Read: Gen. 32-34
Jacob had more encounters with angels than anyone else in the Bible. He had seen them in his dream and now he gets to see the host face to face. I wonder if he recognized them because of his dream or if it was obvious they were angels. I’m sure they gave him strength to go from his confrontation with Laban to his next one with Esau. In the meantime Jacob spends the night wrestling with another angel. When the day began to break, he wouldn’t let the angel leave till he blessed him. The angel, which I would assume was the Lord himself, changed his name from Jacob to Israel. Jacob named the place Peniel which means “face of God.”
When Jacob and Esau do meet, Jacob is pleasantly surprised at Esau’s response. Esau seems glad to see Jacob but he does accept Jacob’s generous peace offering. They part ways and Jacob finds a place to rest his cattle and the people in his household. That place is Succoth which means “booths”. There he builds a temporary house for himself and booths for his cattle. He is acting out the Feast of Tabernacles before it was put into place. The Feast of Tabernacles would also be know as the Feast of Booths. To celebrate the families would set up a temporary dwelling and stay in it during the week of the feast. The feast was a feast of rest. Their temporary booth was to remind them that our dwellings here on earth are temporary and one day we will live in an eternal one. Our bodies are our temporary dwellings but one day we will have a body that will be eternal. Then we will enter into the rest of the Lord.
Jacob only stayed in Succoth long enough to rest. (Moses will rest here when he first leads the children of Israel out of Egypt.) Jacob moves on to Shalem which would later become Jerusalem. When we leave our temporary lives we will move to a holy Jerusalem (Rev. 21:2). God uses the incident with Dinah to rid his holy city of its not-so-holy inhabitants.
Lord, help us to see that everything happens for a reason because we are called according to Your purpose.
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