What affections and energies are here! How finely this vessel did its service in the house of God! Poor David knew more than sorrow for the loss of Absalom in the day of Absalom's fall. That slaying of his son brought sin to remembrance. And here Jacob entered, with full personal sympathies, into the counsels of God, and had his own part and share in recollections that must have stirred the conscience.
He not only announced these judgments of God, but felt them. He was not a mere vessel, but a living vessel. And he was faithful to Him that appointed him, though the service was, after this manner, full of humbling and bitterness.
We saw Jacob "dumb for a season." This we noticed as the character of many years of our Patriarch's closing life. But his mouth had now been opened by faith; and once opened, God uses him abundantly as His oracle. This is like Zacharias, the Zacharias of Luke i. He also, as we know, had been dumb for a season; but in faith he wrote his child's name upon a writing-table, and then the Lord used him as His prophet.
Here the story ends; but I believe we have gathered the moral of it. The Lord's hand with Jacob tells us how unwearied He is with His foolish and wayward ones. It is variety, too, as well as patience, that we see in this constant moral culture. Jacob had to learn different lessons; and He, with whom he had to do, set Himself in patient grace to teach them all to him. Bethel, Peniel, Bethel again, and Beersheba, witness this, as we have seen. And then, throughout a changeful course, at home and abroad, in youth and in manhood, among strangers or at the side of his father and his mother, Jacob betrayed much that needed chastening, and the lesson was taught him again and again.
He reminds us of the disciples in the days of the Lord. In how many ways had the Lord to correct and instruct them! And it was the same to the end; and the patience of their divine Teacher was the same to the end. The ignorance, the selfishness, the constant moral mistakes they made and betrayed, the different ways in which they crossed the mind of their Master, all glorify the goodness that waited on them. And it may remind us also of Him who bore with Israel's manners in the wilderness for forty years. And it may be also a remembrancer to ourselves of much of that patience and grace which we are daily experiencing at the same hand.
Discipline, the discipline of a child, is illustrated in Jacob, as we observed at the beginning, ere we began to consider his story, and as we now have seen it to be. And discipline is healthful, and does good like a medicine. If we need it, it is the only thing for us. When in the days of Samuel, Israel asked for a king, would it have been well for them, if the Lord had given them David? The Lord had David in reserve for them; but would it have been seasonable, would it have been healthful for them, if David had been given to them at once, when with a rebellious will they were asking for a king? Surely, they must first be made to know the bitterness of their own way. A Saul must be given when Israel asks a king. This was discipline, and this was the only thing that would have been healthful for them. But when they have tasted the bitterness of their own way, in pity of their misery, the Lord will bring out that which He has in reserve for them, the man after His own heart that shall fulfil all His pleasure.
How perfect was all this! Had David been given to Israel in the day of 1 Sam. xi. the whole moral of the story would have been lost to us. But the love is the same, whether it be discipline or consolation, medicine or food.
This is the characteristic lesson we learn from the story of our patriarch.
With Machpelah and his burial, Jacob then ends these dying intercourses with his sons, as he had begun them. xlvii. 29, xlix. 29. He had Joseph's word and oath already on this matter, and now he must put all of them under the same engagements to him about it. Death was more important to him than life. Life kept him in Egypt, death would restore him to Canaan. Death linked him with the God and the promise of his fathers. The hopes of faith lay beyond life, and outside Egypt. In spirit he was saying, Absent from the body, present with the Lord; "Confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord." As far as patriarchal faith could utter this, Jacob was uttering it. And at the very last we read, "When Jacob had made an end of commanding his sons, he gathered up his feet into the bed, and yielded up the ghost, and was gathered unto his people."
It was surely no barren or unfruitful time he had spent in Egypt. Though to him and to his hands the business of life was all over, he was not rusting out, as we had to say of Isaac. Jacob's silence was husbandry. We rejoice in these last days as his best days. We rejoice still more in the grace which provided this pause for him at the end of his journey, that, in the language of the Psalmist, he might recover strength before he went hence, and was no more seen.