We must begin with God, our Creator. We exist only because God wills that you exist. You were made by God and for God - and until we understand that, life will never make sense. It is only in God that we discover our origin, our identity, our meaning, our purpose, our significance and our destiny. Every other path leads to a dead end. The Bible says, Obsession with self in these matter is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious free life." Romans 8:6
Starting right away in chapter 31; isn't it amazing how God tells Laban what to do in a dream or in a very still voice. How often do we need to take a step back before doing what we think in the heat of the moment. When we act in the moment... sin or mistakes tend to happen.
When Jacob's name changed to Israel in 32:28 - What a huge moment in the Bible - Jacob lost the wrestling match with the angel, but in losing, he won the prize. In losing, he won, for now he understood the sovereignty of God. He learned that he might succeed in overcoming men by his own strength and wit, but he could never give lip service to God’s sovereignty while ordering Him around, as many do.
The prayer life of many Christians consists of telling God what He already knows in order to coerce Him into doing what they think He ought to do. When will we learn that God really does know what He is doing, and that He is not the helpless giant in the sky that many seem to think He is? We ought instead to hear His voice and find out what He wants and intends to do - and then pray that His will be done, and not ours. This is true recognition of His sovereignty. This is spiritual maturity. This is what it means to manifest the character of a true Israelite.
Israelite - Israel. “God commands, orders, or rules.” Man attempts it but always, in the end, fails. Out of some forty Hebrew names compounded with “El” or “Jah”, God is always the doer of what the verb means.
Joseph's Dreams is one of my favorite stories in the Bible - But I will wait until its over to truly go into detail.
When life is rosy, we may slide by without knowing about Jesus, with imitating him and quoting him and speaking of him. But only in suffering will we know Jesus. We learn things about God in suffering that we can't learn any other way. God could have kept Joseph out of jail (Genesis 39:20-22), kept Daniel out of the lion's den, kept Jeremiah from being tossed into a slimy pit, kept Paul from being shipwrecked three times and kept the three Hebrew young men from being thrown into the blazing furnace - but He didn't. He let those problems happen, and every one of those persons was drawn closer to God as a result.
Its remembering Him everyday good and bad that we really become more like Christ.
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