Jacob finally faces his brother. After putting his servants in front, then Leah and her children, and finally Rachel and Joseph, safely hidden in the back, Jacob goes to face Esau.

I’m sure it was very clear to Leah and Simeon and the other brothers that Jacob cared most about Rachel and Joseph, putting them in the back to make sure they stayed safe. He’s helping create the jealousy and anger that will end up causing Joseph to be sold into slavery. The thing he’s trying to prevent, Joseph’s death, will be the thing he creates by trying to rely on his plan of salvation, hiding Joseph in the back. Joseph doesn’t die, but in time, Joseph’s jealous brothers will sell him, and Jacob will spend decades thinking Joseph is dead.

Joseph hides Rachel and Joseph because even though Jacob prayed and asked God for deliverance, He’s not trusting God. Even though Jacob knows he has been blessed by God, he always calls God “the God of Abraham and Isaac” or “the God of my father.” He doesn’t call Him “my God.”

We each have to make God our God. When we are young, we have the god of our parents. Maybe that’s the one true God; maybe it’s a god they created in the image of their choosing. Either way, at some point, we each have to make the choice, whom will we serve? We don’t need to know everything about God, but we need to choose Him, the real Him that we’ll spend the rest of our lives and eternity getting to know. We need to choose Him over ourselves.

The world we live in today says you can be your own god. You can control your own destiny. You can get what you want if you want it bad enough. You can achieve what you want if you work hard enough. You can even heal yourself by eating and doing the right things. You can give yourself peace by thinking the right way. You can be wealthy by speaking the right things and believing the right things. It is all trying to tell you that you can be your own god.

If you surrender your life to Him, then you can do all things through Christ who strengthens you. You’ll accomplish it all because it will be His work.

The Bible tells us to think about good things, but there is no one good but God. We need to think about Him and His word. The Bible tells us our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, so we do want to care for it and not harm it, but the Bible says all foods are clean for us if we receive them with thanksgiving. Acting as if we can overcome the curse of sickness and death with our food choices is taking God out of the picture, saying we don’t need Him. It’s acting as our own god.

We rely on Him for our health, our life, our next breath. We rely on His word and obey it to walk in blessing (which we’ve already seen can look on the outside like trouble at times).

Give your life to God, give up acting as your own god, Make the one, true God, the God of the Bible, your God. He is good. He is holy. He is love. He loves you. He sent Jesus to die for you. Ask Him to clean you from your sin and to change your mind to think rightly about Him and yourself. Ask Him to take your life and make it His own by His Spirit. Choose to learn and obey His word.