FBC Morning Light – January 16, 2023

Well, a good Monday morning to you. I hope your weekend was a good one, that you enjoyed worshiping together with God's people yesterday, and He taught you something from His Word. I also hope that this week as we look in the book of Genesis, these last several chapters of the book, that the Lord will really help us give some understanding to life and to His purposes and His working in that life.

Resentment Between Jacob and Laban

And so today, let me ask you this. Is there somebody that you're really holding some resentment toward? Maybe there's someone who has resentment toward you. Well, how's that working out? How's that playing out in your life?

You say, well, you know, I don't let that affect anything, you know, this person has done me wrong, I don't like them, I have to deal with them from time to time, but you know, I just don't let it affect me.

Well, here's what we learned from Genesis 31, and that is that a deep resentment is eventually going to show itself. It's eventually going to come out, and this resentment is one that exists between Jacob and his father-in-law, Laban.

And it comes out in the conflict when, you know, Jacob wants to leave and he can't go to his father-in-law and say, you know, I want to go back home. He has to sneak away because he doesn't trust his father-in-law, and then when his father-in-law realizes that Jacob is left with the family, he comes after him, and it's hard telling what he would do if God hadn't stepped in there.

The point that I want us to catch is that that resentment that has to have been there for a long time between Jacob and Laban comes out here in this particular chapter. Another thing I want us to see is the sovereign hand of God, the providential working of God in all of this, because the Lord uses that resentment and that relationship gone awry to give Jacob the yearning to go back home, where he belongs.

I mean, God didn't promise Jacob and his descendants the land of Paddan Aram, which is where he is with Laban. That's not where Jacob is supposed to stay. That's not where all his descendants are supposed to live.

They're supposed to inherit, eventually, the land of Canaan. So God uses that resentment between these two men to, you know, to well up within Jacob a longing to go back to Canaan, and so he indeed does.

Jacob's Fear of Esau and the Unresolved Conflict of the Past

Now then when you progress into chapter 32, you've got another relationship conflict that brings some fruit, and this time it's between Jacob and Esau. And you remember when Jacob left Canaan 20 years earlier, he left out of a fear for his life.

Why? Because he had deceived his father Isaac, and in that deception he stole the birthright from his brother Esau. And Esau was furious and threatened to kill Jacob when dad died. So because of that, he left.

He left, and they used the ruse, that is Rachel, his mother, used the ruse of, I mean Rebecca's mother, used the ruse of...he needs to get a wife, not from the Canaanite women. And so off they go. Jacob takes off to Paddan Aram looking for a wife.

So 20 years later, two decades have gone by, and now he's going to go back to Canaan, but what's the biggest concern on his heart? He's got all of these children, Jacob does, and he's got all of these children, he's got all of this prosperity, this wealth, and he's not really concerned about being attacked along the way, about robbers or anything like that.

His greatest concern is, will my brother Esau accept me? What's my brother Esau going to do to me? And so chapter 32, he concocts this plan to try to curry Esau's favor, to quell any lingering hostility that Esau might have toward Jacob.

And so again, what we discover here is that a relationship conflict that is left unresolved will seethe beneath the surface, and will leave you apprehensive, it'll leave you defensive, you'll be imagining things, you'll be...and they may be reasonable imaginations, but they are, you have to admit, imaginations.

What does that person really think of me? How will they treat me? Will they accept me? Will he still try to get back at me? What's he going to do to me? You see, these are the kinds of questions that are going through Jacob's mind as he anticipates meeting his brother Esau, and he has those things in his mind because of a conflict that was left unresolved from 20 years earlier.

Patching Up Broken Relationships

So my friend, this morning let me ask you this, is there some relationship where there's some resentment going on, and is there something you can do to try to ameliorate that, to satisfy that, to settle it?

Is there an unresolved conflict, maybe between a sibling, maybe between a parent, you and a parent? You know, what kind of conflicts have you left unresolved? They will eat at you in time, they will. So let's allow this passage of Scripture to get us to stop and think, and see, are there some relationships I need to patch up?

Are there some things I need, some steps I need to take to try to get some things right with someone else? Well, let's ponder that today. So our Father, thank you for this challenging passage from Genesis, and I pray that you would use it in our hearts and in our lives.

We ask in Jesus' name, Amen. All right, well listen, have a great day, and I trust the Lord will bless you in it.