v. 1 That strange way of identifying Dinah, "as the daughter Leah bore to Jacob", probably, as one commentator puts it [Wenham], indicates "the emotional dynamics of the situation." She was Leah's daughter and, for that reason, not one of Jacob's favored children. He was indifferent toward her and toward her happiness. He was certainly not carefully preparing a proper marriage for her in which her husband would share the family's faith in God (as Abraham had provided for Isaac and Isaac less carefully for Jacob). She was on her own to fend for herself. "...went out..." seems to suggest more than a simple visit. She is looking for important things in the wrong place.

v. 3 Though his first act was deeply evil and a crime committed against Dinah, Shechem had a romantic interest in Dinah and wanted to marry her. The Bible is very realistic about the mixture of motives and actions in human beings, can acknowledge better impulses in evil men and evil impulses lying behind good deeds. Verse 4, with a blunt imperative and no "please" does, however, seem to indicate that Shechem was a self-centered soul who demanded his own way.

v. 5 When David heard of his daughter Tamar's rape he was furious. Jacob seems throughout appallingly indifferent to Dinah's disgrace. He remained silent and waited till his sons came home and left the matter to them. The narrator leaves us in no doubt that Jacob's indifference to his daughter's honor reflects very badly on him.

What follows is a long dialogue containing the negotiations between Jacob's sons and the Shechemites. Jacob plays no role. Everything is polite on the surface but we learn in v. 13 that the sons of Jacob were speaking deceitfully and in v, 17 (and later in v. 26) that the Shechemites still "held" Dinah and had not returned her to her home. However much Shechem may have ‘loved’ Dinah, he was using her as a bargaining chip.

v. 7 It sounds as though Jacob's sons found out about Dinah's being raped by some other means than a report from Jacob and they are, properly, outraged, in contrast to their father. His sons more are concerned about Jacob's honor than he is.

v. 8 No apology, just a request. And, remember, a request made for a woman they have and have not allowed to return home.

v. 10 The proposal of Hamor to consider the economic advantages of intermarriage, intended by him to make Shechem's request more appealing, actually indicated the real nature of what was at stake here, the mixing of the people of God with the pagan world around them.

v. 11 Shechem was impatient and interrupted his father's negotiations.

v. 12 Probably two separate things: a gift for Dinah and a wedding price or marriage present for Jacob.

v. 15 While Hamor had pointed out the economic advantages to this marriage, Jacob's sons raised the religious impediments to it. Money was not the issue, but religious identity. This was cleverly designed to persuade the Shechemites to agree to their request. Someone might argue that economic advantages didn't require such a drastic step, but everyone knows how inflexible people can be about their religious principles.

What we have here, of course, is Jacob's sons using a rite that was appointed by God to mark the holy seed for a subterfuge, a means to commit slaughter.

v. 17 They were firm in their demand to ensure that Shechem agreed.

v. 23 Hamor and Shechem put the matter in terms of the interest of the community, not their own private wants. Some things never change. Listen to Calvin describe this speech.

"[Hamor and Shechem] then enumerate other advantages; meanwhile, they cunningly conceal the private and real cause of their request. Whence it follows that all these pretexts are fallacious. But it is a very common disease, that men of rank who have great authority, while making all things subservient to their own private ends, feign themselves to be considerate of the common good, and pretend a desire for the public advantage." [In Wenham, 314]

v. 25 That is, Dinah's full brothers. Jacob's indifference to Leah and to her children -- so much in contrast to the preoccupation with Joseph and Benjamin in the history that follows -- may very well explain the violent overreaction of Simeon and Levi. But, it is also true that the narrator chooses events to record in his narrative that he regards as salient incidents, the incidents that expose character, that tell us something important about the parties involved. As Jacob will say of these two sons in his final blessing of his twelve sons in Genesis 49 (vv. 5-7), what we see of Simeon and Levi here is what was all too true of them as a rule. There was a vengeful and violent streak in their characters. It was this, their father would later say, that disqualified them from leadership in Israel. Hotheaded, vengeful, and violent men make for bad kings!

It is very easy to wish that the story of Jacob's return to the Promised Land had ended with the last verses of chapter 33. There we have Jacob, a man of faith, once more in the Promised Land, having been reconciled to his brother and now, after all the years away, taking his rightful place as the heir of God's covenant promise of a holy seed and a promised land.

But, the Bible is too honest and too realistic to have ended the story there. Just when we thought all was going well, just when we thought that Jacob had learned his lesson and would now walk with God in faithfulness the rest of his days, the patriarch takes a header and once again, by his own unfaithfulness, threatens the spiritual well-being of his family and puts his children in moral jeopardy. So disappointingly, the presupposition of this entire narrative is Jacob's lack of leadership in his home.

The chapter begins with Dinah failing to keep a proper separation between herself and the pagan world around her. That was her father's fault for not seeing to her life and her needs. The impression one gets is that Dinah was looking for her happiness because her father was paying no attention to it.

And that is what we see throughout. What is genuinely astonishing in this narrative is that Jacob is never seen to register any emotion over Dinah's disgrace. He never cared for Leah and he didn't care nearly so much for her children as for Rachel's. That will become still more obvious as we get into the history of Joseph. At the end of the chapter, the only concern Jacob expressed was for himself, that the actions of his sons might bring trouble down upon their father's head. This sordid, sorry episode is all a consequence of an uncaring, irresponsible father. And, so sad to say, that father is Jacob, fresh from Peniel.

We've seen already how often it has been made clear in the history of Isaac and Jacob that the covenant promises of God will be fulfilled not because of the faithfulness of man but of God. And, just as it was when Jacob was a young man, before he left Canaan, just as it was through the twenty years in Paddan Aram, so it is now at his return to the Promised Land, the gracious, merciful God keeps covenant with an unworthy and sinful man. And so it is with you and me, brothers and sisters. It is not that God's grace gets us going in the Christian life, but that after awhile we have grown up in faith and love and obedience to the point where we pretty much keep our end of the covenant faithfully. No! We will need God's forgiving, preserving, upholding, enduring grace until the last breath we take, if we are to remain in covenant with God!

The wise, discerning, practiced Christian never imagines that he has mastered the Christian life. He knows he is nearly as far from true godliness as on the day he began his pilgrimage.

That is the overarching lesson of this chapter, along with those chapters that have gone before it and will come after it. Our dependence upon the grace and forgiveness of God, upon his faithfulness to his promises, is the great, unifying theme of all of this material. But this is a chapter that bristles with lessons of many kinds. In Scripture there are two great subjects or themes: what God is for man and what man is for God. [Vos, Grace and Glory, 1]. Jacob's dependence upon God's grace to remain in covenant with God, even here so late in his story, belongs to "what God is for man." But alongside that is teaching of the other subject, the other half of true religion.

I want to draw your attention to two lessons concerning "what man is for God," though we can look at each of them only briefly. Both of these lessons concern the practice of godliness in the world, how believers ought to live, what they ought to do, if they would live lives pleasing to God. Alas, in both cases, we have the lesson taught in the negative, cases of closing the barn door after the cows have already escaped, but sometimes lessons are best taught by cases where one can see the consequences of failure. We are taught about resisting temptation by Joseph's famous and noble resolve in Potiphar's house, but we are also taught the same lesson, perhaps even more memorably, by David's capitulation to evil desire in the case of Bathsheba. In the one case we learn to admire steadfastness, in the other to fear the consequences of weakness.

Things go wrong in Jacob's family here in Genesis 34 because of a lack of faithfulness on Jacob's part. But that unfaithfulness takes two very specific forms, worth our considering and then our applying to our own individual circumstances.

It is not said explicitly, but the implication seems very clear that Jacob had unnecessarily and unwisely paused on the journey he was taking. His return to the Promised Land would not be complete until he had reached Bethel, where he had been given the vision of the staircase, where God had made those promises of the covenant to him, each of which God had wonderfully kept, and where Jacob, in response, had set up a pillar which he said at the time would some day be God's house. That vow and that pillar and that place are referred to again in 31:13 as the focal point of Jacob's return to the Promised Land. The Lord even identified himself to Jacob, while he was still in Paddan Aram, as "the God of Bethel."

What is more, immediately after the disaster of chapter 34, the Lord ordered Jacob to go to Bethel and settle there and worship there. It is hard to avoid the implication that Jacob should have gone straight to Bethel when he first made his way into the Promised Land. But he stopped at Shechem and not just briefly. He bought land and settled among a thoroughly pagan people.

In other words, Jacob was not doing, in general, what he ought to have been doing. He was not where he ought to have been. He was supposed to be on his way to Bethel and he was dilly-dallying, he was not getting there. And because he was not pursuing his pilgrimage, because he had not set his face to doing God's will and fulfilling his own vow, not getting to that place of worship to which he had promised to return, not setting up the more permanent sanctuary to God that he once said he would have at Bethel, he placed his family in moral jeopardy.

This is a fundamental rule of Christian faithfulness and biblical piety taught over and over again in Holy Scripture. The best way not only to live a faithful life in general, but the best way to resist any particular temptation, the best way to defeat any particular evil in your life, the best way to keep the influences of the world at bay, the best way to avoid spiritual falls and setbacks is precisely to be hard at work doing the work God has given you to do.

This is one of the lessons John Owen set before his young hearers -- adolescent and teenaged boys in the College chapel -- the sermons that eventually became his immortal work on the mortification of sin, the most helpful and valuable work ever written on that most important, most relevant, most necessary topic. You cannot deal with sin piecemeal, said this master of the spiritual warfare. You must deal with it entire. You cannot best temptations one at a time, dealing with one while leaving the others to wreck their havoc in your life. The only true and effective answer to any particular temptation is a life of comprehensive obedience. Jacob, no doubt, continued to do holy things and obey in many ways; but some of his duties he left aside and the Devil struck there!

The Christian life is, must be, a life of killing sin. Jacob proves that to us ten times over. Owen puts it memorably: "be killing sin or it will be killing you." [vi, 9] But the effort must be made over the entire field. We cannot leave the sins we love alone while pretending to be devoting ourselves to the mortification of the sins we are quite happy to give up. Nor, even, can we work seriously on one sin at a time, while continuing to practice the others without any real effort to subdue and destroy them.

Or, as Owen has it in his ponderous but powerful English: "Without sincerity and diligence in a universality of obedience, there is no mortification of any one perplexing lust to be obtained." His point is that it is precisely the cast that a diligent, obedient, faithful life, busy at serving the Lord, it is precisely the cast such faithfulness imparts to a Christian's life that gives him or her power over any and every sin. It is when Christians slow down in spiritual things, when they lay down their duties, when they are no longer thinking about pressing on in the life of faith, when they leave off taking new steps in their pilgrimage each day, a general weakness and lethargy overtake them and then particular falls occur. Is this not what has happened here?

Remember David? When did he fall? Well the narrator tells us. "In the Spring, when the kings go off to battle, David stayed in Jerusalem." The whole tawdry, destructive, calamitous affair with Bathsheba would never have happened, if David had been busy doing the work God had called him to do. He was a king. He should have been at the head of his troops. He stayed home and, in his idleness, not only exposed himself to temptations he otherwise never would have faced, but grew weak and flabby spiritually because he was not at exercise, doing the work God had given him to do.

And so here Jacob. He paused, left his duty and his calling to await another day -- no doubt telling himself all the while that he would get back to them directly -- and was blindsided by the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and his entire family and many largely innocent men paid a terrible price for it.

The practiced experts in the spiritual warfare all tell you this: that you are never safer in regard to any temptation, any fall, any sin, than when you are hard at work following the Lord and seeking his will everywhere in your life. Here is William Gurnall, author of The Christian in Complete Armour: "Sins of commission are usual punishments for sins of omission. He that leaves a duty may soon be left to commit a crime." He also gave this warning: "When we are idle, we tempt the Devil to tempt us."

And here is Richard Baxter: "A heart in heaven can reply to the tempter, as Nehemiah did, 'I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come."

You know that Jacob, fresh from Peniel and God's deliverance of him and his family from Esau in such a marvelously happy way, did not intend to disgrace the Lord, expose his children to such terrible temptations, and set his own walk with God back so far as he did. But all of that is what occurred when, instead of keeping up the pace of his pilgrimage and going on to Bethel, he paused at Shechem, bought some land and pitched his tent. He paused in his pilgrimage and all hell broke loose.

You and I are tempted to do the same a hundred times a day. Instead of taking that next step toward the Lord we pause, intending to take it later, and find that single pause undoes much more than we thought.

In general, the world confronts Christians with two possibilities and two only: hostility or absorption. The Canaanites, like most Americans today, were syncretistic. They were happy to absorb another family with its god! Especially a prosperous family like this. They were early supply-siders and believed in "the trickle-down effect." "A rising tide lifts all boats": that was their motto!

By not taking the careful steps Abraham took and Isaac later, to ensure that the children of the covenant married in the Lord, and to protect the purity and the distinctiveness of the believing community, Jacob virtually assured a mixing of his children with the pagan culture and so, for this is always the result of such a mixture, a corruption of the covenant people and a betrayal of the covenant by those whom God had favored with his friendship.

Typically, as Dr. Waltke puts it, the preservation of Christian distinctiveness, separation from the world while remaining in the world, requires "radical symbolization." That is, it requires Christians publicly to identify themselves as Christians, publicly to declare their commitment to Christ and to the life that pleases him. That is what Joseph did in Egypt later. That is what Jacob did not do here. He could have by making elaborate provisions for Dinah, but he did not. He could have by going on to Bethel and there creating the sanctuary he had promised he would build, the sanctuary that would identify him as the son and servant of Yahweh. But he did not. And once the dividing line was blurred, Dinah herself decided to cross the line and mingle among the pagans and what catastrophe was to result from that!

Take an example. A young Christian enters the armed forces. He is at boot camp, in a dorm full of young men, few of whom have any religious commitment at all. Their speech is profane, their behavior corrupt. He rightly assumes that they will make a mockery of serious Christian commitment. He fears the estrangement from his fellows, their scorn if he displays his Christian faith before them. For years he has knelt by his bed to say prayers before sleep. Will he do it now? Will he do it in front of these fellows? And if he does it, will it not mean that, having advertised himself a Christian, he will have to make good on his declaration and live a Christian life before his fellows? That is one form of "radical symbolization." Baptism, which we will witness tonight is another form. Lord's Day worship is another. The way in which you choose to educate your children can be another. And on and on it goes.

There are ways, of course, in which Christians are to identify with the world and be among unbelievers, caring for them, bearing witness to them of the salvation they have found in Christ. But there are other ways in which Christians must always be demonstrating their separateness, their distinctiveness, their difference from the world. Children growing up in Christian homes must learn their separateness, their apartness; they must get it with their mother's milk. Terrible things occur when that distinction is blurred, is not kept sharp and clear, and is not explained and understood.

For, "if anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him." And "what agreement is there between the temple of God and idols. For we are the temple of the living God. 'Therefore, come out from them and be separate,' says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing and I will receive you. I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters,' says the Lord Almighty."

A life lived in constant forward motion with an eye always toward the protection of our purity as a people apart to the Lord, belonging to the holy God. That is a simple way of describing how the Christian life is lived and must be lived. Jacob shows us here the catastrophe that overcomes, overcomes even the well-meaning, when these things are not carefully and faithfully done.

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