaac was the turning-point in Abraham's condition. In spirit, for a moment, he enters the kingdom, raising a new altar, an altar to the "everlasting God," and planting a grove. This was very fine, and the character of it I have considered in its place. See "Abraham," page 126. But so was it now with Jacob, as then with Abraham. As soon as Joseph, the child of promise, that witnessed the grace and strength of God, is given to him, he conceives the thought of freedom and of home.

This was a fine, striking instance of the intelligence of a new mind in Jacob. The way of faith, I may add, is seen in Rachel on the same occasion, for she calls her son "Joseph," that is, "adding;" assured that the Lord, who had now begun His mercies towards her, would go on with them and perfect them. As faith now in our hearts and on our lips, in like spirit, says, "He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?" From His gifts, Rachel not only "drew a plea to ask Him still for more," but in still bolder, happier faith, drew a conclusion to trust Him still for more.

But though this was so, the connection between Laban and Jacob is continued for a while after Joseph's birth, till the separation takes place under force of other circumstances altogether, leaving Laban, still more than before, a kind of pillar of salt, or a solemn remembrance to us of what our wretched hearts are capable.

Part III.--The time of his servitude closes in chap. xxxi. He is then on his way back from Padan-aram to Canaan; the principal scenes of his journey being at Mount Gilead, shortly after his setting out, and Mahanaim, near the brook Jabbok, a little before he entered the land.

It was at Mount Gilead that the parting between him and Laban took place, for Laban had pursued him so far. But there they make a covenant, offering sacrifice, and then eating together as upon the sacrifice.

Such a scene, in mystery, exhibits our blessing. For we enjoy a covenant of peace, secured by a sacrifice, and witnessed by a feast. So, in the night of redemption from Egypt, the altar and the table, that is, the sacrifice and the feast, are there again. The blood is upon the door-post, and the household, thus ransomed and sheltered, are within, feeding on the lamb, whose blood was protecting and delivering them.

But there is another thing on this occasion to be noticed--it is Jacob who offers the sacrifice.

This has a great character in it. It tells us that Jacob knew his place and dignity under God. Laban had all the claims which nature or the flesh or relationship could confer, but Jacob acts in spite of them. Laban was the elder; he was the master and the father-in-law. But still Jacob takes the place of the "better," and offers the sacrifice, in the like spirit of faith as Abraham when entering into covenant with the king of Gerar (chapter xxi.); or like Jethro at Horeb, in the midst of the Israel of God, and in the presence of Aaron. Ex. xviii.

Such cases are among the triumphs of faith; and they are no mean triumphs either. To know our high title in Christ, and by no means to surrender it, even when circumstances may humble us, this is no easy thing. Jacob was under discipline in Padan-aram. He had no altar there. Before God he was rather a penitent than a worshipper. But before Laban he knows himself as a saint, and here, at the Mount Gilead, he has his pillar, his sacrifice, and his feast, and he exercises that faith which emboldens him to act according to his dignity as a saint and priest of God, in the presence of all the claims of flesh and blood. Elihu, in the book of Job, though renouncing himself before his elders, asserts the title of the Spirit in him, in the face of the highest claims of nature.

It is very encouraging to witness such fragments of the mind of Christ in the saints. Jacob never suspected his title in Christ, from first to last, though under discipline all his days. And this is blessed--blessed to take the place that grace, in its riches, in its exceeding riches, in its glory and in its aboundings, gives us. I do not believe, if Peter in John xxi. had purposed to reach the Lord as a penitent, he would have hurried towards him as he did. A penitent would have approached with a more measured step. But Peter was not thinking of his late denial of his Lord, but of his Lord Himself. His step was therefore hurried and earnest. He had sinned against his Master, it is indeed true, and might have been backward and ashamed. But, wondrous to say it, as Peter the penitent would not have taken so ready and so earnest a journey, so Peter the penitent would not, at the end of it, have been so welcome to his Master, as the confiding though erring Peter. In this is the grace and heart of Him "with whom is all our business now."

These are but fragments however, broken pillars in the temples of God. Nature is nature still; and Jacob, quickly after all this, betrays himself as old Jacob still.

One has said, that had the Lord slacked His hand with Job, when the first trial was over, Job would have come short of the blessing. There was respite; and it might have been thought that all had ended. But God's end in grace was not yet reached; and we may be sure that Satan's malice was not yet satisfied. The unweary adversary begins afresh, the Lord gives him place again, and Job is visited a second time.

And nature is just as unwearied as Satan. Expel it and it will return. We have just had this little respite from the way of nature, in Jacob at Mount Gilead, and seen for a moment the better mind in him, and some expressions of the glory, but we are quickly, too quickly indeed, to see the old man again.

Jacob goes on his way from Mount Gilead, and as he approaches the borders of the land, the angels of God meet him. Jacob at once recognizes them. "This is God's host," says he, and he called the place Mahanaim.

This was holy ground. The undertakings of chapter xxviii. had been fulfilled--the pledges of Bethel had been redeemed. Accordingly, we have no ladder here. Providential, angelic guardianship had fulfilled its ministry; Jacob had been kept in the distant land, and brought home to his own land. The ladder may, therefore, be taken down, and instead of angels ascending and descending as between heaven and the patriarch, angels meet him. They are standing before him, just to salute him, or to welcome him on his return. The Lord God of his fathers and of the promises was welcoming our patriarch home, and ministers of the heavenly courts were sent to express the mind of their King towards him.

This was "piping" to Jacob, and Jacob ought to have "danced." He should have breathed an exulting spirit. He should have been already in triumph, ere the battle was fought, or even the armies were arrayed. He should have entered the field with songs, like Jehoshaphat. If the hosts of heaven thus waited on him, what had he to fear from the hosts of Esau? "If God be for us, who can be against us?" But this was not so with him. He "laments," rather than dances, at this piping. He trembles, and prays, and calculates. He marshals his force, as though the battle were his. This is all religious, but it is all unbelief too; and all this the Lord resents. Surely He does. It was all out of harmony in His ear. He had welcomed Jacob home with every token of an earnest, honourable welcome, but Jacob was out of spirits.

The Lord seeks to be one with us, and that we be one with Him; so that discordance of soul can never suit Him. He withstands Jacob. "There wrestled a man with him," as we read, "till the breaking of the day." This was God's answer to his prayer. And this is all very significant, and it has lessons for us.

It is found by us much easier to trust the Lord in all questions that arise between Him and ourselves, than it is to bring Him in, and use Him, and trust Him, in questions that arise between us and others--easier to trust Him for eternity than for to-morrow; because eternity is entirely in His hand. To-morrow, as we judge, is more or less divided between Him and others--in the power of circumstances as well as of God. Abraham, in his day, betrayed this. He came forth at the bidding of the God of glory, leaving country, kindred, and father's house; but as soon as a famine came, his faith failed, and instead of trusting the Lord in the face of circumstances, he goes down to Egypt.

Jacob, at Mahanaim, betrays the same easy, common way of nature. He is unable to trust God in the face of Esau. Esau's 400 men frighten him, and he will interpose, first, his messengers with words of peace and friendliness, and then, his presents, that by one or the other he may allay the heat of his brother's anger. He has no faith in God, so as to bring Him in between himself and Esau. He trembles, and prays, and calculates, and marshals his household. Circumstances have proved too much for him. But immediately afterwards, when the Lord Himself withstands him, when it becomes a question between him and God, then he is bold and prevails. He faints not, though rebuked, and rebuked sharply, by the Lord. He behaves himself like a champion of faith, and obtains a good report. He carries himself like a prince, and gains new honours. This is a common experience, and this moment in Jacob's history at the brook Jabbok expresses it.

There is not, however, necessarily, in such a victory as this, a cure for that faint-heartedness that had occasioned the previous conflict. And Jacob is now about to illustrate this for our further admonition. In the very next chapter (xxxiii.), which is but the continuance of the same action, or a further stage in it, we find him the same timid, unbelieving, calculating man, in the presence of Esau, as he had been, ere he had prevailed with the wrestler at Jabbok.

This is admonition for us. There may be exercise of spirit before God, and yet not much advance in the strength of the soul in carrying on its conflict with the world. In no stage of his history does Jacob appear morally lower than in that which immediately follows Peniel. He is not in anywise purified from himself. He calculates, he prevaricates, he affects amiability and confidence, he lies, he flatters. He stood against the stranger at Jabbok. He was strong in faith, glorifying the grace of God, even when the way of God had a controversy with him. But before Esau he practises and acts the old man to shameful perfection. He rids himself of his brother by a grossly false pretence. He is nothing better than a mean flatterer, a servile courtier, shamelessly speaking of the face of Esau as of the face of God. It is all miserable--a humbling picture of the moral condition to which a saint may come, for a time, if nature be allowed.

There are moments of exhilaration of spirit, and we may be thankful for them; as when Jacob had so lately, in the preceding chapter, said, "This is God's host;" and again, "I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved." These are moments of exhilaration of spirit. But then, they may be only refreshments, and not solid edification. And sad indeed it is to see a saint after them returning so quickly to himself. "Where is then the blessedness ye spake of?"

And who will trust his own heart, when we thus see that Jacob's was so untrue? Jacob had lost the knowledge of God's name. He had to inquire after it, instead of using it and enjoying it. That name was "Almighty," the name that told him of all-sufficiency for all his need. But Jacob had lost it in chap. xxxii., and he is not as one who had recovered it in chap. xxxiii. He is contriving for himself. And we may, in like manner, lose the name that has been revealed to us. That name is "Father"--a name that may give abiding calmness and strength and liberty to the soul. It prepares a home for the heart. "He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God." This home is enough to make our joy full, as John speaks. And though we may be under His hand for discipline, as Jacob was, still we are to know the power of that name, the full, secret, unchanging love of a father. Like Jacob in these two chapters, we have lost the name of God, if it be not thus with our souls. "Ye have forgotten the exhortation that speaketh unto you as unto children," says the apostle to us. And Jacob, therefore, may be no longer such a wonder to us, but we may the rather at times be a wonder to ourselves.

After this, in his journey onward from the place where he and Esau parted, he reaches Succoth, and then Shechem, and we may say, he had then returned to Canaan. But it is only still worse and worse with him. He seems for a while to have entirely forgotten himself and the call of God. And mischief must follow this. Consistency with our calling is looked for. We are all, it may be in a thousand ways, untrue to it; but if it be willingly disregarded by an easy, relaxing conscience, the commonest moral defences may soon give way. Truth and integrity may be forced to yield, and such pollutions may at last be found, that would not, as the apostle speaks, be named among the Gentiles.

At Succoth, where our patriarch first arrived, he builds a house; and then at Shalem, in Shechem, he buys a field--what Abraham and Isaac, truer to the call of God, never did, and never would have done. How could he count on moral security under such circumstances? The tent had been exchanged for a house, and the pilgrim stranger had become a citizen and a freeholder. Was not all this a forgetting of himself under the call of God? The Lord, long after this, lets David know, by His servant Nathan, that there was a difference between a house and a tent, and that He would have that difference maintained. 1 Chron. xvii. But here at Succoth, Jacob violates this. So also it is the divine memorial of the patriarchs in their purity, that they dwelt in tents (Heb. xi. 9); but here at Succoth, Jacob willingly forfeits that memorial. And again, the Lord did not give Abraham so much land as to set his foot on (Acts vii. 5); but here at Shalem in Shechem, Jacob, in spite of this, will have a parcel of ground, and buy it for an inheritance.

The altar, which comes next, in the catalogue, to the house and the field, may appear at first to be a relief and a sanctifier, the one good thing in the midst of corruption. But it is, perhaps, the worst of all. It was not raised to Him who had appeared to him. There had been no communion between the Lord and Jacob, at either Succoth or Shechem. Shechem was not Bethel, and this parcel of ground, where El-elohe-Israel was raised, was not the place of stones and destitution, where abounding grace had shone from an open heaven on the unfriended head of the patriarch, but the parcel of a field which Jacob had bought of the children of Hamor, the father of Shechem. It was raised, not by a heavenly stranger to the God who visited him, but in the midst of the uncircumcised. It looks like an attempt to get the Lord's sanction of Jacob's loss of his separated, pilgrim, Nazarite character; to link His name and His worship with that on which His judgment was resting, and toward which His long-suffering was shown till iniquity was full.

Surely it is rather an uncircumcised Jacob we see here, and not circumcised Shechemites. It is all miserable. Is this a son of Abraham? Is this a saint of God? Is this one of God's strangers in a world that has revolted from Him? This is like the religious energy of Christendom, which has put the name of Christ in company with the world that is under His judgment, and only borne with in His long-suffering. It is as if Israel had consented to Pharaoh, and undertaken to give Jehovah an altar in Egypt. But such altars are no altars--as another gospel is not another. Such religion is vain, whether practised in these earliest days at Shechem, or now in these days of Christendom, among the nations of a judged, condemned world, from which separation is the call of God. But this will not do. A fair trade with the world will be followed, and the course of it pursued greedily, without watchfulness or conviction, but religious family services, and religious national ordinances, the modern order at Shechem, will all the while be waited on.

It was of the fruit of all this that Jacob had afterwards to say, "O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united." For it is to the action in chapter xxxiv. that Jacob thus refers, when he was about to die, in chapter xlix. He finds out, at the end, the real character of all this, the fruit of his dwelling at Shechem. In self-will a man had been killed there, and a fence thrown down. But surely Jacob himself had digged down God's fence before. The partition-wall which the call of God had raised between the clean and the unclean, between the circumcision and the Gentile, he himself, in spirit, had broken down, when he settled as a citizen or freeholder on his purchased estate at Shechem. And Simeon and Levi may perfect this, as soon afterwards as they please.

"And Dinah, the daughter of Leah, which she bare unto Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land." xxxiv. 1. Was this the way of the house of Abraham? Was this the family of the separated patriarch keeping the way of the Lord? Had Abraham been thus slack? What intercourse had he had for his children with either the sons or the daughters of the land?

It is all sad, and proclaims its own shame. Shechem is next door to Sodom. But it is not Sodom, I grant. Jacob is not Lot. We can distinguish; and we have to distinguish, though it is sad to be put to the work of distinguishing. Nature prevails, in some more, in some less, in all the recorded saints of God. But there is moral variety, as well as the prevalency of nature, and "things that differ" among the saints are to be distinguished by us. There is a soiled garment, and there is a mixed garment. Our way, under the Spirit, is to keep the garment both unsoiled and unmixed. Surely it is to keep ourselves "unspotted from the world." But still, a soiled garment is not a mixed garment, a garment, as Scripture speaks, "of divers sorts, of woollen and of linen." Nor is a garment with a thread of "another sort" now and again in it, to be mistaken for a mixed garment, the texture of which is wrought on the very principle of woollen and linen. Scripture, ever fruitful and perfect, exhibits characters formed by what are called "mixed principles," and also characters which occasionally betray the mixture, but which are not formed throughout by them. The life of Lot was formed throughout by mixed principles. As soon as temptation addressed him, he entered into connection with evil. Though associated with the call of God, he had to be saved so as by fire. The garment which Lot wore was of divers sorts, of woollen and of linen. Abraham, at times, wore a soiled garment, but never a mixed one. Lot was untrue to the call of God from the outset of his career to the close of it. He became a citizen where he should have been a stranger, taking a house in the city of Sodom, while Abraham was traversing the face of the country from tent to tent. And Lot's life of false principles leads him into sorrows that are his shame--and that is the real misery of sorrow. He had no comfort in his sorrow. His righteous soul was vexed: this is told of him; but there was no joy, no brightness, no triumph in his spirit. The angels maintained much reserve towards him. He had to escape with his life as a prey, and under the loss of all beside.