Introducing Season One of God’s World, God’s Way
You have been told a lie about Jacob.
For generations, the Christian church has repeated a slander against one of Scripture’s greatest saints, a man whom God loved so dearly that He was not ashamed to be called the God of Jacob. The lie is simple: Jacob was a deceiver, a thief, and a scoundrel. His very name, we are told, means “cheat.” And because of this lie, the riches God has stored up in Jacob’s life story have been locked away from the very people who need them most.
Season One of God’s World, God’s Way is a comprehensive, verse-by-verse dismantling of that lie, and a rebuilding of Jacob’s story from the ground up, using the plain text of Scripture and the Hebrew language in which it was written.
What You Will Discover
This series begins where all good stories begin: with the villain. Before we can appreciate Jacob, we must understand Esau, and Esau is far more dangerous than the Sunday School version suggests. In the opening episodes, we trace Esau’s character from the womb to his 400-strong armed force, and we uncover a pattern that Scripture itself establishes. Esau is not merely a careless brother who lost his birthright over a bowl of stew. He is a wild man in the line of Ishmael and Nimrod, a persecutor of the godly, a man who chose hunting over dominion, power alliances over honest work, and fornication over covenant faithfulness. More than that, the “Esau spirit” is alive and well in our own day, and learning to identify it is the first step towards gaining victory over it.
From Esau, we turn to Jacob himself. What does the Hebrew text actually say about him? Not “deceiver,” but ish tam, a word translated elsewhere in Scripture as “undefiled,” “perfect,” and “upright.” The contrast the Holy Spirit draws between these two brothers is stark, and it is nothing like what most of us have been taught.
The Key Questions Season One Answers
Did Jacob steal the birthright? The text says Esau sold it, and then lied about it afterwards. The church has simply echoed the words of a profane man whom God hates, and called it “sound exegesis.” This series takes the reader through the Hebrew text, the broader Genesis narrative, and the pattern of the godly seed versus the ungodly seed, to show that Jacob acted lawfully, wisely, and in faith.
What about the deception of Isaac? This is perhaps the most challenging episode in the series, and the one that yields the richest fruit. Isaac, for all his genuine piety in his younger years, had gone badly astray. His god had become his belly. He schemed in secret to overturn God’s clear decree, and it was Rebekah and Jacob who intervened to prevent a catastrophe. Far from being an act of villainy, their actions belong in the same category as Rahab hiding the spies, the Hebrew midwives defying Pharaoh, and Zipporah circumcising her son to save Moses from God’s wrath.
How big were Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? This question may seem unusual, but it strikes at one of the deepest problems in modern Bible reading. We have shrunk the patriarchs down to the size of middle-class suburbanites, when in fact they were mighty princes, fabulously wealthy, commanding private armies, making treaties with kings, and shouldering daily burdens of governance, business, and religious instruction for households numbering in the thousands. Getting the scale right transforms the entire narrative.
Why can we not see the wealth and power that is plainly written in the text? Season One traces this blindness to a cluster of pagan ideas that have infiltrated the church: the Greek and Roman dualism that despises matter and exalts a disembodied “spirit,” the evolutionary assumption that ancient people were inferior to us, and a pervasive anti-capitalism that treats honest business as morally suspect. These doctrines of demons have stripped the lead from the church’s roof, and the rot of paganism has been seeping in for centuries.
For the Struggling Man
This series is not an academic exercise. It is built for the man who is struggling, the man whose father never loved him, whose brother is a danger, whose employer keeps changing the terms, whose church leadership has gone soft, whose generation faces economic headwinds that previous generations never knew.
Jacob faced every one of these adversities. His father Isaac never showed him an ounce of affection, preferring the reprobate Esau for the basest of reasons. His brother plotted to murder him. His father-in-law Laban cheated him repeatedly over twenty years. And yet Jacob never complained, never grew bitter, never spoke ill of his father even on his deathbed. Why? Because he possessed something more real than any wound: the promise of God’s covenant blessing, and the knowledge that the righteous shall inherit the earth.
The final episodes of Season One unpack Jacob’s practical strategies for going from zero to abundance. Having been sent away by his cold-hearted father with nothing but a staff, Jacob arrived at Laban’s house and immediately began to demonstrate his mastery of the livestock business. He served humbly, worked day and night, built an impeccable reputation, delegated wisely, and made win-win offers in the marketplace. Within twenty years, he had amassed a fortune. The principles embedded in his story are timeless, and they are available to every man willing to learn and apply God’s ways to God’s world.
A Word About Method
This series takes the text of Scripture seriously. That means slowing down, meditating on the Hebrew, comparing Scripture with Scripture, and refusing to parrot the opinions of commentators when those opinions contradict the plain words of the Holy Spirit. The Bereans did not take the great St. Paul’s word for it; they searched the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so. That is the spirit of this series. You are not asked to take anyone’s word for it. You are asked to open your Bible, read carefully, and let God be true even if every man is a liar.
Season One of God’s World, God’s Way is sponsored by CR101Radio.com, in association with Grace Community School and Nicene Covenant Church. If you have questions or comments, you can reach us at questions@godsworldgodsway.com.
The real Jacob has been hidden for too long. It is time to meet him.