Israel’s First Exodus

Think of the account told in Genesis 30:25-31:55 as a “test run” for God’s people leaving Babylon. Abraham had done it first from Ur. There were even shadows of it in his flight from Egypt. But now we have the beginnings of Israel as a people group being oppressed by a man who should be acting like family, but who instead is playing the role of the devil—a kind of precursor to Pharaoh or Herod. First, deceiving God’s people and then hotly pursuing God’s people. The opening words are shades of Moses saying to Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” Here, more politely, ‘Jacob said to Laban, ‘Send me away, that I may go to my own home and country’ (v. 25).

Our three main points will be three negations.

• Waiting on the Lord is no enemy of our ingenuity.

• Faithfulness is no guarantee of favor with man.

• Attachments to chains is no way to make a clean break.

Doctrine. God’s people under chains must follow God’s way out.   

Recall that Exodus in the Greek (LXX) means “road out” or “way out.”

Waiting on the Lord is no enemy of our ingenuity.

Reconciling divine sovereignty to human responsibility is a big subject. Here is just one slice of it. We know that God is supernaturally the Prime Mover here because, later on, Jacob says to Leah and Rachel, ‘Thus God has taken away the livestock of your father and given them to me’ (31:9), and then to Laban in the end,

“If the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac, had not been on my side, surely now you would have sent me away empty-handed. God saw my affliction and the labor of my hands and rebuked you last night” (31:42).

God saw. God spoke. God took away from one. God gave to another.

And, for all of that, the narrative brings Jacob’s faithful waiting and work to the forefront. Why? It is depicted as being entirely positive, in at least three ways.

First, like Abram before the king of Sodom (cf. 14:22-24), he refused “wages” in that he wanted to eliminate the chains of debt to Laban—So, ‘You shall not give me anything’ (v. 31).

Second, he lays out clear terms: ‘If you will do this for me … So my honesty will answer for me later’ (vv. 31, 33). True, God would use that to Jacob’s advantage, but that is God’s business. It was not a lie.

Third, through his diligence. He obviously found out quickly that Laban had double-crossed him again, giving the agreed-upon livestock to his own sons. Instead of complaining or breaking the deal, Jacob sets to work even harder.

So what do we have coming to the forefront of this picture? Independence, honesty, and contented diligence to get out matter inside of God’s sovereign way out.

Sanctified human agency, a rapidly accelerating wheel of energy, inside of the all-animating current of divine agency.

It is an odd story that forces you to pay attention to the details. Long before the Christian pioneer of genetics, Gregor Mendel, with his pea plants, there was Jacob the geneticist, or more properly, Jacob employing the skill of animal husbandry. Now, others, like Calvin and Boice, point to the words in the next chapter about the vision God have Jacob, and so the stress is all on God showing Jacob these things, rather than our thoughts wandering to what “advanced knowledge of genetics” Jacob must have had. That really isn’t the point of the narrative. Rather, it is simply that Waiting on the Lord is no enemy of our ingenuity. Jacob being faithful is how he waited on the Lord.

Faithfulness is no guarantee of favor with man.

Jacob’s faithfulness is met first with immediate betrayal—‘Laban said, ‘Good! Let it be as you said.’ But that day Laban removed’ (30:34-35), and then met with universal envy: ‘the sons of Laban were saying, ‘Jacob has taken all that was our father’s’ (31:1). Here’s what he had to know, and what we have to know. Jesus said, “If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (Jn. 15:19).

For the Christian—as for Jacob—there must be an awakening, a coming to grips with the world’s disfavor, a seeing into the great war that started in Genesis 3:15 and that your strife with so-and-so is a theater in that war: ‘Jacob saw that Laban did not regard him with favor as before’ (v. 2). Jacob saw means Jacob now realized. You must come to the place of seeing this. There are what we might call “pockets of favor” in this world, as when “Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man” (Lk. 2:42), and, following in His footsteps, the infant church was initially, “having favor with all the people” (Acts 2:47). So Jacob initially had  “favor” with Laban; but when the servants of the devil become “kingdom conscious,” that is, when a fuller light of Christ’s kingdom shines on them, when they realize what is at stake in the Christian’s advancement, this favor vanishes.

Not only must this awakening to opposition happen. But for the Christian who would lead others, helping others come to see the same is crucial.

“So Jacob sent and called Rachel and Leah into the field where his flock was and said to them, ‘I see that your father does not regard me with favor as he did before’” (vv. 4-5a).

Note the care that he took to tell these daughters. The private setting. He must ensure that he said it sensitively, and he must ensure that others do not bud into the conversation. He has hard news for them and they must come to terms with it quickly. We lead by giving the bad news that even those with whom you’ve been familiar are turning over to the devil’s side, but then quickly lifting up their heads to their adoptive Father and King in the very next words: ‘But the God of my father has been with me’ (v. 5b).

“For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the LORD will take me in” (Ps. 27:10).

Jacob’s wives clearly agreed: ‘Then Rachel and Leah answered and said to him, ‘Is there any portion or inheritance left to us in our father’s house? Are we not regarded by him as foreigners? For he has sold us, and he has indeed devoured our money’ (vv. 14-15). The key expression is REGARDED AS FOREIGNERS—particularly evil of Laban, since these were his own flesh and blood. But to be regarded as a “foreigner,” in any social unit, that is, to be viewed as enemies and not friends, or as incompatible with the way of life of the insiders, this is a signal to separate, and to see further unity as a false unity. Two decades is certainly long enough to test that out, and between the fourteen years of working for the two wives, and further calculated with all of these births, it was clear even to the daughters.

Attachments to chains is no way to make a clean break.

Notice Laban suiting up for the role Pharaoh would later perfect:

“When it was told Laban on the third day that Jacob had fled, he took his kinsmen with him and pursued him” (v. 22).

God did not make man to dominate over other men. That is not the design of dominion. Much less are God’s redeemed people the property of the devil’s. Paul gives us a balanced doctrine. On the one hand, “Were you a bondservant when called? Do not be concerned about it”—In other words, find contentment and God-honoring diligence in whatever circumstance or status. But then in the next breath, he adds: “(But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity)” (1 Cor. 7:21)

The first chains that create “attachment issues” can be a false doctrine that chains are good. It is a subtle lie because it twists a truth. The Bible teaches that God is glorified by the Christian in various forms of chains in this life, that is, the kind of suffering that comes at the hand of persecutors. But the good in it is the Christian’s disposition and response, not in the chains themselves.

But as much as Laban’s persecution was motivating Jacob to get his family out of there, as Calvin comments, “the promise of God was the most powerful stimulant of all to excite his desire to return.”1 Now, Jacob already had God’s blessing to leave: ‘the LORD said to Jacob, ‘Return to the land of your fathers and to your kindred, and I will be with you’ (v. 3). It was imperative that everything was done above board. The leader of an exodus—and every Christian who leads is called to lead other souls out of Babylon’s chains—has to make sure that nothing undermines the way out. But a second “attachment issue” is in the promises of this world.

It was Rachel’s mistake that gives us our lesson here. Once he caught up with them, Laban says,

“And now you have gone away because you longed greatly for your father’s house, but why did you steal my gods?” (v. 30)

Most obviously, this could have gotten them killed, except for Rachel’s quick thinking there! But don’t miss the larger point. Why did she do it in the first place? As Lot’s wife looked back at Sodom, and as Israel at Mount Carmel went “limping between two different opinions” (1 Kings 18:21), so the old nature in a Christian pulls us back. Our fleshy hearts are made of the same “spiritual metal” as those chains of Babylon. We are not told Rachel’s mindset or motive, but it is not hard to guess. Clearly she thought there was some power in that little stone idol, or at least, a “just in case” backup deity.

Practical Use of the Doctrine

Use 1. Instruction. About Jacob’s example of faithfulness while still under chains, you may still ask, “Why do these matter so much if they are all animated by the sovereign agency of God? Even if I see how they go together, logically, it still isn’t clear what the point of all this human agency is.” It matters in the first place for God’s glory. Such subordinate Christian motion within the ultimate motion of God honors God, and its opposite dishonors God. Let me say it another way, according to my oft-used maxim that, We do what we do primarily because of what it says about God, not about any lesser thing. So here, the Christian’s independence from man’s debt, the Christian’s honest dealings, and the Christian’s contented diligence to get out are what they are because of what they say about God. That’s my ultimate answer of why it matters. There are other reasons—e.g., setting an example for other Christians, killing one’s own sin and cultivating one’s own personal holiness, heaping those hot coals on the head of one’s oppressor, as Paul says in Romans 12. But at the end of the day, if there were no other reason, God’s glory is at stake in the Christian’s liberation from the devil’s temporal chains.

Use 2. Exhortation. A similar application to one that we saw in the passage where Jacob first came to live with Laban. Where is our confidence when temporal chains have been placed upon us? Note that these are not eternal chains! Remember, “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). That’s the first key to contentment and confidence under chains. These ones can’t last forever and don’t even determine us now. In this too, Jacob is maturing. He says to Rachel and Leah:

“You know that I have served your father with all my strength, yet your father has cheated me and changed my wages ten times. But God did not permit him to harm me” (vv. 6-7).

Jacob gives a YET and a BUT. This balance is the right answer, the right resolve. With that YET, it avoids one ditch by recognizing the grizzly reality of enemies (avoiding pietistic naïveté), but there is that BUT which refuses to fret over those enemies forever. It always comes back to God as the sole Author of the drama. Avoiding both ditches is how we grow out of those chains.

Use 3. Consolation. While Israel, as one man, was faithful here, as a rule, he would not be. If you know the flow of the whole Old Testament, it is mostly the unfaithfulness of Israel in the Master’s field that would point forward to the true Servant of the LORD, who would not only be the only true Good Son who said, “I will go” and did (cf. Mat. 21:28-32), out to labor, but who would have to do so in the fields of the ultimate Labans and Pharaohs.

Jesus, the true and faithful Israel, would be placed under the bondage of the Pharisees, who constantly watched and nit-picked and moved the goalposts of the law, and yet Jesus (who wrote the Law!) submitted ultimately to the heavenly Father by enduring under their yoke. It was of an “exodus” He was about to preform that Jesus spoke of on the Mount of Transfiguration (Luke 9:31). His way out is more than an example of faithfulness under chains.

You and I have been given an example here in Jacob. But it is only a snapshot. In truth, we will fall much in this field: “for the righteous falls seven times and rises again” (Prov. 24:16). Why will we rise again? It isn’t because of that example of Jacob. It wasn’t even simply the ultimate example of Jesus. It was that Jesus’ labor in this world for us, was not only an example of work (which we could never equal), but was a substitute work: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21).

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1. Calvin, Commentaries, I.2.149.