He is running again.
It does not matter, at first, which direction. That detail is almost beside the point. What matters — what defines Jacob more precisely than any other single fact about him — is the motion itself. This man is always between somewhere and somewhere else. Always reactive. Always one step ahead of a consequence he helped create, always moving before the full weight of where he has been can settle on him.
Genesis 28: He is fleeing Esau. He has stolen a blessing, deceived a father, and now his brother wants to kill him. He goes north.
Genesis 31: He is fleeing Laban. He has spent twenty years in a foreign country, accumulated wealth through a negotiation with a man who cheated him at every turn, and now the mood of the household has shifted. He goes south.
Genesis 35: He is fleeing the aftermath of Shechem — not a personal enemy but the catastrophic consequences of his sons’ violence. He calculates, again, what a next move looks like.
Three crises. Three flights. Three times the heel-grabber does what heel-grabbers do: he scrambles.
Before we judge him — let us first consider how recognizable this looks.
Jacob has just deceived his father and stolen his brother’s blessing. Esau’s grief has curdled into a murderous intent. Rebekah dispatches her younger son north toward Laban with a thin cover story, and Jacob sets out with nothing — no inheritance, no escort, no certainty about what waits at the other end. He makes camp wherever the sun goes down.
On one of those nights, with his head on a stone, God shows up.
The Bethel vision is extraordinary not primarily for what it contains — the ladder, the angels, the voice — but for when it occurs. Not after Jacob has sorted himself out. Not once he has arrived somewhere worthy of the encounter. Here. In the flight. In the field. In the dark, with a fugitive’s exhaustion and a schemer’s guilt fresh on him. God appears here and says:
“Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”
— Genesis 28:15 (ESV)
Wherever you go. Including the roads you took for the wrong reasons. Including the directions you chose out of fear and self-preservation rather than faith. God’s faithfulness is not conditioned on Jacob’s geography or his obedience or the moral clarity of his recent decisions. The promise is anchored in God’s own character, and God’s character does not bend to Jacob’s conduct.
Jacob wakes up and makes a vow — touching, if slightly transactional. If You do all these things, then You will be my God. He is not yet living inside the covenant. He is negotiating with it from the outside, treating grace as a bilateral arrangement rather than a unilateral gift. But God has already spoken, and the word does not wait for Jacob’s theological precision to catch up.
I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised. Whatever Jacob understands about that promise in this moment — and he clearly does not understand much — God is committed to its completion.
Twenty years pass.
Jacob has been in Paddan-aram — embedded in Laban’s household, working fourteen years for his wives and six more for his wages, accumulating children and flocks and the particular competence of a man who has survived by his wits in difficult conditions. He and Laban have spent two decades in a quiet contest of competing shrewdness, each one attempting to outmaneuver the other in a negotiation that keeps being renegotiated. Jacob is not, by the end of Genesis 30, a man who has arrived at humility. He is a man who has become very good at the game Laban started.
And then — the moment Laban’s sons begin to murmur, the moment the welcome evaporates — Jacob reads the room with the practiced eye of a survivor, and the old instinct fires: plan an exit.
But this time, God speaks before Jacob can execute:
“Return to the land of your fathers and to your kindred, and I will be with you.”
— Genesis 31:3 (ESV)
The same promise. Twenty years later, in a different country, in the middle of a different crisis. I will be with you. The God of Bethel has not forgotten the man who negotiated with Him on a stone pillow. The covenant is still active. Jacob is still in it.
What is worth noting, however, is the manner of the departure. Jacob does not leave because he has finally grown into his calling. He does not pack the household with the settled confidence of a man answering a divine summons. He slips out while Laban is away shearing sheep, loads the women on camels, drives the flocks ahead, and crosses the Euphrates before Laban knows he is gone. The divine call and the survival instinct are moving in the same direction — but Jacob’s engine is still the heel-grabber’s engine. Still scheming. Still managing the exit.
And still — God with him.
The covenant is not a reward for spiritual maturity. It is the engine of it.
Shechem is the low point of Jacob’s narrative.
His daughter Dinah has been violated. His sons Simeon and Levi have responded by massacring an entire city — deceiving its men into circumcision, then killing them during their recovery. The violence is catastrophic, and Jacob’s response is not the grief of a father, nor the outrage of a man confronting injustice. It is calculation:
“You have troubled me by making me stink to the inhabitants of the land… and I shall be destroyed, both I and my household.”
— Genesis 34:30 (ESV)
He is, again, measuring threat. Assessing exposure. Planning the next move. The crisis of someone else’s making has landed in his lap, and the heel-grabber’s first instinct is to manage it.
God’s response is to take him back to the beginning.
“Arise, go up to Bethel and dwell there. Make an altar there to the God who appeared to you when you fled from your brother Esau.”
— Genesis 35:1 (ESV)
Go back. Go back to the place where I first found you on the road, in the dark, with nothing but guilt and a stone for a pillow. Go back to the ladder and the word I spoke when you had done nothing to deserve what I was about to promise you.
And here — perhaps for the first time in the entire narrative — something shifts.
Jacob does not scheme his way out of Shechem. He calls the household together. He tells them to put away their foreign gods. He buries the idols under the oak at Shechem and leads the household north. He builds the altar. He does exactly what God said — not because circumstances have conspired to make it convenient, but because, haltingly, imperfectly, he is beginning to choose it.
And at Bethel — the place of first encounter — God speaks the name again:
“Your name is Jacob; no longer shall your name be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name.”
— Genesis 35:10 (ESV)
The name had been given before, at Peniel beside the Jabbok, in the dark after a night of wrestling (Genesis 32:28). Jacob already had the name. God is not giving him something new. He is confirming what was already spoken — confirming it over a man who has finally, stumblingly, begun to live in a direction that matches it.
This is where the three-act narrative presses its weight — not on Jacob, but on us.
God named Jacob Israel at Peniel. He wrestled through the night, through the dislocation of his hip, through the breaking of dawn. He would not release the divine figure until the blessing came. And it came. The name came. Israel — he has striven with God and with men, and has prevailed. The encounter was real. The name was real. The blessing was real.
And then — Genesis 35 opens with Jacob’s household full of foreign gods and his sons’ hands still stained from the massacre at Shechem.
The same man who refused to let go of God until He blessed him could not hold onto the blessing long enough to stop running. That is not incidental irony. That is the text being ruthlessly honest about the nature of transformation. The willingness to receive the name and the willingness to inhabit it are two different acts of faith — and the distance between them is where most of our lives are actually lived.
Notice what God does at Genesis 35:10. He does not simply confirm the new name. He restates the old one first: “Your name is Jacob; no longer shall your name be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name.” He names the gap before He closes it. God sees what Jacob has been functioning as — the heel-grabber, the schemer, the calculator of exits — and He does not look past it. He names it. And then He speaks the covenant word over it anyway. That is not theological carelessness. That is pastoral precision. The God who confirms the name also acknowledges the distance between the name and the life. He is not surprised by the gap. He intends to close it.
We know this gap. We live in it.
Declared righteous — Romans 5:1. United to Christ in His death and resurrection — Romans 6:5. Named sons and daughters of the living God — 1 John 3:1. These are not provisional designations or aspirational categories. They are settled realities, spoken over us, ratified in blood, confirmed by the Spirit. The new name is real. The covenant is active.
And yet — the apostle Paul, writing to a church that has received exactly these realities, still has to say: “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body” (Romans 6:12). He is not hedging the doctrine. He has spent eleven verses insisting that believers are dead to sin and alive to God in fact — not theoretically, not aspirationally, but actually. And then he still has to instruct them to live like it. The identity is settled. The living into it is the ongoing work of a life. Jacob and the Roman church are running the same deficit. So are we.
How often do we default to the old name? How often does the heel-grabber instinct engage — the scheming, the self-protection, the flight from the weight of a calling we have not yet grown into? How often do we read the room the way Jacob reads the room in Genesis 31, with the practiced eye of a survivor, rather than the unhurried steadiness of a man who is Israel, who has striven with God and prevailed, who does not need to calculate the exit because the God of the room is already with him?
The patchwork of a maturing faith is exactly this: the slow, uneven, God-accompanied process of learning to live under the name we have already been given. Not perfectly. Not without backsliding into the old patterns. But with increasing orientation — turning, however gradually, toward the One who has never stopped calling us by the new name.
The three flight narratives are not evidence of a failed patriarch. They are evidence of a God who does not give up on the people He has named.
At Bethel — God meets the fugitive. I will not leave you.
At Aram — God meets the schemer. I will be with you.
At Shechem’s aftermath — God meets the frightened father. Go back to Bethel.
Three encounters. Three versions of the same faithfulness. God is not recalibrating the covenant every time Jacob defaults to the heel-grabber playbook. He is not revising His expectations downward or expressing disappointment upward. He is pressing, steadily, toward the moment when Jacob can receive the name he has already been given — and begin, however imperfectly, to live inside it.
He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
— Philippians 1:6 (ESV)
Paul is not offering comfort. He is describing the divine method. The work is God’s. The pace is God’s. Our faithfulness is required — but our faithfulness is not the engine. The engine is the God who kept showing up in Jacob’s flights with the same undeflected word: I am with you. Come back. You are Israel.
The patchwork looks like failure from the inside — uneven seams, irregular patches, the evidence of too many crises survived by too many imperfect decisions. But from the outside, from the vantage point of the finished garment, it is called faithfulness. It is called a maturing faith. It is called the work of a God who does not abandon what He has started.
We know this because we have lived it.
The road between Archers Post and Laisamis is not a road that invites self-deception. The A2 cuts through the Northern Kenya lowlands in long, unbroken stretches — red sand, scrub bush, the occasional camel moving unhurried through the heat. There is nowhere to hide. No ambient noise to fill the silence.
Nearly six years into the work of Beehive Global Collective — well into the ministry, outwardly faithful, inwardly somewhere else — God met me on that road. It was not a crisis that brought me there. That is what made it harder to name. I was not fleeing a Laban or a massacre at Shechem. I was doing all the right things. I was showing up. I was serving. And I was hedging — defaulting, in the quiet beneath the activity, to my own pride, running alongside my calling rather than inside it.
God met me there anyway. Not with rebuke. With a name. He showed me the calling He had always had for me — one I had been given years before but had not yet fully entered. That stretch of barren road in northern Kenya was my Bethel. The calling was not new. The living into it was.
The name was real before the road. The road was where I began to wear it.
Genesis 35 does not end with a triumphant Jacob striding into his destiny.
It ends with a man who buried his household’s idols under an oak tree, built an altar at the place of first encounter, received a name he had been given before, and kept moving. Unfinished. Still patched. Still carrying the accumulated weight of twenty years in Paddan-aram and a massacre at Shechem and a lifetime of reading rooms.
But moving in the right direction.
That is what maturing faith looks like. Not the resolution of all the running — not the arrival, at last, at a version of yourself that no longer embarrasses you. It is the slow turning, through every flight and every scheme and every crisis of someone else’s making and your own, toward the God who has never stopped calling you by the name He already gave you.
You are not Jacob. Not anymore. The name was spoken. The covenant was ratified. The God who met you in the middle of your mess did not do it to observe you — He did it to bring you home.
No longer Jacob. Act like it.
In Christ,
Mathew
Beehive Global Collective
From one man He made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us. Acts 17:26-27