Then God said to Jacob, “Go up to Bethel and settle there, and build an altar there to God, who appeared to you when you were fleeing from your brother Esau.” – Genesis 35:1

Today’s Scripture Reading (June 20, 2015): Genesis 35

The most common prayer of humanity probably starts out something like this – “God if you will get me out of this than I will …” The blank probably varies, but the sentiment of the prayer is fairly stable. And then time does its thing. God delivers on his promise, or dumb luck intervenes, either way we escape from the situation and the prayer, well, it is forgotten – at least, until the next crisis appears - and then we start to pray it again and the cycle repeats itself. I don’t think that it is malicious on our part, I don’t think it is because we intend to not keep our part of the bargain, it is just that when the crisis ends and our stress level drops, our priorities begin re-arrange. And besides, how do we know when it is God that has moved and taken us from our situation and when it is dumb luck. (I have to admit, the movements of God in my life have often looked like dumb luck.)

When Jacob had been running from Esau, he was pretty sure that his life was over. He was leaving the only place that he had ever known, and his own brother wanted him dead. Jacob was a man with a past, but he also seemed to be a man without a future. Exhausted, he had fallen asleep in a field with a stone under his head. But during the night he had a vision of a stairway, and on the stairway the angels of God were ascending and descending, and God himself was standing above the stairway. It all felt so real as God introduced himself to Jacob as the God of Abraham and Isaac. And Jacob knew that this was a holy place, and he promised that if God would watch over him and somehow return him to his home, that he would worship God, and on this place he would build the house of God and he, Jacob, would give to God a tithe or a tenth of everything.

And God watched over Jacob, and brought him home again, and it seemed that Jacob had forgotten all that he had promised to do. Even after “the God of Bethel” had told Jacob to return home, Jacob still seem to struggle in remembering his promise. And so God makes it plain. Go to Bethel and build the altar that you promise to build for me on the night that you were running away from Esau. And then live there and worship me.

The reality is that this is probably what God had intended when he called Jacob back to Canaan in the first place. The phrase “I am the God of Bethel” (Genesis 31:13) was most likely both a reminder to Jacob of the promise that he had made at Bethel, and the place to which God wanted him to return. And if Jacob had gone to Bethel in the first place, the terrible events that had happened at Shechem would never have taken place.

The truth was that on Jacob God was going to build the nation of Israel. But it couldn’t just be a physical nation, Israel needed to be more than that – it had to be a spiritual house. And God’s plan was for the building of that house to begin in Bethel.  

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Genesis 36