The first thing I want you to notice about chapter 34 is that God’s name is never mentioned in it. It is a story of the wicked human heart nearly all through. You remember we learned from chapter 33 that Jacob bought a piece of land, and in a way settled down to live near a little town, perhaps the first one he came to in the land of Canaan, which was not doing what God had told him to do. What a lot of trouble Jacob got into, and how much he displeased God by his doing his own way so much! Anyone but God would have been angry with him and ‘given up trying to help him. But God is not like us. He had thought of this “stiffnecked” Jacob before he was born, and was going. to take care of him all the days of his life and make him praise God for His love and kindness, which he didn’t deserve at all, once and again on the journey he was taking, (just. like we are taking one, you and I from babyhood to eternity), and then God was going to take Jacob at the end of his life straight to heaven itself, because Jacob, in spite of his self-will, believed God.
We shall first talk about a few of the verses of chapter 34. In verse one we learn that Dinah, the only girl in Jacob’s family, went out to get acquainted with the girls of the country round about her home. This was the second wrong step; Jacob, when he bought the farm, and took up his home in this place, had been untrue to the character God meant him to have, of being a stranger and keeping separate from the wicked world around him, which was soon to be judged and. punished by God, and when the father shows a bad example, the children may very likely go on in the same way. You know we are all examples to each other; when we do right, we, without knowing it, perhaps, are encouraging others to do right, and when we dci wrong, we are giving others who see us, encouragement to do the same. Jacob should have kept on his way, and not settled down among those godless people, and Dinah should not have made friends among enemies of God, and these two wrong steps led to great shame and sorrow. The people of the land too, seeing nothing. about Jacob and his family that differed very much from themselves came around, and said, we would like to make marriage between your children and ours. Then we find two of Jacob’s sons deceiving as their father had done, and presently murdering all the men of the place, stealing their wives and children and all their property and destroying the. town; the other brothers, or at least the older ones, joining in the work. How dreadfully wicked all this was! And we can’t wonder at Jacob being very angry and very grieved, and afraid too, as we read what he said to his sons in the thirtieth verse. We wish though, that Jacob had thought about God, and the dishonor to Him, and confessed his own share in it, for he had not been walking with God like his grandfather and others had done.