For Israel’s life as a nation, Edom served as a kind of control, or point of comparison, to show the electing love of God. Jacob and Esau were twins. God gave Edom a land, not in the promised land, but a neighboring territory to the southeast, and he preserved the nation for centuries. Edom shows what Israel might have been apart from God’s covenant.

I think there are at least two important things we learn in Chapter 34. One is an important allusion we see elsewhere in the Bible, and then the other is the main theme of this particular story.

This is the chief challenge for us. When we’re wrestling and struggling in a cursed world, our struggles feel more real to us than God. Laban’s tricks are more real to us than God. Esau’s fury is more real to us than God. Barrenness and infertility is more real to us than God. When Rachel cries out to Jacob, “Give me children or I die!” she is showing that Jacob is more real to her than God. When Jacob responds to her in anger, “Am I in the place of God?” He is acting as though Rachel is more real to him than God. Wrestling with God means that he becomes most real to us.

The promises of God to us are promises that he keeps in our details. God is at work in the tiniest things you do, whether that means picking up glass or setting up sticks. So brothers and sisters, take heart and keep on with the tiny things.

There’s more to say, and two more sons, to Leah’s story. But let’s ask about the connection to us: Have you felt hated? Have you been overlooked by someone who mattered to you? Have you been painfully under-appreciated? Take comfort in this: God loves to choose the overlooked. He loves to love the hated, to comfort the neglected. He loves to take special notice of those who don’t get noticed. Verse 31: “The Lord saw Leah was hated.” And what did he do? Pile on? Join in the hatred? No, it draws out his heart to help. He is gracious and merciful. This is our God.

This whole thing really is a mess; it seems chaotic and fragile — but then here in verse 3 we get this little sneak peak into God’s plan. We see that there’s a single thread of continuity that reaches back to the very beginning. In the middle of all this confusion, simultaneous to the conflict and inconvenience, God is actually working to fulfill his purpose for humanity through Jacob.

In other words, Isaac has come around. He now freely and gladly offers to Jacob the blessing of Abraham, as God had promised. The repetition of the blessing, and the explicit reference to Abraham, is meant to tell us that Isaac has realized his error and repented.

And this is why it’s never a throwaway word. Glory is always talking about something real and something vivid. God’s glory is the showcase of his heart, and historically he has shown us his glory in more vivid ways than others.

That’s the promise of what’s called the New Covenant. God is going to give his people a new heart with a new power. Because we cannot truly love without that power.

But that’s just not the way the Bible puts it. In the Bible, the love of God for his children is a particular kind of love. It is love that we are given as a gift, not love that we are entitled to.