Yesterday’s lesson had Abram leaving Haran and going to the
place the Lord led and now we see his grandson, Jacob, going to Haran to find a
wife among his mother’s people. They
were living among the Canaanites and his mother, Rebekah, had two reasons for
sending her younger son away to find a wife, one to keep him safe from his
brother who had threatened to kill him, a la Cain, and two to keep him from
marrying one of the Canaanite women. Her
husband, Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah, had come back to the home country
to find a wife and now her son was coming back and would ultimately marry two
of his first cousins, Leah and Rachel.
As he went, he had his own encounter with the Lord and in this
encounter, the Lord renewed the covenant with Jacob. He had more or less stolen birthright and
blessing from his brother when it had always been prophesied and in spite of
his treachery, the Lord chose him as the one through whom blessing would
pass. It would be a long time and a
circuitous route, but Jacob, would indeed come back to this place for another
encounter with the Lord.
Continuing to walk through the “I AM” passages in John, we
now find Jesus making two claims but they are indeed related to one
another. He says, “I am the door of the
sheep” to begin this discourse and then later, “I am the good shepherd.” When the shepherd gathered his flock at
night, he gathered them into a small enclosure in the field, a circular rock
enclosure that had been built for this purpose.
Sometimes more than one flock would be gathered together for safety and
warmth. When the sheep were all in the
fold, in some cases the shepherd would lie across the opening of the fold so
that no predator could get in without his knowing it and the sheep could,
likewise, not leave without his knowing it.
The good shepherd risked his life by being the door of the fold in this
way. There are, in the prophetic
literature including Zechariah and Ezekiel, in addition to the 23rd
Psalm, multiple places where God is clearly the Good Shepherd. For Jesus to claim this honorific for Himself
was clearly a claim to equality with God and everyone knew it because the
prophets said that God Himself would come and shepherd the sheep. Like Jacob, these men and women this day were
in the presence of God and didn’t realize it.
The writer points beyond earthly hope because all the saints
of old whose stories he has synopsized failed to see earthly hope fulfilled in
their lives. They, he says, weren’t
looking for fulfillment in their lifetime but saw hope beyond that, had a
longer horizon than most of us ever see.
To find the right horizon, he goes back to the day Abraham took his son
Isaac, the hope of the fulfillment of the promise of making his name great, and
his descendants countless as the stars in the heavens and as the sand on the
shore, up the mountain to kill him as a sacrifice to the Lord. The writer says that he did this because he
believed in resurrection and he must have at some level because the Lord had
been clear that Isaac was the son of the promise. He had to have been as certain this was the
Lord’s voice on that day as he was that first day he heard Him tell him to
leave his father’s country, his faith was the same, he went. All those who he names here took the long
view, the eternal view in blessing their sons in faith and in having their
bones taken to the Land when they could never have reasonably expected these to
come to full flower. Faith is all we
have and all we need, but it is based in promise and in past performance.
No comments:
Post a Comment