Truth for Understanding Our World (Part 21) – Blessing in the Face of Poverty, Injustice, and Impossible Odds – Genesis 30:25–31:55
November 6, 2016Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Speaker: Jerry Cisar
Legendary guitarist Jack White describes the most important requirement for writing a song: “If you don’t have a struggle already inside of you or around you, you have to make one up.” That’s true, and I think it may also be true of all good narrative. Our text is not a song, but it was born out of struggle.
This biographical sketch of Jacob, borrowing from one author, is Everybody’s Biography. It is about Jacob’s struggle for the formation of his home and ultimately a nation. The people of Israel, in their own struggle in Egyptian slavery and becoming a nation in the promised land saw their own struggle in it. Most of us don’t have to make up a struggle in order to relate to this story. We just have to soak in the story and allow it to penetrate our thinking until we see how this struggle is our struggle… the most important struggle there is.
This is a story of the struggle necessary to get from darkness to light, chaos to order, barrenness to the blessing of a nation. It is also that struggle in which Jesus endured opposition from sinners. It is that struggle of which the writer of Hebrews says that “in our struggle against sin, we have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.” It’s that struggle for peace in your marriage and home, that struggle for prosperity in your labors so that you aren’t always working to put your money into a purse with holes in it. It’s that struggle of raising children who make it to adulthood as independent, godly, wrestling through life with faith believers.
What is your struggle? Join us this Sunday as we explore how the blessing of Abraham upon Jacob transformed his struggles into triumph, a triumph that has great meaning for believers in Jesus.