Jacob’s life is one of struggle with God. More than that, he has also had children by their female children. Not learning from Abraham’s mistake, Jacob has taken multiple wives. Like a good baseball game, the stats tell the story: Four women who bore him children.
The passage walks through all of Jacob’s descendants: 70 in all, plus his son’s wives. But if you skip this one, you’re going to miss something important. Nothing causes Bible readers to skip ahead like a genealogy. In the middle of one of the grandest narratives in Scripture-God’s salvation of Israel through the faithful suffering of Joseph-we stumble upon a genealogy. Genesis 46 is the one where your eyes glaze over. We need to learn to see who was at work when all of our own works failed us. We need to develop a theology of looking over our shoulder. As Christians, we need to develop a theology of looking over our shoulder. Not every look over the shoulder is like Lot’s wife. Hebrews 11:10 tells us that Abraham looked forward to the city that had foundations, designed and built by God.
In Christian circles, looking back can often be met with scorn! The faithful don’t look back! We keep our eyes on the Heaven ahead! There’s something to that. He looks back-Matthew 26:75 says he “remembered”-and he wept bitterly. 16:3)!” Peter denies the Lord for the third time and hears the rooster crow.
Later, they would love back on their enslavement with the angst that only bitter nostalgia can produce: “We sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full (Exod. The Israelites looked back at Pharaoh as he pursued them at the beginning of the Exodus and were filled with fear. This look was her last, and God cursed her for it as he said he would. She is known only for her looking back, pining over a worldly city she was attached to as God destroyed it. It is the inability to look ahead because of the attachment to where you have come from. On occasion, it is the impulse of shame and guilt of what came before. For others, it’s tremendous regret at things past. Have you ever been in a season of looking over your shoulder? For some, this is a season of pining over the things left behind or the things we wish were not drifting away.