FBC Daily Devotional – January 29, 2021

Well, a good Friday to you. Hope your week has gone well, as it is now winding down. You're looking forward to the weekend. Hope you're looking forward to the Lord's Day, and we're planning to gather together at 1030 for a morning worship service at church.

And if you can join us in person, you're welcome to do that. Not quite comfortable getting out because of COVID, understand that as well. But you can join us online, join us by live stream on Facebook Live at 1030, or on the YouTube, we have a YouTube channel, or at faithbaptisterling .com, the church home page.

By the way, on that home page, there's a little box for where you can watch the live stream. But to the right side of that box is a list of past videos, and you can click through that, and you can watch all of the past devotionals, and church services, and any videos that we've done in the last year are available there.

Jacob’s Deception of Laban in Genesis 31

But anyway, well, if you've been following in the Bible reading, then you saw today that the old trickster is up to it again. It's up to his old tricks, and you wonder, will he ever learn? Will he ever learn?

Will he ever change? I'm talking about Jacob here, because we read in chapter 31 of Genesis, verse 20, that Jacob tricked Laban the Aramean by not telling him that he intended to flee. All right, so Jacob is married to Laban's daughters, and he has, through those daughters, produced 11 sons, and Jacob's tired of Laban's treatment, and so he's wanting to take off.

He goes to his daughters and says, you know, the Lord told me to go back to my homeland, and they said, okay, let's go. And so off they go, but they don't mention a word of this to Laban, because he doesn't want the pressure that Laban would put on him to try to get him to stay.

So he tricks his father-in-law and takes off. And isn't this a sad, tragic thing? I mean, think of this from Laban's perspective, right? I mean, after all, Laban is his wife's father, and he is the grandfather to these children, and all of a sudden, they're just, boom, taken away, quite suddenly.

How little we think of others when we're scheming and devising and even tricking, maybe, to better our own situation. How little we think of others. This struck me the other day in a sort of sick, comical sort of way.

I had gotten, in one day, I had gotten about a dozen of these spam phone calls on my cell phone from Molly at Apple Support, and she was.

Seriously.

Warning me that my iCloud account had been hacked. Well, I got sick and tired of this. I kept getting it. I guess there's got to be some way. I guess every time I'd hang up, I'd hit the block, you know, so they wouldn't call back.

But they just, you know, they do these different random number things. So I kept getting, it was a different number that called every time. So finally, I said, okay. Molly called again, and I let her finish her spiel, and she says, for Apple Support, press 1.

I said, okay, so I pressed 1, and I got Apple Support, and this guy from India gets on, and he says, Hello, this is Apple Support. How may I help you? And I said, yeah, I understand that my iCloud account's been hacked, and I'm not sure about this.

He says, oh, yes, yes, I see here that your account has been compromised. We can help you with that. And he said, and so then I said, well, wait a minute. Well, I'm a little bit confused because I don't even have a single Apple product.

I don't own an Apple product. I don't have an iCloud account. How could my account get hacked? Why are you guys scamming me like this? Why are you trying to scam me? And then he just laughs. He laughs.

He says, oh, you're like McDonald's. It's just good. I said, what? He said, oh, you're like McDonald's. It's just good. I said, it's good to scam me? He goes, ah, I said, well, you're getting nothing out of me, and I hung up, and I thought,.

Yeah,.

How little the trickster cares or is in the least bit concerned about how his trickery is going to impact those he tricks. He doesn't care. Just let him get what he wants for himself. And by the way, trickery begets trickery, doesn't it?

Remember, Laban over and over again tricked Jacob, who tricked others, his brother, for example, his father. But even Rachel joins in the tricking, and you have that account of Laban's household gods, the whatever statues he made, and you know, we don't know who those gods were supposed to represent, if they were supposed to represent Elohim or the gods of the territory there.

We don't know. But whatever the case, Rachel stole them, and Jacob didn't know about it. Nobody else knew about it. She just stole them. And then when Laban confronted Jacob about the stealing of those household gods, he was adamant.

Nobody here stole them. Well, Rachel knew that she had. So she plays a trickery game herself. And she sits on the saddlebag that has the gods in it, and she tells her father when he comes in the tent, forgive me, I can't get up.

The Way of Women is with me. You know, he's having her monthly time, and so she says, I can't get up. Because she didn't want Dad going in. Trickery begets trickery. But there's one thing that is said in this account on the part of Laban that gives us a little bit of insight, I think, into the conflict between Laban and Jacob.

And it's an attitude that he expresses that is unfortunately not an unheard-of attitude in our own day. And listen to what Laban says to Jacob when he confronts him in verse 43 of chapter 31. Laban answered and said to Jacob, the daughters, speaking of Rachel and Leah, are my daughters.

The children are my children. The flocks are my flocks, and all that you see is mine. You get what Laban is saying here? He's telling Jacob that this whole entourage around you, your wives, your children, your livestock that you earned by the work that you did,.

All the.

Servants that you've acquired, all of this that you have, he says, it's not yours. It's mine. It's mine. Because I'm the dad. I'm the dad. The daughters are mine. The son, the children are mine. The flocks are mine.

Everything is mine. Now that's a rather extreme example, but you know, I've seen this expressed in our day on the part of parents, moms, or dads and or dads, who when their children go off and get married, they're just not able to let go.

And they still have the attitude, express the attitude, that that child who's gone off and got married is still my child. It's not your wife. It's my daughter, and he's not your husband. He's my son. Have you read any of the, do you ever read any of the letters to the dear Abby or whatever, and oftentimes you read of a wife who is beside herself because her mother-in-law still has such control over her son, the husband, and she just it's like she just dominates him.

She hasn't learned to let go. Oh, how much conflict is caused in families? How much dysfunction ends up happening in families when the parents don't know how to let go. Their children are to leave mother and father and cleave to their spouse.

But sometimes, sometimes it's hard to cut the apron strings. Laban couldn't cut them. He thought he owned it all. He thought he had rights over it all, and that created all kinds of conflict. Well, from these very real people who lived long ago, we see challenges and problems that are created in life even in the 21st century.

Wisdom, Deception, and Letting Go in Family Relationships

Deception, trickery, misappropriation of what isn't really mine. May God give us wisdom to live differently. Our Father and our God, we thank you for these very, very difficult to read sometimes accounts of these people in the Old Testament and what they went through, how they expressed their attitudes, and even their sin.

The Lord help us learn from them and grow from it, that we may avoid some of the disasters, some of the difficulties and challenges that they faced. We pray that we would have that wisdom by your grace.

We ask it in Jesus name. Amen. All right, well have a good rest of your Friday, and I hope you have a wonderful weekend. A good Lord's Day on Sunday. God bless.