1. Forth then Jacob went with hope and courage, and he was divinely guided to his eastern kinsmen. In return for the hand of the fair Rachel whom he loved, he offered Laban seven years of service; but by a craft that matched and avenged his own he was defrauded of his bride. The constant Jacob, however, shrank not from other seven years of service for the woman that he loved. But while her sister bore him children, Rachel herself remained barren, and, Sarah-like, sought children through her maid, and by other wrongful means. At length after years of waiting God gave the barren Rachel a son, even Joseph. Thus by his wives and their maids, Jacob had eleven sons and one daughter.
Then Jacob longed to go back to his own country, but his discipline was not yet complete. He must wait and serve yet more. At the entreaty of Laban, who marked the prosperity which Jacob had brought him, he remained, claiming a wage which seemed but trifling. But the wily Jacob outwitted the wily Aramean, and by craft and skill became very rich and prosperous.
If there be a moral end in human life, one purpose served by trial is to produce and strengthen and purify character. Robert Browning declared that there was nothing worth study but the incidents in the development of a soul. Perhaps that is why he, for one, found it easy to provide a place in his view of the world for pain and evil. The struggle was necessary for the high end of character, and was justified by the end. Whatever will further development and growth is sufficiently explained by its practical value. Growth is seen to be a much bigger thing than merely getting rid of weaknesses and lopping off excrescences. It is a process by which the tissue and fibre of character are built up and hardened and strengthened. If the world is to man an arena of moral training, and if life is a great opportunity for becoming, then we have already one simple need for some of the evils of life as mere discipline. It is not a complete explanation of tribulation of all sorts, but it is a partial explanation, and, so far as it goes, we should understand it and accept it. It is not sufficient in itself to explain the function of suffering in human life, but it is undoubtedly a place where we do see some light.1 [Note: Hugh Black, Comfort, 55.]
2. Jacob had served Laban seven years for Leah and seven for Rachel. It is possible that when the fourteen years had run out, he agreed to serve his father-in-law for another term of seven years. But by the end of the sixth year his growing wealth, and the craft by which he had won that wealth, had offended his Syrian kinsmen. The sons of Laban charged him with having enriched himself at their expense, and Laban himself wore a boding look. Then he was divinely warned to return to the promised land. “The Lord said unto Jacob, Return unto the land of thy fathers, and to thy kindred; and I will be with thee.”
In point of fact, Jacob was becoming too contented in that strange land. Like Ulysses and his crew, he was in danger of forgetting the land of his birth, the tents of his father, and the promises of which he was the heir. He was fast losing the pilgrim spirit, and settling into a citizen of that far country. His mean and crafty arts to increase his wealth were honeycombing his spirit, and eating out his nobler nature, prostituting it to the meanest ends. His wives, infected with the idolatry of their father's house, were in danger of corrupting the minds of his children; and how then would fare the holy seed, destined to give the world the messages of God? It was evident that his nest must be broken up in Haran; that he must be driven back into the pilgrim-life-to become a stranger and a sojourner, as his fathers were. And this was another step nearer the moment when he became Israel, a prince with God.
Only by degrees do we escape from that “body of death” which would rob us of freedom and make us simply a limb of the past, without character or individuality. Slowly, by the discipline of experience, and still more by the power of that love on which our relationship with God and others is based, the self gets purged. We are led, on the one hand, to realize the nearness of the spiritual kingdom and the reality of God's presence; and on the other, the varied claims of kinsfolk and friends. Faith pulls us out in one direction and love in another; and so the character, enlarged and deepened, not only affects something here, but is bound to affect something in the world to come. And if we ask what practice it is that keeps all these relationships open, the answer is clear. Jacob came out as he did in the end, because he was pre-eminently a man of prayer. Prayer with him was struggle, a definite struggle to bring his own will into submission to God's and to know God's mind.1 [Note: G. H. S. Walpole, Personality and Power, 55.]
3. Laban started in pursuit; but God intervened to save Jacob from his revenge, and Laban did him no hurt. He was, however, indignant at the theft of his images, which he sought for in vain, being outwitted by the daughter whom years before he had defrauded of her rightful husband. Thus Laban was foiled at all points. Jacob remonstrated with Laban for his unjust requital of all his faithful service, overruled, however, and requited by the gracious God of his fathers. Touched by his remonstrance, Laban proposed a covenant of friendship; and there, between the two, a solemn covenant was made in Gilead, which was henceforth to be the boundary between the Israelites and the Arameans. Then Laban returned to his own land, and Jacob to his.
What a downcome it was from the covenant-heights of Bethel to the cattle-troughs of Haran! What a cruel fall from the company of ascending and descending angels into the clutches of a finished rogue like Laban! Jacob had been all but carried up of angels from Bethel and taken into an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled; but, instead of that, he is taken down to Padan-aram, where he is cheated out of his wages, and cheated out of his wife, and cheated, and cheated, and cheated again, ten times cheated, and that too by his own mother's brother, till cheating came out of Jacob's nostrils, and stank in his eyes, and became hateful as hell to Jacob's heart. Jacob had never seen or heard the like of it in his country. It shocked terribly and irrecoverably Jacob's inborn sense of right and wrong; it almost shook down Jacob's whole faith in the God of Bethel. It was Jacob's salvation that he fell into the hands of that cruel land-shark, his uncle Laban. Jacob's salvation is somewhat nearer now than when he believed at Bethel; but, all the same, what is bred in the bone is not got clean rid of in a day. It were laughable to a degree, if it were not so sad, to see Jacob, after all his smart, still peeling the stakes of poplar, and chestnut, and hazel where the cattle came to drink, till it came about that all the feebler births in the cattle-pens were Laban's and all the stronger were Jacob's; till Laban had to give it up and to confess himself completely outwitted; and till he piously and affectionately proposed a covenant at Mizpah, saying, “This pillar be witness that I will not pass over it to harm thee, nor thou to harm me.”1 [Note: A. Whyte.]
4. Jacob had passed through twenty years of exile. That was a great many years. It ought to have worn off a great deal, and buried a great deal. But when he set his face to go back again to his father's land, almost the very first experience that he had was the shadow of a great fear, lying right across his path. It was the shadow of that brother Esau. “And Jacob sent messengers before him to Esau his brother unto the land of Seir, the country of Edom. And he commanded them, saying, Thus shall ye speak unto my lord Esau; Thy servant Jacob saith thus, I have sojourned with Laban, and stayed there until now: and I have oxen, and asses, flocks, and menservants, and womenservants: and I have sent to tell my lord, that I may find grace in thy sight.” This is the man that had stolen the birthright, and made himself the chief. He is returning to his country; and his very first act is to assume the manners of a servant, and to bow down, recognizing the chieftainship of his brother. Such transformation fear makes.1 [Note: H. W. Beecher, Sermons, 110.]
We are not always in a state of strong emotion, and when we are calm we can use our memories and gradually change the bias of our fear, as we do our tastes. Take your fear as a safeguard. It is like quickness of hearing. It may make consequences passionately present to you. Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision.2 [Note: George Eliot, Daniel Deronda.]
Fear is a very strange and terrible part of our human inheritance. But the raison d'être of it is, I suppose, the instinct to live. If it were not for fear, the fear of death, how often should we tend to end our miseries together, and how little effort should we make in the face of danger to extricate ourselves. Fear, at a crisis, evokes the swiftest kind of inventiveness, and it is, I suppose, the quality which more than any other keeps us alive.3 [Note: A. C. Benson, Thy Rod and Thy Staff, 37.]
