With this paragraph we begin the next major section of the account of the life of Jacob (29:1 to the end of chapter 31). Like some of the other sections of the patriarchal history before it, this next cycle of narratives is arranged or organized in a way that betrays the narrator's art. In particular, the narratives are arranged in what is called a palistrophe (which is a more elaborate form of chiasmus or inverted parallelism) -- sections balanced with one another in an A,B,C,B,A arrangement. Jacob's arrival in Haran and welcome in Laban's household, is balanced, at the end, by the account of his departure from Laban with his wives and children. The second episode, telling how Laban outwitted Jacob in making him work for fourteen years for his two wives, is balanced or matched by the account of Jacob outwitting Laban to obtain the flocks and herds that Laban had hoped to keep from him. At the center, as the pivot around which this cycle of accounts turns, is the narrative of the birth of Jacob's sons.

Throughout this whole section we will see the same themes treated that have already been introduced in the previous material.

1. The lex talionis or law of reciprocity: God is with Jacob, but that does not mean he doesn't have to answer for his sins to some degree. Jacob -- who deceived his brother and his father -- is now to be deceived himself by his uncle Laban. Jacob must reap what he sowed.
2. God's grace overcomes his people's sins. Jacob's behavior is not, in some important respects, laudable, but by God's mercy and blessing, he arrived in Paddan Aram an empty-handed fugitive and left it a man of power, authority, and wealth.
3. And the way in which, in this world of sin, without the spirit of true faith in God and submission to him, one lives only half a life: Leah has children but not the love of her husband; Rachel has love but, for a long time, no children; and the happiness of both is blocked by the hostility each holds for the other.

v. 3 i.e. it took several of them to remove the stone. An important point given what will happen later. The repetition in verse 3 serves to emphasize the significance of the stone and its weight, requiring several shepherds to move it.

v. 8 the commentators think that this brief dialogue between Jacob and the shepherds (four questions by Jacob; four rather brief, even curt replies by the shepherds) exposes Jacob as brash and cocky. His last question does seem impertinent, even impatient. "Why are you wasting time waiting to water your flocks? Get along with it!" -- As if it were any of his business!

The reply is widely taken to mean that the rock over the well is so big and so heavy that they need the strength of a number of shepherds to move it.

v. 10 That is, Jacob did alone, what it ordinarily took a number of men to do. He may have been less oriented to the outdoors than Esau, but Jacob was no pansy. He cooks well, he loves to be with his mother, but he has muscles too!

v. 12 Rachel was beautiful (we learn in v. 17), but vv. 9-12 suggest that, at this point, Jacob was more interested in making a good impression on Laban -- notice how many references there are to Laban in just a few short verses.

v. 14 Subsequent developments will lead us to conclude that Laban hurried out to meet Jacob not out of filial affection and family piety, but in hopes of another financial windfall such as he received when Abraham's servant had come, years before, and showered Laban with wealth as a means of persuading him to part with his sister Rebekah as a wife for Isaac.

But as he listened to Jacob's story ("all these things" v. 13) Laban realized that Jacob was not another emissary bringing riches with him. But he did learn that Jacob was pretty much at his mercy.

Laban's character, as the following chapters will prove, is profoundly self-centered. He uses people for his own selfish ends. He is happy both to deceive Jacob and use him. If, as usually in the Bible, wickedness is disadvantaging others to serve yourself and righteousness is disadvantaging yourself to serve others, then Laban was a wicked man.

Now, this is the second time that a man from Abraham's family arrived at an eastern well on an errand to find a wife. And it is instructive to compare the two incidents. No doubt we are expected to compare them, separated as they are by only five chapters.

Abraham's servant, as we read in chapter 24, wore his faith on his sleeve. He arrived at the well in a prayerful spirit, asked the Lord to bless him and his errand, and, when Rebekah arrived, he paid attention at once to what he might learn of her character, whether she had the spiritual quality to make a wife for Isaac.

Not so Jacob. Fresh from his encounter with God at Bethel, he arrives at the well confident and sure of himself. We can understand that -- he has just had an encounter with God, and heard God promise to bless him after all!

But that confidence he now has is not yet tempered with humility, with the spirit of love and gratitude, and, with what is perhaps the most necessary trait of a true man of faith -- the sense of dependence upon God and submission to him. In the life of faith, godliness does not come all at once, but in steps.

He asserts himself proudly, it seems, before the shepherds, and then, as if both holding them in contempt and desiring to make a big entrance himself, he does by himself what they had just told him it took several of them to do. (We almost wish he had gone over to the stone, grunted and strained, and, unable to move it, had to retire sheepishly while they all laughed at him. It would have been good for him, so we think. But, actually, God had something much more difficult for Jacob to face than some momentary embarrassment, as we will see.) He is now more oriented toward God than he was before Bethel, but he remains a man with a lot to learn!

We might well have thought that Bethel would have put Jacob right in heart, spirit, and faith. But, actually, Bethel -- wonderful as it was and necessary as it was -- was just one very important step forward; it was hardly the whole journey. These next twenty years, in fact, will tell the tale of the transformation of Jacob from an ambitious, self-reliant, self-confidant believing man to a man of true and humble faith in God.

And a great deal of that transformation will come only at the end of the twenty years, the time in Paddan Aram being the sure and steady preparation of Jacob's heart for the crisis that will come at Peniel.

And in all of that, brothers and sisters, hangs a most important lesson.

Pastor DeMass and I were on Vancouver Island this past week with six of our high school young men and we had a great time. On Tuesday we played the first of three baseball games -- Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday -- and the field that we played on was already soaking wet and we played right through a steady rain. The thing that is memorable about this game was that we laughed and laughed and laughed, in fact, I haven't laughed that hard or that long for years. I laughed until my sides hurt because when anybody tried to do anything he fell down. If the ball was hit to the outfield, the outfielder fell down; and if he went to throw the ball, he fell down again. But it didn't make any difference because the fellow fell down rounding first who hit the ball and then he fell down rounding second as well. We laughed and laughed; it was just like the Keystone Cops or Charlie Chaplin or the Three Stooges. We wished we'd had a video tape of the whole thing -- of course, where's the camera when you need it?

But, of course, the reason why it was so funny was because the game didn't really matter and nobody cared about outcome. Nothing was riding on it. Change that single fact and the fact that somebody's falling down all over the place is no longer funny. You're taking food off of somebody's table. You're making millions of people angry at you. Bill Buckner still can't go back to Boston, Massachusetts because he let a ground ball go through his legs in the sixth game of the World Series that was to be the final out of the game. Boston would have won the World Series for the first time since 1916 or whenever it was. But he let a ground ball go through his legs and they still hate Bill Buckner in Boston, Massachusetts. I mean, they really hate him. But you see, that is the Christian life and there is a lot at stake and we're falling down all the time!

You and I almost never come to terms with how difficult the life of faith and godliness really is, how far it will require us to travel from where we are now, how much God will have to do in us and to us to carry us all that way, how much remains to be done even after, even right after he has drawn near to us, blessed us, and changed us in some way, that is, even right after our "Bethels."

I was talking the other day with some friends about a mutual acquaintance, a Christian of real substance with a most fruitful ministry. But we all knew another side of that same person, a not nearly so attractive side. And we were speaking of how that darker side proved God's grace and mercy, and how encouraging it was to know that God could use, even mightily use, a very flawed man. All that is true. But, it is also true that God is not content simply to endure our flaws. He intends to change us, and we must intend to change too, if we really love God and have his interests at heart.

All through the ages Christians have wondered why God doesn't do this work faster. Would it not bring him greater glory? Would it not be a much more powerful recommendation for the gospel? Wouldn't it be a blessing to the church and the whole world if Christians lived much better lives, were holier people, more given to love and self-denial, more devout, obedient, and faithful?

Instead Jacob is blessed in the most dramatic and wonderful way at Bethel and is still showing mostly his warts a few days later at the well. And so it has been, and so it is, with you and me. And so it will continue to be as it was with Jacob, who after the twenty years in Paddan Aram, after Peniel, was still a catastrophically foolish father of his twelve sons.

Now, I do not at all mean to suggest that, therefore, there is little point in striving to be holy in the fear of God -- to cultivate faith, love, humility, purity, obedience, and the like.
"What's the point," we might ask ourselves, "if at the end of the day we will still be many miles short of our destination?" There are many important answers to that question. But the one that concerns us here is simply this: God cares about your growing in grace and goodness, in Christlikeness, and a holy heart and life. And he will see to it that you care also -- however much it takes (and it took a lot of pain in Jacob's case!).

Robert Murray McCheyne says somewhere that it is evident in the world what God cares most about. If God cared most that his children be happy, then they would be happy, much happier much more of the time that they are. But he cares most that they be holy and that is why their lives are so full of those troubles, pains, and sorrows; those punishments and consequences that force believers to face their sins, to trust in God, to look to Christ instead of themselves, to lose interest in the world, and to keep God's commandments. If you are truly a Christian, God will not let you remain indifferent to what displeases him in your life!

That is the lesson of Jacob at Paddan Aram! And that is why life is as difficult as it is for real Christians -- there remains so much to cut away, so much to do and to become -- all made so much more difficult by the fact that it must be done among conniving, evil people like Laban, among many people who make the transformation more difficult at every turn.

So, we have a lot to do, you and I; and God will be at work in forcing this work upon us. Changing us is his project in the world!

And is that bad news or good news? It is good news, absolutely! Wonderful news!

The world may not understand why. But then it has no conception of how unholy it is, how far removed from the will of God and the example of Christ it is. It thinks it is a small thing to be saved. Worldly people do not think that the forgiveness of their sins would take anything as earthshaking as the incarnation, the humiliation, the suffering, the death, and the resurrection of the Son of God. And similarly, they would never imagine that making one single step toward holiness would take twenty years of suffering, pain and effort on Jacob's part in Paddan Aram. But it did and the world is wrong.

That is the proof of how great a thing godliness, holiness, Christlikenss really is! Getting it, advancing it, keeping it is the great story of human life, the only finally eternally wonderful thing that happens in this world. Christians can't resent this, be indifferent to this, when it is so important to God that he makes the whole world turn around this one interest -- taking his people on in the life of true goodness, however hard that advancement may prove to be!

Every true Christian's life, like Jacob's, is an epic of sanctification. It is what God cares most about, what determines how our lives go; and so, it is what we should care about above all things and consider everything in terms of. Let us renew our conviction that because we are God's people our lives must be and we must see them to be primarily about our growing in grace, faith, and love.

You have a long way to go. There is a great deal about your life that ought not to be true about your life when your day is done. You already know a good deal of what that is whether it's pride, or impurity, or greed, or anger; whether the area you're thinking about now so defective, so unworthy of Christ's name in your life, his witness, or prayer, or the love of others, or devotion to God's word, or the keeping of this particular commandment or that. But you don't see the half of the transformation that ought to be underway in your life and that is God's chief interest in your life. Not your happiness, but your holiness.

Or, as Samuel Rutherford put it, in his own utterly unique way:

"The vessel would be prepared with the frequent sense of grace, before Christ pour in it the habit of glory. It is fit that we see and feel the shaping and sewing of every piece of the wedding garment, and the framing, moulding, and fitting of the crown of glory, for the head of the citizen of heaven; yea, the repeated sense and frequent experiences of grace in the ups and downs in the way, the falls and risings again of the traveler, the revolutions and changes of the spiritual condition, the new moon, the darkened moon, the full moon in the Spirit's ebbing and flowing, raiseth in the heart of saints, in their way to the heavenly country, a … smell of that fairest rose and lily of Sharon, Jesus Christ, the delight of men and angels; -- that as travelers at night talk of their [difficult] way, and of the praises of their guide; and battle being ended, soldiers number their wounds, extol the valour, skill, and courage of their leader and captain; -- so the glorified soldiers may take loads of experiences … to heaven with them, and speak there of their way and their country, and of the praises of Him who [led] them …. [Trial and Triumph, 204].

Jacob had a story to tell when he got to heaven! And that story was mostly about how God changed him from this to this. And if you are a Christian, you must and you will have a story to tell as well!

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