Genesis 34:1–7
The Bible4Jesus.com Podcast
About this episode
We come this morning to a passage that is grim, sordid, and deeply unsettling. It is a story of foolishness, violation, rage, and the catastrophic failure of leadership. Our modern sensibilities, shaped as they are by the therapeutic sentimentalism of our age, recoil from such stories. We would prefer our Bible stories to be neat, tidy, and suitable for flannelgraph. But the Scriptures are not a collection of inspirational quotes for coffee mugs; they are a record of God's dealings with a rebellious and broken world, a world very much like our own. And in that record, God does not airbrush the sins of His saints. He puts them on full display, because in the failures of Jacob's house, we see our own failures, and we see the desperate need for the grace that would one day come through Jacob's line.