July 11, 1999 by Tad Mitsui

In 1945, the Allied Forces defeated Germany and Japan, and occupied those countries. I was a school boy in Tokyo. I remember the day when we had to cut out certain parts of our text books. We were told that some parts of them were untrue. Especially, we had to blotch out many parts of the history book. Nobody wants to see anyone talking about their ancestors as robbers and swindlers. So the Allied occupation forces wanted to erase all traces of the Japanese military propaganda about the Western countries.

Having gone through a radical alteration of history to make over a image of the past, I find the story of Rebecca and her two sons quite amazing, because it does not hide the shady characters of their own ancestors. Jacob was the first ancestor of a nation. And Essau was the ancestor of the Edomites. But the Bible speaks about Jacob as a fraud and a scam artist, and Essau a moron. Normally, a history book praises the virtues of the forefather like Jacob and his mother like Rebecca, and hide or minimize their dark side. But the Bible, the sacred history of the people of Israel, totally decimates Jacob”s respectability. If a history book makes people feel ashamed of the founder of the nation, it should be banned under the normal circumstances.

And Jacob, what a sleazeball he was! He was the kind of scam artist who rips off senior citizens and skips the town. And his mother was a partner in the crime! Yet, he became the founder of the nation, who changed his name to "Israel", which became the name of the people of a nation. Rebecca was then in her sixties. She loved Jacob. He was gentle, good looking with pale smooth skins, loved cooking, stayed home to look after mother”s sheep, and was clever like Mama Rebecca.

Essau, on the other hand, was everything Jacob was not. He was hairy, a ruddy-faced outdoor”s man. Poppa Isaac loved Essau, because he was a real man”s man Isaac wanted to be. Isaac was, by then, in his eighties. Essau”s idea of good time was to spend days in the wild hunting animals. Most people would prefer Essau to Jacob. He was big, bluff, easy-going, a man without deception. But he had no brain for some of the sophisticated aspects of civilized life like entitlement, inheritance, promises, or tradition. He had no patience to think what”s more important than his stomach. One day, he was desperately hungry. So, he gave away what he was entitled to as the elder son for mere a bowl of stew. What a sucker! A nice guy though. A bit simple like children. A child can not see the long term benefits, so does not wait. But Essau, he was a grown man. He should have known better.

Some people interpret this story of Essau and Jacob as a proof that God favoured the people of Israel over other peoples. They see it as a proof that mind is superior to passion. I don”t agree with this view. God”s judgement was on both Essau and Jacob. Jacob and Rebecca deceived the aging and blind Isaac, and seemed to have snatched the inheritance away from Essau. But what did Jacob gain from his deception? Nothing! In fact, he had to run for his life, away from Essau”s wrath, and had to live in a foreign country in servitude, for fourteen years. If Essau and Jacob gained anything from their experiences, they gained wisdom. They had to live with the consequences of their mistakes and wrong doings, and learned important lessons about God”s way. Both of them received God”s blessing equally in the end.

The Bible is a collection of records of people”s struggles as they tried to live according to the will of God. So the Bible had to be totally honest about people”s strength and weaknesses. If you are looking for perfect people in the Bible, you will be disappointed. Basically, it tells you how imperfect humans are. Instead, you can learn how just and loving God is. As we go on to read other stories in the history of Israel, you will find that the Bible tells you more about disgusting human behaviours. The Bible is full of stories of conflicts and intrigues, murders and rapes, polygamy, adulteries and even incests. In fact, it can easily be banned from the school libraries, if people read the whole Bible seriously. But they don”t. So, it collects dust safely on the book shelf. Those of us who read it, read it selectively. So we don”t run into the stories which raise embarrassing questions. But if we do, we will have hard time explaining some stories of the Bible to children.

I was once challenged by a Communist friend when I was still a student. He denounced the Bible as an unethical book and people in the Bible were disgusting. Of course, I tried very hard to defend the honour of the Bible. But to my embarrassment, he knew the Bible much better than I did. I knew only the parts I learned in the Sunday School and heard in the worship services. I did not know many passages, that described the evil and immoral deeds committed by many familiar Biblical characters. I didn”t realize that the Bible exposed the human conditions so frankly. As I grew older, I found the Bible embarrassingly closer to reality around us.

The Bible tells us how God has interacted with people. It is the book about God. It honestly described people as they were, good and evil. It also tells us how deeply and faithfully God love us, in spite of our repeated failures and unfaithfulness. It is the Holy Bible not because it has many stories of good people, but because it is a book that tells us how wonderful God was with people who had many shortcomings.

This is why we learn so much about God from a story like the stories of Isaac and Rebecca, Essau and Jacob, no matter how they were weak and deceitful. God loved them all so much that he never gave up on them. God loves us so much that he sent Jesus to us, who died on the cross for us. Let us see what”s going to happen to Rebecca”s son Jacob, next Sunday.