“All these things are against me.” Gen. xlii. 36.
1 So spoke the Patriarch Jacob, when Joseph had been made away with, Simeon was detained in Egypt, Benjamin threatened, and his remaining sons suspected by him and distrusted; when out of doors, nay, at his door, was a grievous famine, enemies or strangers round about, evil in prospect, and in the past a number of sad remembrances to pain, not to cheer him,—the dreadful misconduct of his own family and its consequences, and, further back, the wrath of Esau, his separation from his father’s house, his wanderings, and his ill-usage by Laban. From his youth upwards he had been full of sorrows, and he bore them with a troubled mind. His first words are, “If God will be with me … then shall the Lord be my God.” His next, “Deliver me, I pray Thee.” His next, “Ye have troubled me.” His next, “I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning.” His next, “All these things are against me.” And his next, “Few and evil have the days of the years of my life been.” [Gen. xxviii. 20, 21; xxxii. 11; xxxiv. 30; xxxvii. 35; xlii. 36; xlvii. 9.] Blow after blow, stroke after stroke, trouble came like hail. That one hailstone falls is a proof, not that no more will come, but that others are coming surely; when we feel the first, we say, “It begins to hail,“—we do not argue that it is over, but that it is to come. Thus was it with Jacob: the storm muttered around him, and heavy drops fell while he was in his father’s house; it drove him abroad. It did not therefore cease because he was out in it: it did not end because it had begun. Rather, it continued, because it had begun; its beginning marked its presence; it began upon a law, which was extended over him in manhood also and old age, as in early youth. It was his calling to be in the storm: it was his very life to be a pilgrimage; it was the very thread of the days of his years to be few and evil.
And what Jacob was all his life, that was his son Joseph at least in the early part of it; for thirteen years, from seventeen to thirty, he was in trouble far greater than Jacob’s;—in captivity, in slavery, in prison, in bonds so tight that the iron is said to have entered into his soul. And what Joseph was in the beginning of life, such was Abraham, his forefather, in the latter half of it. For seventy-five years he lived in his “father’s house;” but henceforward he was a wanderer. Thus did Almighty God, by the instance of the patriarchs of His ancient people, remind that people themselves that this world was not their rest; thus did He foreshadow that condition of life, which is not only a lesson, but a pattern to us of our very state of life, “if we live godly in Christ Jesus.” [2 Tim. iii. 12.] He Himself, the Lord Incarnate, chose only to sojourn on earth; He had not where to lay His head. “Let us go forth, therefore, unto Him without the camp, bearing His reproach, for here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.” [Heb. xiii. 13, 14.] In Jacob is prefigured the Christian. He said, “All these things are against me;” and what he said in a sort of dejection of mind that must the Christian say, not in dejection, not sorrowfully, or passionately, or in complaint, or in impatience, but calmly, as if confessing a doctrine. “All these things are against me;” but it is my portion; they are against me, that I may fight against them and overcome them. If there were no enemy, there could be no conflict; were there no trouble, there could be no faith; were there no trial, there could be no love; were there no fear, there could be no hope. Hope, faith, and love are weapons, and weapons imply foes and encounters; and, relying on my weapons, I will glory in my suffering, being “persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor Angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” [Rom. viii. 38, 39.]
That trouble and sorrow are in some especial sense the lot of the Christian, is plain from such passages of Scripture as the following:—For instance, St. Paul and St. Barnabas remind the disciples “that we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God.” Again, St. Paul says, “If so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together.” Again, “If we suffer, we shall also reign with Him.” Again, “Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus, shall suffer persecution.” Again, St. Peter, “If when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God; for even hereunto were ye called.” And our Saviour declares, that those who have given up the relations of this world “for His sake and the Gospel’s” shall receive “an hundred-fold” now, “with persecutions.” And St. Paul speaks in his own case of his “perils,” by sea and land, from friend and foe, without and within him, of the body and of the soul. Yet he adds, “I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities.” [Acts xiv. 22. Rom. viii. 17. 2 Tim. ii. 12; iii. 12. 1 Pet. ii. 20. Matt. xix. 29. Mark x. 30. 2 Cor. xi. 30.]