Jacob’s Talk

Shalom aleichem. Good morning and peace and blessing be upon you. 

My name is Jacob. I have come to you from Egypt where I am living out my final years. I am now about 140 years old to which you will undoubtedly say ‘Yeah, and you look it!’ I bow to your approbation.

I am in the Bible, in fact, which some of you may have heard of. And I know this is very unlikely, but has anyone here ever heard of me?

Okay, good. Well done! Now, I am here to talk to you about my favourite subject…That is me…I mean God…or rather, me and God. No, no, that should be God and me.  

Anyway, I am going to tell you how I became as you are, that is how I became a believer in and worshipper of the one true God. And, very importantly, why.

Now I have heard it said that we should be always ready to give a reason for the hope that lies in us. Have you perhaps heard that saying?

Why do we need to do that? So that others might become as we are. I don’t mean they should become a Hebrew like me, or a Scottish like you - you are all Scottish, I think. Or acquire a voice like a frog and a face like a flea. What I mean is that, like us, they should become persuaded that the true God exists and that he is our true father. This, as you will find out, is what I wanted for my brother.

So, this need to give a reason was made clear to me one day when I was trying to persuade my er…dear...er…brother Esau about God. I think you call it doing evangelism. This is what happened. I told him I believed in God. So far so pretty impressive I thought. He asked - or rather shouted - why, and rather boldly called me a ‘little weed’. I said ‘no reason’. At the time I thought that was quite a good answer. He said ‘thought so’ then proceeded to bash me up. Needless to say, he was not persuaded.

That made me stop and think. Was I doing this evangelism thing all wrong? I decided to talk to my dear mama. At night, when daddy (also known as Isaac) and my bro (also known as Esau) were asleep, mama and I would talk and talk and talk. 

I will let you in on a little secret. Part of me did wonder if God really existed. I mean, I had never actually experienced him, had I? So how did I know he really existed? Mama however told me that Abraham knew God really existed. For why? I asked. Because he had experienced God in many ways: as a voice speaking to him, in visions and dreams, and face-to-face. This was exciting to me. This was real evidence, though not first-hand evidence.

Another thing we talked about was the Great Flood. Could it really point to an almighty God who had judged the world? And did the ark still exist? If so, were these evidences for the existence of God? Mama said so. She had heard that everywhere there were stories, originally told by eyewitnesses, about a great flood. These stories pointed to a single truth: there was a Creator God whose mighty power was sufficient to cause a global flood.

Moreover, she said, she had met traders coming from the north, from a place called Ararat, who claimed to have seen a massive ark, resting on a mountain top, hundreds of miles from the sea. How could that happen except that there had been a great flood and except a god had engineered it? Now this I felt was a powerful argument.

There was something else we talked about which was much closer to home: Sodom and Gomorrah. I had seen their remains. Certainly something very strange had happened there, something an almighty God could do. Bricks had turned to glass, a freshwater lake had turned into a death zone. But was that proof of the existence of God? The local Canaanites mocked the idea. It was just a natural event, they said, nothing more, happens all the time. When asked where else it had happened, they could not say.

But I had spoken about it many times to my grandfather Abraham before his death when I was 15. He said that with his own eyes he witnessed the fireball that had destroyed these cities. And, more importantly, he had seen and spoken with God immediately before the destruction had happened and that God had said it would happen. Abraham’s nephew Lot and his two daughters confirmed the story, claiming also to have been rescued by angels. Four eye-witnesses? Surely this was persuasive evidence?

Who was I going to believe? The Canaanites or Abraham and Lot? The latter always told the truth and they also wanted to walk with God; the Canaanites, by contrast, did not. Here was an important principle: we should trust those who walk in truth. So here again was a reason to believe. 

On another occasion, my mother told me about the names of the first 10 patriarchs. They seem to contain a mysterious but wonderful message. The message was, she said, common knowledge among those who called on the name of the Lord, and though the precise meaning of the message was hidden to them, it spoke of God rescuing humanity from its current grievous estate. Let us now look at what this message says.

Perhaps, my mother and I speculated, the message might be related to something God had once told the serpent after it had first tempted humanity into rebellion:

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers.

He will crush your head and you will strike his heel.

In this way, I built up reasons - some stronger, some weaker - to believe in a God who was there and specifically to believe in the holy but loving God of my fathers whom we most commonly called by these glorious names: El Shaddai, God Almighty, El Olam, the Everlasting God, and El Elyon, God Most High. While the evidence could be questioned, the balance of probability encouraged me to trust it.

So I returned to my brother and had another go at the evangelism, sure this time of a stunning success. He would surely submit and acknowledge that God was indeed God and, ahem, that I was an accomplished evangelist.

So I told him “Esau, I still believe in God”, to which he again replied “Why, you little weed?” I retorted with I think some justified pride, “Er…for many reasons, actually!” To which he again replied “Thought so!” and proceeded to beat me up again.

At this point in my life, I was on the road to faith in God and was beginning to call on the name of the Lord. “God, if you are there, please make yourself real to me”. 

Now those who know me today reckon me to be a great and holy man. I have even been allowed to bless the ruler of the world, the Pharaoh of Egypt. But the truth is rather different and I want to make that plain.

For reasons that are too complicated to explain and are also not especially relevant, my family found itself at war with itself: mother against father, brother against brother, father against one son, and mother against the other son.

This resulted in me deceiving my aged father, robbing my brother of his rightful inheritance, perhaps hastening my mother’s death and blaspheming my God, all things that bring great shame in our Hebrew culture. God had told Abraham to walk before him and be blameless. I now was wanting to walk before God, but my behaviour had been far from blameless and I was justly shamed.

For this Esau was threatening to kill me and so I was forced to flee to Harran, one month’s march to the north, for a short while it was thought, but it was to become a 20-year exile. I was to become a stranger in a strange land away from my family home and forced to work in the open with livestock, work to which I was unsuited and which cast a shadow across my life. But before that, something extraordinary happened.

As I passed across the central highlands of Canaan, aware that there were dangers to the left and dangers to the right, for the Canaanites are a dangerous and barbaric people, I called urgently on the name of the Lord. To my surprise, my journey was without incident and after several days I stopped to sleep the night outside a city called Luz. There was no room for me in any inn that night. 

As I lay staring at the great canopy of the heavens, recalling God’s promises to my father and grandfather to make their descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, I fell into a sleep and I dreamed a dream. What is surprising to me is that while most dreams disappear from the memory faster than the morning dew, this one has remained with me now for nearly 70 years. 

In it I saw a stairway leading from where I was lying far up into the sky to heaven itself. And on that staircase glowing and glorious angels were to be seen, some ascending, some descending. And then I saw the Lord.

Now mark this: a blasphemer, fraudster, deceiver and perhaps a manslayer was lying on the dirt and yet the Lord was standing over and above and next to him. And there was no condemnation.

And the Lord spoke to this man and promised to bring him back at last to his home. And he made the same promises to him that had been made to his father Isaac and his grandfather Abraham. The things he said lifted this poor man from the dust to the heights of heaven.

When I awoke, the dream still clear, I knelt down with my head bowed and prayed, my humbled spirit within echoing this my posture, and then I stood, my arms raised to heaven, again my exalting spirit echoing this my posture.

And when at last I continued on my way, marvelling and laughing and leaping for joy, I reflected that here I had experienced that ultimate reason for belief in God: I had encountered him. I knew he existed. Of this I had no doubt. But I also realised one further thing, which is of far greater importance: what really matters is not so much belief in God as relationship with and trust in him, our creator and our true father, though the latter by no means comes easily.

Now to conclude, I hope that in this my testimony I have shown the need to give reasons for the faith that lies in us. Religious faith is always fortified by solid evidence. And when speaking with our neighbour, if we can present such evidences, we will be helping them rather than hindering them. However, it is useful to remember that there are those who are impervious to evidence. My brother Esau is one such. That is, alas, a mystery and heartbreak for me, and much more so to God I think.