v. 24 i.e. "don't contradict Jacob in any way"; a divine warning Laban promptly ignores. Laban, of course, with "his relatives" had the military superiority to force Jacob to accept whatever terms Laban chose to dictate. The dream, with the Lord's stern warning, intervened.

v. 26 Gigantic hypocrisy. "What have you done?" exactly the words Jacob used when Laban deceived him (29:25). The biter bit. He still speaks of the women as his daughters, not as Jacob's wives!

v. 27 This is outright hypocrisy. Laban had no intention of letting Jacob go. But, then, Laban is a congenital liar.

v. 29 I could harm you but God won't let me; a petulant Laban getting in his last licks, but condemning himself by his own testimony. This is so true to life. People striking the most earnest moral poses who remain totally unaware of their own immorality, even when they as much as admit it with their own words.

v. 30 The powerful irony: the gods can't take care of themselves. The living God has taken care of Jacob!

v. 32 Theft of such property was a capital offense in the ANE. Jacob, unaware of what Rachel had done, is happy to have his integrity put to the test. But, of course, this heightens the drama for the reader who knows what Jacob did not know at that moment. His favorite wife has the stolen gods.

v. 39 In other words, Jacob did more than was required by ANE law. The shepherd was not ordinarily held responsible for losses to wild beasts, nor for most thefts, though Laban demanded payment of Jacob for those. Jacob was an ideal shepherd, did Laban no wrong, indeed, did much more than required while suffering great hardship, though Laban had wronged him.

v. 42 Laban is made to look ludicrous by his own daughter who deceives Laban as she had seen him deceive others. The result is that he made a charge and then couldn't back it up and so lost all credibility. This gave opportunity for Jacob to explode in anger and let Laban have it with both barrels.

"God has seen my hardship" is a link to Israel's history in Egypt (Exodus 3:7 and Deuteronomy 26:7 are the only other uses of the phrase in the Pentateuch and both refer to Israel's oppression during her period of slavery in Egypt).

"The Fear of Isaac" is appropriate as a name for God here; for he is a God who causes others to fear -- Laban here.

v. 44 Laban isn't happy about it, but feels he must protect himself by making a covenant with a man whom God clearly has favored and will always protect.

v. 47 Two names that mean the same thing in different languages. Jacob is identifying with his homeland, the promised land, using a Hebrew name; Laban uses the language of his homeland, Aramaic.

v. 50 High irony here. It was Laban who made Jacob a bigamist.

v. 53 Jacob swears by but one God; Laban is a polytheist. God of Abraham and God of Nahor are not the same god as demonstrated by the plural verb that follows.

v. 54 It was customary to conclude a covenant with a sacrifice and a communal meal. This was, in effect, a non-aggression pact. Jacob has no need for it, but Laban feels the need, for God has spoken so sternly to him and caused him to fear.

Now this material completes the account that we have been making our way through the past several Lord's Days. And, in truth, it is simply more confirmation of the great lessons we have already drawn from this material describing Jacob's sojourn in Paddan Aram, chiefly, of course, the Lord's faithfulness to him, keeping the promises he had made to Jacob at Bethel through the thick and thin, mostly thin, of Jacob's twenty long years under the boot of his uncle Laban.

Jacob returned to the promised land a much tougher man, a man of much truer and sturdier faith, and it is his faith that he confesses here, especially in the climactic verse 42. Jacob knew that it was God who had protected him from Laban's evil intentions; it was God who had prospered Jacob despite all of Laban's efforts to profit himself at Jacob's expense, and, now, finally, it was God who had intervened to prevent Laban either from doing Jacob harm or from seizing him and his family and property and forcing them to return to Paddan Aram. Laban and his entourage were more powerful than Jacob, humanly speaking, but they were no match for the Almighty! "If the God of my Father...had not been with me..." everything would have turned out differently and to my harm instead of my blessing. That is the point and it is given special emphasis by all of the detail, and especially by the long speeches of Laban and Jacob which alternate in this material.

And Jacob, being an example, a model of the Christian in the world -- not a model necessarily in the sense of someone who is to be imitated in all things, but a model in the sense of one whose life is like the lives of other believers in many ways -- what he says in v. 42, we must say as well. What was true of him is true of us. We are as much in debt to the faithfulness of God, to his watching over us and providing for us as Jacob was. And it is as important for us to remember that and confess it as it was for Jacob. It is as much a mark of spiritual maturity and wisdom and insight, and it is as much the proper way of practicing our faith and living by faith for us to confess God's faithfulness as lying behind our lives and our salvation and our happiness as it was for Jacob to do so.

But it is also just as difficult for us to see God's hand supporting and protecting us as he promised, as it was for Jacob to see it. He saw it clearly in retrospect -- but it was a struggle for him to see it during those long and disappointing twenty years working as a slave for the insufferable Laban! We have already seen how the greatest things eventually came, unexpected to Jacob from what would have seemed to be at the time, high tragedies in his life, not least the twelve sons, born as they were out of Laban's deception and the resulting hatred and jealousy that darkened Jacob's home.

But, in fact, God was at work through it all, in ways both seen and unseen, and, at the end, every promise God made to Jacob had been kept, wonderfully and generously kept, and Jacob could see how he had received through it all more than he had ever thought or asked. Sin made everything more complicated, but here he stood, at the border of the Promised Land.

I love this from Henry Alford, the 19th century English bishop, biblical scholar, and hymn writer:

"Look at the foundations of the spiritual life. Where are they? Just where the foundations of the natural life are. If you or I were allowed to superintend every beating of our own hearts, if we were allowed to watch over every one of the processes so necessary to the [support] of our natural life, who could ever live and work in the world? Now just so it is...with regard to the spiritual life. Its foundations are deep: they are not always affected by that which goes on upon the surface. The dejection of the Christian, and the exaltation of the spirits of the Christian, may be compared very much to that which goes on upon the surface of the great deep, when we know that the depths below are unmoved. And even so, we may say, the Lord is carrying on his great work in us.

You and I, brothers and sisters, have no idea how much of God's faithfulness and provision we have consumed over the years of our lives or how utterly different our lives would be if God had not, all the while, been at work in us and for us, keeping his promises to us.

"O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord. You hem me in -- behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. ... How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you." [Psalm 139:1-6, 17-18]

It is too lofty a knowledge. We cannot see what God is doing with us. Nor could Jacob during the long reaches of those twenty years. But he learned in time that all that while God was with him and was keeping him, protecting him, and blessing him in the ways that mattered most for time and for eternity.

And nothing better communicates that fact and the glory of that fact than simply the story of Jacob's life when read by an interested and thoughtful reader. And nothing today impresses that same conviction of God's faithfulness and his working in our lives to keep his promises to those who believe in him, than just the same kind of story of a life that reveals this blessing of God behind, underneath, and before.

So, I propose to tell you a story this morning, a true story, just one among millions like the story of Jacob in Paddan Aram, of God's faithfulness undergirding a human life and bringing one of his children -- a woman this time, a mother, for mother's day -- through the trials of life to the full conviction of that divine love, provision, protection, and blessing that had been with her all along.

Many of you have read A Severe Mercy, the autobiographical account by Sheldon Vanauken of his marriage to Jean Davis -- Davy as she was known to everyone --, their coming to faith in Christ while studying in Oxford, in part through the influence of C.S. Lewis, and then her sickness and death just a few years later. It is a great book, indeed, in my opinion, one of the few Christian books of our generation that will still be read with profit by Christians and non-Christians alike two hundred years from now if Christ has not yet come. The book works on several levels -- as an account of a beautiful love and marriage, as an argument for Christian faith in a secular world, and as a description of faith on trial, bloodied but finally unshaken.

But there was a part of the story that was not told in the book. Before she ever met Sheldon, when she was just fourteen years of age, two years after her father, a Methodist minister, had died, leaving his wife and three children, Davy, running a bit wild, found herself pregnant. There was nothing to do but tell her mother, who stood by her. In due time she bore the child, a little girl she was to remember all her life as blue-eyed and beautiful. She named her Marion. After a brief few days with her daughter she gave Marion up for adoption, adoption, it was specified, by a Christian family. Davy went on with her life, to prep school, to love and marriage and to Christ and salvation and then her death in the middle of her years.

She told Sheldon, soon after they had fallen in love, of the skeleton in her closet and after their marriage spoke from time to time of the little, lost Marion, whom she still loved and longed for. Sheldon and Davy, those of you who read the book may remember, had decided not to have children, so as to permit nothing to come between them. This was before they were Christians, a decision Vanauken now admits was wrongheaded, but by the time they were Christians and might have thought differently, Davy was dead.

After her death, Sheldon thought from time to time that Marion, if she could be found, might be happy to know about her mother. So he began to look for her. He found the agency that had handled the adoption and talked with officials there. He told them that he was not asking, necessarily, to meet Marion himself, only to write her an account of her mother's life and perhaps give her a few things of her mother's, some jewelry and perhaps a few of Davy's paintings. At first the agency seemed sympathetic, on the verge of telling him, but then it stiffened, refused, and he gave up.

Years went by and then came the book. When it was published and became a best seller, Sheldon wondered again if Marion might have been one of the book's readers and, if so, whether she knew enough about her mother to recognize her in the book's portrait of Davy. There was even a picture of Davy on the back of the dust-jacket. Might she recognize herself in her mother's picture? And what would she think reading an account of her mother's youth, of her mother in love, getting married, loving to sail, traveling to Oxford, becoming a Christian, and all the rest. Few of us really know our parents as full rounded individuals, especially when we are young. We think of them as Mom and Dad, not as young people who were young as we are young, who fell in love and found their way as we must find our way. But young people by the thousands loved A Severe Mercy for its portrait of young love and faithful marriage and the rich life together of a man and a woman. What would Marion think, seeing her mother that way?

As it happened, Marion had been adopted by a childless Christian couple. The adoptive father was a Reformed minister; the mother was, like Davy, short. Marion -- though she had a new name, she knew that she had been named Marion -- was short herself. But when she was five, her adoptive mother died and when she was twelve -- the same age as Davy when she lost her father -- her father died. Now she learned what it was like to be unwanted. She overheard a conversation in which the family discussed what to do with her. Her father's wealthy brother and his wife refused to take her because she might turn out badly. But cousins of her adoptive mother spoke up, saying that they loved the little girl and would be happy to take her. So Marion, loving them, went to live in the country on a diary farm with horses, dogs, and woods. Perhaps because of her parents' death and all the unsettling changes that had overtaken her, through these years she longed to know her natural mother.

When she graduated from high school, she became, as she had promised her father she would, a nurse, graduating with high marks to the pride and joy of the cousins on the farm. Then in due course she met and married a young surgeon. Children came, a boy and two girls, and the family crossed the continent to settle in the Bay Area, where they prospered. Interestingly, given Sheldon and Davy's love of sailing, Marion's husband took up yachting and their son grew up to be, not only an architect, but a blue-water sailor and ocean racer.

Always Marion wondered about her natural mother. There was another curious link between mother and daughter. When Davy and Sheldon first saw "Gone with the Wind" they were struck by the resemblance of Olivia de Havilland (Melanie) to Davy herself. And when Marion saw the movie she saw so much of a resemblance between de Havilland and herself that she seriously wondered if the actress might be her mother. But she was never bold enough to write to ask. Several times she was on the point of attempting to find her mother, especially when the movement to put adopted children back in touch with their natural parents began, but she always drew back. Perhaps her mother would not want to know her; perhaps she would be cold and hard; an alcoholic or a drug addict. Perhaps it was better not to know.

Sheldon was himself aware of that movement in adoption circles and contacted the woman who headed up one such movement to reunite adopted children with natural parents. He sent her a copy of A Severe Mercy. She, in turn, tried to convince the agency that had handled Marion's adoption, and when turned down at first, persuaded a woman at the agency to read the book. That agency woman, moved by the book, then phoned Marion, one day, to say that she was looking at a picture of her mother on the back of book that had been written about her; that her mother was beautiful, an artist, and was dead, but that her husband was searching.

And so, one Spring day in 1988 Sheldon received the phone call he had been waiting for. Marion had been found and he was given her present name and address. He put the phone down wondering if he should call or write. Two minutes later the phone rang; Marion herself, wild with excitement. Not quite Davy's voice, but familiar. Having been told of the book, she had run out to the bookshops, found a copy, and her eyes were now boring holes in the back cover, staring at the picture there of Davy, her mother, blood of her blood, who had sheltered Marion in her womb and held her in her arms when first born. "Found at last!" she wrote later. "Incredible, choking joy! Thanksgiving. Yet sadness also -- ...that I could not touch her, hold her, and be held. Smiling with tears on my cheeks."

Then, of course, she devoured the book. "At once thrilling and scary!," she wrote Sheldon later. "My heart pounding. Almost breathless with discovery, unable to sleep till I'd read every word. Excited beyond belief, sobbing, my pillow wet with tears. Seeing my mother as a young woman loving the things I loved -- beauty, dogs, sails in the wind, music. ... I loved her love for you and your sharing and the incredibly wise things you did to protect your love. And the piercing beauty of Christ coming into your lives."

She came to visit sometime later, in the Autumn, the Virginia colors at their height. Sheldon found her short, like her mother, with a similar personality -- warm, bright, eager. They talked for days, prayed in the church where Davy had prayed, met people who had known and loved Davy, drove the winding back roads in the old car, the top-down Morgan, that her mother had loved. Before she left, Sheldon gave her some things that had been her mother's, including an old and lovely Caucasian rug on which Davy, as a child, had skidded across the parsonage floor. Marion slept that night with that rug in her arms.

It was, as she put it, "God's answer to my prayer, the completion of a life-time of longing for my mother, and growing closer to her God and mine." [Taken from New Oxford Review (May, 1990), 12-17.]

Now what is that but just one more true story, like the one we have read of Jacob in Paddan Aram, and like the one that might be written about your life, if you are a Christian man or woman, boy or girl. A story of God's faithfulness, provision, protection, blessing, and care through the thick and thin of life. A divine providence we can see only the occasional demonstrations of -- like Jacob, Marion lived many years wholly unaware of how God was going to resolve various important matters in her life --, but which, looking back, we are left in no doubt has brought us all along the way that our heavenly Father has ordered for us in this world and preserved us in Christian faith and love to this very day. Troubles and sorrows and difficulties, to be sure. Jacob had those; Marion had those, in spades. But God's faithfulness more, much more. And here he was at the last, unharmed by anything that Laban had planned to do to him, wealthy at Laban's expense, standing on the border of the Promised Land.

We too can say, must say, and will say, as Jacob said to Laban, "If God had not been with me..." All those long years, even when I often forgot that he was with me, even when I acted as no one should act who is walking with God, even when I sometimes searched for the sight of God's hand and could not see it, he was with me, to bless and care for me. "If God had not been with me..." it would have been another life I led, and another journey I took, a journey that would never have deposited me finally at the very gates of the Eternal City.

Say it yourself, ten times a day: "If God had not been with me..."

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