So many preachers and teachers eviscerate the lesson of Jacob by making him out to be the bad guy. It can sound pious to say that Jacob is an example of salvation by grace, but in saying that Jacob’s struggles are not an example of living by faith, Christians deprive the Church of a lesson and example that they need more than they want to admit.

J. I Packer wrote an incredible book that remains a classic today called Knowing God. But in it he exemplifies this damaging misreading of Scripture. He claims that Jacob had “all the opportunist instincts and amoral ruthlessness of a go-getting businessman.” He says that he needed God to convert him from unbelief, as he puts it, “instill true religion” into him. He writes, “Jacob must be weaned away from trust in his own cleverness to dependence upon God, and he must be made to abhor the unscrupulous double-dealing which came so naturally to him.”

But when God confronted Jacob, he did not rebuke him for his struggles, but rather blessed him. The simple fact is that Jacob was never held to be in the wrong for struggling with Esau in the womb, and when Isaac sought to go against God’s will and give the birthright to Esau, it was his wife, Rebekah, the boys’ mother, who hatched a plan to prevent Jacob from being robbed of what God had said was his.

The bottom line is that it was God, not Jacob, who chose impossible and tyrannical circumstances for Jacob’s entire life. By standing above Jacob and moralizing about him in the name of salvation by grace, the Church is robbing herself of what the Bible says about living by faith.

Because the fact is that Christians are often not in control, not on top of the world, not in respectable circumstances, not part of the ruling class. They are put in places where they are underdogs, where they are the scum of the world, where they have to be as wise as serpents.  As Paul later writes, “we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things”