Israel and the Shechemites

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Preacher: Ross Macdonald Scripture: Genesis 34:1-31

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Well, we hope to complete chapter 34 this morning. There's some messages you look forward to preparing, and then there's sometimes words out of season even for the preacher.
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I'd have to admit I wasn't exactly looking forward to spending so much time in Genesis 34 given the rather graphic and tragic subject, and yet at the same time we recognize that all of Scripture is profitable.
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It's all given for the sake of God's people to understand more about Him, more about ourselves, and I think
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I was encouraged as I worked through this passage to consider how much there is to be taken away from this.
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And of course we want to keep in view this larger flow of redemptive history where there's both positive movements forward, but also negative ways that our anticipation and yearning for the one who is promised to come begins to grow, and I think in chapter 34 we experience something of that yearning.
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When will God bring about what He has promised? We enter chapter 34 and really begin an interlude in the story of Jacob.
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Now I say that because we've seen a sort of pattern as we've worked our way through the patriarchal narratives.
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So you have the the cycle of Abraham, the cycle though short of Isaac, and then of course the cycle of Jacob and significantly where we'll be heading shortly, the cycle of Joseph.
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Isaac is so small we could almost sort of put him, situate him under Abraham, but as far as narrative patterns we have
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Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph, and you find this interlude in each of these cycles.
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With Abram we had the interlude of Hagar in Genesis 16. Here in chapter 34 with Jacob we have this interlude with Dinah, and then in Genesis 38 in the
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Joseph cycle we have the interlude of Tamar with Judah. And so there's this pattern as we're uncovering the story of God's work in and through the patriarchs.
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We have these moments, these chapters, that are devoted to a plight in the life of a woman, often experiencing the effects of the fall, sin, in shocking and tragic ways, and this creates a pattern that breaks up the,
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I think, the focus of the narrative. And so we want to be sensitive to the significance of that.
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Now, of course, as we work through this chapter we'll see the way that this relates to Jacob and sets up where we're going in chapter 35, which is
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Bethel, where God will renew his work in the life of Jacob. There's almost a revival in the life of Jacob that we'll be discussing next week.
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But we want to be sensitive to the fact that we're seeing the effects of the fall, and as we look at the patriarchal narrative, we're also looking at the spread of sin, the spread of the effects of the fall.
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This is, again, framing our hope for the one who is coming to undo the fall, to redeem the curse of sin.
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And when we begin in verse 1, we begin with the rape of Dinah. Now, we're gonna move through this chapter in six parts, and I'll just announce them as we go.
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I don't want to... you're not that fast at writing, so I'll just announce them as we go. So first, we'll begin with the rape of Dinah.
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We read, beginning in verse 1, Now Dinah, the daughter of Leah, whom she had born to Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land.
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Already we're getting, and we're going to see this throughout the chapter, we're getting these little notes, we already know who
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Dinah is. It's emphasized that she's the daughter of Leah, perhaps that's cluing us in to that she's not exactly close to Jacob's heart.
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Remember when Jacob was arranging his family in succession for Esau to be able to meet them, how it was at the very end that Jacob was there with Rachel and Joseph.
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And so you can see the significance of, perhaps, this mention of Leah. Perhaps Leah was still feeling somewhat on the outside of Jacob's affection, and then maybe even
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Dinah more so as a result of that. But we're reminded whom she had born to Jacob. Again, we already know this.
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We know who Dinah is, we know that she's Jacob's daughter, but the text is going to keep forcing this into view.
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Jacob's daughter, his daughter, the daughter of Jacob, and that's meant to highlight the shock of how
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Jacob reacts to the news of this rape of Dinah. So we have
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Dinah, the daughter of Leah, whom she had born to Jacob, Jacob's own flesh and blood.
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She went out to see the daughters of the land. Now the verb to see here, it's followed by a preposition, so we would almost want to translate it, she wanted to go overlook, oversee, observe in a very intent way.
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She wanted to see the daughters of the land. So it's not just see her friends in the land, you know, they had been chatting on Facebook Messenger and it was just their plan to get together for lunch.
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No, no, that's not that kind of casual see. She had this intent. She went out to go observe and see and look at the daughters of the land.
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Some think she's likely around 15, maybe 14, 13, 16, somewhere in that range.
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We don't have an exact age, but like many girls of that age, she perhaps was feeling like,
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I have an identity crisis. Who am I? My family's so weird. What are the other girls like my age?
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What am I going to be like? What am I going to look like? How am I going to be? What are my prospects? What are the other girls doing?
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And who are they with? And how are they? And we get the sense that in going out, she really wanted intently to observe, maybe even to mimic, to imitate, to get a sense of what she was missing out on.
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Very typical for this age, that fear of missing out, that identity crisis. Who am I? I'm not ready to be locked into the ways of my family.
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And so some rabbis think they're significant to the went out. It implies maybe she snuck out.
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This was not something that Leah or even Jacob would have condoned. Of course, Nahum Sarna reminds us, unmarried girls in the ancient
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Near East would very rarely enter into a town unaccompanied. And that's still true in many parts of the
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Middle East today. You won't find an unmarried woman unaccompanied in the middle of the city, in the middle of the town.
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And there's this honor -shame dynamic that we're going to see unfold. So perhaps Dinah's going out implies a secret departure, and we're given this reason in verse 1.
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She had this longing, this heart to observe the ways of the daughters of the land. Her heart was being drawn toward the
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Canaanite culture. Now that doesn't excuse at all what happened to her. In fact, we're going to see ways that her own siblings are complicit in their own influence by Canaanite culture in chapter 35.
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We don't have the details of it here, but I think we'll be able to read between the lines in chapter 35.
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They too were rendered unclean and impure by Canaanite culture, and that had to be purged from them at Bethel.
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This fateful departure turns tragic. She went out to observe the ways of Canaan, and she got more than she ever wanted of the ways of Canaan.
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Verse 2, when Shechem, the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, prince more like a tribal leader, chief, all the same word, saw her, he took her, lay with her, and violated her.
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At a literary level, we might notice the echo of the fall here. He saw her, he took her.
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At a literary level, we're having the repetition of Eve's fall when she saw the fruit and she took it.
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Sin was crouching at Shechem's door. He needed to resist it, but he didn't. He saw and he took.
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We're reminded of that same echo back in Genesis 12 when Abram came into Egypt.
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The Egyptians saw the woman, that she was very beautiful, saw the fruit, that it was pleasing to the eye, and they commended her to Pharaoh, and the woman was taken to Pharaoh's house.
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They took her, and so we have that repetition of the fall. They saw, they took.
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This is fallen behavior, the seeing and the taking, the impulse toward evil as a result of self -will at the complete and utter expense, the tragedy of the other.
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But in Genesis 12, interestingly, though Sarai was seen, though Sarai was taken, the
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Lord intervened, right? The Lord plagued Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai.
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We see that same pattern, and God intervened to preserve Sarai again.
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Genesis 20, Abimelech, king of Gerar, sent and took Sarah. But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night and said, indeed, you are a dead man because of the woman you've taken.
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So we're here in Genesis 34. We've said Jacob is retracing the steps of Abram.
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He's here in Shechem. He's now feeling threatened by the threat of someone like unto
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Pharaoh, someone like unto Abimelech, a prince in the land as it were, who's now taken a liking to his daughter.
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We're going to see that fear in the rest of the chapter, and we're here sitting in Shechem with Jacob in the footprints of his grandfather
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Abraham, and we're watching as Shechem sees and takes, and we're waiting for God to intervene.
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We're waiting for plagues to break out on Hamor's household. We're waiting for Shechem to wake up sweating from a night terror because God said, you're a dead man, and it doesn't come.
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She's raped. Birds chirp. The street has the noise of the marketplace.
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God never intervened. There's no dream. There's no plague. There's no divine intervention.
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In fact, God's name isn't even mentioned in this whole chapter. Where is
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God? It's sort of on the face of the chapter. Where is God in the midst of this? Why didn't He intervene? This is part of what this chapter is meant to say.
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It's helping us frame and understand evil acts, not excusing them, not explaining them away, but also not trying to offer an excuse as to why
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God did not intervene. The text has no interest to do that. An evil man does an evil thing.
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God's people cry out, why? How long, O Lord? Why do the wicked prosper? Now, of course, retribution comes and it comes in a wrong way, as we'll see.
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And yet here we see God not intervening in the way that He had intervened in the life of Abraham.
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Here we see this evil not stopped short, not cut off, but actually come into full bloom.
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Reports of civilians murdered in Busha in Ukraine, shallow graves, estimates of at least a hundred.
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Where is the intervention? One of them, Vitaly Vinogradov, he was a dean of an evangelical seminary in Kiev.
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One of the ones that I think was reported had their hands bound, evidence of torture. And as God's people, we say, why was there no intervention?
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Where was the plague? Where was the dream? Why does evil happen? Why are people that had no reason to be tortured or brutalized or raped, why do they experience this kind of suffering?
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How long, O Lord? Shechem took her, laid with her, humiliated her.
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That word humiliate, it's in the humiliate, defile.
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And that said in contrast with Shechem's own understanding of what he has done. So the
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Bible gives us the description of what he did. He saw, he was led by lust and impulse.
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He seized, he brutalized her, he humiliated her, he defiled her, he made a shame out of her.
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That's what really happened according to scripture. But according to Shechem, we have verse three, his soul was strongly attracted to Dinah, the daughter of Jacob.
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Again, there it is, the daughter of Jacob. And he loved the young woman. He spoke kindly to the young woman.
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So you see the contrast between these three actions, verse two, he seized, he took, he laid with, he humiliated, versus he was strongly attracted.
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He loved, he spoke kindly. Do you see the difference between the honesty of scripture and the perversion of man's own imagination?
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Shechem just thought, well, of course. How could I help myself? And I'm going to make it right now.
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I'll make up for it. It was actually a noble thing because of the way I feel for her. So the sin is exposed in verse two, and his own warped perspective is exposed in verse three.
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His soul, we read, was attracted to Dinah. That's language from Genesis 2. We could almost translate it, his soul was cleaved to Dinah.
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Dinah didn't want his soul to be cleaved to her. This is a perversion of this marital language, not
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God's good design, but a forced intimacy that defiles. And perhaps it was because of this he saw how distraught he had made
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Dinah. That's why perhaps he spoke kindly to her. It's literally he spoke to her heart.
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He was almost trying to comfort her. We get the same verb in Hosea 2 .14, I will bring her back to the wilderness.
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I will speak comfort to her, reassurance to her. Don't worry, I'm going to make this right. Don't worry, you're going to be my wife.
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Don't worry, it will all be okay. You don't have to cry, you don't have to feel this way. And we begin to see this twisted nature of Shechem emerge even further.
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We know he was an important figure in the town, as we said, sort of a tribal chief. We also get the sense he was used to getting what he wanted.
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Not exactly a patient man, not a pious man. Look at the way in verse four he speaks to his father.
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So Shechem spoke to his father, saying, get me this young woman as a wife. If we see perhaps at the beginning of this chapter a breakdown in the way that Dinah was raised and guarded, protected, cherished, warned, we also see a breakdown in the way
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Shechem was raised, the way that he was regarded, the way that he was disciplined. We don't know anything about Hamor, we don't know anything about the upbringing of Shechem, but it can't be good if the son says to the father, get me this young woman as a wife.
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That speaks volumes to not only the kind of man Shechem is, but the kind of father that Shechem had, who allowed his son to grow up thinking he was the pearl of the world, that he could have things on demand.
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If he saw something and he wanted it, he would take it. I'm going to take Dinah for myself, and father, I want you to go do this for me.
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And we see Hamor running off to the tents of Jacob to work out his son's request, his son's demand.
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So we see a breakdown, I think, of sin affecting family relationships.
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I think this speaks volumes against Leah and Jacob. Apparently they weren't looking at the warning signs of Dinah's heart craving after the ways of Canaan.
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It's not like everything's going really well, you know, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, singing the hymns, rounding the family worship, finishing up that homeschool workbook, and then one day she's like,
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I'm going to run off and go see how it's done elsewhere. You know what? That sounds like a great idea.
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I'm just going to run off, sneak out in the middle of the night, and I'm going to start to see how I can be a little more like the young ladies of Canaan.
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It doesn't happen overnight. And Jacob seems to be passive. These years in Shechem have compromised him.
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We came from that triumph when he pitched his tent and built the altar, but that was years ago.
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The subtlety of the world, the influence of the flesh. He's become very passive, so passive when he gets this news, as we'll see, he doesn't even react.
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He doesn't even know what to do. His sons end up taking the action, and so I think we see a breakdown of the way
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Jacob and Leah were parenting Dinah. We see a breakdown in the way Hamor had raised
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Shechem, and brothers and sisters, we better be aware of the Shechems and the Dinahs that we are raising.
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Jacob heard, verse 5, that he had defiled Dinah, his daughter. Again, please notice that language, his daughter.
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We already know who she is. Why is that there? It's emphatic. This is Jacob's daughter.
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Now his sons were with his livestock in the field, so Jacob held his peace until they came.
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We're not told how Jacob heard this, whether servants had observed it, whether the gossip came out of the city of Shechem and came back toward the tents of Jacob.
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However he heard about it, when he heard about it, we read he held his peace. His lack of shock is shocking.
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His lack of fury is infuriating. The narrator wants to emphasize this by saying this was his daughter, this was the daughter born to Jacob.
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This was a little girl that he cradled, that he prayed and wept and sang over. This was a little girl who he pushed year after year, cake with more candles year by year in front of, had all the iPhone pictures which would show dotingly this was his daughter.
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And when he hears the news that she's been violated, humiliated, and she's not even there, she's still in the household of Shechem.
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It's like she's captive. He's not even there. He's not even able to comfort her, not even able to say what really happened.
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He holds his peace and it's shocking almost. Could it be the numbness of a discouraged parent?
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You know sometimes that's a defense mechanism. Some grievous news happens and it seems like the parent has just checked out and it's almost like I don't even want my feelings to go there.
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It's just easier to sort of dissociate. Is that what's going on? Maybe he's insulating his heart.
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Maybe he really is just so passive that he doesn't actually have that strong of affection for Leah or Leah's children.
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Maybe it's the fear. Here comes Shechem, here's Hamor, maybe many others besides and like Abram he's feeling a little spooked and so the fear is almost restraining him.
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I'm not really going to say anything. I'm going to restrain my fear. We can't really say.
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All we can say is he held his peace and that's shocking. The narrator I think wants us,
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Moses wants us to see that as wrong. The expected response would be anger, rage.
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Remember when Laban was pursuing him and how he as it were let out this great exclamation, this great cry to God in prayer and then as a result of seeing
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God's deliverance he was able to boldly rebuke Laban. He let him have it. He unloaded everything on him.
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So it's not that Jacob doesn't have it in him. We've seen that but first of all where's the exclamation of prayer and then where's that loud furious rebuke?
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How dare you? You will pay for what you've done to Dinah. Jacob doesn't act at all.
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He waits for his sons and even when his sons come he still doesn't act. He's so fearful, so distraught, so anxious he's unable to act decisively and we can see as a principle when a leader, this is true in society as a sort of magistrate level, this is true in the church, this is true in the home, when the one that God has appointed to lead does not lead, is caught up with anxiety and fear and confusion, the more zealous will step up in that vacuum and they will lead and usually not in a good way, not in a wise and balanced way.
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It's the vacuum that is created. So we go from first the rape of Dinah to second, number two, the response of Hamor.
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The response of Hamor. We have two fathers now meeting face to face in light of this crisis.
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The response of Hamor. Hamor the father of Shechem went out to Jacob to speak with him and the sons of Jacob came in from the field when they heard it and the men were grieved, very angry, because he had done a disgraceful thing in Israel by lying with Jacob's daughter, a thing which ought not to be done.
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This whole exchange between Hamor and Jacob is not driven by Shechem's sense of guilt.
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We don't read Shechem saying, I've done a horrendous thing, Father, you have to help me, you have to work this out, let there be peace between us and Jacob.
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It's not driven by Shechem's sense of guilt at all. It's actually driven simply by his desire to have
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Dinah as a wife. Go make this happen. I want her as my wife. And by the time Hamor's negotiating, even he sees, hey, this could actually be in my interest too.
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We might actually get Jacob's livestock, get some plunder out of this whole arrangement. We see the contrast between Jacob and his sons.
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Jacob held his peace. His sons come in from the field. When they hear what happened to their sister, they're grieved and very angry.
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Occasionally translations don't do justice, and here's a moment where translations don't do justice.
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I don't know how you could translate it better, but it's weak, it's too weak to say they were grieved and very angry.
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It's like if I go through the drive -thru and something wasn't put in the order, I'm grieved and very angry.
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This is a lot more than that. That verb grieve, the last time we saw it, Genesis 6, verse 6.
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God regretted that he had made man. He was grieved in his heart. It's almost unutterable to think of this kind of grief.
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They weren't disturbed. They weren't annoyed. They would have put their hands over their mouth.
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Their stomachs would have turned. Their eyes would have squeezed out tears.
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They would have been vacillating between rage and sorrow. Rage when they looked at Shechem standing there in his fine robe.
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Sorrow when they imagined how Dinah was doing, shacked up in the household. That's how
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Jacob should have been. These brothers, of course, had a responsibility to protect their sister, but the text emphasizes again and again, not
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Dinah, their sister, but Dinah, Jacob's daughter. It was the father's role.
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It was the father's domain to defend the honor of his daughter.
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Now, that's not a very popular thought sentiment in our culture today, is it? The culture loves to mock what's derisively called purity culture.
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The idea of fathers taking their daughters to some ball, you know, that's seen as repressive, outmoded, old -fashioned, bizarre, awkward.
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What's the world's answer to that? Isn't it better to shave your head and have nothing to do with your family?
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Pretend you came out of nowhere and you have no obligations or relations and live your life freely as if you have no vulnerability whatsoever.
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That somehow is a better alternative to what I think the text is pointing us to see, the father's obligation to protect the honor and integrity of his daughter, the way that that does not repress or diminish, but rather enhances the nobility and the beauty and the value of a young woman.
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This is not something that God gives to all men for all women. This is not something that all men are to do for the sake of all women.
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This is something that is bound up in relationship. There's a covenantal arrangement to this, right?
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Priscilla relates to Aquila in a very different way than she relates to Paul. There's a covenantal arrangement to these things.
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It was upon Jacob, not even necessarily upon his sons so much as upon him, and yet of course his sons were to also be concerned and prepared to step in to defend their sister.
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Again, we see this arrangement. This is the way that God has designed the distinction between men and women, not generally but in terms of those familial relationships, and when you have families and households that are ordered in this way, society begins to reflect that.
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Now because of this, women are protected, revered, honored, ennobled at different levels of society.
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We used to live in a day when doors were held open, and you can watch old reel -to -reel films from the 1920s, and you'd have to say women had it better then than in these days.
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Now I don't mean to whitewash sins and crimes and corruptions that have always been a part of our fallen race, but I mean to say in terms of the societal ennoblement of women, the very fanatics that think they're advancing it are actually bringing it down, and it's because of these things right here.
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It's because brothers aren't outraged over the dishonor of their sisters. It's because fathers aren't furious about the humiliation of their daughters.
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It's because men and the family won't protect the women in their family.
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It seems in fact that Jacob is going to let Shechem marry
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Dinah. He doesn't seem to be in on this plot. Remember in Genesis 28 when
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Isaac called Jacob and blessed him and charged him, you shall not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan.
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And here we are in Genesis 34, and Jacob seems ready to let his daughter marry a
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Canaanite. Jacob's not following after Abraham or Isaac's example here, and this is in contrast to the narration that's given.
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Shechem had done a disgraceful thing in Israel. Here's Moses writing, and this is not technically
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Israel yet. Israel is literally Jacob, and yet we have a sort of narrative comment.
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You'd almost say a parenthetical comment. Shechem had done a thing in Israel by lying with Jacob's daughter, a thing which ought not to be done.
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It's like, if you missed what we're saying in this chapter, let me put it in bold so you don't miss it.
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Jacob allowed this. Jacob was almost willing to let this happen. This should not have been done.
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Shechem had done a disgraceful thing. So Moses is writing for the people of Israel, and this is an application to the nation of Israel.
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Don't intermarry. Don't intermingle in a way that your daughters will be vulnerable to this.
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Don't be tempted by the threat of this. You need to raise up Nehemiahs that will cut off the marriages from the peoples of the land.
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This phrase, disgraceful thing, again, the translation fails. This is something abominable, provoking.
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It's not disgraceful like you forgot to say bless you after someone sneezed. It's shocking.
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It's the kind of thing in Deuteronomy 22 that requires stoning and the constant refrain, let the evil be purged from among you.
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Let the evil be put out from your midst. That's something disgraceful that ought not to be done, but Hamor spoke with them.
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The soul of my son Shechem longs for your daughter. Please give her to him as a wife. Make marriages with us.
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Give your daughters to us. Take our daughters to yourselves, and if you do this, you'll dwell with us.
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The land will be before you. Oh, is it up to Hamor if the land will be before them, or is it up to God that the land will be before them?
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Is it up to Hamor's way? Dwell and trade. Acquire possessions for yourselves in it. Is it up to Hamor that they will be able to dwell and acquire abundance, or is it up to God?
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You're put before the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked throughout the patriarchal narrative.
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It's no different here. Psalm 1, shining light upon this moment in Genesis 34, and Jacob seems willing to go the way of the wicked, willing to intermarry, willing to give his sons and the covenantal legacy of his sons over to the
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Canaanites. This is opening the doors to intermarriage, something that God had forbidden.
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Abraham charges Isaac, Isaac charges Jacob, but here's Jacob at the fork in the road, and he's seeming to fail.
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If they married, Israel's calling to be distinct from the nation, to be set apart from the people of the land, will inevitably fail.
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Israel will be completely assimilated into the Canaanite nations. That's what we're seeing in verses 8, 9, and 10.
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And then, to enhance this, Hamor now has said his part, Shechem, he steps in.
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This is the vulnerable moment. If Jacob was like, okay, but, you know, Shechem's just going to close the deal.
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Verse 11, Shechem said to her father and her brothers, again, notice the the way this is reported, not
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Shechem said to Jacob. Shechem said to her father, to her brothers.
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We already get the sense of what the narrator is wanting us to see, whose side he is on. Let me find favor in your eyes.
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Whatever you say to me, I'll give. Ask me ever so much dowry and gift.
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I will give according to you what you say to me, but give me the young woman as a wife. Because he goes from demanding it from Hamor to now demanding it from Jacob.
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He gives Jacob a blank check. Write in what you want. It'll be in your account. The world thinks that everything has a price, inevitably, right?
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Everything has a price tag at some level. And there's some things that, as Christians, we recognize there's no price.
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There's no amount of money. There's some things that have infinite value.
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Some things that you could gain the whole world for and it would be a bad deal.
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Short of Dinah's consent. We don't read like Rebecca arranging this negotiation with the servant.
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Well, as long as our sister is okay with it, we'll go for it. We don't have that kind of negotiation. Dinah's not even able to say yes or no to this.
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We don't have her consent. More importantly, we don't have Shechem's repentance. Shechem has never acknowledged what he's done.
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Shechem doesn't seem apologetic. Shechem doesn't come hanging his head in guilt. He doesn't say, please spare my life and whatever else.
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If it's possible, I will pay reparation and I can only even imagine that you would even consider me, that somehow
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I might even have a relationship. So we don't have Dinah's consent. We don't have
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Shechem's repentance. Money, marriage, they can't take away this stain.
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They can't take away the evil that was done. Another thing that might have been taxing
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Jacob is notice the way Shechem approaches. Let me find favor in your eyes. Boy, that sounds familiar, doesn't it?
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If only I could find favor in your sight. Without saying it,
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I've wronged you. Oh, Jacob, Shechem says, to find favor in your sight would be like your face shining upon me.
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It would be like seeing the face of God. Maybe Jacob is reminiscing on the fact that he was a lot like Shechem.
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Maybe he's gone soft, and rather than stepping forward in justice for the sake of his daughter, he's beginning to sympathize with this young man, and oh, maybe it'll be okay.
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You know, I can think of a good amount to write on that check. I can think of what I would like for the dowry, and maybe this will be okay. In fact, this will give us some security and protection in the land.
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But Jacob's not able to give an answer. If he was about to say, yeah, his sons cut him off. Thankfully, his sons cut him off, but sadly for what they planned.
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Verse 13, the sons of Jacob answered Shechem. Shechem's been speaking to Jacob, and now the sons bust in.
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Our father's not fit to lead. We're going to tell you what this will be like. The sons, Jacob's sons, are actually concerned about Dinah.
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They have not lost sight of the victim of Shechem's evil. The sons of Jacob answered
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Shechem and Hamor his father and spoke deceitfully, because he had defiled Dinah, their sister.
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And they said to them, we cannot do this thing. To give our sister to one who's uncircumcised, that would be a reproach to us.
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On this condition, we will consent to you. If you will become as we are, if every male of you is circumcised, we will give our daughters to you, and we will take your daughters to us, and we will dwell with you.
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We will become one people, but if you will not heed us and be circumcised, then we will take our daughter and be gone.
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It's fascinating that they're speaking of Dinah as their sister, and yet they say our daughter. It's almost like their way of saying we're going to speak on behalf of our father, because he's not really speaking like a father.
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Even though Dinah is but our sister, we're going to refer to her as our daughter, because this is what a father should be doing.
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A father should be defending his daughter, should be concerned about the injustice and defilement of his daughter.
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The response to Shechem and Hamor was planned, calculated deception.
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They're going to use circumcision, God's covenantal sign with them as the sons of Abraham, as a method to bring the
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Shechemites to ruin. Of course, God desired for the sons of Israel to make him known, and circumcision would have played a role in that.
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As they proclaimed the name of God, and as they demonstrated the worship of God, as they lived out the ways of God before the
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Canaanites, the idea was the Canaanites would be drawn toward the worship of Yahweh, nations streaming toward the
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Mount of Zion, and they would be entering into the refuge of the Abrahamic covenant.
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As sojourners among the covenant, they would have been circumcised, and so they're using this covenantal sign, the prospect of evangelism, to actually cover over a planned mass murder.
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They take Israel's most cherished symbol of faith at this point, and they use it as a tool of vengeance, and Shechem takes the bait.
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The words, please, we read verse 18, Hamor and Shechem. So the young man did not delay to do the thing because he delighted in Jacob's daughter.
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I've been pretty mean to Shechem, and I intend to be mean to Shechem, but I will give him credit for that.
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It was wrong what he did to Dinah, but his feelings weren't artificial. He wasn't just saying, well, if I can't have her the way
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I want her, then I don't want her. He genuinely desired her in an evil way, and yet his desire is shown in his willingness to be circumcised.
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He rushed to circumcise himself out of his feeling for Dinah. I love
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Elisha, but to paraphrase a 90s song,
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I would do anything for love, but I won't do that. I'll not rush to circumcise myself.
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So Shechem's on a different level. Now, verse 19 has an interesting translation. He was more honorable than all the household of his father.
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Well, if he's the most honorable in the household, that doesn't speak well for the household. He's a rapist, but I think that's actually not the most helpful way to translate verse 19, and verse 19 is helping us understand verses 20 and following.
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He is convinced he's ready to circumcise himself, but that's not the condition that Jacob's sons let out.
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It's not just that he needs to be circumcised, all of the Shechemites need to be circumcised.
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Well, now that's going to be hard to convince a town full of men to do, and so verse 19 is here to say he was more honorable than all the household of his father, and that's not saying that Shechem has the virtue of honor.
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He was a very honorable man, as though that were a virtue. No, no, no, no. The Hebrew verb here, kavod, it means heaviness, weight.
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We translate it as honor, sometimes glory, and significantly here, it has a secondary sense of meaning he was very important.
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He was very significant. He was weighty, right? He had more weight, more significance than anyone else in his father's household.
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That's verse 19, and that explains why in verse 20, when the people are coming and going through the gate, they actually will, okay,
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I'll consider getting circumcised. This seems like a good arrangement. It's because of the weight of Shechem.
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Verses 20 and following, Hamor and Shechem his son came to the gate of their city and spoke with the men of their city, saying, these men are at peace with us.
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Therefore, let them dwell in the land and trade in it, for indeed the land is large enough for them. Let us take their daughters to us as wives and let us give them our daughters.
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Only on this condition will these men consent to dwell with us, to be one people. They're quoting the arrangement.
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If every male among us is circumcised as they are circumcised, will not their livestock, their property, every animal of theirs be ours?
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Now there is a sort of double deception going on. This wasn't part of the arrangement. There's this planned plunder.
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If we can work this out, we'll slowly, surely, a sheep here, a goat there, we'll begin to plunder their goods.
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And all who went out of the gate of the city heeded Hamor and Shechem his son. Every male was circumcised. All who went out of the gate of the city.
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On the one hand, they were promising, you can settle among us, our land will be open to you, live in it, trade in it.
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But when they went to the town people, they said, these things will be ours. Their animals, their private possessions, their property, this will become ours.
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And that's why the men are willing to be circumcised. And remember, again, 10 ,000 foot view,
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Moses is writing this when Israel as a nation is about to enter into Canaan.
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The greatest danger facing the Israelites as they entered into the land was not fighting in the land. God was with them.
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They had learned anything about the Lord's deliverance. They should know fighting was not going to be the issue. It was the danger rather of not fighting, of being gradually but surely seduced into assimilation with the
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Canaanites, to lose their identity as the people of God set apart from the peoples of the land.
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And in order to reach the people of the land, in order to be a blessing to the nations, they had to be set apart.
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They had to be made distinct. And so we see in verse 16 the significance for Moses writing this to the nation of Israel.
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We will give our daughters to you. We will take your daughters to us. We will dwell with you.
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We will become one people. And that's actually exciting to the Shechemites. We're going to be one people with them.
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And Moses is saying to the nation of Israel, do not let this happen. Do not approach in this way.
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Do not let the threat nor the temptation nor the crises lead you into this kind of relationship.
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Deuteronomy 7, neither shall you make marriages with them. You shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor take their daughters for your sons.
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They will turn your sons away from following Me. Joshua 23, as they're literally heading over, take careful heed to yourselves that you love the
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Lord your God or else if indeed you do go back and cling to the remnant of these nations, these that remain among you and make marriages with them and go into them and they to you know for certain that the
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Lord your God will no longer drive out these nations from before you. There'll be snares, traps to you, scourges on your sides, thorns in your eyes until you perish from the land.
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These things were written for our sake. We need to have a balance, don't we?
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In the land but not assimilated to the land. In the land but not like the land.
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In the land but separate from the land for the sake of the land.
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We need to have a balance on these things. In other words, there needs to be an understanding of our task as the
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Israel of God that we're neither to be extreme inclusivists nor extreme exclusivists.
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That we're not about trying to bring everyone in and let's find the lowest common denominator so that the church is very appealing to the world.
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Why is it appealing to the world? Because it's just like the world. It is the world. It's the world in a petri dish every
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Sunday. We're not called to be radically inclusive in that way. We're called to be separate, distinct.
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We're saints, holy ones. A special, unique possession of God set apart in holiness for his purposes.
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Not to be like the world. The kingdom of God is not of this world. And yet at the same time, avoiding that danger of inclusivism, we don't want to veer to the other extreme of exclusivism.
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Where we're essentially here and we have our blinders on and we have nothing to do, nothing to say, nothing to be with the people around us.
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That we have a holy huddle or a 2022 monastery.
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Well that's another extreme that must be avoided. And we're to understand the way that God separates.
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It's a separation from the people but it's a separation for the people. We separate so that we can be a light unto the nation.
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So that we can be a witness. So that there's something different in this train of captivity to Christ that is a glorious perfume to those that he is saving and a stench, an odious stench of death to those that are perishing.
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The tragic outcome of this crisis and the temptation of intermarriage which is threatening the people of God.
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We see all of this is warning Israel. All of this is warning
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Israel. Don't come in to take vengeance and lose the sight of why you're here in the first place.
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But also don't come here and create this artificial peace that's just a piece of compromise.
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And so I think we need to have some sort of, I don't know what the right word, a distant nearness or a close separation.
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Right? A distant nearness that we're distant in almost every way and yet we're near.
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We're among. We proclaim. We live. We speak. We bring salt and leaven.
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We're near but we're distant. We're close but we're separate.
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Fifth, the reckoning of Simeon and Levi. This is sort of the great moment in the chapter, isn't it?
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Now it came to pass on the third day when they were in pain that two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brothers, again please notice that,
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Dinah's brothers, they each took his sword and came boldly upon the city and killed all the men.
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Tough day to be a Shechemite. You might not have even known anything that happened. As far as you knew you were about to get a land grab and that's why you were recovering from circumcision and then some guy you don't even know comes at you with a sword.
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Tough day to be a Shechemite. Levi and Simeon are Dinah's full brothers. That's significant, isn't it?
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Dinah has many siblings but she only has Simeon, Levi, Reuben and Judah as brothers from the same mother, the same womb and Simeon and Levi, they're her full brothers and they perhaps are the most outraged.
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That is what has taken place to Dinah. We cannot condone at all, at all what
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Simeon and Levi do to the rest of the men of Shechem but I can't help but think as to Shechem himself that Simeon and Levi have a sort of fineas moment.
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Again you might disagree with that. I can't help but think this was a fineas moment in terms of Shechem and his defilement and their righteous anger against this evil man but that righteous anger becomes anarchy and bloodlust and they end up taking what seems just to a level of atrocity.
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They kill every man in the city. They didn't just deceive like Jacob, their father deceived.
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You know a bowl of stew or some goat hair cufflinks. They're mass murderers. We're looking at Simeon and Levi like Reinhard Heydrich or Pol Pot.
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They're mass murderers and they killed Hamor and killed
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Shechem, his son, with the edge of the sword and they took Dinah from Shechem's house and they went out and the sons of Jacob came upon the slain.
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This is sort of the mop -up now and they plundered the whole city because their sister had been defiled.
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They weren't willing to commit the bloodshed but they come in for the spoil and so all the sons of Jacob are complicit in the destruction of the
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Shechemites. They took their sheep, their oxen, their donkeys, what was in the city, what was in the field, all of their wealth, their little ones, their wives.
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You picture these women that were holding the corpses of their husbands, covered in their husband's blood, weeping, clutching their children around as these men pulled them into the line to be dragged away toward their tents to now be subsumed into their family.
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The sheep and the spoil in the city, the stench. It was an atrocity.
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It's not justice, it's genocide. I was reminded of an interview that I saw some years ago of, some of you might have actually seen the original reports of this in 1968, the
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My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, something that had been covered up among the army for about a year before it came out and certainly something that to the
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American public only enhanced their distaste for the Vietnam War.
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My Lai Massacre occurred in March 16, 1968 when Charlie Company entered a hamlet in a village called
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My Lai. They had reports that Viet Cong were going to be there and they could expect resistance and they were to meet with appropriate force.
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However, when they came, there was only women, children, and elderly men and they were all assembled in the common areas cooking breakfast.
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They were to look for weapons, anything that might be of use to intelligence, but Lieutenant William Calley ordered his soldiers to assemble the citizens and open fire.
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And most of the men of Charlie Company had been through the events of the Tet Offensive.
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If I remember right, Hamburger Hill, they had lost so many men in their units. Calley himself lost a radio operator to a sniper.
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They were all coming in and out of burials and they began to see the civilians as no different from the enemy.
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Villagers were shot with machine guns, grenade launchers. Women who attempted to shield their children were killed. Children fled from the gunfire but were mowed down.
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The living and the dead were dragged into trenches and the soldiers continued to burn and obliterate the village.
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If there were some that were spared, they were raped and all of this was continuing hour after hour until a warrant officer named
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Hugh Thompson arrived, landing in a helicopter, saw the carnage, and then stood in between, raised his rifle, and said he would shoot if his comrades didn't stop shooting.
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And he said this, we kept flying back and forth and we kept on noticing large numbers of bodies everywhere, everywhere, everywhere we looked we saw bodies.
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That's what it would have been like to be in Shechem. Just carnage everywhere you looked, bodies, devastation.
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And we see last the recoil of Jacob, number six, the recoil of Jacob. Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, you've troubled me.
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You've made me obnoxious among the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites and the Perizzites. I'm few in number.
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They will gather themselves together against me and kill me and I will be destroyed, my whole household and I.
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Jacob recoils at this but we detect in his recoil what's been driving him all along, what has kept him silent, what has kept him from actually working and reasoning against the outrage of his sons and trying to find something that would be just towards Shechem and just toward Dinah, is the fear of the peoples of the lands.
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And you see that everything becomes about me, my, I, I'm few in number, they'll come against me, they'll kill me,
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I will be destroyed. He's lost his perspective on God's covenant, on God's separation.
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He's lost his view of God's protection and provision. He's lost his view of God's justice and God's vengeance.
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He should have known the way that God dealt with Abimelech, the way that God dealt with Pharaoh.
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He would have known vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. But instead we find him complaining and whining to his sons.
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Now look at what you've done and now look what will happen to us. He's not even worried about justice here. He wasn't worried about justice for Dinah, he's not worried about justice for the men of Shechem.
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He should have been worried about justice at all of those levels, but he's only concerned about himself.
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No concern for right and wrong, no concern for God's righteousness, no concern for the the scene of death and misery and plunder of innocent people.
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Again, speaking horizontally. And then the last verse of our chapter gives his sons the last word, but they said, should he treat our sister like a harlot?
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Simeon and Levi have lost respect for Jacob in this moment. They just killed the whole city, they're glistening in the blood of the slaughter.
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And Jacob said, what have you done? We are ruined now, we will be destroyed. And they're still so frustrated that he has no thought toward their sister
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Dinah. It's like they're screaming at him, don't you actually even care what happened to Dinah?
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Should they have just treated our sister like that? Your daughter, Jacob. And so they have no respect for Jacob and they actually justify their action because Jacob refused to act.
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Simeon and Levi have the last word here and their right to protest against Jacob and his cruel passivity and his lack of concern for justice, both toward Dinah and the city of Shechem.
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But at the same time, that indignation is not counted as righteous.
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They have the last word here, but Jacob has the last word on Simeon and Levi. And on his deathbed in Genesis 49,
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Jacob says, Simeon and Levi are brothers, instruments of cruelty in their dwelling place.
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Let not my soul enter their council. Let not my honor be united to their assembly.
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In their anger, they slew a man. In their self -will, they hamstrung an ox. It's just like needless cruelty to hamstring an ox.
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You think of all the weight and support that is upon the ox's legs and you're not just slaughtering it in a humane way, in an efficient or necessary way, you're torturing it, the most painful, slow, unnecessary way to die.
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They hamstrung the ox of Shechem. Cursed be their anger. It is fierce.
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Cursed be their wrath. It is cruel. I will divide them in Jacob, scatter them in Israel. Do you see
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Simeon and Levi have the last word in 34, but many decades later,
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Jacob never forgets what they have done and perhaps now coming closer toward justice pronounces this curse upon them.
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And this is a prophetic word that is true. They're divided in Jacob.
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We know that the tribe of Simeon is shown to be in their history somewhat faithless, and they end up just being scattered into the allotment of Judah.
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They sort of get absorbed into the area of Judah, and Levi is scattered among Israel.
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Interestingly, not so much because of the curse, but rather because the Levites end up redeeming their tribe, and in their faithfulness during the
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Exodus 32 golden calf episode, God appoints them to be priests unto the people of God, and so you get the
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Levites who are scattered among Israel. So Jacob's prophecy is shown to be true for Simeon as a true curse, for Levi actually as a blessing, interestingly, but not because of Levi the man.
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Listen to what Charles Simeon has to say about this. This is just, I think, right on the money. We might well expect that after a moment's reflection these bloody murderers should relent and be filled with remorse, but all sense of guilt, all regard for their own and their father's safety seems to be totally banished from their minds.
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They're so caught up in the adrenaline of what they've done, they're not concerned about any other Canaanites coming. Instead of regretting that they had acted so treacherous and cruel apart, they vindicate themselves.
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They even condemn their father, who shows little concern for their sister. We can scarcely conceive a more awful instance than this of the power of sin to blind the understanding and harden the heart, but daily experience shows that once the conscience is seared, there is no evil which will not palliate, no iniquity which we will not justify.
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These men could see evil in the conduct of Shechem, and yet they could justify their own evil, though theirs was beyond all comparison far more vile and horrible, and it is not thus with us.
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If the world sees anything amiss in the conduct of a Christian, with what severity they will condemn it, even though they themselves are living the unrestrained commission of 10 ,000 sins, and even professors of religion are apt in pulling out a moat from their brother's eye while they're inattentive to the beam in their own, but let us learn to be forbearing toward the fault of others and severe toward our own fault.
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I think that's well said. They're aghast, they're horrified by the crime of Shechem, but they vindicate the slaughter of a city full of men.
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They think, how could Shechem not recoil and come to us in shame and guilt?
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How dare he stand before us when they're mass murderers? You see the blinding, numbing, deadening effects of sin in every family member.
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So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.
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The wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God. If ever there was a illustration of that verse from James, it is
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Genesis 34, and we learn also not to avenge ourselves. Jacob should have acted and he should have sought justice for Dinah.
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We fault him for that, and yet he was right to not seek vengeance for himself. And we are right to never seek vengeance for ourselves, for it's written, vengeance is mine,
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I will repay. Therefore, for us, if our enemy is hungry, we feed him. If he's thirsty, we give him a drink.
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Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. If ever there was a premier moment for the whole city of Shechem to become like the city of Nineveh and repent in dust and ashes, it would have been the way that Jacob could have handled this episode, this crisis.
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If ever there was a moment to evangelize the city of Shechem about the grace of God and the cause of justice and truth, it was this moment.
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But instead of evangelism, there's a scene of genocide. One more application we need before we conclude.
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We need to avoid, and we see this in Jacob and we see this in Jacob's sons, on the one hand, with Jacob, we need to avoid passivity, indifference.
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With Jacob's sons, we need to avoid outrage, loss of self -control. We have, on the one hand,
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Jacob showing more concern for himself than for Dinah, and he's shown to be silent and inactive and unsure of what to do throughout the whole episode.
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His sons, on the other hand, they know exactly what needs to be done, but they can't restrain, they can't reason, they can't moderate themselves.
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So Jacob is all too passive on the one hand, and his sons are all too outraged on the other.
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Two wrongs don't make a right. The sons, in planning this deceitful plot, were planning something evil.
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Now perhaps in our own day, we, more than anyone, should be concerned for justice, not justice according to the nitwits of the left, not social justice, which is really no justice at all, but biblical justice, which is true justice, the kind of justice we've seen glowing off the page of chapter 34, yearning for justice.
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And as we yearn for justice, I think we need to have this balance that we avoid passivity, that is indifference toward injustice.
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The church, in many respects, is all too much like Jacob, indifferent, inattentive, and unsure of how to handle acts of injustice.
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On the other hand, for those small pockets that actually are concerned and are enlivened and are outraged by what they see, there needs to be this balance of moderation and self -control, to be wise and discerning and careful about the way and the draw of the flesh toward vindication, indignation, and self -vindication.
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So, conclusion. We have this tragic chapter, this tragic event, this tragic episode in the life of Jacob, in the life of Dinah, in the life of Simeon and Levi.
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When we see where we are in the flow of history, if we had pinned our hopes on Jacob, you know, you think of Noah, Noah's gonna get it right.
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Now, what has he got to lose? There's no neighbors, there's no city, there's no culture anymore. It's just his family.
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He can do it. Of course, the drunkard Noah, we see even that righteous man who had faith in his generation, even that righteous man could not be our hope.
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And perhaps with Jacob now, this twister finally being untwisted, coming to Shechem, pitching his tent, maybe he'll go further than Abraham, maybe this will be the one that we can hope.
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And we see in this chapter, no. Even Jacob is not the one we're looking for.
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He's not the one who's been promised to come. We see the spread of sin, we see sin's consequences in the family of Jacob.
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We see that God does not intervene on this occasion like he did with Pharaoh or Abimelech. He allows this evil to take place.
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He allows Simeon and Levi to commit evil. Why? Perhaps in part we can never answer until we see him on that day and we understand why he is allowed what he has allowed, knowing that he's not the author of sin or evil, but he's all wise and all good.
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One thing I think we can say is he allowed this to happen so that Israel and the tribes of Israel embedded in these young men would not assimilate to the ways of Canaan.
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They were a hair's breadth away from doing so, and in order to keep his people distinct,
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God made them odious, made them a stench. In their unrighteousness, they will be separated when
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God had called them to be separate in their righteousness. The whole chapter is a downer.
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I love what Jeff Thomas says speaking of Jacob and his words to Simeon and Levi in Genesis 49.
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Jacob stood on the edge of eternity and he had years to think of his failure as a father, years to think of the wickedness of his sons.
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He'd seen it, he'd grieved over it. Had they done the same? Let him speak now, not oily parting words that everything was well.
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Have we learned that all is not well unless Christ the Savior and Judge is all in all to us, that we have made great mistakes and hurt people, that our testimony has been utterly inconsistent, that our best actions need mercy, and as we move on to Bethel, we see that God is faithful.
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He renews his people. He purges the sin from among them, re -establishes them, helps them on the way, but we know even
01:04:15
Bethel's not our hope, but rather far beyond Bethel to Bethlehem when the one who was promised actually comes, the true
01:04:24
Israel, who is not like Simeon and Levi, who actually brings light to the nations, brings healing in his wings, the
01:04:33
Savior who bears the wrath of God for our sins, turning it away from us, and when he comes, this is just something
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I think we can be encouraged by, when he comes 2 ,000 years ago, we find a very different Simeon and a very different Levi that accompany him.
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In Luke 2, we find a very different Simeon, a man in Jerusalem whose name was
01:04:59
Simeon who was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel. The Holy Spirit was upon him and it had been revealed to him by the
01:05:06
Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Christ, and so he came by the
01:05:12
Spirit into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him according to the law, he took him up in his arms and blessed
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God and said, Lord, now you let your servant depart in peace according to your word. My eyes have seen your salvation, which you've prepared before the face of all peoples, a light to bring revelation to the
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Gentiles in the glory of your people Israel. And so here we find a different Simeon who actually finds the one they've been looking for,
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Luke 5, a different Levi. After this, Jesus went out and saw a task collector named
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Levi sitting in his office, and he said to him, follow me, and he left all, rose up, and followed him, and Levi gave him a great feast in his own house, and there were a number of collectors and others who sat down with him, but the scribes and the
01:06:02
Pharisees complained against his disciples, saying, why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners? Jesus answered and said to them, those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick,
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I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repent.
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We're much like Jacob, we're much like Simeon and Levi, we're much like Shechem.
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One of the best things about this chapter is how honest it is. One of the best things we can do when we read this chapter is be as honest with ourselves.
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Let us not think that we're somehow above these men. We are these men, and like these men, we look for the one who is to come, the one who did not come to call the righteous but the sick, the one who did not come for the noble moments and triumphs and hopes, the prospects of what might come, but for the failures and the shortcomings and the travesties, the one who came to call sinners to repentance.
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Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your
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Word, we thank you for the mirror of your Word. We pray that we would reflect upon ourselves rightly, that we would see ourselves as you see us,
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Lord. First, that we would rightly understand our own sin, our estrangement, the way we completely pervert the reality of who we are and what we do, in the same way that Shechem perverted the reality of what he did to Dinah in his own mind and heart.
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Let us be honest from your Word with who we are and what we're like, but then,
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Lord, let us consider how you see us under the blood of Christ, as beloved, as those who are being healed, as those pursued by the
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Holy One of Israel, as saints with a high and holy calling to be separate,
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Lord. We pray you'd show us ways that we're on the verge of assimilation. We pray for the mothers and the fathers in this room,
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Lord, that they would learn the lessons from Dinah and Shechem, that they would be diligent and earnest to raise up their children in your fear and admonition, that it might go well with them, that we might dwell in this land.
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These things we ask in your Son's name, amen. Now's our time for interaction.
01:09:13
Ros, thank you for that, and what I have to say really isn't adding anything, more emphasizing what you've already said, but I chose to open this morning from Isaiah chapter 2 because it is the very inverse of what we saw in this chapter.
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Isaiah chapter 2 is really the fulfillment we see of the Abrahamic promise that in you all nations of the earth shall be blessed, and of course we see that as ultimately in Christ, but in the working out of that, the expansion of his kingdom, it's here and now, even as he sits at the right hand of the
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Father, and he's left us his church, which is his body on earth, to do that work.
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And so we should see this passage as us now. Progressively, we're supposed to be this mountain of the
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Lord's house that's exalted above the hills, such that all the nations are flowing unto it, and sadly what so often happens is the church tries to go to the world rather than have the world come to it.
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So I appreciated what you said about being not veering to, you know, extreme exclusivity, but also not being inappropriately inclusive as well, and I think that one of the ways we should look at that is not going to the world, but we should be welcoming the world to us.
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We should be this mountain that's established firmly. It's not chasing after anything, and yet the world will come to us, and we should be ready to welcome the world to the truth.
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The truth does not change, and sadly what we saw in this chapter is what happens over and over again in the history of Israel, where the
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Israelites go to the world and try to be friends of the world through syncretism, and it doesn't end well, and sadly it's the story of really 19th and 20th and now 21st century evangelicalism in the
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United States, which is progressively hankering after relevance in terms of, well, we've got to go to the world, make ourselves more like the world, be more relevant, and somehow that'll be the proper relationship, and we're seeing kind of the same results, sadly.
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Ironically, we have almost the exact same thing happening when Christian fathers send their daughters off to universities now.
01:11:39
Yeah, yeah, I think it's important to say that. Amen. Okay, thank you.
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You know, when you were, oh geez, when you were reading it, kind of, it just reminded me early on, you know,
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Jacob reminded me a lot of Lott, you know. I mean, he went by the city, just like Lott did.
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We kind of saw those wayward children, you know, just with Lott, and there's a lot of parallels.
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I guess it could be, as you were saying, parallels even with us. I mean, you know, there's dangers, yes, we need to interact with these dangers of this world, and the things that happened here just weren't a result of that one move, you know.
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I mean, I can see, I can look back, and that's the good thing about being old. We can look back, and we can see all the failures that we made, and the things we shouldn't have done, and we can see the results of that, and the 30 and 40 year olds walking around that, you know, we produced, but I just,
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I was struck by that parallel, and unfortunately it does, a lot of people, I guess, can't see it at the time, but those decisions, where you are, who you're going to react with, how are you going to integrate your children, those are really, really important, and you know, this is at least the second time,
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I'm sure, if I think there's other times in the Bible, we can see just the tragic effects of a father not taking his responsibility, his responsibility to the
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Lord, and his responsibility to his wife, and his responsibility to his family, and we see the terrible results, and I have to say,
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I mean, I almost, I know it's bad, but I almost, in a way, my sinful self, I kind of side more with, you know, with Levi, and with Simeon, I mean,
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I can understand that, although it's wrong, you don't murder, I could understand them doing that out of reaction to Shechem, but it's the passivity of the dad,
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I just think it's just, obviously he wasn't just passive in this event, he was a passive father, and that's why we see these problems, that's my opinion, but anyway, again, my only point was,
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I was just, I didn't see it before, but I was like, wow, this seems a lot like law, you know, right on, right on, absolutely,
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I'm sure it's meant to parallel law, you know, he never thought it would get that far, and you know,
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I'm sure Jacob felt the same way, when he was in that tent, building the altar, he never would have thought this would be the outcome of years later,
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I can keep talking, I have the mic, but I don't want to go there, does anybody else want to, what's that?
01:14:45
Thank you, Ross, Mike, and Joshua, so one of the words, or a couple of words that come to my mind in thinking about this, is being salt and light, like, it's really hard to distinguish, you know, how near should
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I get, right, we're not supposed to be in, and how far away I should be, and I think, like,
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I don't, I don't know, I don't want to say I don't blame Jacob so much, I think what
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Levi and Simeon did was, right, they could have brought Shechem to justice, so they could have tried to, right, and I think in the same thing, it's right for Jacob to look at the nations around him, but not the way that he did, but certainly, the family of Israel could have been salt and light to the
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Shechemites. Now, they may have been destroyed in trying to do it, I don't, I mean, I don't think they would have, because the
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Lord made them a promise, but the point is, he promised them something, right, he promised, he covenanted with them, the
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Lord did, and so we can be salt and light because of God's covenant with us, like, and we worry about the consequences of all the decisions we make in the world, right, so salt and light doesn't really do that, right, right, you know, how can light be with darkness, right, so there's a sense that we're supposed to be so far away, you, like, you know, you can't, you can't be the same, right, one is light, one is darkness, right, and to Josh's point, when the world comes to the light, yeah, then we're one, then we're near, then we're close through Christ, right, and they could have been that, they could have been salt as well, so some of them might have been destroyed in trying to doing it, you know, someone might have been killed, and there may have been consequences in that sense, but then the
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Canaanites and the Perizzites would have seen some of God's glory, right, and the
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Shechemites, you know, they would have seen some of God's glory in this as well, there would have been a possibility to see, but what they were left with was trample on the salt, it's no good anymore, and where's the light, and where's the darkness,
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I can't make a difference between the two here, and we need to look at, I mean, shamefully, we need to look at ourselves that way, you know, that we, we are in covenant with God, those that are believers in this room, we're in covenant with the living
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God, that is the promise that's put before us, that's why last week we're to worship Him, right, we worship
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Him whether we are or not, but we can do it with a full heart and full of joy, because we're His, right, and because of that promise, we can be salt in light, and that will show us how near and how far to be, depending on where we are, right,
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I mean, we're gonna have to make difficult decisions where we might be destroyed in some of those decisions that we make, bringing someone to justice or doing things, right, what we see in the world is, we see a lot of, you know, like, we want to grab all the guns, right, we want to do it, but that might not be justice, right, even though we need to defend ourselves, we need to look for justice, then we'll be salt in light, we need to look toward what
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God wants and be in the light to the nations, right, and so, you know, for me, that's helpful,
01:18:06
I hope it's helpful, you know, in light of that's what it reminded me of when you were, when you were preaching and hearing that, let us, let us move forward in that, remember, we are in covenant, it's easy to forget that, the problem is, is we start to believe we're in covenant with the world, that's wrong, that, that's being, you know, that's being in the world and part of the world, right, you know, we're not to do that, right.
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So, kind of along the same lines of what others have said, just this whole idea of passivity and passiveness, it's really scary, you know, if you think about that, you know,
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Jacob coming down from this place of being, you know, at the, at the height of his, you know, Christianity, his walk with the
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Lord and just how quickly that can, that can change and I think the other scary part in it is that, yeah, when we're passive, when we grow cold, it affects us but just the devastating effect that it had on everyone else as well, on Dinah, on his family, it's even more destructive, yeah, and just as I'm thinking about that and trying to apply it to my life and our lives, you know, the topic of us being in covenant, us being unified and trying to hold each other up and use the means of grace, just think about, you know, in thankfulness, the blessings that we have that Jacob really didn't have, you know, the, the, the word of God, prayer, you know, gathering together and being able to hold each other up, you know, when, when
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I grow passive, you know, having brothers and sisters who are able to, to see that and, and, you know, hold me up and get me out of that passive place, so I guess just not taking that for granted and, and taking it seriously when, when we are not actively trying to stir up, you know, our hearts, dangerous things happen and, and it happens very fast, so just thankfulness for tools to be able to deal with that, but at the same time, kind of an urgency to, to deal with that, you know, and to be prepared to help others with that as well.
01:20:24
Yeah, amen, yeah, I appreciate it, clearly, you know, Mike's comments as well as yours, they are highlighting that danger of passivity, and as I said, we see it in Shechem's father and we see it in Dinah's father in two very different ways, and, and the tragedy that happens as a result of that, and, you know, as parents, we ought to read
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Genesis 34 with eyes wide open, and I, I think maybe just because I have three girls,
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I especially am concerned to read about Jacob's relationship with Dinah, you know, what, what was she seeking out in, in Canaan that was representative of a failure within the home for her to understand who she is and what she had been called to, and, you know, when you think about a father, one of the charges that he has uniquely is to enhance and exclaim the honor of his daughter, and then to defend it and to protect it, and the world says that's repressive, that's outmoded, that's patriarchal, and they always say that as a bad word, it's not a bad word, when in fact,
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I, I think a daughter that's raised in that way will be a very secure, noble, honorable woman, and so it's a high and holy calling, and likewise for a father like Hamor to not raise an opetulant, greedy son, but a son who has a view of women in the same way.