As the book of Genesis draws to a close, Jacob, who was a protagonist throughout half of the book, is also drawing near the end of his life. If you know his story, you'll remember that he spent the last seventeen years of his life in Egypt, where his son Joseph was the governor who guided the nation through a time of famine.
When Jacob first arrived in Egypt, he was introduced to Pharaoh, who asked him how old he was. "I have travelled this earth for 130 hard years, " replied Jacob. (Genesis 47: 9) That was his perspective on his life: that it had been hard.
Seventeen years later, when he is nearing the end of his life, we can see that his perspective on life and on God has evolved to a more accurate one. Now, as the end is near, he realises that God "has been my shepherd my whole life to this very day" and "has redeemed me from all harm." (Genesis 48: 15 - 16) When all is said and done, he takes an honest look at his life and recognises that he has indeed been blessed, materially as well as in other ways.
Yes, there had been hard things in Jacob's life, but that's true of everyone's life. How sad to live your whole life focusing on the few things that are hard, and realise only at the end how incredibly blessed you were. Jacob might have lived his life with greater peace and thankfulness if he had focused on God's goodness instead of focusing on the few things that were challenging or disappointing.
What about you and me? Are we living our lives with gratitude for the many blessings that have been showered upon us? Do we realise how fortunate we are, compared to so many other people? Or are we focusing our attention on a few things that are difficult or less-than-perfect? It's never too late to get a change of perspective. You can change yours today, simply by choosing to live life with a spirit of thankfulness and starting each day by thanking God for the good things in your life.
Jacob lived almost 90% of his life feeling sorry for himself... and it was only during his last decade that he learned to see things from God's perspective, and to focus on all the good things that were his to enjoy. Let's not miss out on life by choosing to keep our attention on the few things that are hard.
A few days ago (see below) I wrote a couple of posts about Jacob's encounters with God, and reflected on the fact that sometimes, in our modern world, we settle for a Bethel encounter, instead of pushing in for a Peniel, face to face encounter with God.
But I was talking about "Bethel 1." As we continue reading in Genesis, we discover that there was a second Bethel encounter for Jacob, and "Bethel 2" was completely different from the first one.
In Genesis chapter 35, Jacob and his family are still reeling from the aftermath of a family trauma that not only damaged them emotionally, but also made them fear for their lives. It's at this point that God appears to Jacob, telling him to leave Shechem, where they lived, and to go back to Bethel. Bethel held a special significance for Jacob; it was the site of his very first personal encounter with God and the place where he heard God's promises for himself.
Interestingly, God tells Jacob to build an altar when he gets to Bethel. It's the first time we read in the Bible that God actually told someone to build an altar. All the previous altars we've read about seem to have been an individual's personal response to God's goodness.
But the last time Jacob had been in Bethel, some 20 years previously, he hadn't built an altar for worship, but had simply raised up a "memorial stone." His response to God's promises had still been full of ambivalence, full of ifs: Genesis 28:30 - If God is with me... if He protects me... if He provides for me... if I return to this land... (in other words, if God keeps the promises He has just spoken to me, then He will certainly be my God.)
Jacob wasn't yet believing God with real faith; he still doubted that God would really do what He'd said He would. But, despite all his equivocation, Jacob does make a promise in Genesis 28:22 - "This memorial pillar will become a place for worshipping God."
So now God is taking him back to Bethel and asking him to build an altar there... and Jacob's attitude is completely different this time. There are no more ifs. As he tells his family about the planned journey to Bethel, he says, "God answered my prayers when I was in distress. He has been with me wherever I have gone." (Genesis 35: 5)
In preparation for the new Bethel experience, Jacob tells his household to get rid all of their "pagan idols." (Gen 35:2)
Was this referring to the gods that Rachel had stolen and brought back from Paddan-Aram, or was it idols that came with the people they'd captured from Shechem in the previous chapter?
Either way, it seems that Jacob's household was still worshipping other gods at this point. The Lord was not their only God. So, before they head back to Bethel, they leave behind their idols and bury them under a big tree.
In a modern way, many believers today are still at the stage of the "Bethel 1" experience. They've seen that God is real, but they still hold on to other props for support - things like financial security, reputation, and the right to determine the course of their own life and their preferred way of following God. Their own opinions and traditions have been given more authority than the things God has actually said in His Word. In order to fo further or go deeper with God, they need to give up those idols and bury them once and for all.
When Jacob's family does that, when they build an altar and make Bethel a place of wholehearted allegiance to God, it leads to a new revelation of who He is. As God reminds Jacob of his new name, Israel, He also reveals to him a new name for God. Actually, it's a name that was once revealed to Abraham, way back before the birth of Isaac, but it seems to have been forgotten over the succeeding generations. God is El Shaddai, the all powerful or all sufficient One. (Genesis 35: 11) Once you truly believe that God is all powerful, you no longer need to keep other idols as part of your support system.
And so Jacob sets up another memorial stone, but this is "Bethel 2." Now there are no more ifs. Idols are gone and Bethel has become a place of wholehearted worship.
Sometimes, in my work as a missionary, I meet people who tell me, "I don't believe in God!"
"That's interesting," I'll reply. "What sort of God don't you believe in?"
Invariably, they'll tell me all their negative pictures of God, all the things that make them feel angry or bitter about the possible existence or role of a divine being.
Usually, I listen quietly, and then I say, "Well, I don't blame you. I don't believe in that sort of God either."
This usually takes them by surprise and makes them curious to know more about what God is really like.
But the truth is, even among Christians, you'll find some very diverse and sometimes inaccurate pictures of what God is like. And just like those non believers who don't want to believe in Him, our picture of God will very much determine our experience of God. If our experience of God feels inadequate, it's very probably because our picture of Him is inadequate and inaccurate.
I've been reading in the book of Genesis over the past month, and this week I reached chapter 31. It's the story of how Jacob, (who has lived for 20 years in Paddan-Aram - an area of the Middle East that's in the north of modern day Syria) decides to take his family, flee from his father in law, Laban, and head back to Canaan. Laban pursues him, but there comes a point, at the end of Genesis 31, where the two men decide to make a treaty or a covenant.
The usual way to make a covenant was to swear it in the name of your god, and that is where things get kind of interesting. You see, Jacob and Laban, as well as being in-laws, were also second cousins. You'd expect that these men, from the same family, would worship the same God and see God in the same way. But that's not at all what we see in this passage. The way they refer to God is very telling, and it seems that neither of them really sees the Lord as "my God" at this point in the story. In fact, we see several different perspectives of God emerging in the family lines of these two men.
In verse 42, Jacob calls Him, "the God of my father," but then goes on to say, "the God of Abraham and the fearsome God of Isaac." The Hebrew text literally says, "the fear of Isaac." This would seem to confirm what I had been suspecting as I read earlier chapters in Genesis - that Isaac had a negative picture of God and perhaps even was afraid of Him. Did it date back to that day when it looked as if Abraham was going to sacrifice his son? Did Isaac struggle to understand what God was actually doing at that time?
A little later, in vs 53, Laban refers to God as, "the God of our ancestors, the God of your grandfather Abraham and my grandfather, Nahor." Was it simply a cultural norm to refer to the grandfathers, or was it a sign that succeeding generations had never really made God their own God to the extent that Abraham and Nahor did? Abraham and Nahor seem to have known God in a real and personal way, but it seems that the generation of Isaac and Bethuel kept Him a bit more at a distance. Then, in the third generation, we see that Jacob is on his own journey of finding out who God really is, while Laban actually has other "household gods" - idols that he kept in his tent and that were stolen by his daughter Rachel as Jacob's tribe was fleeing back to Canaan.
There's an old maxim that, "God has no grandchildren," and this family is an illustration of that. It highlights the importance of each individual having a personal relationship with God. It's not enough to have parents or grandparents who knew Him.
I have a friend who used to say to the teenagers on our KKI camps, "You can be as close to God as you want to be." That might sound surprising at first; you only need to have a few conversations to realise that some people are closer to God than others. What my friend meant is that it isn't God who decides who's close and who isn't. Each one of us has a choice about how close we want our friendship to be. The Bible says, "Come close to God, and He will come close to you." James 4: 8
When it seems that He's distant or that we don't feel we know Him well, it's almost always because we've believed lies about Him and we've allowed those wrong pictures of God to form a barrier to a close and intimate friendship with Him. The more we stubbornly hang on to our wrong beliefs, the less likely it is that we'll be able to see Him as He really is. Perhaps that's what Isaac, Bethuel and Laban did to some extent.
However, Jacob and Laban both seem to know a bit about what God is like. Laban refers to Him as "the Lord" - using the Hebrew word Yahweh or Jehovah. Both men seem to understand that God is an all-seeing witness to their covenant and that He is a judge between them. (vs 50 and 53.) They knew a bit about God, but they didn't yet know Him as well as their grandfathers had done.
Jacob, however, was on a journey - not just a physical journey back to the land where he was born, but a spiritual journey of discovering the reality of the God that his grandfather had known and served.
We read more about that in the next chapter. (See the blog post below.)
In the post above, I reflected on how our picture of God can greatly influence our experience or encountering of God. We saw that Jacob was a work in progress, still on his personal journey of discovering God for himself. And the truth is that all of us are a "work in progress." No one has a perfect picture of God and we're all on a journey of discovery that will last our whole lifetime.
Jacob hadn't got off to a very good start when it came to knowing God. He grew up with a father, Isaac, who saw God as someone to be feared. And he grew up with a mother who knew how to hear God's voice, but who used manipulation and deception to give God a "helping hand" in fulfilling his promises.
Jacob had been self-seeking for much of his youth. Not necessarily selfish, but certainly very self-focused. He bought his twin brother's birthright and then, with his mother's help, he used deception and subterfuge to steal his brother's blessing. All of this led to his having to flee from his native land and seek refuge with relatives in a far off country. Probably at that point, he thought that he had permanently messed things up and had completely forfeited the inheritance that had been promised to his family line.
We don't know much at all about how Jacob saw God in his growing up years, but it was at the point of leaving everything and losing everything that he had his first truly personal encounter with God. (It's the same for many people today; often it's only when we come to the end of ourselves and our own self sufficiency that we're in a place to really hear from God.)
You probably remember the story; we read about it in Genesis chapter 28. Fearing for his life and fleeing far from his family, Jacob has a dream of angels going up and down a ladder or a stairway. God speaks to him in the dream, reassuring him that he will still inherit the ground he is lying on, and that his descendants will be as numerous as the sand. God promises him that He will one day bring him back to that land and that, in the meantime, God will be with him and will protect him wherever he goes. Jacob's response was to put up a memorial stone and to call the place Bethel (Hebrew for "house of God") because he realised that, "God is in this place and I wasn't even aware of it."
Twenty years have passed since then; Jacob has had a taste of his own medicine and has learned a lot of hard lessons. Now, finally, he is heading back to where he originally came from, and he is feeling fearful about meeting up again with the twin brother that he wronged so many years before. It's interesting to read his prayer in Genesis 32: 9 - 12. We can see that Jacob is not the same man who left this land two decades earlier. He expresses it in material terms: "I left with only a walking stick and I'm returning with great wealth." But there's a deeper change, too: a new humility. Jacob tells God, "I am not worthy of all the unfailing love and faithfulness you have shown to me." And perhaps there's also a new depth of faith, as he prays out the promises God had given him: "You told me to return here and you promised to treat me kindly."
It's at this point in the story, back in the promised land, that Jacob has his second personal encounter with God. You probably remember this story, too. In the middle of the night, Jacob "wrestles" with a man (we realise later that it was God) and refuses to let go until he is given a blessing. It's described as physical wrestling, but we can probably identify with the night-time wrestling experience: wrestling with something God has asked us to do and making the hard choice to obey, or wrestling with a difficult situation and crying out for God to bring change. What makes all the difference, though, is who or what we are wrestling with.
Sometimes we wrestle with worry, and we allow worry to win. Or we wrestle with self-centredness and allow that self interest to have the upper hand. What was different in this encounter was that Jacob wasn't simply battling his guilt or fear or worry. He was holding on to God and wrestling in prayer for a blessing.
This made the two encounters quite different in character. In the Bethel encounter, Jacob was fairly passive in receiving the dream and the promises. This time, in the Peniel encounter, Jacob is more actively involved, wrestling with God and persevering till he gets his blessing. No wonder the location of first encounter was called Bethel (house of God), while the location of the second encounter was named Peniel (face of God) because Jacob realised that, finally, he had met God in a real, face to face way.
He got his blessing... and it marked him for life. He got a new name: instead of being called Jacob (the deceiver), he became known as Israel (the one who wrestled with God.) And he left that place with a limp, a permanent reminder of his own weakness and God's graciousness. All true encounters with God will leave us changed, marked for life... sort of like the spiritual equivalent of a limp.
That's probably why many people are satisfied with a Bethel kind of blessing: they go to church, they enjoy God's presence (in a generalised kind of way, as in Gen 28: 16, without even being aware of it) but they never put in the effort, the spiritual "wrestling" needed to go to a deeper level and experience God face to face in a Peniel kind of encounter. Perhaps, as with Jacob, that can only happen when we come to the end of ourselves; when we acknowledge that we're not doing a very good job of knowing God on our own terms and that we need to humbly cry out for Him to reveal Himself to us.
After this encounter with God, Jacob meets and reconciles with his estranged brother. And once he settles again in the land, he builds an altar (Genesis 33: 20) and calls it El-Elohe-Israel - which means God, the God of Israel. Now, remember that Israel as a nation didn't exist yet. At this point, Israel was Jacob; it was the new name he had been given when wrestling with God. At last, after his Peniel encounter and the proof of God's graciousness in repairing the rift with Esau, Jacob was finally saying, this God is my God, the God of Israel.
Andalucía, this southernmost region of Spain, is famous for its "pueblos blancos" - the white towns and villages that scatter the mountain sierras. One of those towns is Ojén (pronounced "oh, hen.") It's near the coastal resort of Marbella, which means it's not particularly far from where I live, but for some reason I've never visited it until today. Driving home from a meeting in Marbella (I was taking the route over the mountain range, the Sierra Blanca) I decided to pop into Ojén and see what it was like.
It's not a very large town, and so it didn't take me much more than an hour and a half to walk around its quaint, steep streets. I was given a personal tour of the little "mill museum," seeing how past generations used giant millstones to press their olive oil and huge copper stills to make a famous aniseed brandy that the town is still known for.
I also went to see the neolithic caves, that were used as places of shelter for families and livestock in ancient times. You can still see parts of the stalactites that formed the caves in the past. Ojén has recently restored a couple of them, putting in benches and spotlights so that they can be used as lookout spots with wonderful views over the town and out to the Mediterranean.
Speaking of lookout spots, the mountains behind Ojén, the Sierra Blanca or "white mountain range," have some high peaks and viewpoints with amazing vistas that stretch all the way across the sea to Africa. As I had some time available, I decided to make a detour on my way home and take a walk to the two closest viewpoints. One of them had a view over the town of Ojén and onward over the mountains to the Costa del Sol and the Mediterranean Sea. The other had a view down to Marbella and out over the sea to the mountains of Morocco in the distance.
It was a pleasant walk there, among the mountain peaks. I met a French couple who were also walking up to see the view, and when I arrived at the furthest "mirador," I had a long chat with an elderly English couple who had walked all the way up there to enjoy the view and a rest in the sunshine. All in all, an enjoyable day of exploring, before heading home to Alhaurín again.
At the beginning of this year (click here to read more) I began counting the kilometres I was covering while walking the dogs. A national campaign here in Spain, called "Yo doy mis pasos - I donate my steps" is seeking to raise a million euros to help research into the causes and possible cures for multiple sclerosis.
Almost six months have gone by, we've been faithfully counting our steps every day, and today we reached a big milestone: we've clocked up and donated one thousand kilometres! (That's about 620 miles, or a hundred miles every month.)
A friend of mine, a fellow arthritis sufferer, asked me why I do it. "You live with daily pain," she said. "Why on earth would you want to walk so much?"
And it's true that it would probably be easier to see myself as an "invalid" or a victim of circumstances and add walking to the list of things that I'm "no longer able" to do. Things like unplugging the iron after I've used it, or removing the ring pull lid from a can of cat food; pulling the washing machine forwards to vacuum behind it, or wrestling the double duvet into its duvet cover...
No! There are already too many things that arthritis has made me unable to do, and so I'm not going to add walking to the "no longer able" list. There's nothing heroic about it; I simply see it as "walking in the opposite spirit." If the dogs and I can clock up and donate kilometres to help in the battle against MS, I'm going to take advantage of every opportunity to do that... and it helps to keep me mobile, too.
There's nothing too impressive about a German Shepherd, or a Labrador or English Setter, walking a thousand kilometres. Hugo, Nelson and Buba are fairly big dogs, with long legs. The pack member who has impressed me the most is little Bonnie, who's a cross between a Pekinese and a Chihuahua. Whether we're climbing mountains, crossing rivers or hiking through forests, Bonnie keeps up valiantly on those short little chihuahua legs. (Can you spot her in the photo above?)
I've never been a fan of small dogs. It's just my personal preference that a dog should be bigger than a cat. And when you've got a cat as big as my Teddi, that kind of raises the bar even more. Bonnie weighs 2 kilos less than Teddi, but she weighs 2 kilos more than Tobi, so I guess that technically makes her "bigger than a cat." We're so used to seeing chihuahuas being carried around like accessories in women's handbags, but Bonnie's feistiness and stamina have gone a long way to redeeming my opinion of them. She's living proof that you don't need to let your physical limitations (even those short chihuahua legs) stop you from making life an adventure and doing things that others might think you can't or shouldn't do.
Now that we've achieved our first thousand kilometres, our next goal is to complete another thousand before Christmas. Yes, Bonnie and me too.
At the start of a new week, I'm feeling encouraged by all the tasks that have been accomplished over the past ten days. At the beginning of last week, I was connecting over the internet with my colleague Andrea, in Hong Kong, as we worked on preparing the camp teachings and activities for our Planting Together outreach teams in West Africa this summer. I've also been working on writing a little quiet time booklet that will help the young people to spend time alone with God during their weeks in Senegal and the first few days back home after their trip. The booklet is almost completed now, and is likely to be finished over the next few days.
Then, in the second half of last week, my colleague Patti arrived from Barcelona; we had planned in five intensive workdays together to re-work the training material for the Spanish language coaching workshop that we hold in Barcelona every February. Here too, we were encouraged by the real progress we could make with the material, and are looking forward to finishing it over the coming few weeks. The course begins at the start of the autumn, not long after we get back from Planting Together, and then the onsite workshop is held at the beginning of next year.
As well as making big strides forward with the training materials, Patti and I also did some physical striding forwards, as we took the dogs for pleasant shady walks in the nearby woods. I was trying out some new trekking poles (walking sticks) that I'd bought with my birthday money, as someone had told me that they could help ease the strain on my arthritic knee joints.
The mountain range near my home town is called the Sierra de Mijas and there are almost no sources of water in it (all the stream beds are dry) except for two natural springs. Past generations got their own drinking water there, and also built fountains and troughs so that their livestock had a place to drink. It was kind of fun to combine our work discussions with forest walks to the Fuente de Jarapalos and the Fuente de Acebuche, and the dogs seemed to enjoy the exercise too.
