Jacob No.7 A Father's tears for a daughter

Genesis and chapter 34, but actually we should pick up the reading from the previous chapter in the 18th verse because that sets the context. After Jacob came, this is Genesis 33, after Jacob came from Paddan-Aram, he arrived safely at the city of Shechem in Canaan and camped within sight of the city. For a hundred pieces of silver he bought from the sons of Hamor, the father of Shechem, the plot of ground where he pitched his tent.

There he set up an altar and called it El Elohei Yisrael. Now Dinah, the daughter Leah had borne to Jacob, went out to visit the woman of the land. When Shechem, son of Hamor the Hivite, the ruler of that area, saw her, he took her and raped her.

His heart was drawn to Dinah, daughter of Jacob, and he loved the girl and spoke tenderly to her. And Shechem said to his father Hamor, get me this girl to my wife. When Jacob heard that his daughter Dinah had been defiled, his sons were in the field with his livestock, so he kept quiet about it until they came home.

Then Shechem's father Hamor went out to talk with Jacob. Now Jacob's sons had come in from the fields as soon as they heard what had happened. They were filled with grief and fury because Shechem had done a disgraceful thing in Israel by lying with Jacob's daughter, a thing that should not be done.

But Hamor said to them, my son Shechem has his heart set on your daughter, please give her to him as his wife, intermarry with us, give us your daughters and take our daughters for yourselves. You can settle among us, the land is open to you, live in it, trade in it and acquire property in it. Then Shechem said to Dinah's father and brothers, let me find favor in your eyes and I will give you whatever you ask.

Make this, make the price for the bride and the gift I am to bring as great as you like and I'll pay whatever you ask, only give me the girl as my wife. Because their sister Dinah had been defiled, Jacob's sons replied deceitfully as they spoke to Shechem and his father Hamor. They said to him, we can't do such a thing, we can't give our sister to a man who is not circumcised, that would be a disgrace to us.

We will give our consent to you on one condition only, that you become like us by circumcising all your males. Then we will give you our daughters and take your daughters for ourselves, we'll settle among you and become one people with you, but if you will not agree to be circumcised we'll take our sister and go. Their proposal seemed good to Hamor and his son Shechem.

The young man who was the most honored of all of his father's household lost no time in doing what they said because he was delighted with Jacob's daughter. So Hamor and his son Shechem went to the gate of their city to speak to their fellow townsmen. These men are friendly towards us, they said.

Let them live in our land and trade in it, the land has plenty of room for them. We can marry their daughters and they can marry ours, but the men will consent to live with us as one people only on the condition that our males be circumcised as they themselves are. Won't their livestock, their property and all their other animals become ours? So let us give our consent to them and we will settle among us and they will settle among us.

All the men who went out of the city gate agreed with Hamor and his son Shechem and every male in the city was circumcised. Three days later while all of them were still in pain, two of Jacob's sons, Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brothers, took their swords and attacked the unsuspecting city, killing every male. They put Hamor and his son Shechem to the sword and took Dinah from Shechem's house and left.

The sons of Jacob came upon the dead bodies and looted the city where their sister had been defiled. They seized their flocks and herds and donkeys and everything else of theirs in the city and out in the fields. They carried off all their wealth and all their women and children, taking as plunder everything in the houses.

Then Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, you have brought trouble on me by making me a stench to the Canaanites and Perizzites, the people living in this land. We are few in number. And if they join forces against me and attack me, I and my household will be destroyed.

But they replied, should he have treated our sister like a prostitute? One very famous commentator that I checked when I came to have a look at this particular passage and its contents leads off with this comment, or at least concludes this chapter, the chapter of his commentary. We may well wonder if any man who had proper discernment ever drew a text from this passage of scripture, we cannot venture to offer any homiletical suggestions. The word homiletical really means preacher's tips, any helps.

I checked the great Spurgeon and discovered that he had conveniently skipped over it. And also A.W. Pink and Campbell Morgan. And yet the back of the mind of Tim and myself as we set up our schedule for Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings is the deepening conviction that all scripture is given by God.

And it's profitable for correction as well as for instruction to leapfrog over a passage simply because it deals with something that is very sensitive, at least in the latter part of the 20th century seems to be unwarranted. And therefore we're going to take you to this particular incident in which the house of Jacob is severely tested. And Jacob and his sons don't do particularly well.

There is a program coming on television tomorrow evening, I think it's in the Panorama slot, and it's called The Rape of Law. It's followed, I understand, at 11 o'clock by some personal experiences of women who have been terribly abused and the state that this has left them in. If you wanted to summarize what is found within this particular passage of scripture, you would find that it speaks about sex and abuse.

Three words particularly, folly, lust, and butchery. But then if you read a lot that's in the tabloids, which I'm not recommending, and if you take a fair sample of ITV and BBC television, then the spotlight is often on those things. Maybe the reason why men of more tender years, if one can so describe any epoch in civilization, balked at this particular chapter was because what is contained here was not so explicitly dealt with by the media.

But we live in the sophisticated days of the 20th century when there are no holes barred, when eight-year-olds are given information which we perhaps just 20 years ago might have thought should have been retained until they were more mature and could handle it. We live at a time where there is such emphasis placed upon sex, and sometimes in its more bestial and perverse fashions, and where violence is often seen not only in terms of what happens on the streets of London and elsewhere in the so-called great cities, but where in countries like Bosnia and Serbia, we read of things that are equally as terrible as found in the latter part of this particular chapter. So we draw your attention to what's contained here in folly, well, the folly of Father Jacob.

In one sense, parents influence children more than any other factor in the emerging personality of a juvenile. That is the curse that is upon us today in terms of one-parent families where mum also has to do the job of dad. But dads don't always get it right, so we'll have to speak about the folly of Jacob in a moment or two.

The lust, well, the lust of a young man who eyes a girl and finds that those deep passions which are buried within the breast of all, whether male or female, when they are uncaged, they become like a ferocious tiger, and reason is obliterated, and the satisfaction of the uncaged desire is the thing that is of greatest importance. Hatred, taking the law into your own hands. In this case, when someone has been badly treated, the sort of vigilante mentality which is greeted popularly by many of the people who live in New York City because it seems as though the police cannot cope with the crime that there is often in the metro there.

And so there's a band of citizens who want to prosecute as though they were the upholders of the law themselves and take immediate reaction, make immediate response to the lawbreakers, as in one of our smaller towns when one naked young fellow was trussed up and exposed in more senses than one for violently destroying and abusing property. You see how with my opening remarks, though not intent on trying to defend, I never defend God's word, I declare it. I have every justification, and had Tim been preaching, he too could have claimed the right to bring the contents of this chapter before you, because whether it was necessary in Spurgeon's day, in the tail end of the Victorian era, it is necessary today.

And so we're going to speak about a father who messed up certain aspects of the family life, and a daughter who was exploited, and have thoughts about people perhaps within my congregation this evening who have been exploited and feel somewhat dirty and incomplete as a result. I remember on one occasion preaching from this pulpit about twelve years ago on abortion, and getting a letter from a lady who had gone through an abortion when she was just in her twenties, and she wrote and told me that far from the subject disturbing her, having placed it within the context of the love of God and the scriptures, she felt that night that God had healed her and enabled her to walk tall into tomorrow. And this is what we're praying, for those who may have been abused, and indeed for those who abuse, for there have been a number of folk who have passed through our hands, whose great guilt has been that they have perpetrated folly, the like of which they blush to recall but cannot forget, and feel ashamed as a consequence.

And those people we offer to you the love and the forgiveness of God, and claim a gospel that dignifies men and women as being applicable to you. And those caught up perhaps on the wave of hatred, who feel that they had righteousness on their side, and yet they overreacted in prosecuting what seemed to be a good cause. Then we bring you back to the Bible, and to the recognition of the principle of scripture that vengeance is the Lord's, and he will repay.

It is God who one day will balance the scales of injustice, and it is not for us outside the legal system of this land to prosecute such on our own. So if you're with me, here is number one, so to speak. Jacob, a father's folly.

Jacob was where he should not have been. Those of you who were present last Sunday week will recall that we were dealing with Jacob when he had had this tremendous encounter with God. He'd wrestled with the Lord, and as a result he'd started to limp, you recall, and he went back into the land that God had given him.

And his predetermined meeting place with God again was Bethel. Jacob was a Bethel man. He came from Bethel.

He was brought up in the surroundings of Bethel, and he was to return to Bethel. But as he returned to the land from which he'd come, he decides to do what Lot did some decades before. He settled at a place called Shechem.

He arrived safely at the city of Shechem, verse 18 of the 33rd chapter, and he camped within the sight of the city. Never did a man make such a culpable mistake with such awful consequences. Jacob, you should be at Bethel.

You may be able to handle Shechem, but your children cannot. Jacob buys a piece of land from the chiefs of Shechem, land that he had been promised in any case by God, and to try to buy in literal currency that which God has promised you that is without money and without price is to show that you have a very poor understanding of the grace of God. Ah, but you say, Jacob, he was made Israel.

He was heightened in his spiritual awareness when he had this remarkable encounter that evening that took him into the following morning as he wrestled with the Lord. No longer is Jacob the supplanter, but now Israel. Ah, my friend, has it never been told you that when you become a child of God, the old nature is not completely assassinated, would to God that it was, and that it is possible for the old to cling and to contaminate the new, and all of us are an admixture, those who are Christians, of the new and the old.

And here is Jacob who slips to the lower level in his decision making. He camps within the side of Shechem. He buys what he has been promised.

And Jacob will go through, as far as his family is concerned, disastrous consequences by halting in his own pilgrimage. He dangerously dangled the lives of his children at the spiritual level, and they didn't fare very well indeed. Parents, what you do, where you live, the decisions that you make, influences your children more than anything else, apart from the grace of God.

Your kids can go to the lousiest school, and thank God we've got good schools in Worthing. They can come up against the most incredible pressures, but there is nothing that is more powerful in the upbringing and the maturing of the personality of a child than the way his dad behaves, the way his mother behaves. It can cancel out a thousand negatives if there are positives at home.

And when I speak of Jacob's folly, I do so pleading with you that the decisions that you make and the society that you cultivate are not only ones that you can handle, but also that your children can. A father's folly, Jacob. A lad's lust, Shechem.

Now it's a little confusing when you get to the 34th chapter, because the name Shechem not only is the name of a boy, it's also the name of the place where this incident happened. So with that as a bit of an explanation, you should be able to follow. Jacob is known for his children, and when we think of Jacob's children, we always think of the boys, but actually he had a girl.

Her mother was Leah, who was Jacob's second choice if he would ever have selected her in any case. Leah, she was the sister of Rachel, who is known in the lore of Judaism as being one of the most attractive women that there ever was, alongside Sarah. You know, sometimes nieces can look more like their aunties than what they look like their mothers.

It's an extraordinary genetic thing. And I wonder if Dinah looked very much like Rachel. And here is this girl whose father has now planted his dwelling place in the tract of land that he has brought near Shechem, and she decides to go and visit some of the girls in the land.

Stunningly beautiful. If my calculations are right, about 15 years of age. Maybe she's got a dress she wants to show off.

Maybe there's the jewelry that Uncle Laban gave her. Did she not know that in those days, and there is appallingly a contemporary ring about this, that a young attractive woman on her own was inviting attention that she did not want when she moved into the territory of the Canaanites. On three occasions, my friend, in the book of Genesis, and this is the fourth occasion, you get the problem of this century embedded in the problem of centuries ago.

Men looking upon women as though they are objects that can be possessed and have little in terms of rights themselves. But, for you remember the Sarah, that Sarah had problems in this area with men. And now you find Sarah's descendant, Dinah, with the same difficulty.

Women can be fair game. With sexual harassment on the increase in our country, and many more women prepared to complain about such harassment in offices and businesses today, I have every right in bringing this to your attention. When the page three girls betray femininity by exhibiting their beauty and disengaging sexuality from the context of love and appreciation, they make it more hard for every woman.

When sexuality is isolated from the context in which it should find expression, men can be reduced to an animal level, the one night stand that's in it for the kicks, with no concept of the ongoing responsibility. Never denigrate the Bible's teaching on sexuality. Never misunderstand it.

It heightens the gift of sexuality and sensuality. You read the book of Solomon. You read the intricate and intimate and delicate and poetic and beautiful way in which it spells out the whole vista of human sexuality, and there is no way that you can say that God who invented sex has turned his back on it.

What you find in the Bible, however, are examples which alas are with us on every hand in contemporary society of sexuality disengaged from responsibility and dignity. So here is this 15-year-old beautiful, stunning girl, and she goes for a walk to see some of the girlfriends in Shechem, and the lads are around, as lads are always around. Maybe there were wolf whistles.

Maybe, in one sense, she was to blame. I don't know. I have problems with men directing blame, particularly judges, telling us that eight-year-old girls were less than angels, or less than an angel, as though that gives a man a right to steal sex from a woman.

We find that the exploitation of Dinah is described in very few words. When Shechem, son of Hamel, the Jehivite, the ruler of that area, saw her, he took her and raped her. However, one of the most terrible things that anyone who's got a greater physique than another can do to the weaker person is to use your physique to your advantage.

That is why wife abuse, physically as well as sexually, is abhorrent in the sight of God. We are not to abuse at any level. You have, however, to make this caveat as far as, that means, put this little emphasis in as far as Shechem is concerned.

In the very act of lust, extraordinarily, he discovers a love, and it's a genuine love. That does not in any way excuse his advance in the first instance, but at least it makes the story a little bit more tolerant and tolerable for us to consider this Sunday evening. He wants this woman for his wife.

Get me this girl, verse four. His father is instructed, but here is a lad who has got a girl into difficulty, and here is a lad who has been controlled by lust. How does it all work out? Well, I've shown you something of Jacob, a father's folly, Shechem, a lad's lust.

Let's look at Levi and Simeon, the brother's butchery. You see, news of what happens filters back to Jacob, verse five. Now, he seems to be significantly silent, or somewhat quiescent at any rate, in his immediate reaction.

The culture of that day apparently indicated that when a daughter and a sister was wanted in marriage, well, the transaction, the fixing of the arranged wedding, had to be undertaken not only by father, but also by the brothers. So Jacob waits until the brothers come back, and when they're on the scene, also alongside is the father of Shechem. His name is Hamer.

And they come to talk and to negotiate together. Now, it's a sad fact then, and perhaps now, that there is no apology made in all this negotiation. There is no indication that something has happened in terms of, well, it is wrong for a man to so exploit a woman.

There is no repentance at all. And Jacob's sons, they are outraged. We are going to censure them unfairly heavily in a moment or so, but let's say something positive about them.

Their immediate reaction was good. They were filled with grief. Whenever you hear of someone's fall or someone's exploitation, let grief be the first reaction.

Had the grief just moved into a righteous indignation, I would still have been commending them. But the grief moves on to fury, but more of that in a moment. The reason for the grief, let's congratulate them again.

A disgraceful thing had been done in Israel. A disgraceful thing to a member of the family of Jacob. When David recognizes in a different context that he has sinned sexually, he says of God, against Thee, Thee only have I sinned and done this evil in Thy sight.

God registers sexual sin. It's an offense to Him. It hurts Him because it has dragged down to the level of the sewer, that which God contextualized and called holy.

Ripping it from the context offends God. Righteous indignation is one thing, deceit is another. A star performer in deception in the Old Testament is Jacob.

Now, when you get to the New Testament, you discover that what a man sows, he also reaps. Let's twin that with another adage, which isn't from the New Testament, it's from a French philosopher. History teaches us that history teaches us nothing.

In other words, the same mistakes are reproduced in every generation. So you see Lot, Lot moves towards Sodom and Gomorrah. Can you handle it, Lot? More importantly, can your sons, can your daughters rather, Lot, handle Sodom and Gomorrah? And the answer is no, and Lot should have lived to call a plague on the day when he decided to go and sojourn in Sodom and Gomorrah.

And history taught Jacob nothing, for he pitched his camp near Shechem, and Jacob had deceived his elderly father with the eyes that were more and more defective when he filched the birthright from Esau. And there will be deception shown by his sons as they seem to negotiate with Hamer and with Shechem, and here we part company. Now we're well away from the lack of ethic in the Old Testament story here, and we're into the New Testament, but basic in the Old Testament is the morality and the ethics of the New.

It is always wrong to deceive, even if there had been some honorable motive in the first instance. You want our diner to marry your Shechem? Okay. But first of all, you've got to be circumcised.

Jacob's off the scene. The old man has left it to his sons to work out this dilemma, and he's not seemingly party to it at all. They said, verse 14, we can't do such a thing as hand you our sister.

We can't give diner to a man who is not circumcised. That would be a disgrace to us. We will give our consent to you on one condition only, that you become like us by circumcising all your males.

And if you go on in the narrative, you discover that for certain commercial reasons, Hamel, the father of Shechem, with the agreement of his son, and the rest of the citizens of Shechem, verse 24, who go out to a public meeting at the city gate, they all agree how circumcision is a sort of operation that is applied to the reproductive organ of the male generally done within days of birth, when done to mature men. The first day it's uncomfortable. The third day they're totally incapacitated.

But circumcision was a mark that set Israel apart from God, for God, not just only a physical mark but standing sacramentally as an indication that the sons of Israel were different. And you see what has happened? Jacob's sons, who have reacted against a perversion, are now matching it with an even greater perversion. Leah had four sons by Jacob.

Two of them particularly were involved in the butchery that follows. For Levi and Simeon, when these men from Shechem were so incapacitated, they went in, they did the murderous act, they made the name of Jacob and his sons and the name of Yahweh to be a stench amongst the Canaanites. I'll tell you something.

If you are questioning the authority, the truthfulness of the Bible, then I put one particular challenge to you. The Old Testament, this is not up for debate, this is a statement of obvious historical fact, relates the dawning of the nation of Israel. If this is myth, if this is legendary, then why did they not carve this out completely? Because there are no legends that purport to enhance the greatness of a people that have this sort of disgusting overtone.

But this book is a completely different book from any other historical book. It does not enshrine fable and legend and present it as truth. It tells you what's in all, what men were like, what women were like, what communities were like and even when these communities have the hand of God placed upon them, it will show you when they go wrong and I say thank God for that.

Because it gives me a gospel of recovery to preach in the 20th century when I see exactly the same women exploited, sexuality drawn to the level of the gutter, when I respond to the horrific things that happened in Serbia and Bosnia, I realize afresh, oh God we have been this way before. And when I ask him from the depths of my soul, why is it that you do not wipe out every trace of the race of Adam from this world which has brought such pollution and such hurt and which has been so vindictive? Then I am taken back to the concept that God is the God of Jacob, he is the God of Bethel. No he will not cover up sin, he will expose sin, but having exposed sin he will then make it possible for the sons of Jacob and all their ancestors so to speak, all sinners, to come back to him and find forgiveness.

Says Jacob when he hears what's happened you have brought trouble on me by making me a stench to the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the whole future of the race of Abraham's descendants was brought into jeopardy as a result of the folly of these brothers who took the law into their own hands. Let's try and make some concluding comments. What far-reaching effects private sins can have? You see there are some of us who feel that if we sin privately it's not going to offend anyone else.

In one sense there is no such thing as a private sin. You imagine a still pool, do you know what a sin is? Take a pebble, throw it into the pool and it will have a ripple effect. Sin however small, however private will have its own rippling effect on your personality and ultimately your personality will affect those of your peer group.

What is more, sin is a sort of contagious thing. One sin will provoke another sin. It's like a game of billiards.

You hit one ball which hits another ball. Dinah is exploited and because some men took the law into their own hands and contaminated the law in the way that they applied it. Every family of a whole township was terribly affected.

If you want to find the reason behind the problems of Simeon and Levi you've got to look to the old man Jacob. You cannot disengage him from responsibility no more than those of an older generation like me can disengage ourselves from the responsibility of what we now allow to be placarded in front of a younger generation. My generation ought to seek the forgiveness of younger people for the way that we have mishandled some of the things that we have done in our country and some of the statutes that are written in Parliament.

When Jacob was on his deathbed, do you know what he did? He brought his sons before him. I'm talking about years after this event and eventually in front of him came Levi and Simeon and what does the old man then do? He curses them for their anger because that anger had brought such disrepute in Canaan and such problems for the people of God. I wish that Jacob had flexed his spiritual muscles and on this particular occasion had said to the men of Shechem long before, at least days before the murderous assault that was levelled on them that Dinah with no contracts at all could have stayed on had that been her wish in Shechem.

But they, that is Jacob and his wives and his boys would move on to the Bethel where they ought to have arrived at and made their dwelling place when first they returned to the promised land. Jacob Israel, a man significantly touched by God to live his life at the capital case level submits to the lower case, reverts to his older Adamic nature and is not the tower of strength that he should have been. And in condemning Jacob I condemn myself and so many of us here who are called to be fathers and leaders.

One of the consequences of our bad example can be the low level of spirituality amongst other believers but God does not disengage himself from Jacob. He takes Jacob to Bethel and he continues to use him and God will not remove himself from the Dinahs who have been exploited. He will grant cleansing and wholeness and healing and the Shechems who I take as a category of those who have abused in any fashion, they too within the purposes of God can be healed.

For there is a shadow that falls across this chapter and the foundation that causes the shadow to fall is found in the pages of the New Testament. There is a cross that is perspective and retrospective. There is grace and pardon and forgiveness offered to those who follow the folly of Jacob, those who exploit like Shechem exploited, those who have butchered like Simeon and Levi were guilty of, you in some degree, they absolutely.

There is forgiveness, there is pardon, there is cleansing, there is a new beginning, there is a possibility of a new order and a new discipline in your life. Jacob's God opens his arms to all the categories of people that we have met tonight in the verses of this chapter. Let us pray.

We ask, Lord, that this message may live on in our minds. To Jacob's God we flee, pleading the forgiveness for all that we have done that is wrong. To the cross of Calvary we come.

Lord forgive us. Lord heal us. Lord purge our land.

In the name of Jesus our Saviour, Amen.