Genesis 30:43 - Forerunner Commentary

Genesis 30:43

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Articles, Bible studies, and sermons that contain The First Book of Moses Called Genesis 30:43:

Genesis 30:43
Excerpted from: Overcoming Is A Choice

And Jacob goes on a mission—this is get-er-done Jacob. He goes out on a selective breeding campaign like you have never seen. And within a little while, Jacob’s flocks were full of spotted and speckled animals, making him very rich.

Jacob became a wealthy man through the selective breeding he had done. I will not go into of the details because I do not understand it all myself. But basically what Jacob did was use simple genetics to breed for speckles and spots. And it worked. And he became really rich.

This may seem to be a reversion to Jacob’s trickery, but it is a lot more complex than this, because Jacob was converted. You may have never thought of it in this way, but Jacob really does nothing wrong. For one thing, Laban had put him in charge of the flocks and herds already. It was his job. Secondly, Laban and Jacob had agreed to this wages. The deal was agreed to. Then, Jacob went out and worked, and worked, and worked to increase his flocks for his wages for which he was entitled by contract and his labor that he had put in all those many years of service.

What this shows is that Jacob does nothing wrong. He works within the agreement. And he uses correct principles of animal husbandry to become successful.

The reason I know that he did all this is because God blessed him until he was extremely wealthy. This step in the process of overcoming I will call the application of right principles. He worked within the system. And, he used all the leeway that God gave him within that system to do what was right, and to grow and prosper.

Genesis 30:37-43
Excerpted from: Created to Do God's Will and Work

In addition to the speckled sheep and goats there was the matter of the partially peeled branches.

When Jacob took partially peeled, stripped, and spotted branches and placed them in the watering troughs so that they would be in front of flocks when they came to drink, did he believe that merely seeing the striped and spotted branches would cause the animals to give birth to spotted offspring? No, he did not. God commanded him [Genesis 31:9-12] to set up a striped branches, which he did, not as a physical means to the end of producing striped or spotted offspring, but rather as a symbol of Jacob’s faith and obedience.

Remember in a parallel situation God later caused Moses to set up a bronze snake in the wilderness when the people had been bitten by serpents. The people were not healed by the snake, they were healed by God through faith expressed in their obedience in looking to the snake. They were not looking to the snake for any power or healing, rather it was a symbol of what God was going to do.

In a parallel, but not identical way, Jacob’s trust in God would have been similarly rewarded. In the next chapter, Jacob speaks of having had a dream about streaked, speckled, and spotted cattle in which God spoke to him. It may be that God told him what to do on that occasion.

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