3/29/2024 0 Comments Audio sermon genesis 34And we come prayerfully, asking God to reveal Himself and His truth to us as we read and study. So we come humbly before His word, knowing its divine author and its authority over our lives. He wants us to understand it and to know Him through it. How should we read and understand such chapters? First, remember that the Bible is God’s word. This is not the last unpleasant chapter in the Bible, or even in Genesis. God is faithful to preserve His people and to keep His promises to them, despite their weakness, failures, and sins. Part of what we are learning from the book of Genesis is that God is so wise, so powerful, so gracious, and so faithful to His promises that He is able to carry out His good purposes even with people who are extremely broken and sinful. The Bible is very candid about its characters. 9)? Haven’t we seen righteous Lot reluctant to leave the sinful city of Sodom and being drunk and raped by his daughters? Haven’t we seen Abraham and Isaac lying about their wives being their sisters in order to save their own skins? And of course, we have Jacob deceiving his father to steal his brother’s blessing. Haven’t we already seen godly Noah passed out drunk and naked (Gen. In one sense, it should not surprise us to find such a chapter in Genesis because we have already seen material that not only shows the depravity of human sin in general, but also the wickedness and sin in the hearts and lives of those who were men of God. But we won’t be just brushing over it today because it is our commitment to preach the whole counsel of God in His Holy Scripture. Pink and Alexander Maclaren skip over it. What are we to do with such a chapter? One commentator said, “We may well wonder if any man who had proper discernment” would preach from this text. Genesis 34 is such a narrative, for it tells of the rape of Jacob’s daughter Dinah by Shechem, son of Hamor, and of a bloody revenge on the city of Shechem by Jacob’s sons. Sometimes the scripture reports such reprehensible actions that, I’ll admit, it is difficult to know how to preach on them. Every so often in the Bible we come across an account that is just plainly distasteful and repulsive.
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