What is the purpose of Christianity and the church? Why the busy programs, expensive edifices, learned clergy, and scholarly seminaries? One basic purpose: to bring God and human beings into a relationship so as to supply life with meaning and hope. People do not exist for the institution; the institution exists for people. Failing that, the church loses its franchise. The central purpose for which the church and its ministers exists is to cultivate and inspire that meeting of humans and God.
When asked why he robbed banks, a notorious bank robber answered, "That's where the money is." Ask your congregation why they come to church and do they say, "That's where God is"? Meeting God is the core purpose of biblical religion. A study of Jacob illustrates the point.
Genesis presents Jacob's life as a movement from being a deceptive manipulator to becoming a man at peace with God, from a devious religionist to a devout and deeply spiritual person. Jacob's life can be divided into three phases.
Phase 1: Egocentrism
The first phase of Jacob's life may be labeled as "egocentric." Jacob had an acute case of it. He was the leader and others were his servants, even if he had to conquer them by wit and strategy. In the young Jacob we see a dangerous mix of naive intelligence, driving ambition, and illusions of grandeur. He seems to have absorbed, at his mother's knee, the skill of spotting and exploiting the weaknesses of people to his personal advantage.
Scripture cites three instances to support Jacob's early reputation as a cheat. Genesis 25 relates his birth account as if to say that Jacob's tendency was congenital. When Rebecca delivered the twins, it was noticed that Jacob grabbed the heel of his brother who preceded him from the womb. Jacob seemed to protest the accident of being born second, and from the beginning tried to manipulate things in his favor. Thus the ancients tead the incident and named the child Jacob, meaning "supplanter" or "one who grabs the heel."
The second instance involves taking advantage of his brother's hunger. Esau, the older twin, was a robust, hairy outdoorsman. Jacob pursued the more refined and intellectual arts. No wonder his mother arid he grew close.
The day Esau returned from the hunt, starved, Jacob saw his opportunity to recover the birthright .denied him at birth. For a simple meal of porridge, Jacob asked in return his brother's birthright. Hungry, naive, and impulsive, Esau traded his birthright for a single meal. Jacob was learning well the art of saving his neck by using his head.
The most cruel deception of all was Jacob's daring plot in tricking his aged and blind father. Two assets most coveted by a Semitic son were birthright and the death blessing. Jacob had manipulated himself into gaining the first. He had apparently awaited the opportune moment to capture the second.
Genesis 27 records the ugly deed. Isaac's dying request of his elder son, Esau, was a meal of his favorite venison. Esau loved his father and was delighted to do his bidding. He left immediately for the.hunt. Unfortunately, Isaac's wife and the mother of his children, who preferred Jacob to Esau, overheard the request. She quickly plotted a deception. Jacob would take it to his father dressed in a hairy garment simulating Esau's body. Although Isaac was suspicious, the deception succeeded and Jacob won the coveted blessing. Jacob cheated his father and betrayed his brother a memory he would never shake off.
The price was high. Jacob lost his father's respect and his brother's trust. Within hours,urged by his mother who feared Esau's reprisal, Jacob was on the road. Why not use the time to find himself a wife among their relatives far to the east? As it turned out, Jacob never saw his mother again. When he returned 20 years later, she was dead.
The third instance showing Jacob's egocentrism was at the time of his famous dream. While he grew immensely as a result of this dream, his ego was still insistent. In the dream Jacob saw a ladder, or ramp, stretched from heaven to earth, indeed to the very place he lay. Hurrying back and forth on errands were angels, obviously messengers of the real King over all the earth. The ramp led up to God's throne. Instantly and hauntingly, Jacob would have to reckon with the Almighty. Jacob's dream was not his conversion, however, for he quickly tries his ingrained bargaining skills on God. "Bring me back," he says, "to this place, and I'll give You ten percent of my gains" (see Gen. 28:20-22).
At least we can say this: The God who until then had been academic and irrelevant to Jacob, now became, if not dear, at least actual and real. This first phase of Jacob's life illustrates the adolescence of our modern mind, which dismisses God as a myth, and the human as ultimate.
Phase 2: Realism
As it is for all of us, reality was Jacob's main subject in the school of the real world. Fantasy was forced to give way to adversity. During the next 20 years, Jacob grew humble. What he had previously done to others was now being done to him.
Charmed by Rachel, he agreed with her father to pay a dowry for her hand in marriage through seven years' work without pay; but on the wedding night he discovered that he'd been outwitted by a father-in-law more skilled at deception than he (Gen. 29 and 30). Rachel's sister was now his wife. To marry Rachel, the woman he loved, he agreed to work an additional seven years on the same terms. Fourteen years to get a wife!
On a subsistence income, Jacob raised a large family. Only by the help of God and careful strategy was he able to escape at last. Life plodded hard during those years. No heavenly dreams or divine revelations came to brighten Jacob's life. The daily chore of his life was as normal and uneventful as ours. Yet he did not seem to grow cynical. If God had forgotten him, he could not forget God.
The Jacob of Phase 2 became a seasoned man, mellowed by life, and ripe for the higher life. If not yet a fully changed man, the foundations had been laid for Jacob's ultimate encounter with God.
Phase 3: Conversion
If in Phase 1 God had been academic with Jacob, and in Phase 2, seemingly absent, with Phase 3 God became actual and alive to Jacob. He discovered in God the answer to life. He became a transformed person.
Genesis 31 tells the story of his stealthy, near violent escape from his father-in-law and their coming to terms. But the worst was yet to come.
As Jacob traveled toward his original home, news arrived that his brother, Esau, was coming to meet him with a small army of 400 men. It seemed that Esau was about to deal out Jacob's final deserts. Yet Jacob would use his head to salvage what he could. One wife, half the children, and half the cattle he sent in one direction, while the other half of everything he sent off in another direction, thinking that if one group were captured, at least the other group would escape. But he himself stayed back, alone.
That night Jacob didn't sleep. He was terribly afraid, but what finally dominated him was a need beyond that of protection. It almost seemed he was struggling for his soul with God. The fundamental commitments of his life were at stake as out of the darkness of the night a terrifying stranger emerged to wrestle with him.
As morning began to break, so did the ultimate cry of the human soul. Jacob cried out to the stranger, whom now he began to realize was not an enemy, "I will not let You go until You bless me."
By cunning Jacob gained earlier the best blessings men could give the birthright and the death blessing, but he remained unsatisfied. There had to be more. The blessing he now craved with the whole of his being was the blessing of God. He would cling until that blessing came. This was the moment of Jacob's ultimate turning.
The person first born as "Jacob," God now made into an "Israel." He was given the name that the Jewish people have carried with pride ever since. Religion fulfilled its purpose in Jacob's life; it had brought him to God and made him completely new. That's true religion. That's what the church and its ministry is all about.
Clement of Alexandria was right in asking, "What help is it to you that God is God, if He is not your God?"
