Scripture Daily

Context No. 1592 of 4322 · Genesis

Context · Reflection

Genesis 35:23-29: in context

23The sons of Leah: Reuben (Jacob’s firstborn), Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun. 24The sons of Rachel: Joseph and Benjamin. 25The sons of Bilhah (Rachel’s servant): Dan and Naphtali. 26The sons of Zilpah (Leah’s servant): Gad and Asher. These are the sons of Jacob, who were born to him in Paddan Aram. 27Jacob came to Isaac his father, to Mamre, to Kiriath Arba (which is Hebron), where Abraham and Isaac lived as foreigners. 28The days of Isaac were one hundred eighty years. 29Isaac gave up the spirit and died, and was gathered to his people, old and full of days. Esau and Jacob, his sons, buried him.

The passage lists the twelve sons of Jacob, born to four different mothers: the sons of Leah, the sons of Rachel, and the sons of the two servants, Bilhah and Zilpah. These twelve, from a household marked by rivalry between wives and favoritism among children, would become the twelve tribes of Israel. The passage then records the death of Isaac at a hundred and eighty years, old and full of days, buried by his sons Esau and Jacob.

It is worth pausing on what this list of twelve sons represents. They were the children of a deeply flawed and fractured family: two rival wives and their two servants, a husband who loved one wife over the other, sons born into jealousy and competition, a household full of the favoritism, rivalry, and sin that runs all through Jacob's story. And from this troubled, dysfunctional family came the twelve tribes of Israel, the whole people of God. God built his purposes not on an ideal family but on this one, with all its brokenness. There is real encouragement in that for anyone whose family is far from ideal. We can imagine that God works his purposes only through harmonious, godly, well-ordered families, and feel disqualified by the dysfunction, rivalry, or brokenness in our own. But scripture shows God building the foundation of his people through a family riddled with exactly those failures. The twelve tribes sprang from jealous wives and favored sons and a tangle of human sin, and God worked through all of it. He is not limited to perfect families; he accomplishes his purposes through ordinary, flawed, broken ones, weaving even the dysfunction into his plan. The family that produced the tribes of Israel would not have looked, from the inside, like a promising vehicle for God's purposes; and yet it was. God works through the families we actually have, with all their fractures, and not only through the ideal ones we imagine we should have had.

Do I feel disqualified from God's purposes by the brokenness or dysfunction in my family, when he built the twelve tribes of Israel from a household full of rivalry and favoritism, and can I trust that he works through the flawed, ordinary families we actually have?

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