Day 013 - Genesis 31-32

The idea of the Lord's favour being on one particular person, his family and eventually a nation is a little strange to someone who has grown up in an environment where God is equally available to all. With hindsight it's possible to know where this whole thing is going and when the word Israel pops up at the end of chapter for the first time the modern reader knows that this story is still going on today in some shape or form.

God is extravagant in what he gives to Abraham, Isaac and now Jacob, but he doesn't overwhelm them and they are always dependant on him. It's a slow process as we are now a couple of generations down from the original promise and all that seems to have happened is the accumulation of wives, slaves and livestock for Abraham's descendants.

And then we have this strange wrestling match where Jacob becomes one of the few people in the Bible before Jesus came who actually gets to meet with God in a real physical way. He's just as stubborn as he's always been and it costs him to extent of being crippled for the rest of his life.

This passage has again reminded me of how the Bible is written, not as a God's list of rules for living or a book of systematic theology, but a story of people and their interaction with him. As such it contains little bits of human activity and at times is even humorous. The scene where Laban is searching for his household gods which Rachel is sitting on brought a chuckle to my lips as I was reading it out. It seems that God is not just concerned with the big picture, but with the smaller less significant things of life.