God’s favor on Jacob, the heir to the Abrahamic Promise, is obvious in this situation. Jacob is blessed by God in a foreign land while someone is intentionally trying to rip him off.

Jacob begins his defense to his wives with “You know” which indicates his two wives are aware of their father’s mistreatment of Jacob and of Jacob’s innocence in this matter.

Jacob focuses on the fact that he has “worked…with all my strength” over the past twenty years (Genesis 31:38). All this time his father-in-law, Laban, has tried to offset the Lord’s blessing on Jacob ten different times. Laban was constantly adjusting the situation in order to benefit himself, while the Lord used each adjustment by Laban to bless Jacob.

It is important to recognize that Jacob saw God’s immediate intervention in every area of his life:

• family
• work
• prosperity
• future and more.

Jacob’s confidence in God’s presence is going to encourage him to boldly move where God wants him to move and do what God has called him to do. This confidence includes the ability to return to the Promised Land where he must face Esau.

"It often astonishes me that I did not see the importance of meditation upon Scripture earlier in my Christian life. As the outward man is not fit for work for any length of time unless he eats, so it is with the inner man. What is the food for the inner man? Not prayer, but the Word of God – not the simple reading of the Word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe. No, we must consider what we read, ponder over it, and apply it to our hearts."

- George Muller

Many are frightened because meditation has become something of a buzzword in New Age circles. But the differences between biblically based meditation and what we find in Eastern religions and the New Age movement are profound. Here are a few of them:

1. Unlike Eastern meditation, which advocates emptying the mind, Christian meditation call for is to fill our mind with God and His truth.

2. Unlike Eastern meditation, which advocates mental passivity, Christian meditation call on us to actively exert our mental energy.

3. Unlike Eastern meditation, which advocates detachment from the world, Christian meditation call for attachment to God.

4. Unlike Eastern meditation, which advocates visualization in order to create one’s own reality, Christian meditation call for visualization of the reality already created by God.

5.  Unlike Eastern meditation, which advocates metaphysical union with “god,” Christian meditation calls for spiritual communion with God.

6. Unlike Eastern meditation, which advocates an inner journey to find the center of one’s being, Christian meditation calls for an outward focus on the objective revelation of God in Scripture and creation.

7. Unlike Eastern meditation, which advocates mystical transport as the goal of one’s efforts, Christian meditation calls for moral transformation as the
goal of one’s efforts.

- by Sam Storms, in "Pleasures Evermore"