Vengeance Is Mine

Introduction

Some sermons are harder to make than others. Some texts you read and think, “Well, that’s a sordid tale. Not much to uplift the soul here. Let’s move on.” There are others where you encounter a story like this, and those brave souls who attempt to spend some time in there can see multiple ways of looking at the story.

Unfortunately, this is a story that isn’t unfamiliar to our culture. Versions of this happen every day. Something like this may have even happened to you in this room. Because this topic is so familiar, it can blind us on how best to see it, because our various cultures and upbringings crowd around us as we read.

A mistake that we can make in looking at this text (and really many others) is to try to find the main villain. We try to make it simple and reduce the story to pure good guys versus pure bad guys. And that’s just not what we see here. As one commentator put it, there is “ostensibly nothing…commendable” in this chapter (Matthews). He’s right. Yes, there are some actions in this chapter that are worse than others, but there is something that everyone in this room can identify with.

This is a hard story, but there are two points for us to draw from it that Tim Keller, I believe, famously said: You are worse than you think but You are loved more than you know.

You Are Worse than You Think

One of the drawbacks of a great theological education is pride. One of my professors warned me about this in that we can look at things and go, “Well, technically this isn’t wrong.” There is the temptation to look at this scene and feel like the brothers are justified. After all, this is one of the more horrific crimes that we can imagine. Even the text itself is saying that this is an outrage. Couldn’t we frame this as an outworking of justice in a lawless place? Aren’t the descendants of this very family going to come through in a few hundred years and do the same thing anyway? They’re just getting an early start. It can sure feel justified in the wake of such a crime, but the fact of the matter is, there is no command from God or even mention of Him here (Matthews). The response to this crime is massively out of proportion, especially the methods that they used. Let’s explore this piece by piece.

The troubles begin even before verse one. As scholars point out, Jacob and company were supposed to be heading Bethel to fulfill his vow before God (Waltke, 459; Ross, 572). Way back when Jacob was fleeing Esau, he had that vision of God and promised to return to Bethel to offer worship. This point is short of that vow, and it wasn’t just a one night stay, but rather, at least according to once scholar, this was a ten year layover (Waltke, 459). This setup reminds us of Lot, setting up his tent within sight of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Having been in the wrong place for a long time, Dinah decides that she would like to meet with some of the other women in the city. Ancient standards would have recognized this as a very dangerous thing for her to do, because she doesn’t have anyone going with her. She is probably in her teen years, best as we can tell, so this is a very vulnerable person heading into a lawless place (Waltke, 459). This doesn’t make it her fault that this crime happened, but she should have been more careful in how she approaches this city.

We have a responsibility to care for ourselves. We don’t get to simply chalk everything up to the sovereign plan of God as an excuse not to be wise in our approach to life. The command to not murder includes a command to preserve life, even our own.

After she enters the city, she is found and abused. The author, Moses, goes out of his way to condemn Shechem. This is a horrible crime with no excuse for committing it. She is being used as an object, yet incredibly, Shechem has convinced himself that he actually loves her and desires her to be his wife. Obviously, this is meant to teach us about what the Canaanites were like. Like their ancestor Ham, sexual immorality is a part of their character, and it has only gotten worse.

It is easy for most of us to distance ourselves from this sort of crime, but the internet has made this remarkably common. The producers of such content are often taking the same advantage that Shechem does here, and to choose to watch such things is to condone and even celebrate and motivate such crimes. Even consensual activity outside the marriage covenant is a similar abuse of such a person. It isn’t love as God calls it.

But the main body of the text isn’t looking at this issue too deeply. The way the author writes about it makes it obvious enough the sinfulness of such an act. The main part of this chapter is focused on the area we would probably be quicker to try to justify, the response of the family.

Hamor, the father of Shechem, comes out to negotiate a marriage. While this strikes our modern ears like an exchange of property, this is how things were done back then. While certainly women weren’t viewed as equal like they are today (more or less), losing a daughter to a marriage then did carry more economic loss than it does today.

Jacob is the first point of contact, but strangely, he doesn’t react to the crime. He waits for his sons to come back and they seem to take the lead in working this out. While some commentators of Israel’s tradition and even Reformation commentators like Calvin and Luther try to rescue Jacob’s move here as wisdom and emotional control. It’s rare for me to disagree with them, but I think Matthews is correct that it is hard to look at Jacob’s reaction at the end of the chapter and still think that he isn’t just trying to avoid trouble here.

It can get lost in the middle of sexual sin and mass murder, but Jacob’s passivity here opens up the possibility of Levi and Simeon acting as they do. This sort of principle applies to pastors, elders, and workplace leaders as well as fathers (Ross, 576).. Authority given is a privilege as well as a responsibility. This isn’t to say, obviously, that every abdication of leadership will result in this or that Jacob bears all the blame for the choices of his adult sons. But like Dinah, Jacob does bear some culpability here as a passive leader in this moment, and even if nothing happened, he still bears responsibility for that breach of duty at least.

The Canaanites offer all the things that an ancient person could want. Yet God is the one who is going to give it to them, not the citizens of Shechem (Ross, 574). This passage reminds me of Satan tempting Jesus with a cross-free inheritance of the kingdoms of the world. But Jesus recognizes that it would be given to Him without Satan.

The sons counter the offer with a condition, they would have to be made as they are. In one sense, they are correct. There couldn’t be intermarriage with a people outside the covenant of God. That covenant sign at that time would be circumcision. As we will see, they actually have no plans to mix with the people (God wouldn’t have allowed that anyway), but faithfulness to God isn’t their aim. Their aim is to use the painful recovery from the procedure to their advantage.

This is obviously not the way this sign is to be used (Ross, 574). It would be like us trying to kill someone by drowning them in their baptism. It is an absolutely grisly approach to God’s signs, but we do the same by using Church attendance to sell a particular image to other people. It is a misappropriation of the sign. This is why we explain the Lord’s Supper procedure every week. We never want to use the Lord’s Supper to hide our sin. We can think, “If I don’t take this Supper, other people might ask me what’s going on in my life. I’m hiding sin, so if I don’t take, I might be found out.” Don’t do what these guys are doing here.

As the story winds up, their plan works. With the men all out of commission, it is quick work killing all of them, taking all the plunder, and stealing all the people rest of the people. That is the wrong response. There is evidence to suggest that they were keeping Dinah hostage, so doing what it took to rescue Dinah would have been fully appropriate. That is what Abraham did to rescue Lot. When Abraham returned, he made a point of taking nothing that wasn’t appropriate for him to take. This moment here is not in keeping with what Abraham does.

While I don’t think any of us have committed mass murder for a crime committed against us, I think it is no exaggeration for us all to respond beyond what has been done to us. We often want to return evil for evil. It’s only fair. But that’s not how it works for Christians. We are to do good to those who hate us. Its an incredibly high standard.

Right here at the end, Jacob shows a bit more of his character. After all that has been done, the abuse of his daughter, the mass murder carried out by his sons, his response is what this is going to mean from a personal security standpoint!

It’s a mess, and while we might not have committed these exact same crimes, we can find an uncomfortable realization that we have dealt in these categories of sin. Are there degrees of sin? Absolutely. Jacob’s abdication of leadership is not the same level of heinousness as the mass murder of a village. However, there is no such sin that is too small to avoid punishment in hell.

You are loved more than you know.

This is where Jesus must come in. We rightly talk about how much Jesus loves us, but when we fail to grasp the level of our sin, we cease appreciating it. Even if you have committed every one of the sins written in this chapter you can find forgiveness.

This is where most people struggle with Christianity. People will say, “Oh, so you can just murder people all day, and then right before you die, just pray a prayer and boom, heaven?” The theological answer to that is yes, because that is exactly what the thief on the cross did. But it wasn’t because he prayed a prayer, but it was because Jesus, God Himself, never sinned in any capacity, never came close to sinning, but took on all the murders, all the rapes, all the lies, all the sinful abdications of leaders, and took those sins on His record so you could go free. It isn’t the prayer you pray, it is the the One who sacrificed that makes the difference.

Now, lest someone say, “Well then it sounds like I can have the best of both worlds if I just wait until the last minute.” To that, let me remind you that there were two thieves. Both had access to the same information. Both of them knew that they were at the end of their lives. One was given the grace to repent, the other not. The Bible stresses that today if you hear his voice, repent. In Hebrews 3:7, 15 it is warned twice to not harden your heart to God’s calling on you. If you feel that tug to repent, give into that tug. Isaiah 55:6 tells us to seek the Lord, while He may be found. That implies that there may come a time where He can’t be found by you anymore. Has that time passed? Let’s find out. Turn from your sins, trust in Christ today, and what you will find is that God will take you as you are, but He won’t leave you there. He will take you and shape you, but you must turn to Him today.