“Oh,” they would say, “you have it all your own way there, and we can’t answer back; but come to the factory and we will put a few questions to you.”
So I went down, and they made it pretty hot for me sometimes. One of the favorite characters that they brought up was Jacob. Many a time I have had men say, “You think Jacob was a saint, don’t you? He was a big rascal.” Many have said they thought Jacob wasn’t as good as Esau. Notice this fact. You read in the Bible, “I will punish Jacob according to his doings.” This law of retribution runs through his Life; although he was a friend of God, a kinsman of Abraham, and was third in the line of the covenant, yet God made Jacob reap the same kind of seed he sowed. Some one has said that “Jacob’s misfortunes were uniformly calculated to bring back to his recollection the picture as well as the punishment of his faults.”
When Isaac in his old age wanted some venison, and sent Esau out to get it, Jacob slipped out and took a kid from his father’s flock, and Rebekah, his mother, cooked it; he brought it to his old blind father and said he was Esau. The old man recognized his voice, but he had very cunningly put the skin of the kid on his hands and neck; so that the old man felt him and said;
“The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.”
By this lie he got his brother’s birthright blessing, but he paid ten thousand times more for it than it was worth. “Who steals my purse steals trash.” A man who steals my pocketbook is the chief sufferer, not I. When Jacob had grown to be an old man, he lived in continual suspicion that his sons were deceiving him. The sin of deceiving his own father bore fruit.
Jacob was the great loser in this transaction. When Esau returned he had to flee for his life. Then God met him at Bethel. “And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed: and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth: and thou shalt spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.
“And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again unto this land, for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.”
Men will read that far in the life of Jacob and say, “I don’t want anything more to do with a God who will deal in grace with a man who had done so mean a thing.” My friend, hold on. Follow him to Padanaram. He was there twenty years, and during that time his wages were changed ten times. He worked seven years for the lovely Rachel, and then had another woman put upon him. Jacob had by deception obtained the blessing of the first-born son, but Laban sarcastically reminded him, “It must not be so done in my country to give the younger before the first-born.” He found that Laban could drive as sharp a bargain as he. Wherever you find a sharp, shrewd man, you will always find that he draws just such men around him, and that he who cheats will himself be cheated. “Birds of a feather flock together”; blasphemers get together, and sharp, shrewd men get together. Jacob found in Laban just such a man as himself. It was “diamond cut diamond.”
Look a little further. Jacob had twelve sons, but he loved Joseph and Benjamin more than the others because they were the sons of his beloved Rachel. He was partial to Joseph, and had a coat made of many colors for him. Partiality will raise the old Adam in any family.
One morning Joseph, in the innocence of his heart, tells a dream in which his father and all his brothers had bowed down to him. Then his brothers began to plan to get him out of the way, and when his father sent him to find them when they were tending the flocks, they said: