Tag: Jacob

Jacob – The Deceiving One

The life of Jacob takes the twists and turns of a modern potboiler.
The cast changes over time but there is sibling rivalry between two brothers, two sisters and among a dozen brothers; parental favouritisms; deceit and betrayals; thirsts for revenge; love and romance; heartbreaks; deaths and family reunions.
The cheater becomes the cheated.

Genesis 50 – God our Guarantor

Our lives are not perfect and oftentimes we too mess up like these people, but if we allow God to work in our lives he will transform our mess into something beautiful. And that’s the story of Genesis!

Genesis 48 & 49 – The Scepter Will Never Depart

The final chapters of the book of Genesis don’t really give us any insights into the lives of Jacob and his sons in Egypt but if we read carefully they do give us a glimmer of hope for a promise to come.

Genesis 47 – Rags to Riches

While Egyptians were selling of their lands to ward off starvation, Joseph’s family was making real estate investments in Egypt. For us it may be a flip of the page but for Jacob’s family it took many years for them to realise the dream that God had shown the patriarchs. Most of us give up on God when we are passing through our famines. We forget all his past blessings and promises for our future. .

Genesis 45 & 46 – The Big Reveal

The basic principle behind Machine learning is to use past mistakes to figure out the right path. That’s how our mind also works when it comes to the people who have hurt us. We pretend that we are over it, but deep down our minds are still storing their mistakes and our future actions will be based on this data, all this to avoid getting hurt by them in the future.

Genesis 43 – Here We Go Again

In trying to hide his identity, Joseph kept delaying God’s plan in the lives of his family members.
The outward show that we put on may prevent us hurt from the people around us but it also prevents us from admitting our weaknesses and coming to God for a solution.

Genesis 42 – Everything is Against Us

So many of us carry that guilt around, the guilt of our past mistakes. It is not God who burdens us but the deceiver who keeps reminding us of our past shortcomings so that we drown ourselves in sorrow and guilt and forget about our connection with God.

Genesis 37 – The Corrupt Race

A combination of Jacob’s love for Joseph and Joseph’s innate nature of telling on his brothers caused friction in the house of Israel. Jacob did not help matters when he made an ornate robe for his favourite son Joseph causing further drift among the siblings.

Genesis 34 – Love or Lust

A very dark but real chapter in which we learn about Dinah, the daughter of Leah, who on her casual outing to visit her friends was raped by the ruler of the land, Shechem.

Genesis 31 – The Exit Strategy

Jacob finally had enough of his uncle Laban’s attitude and after a message from God, finally got the nerve to return to his hometown and face his brother. He met with his wives privately in the fields to plan his exit strategy. He put forward his case in front of Laban’s daughters, pointing out how badly their father had treated him and let them in on his dream, that he thought was from God, asking him to go back to his homeland.

Genesis 29 & 30 – A Tale of Two Sisters

Jacob finally arrived in the land of the eastern People and met few shepherds who were waiting to water their sheep near a well. This could have very well been the same well where Eliezer, Abraham’s servant met Rebecca almost a century ago….

Genesis 28 – Backpacking Through Europe

Jacob did not know God or the plans He had for him. Maybe that is why he was afraid of the dream he saw. The only way to know the heart of God is to have regular fellowship with Him. That was missing in Jacob’s life and truth be told, in most of our lives today.

Genesis 27 – A Case of Mistaken Identity

The the chosen family became the fractured family where none of the four (Isaac, Rebecca, Esau & Jacob) trusted God to carry out his will but rather tried to intervene in every possible way to ensure their own will be accomplished. That might as we be the summary of our own walk with Jesus.