I’m trying to prepare a Sunday school on Jacob, Leah and Rachel.  I keep thinking about it, and its really different than a didactic New Testament epistle.  One of the tendencies I have with studying the bible is to 1) find the principle 2) apply it to my life.  I mean, that’s what the OIA method of bible study teaches isn’t it?  The problem is, I couldn’t come up with anything new.  These are the lessons I came away with…

Lessons from Jacob’s story:

Don’t practice polygamy.

Don’t show favoritism

Don’t be deceptive… it will bite you in the back.

All of these lessons were very, well… lame to me.  Nothing new.  Nothing interesting.  So I got to thinking, if God only wanted to teach us lessons and princples, he would have written the entire book in that format.  The entire bible would be epistles or proverbs or something like that.  He didn’t write the story of Jacob in a story format for nothing.

Why stories?

I realized that we tell stories of our past in order to see where we’ve come from.  Native Americans told stories to explain natural phenomenon.  We tell stories and histories to explain the phenomenon of our own lives.  We want to know where we came from.  We want to be connected to a bigger community that transcends time and space.

Truth: Principles or Stories?

Where is truth is found?  Is it in principles or narratives?  Sometimes when authors write novels, they write them in order to communicate certain principles they have already laid out.  Other authors write about what they’ve seen in life and the incidences that connected to them, and allowed their readers to draw their own interpretations.  So which came first for the bible?  Well neither.  God came first and God isn’t a principle or a story.  But the point is that we need both in our lives. God doesn’t want us to just follow his will.  He wants us to struggle with and truly be transformed by it.  I truly believe that a conquered sin is better than a sin never committed in God’s eyes.

Divine Connection

God wants us to feel a connection to the people in the stories.  He wants us to see how they struggled with his word and how they failed and how they succeeded.  He doesn’t just want us to ”live the right life.”  He wants us to be connected to him through community with the biblical patriarchs.  He wants us to be connected to him through community with one another.  He wants us to be connected to him in every way.  This includes living a holy life, but it also means tracing our history and heritage back to God.  It means finding our purpose in Him.  It means seeing that we are a part of a bigger community and plan.

Narrative connects us to God.  The narrative of Jacob connects us to God and his blessing.  Seeing Jacob’s struggles and sin is one part of knowing God.  Understanding Rachel’s jealousy and Leah’s one desire in life is part of communing with God.  We don’t need to draw lessons and applications out of narratives.  The lessons and applications are never the same.  What we need to do is to situate ourselves within God’s huge plan and rich history and know that we are a vital part of it.