1 SAMUEL 16
I just love it when the Bible hauls off and slaps me upside the head. This was one of those chapters. I read the whole thing, of course, recognizing the most famous verse along the way—"People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart."(vs 7) But, mentally, I never really got past verse one. It hit me right between the eyes the second I read it:
Photo © Unsplash/Fadi Xd
as the years had come and gone
since selling Joseph like a pawn
Judah'd had a lot of time
to contemplate his clever crime
but watching how his father grieved
had been much worse than he'd conceived
it wore him down, right to the bone
he reaped much more than he had sown
until at last, a broken man,
he lived a different master plan:
a willingness to be the slave
to sacrifice, and thus to save
redemption needn't seem so strange
even dirty hearts can change
Photo © Unsplash/Claudia Soraya
"An eye for an eye" doesn't normally smack of grace,
but it would have been exceedingly merciful
compared to the revenge exacted by Dinah's brothers:
an entire community destroyed
because one person was brutally assaulted.
Some wonder
why they didn't choose
a different response—
something non-violent,
something conciliatory.
I wonder why they had to choose at all.
What was Jacob doing in Shechem?
He promised Esau a rendezvous in Seir;
instead, he traveled in the opposite direction.
He promised God an altar and a tithe at Bethel;
instead, he built that altar in a heathen place.
It's so easy to only ask
What If
when the Big Tragedy hits.
But
What if Jacob had kept his word?
What if he'd taken his family in the opposite direction?
What if he hadn't built his house in a dangerous and foreign land?
What if Genesis 34 tragedies
are always preceded by
Genesis 33 choices?
It's easy to say
Dinah shouldn't have been raped
or
Dinah's brothers shouldn't have retaliated
but I say
Dinah shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Esau walked into
Jacob's restaurant
and ordered the special—
rustic lentil stew and bread.
The bill came before the meal:
Esau's birthright
guaranteed with an oath.
Esau was pleased, or so it seemed.
He slurped up every morsel without complaint—
no fly in the stew,
no hair on the plate,
no "this is too cold"
or "that needs more salt."
Some time later,
the hunger pangs he foolishly assuaged
became pangs of remorse he couldn't stomach.
He regretted the cost
of that hasty meal
and published a nasty (and untrue) review:
"The chef in that joint stole my dough with his bread!"
GENESIS 44
One of the central tenets of Christianity is that Jesus is the mediator between God and man. Since the root of "mediator" is "media," we can see that there is an element of communication involved in such a role. But often, Christianity gets confused about what Jesus is communicating and to whom. So why does Jesus play the role of mediator? And what the heck does any of this have to do with Genesis 44?
