Genesis 30 God Blesses Jacob

Would you open this, please? Yes. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for another chance to open your word, and we pray that our hearts would be opened to hear and receive what you have to say to us,

Lord. We pray that you would empower your servant John as he pastors and leads us through the text here today, that we would hear the word of the

Lord. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Mary Elizabeth, do you know 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17?

If not, you can look it up. Okay, say that one more time. 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17.

That could be on your heart's list. Your husband's Timothy. I mean, seriously. Right. Rumor has it, so he, this guy here and Jeff's son played in a pickleball tournament at Cairn University, and they did quite well.

Really? The name of their team, 1st and 2nd Timothy. Is it actually true?

Yes, it is. Are you sure it's not true? We won best team name, that was it.

Yeah, but a place like Cairn, 1st and 2nd Timothy, how do you beat that? I don't know. No. There's Holy Trinity.

I just heard by Jeff, it's like 2018. Do you have the answer? I do, I do. Yeah. Can you let me read it out?

Please answer, yes. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, approved for every good work.

All Scripture is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.

All Scripture is profitable for these things. We get into passages of Scripture that seem to be genealogical lists.

And we get into passages of Scripture that seem to be an account of plenty that God has blessed somebody with.

All Scripture is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.

And sometimes it can be really difficult to take a passage like Genesis 30 and say, where am

I getting doctrine, correction, reproof, and instruction in righteousness?

What is it about genealogies, or then the description of how God has blessed

Jacob with plenty, what is it about that that is instructive for us?

Hold that thought. About 35 years ago, give or take, our family went to Marshall, Virginia.

It's a town kind of in the foothills of the mountains. Virginia, it's directly west of Washington, D .C.

And it is Sanny's father's hometown. And there was a family reunion there.

No special event, a family reunion held in, I think it was in a fire hall or something like that.

Lots of people, somebody had done work, and on the wall was an enormous genealogical tree of the

Murphy families and what other families were there. It's not important, but there were a lot of families and how the ancestries worked down to children, grandchildren, great -grandchildren.

And it was really fun to look at it and see where Sanny fit into the whole thing.

And then I'm included in it by marriage, and then our children are included in it. We used that time when we were there after the reception was done to explore.

And we found the house that her father grew up in. It's still standing.

And then we found the graveyard and walked through, and we found ancestors that were interred in the graveyard.

And it was really kind of interesting to see that, to see the history behind it.

Genesis chapter 30, and we're going to be talking about genealogical history for the first half of the chapter.

I believe that there are reasons why God does this, and why he has the details.

And that's to say that this is not some mythical story.

This is not some account of perfection. Those who say that this is just something that those who follow

Jesus or whatever wrote after the fact. But how do you account for things like David and Bathsheba in the account of a man after God's own heart?

This is truth. This is truth. We have the listing of the people.

This is truth. This is real history. And this is God's ordained sovereign will for how things are.

There isn't a name in chapter 30 or any other part of scripture, but God's sovereign will.

Just as a note, by the way, if the scripture calls somebody

Bilhah, she's a woman. She's not something else. Somebody calls a name

Asher, it's a man. It's not something else. I'm just saying in God's sovereign will, he creates and it's recorded for us for a reason.

Genesis 30, verses one to 24, it is a long passage. So maybe take four or five verses and take it around and let's read what's happening here.

So Tim, you're gonna be first. Are you first Timothy or second? You're first Timothy. Good. They are only

Timothy. In the room. When Rachel saw that she bore

Jacob no children, she envied her sister. She said to Jacob, give me children or I shall die.

Jacob's anger was kindled against Rachel. And he said, am I in the place of God?

Who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb? Then she said, here is my servant,

Bilhah. Go into her so that she may give birth on my behalf, that even

I may have children through her. So she gave him her servant, Bilhah, as a wife, and Jacob went into her.

Verse five. And Bilhah conceived and bore Jacob a son.

Then Rachel said, God has judged me and has also heard my voice and given me a son.

Therefore she called his name Dan. Rachel's maid conceived again and bore

Jacob a second son. Then Rachel said, this might be restings. I have wrestled with my sister and have prevailed.

So she named his name Nephi. Good. When Leah saw that she had ceased bearing children, she took her servant,

Zilpah, and gave her to Jacob as a wife. Then Leah's servant, Zilpah, bore

Jacob a son. And Leah said, good fortune has come. So she called his name

Gad. Leah's servant, Zilpah, bore Jacob a second son. And Leah said, happy am

I, for women have called me happy. So she called his name Asher. In the days of wheat harvest,

Reuben went and found mandrakes in the field and brought them to his mother, Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah, please give me some of your son's mandrakes.

But she said to her, is it a small matter that you have taken away my husband? Would you take away my son's mandrakes also?

Rachel said, then he may lie with you tonight in exchange for your son's mandrakes. When Jacob came from the field in the evening,

Leah went out to him to meet him and said, you must come into me, for I have hired you with my son's mandrakes.

So he lay with her that night. Then Leah said,

God has rewarded me for giving my maidservant to my husband. So she named him

Ishachar. Leah conceived again and bore Jacob a sixth son.

Then Leah said, God has presented me with a precious gift. This time my husband will treat me with honor because I have borne him six sons.

She named him Zebulun. Sometime later, she gave birth to a daughter and named her

Diana. Then God remembered Rachel. He listened to her, opened her womb.

She became pregnant and gave birth to a son and said, God has taken away my disgrace.

She named him Joseph and said, may the Lord add to me another son.

We have a story here which is part of the story. It starts in chapter 29 and it's eventually going to come to its ultimate conclusion in Revelations 35 to be actually true.

And then maybe as far out as 48. These are the sons, these are the tribes, the 12 tribes of Israel.

First of all, we do understand that God changes Jacob's name to Israel.

So what we have here are the 12 tribes of Israel. At this point in time,

Jacob is the father. But in reality, although we have 12 tribes here, what we have now is a story about procreation.

We have a story about families. Let's just start this from the very, very beginning because it appears that there is a certain favor to this family, but let's not lose sight of a couple of other facts.

Genesis 131, that's the end of the six days of creation. And on the sixth day, it includes,

God created man after his own image. After our image, we created man.

That's the trinity in place there. There is no denying the fact that mankind is

God's special creation, different than all of other creation, different than the animals, different than the angels.

Man is this very special creation. We can continue on that mankind has a special attention from God, if you would.

John 316, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believed in him should not die, but have life everlasting.

This is God's love that is general across all of humanity.

John 1, 4 to 10, he loved us. This is love, not that we loved him, but that he loved us.

This is God's relation, God's response, but let's also remember that while that is going on,

John 1, 11, he came to his own, but his own received him not. And then

Ephesians 2, 4, after the description of how bad and despicable man is, we have but God.

The reality is that mankind is loved by God, not because mankind deserved that love, but because God in his sovereign will chooses to love mankind.

And he eventually loves him so much, he gives his son. So now we start to bring the aperture a little bit tighter.

We get into Genesis 12, and we have Abram, who has gone with his family from Ur up to Haran, and God speaks to Abram with the covenant of promise, to him

I will make you a great people, and in you all the nations of the earth shall be blessed. But God chooses

Abram, and he's called the father of our faith, and in Abram is the seed of promise.

The Messiah is gonna come from Abram, and through his genealogy. In fact, if you go into Matthew 1, if you go into Luke 3, you're going to find the very specifics of the genealogy.

In Matthew 1, it's gonna go from Abraham all the way to Jesus, very detailed, very precise names.

And if you do it in Luke, you're gonna go from Jesus all the way back to Adam. And so the genealogies are very important.

I do appreciate, Jeff, the way that you have been describing the blessings.

They are the seed blessing, but there are other blessings as well. But there is a unique, generational to generational, all the way to Jesus, that is the seed blessing.

That being said, that there are blessings to others, okay? We have

Jacob and Esau, the sons of Isaac, and Isaac loved

Esau, but Rachel wanted Jacob to get the blessing, so the deception.

And the seed blessing goes to Jacob, but yet there are blessings given to Esau as well.

Ishmael was not the intended child of Abraham, but yet he was the child of Abraham.

And Isaac gets the seed blessing, but Ishmael as well is blessed. In fact, he's told he will be a father of many nations.

So there are blessings that God gives outside of the seed blessing. And how about Nineveh? Jeff, you talked about that Sunday.

How about the amazing gift that God gave to 150 ,000, 120 ,000 people of Nineveh, who were absolutely opposed to God, but they heard the word and they believed?

The only reason they believed was God's grace softened their heart so that they would believe.

The blessing was given to the people of Nineveh. And how about the

Jomoabitess, Ruth? She's definitely of the wrong lineage, but God chooses her, and she actually becomes the grandmother to David, or is a great -grandmother.

But she's listed in the genealogy going to Christ. So now we have here in chapter 30, continuing from chapter 29, the 12 sons of Jacob.

And if we wanted to look at that, we start out in chapter 29, where we have

Leah. Now, Jacob was deceived by Laban.

He worked for seven years for Rachel. Jeff talked about this last night, how did that night actually transpire?

But he was deceived, and he takes Leah as his wife.

And I'm here to tell you that that relationship actually lasted for quite a long time, because in chapter 29, there are one, two, three, four, there are four children.

If you do just the math of calendars, that relationship does last for quite a while.

So in chapter nine, we have Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah. All are of the first four in chapter 29.

But the story continues on in chapter 30 with Issachar and Zebulun, down verses 18 and 19.

Now, between those first four, and then the later, and oh, by the way, Dinah is also listed as the only daughter that's identified as a child of Jacob here.

There's a break between them, because we had the first four culminating in Judah, and then it says

Rachel saw that she hadn't given Jacob any children. The amount of time that has transpired, we really can't definitively set.

But what we can say, we think we know, is that Jacob goes to Haran, and he meets

Laban, first he meets Rachel, then he meets Laban, and they negotiate seven years of labor so that I might marry your daughter,

Rachel, and then the deception, and instead of Rachel, it's the woman with the weak eyes.

Whatever that means, but he ends up with Leah. But he stays with her for a period of time because they conceive

Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah. So the relationship is honored by Jacob with Leah.

Now, he has to work seven more years before he can marry Rachel.

And it starts out in chapter 30, when Rachel saw she bore Jacob no children.

You can almost imply within that that the marriage relationship has been met, it has been consummated between God, between Rachel and Jacob, but she could not have children at this point in time.

God has withheld from you the fruit of the womb. Am I in the place of God that has withheld the fruit of the womb?

She can't have children. So the answer was very similar to what Sarah did, take my maidservant.

And so he encourages Jacob to go to Bilhah, and so through Bilhah, there is an encounter as if they were husband and wife, and Bilhah gives us

Dan and Naphtali, and which gets us to verse 11. And Leah said, good fortune has come.

Leah's servant bore a second son and called him Asher. When Leah saw that she wasn't having any more children in verse nine, which again implies to me that the conjugal relationship has not ceased, the implication there is that the conjugal relationship is going on with Leah.

She bore four children. Perhaps going on with Rachel, she couldn't bear any children.

So Rachel says, here's my servant Bilhah, and he now has relationships with her as if she was his wife, and they have two children.

And then Leah saw that she's not having any more children, which to me says that they've been trying, but it hasn't been working.

So she takes her servant Zilpah. Okay, let's have another one in the mix.

And so then Jacob goes into Zilpah, and Zilpah has Gad and Asher at verses 11 and 13.

It's an amazing family tree that if you were to go into Marshall, Virginia and draw this tree, it is an amazing tree.

In fact, the genealogies are listed, and it's fascinating, but detailed. So now we have, in the days of the wheat harvest,

Reuben went out and found mandrakes and gave them to his mother, Leah. Okay, so Reuben is the first one.

That's back in chapter 29. And then Rachel says, please give me some of your son's mandrakes.

This sounds again kind of like Esau, give me some of the stew, whatever.

I hunger for the stew, I'll give you my birthright. There seems again to be this desire to satisfy the hunger.

She said, as a small matter, you have taken away my husband. Do you want my son's mandrakes? And Rachel says, well,

I tell you what, I'll let you lie with him tonight if you give me the food. She's bartering for food.

And who is the favored relationship? It's still, I think it's Rachel, but Rachel hasn't had any children, but Leah has stopped having children, but Rachel gave him bilhah, and then

Leah's jealous, so she gives him zilpah, and said, now come the mandrakes.

When Jacob came from the field, Leah went out to meet him. You must come in to me tonight.

There's been a trade, there's been a barter for mandrakes for some food. For I have hired you with my son's mandrakes.

So he lay with her that night, and God answered, and Leah conceived and bore a fifth son.

God has given me my wages and given me a husband. She called him Issachar. And then Leah conceived again and bore him a sixth son.

He endowed me with good endowment. Now my husband will honor me because I've given him six sons, named him

Zebulun, and then she had a daughter named her Dinah. At this point in time,

Rachel is still the one left out in the cold without children. So Leah has now born six sons and a daughter, and then we have bilhah and zilpah, each with two sons.

And then chapter 22, but God remembered Rachel and listened and opened her womb. She conceived for a son.

God has taken away my reproach and named him Joseph. And that ends chapter 30, yeah.

The curious word there is God remembered Rachel. Which, like he ever forgot, which he ever forgot.

And I would put into that, for our own purposes, God heard the prayer and answered the prayer.

Well, he already intended to hear the prayer and answer the prayer. God met with Abram as he negotiated.

What if there are 50? What if there are 30? What if there are 10? And God was not changed in his opinion at all.

This is just God allowing people to see that their approach to God matters because we don't know

God's final mind. And it's important for us to be in prayer. Okay, it's important for us to be in prayer for Joe Biden and for Kamala Harris, that God would save them.

Because we don't know if that's his plan. The golden chain of salvation is not something we get to identify who's on that chain.

So in this case, God remembered Rachel. It isn't like he forgot Rachel, but in this point in time,

God's blessings continued for Rachel. And so she has Joseph.

We have to go way further back into chapter 35 before we find the 12th son.

And that's Benjamin. And that's in chapter 35, verses 16 to 18.

So at this point in time, we have the 12 tribes, the 12 sons of Jacob, also now known as Israel.

Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Joseph, and eventually

Benjamin. Benjamin is the youngster of the clan. When we get into the promised land, and the land is allotted to the tribes, it is allotted to 13, not 12.

Because Joseph's sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, are given an equal share of blessings.

So there are actually going to be 13 allocations of land when we get into the book of Joshua.

And we read about all of that at the end of Genesis, as Joseph has his ministry in Egypt, and he has two sons.

Now, here's what's gonna happen to these sons of Jacob, of Israel.

First of all, they are going to enter into Egypt as a family. Later on, we're going to read, and we're gonna study how the jealousy of Joseph's sons, when

Joseph brags about his coat of many colors, and his sons come up with a plan to get rid of this little guy, and they end up putting him in a pit, not to be killed, but ends up being taken down to Egypt, and into Pharaoh's family.

We're gonna study all about how God protects, God protects the seed of blessing.

So that the famine in the land won't end the seed of blessing. They're gonna end up going down to Egypt, where there will be plenty, because Joseph, in gaining favor with Pharaoh, says for seven years, store the food, so that in seven years of famine, you're going to have food.

And then Jacob's family comes on down. Oh, by the way, it is fascinating in scripture to see the times that the seed of blessing is at risk.

Who is doing everything possible to stop the seed of blessing? The blessing of the seed?

Satan. Satan is. Absolutely, he is. And think of the book of, oh my goodness,

Haman, and... Esther. Esther, thank you. Couldn't come up with it.

Think of Esther. And how the decree was to kill all Jews. That would have stopped the blessing of the seed.

But God intervenes, intervenes there. Now they're gonna come down as a family. They're going to be in captivity.

They're gonna come out as a nation of tribes for the first time. By the way, while they're in Israel, it's the first time they're called

Hebrews. That's just an O, by the way. Hebrew is wanderer. That's the name that was given to the

Jews while they were in Egypt, was Hebrew. Okay, so now they're gonna come out. They're gonna go through the wandering.

They're gonna eventually get into the land. And it's gonna be a theocracy. God is their king.

But in 1 Samuel, we're going to read that Israel rejects God as their king.

We want a king like all the other nations. We want to be like the other nations.

So the 12 tribes have basically gone away. The kingdom is divided.

First Kings 11 and 12, Rehoboam and Jeroboam. And so now we have the northern tribe and we have the southern tribe.

And this becomes real interesting. The northern tribe, wicked, very wicked, incredibly wicked, they go into captivity and we've lost them.

We consider them the lost 10 tribes. The southern eventually goes into captivity and they're in Assyria.

And we have the stories of Daniel. We have the accounts of Ezra.

We have the accounts of Nehemiah. And how God, through the prophecy of what he gave to Daniel, they are coming back after 70 years.

And they go in. But it's not the northern tribe. The northern tribes, we don't know what happens to them.

But I'm gonna fast forward this to Revelations chapter seven. And Revelation 7 .4,

Sandy, you haven't read yet. If you would get to Revelations 7 .4. We believe that the church has not replaced

Israel. We believe that Israel are still God's chosen people.

We believe if you go into the book of Daniel, you have 70 weeks and there is a break between the 69th and the 70th week.

Some call that the age of the Gentiles. Yeah, Rick. Do you know whether contemporary

Jewish people are aware? I personally don't know that.

I have heard that they choose to find it. But what do you know?

Yeah, a lot of them claim to. But the records were destroyed in 70 AD. And then they went into diaspora.

But if you had the last name Cohen, like the new guy in our church, Cohen means priest. So you think maybe he's from a priestly kind of family.

A lot of people, it's like an oral family tradition usually that a lot of people think they do. Yeah, I don't know how accurate it is though.

I'm gonna say this about that. And that's a great question. God knows who they are. And the reason

I say that is when we get into the book of Revelation, there is going to be a tribulation.

There is going to be the wrath of God. All this is gonna be going on. The Antichrist, the beast, we're going to see the prophet.

We're gonna see the unholy trinity. We're gonna see all of this. And in the midst of it,

Sandy's gonna read chapter seven, verse four. And I've heard the number of those who were sealed 144 ,000 sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel.

12 ,000 from each of the 12 tribes. So if this particular

Jewish individual is part of the seal, God knows which tribe he belongs to.

So the record is still valid, God knows. But what

I think I find fascinating is that if we go into 1

Kings 11 and 12, where the Northern Kingdom breaks away from the

Southern Kingdom, and they set up their own place of worship, and they have their kings who are wicked, and the

Southern Kingdom has trouble too. But the Northern Kingdom goes into captivity, and we've lost them, the

Southern Kingdom, but they come back. The Southern Kingdom has a little bit more of a history through the rest of the

Old Testament than the Northern Kingdom does. But when we get into the book of Revelation, and this

I think is one of the strengths of the reason why we believe that the church has not replaced

Israel, is that 144 ,000 from the 12 tribes

God has sealed. So they're all gonna come back. Now within this list of 12, and by the way,

Benjamin's part of that list, although he shows up much later. And you could say that Joseph is broken into Ephraim and Manasseh, and I would not dispute that because they're partly allotted.

But when I get into Revelations, it's not Ephraim and Manasseh, it's Joseph. It's the original 12 sons.

One of them gets the seed blessing. Which one is that? Judah, the

Lion of Judah. There it is. He is actually the one, two, three, the fourth born, but he is the one that gets the seed blessing.

And that's an important seed blessing. And when you get into the genealogies of Matthew and Luke, it is important to understand how the seed blessing comes all the way down to Messiah.

But let's look at some of the others. Levi. What is special about Levi? And you actually started to talk about it.

What's special about Levi? What role does Levi have in his? The priestly role.

The priestly role, why? He did something that gave him the position to be the priest in front of the, do you remember the golden calf and all that other kind of stuff?

Levi opposed, and he was given blessings because of it.

But Levi gets blessings as the priest, as the Kohanic priest, these ancestors, these children of Levi.

Who was the first king? God is the first king, all right. But who was the first earthly king of Israel?

And what tribe is he from? Benjamin. So the first king to come along that was chosen because he was great in form and power and everything else, was actually from Benjamin.

He was not the intended king, but he comes from Benjamin. Who did

God use to uniquely protect the seed blessing? Of the 12 sons, who did

God uniquely use to protect the seed blessing? Joseph, that he kept his brothers.

Yes, it was Joseph. So God uniquely uses Joseph down in Egypt so that Jacob and all the children could come down and the seed blessing through Judah would actually be protected.

The reason I go through all of this, all scripture is given by inspiration and is powerful for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction and righteousness.

So we get into the genealogies here in chapter 30, back in 29, moving forward from that into 35, eventually in 48.

The details of God selecting and having those children that he was going to use, and he's calling his chosen people, is validated all the way forward in Revelations chapter seven where 144 ,000 are sealed.

12 ,000 from each of the 12 tribes. I think it's important for us to acknowledge these.

I may not understand why it is important for me to understand everything about Naphtali, but God placed him here for a reason and I think we should acknowledge that.

Now, this is the end of the story here of the children and it's going to end up continuing further as we get into chapter 35 because we haven't seen

Benjamin yet. But at this point in time, Joseph is going to believe it's time for me to head back home.

I've been here for a while. We don't know, as we get into verse 25, how long this has been.

If you were to do just a straight line reckoning of time, there are, between 29 and 30, there are 12 births if you count, actually, yeah, there's 12 births if you count

Dinah. Is it 12 months, nine times, is there an overlapping?

We honestly don't know that. We do know he worked for 14 years. We do know that there are a lot of children born.

One commentary I had has it over 20 years that he was in Haran. And after all of this, as soon as Rachel had born

Joseph, Jacob sent Laban, send me away that I might go to my own home and country.

He was sent, why did he go to Haran in the first place? Why was it important for Jacob to go to Haran in the first place?

I don't know. Why was that important? I don't know. Why was that important? Because his brother was there to kill him.

Not yet, that does come to be, but. He didn't wanna marry from the

Canaanites. And by the way, isn't that what Esau's already done? He's taken wives from the

Canaanites. And so, he was not to take a wife, where was he supposed to go? He was supposed to go to the land, and this was

God's choice that out of the heritage of Laban, the child would come, and then the line would be there.

He says, send me away that I might go to my own home and country. Give me my wives. That's just a bad statement right there.

That's supposed to be St. Dillard. Now, he definitely has two wives, and he has two mistresses that he's treated.

Yeah, Tim. I have a question. With all this mess of the wives and everything like that, you feel bad looking at it.

They're even paying each other, and really weird stuff, and it's a mess, but there's cultures that still do this, and there's even some

Muslims or people from different countries, even living in America, that might have different wives.

Say one of those people becomes a Christian, and they have four wives living in their house, and they wanna come to church.

How do we? How do we? It happens every week. We have to deal with that. It probably happens once a year, somewhere on the planet, yeah.

Well, in Africa, it is more common that missionaries have to deal with that question. Mormons have had lots of wives.

Yes. What would you do? I think that would be a matter of discreet discipleship, but working toward him becoming monogamous, yeah, who is the legitimate wife of his youth.

I think Jacob should have been with Leah only, even though he was deceived. Absolutely, that's true.

The only answer I could give on top of what Jeff just would say is that the individual who has multiple wives is living in sin, let's just call it for what it is, and 1

Corinthians 10, 13 is gonna give the strength, the discernment, that God would give grace and discernment to the individual to do the right thing.

That's, I think we would have to trust in that. Yeah, to be an elder, you have to be monogamous.

You can never be in a church office, but how to provide arrangements and things like that to, you know, in like some cultures, to just send them away could be the death of them, but in America, and I think

Western civilization built on the Bible, you just bring them to monogamy as discreetly as possible.

The teaching of the church has to teach them. They have to make the decision. The only thing the church is responsible for, if they go to leadership, that's when the church has to say, well, this is what the scripture's saying.

Jacob is gonna go to Laban and said, I believe it's time for me to go. Please send me away.

Give me my wives, my children, for whom I have served you that I may go. For you know the service

I have given you, but Laban says, and I find this very inciting, Laban has said,

I found favor in your sight. I have learned by divination that the Lord has blessed me because of you.

So even Laban, in the time that they've been together, has been able to discern through God that just the very presence of Jacob and his faithful service, there has been blessings even on Laban's family.

So he says, name your wages and I'll give it to you. And Jacob said, you know how I have served you and how your livestock has fared.

For I had little when I came, but it has increased abundantly, and the Lord has blessed you wherever I have turned.

Now, when shall I provide for my own household also? The Lord has blessed you.

Jacob says, the Lord has blessed you, Laban. The Lord has blessed you wherever I have turned.

And so the reality that Jacob has been doing what he has had to do and God's blessings has been there.

He said, what shall I give you? Jacob said, you shall not give me anything.

If you will do this for me, I will again pasture your flock and keep it. Let me pasture all your flock today, removing it.

And so now we get to the story of the speckled as opposed to the black and the goats and one or the other.

So he wants to say, I'm only gonna take the speckled. The rest are yours and we'll let it be.

So Laban now becomes a little bit deceitful. He plans to defraud him. He's going to take all of the black goats and he's gonna put them away, miles away, three days journey.

And I guess his design was that Jacob's flock is just not going to be able to flourish, but his will.

And so Jacob will just get these few and he's gonna keep the rest. That's Laban's big plan. Then Jacob, in response to that, as God leads him, takes fresh sticks of poplar and almond and plain trees, peeled white stakes, exposing the white of the sticks.

I'm trying to figure out where he got this from. Clearly this is what God told him to do.

It's like, Noah, build me an ark. Was an ark. God has a way of just, just do it.

I've told you what to do, just do it. He sent the sticks that he had peeled in front of the flocks of the troughs, that is the watering places where the flocks came.

And since they bred when they came to drink, the flocks bred in front of the sticks. And so the flocks brought forth striped, speckled, and spotted.

And although Laban did everything he could to minimize the opportunity for the striped, speckled, and spotted,

God did not. God said, you do this, just do this. Don't ask why, just do this. He did it. And as a result, the flocks became strong.

Jacob separated the lambs, set the faces of the flock toward the stripe in the back, in the flock of Laban, put his own droves apart, and did not put them in with Laban's flock.

Whenever the stronger of the flock were breeding, Jacob would lay sticks in the troughs that they might breed.

The feeblers. The story here is God prospers Jacob in a way that can only be explained by the sovereignty of God over nations, over nature, over even the flocks of the field.

So how do these two stories fit together? In the beginning of the chapter, we have the story of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight of the sons.

Are in this story, plus a daughter. How does that fit into the story of the flocks and the speckled flocks?

And I come up to this answer. I believe that Jacob is rewarded for his obedience in how he sought a wife.

He did not do what Esau did. He did not take the Canaanite wife. He does take the journey.

He does lay down and sleep on a stone pillow and he sees the ladder and he hears the promises of God.

You will be a great nation. Once again, rehearsed for him that had been given to his father and his grandfather.

He then gets to Heron and by chance, he meets Rachel. And then by deception, he ends up marrying

Leah, who and I agree with you, Jeff, that's his rightful wife, however that came to be. But then there are children and why is it obvious that he's the rightful wife?

Because where does Judah come from? Leah. Leah. And that is the blessing.

That's the seed blessing that comes through Leah. But anyway, he's rewarded for his obedience, how he sought a,

God also remembers Jacob in his times of toil and the flocks. While he worked for at least 14 years, perhaps as much as 20 some years, the blessings that God gives to those that Jacob works with, it's even noticed by Laban.

I know that I am blessed because you are here. So God blesses him.

Laban's brought into the presence of God's abundant favor. The one who experiences

God's provision, that's true blessing. And I think that's the tie between these two sections.

On one side, it's the blessing of tribes, a blessing of children, which started the chapter before, won't finish until towards the end of the book.

But God blesses with the children, with the family, with the promise of the seed blessing that will be continued.

But God also cares for his children. And in this case, it's through the flocks.

It's through the riches and the plenty that God gives. I think that the one who experiences

God's provision, and it's God's provision, not yours, that's true blessing.

And I think that's what Jacob gets as we get through this chapter. Do you wanna close this, please? Yes. Father, every good and perfect gift comes from the

Father who likes me. Thank you for the blessing. We thank you for the blessing of children, and blessed is the one whose quiver is full of those arrows,

Lord. Thank you so much for the children of this church. We pray a blessing on them, Lord God. And we thank you for how you provide everything that we need for life and Godliness.

So thank you for our blessings in Jesus' name, amen. Amen, thank you. Have we decided what we're doing next week?

It's Thanksgiving Wednesday. I think we're still on. Okay. Yeah, we're still on.