The Promise Endangered

Go ahead and open to Genesis 34-35.

If you were with us last summer, we spent a lot of time in 1 Peter talking about how God has called us to be his unique people.

We won’t think and act and live like those who don’t know Jesus because he has saved us, given us new life, and called us to honor him in his kingdom.

God had similar expectations of Abraham’s family.

He called them to be his special people, and he expected them to show what he was like to the rest of the world.

However, as we have seen so far, they didn’t always do a great job.

In fact, as we will see this morning, they seem to get awfully close to endangering the promise God made to make them a great nation.

They make some terrible decisions in the chapters we will look at this morning.

They put the promise at risk, but the faithfulness of God drew them back to himself.

As we see how they drifted off track and how they came back, I pray that God will make all of us aware of where we may be drifting and how we can come back.

Let’s catch up with what all has been taking place.

God made a promise to make Abraham’s family into a great nation.

He has reiterated that promise to Abraham’s son Isaac and Isaac’s son Jacob.

Jacob ran away from home because he had manipulated his dad and brother and his brother wanted to kill him.

Last week, we saw Jacob getting back on track in his relationship with God as God brought him back into the land.

The family has settled near a town called Shechem, which is going to come up often in the Old Testament.

In chapter 34, the focus is shifting from Jacob to his sons.

With each generation, we hope someone is going to step up and be a godly man.

With each generation, though, we see things go from bad to worse.

The chapter revolves around a terrible situation. Start in 34:1-4...

Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, goes out to see some of the women of the village.

Shechem, the son of the leader of the village, assaults her and decides that he wants to marry her.

While some commentators try to say that this doesn’t necessarily mean that he assaulted her, the rest of the chapter seems to indicate that he violated her this way.

As we see how Jacob doesn’t react and how his sons decide to stand up for their sister, we see a warning for us all:

1) Beware of the drift.

Right off the bat, let’s make this clear: what happened to Dinah was absolutely wrong.

Shechem deserved to be punished and to make restitution for what he did.

As we go through the chapter, though, we will see that Jacob’s sons were not looking for justice for their sister; they were looking for revenge.

When Jacob hears the news, he is strangely silent. In fact, he is going to seem very passive throughout this entire narrative.

Her brothers, however, are livid. Verse 7 indicates that they were grieved and angered, which they should have been.

Shechem’s father, Hamor, comes to propose a solution. Pick up in verse 8-10.

Here is the first challenge we find Jacob’s family facing: they are given the offer of blending in with the people of Shechem.

Remember, God called them to be separate and to live separately from the other nations around them.

While they weren’t the only tribe that did this, God gave them the ritual of circumcision as a physical symbol of their relationship to him. That’s going to be important later.

Now, Hamor is giving them an opportunity to intermarry with them, do business with them, and just assimilate into their culture.

We find out later in verse 23 that Hamor and Shechem were proposing this because they wanted a piece of the wealth and prosperity God had given Jacob’s family.

As we will see, Jacob’s family didn’t allow themselves to be grafted in, although they reacted wrongly in their own way.

For us, though, I think it is again worth the reminder that we are called to live differently than the world around us that doesn’t know Jesus.

Satan is trying to destroy what God is doing, so he is more than happy for those who follow Jesus to live lives that are no different than those who don’t follow Jesus.

For many of us, our mind goes quickly to the hot-button issues like gender, sexuality, and abortion.

It is certainly true that those who don’t follow Jesus would put pressure on his followers to compromise on these areas even though God has been very clear.

However, some of us have our guard up against those issues but are missing some of the other ways we drift into living like the world.

We may hold to biblical models of sexuality and the right to life, but how often do we respond to others the same way people who don’t follow Jesus do?

How often do we use others for our advantage or react in ungodly anger? How do your priorities in life differ from those who don’t follow Jesus? Are you living for him first and foremost, or are you living for your safety or your security or your comfort or whatever your definition of success is?

How do you use your money? How do you spend your time? How do you treat people who can’t do anything for you?

If we love Jesus, that should be reflected in everything we do.

If we aren’t careful, though, we can start to drift slowly away and before we know it, we have blended in with the Shechemites and lost sight of who God called us to be.

Had Jacob’s family taken Hamor at his word, they could have endangered the promise by blending in with the world around them.

While it’s a good thing they didn’t, they endangered the promise in a whole other way.

Again, we see the progression where the kids continue to do what the parents did.

Jacob has been willing to lie and manipulate. As we will see, Simeon and Levi are willing not only to manipulate, but also to murder.

Pick up in verse 13-17...

It is interesting because Simeon and Levi are taking the sign God gave that marked them as a people who were specially separated out for him, and they are instead pretending to use it as a sign to join with others who aren’t following the one true God.

Shechem and Hamor think this idea sounds good in the long run, so they go back and convince all the men of Shechem to get circumcised.

Pick up in verse 25-29...

When all the men were in pain and recovering from the procedure, Simeon and Levi come and slaughter all the men of the city and plunder it.

Again, this wasn’t justice for Dinah, it was vengeance.

They may not have compromised by joining with the people of Shechem, but they were blatantly disobedient by taking matters into their own hands instead of allowing the Lord to direct the process.

Throughout all these events, we haven’t heard a word from Jacob.

He finally pipes up in verse 30, and his concern is that they have endangered the family because now everyone is going to want to kill them in retribution.

They put the promise in danger because now everyone else will want them dead.

While that’s a valid concern, there isn’t anything in his response that talks about them sinning against the Lord or against the people of Shechem.

Instead, Jacob just seems passive through the whole ordeal and scared of the outcome.

To put it mildly, they are not doing great, are they?

They have faced the risk of drifting off track one direction by blending and compromising.

Instead, they went the other way and got off track by taking matters into their own hand and letting their anger run unchecked.

If I were God, I would have just left them and said, “Forget it. You’re on your own.”

Are you ever surprised that he doesn’t say that about you?

You have compromised to the point that there is almost no real trace left that would show others that Jesus is your Lord, or maybe you have gotten so deep in sin that you don’t think there is any way out.

I am so glad the story doesn’t end here, because God, in his grace and his mercy, calls Jacob and his family to...

2) Get back on track.

Start in 35:1 - While Jacob and his sons have seemed to have little regard for what God is doing, God is still good enough to call them back to himself.

He calls them to make a change and to go back to a particular place.

That place is Bethel, which will be another significant place throughout the Old Testament.

It’s the place where Jacob met with God when he ran away scared.

This gets to a key principle of getting back on track: You have to be willing to make a change.

For Jacob, that change was going back to where he had first met with God.

For you, it might mean a move or a job change or breaking things off with a boyfriend or girlfriend or blocking that app or site on your phone or changing the way you spend your time.

I don’t know the specifics, but to quote author and teacher Henry Blackaby,

“You can’t stay where you are and go on with God.” - Henry Blackaby

You can’t keep doing the things that got you off track.

A critical step for you will likely be to repent of what you have been doing that you know is wrong.

Repentance is more than just confessing that you have sinned.

Repentance is allowing the weight of what you have done drive you to agree with God that it is sin and then make whatever changes you need to make to get back right with God.

Look at what that meant for Jacob in 35:2...

Along the way, they had picked up other gods they were worshiping. They were putting their trust in things besides the one true God, and for them to get right, they needed to bury them and leave them behind.

They needed to wash and change clothes as an outward symbol of the change they were making.

When they did, they had to leave the place they had been living and go to Bethel.

God protected them along the way, and God spoke to Jacob again when they got there, reaffirming the promise he had made and proving that God had been faithful the whole time.

That’s what Jacob acknowledged in verse 3 - “He has been with me everywhere I have gone”

What does repentance need to look like in your life?

This is what God called the church at Ephesus to do in the book of Revelation:

Revelation 2:5 CSB

Remember then how far you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. Otherwise, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.

Listen: we know that emotions come and go, but what have you stopped doing that you once did in your relationship with God?

What are the compromises, the sins, the ways you have drifted, that you need to repent of?

In your mind, think about at least one actual, tangible change you need to make today to get back on track.

Why would God forgive you today?

Why doesn’t he just drop us and kick us to the curb?

Because he has made a promise to us.

For us, it isn’t the promise that we will become a great nation.

Instead, that promise is that those who trust in Jesus as their Savior and Lord can become part of his special people.

His promise is that our sins can be forgiven if we will surrender to Christ and trust in his death on our behalf.

The call to repentance and obedience is not a call to try hard to earn our salvation; rather, it is a call to live out the salvation he gives.

If you are here this morning and have never entered into a relationship with Jesus, you start by surrendering and trusting in him.

The Bible says:

Romans 10:13 CSB

For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

So if you call on the Lord today, you will be saved.

Calling on him means trusting, it means allowing him to put his finger on your life and say, “This isn’t best,” and then repenting and turning from it.

If you’ve never done that, you can do that right now.

If you have done that, have you drifted off course?

Have you compromised in ways that may seem small, or have you engaged in things you know to be big?

Trust afresh in the faithfulness of God. Repent and do the things you did at first.

Get back on track today by his grace.