Surely it is rather an uncircumcised Jacob we see here, and not circumcised Shechemites. It is all miserable. Is this a son of Abraham? Is this a saint of God? Is this one of God's strangers in a world that has revolted from Him? This is like the religious energy of Christendom, which has put the name of Christ in company with the world that is under His judgment, and only borne with in His long-suffering. It is as if Israel had consented to Pharaoh, and undertaken to give Jehovah an altar in Egypt. But such altars are no altars--as another gospel is not another. Such religion is vain, whether practised in these earliest days at Shechem, or now in these days of Christendom, among the nations of a judged, condemned world, from which separation is the call of God. But this will not do. A fair trade with the world will be followed, and the course of it pursued greedily, without watchfulness or conviction, but religious family services, and religious national ordinances, the modern order at Shechem, will all the while be waited on.
It was of the fruit of all this that Jacob had afterwards to say, "O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united." For it is to the action in chapter xxxiv. that Jacob thus refers, when he was about to die, in chapter xlix. He finds out, at the end, the real character of all this, the fruit of his dwelling at Shechem. In self-will a man had been killed there, and a fence thrown down. But surely Jacob himself had digged down God's fence before. The partition-wall which the call of God had raised between the clean and the unclean, between the circumcision and the Gentile, he himself, in spirit, had broken down, when he settled as a citizen or freeholder on his purchased estate at Shechem. And Simeon and Levi may perfect this, as soon afterwards as they please.
"And Dinah, the daughter of Leah, which she bare unto Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land." xxxiv. 1. Was this the way of the house of Abraham? Was this the family of the separated patriarch keeping the way of the Lord? Had Abraham been thus slack? What intercourse had he had for his children with either the sons or the daughters of the land?
It is all sad, and proclaims its own shame. Shechem is next door to Sodom. But it is not Sodom, I grant. Jacob is not Lot. We can distinguish; and we have to distinguish, though it is sad to be put to the work of distinguishing. Nature prevails, in some more, in some less, in all the recorded saints of God. But there is moral variety, as well as the prevalency of nature, and "things that differ" among the saints are to be distinguished by us. There is a soiled garment, and there is a mixed garment. Our way, under the Spirit, is to keep the garment both unsoiled and unmixed. Surely it is to keep ourselves "unspotted from the world." But still, a soiled garment is not a mixed garment, a garment, as Scripture speaks, "of divers sorts, of woollen and of linen." Nor is a garment with a thread of "another sort" now and again in it, to be mistaken for a mixed garment, the texture of which is wrought on the very principle of woollen and linen. Scripture, ever fruitful and perfect, exhibits characters formed by what are called "mixed principles," and also characters which occasionally betray the mixture, but which are not formed throughout by them. The life of Lot was formed throughout by mixed principles. As soon as temptation addressed him, he entered into connection with evil. Though associated with the call of God, he had to be saved so as by fire. The garment which Lot wore was of divers sorts, of woollen and of linen. Abraham, at times, wore a soiled garment, but never a mixed one. Lot was untrue to the call of God from the outset of his career to the close of it. He became a citizen where he should have been a stranger, taking a house in the city of Sodom, while Abraham was traversing the face of the country from tent to tent. And Lot's life of false principles leads him into sorrows that are his shame--and that is the real misery of sorrow. He had no comfort in his sorrow. His righteous soul was vexed: this is told of him; but there was no joy, no brightness, no triumph in his spirit. The angels maintained much reserve towards him. He had to escape with his life as a prey, and under the loss of all beside.
Our Jacob was not of this generation. We dare not say he was a man of mixed principles, or one who wore a garment of divers sorts, of woollen and linen. But he had a soiled garment on him pretty commonly, and here at Succoth and at Shechem, a garment with threads of another sort woven in it. His schemes and calculations disfigure him, and are the soiled garment; his building a house at Succoth, and purchasing a field at Shechem, untrue to the call of God, and to the tent-life of his fathers, look very like a garment with threads of another sort in it.
Still Jacob is not to be put with Lot. His life was not formed of mixed principles. He was indeed a stranger with God in the earth. But, like Lot, he had been in the place of the uncircumcised willingly; and he was now to feel the bitterness of his own way; and very much what Sodom had been to Lot, Shechem is now to Jacob. He is saved (may I not say?) yet so as by fire. The iniquity of Simeon and Levi, with the instruments of cruelty that were in their habitations, bring poor Jacob very low. He is at his wits' end in the midst of that people, of whom he had purchased his estate, and in the neighbourhood of whom, he had, Lot-like, consented to settle.
Things, however, are now at the worst. We are about to make, through the grace of God, a happy escape with Jacob out of all this, to find a good riddance of Shechem and all its pollutions.
"A word spoken in due season, how good is it!" We often prove this ourselves. A word will do more for us at times than long and careful discourses. For "power belongeth unto God." "Follow me," from the lips of Christ, had power to detach Levi from the receipt of custom; while, in the same chapter, a discourse was heard by Peter without effect, being left by it, as he had been before it, the easy, kind-hearted, amiable, and obliging Peter. See Luke v. "Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power," even that very people, of whom it had been said before, "All day long have I stretched out my hands unto a disobedient and gainsaying people."
An instance of this power is found in the history of Jacob, just at this time, in chapter xxxv. 1.
"Arise, go up to Bethel," said the Lord to him, "and dwell there; and make there an altar unto God, that appeared unto thee when thou fleddest from the face of Esau thy brother."