Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
Dr. Manny Arango
Hey, Bible nerds. This is Dr. Manny Arango and I'm your host for the Bible department podcast powered by Arma. This podcast follows a Bible reading plan we created to help you read the entire Bible in a year. You can head to the show notes or thebibledepartment.com to download our reading plan and join the journey. To all my fellow pastors, I've got a question for you. Does your city know that your church exists? Listen, I get it. You're preaching, you're leading, you're discipling, you're doing ministry. We are in the same boat. And let's be honest, social media and marketing, not your strong suit. Not mine either. And that's probably the last thing on your mind. And that's why we chose to partner with Church Candy Marketing for our church Plant the garden. We out here, y'all. They help churches get more actual guests walking through the doors on Sunday without your eye having to stress over ads or algorithms or trying to crack the social media code. Right now, Church Candy is helping nearly 400 churches reach their communities with simple invite ads. And it works. It's super effective. I can tell you from firsthand experience. So if you're tired of being your city's best kept secret, how about you do this? Go to churchcandy.com Manny and book a free consultation book a discovery call. Their team will break it all down and show you how to start seeing new faces at your church this Sunday. I'm in the trenches with you trying to grow the church. And how about we just start a whole campaign? No more empty churches. So let's partner with Church Candy and get our churches full. The glory of Jesus. Let's go. We get to jump into day 90. I got so much to share with you today. Like always, we're going to give you some context clues. We're going to give you some dirty nuggets. We're going to give you a timeless truth you can walk away with. If you have not done the reading for today, go ahead and do the reading. We are in Genesis, chapter 28, 29, and 30. A lot of action. We got an action packed, three chapters. So with no further ado, let's jump in. If you're on a streak, I'm proud of you. If you're not on a streak, I'm still proud of you. Grace is real, okay? I'm still proud of you if you're not on a streak. But today's your opportunity to get on a streak. So let's do this. Genesis chapter 28, 29, 30. Big picture, there's a couple of things that we got. Jacob has just tricked or deceived his father with his mom's help, okay? Isaac has not blessed Esau, which is the older boy who's supposed to be blessed, but has blessed Jacob. Now it's time for Jacob to go on the run, okay? Because his brother has vowed that he's going to kill him. And so Isaac sends him on his way, but he's got some instructions that he actually needs to go take for a wife, someone from his parents household. This kind of sparks, this idea in Esau's mind that, oh my gosh, I can't believe how disgusted my parents are with the Canaanite women that I have married. And so Esau then goes and gets a wife from the Ishmaelites. Jacob is on the run. He uses a stone as a pillow and he gets this vision, okay? And he gets a vision. We call it Jacob's Ladder. It's funny, I remember being in like first or second grade, we made those, those things out of string. I don't even know what they were called. It's not origami. It was like, I don't, I don't, I can't remember what it's called. But like we would make this thing called Jacob's Ladder. Anyway. The context for Jacob's Ladder is right here in Genesis chapter 28. And here's our first just context clue, okay? What Jacob probably saw in that vision is a ziggurat. Now if you go all the way back to the Tower of Babel, what they were building in the Tower of Babel is a ziggurat. You can actually Google the word ziggurat. Z I G G U R A T Ziggurat. These were ancient temple structures. It's not a ladder, okay? It's actually a temple that kind of keeps going in like that. So it's like this big, huge temple structure. These things are massive. And so this is what Jacob gets a vision of. Now let's think Jesus is actually going to pick up on this. In John John, chapter one, verse 51, Jesus is going to say this. You're going to see angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man. So a ziggurat is a pagan temple. The reason that the people at the Tower of Babel want to build a ziggurat is because they want to reach the heavens. They want to reach God. This is pagan idolatry, but this is the very thing that God reveals to Jacob. Because what is God revealing to Jacob? He's saying, the desire to connect with me is not a bad desire, but you are going to have to do that in the boundaries, in the confines of. Of how I want to have relationship with you. There's also an introduction for Jacob into the mission for the family that he's about to start. Okay, in the next two chapters, we are going to see the birth of. Of his 12 sons. And Jacob is actually not just being called into a personal mission, he's being called into a mission for his family. And what is the mission for his family? Exodus actually tells you the mission. Exodus says this to the descendants of Jacob. You will be for me. This is God speaking. You will be for me a kingdom of priests. That you are going to be the kind of people who connect other people to God. That's what a priest does. A priest is a walking ziggurat. A priest is a walking temple. A priest is someone who is an access point for people to actually meet with the divine. And this is why we would say that Jesus is a walking temple. Paul picks up on this imagery in the New Testament by saying, you're temples of the Holy Spirit. So Jacob gets a revelation that he's a priest. Now, what do you need in order to be a priest? Well, you need empathy. You need empathy to be a priest. Which immediately leads us into the next chapter. Because in the next chapter, Jacob is gonna meet this woman. He's gonna fall madly in love with her. Her name is Rachel. He's gonna tell Laban, his uncle, I worked for you for seven years. If you give me your daughter Rachel, if you give me your hand in marriage, okay? And then Laban pulls an okie doke. Okay? Laban pulls a fast one. Instead of giving Rachel to. To Jacob, he gives Leah, the older sister, who the Bible says is not cute. Okay? That's a whole nother level of ugly. When the Bible is saying that you're not cute. I would. I would go as far as to say, objectively, you're just probably not cute. And so Laban. And here's our nerdy nugget for the day. Laban is actually able to trick Jacob because everyone in the. In. In Middle Eastern, ancient Near east culture, going to get married with a veil, and Laban's going to wait till it's nighttime. And Thomas Edison has not invented the light bulb. It is dark. And so Jacob actually does get deceived. Here. Here's a little. Another nerdy nugget. Some people may ask, why is it that Isaac can't just bless Esau? I mean, he's blessed Jacob. Why can't he bless Esau? Well, what happens when you're a patriarch of a family? You spend decades crafting a blessing for a particular child. And the oldest son would be called the behor. You would craft a blessing for them. It's funny, I never had context for this. Then one time I was on a 40 day fast and God gave me like a blessing, like a prayer that I know I needed to pray over my goddaughter. Her name is Nyla. She's the daughter of good friends of ours named Jesse and Sarah Summers. And I remember on that 40 day day, like on that 40 day journey, just like going to their house and God gave me like specific words for Nyla. And so a lot of people may be thinking, if you're not familiar with just this context, why can't Isaac just bless Esau? He's blessed Jacob. It's just words. Well, it's not just words. It's actually like prophet, a prophetic prayer. It's not just words. It's God, the Holy Spirit, giving the patriarch of a family a very specific blessing to give to a very specific person. Let's get back to empathy. Why is empathy important? Well, because Jacob and Esau actually mirrors Rachel and Leah. So what happens? In one story, you have a family member, Rebecca, tricking her husband to bless one of her sons or one of their sons and not the other. So you have siblings and you, you have family betrayal. And what happens is that Esau finds out that once Jacob has been blessed, he can't be unblessed. So what's the next story is you have Laban, a family member who tricks Jacob into marrying one sister and not the other sister. Literally, you, you have the exact same thing happening. Rebecca, Isaac, Jacob. And Esau is then mirrored by Laban, Leah, Rachel and Jacob. And in the same way that Isaac cannot unbless Jacob, Jacob cannot unmarry Rachel. And so finally, for the very first time, Jacob has been deceived in the same way that he has deceived. And this, I think two things begin to happen. He can finally see, see himself in Esau. He can finally have empathy. And instead of competing with his brother Esau, he can actually begin to be a priest for his brother Esau. He can actually be the kind of person who introduces his brother to the God that he loves and worships and serves. This is the eyes of a priest. It's funny, I was talking to someone on staff at a church, and they are like, they're the young adult pastor. They were really, really, like, aggravated with their senior pastor. And I said, have you ever stopped to have empathy for your senior pastor? Have you ever stopped to think your senior pastor's in the middle of a $9 million building campaign? Have you ever stopped to think about how much stress your leader is actually under? And a lot of times we love to have empathy, and this is just the culture that we live in. We have empathy for people who we think are victims or that lack power, but it's hard for us to have empathy for people who we think are better than us or have more privilege than us. It's hard for us to have empathy for people who are in authority over us. It's almost like our culture's trained us to have so much empathy for the orphan, the widow, the victim, but not have empathy for police officers, politicians, pastors. Like, it's okay to drag pastors through the mud on social media, but it's not okay to just, like, serve and love and operate from a healed place. For all of Jacob's life, he has seen Esau as his competition, as his enemy. And now he gets a vision of a ziggurat, and he gets called to be a priest. And now God has to introduce him to a man by the name of Laban so that he can experience the same pain that Esau's gone through, so that he can actually have empathy for someone who he wasn't able to have empathy for. You can't have empathy for someone who you don't have eyes to actually see. I love to give people this framework that it's like when you're young, it's almost like you idolize your parents, Especially if you're a girl. It's your, you know, your mom, your dad, your young boy, your mom, your dad you idolize. They can do no wrong. And then the pendulum totally swings, and you villainize, right? Everything's their fault. It's like, welcome to teenage years. And then somewhere you realize that idolization and villainization are both off, and then the equilibrium fixes itself. And you can humanize. You can't have empathy for someone who you haven't humanized. If you've idolized someone to a place of leadership, or you villainized somebody to a place of having all the power and you have no power, then you're not able to humanize them. And if you can't humanize, then you cannot empathize. So empathy or your ability to be a priest, your ability to Actually connect people to the savior of the world is completely contingent upon your ability to feel their pain. And so God has to walk Jacob through the exact same painful experience that his brother Esau has actually gone through. Bible nerds. I have an announcement. My brand new book, Crushing Chaos releases May of 2025, and pre orders are officially open. When I began to learn Genesis in its proper context, I learned that the creation account is not primarily about God creating something out of nothing, but rather God bringing divine origins, order to the chaos of the cosmos. That one nugget was a game changer for me because I've been preaching to all the kids in my youth group that peace was a solution for their anxiety. But really, God's solution to chaos is never peace, but rather order. Peace isn't something that you stumble into. It's something that you intentionally step into. And that starts with aligning your life with God's order. I think that this book is a game changer. It's nerdy, it's practical, it provides a very contextual understanding of the book of Genesis. And if you grab a copy, you'll learn why there's a huge dragon on the COVID Head to the link in the show Notes to pre order, or head to crushingchaos.com to see the really dope trailer that we made for this book. I think it's time for you to crush the chaos in your life. And that starts with grabbing a copy of this book. Now back to the podcast. He's now married to Leah, and Leah starts cranking out babies. Okay, so we have two women. One woman is beautiful but barren. That's Rachel. And the other woman is not beautiful, but is so fruitful, keeps having children. And the text actually wants us to see these as a. As a juxtaposition. There's this interesting little nerdy fact. In Genesis, chapter 30, verse 15, there's some mandrakes. Now, if you don't know this, mandrakes would have been considered fertility fruit in the Old Testament. Leah's sons find some fertility fruit, some mandrakes, and Leah and Rachel make a trade. Leah is able to get a night with Jacob, and her son gives Rachel the fertility fruit. And there's this interesting little word, it's called sleep with. Now, in Hebrew, the word sex and die are both the euphemism. Sleep with is what's used. So I'm going to sleep with Jacob tonight. That means have sex with. Not a lot of sleep is going to happen, that sexual activity. But then when someone dies, you know, there's Lots of times where Jake, where Jesus will. He'll say to Lazarus, like, no, no, no. Or the girl who's dead, the synagogue leader's daughter. No, no, no. They're not dead. They're just sleeping. Okay, so sleeping is actually a Jewish euphemism for death. So Genesis 30, verse 15, and Genesis 49, verse 29, 31, are completely connected by this idea of sleep. So Leah bargains for with some mandrakes, her fun. Her son finds mandrakes. She gives the mandrakes to her sister, who's infertile. She gets to sleep with Jacob that night. But here's What Genesis chapter 49 tells us, that when Jacob's about to die, he says to his sons, don't bury me in the land of Canaan. Go all the way back to my homeland. I want to be buried. I want to sleep with my ancestors. And there's a very clear instruction. Bury me with Leah. So at the end of this whole saga, actually it's Leah that gets to sleep with Jacob for eternity. Because although she wasn't the pretty sister, I would actually contend that she's the sister that was the best thing that ever happened to Jacob, which immediately leads us into our timeless truth. So timeless truth for the day. Genesis chapter 29, verse 35. This is Leah. This is kind of a barrage of her having son after son after son. And I'll kind of read the verses leading up to this. Genesis chapter 29. Start reading. In verse 31, when the Lord saw that Leah was not loved, he enabled her to conceive. But Rachel remained childless. Leah became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She named him Reuben. For she said, it is because the Lord has seen my misery. Surely my husband will love me now. So she's having children to try to get her husband to love her. In verse 33, she conceived again. And when she gave birth to a son, she said, because the Lord heard that I'm not loved, he gave me this one too. So now the children are like bargaining chips to. To make her feel good about herself because she's not loved. Son number three, verse 34. Again, she conceived. When she gave birth to a son, she said, now at last my husband will become attached to me. So she. She wants her husband to love her because these children. And then we get to verse 35. She conceived again. When she gave birth to a son, she cried. This time I'll praise the Lord. So she named him Judah. She stopped having children. It's my timeless truth for us today. I think sometimes we do a lot of things to get validation, to get approval, to get people to like us, to love us, to become attached to us. It's almost like we want God to bless us so that we can use the things that God's blessed us with as bargaining chips to get people to need us. It's like there's this desire that we have to want to be wanted by people. And then finally Leah just realizes, I'm going to be in this endless cycle of doing this if I don't get out of this. And that real worship, real praise is saying God, I actually am just grateful that you've blessed me and there's no strings attached. I don't want you to bless me so that I can use what you've blessed me with to manipulate other people. I don't need love from Jacob. I actually just need you. Worship is when you get to a place, you get to a place in your life where you begin to live for an audience of one. And the reality is that if there isn't a deep validation that you've gotten from the Lord, then Jacob's validation is never going to matter to you. It's never going to be enough. And so God uses this crazy, I mean, totally ungodly method in order to birth the people of Israel. This is another timeless truth, man. God can use family dysfunction, he can use all kinds of whacked out weirdness because this is the most Mormon situation in the whole Bible right here. Like, this is just a lot of drama. Also, last thing I'll say is that the Bible never says thou shalt not commit polygamy. Like that's not, like that's not a command. But the Bible uses narrative to show us that polygamy is totally toxic. And so this story is actually here to show us that this rivalry between sisters, this infighting, the jealousy, the competition, that this creates chaos and confusion. This does not create the order and the peace and the clarity that God actually wants. And so, yes, this is a story about polygamy, but this story does not glorify polygamy at all. This story actually demonstrates the dangers of a polygamous lifestyle. And so God is actually condemning polygamy by the story. But even in his condemning of polygamy, he can still use it for his ultimate goals and for his glory. And that, that is the grace of God on display. All right, we got some context clues. We got some nerdy nuggets. We got our timeless truth. We got a couple of Thomas Truth today. I'm glad we got to spend some time together. Hey, I hope you've enjoyed this. Tomorrow we've got Genesis chapter 31 to 33. If you're on a streak, don't break it. If you're not on a streak yet, it's a perfect chance to start one. I love you guys. I hope today blessed you. Love you. Peace. Thanks so much for joining us on the Bible Department Podcast. You can find us online and learn more about the show at the Bible Department and on Instagram. Hebibledepartment if you enjoyed this episode and want to dive deeper into the Bible, you can get free access to our library of courses@thebibledepartment.com we'll see you back here tomorrow.