Israel the Re-Deaux - Genesis 35 9:15

35:9-15 - This journey that Jacob is taking his family on is so that they can go from where they were living in Mesopotamia to the land of Canaan, which is the land that God had chosen for them to have as their Promised Land. What’s interesting to me is that on the journey, after Jacob crosses into Canaan, God appears to him again, but largely just tells him the stuff that he’s said before. He tells Jacob “thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name.” God reaffirms that he is in fact, “God Almighty,” and commands Israel to “be fruitful and multiply,” and that he will have “a company of nations shall be of thee, and kings shall come out of thy loins,” and this is the same place that God promised to Abraham and Isaac “to thee I will give it, and to thy seed after thee will I give the land.”

This is all stuff that Jacob has heard from God before, so the question becomes, “why did God appear to Jacob here and tell him all this stuff from before?” Tom Bradford from the Torah Class give an excellent explanation that Jacob, like all the rest of us, need constant reiteration from God of what he expects from us, and as we grow on that knowledge, we are taught more, but we need that constant stream of information, counsel, guidance, and comfort.

Another important point Tom makes is that when Jacob had received the promises and name change previously, he was “on the OTHER side of the Jordan River, OUTSIDE of the promised land. Now that Jacob is INSIDE the Promised Land, it needs to be reaffirmed. Why? Because in Jacob’s mind… just like in the minds of all the peoples of the world in that era… gods were numerous, and they were territorial. When Jacob’s name was first changed to Israel, he was still in the province of the Mesopotamian gods, and therefore under their sphere of influence. Now that Jacob is in Canaan, he is in the province of El Shaddai, Yehoveh, the god whose territory is Canaan, and so he needs El Shaddai to affirm that what he was told before still stands. Did Jacob believe there were other gods? Yes. That Jacob mistakenly thought this is true we, of course, know his thinking to be false. Yet, God showed grace and mercy and played along, and didn’t insist that all at once, Jacob was to understand all the truths about God… Don’t think for a minute that God doesn’t play along with each of us on many matters that may prove, in the course of time, to be error.”

I really liked this because it demonstrates that God meets us where we are. This life is messy and people believe all types of things for all types of reason, and I think back on the times that there has been some single strand of spiritual understanding that has come to me that shook my whole world and I had to spend a lot of time in contemplation about it in order to move forward. For instance, when I was listening to one of the scriptorians talk about Genesis and she talked about how much of the Old Testament was used as allegory to teach the people principles using concepts they already understood.

This lead me to the conclusion that much of what is recorded in the Old Testament might not have even happened at all, and that was confirmed by a guy in my ward who wrote the Institute Manuals for the Church for 25 years. It took me a long time to reconcile the fact that I had always taken the Old Testament to be a factual account of real people and the things that happened to them, and that maybe that’s not the case. My point is that this one tiny concept threw my world into a tail spin that I had to pull out of with a lot of time, contemplation, and energy. Now imagine if God came to us with a concept that was way bigger than that and exploded our world view and spiritual understanding, that would probably be quite detrimental to our progress. We wouldn’t be ready, we wouldn’t understand how that truth fit and what the significance was.

This is why God meets us where we are, teaches us gospel doctrine little by little, so that we are able to work it into our understanding and use it to grow closer to Him spiritually. This is why he doesn’t rush to correct our mistaken understandings so quickly, why the fundamentals are so important, etc. It’s a process and as the master psychologist, only God knows the best way for each of us to move forward in our spiritual understanding. That’s why when we look back and beliefs that people had held historically, we think, “we know that that was wrong, why didn’t God correct them then?” The people weren’t ready for the correction, it would have hindered the progress. And this only works in the context of an eternal perspective, it’s only fair to everyone in the eternities.