Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What's Keeping You From God? | Torah | Genesis 35:1-15

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

What's holding you back from a deeper relationship with God? Is there anything you're doing that distances you from him? In today's episode, Tanya shares three things Jacob does that separate him from God (and three things God does to bring him back in Genesis 35:1-15). Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Genesis 35:1-15 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Daniel Wilmeth. Right now, we're going through the first book of the Bible, Genesis. This morning the Senate is going to vote on whether or not to get rid of daylight savings time. If it passes, it will go to the president and voila, all the spring forward and fallback will be gone, along with all our complaints that we make about it and the rhythms we've adapted because of it. So daylight savings was an agricultural solution. It was supposed to, provide more hours of daylight so kids and workers could help farmers get the crops planted in the spring and harvested in the fall before and after school and work. But it doesn't fit as much with

our current economy and our rhythms. And some say that an extra hour of light over the winter will especially help businesses like restaurants bring patrons in after work. So it's an intersection of where we've been and where we are. And it's kind of fascinating to look at how we keep doing things without really knowing why we do it. Now, we've looked at a lot of people in the Bible on this podcast, and we have yet to find anyone other than God who is perfect. But we continually look at how God intersects his perfection into the lives of imperfect people and wakes them up to the rhythms and patterns that keep them out of his light. And this is where God finds Jacob when he calls him and tells him to head back to Bethel. It's a beautiful exchange where God speaks to Jacob

and Jacob wakes up to the reality of God's presence and has a fresh awareness of God's holiness. It had been 30 years since Jacob's dream, where God showed him a ladder and told him he would always be with him, wherever he went. Jacob sometimes remembered this and sometimes didn't. But most recently, he'd been living outside of God's will in a land that wasn't quite where God told him to be.

Things didn't end there. Dina was defiled and her brothers, will they trick the Canaanites into circumcision, and then they used their recovery to murder them and steal their gold and silver idols and their jewelry. There was a lot of evil in Chapter 34, but no mention of God. And chapter 35 begins with God

and has him all over the pages. We're going to look at three ways that God dealt with Jacob when he was feeling defeated, deflated, and afraid. Let's dig in, Genesis 35. Step 1. deal with your pride now just when we finished reading jacob's words of desperation towards his sons about how they'd made him a stink in the land and how he was afraid to travel because the canaanites would try to kill them and everyone with them we hear god speak to jacob and god said arise go to bessel

and dwell there now that word arise in the hebrew is kum kum which also means stand up persist, be valid. And that's so opposite of what we want to do when we're down. We want to wallow and point fingers. There's a rule in soccer that you can't kick from the ground. But last weekend we saw a friend, well, she got tripped, and then she was on the ground, and she got a yellow card because she tried to kick the ball and the player who tripped her from the ground.

Pride, it can talk us into feeling like victims instead of people with responsibility. But there's actually less distance between our sin and other people's sin than we like to think. Jacob was angry with his sons for deceiving the Canaanites, but Jacob was one of the original deceivers. Now, when God told Jacob to arise, he was restoring him. Arise. And be valid. Be valid because I have made you so. Pride lies to us, and it tells us to protect ourselves because no one else will. It tells us to build walls and false identities. But there's nothing anyone can do or say to us that Christ already hasn't given on our behalf. We walk into a room in confidence not in ourselves, but in Christ.

We're not any better than the people in that room, but we're comfortable in our skin because we know who we are. Step two. Deal with your false gods. After he stood up, Jacob was able to look around at his family and the people traveling with and lead them in the restoration process. And he could see how they needed to deal with all those false gods they'd plundered from the Canaanites before they headed back to Bethel. When Simeon and Levi went through the Canaanite camp and killed the men,

they stole their things. And it was gold and silver. It was jewelry carved with pagan symbols, images of gads who the Canaanites believed held power to heal and provide. But for Jacob's family wearing these things and having these things, was like religious contamination. Even when they tried to move forward in obedience to God, these statues and images would be a constant reminder

that there are other ways to try to gain power and find comfort apart from God. They would be lulled by untruths and half-truths as long as they held on to these things. Anything we turn to to feel better about ourselves or anything we turn to to figure out who we are and what our place in the world is outside of Jesus is a foreign God.

people pleasing, identity shifting, false humility, playing the victim instead of owning our part. These are all things that make us feel safe or powerful, but keep us from submitting to the pure holiness of God. Hebrews 12-1 talks about this. Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance, the race marked out for us. and sometimes the casting off is painful, but there's great freedom in getting rid of those things. Jacob actually told his family to bury them, so they wouldn't have to carry them around anymore. Step three.

Deal with your godlessness. When God appeared to Jacob in that dream 30 years prior, Jacob set up a stone there and said, If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear so that I come again to my, my father's house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God. So that was then. Then he traveled to Mesopotamia. He married Lee and Rachel. He served his uncle Laban. He had a lot of children. At the end of 20 years, God came to him and reminded him of his obligation to leave Laban and go home. But Jacob got a little sidetracked on the way for about 10 years. He stayed outside the promised land, and then when he did

cross back over in De Canaan, he settled down. in the prosperous territory of Shechem, instead of making the final trek 20 or so miles back to Bessel. He was close to home, but not all the way there. He was kind of following God's command, but not all the way. Godlessness is having an irreverent and irrelevant attitude toward God. It's not that we don't acknowledge him at all, but we don't acknowledge his absolute holiness and our absolute dependence on him. It's when we think we're doing fine without him that we tend to dismiss God as irrelevant in our plans and choices. Jacob seemed to be okay living that way for about 10 years until that conflict happened with Shechem and Hamar. And now because he was afraid and unsure, he was more than ready to hear God's voice again.

And the beautiful thing was by grace, God was there. God was always there. Jacob's attitude and posture toward God didn't change anything about God. It just changed Jacob. And now God was restoring him and calling him back to Bethel to the place where Jacob first knew the Lord would always be with him. So now he could see how true that was and build an altar to the Lord there. So Jacob went back to Bethel and understood God with a depth and devotion that he wasn't capable of before. His experiences with Laban and the Canaanites enhanced his understanding of God's holiness.

His ups and downs gave new application to the truth that God would always be with him. God kept his word, despite Jacob's pride, false worship, and godlessness. Grace awakened, cleansed, and restored Jacob's stubborn soul, and God made that clear when he gave Jacob a new name at Bethel, calling him Israel, which means strives or fights with God. That name foreshadowed a future with God. God hadn't just been with Jacob like he promised, but God would be with Jacob and continue to carry out all his promises.

Today, as I write, I look out my window in a mixture, there's sun, there's melting snow. I see dried out brown branches from hydrangea bushes, and they need to be pruned. But I also see fresh green stems from tulips that are going to sprout. I see beauty that is promised and work that needs to be done to prune and trim so new things can grow and show off their new color. I've heard that Hawaii can't grow food and Florida can't grow flowers. As much as I love those places, I also love the freshest strawberries you can find

anywhere, laying in the sun on the spring soil in Missouri. I love bazinnias that wait until it's so hot you can't bear it. And the pumpkins that roll over in the fall sun when everything is about to fade for the winter. We couldn't have these things without the extremes and the renewal that comes from them. Beth Moore has been teaching the Bible for a long time, and she's also been through a lot of hard things personally and professionally, and she recently said, This is the gift of age. When you age in faith, there is no one like Jehovah. Chapter 35 is like a biography of Jacob finding out that there is a story of Jacob finding out that there is no one like Jehovah. By His grace, God will continue to use all our junk to make us see and love him more.

Before you forget, sign up for the brand new TMBT newsletter. Hit the link in the show notes, and you'll get an email every Wednesday that will help you beat the midweek slump and go deeper in your walk with Jesus. Thanks for listening.