(I want to listen to this sermon)

Text: Deut.6:4-5 "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might."

A Sordid Saga

When you take up your Daily Newspaper and thumb through its pages you come across all kinds of horrors and atrocities. In so much of what our newspapers report God is completely absent from the picture and we're left with tawdry depressing stuff.

In any given week I guess you could find, without too much difficulty, articles touching on the "ladette" culture, violence, lust, pre-marital sex and rape, honour killings, greed, lies and deception.

All of those things are found here in Gen.34 as God is left out of the picture. We are confronted with what life in the raw is really like. Strip away some of the veneer of social respectability and you soon find what fallen mankind is capable of. Sadly we find too what disobedient believers are capable of when they allow themselves to get their priorities all wrong – their moral compass goes hay-wire.

Unpleasant as this chapter is to read and study it is sometimes necessary to allow the Bible to speak to us about sin and to show us its tendencies and where it can lead. This chapter makes for shocking reading but perhaps sometimes we need to be shocked because we can all too easily minimise or overlook completely just how horrible sin is and when we do that we're in grave danger of going soft on sin in our own lives. May God preserve us.

Some time has passed. It would seem in fact that a number of years must have passed because now Jacob's sons are out in the fields taking care of their father's flocks and herds and Dinah is of marriageable age – so probably at least in her early teens.

And Jacob is still living near Shechem.

The first question we should ask is "Why is he still there?"

Abram had met with the Lord in Shechem but we're informed in Gen.12:6 that there were Canaanites in the land and Abram soon moved on to Bethel.

Now Bethel was only about a day's journey further on and given the fact that the Lord had met dramatically with Jacob there all those years ago when he was fleeing from Esau it should probably surprise us to find that Jacob has not moved on there himself!

But the "world" has its temptations and so did Shechem!

Lot had been tempted when he looked at the fertile Jordan valley and had chosen that despite the proximity of Sodom and Sodom was full of wicked men who were great sinners against the LORD (Gen.13:10-13). Do you remember what a mess this landed him in?

It would seem that Jacob had succumbed to similar temptations – the region around Shechem was evidently suitable for livestock. Doubtless Jacob convinced himself that he'd be alright there, he wouldn't be in danger there. But surely he knew what the inhabitants of Shechem were like – they were certainly no angels! What must the place have been like if Shechem, who becomes the perpetrator of the crime at the centre of this episode, can be described as "the most honoured of all his father's house"? v.19. What has the world come to when a rapist is the most honourable person around!

How easily we can convince ourselves that we'll be alright, that we don't have to take careful precautions. How often we are prepared to sail close to the wind vainly imagining that we will be safe. We can even appreciate that for others the danger might be real but then proudly we convince ourselves that it'll not be like that for us. Peter was warned of coming temptation – he was told to watch and pray – but Peter was cocky and full of his own abilities:

“Though they all fall away because of you, I will never fall away.” Mt.26:33 and you know just what did happen! The Book of Proverbs puts it in the form of a simple question and the answer is self-evident:

Pr.6:27 "Can a man carry fire next to his chest and his clothes not be burned?

Dinah goes off to town to see the girls. Sounds innocent enough doesn't it? What more natural? Except that the only other time the phrase "the women of the land" is used it appears in a very negative context. (Gen.27:46). She seems to end up on one of those "girls night out" of the ladette type.

And of course she's spotted. Shechem is delighted with her and takes her to bed – he has his way with her – she's humiliated. Objectively at least! But why is she still found living in Shechem's house down in v.26.It doesn't look like her resistance was as settled as all that!

Interesting to note that the "women of the land" are nowhere to be found now. Perhaps they were all out for a good time and in their understanding that's just what Dinah was about to have!

And looking at our own day and age has much changed? Girls are becoming increasingly aggressive on their binge drinking nights out with more than an eye directed at the lads! Oh how sad our society has become when the wonderful gift of sexual intimacy is cheapened and degraded in lustful one night stands. Premarital-sex may well have become commonplace in British society as lust has to be immediately gratified but broken-homes, failed marriages and moral wrecks have become endemic at the same time.

How easily we buy into Satan's lie – everyone does it, it's my life, etc. etc. But sin has consequences however much we much wish it otherwise!

At this point there is perhaps just one thing that can be said positively about the young man Shechem – he's not as bad as he might have been! Having got the order of things completely wrong as he took and forced Dinah he does now want to do the honourable thing. Not that he's motivated by honour but he does love this girl and sincerely wants to marry her – he speaks to his father whose responsibility it was to find a wife for his son.

How Jacob learnt of what had happened to Dinah we're not told. Was he suspicious when she didn't return home? Had the girly gossip got around? But we are told of his reaction: he hardly had any! All we're told is that he held his peace until his sons returned from the field.

Jacob seems to feel no anger or any other strong emotion – is he once again thinking only primarily of his own interests? He does appear to be more concerned for his own skin that for the well-being of Dinah. How unnatural for a father to hear of such treatment of a daughter and hardly to react at all!

When we read about how his sons reacted when news reached them the contrast is very great! Surely the emotional reaction of Jacob's sons is more comprehensible than their father's apparent indifference!

As soon as they hear they react. At once they come in from the fields. They are indignant and indeed they are very angry. They know that was Shechem has done was wrong – look the words Moses uses to describe Shechem's behaviour:

v.7 It was "outrageous"; it was "such a thing (that) must not be done".

The thing itself was an outrage but that hardly seems to be the view of Hamor and Shechem as they come to seek to secure Dinah's hand in marriage. The fact that Dinah was apparently still in Shechem's house may well have been intended as a further inducement to Jacob and his family to play ball and not be difficult in the negotiations.

But there is no hint of remorse, no recognition that things had not been done properly. How sad and how terrible when parents and children are complicit in sin!

Many today assume that sexual immorality is a matter of personal choice, a purely private affair. If Hamor and Shechem were of that opinion they were shortly to find out that such sin does indeed have ramifications of a much more public nature.

Hamor begins by declaring his son's love for Dinah and puts in a formal request for her hand in marriage. The request broadens out into the suggestion that this could indeed be the beginning of a profitable link between the entire clans. Say yes and you'll not suffer for it, Hamor seems to say. Say yes and your situation in life will become very prosperous.

At this point Shechem cuts in and offers to pay the bride price, however high they set it.

Superficially it appears appropriate but is it right?

The issue that is now coming to the fore is the identity of Abraham's descendants!

Do you remember the care Abraham took to ensure that his son did not take a wife from amongst the inhabitants of the land? Do you remember how Isaac sent Jacob away so that he wouldn't marry "one of the women of the land"? And now Jacob is being tempted with inter-marriage on a grand scale.

Abraham's descendants were to be a distinct people, a people set apart for the Lord but now Jacob is in danger of being assimilated by the wicked world in which he finds himself.

His sons at least realised this as is clear from the way they respond. They name their terms and conditions which they declare will permit the marriage:

v.16 "Then we will give our daughters to you, and we will take your daughters to ourselves, and we will dwell with you and become one people."

Throughout the running centuries right down to our own day the people of God have faced and continue to face the same sort of temptation. How much easier life would be if she dropped her opposition to the world and to the ways of the world! Or so the enemy whispers. We need to be vigilant in our day – "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect." Rom.12:1. The Christian church is not to become like the world imbibing its values and aping its methods rather the church is to be distinct, separate:

2Cor.6:17-18 "Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.”

Lies and deception are written large all over this section.

Hamor has spoken of the advantages to be gained by Jacob by the alliance between their clans but to his own people he explains his manoeuvring in a totally different way. To his own people he sells the deal as a means whereby they will secure the wealth of the newcomers! Yes Hamor too speaks to the men of his own city of them becoming one people with Jacob's clan – he has in mind swallowing them up!!

How greedy the human heart can be! And in our day materialism has certainly not grown any less has it?

Jacob's sons participate in the negotiations but deceitfully. They have a hidden agenda and they actually use religious practices to further their ends. Having been asked to name the bride price that Shechem must pay for Dinah the brothers declare that for such union to take place all the males of the region must be circumcised.

The men of the city assume this to be some pre-marital rite but circumcision had originally been given to Abraham as the covenant sign of God's blessing ! The sons of Jacob pervert this and use circumcision as a means of incapacitating their enemy so that they might strike them dead!

Sexual sin a purely private matter – I don't think Shechem would agree!

Everything seems to be working out in Shechem's favour. He'll soon be able to marry Dinah. Just a few more days of pain for me and the other men in the city and then…

One the third day the door bursts open and in rush Simeon and Levi!

All the men of the city are struck down and murdered. Here we have the ancient equivalent of what is so inappropriately called "honour killings". Their brothers follow quickly behind and the entire place is plundered!

How disproportionate it all is! No restraint is shown but total destruction. Here is the mafia style retribution that began way back in Gen.4:23 with Lamech singing "I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me."

How terrible when men take things into their own hands! How much better to leave such things to the Lord who said:

“Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” Rm.12:19.

For the first time in this chapter Jacob is animated. He didn't get worked up much over the mistreatment of his daughter but now he fears for his own safety. Jacob is convinced that the other inhabitants of the land will hear about what has been done and thoroughly disapprove of Jacob and his family. They're bound to come after him now and the result will be his own personal destruction along with the destruction of his household.

And this is from a man who has been preserved by God for maybe 30 years now; from a man who has known what it is to wrestle with God and to prevail; from a man who has had his prayers heard and answered; his from a man who had feared the arrival of an angry brother accompanied by 400 men only to find that the LORD was well able to keep His promises. Oh how faithlessly a believer can behave at times!!

Let this be a warning to us!

Jacob hadn't pressed on as he might have done in his walk with the Lord. He'd got stuck by worldly Shechem and not pressed on the Bethel the House of God. The world had got into his system and clouded his judgment. It will do just the same to you if you don't take care.

We all need warnings from time to time. It is better to be rudely shaken up than left to slip and slide quietly into spiritual declension. And that is really what this chapter does. It shows us how degrading and debilitating sin can be.

But I don't want to end on such a note even if that is where the chapter ends. Our chapter divisions are NOT divinely inspired and Jacob's story is not yet over. God has not finished with him even though he has shown himself to be a self-centred, self-interested, faithless believer. Just go on and look at the first four words of ch.35:

v.1 "God said to Jacob…"

God hasn't given up. God may well have been left out of the picture in ch.34 but He sovereignly thrusts Himself back into it again in ch.35. You see when He begins a good work He is determined to carry it through to completion. God's grace is wonderfully free and Jacob will go on to experience more divine protection and more divine blessing.

May that indeed be the experience of us all as we maintain our trust in Christ.

AMEN.