Sermon Tone Analysis

Moving Jacob’s Family

Growing up, I always felt I was a little different from the other kids in school.

Now, there were probably a number of reasons for that feeling, but one big reason was certainly that my family moved around a lot.

It often felt like we moved to a different house every year, and a different town every four or five years.

I actually had to consult my parents to get a good count, and together we figured that during my 18 years growing up we lived in 17 different houses.

17 houses, and 7 different towns.

During that time, I attended four different districts.

Some of the moving was good.

We’d move to a nicer home, or one with a bigger yard.

One house we moved to actually had a spare room that I was allowed to turn into a music studio of sorts.

Some moves were not so good.

I left friends behind or else we were really being forced to move because we couldn’t pay rent or the neighborhood was not good.

When I got to college, the moving didn’t stop either.

I lived in a different house, dorm, or apartment each year that I was at Mississippi State.

In fact, during my senior year, the house I was living in burned down.

So I had to move again (the good news, though, was I didn’t have to pack anything that time!).

After college, I moved two more times, until Allison and I got married.

After we were married, we lived in a tiny farm house for two years.

And then, just as we were getting settled down, we felt God tugging at our hearts, telling us it was time to move once again, this time to Kentucky.

So, in total, I’ve lived in 26 houses during my life, I’ve lived in 10 different towns, and three different states.

I really do hope God allows me to stay put for a while.

Maybe, because I believe God has a sense of humor, he was just training me to be a Methodist pastor before I was ever a Methodist.

Jacob, too, had a good understanding of what it means to move constantly.

He was a nomad, and lived in a tent for starters.

But even more than that, Jacob had been pushed out of his home at an early age, forced to run away in order to escape the wrath of his brother Esau.

He moved from the promised land, up to Abraham’s home country, then back down to the promised land again.

And now, in our story today, God calls Jacob to move once again.

It is not insignificant that Jacob encounters God in this way in precisely the same spot where they’d met years before.

It was at Beer-Sheba where Jacob had had a vision of God descending the ladder of heaven.

Even while he was fleeing for his life, God met Jacob at Beer-Sheba and made this promise to him,

“I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; 14 and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring.

15 Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

Now, in his old age, Jacob receives a very similar promise from the Lord:

“I am God, the God of your father; do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make of you a great nation there.

4 I myself will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also bring you up again; and Joseph’s own hand shall close your eyes.”

“I am God, the God of your father; do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make of you a great nation there.

4 I myself will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also bring you up again; and Joseph’s own hand shall close your eyes.”

There’s a pattern here that’s important to pick up on:

First, God introduces himself, “I am God, the God of your father...” God wants Jacob to know who he is, and to remind him that they have a history together.

This isn’t just any god, it’s the God of your father, so you can trust him.

Trust and faith, after all, is essential to our relationship with God.

Second, in both instances, God reminds Jacob of the promise, the promise that started this whole crazy adventure with Abraham’s family, “I will make a great nation of you...” Importantly, we should note that it doesn’t really seem to matter where Jacob happens to be.

Whether it’s “the land on which you’re now standing,” or the land you’re about to go to.

Either way, God has the power and the desire to keep his promise, and to bless the faithful ones who follow him, whether here or there.

Lastly, and this is the really big one, God says to Jacob, “I will be with you.

I will go down with you, and I will bring you back up.”

Whether Jacob is in Padam-Haran, Canaan, or Egypt, his God goes with him.

His God does not abandon him, and is always working to bless him, and to fulfill his promises.

So God has really given Jacob the exact same promise two different times in his life.

It is interesting, however, that we see two rather different responses to God’s call to move.

When he was young, Jacob was a little apprehensive about this moving business.

After he wakes up from the dream, he doesn’t rush off to pack his things and move to Padam-Haran.

Instead, he tarries around a bit, and then makes a kind of wishy-washy half-promise with God.

“If you really do what you’ve said,” says Jacob, “then I’ll call you my God, and I’ll worship you.”

But old man Jacob has been here and done that.

He has learned from his own experience that what God has said, he will do.

And so, after hearing this message from God later in life, he does not hesitate.

The very next line in Genesis after the dream is, “Then Jacob set out”.

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), .

Moving in the OT

We’ve seen many times so far where God has called on a particular person or family to move.

God blessed humanity to “be fruitful and multiply,” but when humans tired to congregate and clump together at the tower of Babel, God forced them to spread out and move across the earth.

Then, he asked Abraham and Sarah to move 500 miles across the desert to a strange land.

Joseph believes that it was God who orchestrated his own move from Canaan to Egypt, and now Jacob’s whole family is being asked to move.

Because Jacob and his family moved to Egypt, they will eventually have to move back to Canaan.

So hundreds of years later, God calls Moses to lead the Israelites back through the desert.

Then we see something similar happen in Israel as it happened at Babel: God’s people get content, and they want to clump together and do their own thing in Jerusalem.

So God forces them to move, and he sends the Israelites into exile in Babylon.

After 70 years in Babylon, God returned his people again to Jerusalem.

Moving in the NT

And God’s moving doesn’t stop in the Old Testament.

In , we see Jesus explaining how God plans to move his people again.

Before he ascended, Christ’s followers asked him:

“Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.

8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

See, at that time most of Jesus’s followers were Jews.

They were still thinking that Jesus had come to destroy Rome and set Israel up as a new powerful kingdom.

Even after his death and resurrection, they still couldn’t wrap their minds around what Jesus was really all about.

“Lord, did you come here for Israel?” they asked.

But Jesus says, “Your thinking is too small.

Not just Jerusalem, but all of Judea.

And not just Judea, but even Samaria!

And we won’t even stop in Samaria, but we’re taking my rule and my kingship to the ends of the earth!”

That’s a lot of moving!

But, of course, the early Church didn’t want to move.

They too, tried to stay hunkered down in one place.

The early church didn’t want to go out to the ends of the earth, they wanted to stay safe inside the walls of Jerusalem.

But, once again, God made them get up and move!

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), .

It took the stoning of Stephen and severe persecution to finally get the Church up and moving like Jesus wanted.

And so, in , we read:

That day a severe persecution began against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria. 2 Devout men buried Stephen and made loud lamentation over him.

3 But Saul was ravaging the church by entering house after house; dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison.

That, no doubt, sounds pretty bad.

And it was a bad time for the church, yet it took that to get the church moving.

Just one verse later, we see how God was at work in this moving:

4 Now those who were scattered went from place to place, proclaiming the word

Like so many people in the Old Testament, the early Church didn’t want to move.

God had push them out of their comfort zones, but when they finally got on the move with God, great things started happening:

The gentiles flooded the church, the Church grew exponentially, and the good news about Jesus really did begin to spread to the ends of the earth.