November 21, 2022

Passage Read: Genesis 33-36
Meditation Verses: 33:18-20

Thought

Jacob had been with Laban twenty years. After seven years he received his first two wives, so he had all his sons and daughters except Benjamin in about 13 years, then he returned to the land of Canaan. So when he first settled at Shechem, Reuben could only have been 13 or 14 years old, and his brothers and sister even younger. The events of the next chapter surely were not done by young teenagers. Jacob must have stayed many years at Shechem over the course of these few verses. He could not have been unfamiliar with the Canaanites and their practices. He perhaps had become too comfortable and familiar with them, which led to the next chapter's tragedy.

Application

I need to be wary even of the nice unbelievers around me. While they may not lead me directly into sin, they may very well lead me to soften my view of God and His righteous standards. They are lost and going to hell, but if I think of them as really nice people who I like, I'll be tempted to think they'll be fine and don't need the Gospel, don't even really need God. And then I'll think I don't really need to worry about God's standards and become careless in my walk. This is what Jesus was talking about when He told about the servant who thinks his master has been gone a long time and begins to beat his fellow slaves and get drunk. He turns to unrighteousness because he loses sight and fear of His master.