Faithful Then, Faithful Now | God is for God - Genesis 35-36(June 11) Myles Holmes

Hello and welcome to the Redemption Church Podcast.

We're a church in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada that exists to glorify God through the fulfillment of the Great Commission and the spirit of the Great Commandment.

Thanks for joining us today.

God, we do praise you.

For Lord, to be in your presence, to know you in any measure of truth, Lord, is to know that you are faithful to a wayward, to a sinful, to a hard-hearted people.

And God, we've seen this so clearly as we have walked through the life of Jacob.

But God, we've witnessed it so clearly in our own life.

We don't deserve you.

And yet, God, the fact that we are standing here in this place, about to hear your word is such proof, Lord, of your faithfulness to us.

God, that you wish to speak to us.

That you wish to be glorified in our hearts.

And so, God, I pray that those things would happen.

God, would you speak your word?

And God, would you find your hearts submissive to your word?

Wanting to bow down and worship.

We pray by the power of your Holy Spirit.

And pray this all in the name of your Son.

Amen.

Amen.

So good to be with you this morning.

If you have your Bible, and I hope that you do, you can open it up to Genesis chapter 35.

Genesis 35 · chapter mention

And we're going to be in Genesis chapter 35 and 36 this morning.

Genesis 35 · chapter mention

But Genesis 36 has a lot of really hard to pronounce names, so I'm going to just read Genesis 35, and you are going to cover the rest with grace.

And we're also going to work through Genesis 36, which I could have read Genesis 36.

I have a rule that if you read these names with enough confidence, anyone will believe you.

But we will work through that together, picking out portions we need to understand what Moses is writing to us.

Look what God's word says in Genesis 35, verse 1.

Genesis 35:1

God said to Jacob, Arise, go up to Bethel and dwell there.

Make an altar there to the God who appeared to you when you fled from your brother Esau.

So Jacob and said to his household and to all who were with him, Put away the foreign gods that are among you, and purify yourselves and change your garments.

Then let us arise and go up to Bethel, so that I may make there an altar to the God who answers me in the day of my distress, and has been with me wherever I have gone.

So they gave to Jacob all the foreign gods that they had, and the rings that were in their ears.

Jacob hid them under the Terabith tree that was near Shechem.

And as they journeyed, a terror from God fell upon the cities that were around them, so that they did not pursue the sons of Jacob.

And Jacob came to Luz, that is, Bethel, which was in the land of Canaan, he and all the people who were with him.

And there he built an alt altar and called the place El Bethel, because there God had revealed himself to him when he fled from his brother.

And Deborah, Rebekah's nurse, died, and she was buried under an oak below Bethel.

So he called its name Alan Bakuth.

God appeared to Jacob again, and when he came from Padan Aram and blessed him.

And God said to him, Your name is Jacob.

No longer shall your name be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name.

So he called his name Israel.

And God said to him, I am God Almighty, be fruitful and multiply.

A nation and a company of nations shall come from you, and kings shall come from your own body.

The land that I gave to Abraham and to Isaac I will give to you, and I will give to the land of your offspring after you.

Then God went up from him in the place where he had spoken with him, and Jacob set up a pillar in the place where he had spoken with him, a pillar of stone.

He poured out a drink offering on it, and poured oil on it.

So Jacob called the name of the place where God had spoken with him, Bethel.

Then they journeyed from Bethel, when they were some distance from Ephrath.

Rachel went into labor, and she had hard labor.

And when her labor was at its hardest, the midwife said to her, Do not fear, for you have another son.

And as her soul was departing, for she was dying, she called his name Benoni.

But his father called him Benjamin.

So Rachel died, and she was buried on the way to Ephraith, that is Bethlehem.

And Jacob set up a pillar over her tomb.

It is the pillar of Rachel's tomb, which is there to this day.

Israel journeyed on and pitched his tent beyond the tower of Eder.

When Israel lived in that land, Reuben went and lay with Bilhah, his father's concubine, and Israel heard of it.

Now the sons of Jacob were twelve, the sons of Leah, Reuben, Jacob's firstborn, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun, the sons of Rachel, Joseph and Benjamin, the sons of Bilhah, Rachel's servant, Dan and Naphteli, the sons of Zilpah, Leah's servant, Gad and Asher.

These were the sons of Jacob who were born to him in Padan Aram.

And Jacob came to his father Isaac at Mamre, or Kiriath Arabah, that is Hebron, where Abraham and Isaac had sojourned.

Now the days of Isaac were 180 years, and Isaac breathed his last, and he died, and was gathered to his people, old and full of days, and his sons Esau and Jacob buried him.

There are three questions that every human being, regardless of your world view, must answer.

These are questions that everyone, I think, grapples with to a certain degree, but not necessarily with the same frequency.

And these questions that every human being wrestles with are the questions of how, where, and why.

The first question is, how did we get here?

How did this thing called humanity get to be to this place on earth?

And the second question is, where are we going?

What happens after death?

And the third question is, is this, why are we here?

Why do the things that happen in our life happen?

What's the purpose of life?

Now the last question, really, the question of why, it's really the most potent question, isn't it?

Because that question is, it's really the answer to that question is how we filter the events of our life.

Everything that happens in our life, we filter through the way that we answer that question, why are we here?

It's how we make sense of our world.

And so our answer to that question, why are we here?

Why are the things that are happening happening?

Really dictates the way that we respond to the events of life.

And so take, for example, the popular worldview of our day, naturalism, which believes in the evolution of humankind according to survival.

Well, that worldview really responds to the events of life as though they're just kind of random chance.

And there kind of grows this futile feeling of like there's no control.

You're just kind of a part of this machine that's chugging along.

Well, we can take it into the religious world, and there are some who believe that the purpose of life, why we are here, is so that we can live righteous lives in order that we might appease the God who created us.

And so they have a sense of us as created beings, but they think that their purpose maybe is to live a righteous life, to appease this God through morality.

You know the end of that, that it's like a treadmill where you're constantly running, but you're getting nowhere.

The end of that is discouragement and despair.

And we could walk through every worldview and the different ways that they answer this question: why are we here?

And yet, what I want to point out this morning is that our answer to that question is very important because it dictates the way that we respond to the events of our life.

And it really guides us as we navigate our life, doesn't it?

Well, as we've walked with Jacob over these last few weeks, we are coming this week to the end really of Jacob's story in Genesis.

Not that Jacob dies at the end of this, but after these chapters, Joseph will really take the spotlight, and Jacob's story comes to an end.

And as we've walked through Jacob's story, it really has been, we've described it before, as a train wreck.

It has been failure after failure.

And I wonder at this point if Jacob could look back on his life after the devastation of what happened in chapter 34.

I wonder if he would look back on his life and ask this question why are these things happening?

Remember that Jacob had a really grand promise, didn't he?

At the beginning of Jacob's life, the God of the universe, the one who created the whole world and all the beings on it, said to Jacob, You are my chosen child, and it is through you that I am going to accomplish my plans.

Now I don't know about you, but if God had showed up to me the way that he had showed up to Jacob and told me that I was the one through whom he was going to accomplish his plans for the world, that would get to my head a little bit.

Would it not get to your head a little bit?

Would you not kind of have all these dreams and aspirations of what life might look like if God were to appear to you and say, hey, you're the one I'm going to work through?

Yet here Jacob is at the end of his life and he looks back, and it's really been failure after failure, most of his own doing, but really he's been surrounded by people that also fail him as well.

I wonder if Jacob looks back on his life and he asks this question, why has life played out this way?

Friends, I'm reminded that we often do the very same thing, don't we?

That each of us in this room very likely has a period of our life that we look back to with regret, if not sometimes the whole thing.

We look back to our life, over our life, and we ask this question why have things gone this way?

Maybe some of the frustration is personal.

Maybe it's like, why did I act that way for so many years?

Why did I backslide for so many years?

Why didn't I turn to the Lord sooner?

Why didn't I raise my kids a different way so that now they could have followed the Lord?

And our lives are really filled with regret as we look back and think about the way that things played out.

For some of us, it's a little less personal.

We look back on our life, and because of the sins of other people or the way that other people have treated us, we are filled with this question: why God?

Why would you do these things?

Jacob wrestles with this question.

We wrestle with this question.

And I believe this morning, as we end the story of Jacob, we are given this answer to why God does the things he does, why we are here.

We're given this answer in the life of Jacob as we think about where Jacob is now and all that God's going to accomplish in this final place of Jacob.

Take a moment with me to think about Jacob's journey.

You remember when Jacob began, he had left Beersheba under the threat of his brother Esau, of whom he had stolen the birthright and he had stolen the blessing from.

And his brother, talk about families that are messed up, his brother wanted to kill him.

And so, in order to protect him, Jacob's mother sent him away.

Jacob is alone, sleeping with his a rock for a pillow.

And you remember what happens at Bethel the first time that Jacob goes there?

God meets with Jacob.

And in this place of desolation and in this place of loneliness, Jacob sees God.

And he sees the ladder reaching from heaven to earth, and he sees the angels descending upon it.

And what does Jacob say?

Surely God is in this place.

But when we walk through that passage, we notice something.

Jacob misses the point.

God appears to Jacob, and instead of Jacob saying, What an amazing God, you know what Jacob says?

What an amazing place.

We looked at that and we said, Jacob, you're missing the point.

You are in the presence of the most glorious worthy God.

And Jacob worships the place.

Jacob doesn't understand the purpose for which he was created.

And so over the next 20 plus years, God would bring him on a journey to the place that we come to this morning.

And the journey was this God needed to show Jacob that the only thing, the only person that was worthy of his worship was God himself.

That if Jacob wanted to understand his life, he needed to understand this: that the only person worthy of his worship was not Jacob himself.

It was not the place of Bethel.

It was the God of Bethel.

And so Jacob leaves Bethel awed by the place and he goes to Haran for 20 years.

Nothing goes well.

He's deceived by Jacob 2.0 and Laban.

He experiences family strife.

And Jacob, in Genesis 34, we read it last week.

We read of all the family tragedy with Dinah and the ways that the Canaanites abused her and the horrible, horrific response of Jacob's sons in response to the sexual assault of Dinah.

Jacob has experienced a lot.

Jacob has been wayward, and so it's significant that in Genesis 35, verse 1, we read these words.

Genesis 35:1

God said to Jacob, Arise, go up to Bethel and dwell there.

After all that Jacob had been through, what does God, what word does God have for Jacob?

The word is this, return to me.

Return to me.

Return to me and build an altar to worship me.

Now Jacob does just that.

He listens to God.

And notice in verse 7, notice in verse 7 that there's a categorical shift in Jacob's mind.

Do you read it in verse 7?

It says, And there he built an altar and called the place El Bethel, which means the God of Bethel.

And notice why he named it that.

He said, Because there God had revealed himself to him when he fled from his brother.

Jacob goes back to this place and something categorically has changed in his mind.

Jacob realizes when he comes back to Bethel that the most amazing thing about Bethel is not the place.

The most amazing thing about Bethel is God.

That God was there.

That the purpose of Jacob's life, Jacob would never live a life that would make sense unless he understood this truth, that the most important detail of your life is that God has the preeminent place of worship in your heart.

Another way that we could phrase the question that we're asking this morning is this: When God created you, and now because God has created you, what is God's desire for you?

God's your creator.

What's the purpose that He created you for?

You know that if someone, a mechanic, builds a car, there's a purpose for which they built that car for someone to drive in.

And so, what's the purpose for which God created you?

Why are you here?

And we understand in the life of Jacob exactly what God is leading us to.

God is leading us to a place where we recognize that the reason God created us is for God.

What's God's passion in your life?

God's passion is for God.

God's passion is that you worship Him.

God's passion for you, no matter where you are in your walk with the Lord, whether you are the maturest of Christians, whether you feel like you've you're kind of like slugging in in the Christian life, where you feel like you've been backsliding for years, you know what God's desire for you is in this very moment.

Even if you don't know the Lord, God's desire is that you leave from this place with more of him.

God's desire is for God.

He wants you to have more of him.

This is the work that he wants to do in your life.

This is the work that he wanted to do in Jacob's life.

And once Jacob understood this, he can make sense of all the ways that God, all the things that God had done in him.

God's passion for our life is that we have more of him.

God's passion is for God.

Well, we need to recognize this in the story of Jacob, and so I want you to see this in three ways this morning.

God's passion is for God, and I want you to see that when we understand this, we recognize that this is a glory that consumes us.

It's a glory that consumes us.

Now, Jacob up until this point has not been amazed by God, has he?

Because we think about the life of Jacob, like Jacob has done everything but point his eyes on the Lord.

I wonder this morning if there are any who are here that are in that place.

Your whole life has just been lived, and the only thing that you've ever really paid attention to is the thing that is right in front of you.

We've talked about this before, that I think that this is kind of like the spiritual condition of North America.

North America, in principle and in philosophy, is not really hostile to God, although it's growing increasingly.

But if you were to talk to your neighbor about the Lord, what you would find is that it's not so much that they've kind of like formulated a worldview of who God is and why God doesn't exist, more so, it's just that they haven't really thought about the Lord.

I think probably the worldview could be summed up as I don't know.

And not only that, as I don't really care to know.

And that's really been Jacob's life.

Jacob, though he is the chosen child of God, though God has promised to work through him, Jacob has lived his life distracted.

And on his journey, as although he has been led by God, he has always been either disobedient, or his obedience has kind of been like this half-hearted obedience.

Think about the very place that Jacob even finds himself in verse 1.

Jacob finds himself in Shechem.

And you'll remember that in Genesis 28, God, when God appeared to Jacob and Bethel, Jacob made a vow to God.

You know what Jacob said?

He said, I'm gonna come back to this place.

I'm gonna go to Padan Aram.

I'm gonna find there a wife.

And Jacob made a vow to God that he would come back to Bethel.

But if you were to look on a map, you would find that Shechem is like the first city you can stop in in Canaan.

Instead of going to Bethel, Jacob made his home in Shechem.

And this really summarizes Jacob's obedience.

It's always like half-hearted.

Jacob never goes all the way.

Jacob never listens to God fully.

God is a part of Jacob's life, but he's not the whole part.

And there's so much application for us here this morning.

Because if you truly have a relationship with God, that relationship consists of the glory of God that consumes you fully.

The problem is that so many have a faith that is happy to include God in their life, but not happy to make much of God in their life.

It's like, I'm happy for God to be a part of my life.

I'm happy for God to be the Sunday morning part of my life.

And yet, what we discover when we come to know God is that God is jealous for all of our worship.

He's not looking for half-hearted obedience, he's looking for full obedience.

This is why Jesus said, you cannot serve two masters at once.

He said, either your life is given in full allegiance to the Lord, or you haven't given your life to the Lord at all.

Notice that Jacob in verse one is called back to Bethel, but he's called there for an express purpose.

This is the only time that God commands someone to build an altar.

He tells Jacob in verse one, make an altar there to the God who appeared to you.

God commands Jacob with this command, worship me.

Worship me.

Jacob, if you want to get your life back on track, worship me.

And can I tell you something this morning?

The very same thing is true for you.

You want to get your life back on track.

You want to live for the purpose for which you were created?

Worship God.

Live your life today to the glory and honor of God.

Do everything to shine a light on how great He is.

This is the guiding direction of our life, that we live for the worship and glory of God.

This is the purpose for which you were created.

And so God in His grace appears to Jacob and He says, Worship me.

Now, some of us have a problem with this.

Because as we consider the fact that God is for God, that God's greatest desire for you is to worship Him, we kind of think like, that's kind of stuck up with God, isn't it?

If I came to you this morning and I said to you, hey guys, I want you just to live this week as though I am the best preacher in the whole entire world.

Okay, just worship my preaching ability.

And the whole sermon was hey, here's three points on how you can do that, okay?

Go on your social media, share the podcast, tell everyone how great I am.

Think about me every waking moment of the day.

Okay, if there's any silence, I want you to be playing that sermon in that moment.

Well, you say that that's ridiculous.

That's ridiculous.

How could you call people to worship you?

That's conceited, it's prideful.

Why then is it right for God to be for God?

Well, the reason that God can call us to worship Him, and I, it would be wrong for me to call you to worship Him myself, is because God is the highest good there is.

God is the highest treasure there is.

And because of that, it would actually be unloving for God to point your direction, your attention to anything else.

You imagine for a moment that God appeared to you and said, Hey, listen, I just want you to get a brand new car, okay?

Just get a brand new car.

Some of you guys, including myself, some of you have seen my car, some of you are like, oh, that would be amazing.

That would be great.

And yet, what God would be doing in that moment is calling your affection to delight in something that could never satisfy you like He can.

God is the highest good.

And for all of eternity, He has existed to call His Son and the Spirit to worship Him as the highest good there is.

And when He creates humanity, He calls them, He creates them for His glory, so that they might experience the joy of satisfaction and the highest good there is.

So that notice then, notice then that what God is doing this morning in your heart, what God is doing this morning in your life in calling you back to Him, it's all of God's grace.

It's all of God's grace.

God wants you to have laser focus on the only relationship, the only person that can truly satisfy you.

And so in this moment, it is not a mistake that God has brought you here on this day where you look outside and you're like, oh, it's a good day just to sleep in.

It's a good day to just make a big breakfast buffet, to drink coffee, and rest from the hardship of the week.

God has brought you to this place and is telling you this message that your greatest life's purpose is to worship him.

This is God's grace, especially, especially to Jacob, when you consider where Jacob has been.

What should God's response to Jacob be?

It should be just wash his hands clean of him.

I'm done with Jacob.

This guy has done nothing but sin, and yet God's grace is to invite him.

Do you see God's mercy for you?

Some of you here have been backsliding.

You look at a time in your life where you're so much closer to the Lord, you are so much more on fire for the Lord.

And you just cannot get back to that place.

You read the Bible and it's not like what it used to be.

You read that book that when you first read, it ignited your soul with a worship for God, and yet you read it and it's and it's dead to you.

You feel like you're backsliding, you're not as passionate as you once were for the Lord.

And I want you to know God has not given up on you.

God relentlessly pursues his children, just as he pursued Jacob.

He is pursuing you this morning, asking you to believe this message that there is no better place for you to be than to be in the place where your greatest passion and worship and joy is God Himself.

You can tell that Jacob and his family take up this message because in verses 2 to 4 they start to put away the idols of their life.

The idols that they once stole from Laban.

You remember that Rachel stole the household gods.

Now they are throwing under an unnamed tree.

Their devotion to the Lord shows itself in a rejection of the things of the world.

And this really is the work of Christians.

If you are going to make your life's greatest passion God, this is the work that you must do.

You must put off the things of the world.

And I want you to recognize, church, that this is the work of all Christians.

There is not a single person who has truly been saved by the Lord, who the Holy Spirit is truly in, who has not struggled to put off the things of the world.

If you're here this morning and your feeling is like, yeah, you know what, I've never really had to like struggle to put off anything.

I want you to know that's the greatest place of concern.

But if you're here this morning and you're like right now, you you just feel you feel weary from the battle against the things you know are sinful.

You're trying to put off that sinful attitude, you're trying to rip yourself away from that love of the of material things that you have.

You're trying not to be angry anymore, you're trying not to gossip anymore, you're trying not to do these things, you're struggling against sin.

You feel defeated.

This is the place of God's grace.

This is how you now know that God is working in your life.

It's not natural for sinful men and women to be struggling with sin.

It's natural for sinful men and women to be delighting in sin.

And here you are, because of God's grace, you are struggling against sin.

You're putting you want to put away the idols of your life.

And so let me ask you this question.

Are you doing it?

Are you doing it?

Can I ask you this question?

What are you struggling with right now?

What idol?

What attitude?

What action?

What sinful habit?

What sinful relationship are you currently struggling with in this moment?

Does an answer come to your mind right away?

If it does, I want you in this moment to praise the Lord.

It is God who has given you the power to struggle against that sin.

It is the Spirit who has revealed that to you.

And if it if nothing comes to your mind right now, then I would urge you to get on your knees and repent and ask God to do this work of changing you.

Because changing you is never easy.

It is never easy, it is always a struggle.

And I reminded them that this is what mature Christians do.

Like the mark of maturity in your life is the degree to which you struggle with sin.

It's the degree to which you hate sin.

Like if in your life sin is revealed and your attitude is just kind of like, huh?

That is not maturity at all.

What we see here is that Jacob, the time that he finally gets it is when his attitude towards sin is to put it as far away from his as possible.

If your attitude is to struggle against sin, to do everything within your power to root out sin, then you are in the same camp as Paul, who in 1 Corinthians 9 26 said he labored to bring his body under self-control in order that he might live for the Lord.

That's the work of our lives.

I want you to notice that this is God's greatest passion in the life of Jacob and his family is that they would be devoted to him.

The people of God have faced many enemies over their life, haven't they?

Many things have threatened God's people throughout Genesis, whether it's threats of war, threats of infertility, threats of disobedience, and yet I want you to notice that the greatest desire of God is for the worship of his people.

You know what the greatest enemy to your life is, to your eternal life with the Lord?

The greatest enemy is your heart not being set on the Lord first and foremost.

Listen, you can face all sorts of enemies in your life.

You can suffer all all sorts of you can endure all sorts of suffering and yet the most important thing is that your heart is set on the Lord.

As elders, we know this as a church.

We talk about this frequently at the elder table.

We talk frequently how about the most important thing is our personal holiness.

Because the church can endure all sorts of attacks from the outside, can't it?

In fact, often the church thrives in the presence of persecution.

The church thrives in it.

And yet the one thing that the church cannot cannot endure is when its leadership becomes sinful and takes its eyes off the Lord.

That's the moment that a church dies, is when the leadership ceases to follow the leading of the Lord and ceases to pursue the worship of God in their own personal life.

You need to know this in your own family life.

There are many things that are working against the health of your family in this day and age.

And yet the most important thing is not the choices that you make about schooling, it's not the influence of their friends.

The most important thing is the influence of their parents and the children in your family seeing their parents pursuing God.

That doesn't mean being perfect, but seeing their parents living a life that is founded on the gospel.

It's the most important thing.

God is passionate because our first need is the Lord.

This is the thing we need most.

And so let me ask you this question.

Do you believe that?

Do you believe that God's worship, that God's glory is the most important thing?

Then struggle, struggle, like Jacob, to root out everything.

I love that at the end in verses 9 to 15, I love that God renames Jacob.

Did any of you read that and notice something?

If you've been with us in Genesis, you notice like, well, this is weird.

I feel like uh something happens and it's like, I feel like this is the second time I've experienced this.

It's like deja vu or something.

Was this a dream I had?

That's kind of like what's happening in Genesis 36, isn't it?

Didn't Jacob already get renamed to Israel?

Didn't God already do that work?

I think it's so significant that God does it again.

God appears to Jacob and again he renames him to Israel.

Why?

Jacob already was Israel, but Jacob's work was to live in the new identity that God had given him.

And this is your work too.

This is your work.

If you are in Christ, you've been given a new identity.

You have been saved for eternity.

The Bible says you are now fully sanctified in him, you are glorified, you're as good as given eternal life, and yet we struggle against the old man, against the old flesh.

And our life's work is to live according to the new name that we have been given in Jesus Christ.

In order to do that, we need to have a glory that consumes us.

The second thing I want you to see in Jacob's life is that he recognizes that the mission that God is doing in him does not puff him up like we joked about earlier.

Instead, it's a mission that goes beyond him.

And so for the rest of Genesis 35, from 16 to the end of 36, what God is doing for us is he's showing us two ways of life.

He's showing us a life that treasures God.

That's the life of Jacob now.

And a life that treasures things.

That's the life of Esau.

And we see this really in verse 29.

See, in verse 29, Jacob and Esau's father Isaac dies.

And both Esau and Jacob are there.

And there's this picture of like, here is the same event of suffering, and let's see how Jacob responds to suffering in his life.

Let's see how Esau responds to suffering in his life.

And it's very relevant for us because each of us here, whether you are a Christian or not, no matter what, to be human is to suffer.

That's the reality of the world that we live in.

All of us suffer.

But the question then is: how do you suffer?

How do you cope with that?

What we notice, especially in the life of Jacob, at the end of chapter 35, is that when God is at the preeminent place of worship in our heart, we are given perspective and we are able to endure the hard things that we go through.

We're able to endure the suffering.

Now, Jacob, he's going to walk through four trials in life.

Notice the first trial in verse 8, when Deborah, Rebecca's nurse, died.

This really would be Jacob's closest relation to his mother.

And in losing Deborah, we get the sense that there is great sadness when he names, when he buries her under the tree that is called Alan Bakuth, which means the oak of weeping.

Jacob has had this relationship taken from him.

And he's so close to Deborah.

He loves Deborah.

And yet he experiences this loss, but it doesn't end there because in verses 16 to 21, we read that Rachel then dies.

And I want you just to imagine, like, I think we can read this kind of pretty indifferent to Jacob's plight here, can't we?

Remember who Rachel is.

Jacob loved Rachel to such a degree that he was willing to endure what can only be called slavery for 14 years in order that he might win Rachel.

He had spent a large portion of his life working for the love of Rachel, that he might have her as a wife.

And now in these moments, remember when Jacob and Rachel, probably the thing that bonded them closest together was Rachel's struggle to have a child.

And Jacob would remember the day that Rachel came to him and said, Give me a child, or I will die.

And God provided Joseph.

And that miracle of God's grace working in their life and providing that child would have brought them so close together.

And here we find Rachel pregnant again, and I'm sure there was so much joy.

And yet on the journey, as Rachel goes into labor, we're told it was a hard labor.

So hard that in the midst of the labor she dies.

And her last words to Jacob are filled with sadness.

She says that Jacob, named the name of this child Benoni.

Which means son of my sorrow.

And this thing that Rachel had set her eyes on, remember she said to Jacob, give me a child or I will die.

Like I cannot live with this thing.

It's ironic then that the very thing that Rachel thinks will bring her satisfaction and life actually bring her sorrow and death.

And this is a note for us, this is an application for us, that it's the truth, the same is true of us.

The reason why God doesn't have the preeminent place of worship in our life is because we think that other things will be better for us to pursue.

That's just the bottom reality of it.

That's the bottom line, that's the truth.

That if you do not worship God, you only do that because you think something is better than God.

Rachel realizes that the thing that she had been after would only lead to her sorrow.

It would not lead to life, but would only lead to death.

And there's great sadness here.

As she names her second child, the one that she longed for, the one that she asked God for, son of my sorrow.

Jacob experiences another loss with Reuben.

Reuben, we're told, takes the concubines of Jacob and sleeps with them, which in the ancient Near Eastern culture, what Reuben was doing was setting himself up for success.

By taking the concubines of his father, he was in by nature, then by law, inheriting the birthright.

And it's interesting that just as Rachel would lose her life by setting her hopes on something that was not the Lord, we're told in Genesis 49, 4 that Reuben would also lose the blessing of the birthright because of his sins here.

And it's teaching us that we can never accomplish what we want.

Sin never does what we want it to do, it never will, it never can.

Lastly, Jacob experiences the loss of Isaac.

It is loss after loss.

And yet, in all these things, what we see here is that Jacob is responding well.

We see that most in what he does with the child that Rachel has.

Notice that when Rachel desired to call him Benoni, immediately, as Jacob is in the same room as the cold, dead body of Rachel, Jacob names this child Benjamin, which means son of my right hand.

That means this is the son of my strength.

This is the son of honor.

This is the son of grace, of favor.

Benjamin, in possibly the darkest moment of his life, where the thing in Rachel, the person in Rachel who he loves the most is taken from him.

Benjamin sets his eyes on the Lord.

Sorry, Jacob sets his eyes on the Lord.

Benjamin would make up the 12th tribe of Israel, and Jacob would recognize in Benjamin that God was being faithful to his promise.

And I want you to understand this that only if God is in the central place of your heart will you ever have clarity to make sense of your life.

Every time Jacob had suffered up at this point, he did nothing but work to get out of it.

But finally, once God takes up the central place of his heart, Jacob is able to see his life with clarity.

I know what this is like.

Some of you guys are with me.

You guys are in the four-eye squad.

Anyone here?

You got glasses?

Well, I can see that some of you do, some of you are hiding it.

You don't want to be publicly a part of the club, and so you've gotten some laser eye surgery or you're wearing some contacts, and you know how great glasses are.

You go from a position of not wearing your glasses and not being able to see anything and not being able to make a sense of the world to putting on your glasses and being given clarity of this world.

I want you to know that's a really simple illustration to illustrate what happens when you place God at the center of the worship of your life.

You begin to make sense of the things that are going on and take as an illustration when something bad happens to you, something's taken away from you, maybe it's your health, maybe it's a loved one, whatever trial you're in, something is taken away from you.

Well, when if you think that life revolves around you, you will only see that as a loss.

You will only mourn that.

But you know what happens once God is at the center place of your life and you recognize that God's greatest desire for your life is that you glorify and worship Him, you know what happens?

You're given perspective.

And you look at the suffering and you say, I might go even deeper into this valley that I'm currently in.

Things might get even worse.

My worst fears might come true, but but if God is glorified, if God gets glory from this circumstance, I know at the end of the day my purpose will be fulfilled.

See, it's only when God is the center of your life, it's only when your life is lived for God that you can make sense of the trials that you are enduring.

It's only then that you can make sense of the things that are happening in your life.

This is what Jacob recognizes.

He recognizes that his life is so much more than him.

His life is about a mission that God is pursuing through him.

A mission to be glorified.

I want you to notice in Esau's life, then our third point is that when we recognize that God is for God, we find a treasure that captivates me.

Find a treasure that captivates me.

Now, you can scan through Genesis 36.

You'll notice that likely in your Bible, the headline there is Esau's descendants.

And there we find a genealogy of Genesis.

You'll be, you'll remember that the book of Genesis is really a book of genealogies.

And that 11 times in Genesis, we have what in the Hebrew are called Toledots.

This phrase, these are the generations.

The purpose of Genesis really is for Moses to write to Israel to say, hey, this is where you came from.

This is a family lineage.

This is how the people of Israel, the Hebrews, started.

And so this really is the purpose.

Now we find here that Moses is spending a significant number of verses focusing on the family that is not God's family.

This is Esau's family.

This family would make up the Edomites, which we have talked about before, would regularly show up in the history of Israel as Israel's enemy.

They would be at war with the Edomites.

In fact, as we think about really the grander picture of the Bible that all springs from Genesis 3.15.

You remember there after Adam and Eve had sinned, God entered into cosmic warfare with Satan, and he said to the serpent, I'm going to crush your head, you're going to bruise my heel.

And we can make sense of all of humanity's history through that one verse, that there is a war happening between God and the spiritual forces of evil in this world.

We've seen this throughout Genesis, haven't we?

We see the division between Lot and Abraham.

We see the division between God's people and Canaan in Genesis 34.

And here we see the division between Jacob and Esau, the Edomites and Jacob's family.

God's focusing a lot of attention on the people that are not his own children.

And I think that's really instructive for us.

I think one of the things that this tells us is God has a heart for all people.

God has a heart for all people.

And if you're here and maybe you're not a Christian, you need to know that God has a heart for you.

God, because you are created by Him, because you have a soul, God longs for your worship.

He knows who you are.

He has an intimate knowledge of your life.

And his desire for your life is the same as the desire for his children that you would live to glorify him.

In church, you need to know this is also why we evangelize.

The reason we evangelize is because God has a heart for the lost.

And we want our heart to reflect God's heart.

God loves the lost.

Now in Esau, we have a comparison to Jacob.

Really, Esau, in every way, and things that he pursues and the ways that he makes sense of his life.

He's the opposite of Jacob.

Where Jacob has made God his highest treasure, Esau's sin, really, for the entirety of his life, has been the same.

That instead of being driven by spiritual desire for God, Esau has been driven by selfish gain.

Remember the start?

Remember when Esau entered the story?

Remember when he was hungry and he came in from hunting and he was with his brother who had just cooked stew.

And Esau gave up his whole birthright just for a bowl of stew, to which we respond, it must have been a very good stew.

But there we recognize that Jacob was a worldly man.

He loved the things of this world.

He was always driven by gain.

This is what drove him to seek revenge against Jacob when Jacob stole his birthright and blessing.

His life was then filled with seething rage.

He was filled with revenge as he sought to murder Jacob and get revenge.

And Esau's life in every way is worldly.

Esau in this chapter, there are 67 of his children named.

And only two of them, remember that names are significant in the ancient Near East, only two of them mention the Lord.

He names his one son Eliphaz, which means the God of finding gold.

Which, even there, if you named your child lottery ticket, we would have a good sense of where your heart's desire is.

Well, the other child he names Ruel, which means friend of God.

And of these 67 children that Esau has, only two are named with the name God in it.

And that's even at the very beginning of his life, before he leaves Canaan, we get the sense that Esau never really had a heart for the Lord.

And as he lived his life, he only drifted farther and farther away from God.

Esau was willing to give two of his children to the Lord, but he was unwilling, like Jacob, to give all of his children to the Lord.

It's a reminder to us again that it is not enough for God to be somewhat of a treasure to us.

God must be our whole treasure.

That's why the Bible talks about our relationship with God as though it's a wedding, that we are the bride of Christ and Christ as the groom.

Because the picture of a wedding is so good there.

Women could you imagine, you know, standing in front of your groom, and you know, he's standing there and you're saying your vows, and he says to you, I will love you with a little bit of my heart.

Well, in that moment, you would be like maybe a slap would be the proper response.

For sure, you would realize in this moment, like, this is not what this is supposed to be about.

You're not supposed to love me with a little bit of your heart.

This is supposed to be like an overwhelming love.

Biblically, you know, like Paul called the husband to love the wife as Christ loved the church, is not like just a little bit of love.

It's like this love that can't even be attained.

The desire of a husband should be to love his wife to the degree that he doesn't even know how he's going to do that.

That's why the picture is so fitting for God's people to be the bride of Christ, because your love for Christ is to be overflowing.

It's not enough just to for him to be somewhat of a treasure in your heart.

He must be the whole treasure.

And what we find in Esau is that in some ways he wants to be near to God, but he's unwilling to fully pursue God.

And so we read through Genesis 36 that Esau, instead of pursuing God, he pursues other things.

And the incredible thing is that Esau, in all worldly standards, Esau flourishes more than Jacob does.

Esau is given pleasures, of riches.

He becomes very rich when he leaves Jacob.

He's given land.

Remember, Jacob was promised land?

Well, Esau establishes the Edomites like in an incredibly quick fashion.

He's given a nation.

We're given a list of kings that come from Esau.

When Jacob was promised by God that kings would come from him, he looks to Esau and it seems like Esau is flourishing.

He has kings, he has land, he has a nation, he has all these material riches and wealth.

He has a huge family where Jacob has only 12 kids, Esau has 67.

It seems like Esau is flourishing.

And yet what we discover in the end is that all of these so-called blessings were fleeting.

The Edomites, the family of Esau, would have a short history.

In 586 BC, they would be defeated underneath the Babylonian Empire and they would be subsumed into another nation and they would be forgotten.

No longer a nation of their own.

The things that Esau would pursue were fleeting pleasures.

And it's a reminder to us that when we pursue anything other than the Lord, it is like trying to hold on to sand.

You ever done that?

You try to hold on to really soft sand and it just keeps slipping between your fingers.

The harder you hold, the more it slips between your fingers.

And God this morning is showing us this that the pursuits that you have your heart so set on that you struggle to put off those pursuits are such a waste of time.

They will never satisfy.

If they do, their pleasures are fleeting.

They have no eternal value.

The only thing of eternal value is to know the Lord.

There's a day coming when all your riches will be gone.

That business that you worked so hard to pour into.

That job that you were willing to sacrifice your family for.

You know what's amazing?

You will retire, and the next day you'll be replaced.

All of it is fleeting.

Nothing will last apart, apart from what is done for the Lord.

Church, when you have God, you have a treasure that cannot be taken.

Jacob would not experience the worldly blessing that Esau would.

But the promise that was given to God still stands today.

And you and I, the Edomites have nothing, no influence on our lives, but in every way, Jacob has eternal significance on our life because it is through the line of Jacob that Jesus comes.

And God would do amazing things through Jacob.

So that today, if your faith is in Jesus Christ, who is in the line of Jacob, then you can be saved.

God does through Jacob the most significant thing he could do for humanity.

He provides a way of salvation.

And it all is because of God's grace to Jacob, which drives Jacob to obedience.

And so the question for us this morning is this: what will you do?

What will you do?

We have here the example of Esau and the example of Jacob.

Whose path will you pursue?

The path where you pursue the treasures of this world that are fleeting or the path of Jacob or the highest treasure of your life is that God is your God.

That He is in the preeminent place of worship.

Let's close in prayer.

Father, God, we pray that this, Lord, this morning would be a time of repentance.

As we sit and hear your word, God, that we would be turning away from the things that we have pursued even this week.

And turning to the God who, through Jacob, Lord, is inviting us this morning to Him.

God, you have invited us back to you.

God, your mercy is so much greater than our sin.

And there is no degree of waywardness and sinfulness to which if we were to turn to you right now in this moment and declare, God, you are our God.

We want nothing else.

We want you to be the fullness of our worship, the greatest of our joys.

God, there is no depth of sin to which your mercy could be outmatched.

God, your mercy always covers us.

It always calls us back.

And so, God, as we respond now to you through this song, God, I pray that we would delight in the mercy that you have shown us in Jesus Christ.

God, we thank you.

We give you all the praise.

Lord, we sing this for your glory.

In the name of your Son.

Amen.