You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan continues a series engaging the sweeping, chaotic, sometimes tragic,

and sometimes glorious stories of four characters in the Old Testament,

Jacob, Joseph, Jeremiah, and Jonah. Dan invites us to consider the story of Jacob,

a manipulative trickster who has much to teach us about the story of God and the nature of

redemption. I want you to think about what it would be like to have Jacob move next door to you or worse. You're going to enter

into a business relationship with Jacob. Maybe worse upon worse, you're going to have Jacob as

your husband, your father, a dear friend.

There is no one I think who would want to be in relationship with Jacob.

And yet, Jacob is a patriarch.

In fact, maybe one of the most important patriarchs, because the actual

name of the people of God, Israel, comes from this character, Jacob. And I'm going to presume

that you know a great deal about Jacob. And if not, it's a advisable journey to begin in the 25th chapter of Genesis,

where you'll meet Jacob and his birth.

Rebecca, Isaac's wife, has, as the passage says, two nations in her womb.

And the older boy, Esau, red and Harry, comes out with his brother, Jacob, grasping his heel.

And actually, the word Jacob means surplanter, or another word for that

is the one who grabs the heel, the one who's following and making his way into the world,

forming and conforming the world to what he desires. In some ways, we can say of Jacob, we know that he is a

highly manipulative, very opportunistic trickster who's working the world always to the angle

that he wishes. And you get that very, very rich history when you begin to see that right from the

beginning, the selling of Esau's birthright, what it says about Esau's impulsiveness and lack of awareness of the implications and the complications

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