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I. ITS HISTORY. The character of Jacob is one of the standing difficulties of the Old Testament, because of the interest and love God cherished for him. David offers to us much the same difficulty: "the man after God's own heart," and yet so base and vile in his great sin. But it is the Bible which tells us what these men were. Its frankness is conspicuous. But David, after all, does not puzzle us as Jacob does. There is a vein of pure nobility and of splendid genius through David's character and life, which helps us to understand the relation of God to him. But Jacob's character fails to kindle a corresponding enthusiasm. He does not stand out before us a man of genius, as a hearty lover, a faithful friend, or even as a noble and gallant foe. A vein of trickery and treachery runs through his nature, so unlike David's frank and self-forgetful generosity. Stratagems are his delight; the easy refuge of his weakness. And when we find through life the same tendency to underhand tricks prevailing, we begin to wonder what God could see in the man to make him a prince in the heavenly order, and why throughout the Scripture the name God of Jacob, God of Israel is the name in which He especially delights. It seems to them the purest exercise of the Divine sovereignty on record. But it is sovereignty of the same order as that which moves Him to elect to be the Redeemer of the world. The spring of that redeeming love lies within His own nature. It arose out of the depths of the Divine nature, and must be based, we may be sure, on essential reason. God chose Jacob, and chooses to be called the God of Jacob, just because he was a man so full of human infirmity and littleness, mingled with those higher and nobler qualities without which the spiritual culture of mankind becomes impossible. Had God chosen only to be called the God of Abraham or Moses, and to take supreme interest in such lofty lives alone, alas! for you and for me and for mankind. Jacob is more within our sphere. What God was to him, we can believe that He may be, He will be, to us; thus the name "God of Jacob" has a sound hill of comfort, full of assurance to our ears. That it might be so, we may be sure. He chose it. Now, see this when developed in history. God, as the God of Jacob, did make Himself a glorious name in the earth (Deuteronomy 2:25; Joshua 2:4-11). Their internal organisation under the constitution which God had ordained marked them out as a favoured people. There was nothing like them in the wide world, until the German races appeared and brought the same love of freedom, the same domestic affections, the same noble womanhood, the same essential manliness, to build on the foundation of Christian society. Again, Israel was the only nation of freemen, in the largest sense, in the Old World. The people were knit into a brotherhood of liberty, with special safeguards in their constitution as a nation against the lapse of any Jewish freeman into serfdom, or even into penury (Deuteronomy 15; Leviticus 25:23-31). They were facile princeps among nations, witnessing to the heathen around them of the blessedness of obedience to God. And what men they produced l The Greeks are their only rivals. But while Greece produced the heroes of the schools, the Jews produced the heroes of the common human world. Every man and every people is conscious of a relation to them, such as he sustains to no other race which has played its part in history. The lives of the great Hebrews belong to us as no Greek belongs to us. They are literally part of our history. How few know Greek; who knows not the histories of the Bible? They are our fathers whose lives we read there, our history, our hymns. Man's history is the elucidation of this title; the God of Jacob has written for Himself a glorious name in the records of the world.

II. ITS WORK — THE FUNCTIONS WHICH THIS NAME FULFILS IN THE CULTURE OF OUR PERSONAL SPIRITUAL LIFE.

1. The God of Jacob tells us, by the very name, that He is a God who is not deterred by a great transgression, or by great proneness to transgression, from constituting Himself the guide of our pilgrim life. If ever your heart dies down within you under the consciousness of an inbred sinfulness, which you think must alienate you from God's love and care, let the name of the God of Jacob reassure you. "Long suffering" is the quality which the name of "the God of Jacob" seems specially to suggest to us. Jacob was a man of many and grave infirmities. And the God who came to Adam with a promise which implied a pardon came also to Jacob, and comes to us all. God undertook the guidance of that man's pilgrimage, because he was a sinful man, a man full of infirmities and treacheries, but with a nobler nature beneath and behind which He made it His work to educate by suffering, until Jacob the supplanter became Israel the prince. Jacob was as full of folly, falsity, and selfish ambition as most of us; but he had an instinct and a yearning for deliverance. God's promise rang full sweetly on his ear. The worm Jacob, trained to be a prince, is full of precious suggestions to us all.

2. The God of Jacob must be a God who can bear to inflict very stern chastisement on His children, and to train His pilgrims in a very hard, sharp school of discipline, without forfeiting the name of their merciful and loving God. "Few and evil have the days of the years of my life been," said the aged patriarch, reviewing his life course before Pharaoh. Why? Because through life he had been under the hard, stern discipline of the hand of God. And so, as his life was spent in learning, it was spent in suffering. God did not shrink from wielding the scourge to the very close. Then, he witnessed a sad confession before Pharaoh, such as Abraham and Isaac would have had no occasion for; for they lived better and happier lives than Jacob. But it is this very discipline which makes Jacob's life so instructive. It teaches us —

(1) The thoroughness of the Divine method, that we have to do with One who will sanctify us wholly; will search out the very real fibres of evil within us, and scathe them, whatever may be the cost.

(2) Let the name of the God of Jacob assure you that there is no extremity in which you have a right to cry, "The Lord hath forsaken me, my God hath forgotten me." Jacob's life is surely the witness that the veriest exile cannot wander beyond the shelter of the Father's home; the most utter outcast cannot stray beyond the shield of the Father's love. There is no condition of darkness, of straits, of anguish, inconsistent with your standing as a son and God's tenderness as a Father. For —

(3) The God of Jacob is the God who will bring the pilgrims home. "He is not ashamed to be called their God, for He hath prepared for them a city." Led by the God of Jacob, your bones can never whiten the sands of the desert; your choking cry can ever be heard from the waves of Jordan. Mark the splendid and joyous picture of the end of all our pilgrim wanderings, toils, and pains, which is painted there. The Angel which redeemed him from all evil is redeeming us through pain as sharp, through patience as long, through discipline as stern. And He has caused all this to be written for our learning, that the hope of a final and eternal triumph over evil might sustain us through the conflict, through the wanderings, and assure us that in His good time the God of the pilgrim Jacob will bring us into His rest. Weary, worn, with shattered armour and dinted shield, we may struggle on to the shore of the dark river. A moment, a gasp — and there is a white-robed conqueror, with the dew of immortal youth upon his brow, led by the angels before the Throne of God and of the Lamb.

(J. Baldwin Brown, B. A.)

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KJV: {To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David.} The LORD hear thee in the day of trouble; the name of the God of Jacob defend thee;

WEB: May Yahweh answer you in the day of trouble. May the name of the God of Jacob set you up on high,