Be careful ‘NOT’ to STEP OUT of your BOUNDARY!
January 12
Bible Reading: Genesis Chapters 34-36
Be careful ‘NOT’ to STEP OUT of your BOUNDARY!
"Now Dinah the daughter of Leah, whom
she had borne to Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land. And when
Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took
her and lay with her, and violated her. His soul was strongly attracted to
Dinah the daughter of Jacob, and he loved the young woman and spoke kindly to
the young woman. So Shechem spoke to his father Hamor, saying, "Get me
this young woman as a wife." (Gen 34:1-4)
The name of
God is not mentioned in this chapter (34), and this incident occurred during
the return journey of Jacob and his family back to his ancestral home. Jacob halted
and purchased a small property opposite to Shechem and decided to settle there by
pitching his tent in that place (33:18-20). We can recall that Shechem was the
place sanctified by Abraham as his first stop in the land of Canaan (12:6).
As an
afterthought, instead of residing at Shechem, perhaps Jacob should have
fulfilled his vow at Bethel (28:22; 31:13; 35:1) and moved on. We know that Lot
pitched his tent toward Sodom and lost his daughters (19:30), and Jacob pitched
his tent toward Shechem and lost Dinah. While Jacob and his family were living
in Shechem Dinah, Leah’s only daughter (30:21), mingled socially with the
heathen women as she was looking for women companionship. She stepped out of her family boundary and breached
the proper separation from the ungodly!
What we can
infer from this incident is that Satan attempted to pollute the godly line of
Abraham through intermarriage between
the Israelites and Canaanites by granting full rights for the Israelites as
citizens of the land. There is no
separation from idolatry as well, a sad commentary on Jacob’s spiritual
leadership (35:4).
There is also
a real problem of contamination of God’s elect people through improper relationships with the pagan
people of the land (34:30). In his analysis on this chapter, Kidner has
remarked the following: “Chapter 34 shows
the cost of … rape, treachery and massacre, a chain of evil that proceeded
logically enough from the unequal partnership with the Canaanite community”.
Let us be
careful everyday that we do not step out of the boundary that God
through His Word has placed upon our lives! If we do that, even innocently as in the case of Dinah, we may slip into a
terrible place (Psalms 73:18) that we will regret
for a long time. Let us only keep our
eyes on Jesus “the author and finisher of
our faith” (Hebrews 12:2) during our life journey and stay close to HIM.
