Jacob is also one of the series of representative men; he represents the course of discipline and attainment; and now the most important point of his life is reached. He arrives at Jabbok (depletion), where he indeed is depleted, humiliated and crippled; yet he prevails with God, and attains to an altitude of spiritual power, for which he is divinely honored and invested with a royal title. He comes thither, it is true, “planning” as well as praying, but I could never see why, he is blamed for that. Is planning, wrong? Do his critics never plan? Planning is only wrong when our plans are substituted for, or traverse God's plans; as “system” —so often denounced is a highly desirable thing, unless it interferes with some divine system already announced., There is no evidence that this was the case here. He feared; yes, perhaps he ought not to have been afraid; but would his critics now, I wonder, feel at all nervous if they had all their loved ones menaced by the appearance of a hostile army led by a wronged and revengeful warrior?
But whether he feared or planned, he prayed, and he also went forward, and this was the important matter after all; like that soldier whose knees used to tremble when going into battle: but it did not stop him; he looked down at them and said, “Ah, you'd tremble more if you knew where I was going to take you.”
He was under the discipline of suffering all his life; it was not he who could write that proverb: Si longa est, levis est; si gravis est, brevis est. His burdens were long and heavy too. And it is remarkable that we have a chapter interjected to show us how Esau and his family were prospering, producing wealth with Midas-like power, and developing kings and nobles by the ton—I suppose that avoirdupois weight is moat suitable here—while blow after blow fell upon Jacob. If we judge by mere outward signs—sight—as Jacob's friends did, we should assuredly conclude that Esau's was the right course and Jacob's was the wrong. A prolonged succession of disasters darken the true servant's life, some of the heaviest of which occur when he is walking in the path to which God called him: the dishonor of Dinah; the cruelty of Simeon and Levi, and the consequent hatred of his neighbors; the death of Deborah; then of the thrice-beloved Rachel; Reuben's wickedness; Judah's profligacy and violence; the loss of Joseph, and then of Benjamin; the famine; and approaching blindness.
The lesson of the first importance here is that outward calamities do not prove that a man is in the wrong place—of course outward persecution rather tends to prove that he is in the right place. Nor is outward success a necessary evidence of God's approval. This is certainly a very rudimentary lesson, yet it cannot be too often undated upon. For there is such a strong tendency in us to judge in that vulgar and childish way, that we are not only likely to submit to the ruling of Job's comforters in judging of the lives of others, but also to be misled by such tests in reference to our own course. How many men, even devout and earnest, have been turned aside from a right course because they thought the calamities falling on them were signs of God's disapproval! This is a mere judging of the outside of things. No man would do anything so stupid in daily life; would he buy a horse without listening to its breathing, or seeing its action, because it was shapely? or an organ without hearing its chords, because it was well veneered? or a bale of goods because it was nicely canvassed?
But whilst this is all true as to the general course, there was undoubted failure in that course, and many of the ills that befell him probably—and some of them certainly—were the results of such local and temporary failures in a (generally) right courses He promised Esau that he would go and see him at Seir, in the south; but as soon as Esau’s back is turned, he goes away eastward to Succoth, and settles down there, outside Jordan; he builds a house, but not an altar. “Capua ruined Hannibal.” Its luxuries and ease turned the victories of that illustrious conqueror into defeats. And that house at Succoth, the place of compromise, where the Gadites afterward hung back, may have left far-reaching results of evil and misfortune. It is true he moves on to Shechem, within the land; but—even here he “buys a field,” and here happens to him one of the most dreadful calamities of his life: presently it comes out that there have been idols tolerated in the house. His management of his family seems quite faulty: it was lax, petulant, and partial (in justice though we admit that they were always an extremely awkward set to manage); and it is not surprising that heavy sorrows came upon him in consequence. When a young man was profane, Diogenes struck the youth's father: when Jacob's son (or daughter) was wicked, it generally reacted with special force on himself.
But though in his haste and distress he cries, “All these things are against me,” they were “all working together for good.” “The Swedes,” said Peter the Great, “will conquer us for a long time, but they will teach us to conquer them." It was so with Jacob too; and we see him at last having overcome all, resting on his staff, calmly victorious. If Seneca's words be not applicable, at least old Rutherford's last words are “With mercy and with judgment My web of time He wove, And aye the dews of sorrow were lustered with His love.”