This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
Lesson 10: “Jacob-Israel”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- This lesson ignores God’s restating His covenant with Abraham to Jacob, the son whom God chose to receive the covenant blessings.
- The lesson focusses on the speculative analyses that Jacob longed for forgiveness for deceiving Esau and changed his life because God forgave him.
- The lesson misses the God-centered view of Scripture in the story of Jacob-Israel and misses the significance of the nation Israel’s identity being defined by Jacob’s old name and his new name.
This lesson makes the story of Jacob as he leaves Laban and encounters his brother Esau, ultimately settling in Canaan, all about Jacob’s weakness and emotions and how he became different because God forgave him and blessed him and changed his name.
In other words, this lesson misses the God-centered sovereignty that makes this account of the third patriarch significant. The point isn’t that Jacob changed but that God did what God intended to do, fulfilling His purposes, His promises to Abraham, and bringing His holy Seed into existence.
Perhaps the most obvious failure is the lesson’s not examining that God renewed His covenant with Abraham when He led Jacob back to Bethel in the land of Canaan. It also misses the significance of Jacob’s wrestling with the angel of God on his way to see Esau.
The lesson claims that Jacob was desperate for God to forgive his deception of Esau, and when the Lord wrestled with him, Jacob demonstrated his passionate desire to be forgiven by refusing to let “the man” go without a blessing. This focus, however, is not in Scripture.
Genesis 32 describes this experience as one in which Jacob realized by the end of the night that he was struggling with God. The struggle did not end definitively until “the man” touched Jacob’s hip and dislocated it. Before that moment, when Jacob told “the man” his name, the man told Jacob, “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed” (v. 28).
Before Jacob met Esau, whom he was afraid to encounter, God changed his name from Jacob, which meant “one who supplants”, to Israel, which means “He who strives with God”. In other words, God gave him a new identity; no longer would he merely be the one who struggles and deceives to get his way, but he would struggle with God. Struggling with God directs one’s attention toward God, not toward one’s own desire to overpower and overcome men.
In Genesis 35, after God had led him to settle in Bethel, God met him again and reiterated his new name: Israel. At that time God restated the terms of His unconditional covenant and confirmed that Jacob-Israel was His chosen one through whom He would bring “a nation and a company of nations” (v. 11), and He was giving his descendants the land He had originally promised to Abraham. In this covenant blessing God echoed His original words to Adam and Eve, that he should “be fruitful and multiply”, and through his seed God was keeping His promises.
The lesson says nothing about God’s unconditional covenant with Abraham being restated and confirmed to Jacob, and it also evades the point that the nation of Israel would take on the name of this particular son of Isaac. The nation of Israel, often referred to by the prophets as “Jacob”, received its identity as the people who struggled both with God (Israel) and with men (Jacob). God’s choice of name for Jacob was His choice of name for His nation, and the nation of Israel was part of God’s fulfillment of His unconditional covenant with Abraham.
These eternal, sovereign moments in Jacob’s life are reduced in the lesson to moralisms showing how a flawed man became better over time. This focus, though, is wrong. Jacob did not become “better”; rather, he learned increasingly to trust the God who had sovereignly chosen him and gave him the twelve sons who would become the fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel.
These men did nothing to recommend themselves to God; God chose them and accomplished His purposes in their lives by confronting them with Himself and showing them that they couldn’t avoid or outsmart God. They could only submit. The lesson says that God still accomplished His purposes in spite of all the ways Jacob (and others) messed up and got in God’s way.
This idea is not in Scripture. Jacob and the other men God chose were depraved by nature, and God worked in their lives to accomplish His purposes and to teach them to trust. They were never in God’s way. Their weakness was always part of God’s Plan A, and God worked in them to bring them into HIS story.
Adventism has a way of writing the sovereign power of God out of the Bible stories. In fact, it disconnects the biblical accounts from each other and renders them moral lessons as the author superimpose philosophical and psychological ideas onto the characters.
One last detail: the lesson pictures Levi and Simeon, the brothers of Dinah who devised the plan to kill all the men of Shechem by deceitful means after the prince raped Dinah, as men “who present themselves as the defenders of God and His commandments, and who resist intermarriage with the Canaanites (Lev. 19:29)…” (p. 127).
This idea is nowhere in the Bible. These brothers of Dinah are simply defending the honor of their sister and are punishing the people who besmirched their family’s name. It is illegitimate for the lesson to say the resisted intermarriage and to refer to Leviticus 19 because the law had not yet been given!
The law did not exist before Sinai; there were no Ten Commandments, and there were no laws against intermarriage. This gratuitous insertion of the Adventist agenda that law is eternal twists the story and uses this account for cultic purposes.
The story of Jacob is complex and disturbing in many ways, but throughout the entire narrative in Genensis, God is at work, revealing Himself and teaching His chosen people to trust Him as He keeps His eternal, unconditional promises to Abraham. †
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