People in the Know: Knowing Our Father

 November 16 2025

Jeremiah 17:1-14

         A couple of weeks ago, I got to visit with all of my siblings via a Zoom call. Now, most of the time was spent catching up with what everyone is up to at the moment, as expected, but we also had to remember the good, old days. Somehow the conversation became all about how our seven member family all squeezed into a Ford Granada. It was a stretch to call the car a six passenger vehicle, let alone being able to fit seven people. Yet there we were, every Sunday, my older brother, George was up front with my Mom and Dad, and I was in the middle of the back seat, a sister on either side and my younger brother, Jeff, straddling the hump, leaning back on my knees. So, in effect, I got to be my little bothers seat belt, holding on to him for dear life, hoping there would be no sudden stops on the way to church. Needless to say, I was envious of my older brother because it just seemed like he got to be in first class, while the rest of us were crammed into the back. It just always seemed that being born first came with a lot of perks that the rest of us second-class siblings never got to experience. Well, at least we can laugh about all of it now!

         Well, this having sour grapes about where we ended up on our birth order, this is more than a laughing matter for a lot of people, especially those we find in the Bible. So it should come as no surprise that these hurt feelings that occur through circumstances beyond our control, are what keep our hearts from being directed by love as God expects. This is what we are going to look at in this next segment in this series of messages entitled, “People in the Know”. This title describes how the prophet Jeremiah hoped the people of Israel would be, those who knew God intimately, much like a husband and wife know each other. Yet instead of finding people who were up close and personal with God, what Jeremiah found is people who had no clue who God is, where God is working nor did they even know where God is headed. Instead of living life through the abundance of God’s blessings, they, decided to live their life without any certainty, spurning the ever steady heartbeat of God’s love for us. So they no longer could call on God and expect him to show up. They no longer could depend on God to provide all that they needed, either. So, instead of faith their life was filled with fear, fear which lead them to be puffed up with pride. 

Such fear and pride ruined how the people of God worshiped God in the Temple. They offered sacrifices as a means to please the God they had no certainty about. So they developed a wrong way of thinking about God that led them to believe they could manipulate God into going along with any scheme they might concoct. Yet all was not lost for God reminded his people of how he continued to speak to them, every morning, calling his people to listen and to do what mattered most. Then his people could go out and live the day being led by a heart that loved, a soul that judged everyone as being worthy of life and the strength, or resources to share their life with others. Yet, as we hear today, there is trouble brewing deep within our hearts, something which threatens to take over our inner guidance system. Instead of a heart directed by the same faithful, loyal love God first loved us with, our hearts are found to be, as Jeremiah tells us in the ninth verse of this seventeenth chapter that we read today, to be, “…deceitful above all things.” So if we really do want to be people who know what matters most to God then we must figure out just what is Jeremiah telling us when he insists that inwardly we are very broken people.

What provides us a clue to understanding what Jeremiah might be saying to us when he tells us that our hearts are deceitful above all else, is discovering that in the Hebrew language, the word for, “deceit”, is the word, “acov”, which we know as being the same as the name, ‘Jacob”. This word comes from the act of grabbing someone from behind by their ankle in order to trip them up. It’s the same sentiment as telling someone that they’re, “going down”, or saying that someone else can take the fall for something you have done. The point is to take the honor away from someone in order to level the playing field before the watching eyes of those who matter.

 Jacob was one who wanted to trip up his older brother Esau’s to get his hands on his first-born privileges right from their birth. We are told of this birth in the twenty-fifth chapter of Genesis. There we find that Rebekah, wife of Issac, is pregnant with twins, who struggled inside of her. So she inquires of God as to what this internal trouble was all about. God tells Rebekah that inside of her were two nations, one stronger than the other, and the older shall serve the younger. Now this had to be rather shocking because God was saying something that was unheard of, that the older child would end up serving the youngest child, a total upsetting of what one would expect. You see, the oldest male child was given special privileges because they would be expected to be in the know about the ways of their Father. The Father would put his blessing upon his first-born son as a sign that this son was the one who would keep safe the ways of his Father that had been entrusted to them.

When Jacob was born they said that his hand, even then, was grasping the heel of his brother, Esau. Jacob was always scheming always trying to figure out his brother’s weaknesses. One day he waited until his brother was hungry and tired, and then Jacob got Esau to trade him his birthrights for a bowl of stew. You see, Jacob knew that Esau did not treasure the privileges associated with his birth. Later on, Jacob, with the help of his mother, tricked his own father, Issac into giving him the sacred blessing instead of giving it to Esau. When Esau found out about Jacob cheating him out of his rightful honor, he was angry. Now Esau would have to serve Jacob, just as had been prophesied. Esau was having none of this, so he plotted to kill his brother, and Jacob had to leave the very home that had been given to him.

When Jeremiah told the people of God, that their hearts were entirely deceitful, they knew that the word Jeremiah used was to cause them to consider these stories about Jacob. While in name they were the people of Israel, they were, nonetheless, people who were like Jacob in their hearts. You see, Jacob, the cheat whose very name means deceit, had an encounter with God which changed his life, an experience so powerful that he went from being Jacob, the deceiver, to being Israel, the prince of God. So when Jeremiah says that God’s people have hearts that follow after their ancestor Jacob, he appears to be insinuating that what they are in desperate need of is an encounter with God to transform them just as he had done with Jacob. 

We find the story of Jacobs life changing encounter with God, in the thirty-second chapter of Genesis. Over twenty years have passed since Jacob cheated Esau out of his rightful blessing by their father, Isaac. Jacob is now married, to two wives, and he has grown quite prosperous. Yet he knows that he must at last confront the brother who swore to kill him. So Jacob sends word to his brother Esau that he wants to meet with him. Jacob gets word back to him, that Esau is headed his direction leading a four-hundred man army. So, Jacob is rightfully afraid, not just for himself but for his family as well. So he begins to pray, as one would expect, and he asks God for deliverance from what he believes will be a certain attack. Well, as nightfall comes, Jacob moved his family to a safe place and he finds himself alone. There in the dark he was approached by one he thought was a man. Jacob and this man began to wrestle, and they kept at it until the sun began to rise.  The man told Jacob to let him go but Jacob told him that he would not let him go until he blessed Jacob. Here we must pause for a moment to grasp what is happening here. Jacob has realized that this one he is wrestling with is connected in some way to God. What Jacob desires is to be certain that God will indeed fight for him when the time comes. Jacob believes that if he can win over this God sent warrior then God will be obliged to side with him. So Jacob believes he has prevailed and he now deserves to receive a blessing from God, just as he received a blessing from his father Isaac. So what Jacob desires is that God look on him as a first-born son who stands to receive a blessing, a seal of approval from God. Well, what brought this fight between Jacob and this heavenly warrior to an end is that the heavenly warrior touched the hip socket of Jacob, so that the hip of Jacob was put out of joint. So it appears that the only blessing Jacob received from God was that he was given a permanent limp, a permanent reminder of his wrestling match with God. Yet there was one positive outcome of this blessing. God changed Jacob’s name forever. Now instead of being known as Jacob, the cheat, he became, Israel, prince of God. You see, I believe that God understood Jacob’s longing to have the privileges that came so easily to the first-born as their culture demanded. Jacob’s solution was to cheat and deceive his way to the top even if it meant that he would be estranged from his own brother for over twenty years. God had a better answer for Jacob and his family. God would state that Jacob was now to be known as his first-born son. The mark this God’s blessing was that Jacob, now Israel, must lead with a limp, demonstrating the worthiness of being made weak by God. You see, now because of the blessing of God, Jacob now Israel, would limb out to meet his brother, unable to lead a battle charge. No, now Jacob, become Israel, would instead go forth and kneel before his brother Esau, not once but seven times, an action which spoke of the fullness of blessing Jacob offered up to his brother. Esau was so moved that he rushed toward his brother and embraced him, and they wept together as they had been apart far too long.

You see, the lesson of Jacob, the deceiver and cheat, is that the life we are born into does not have to define us. God’s deliberate choice of Jacob and his family was done as a way of showing his understanding that the norms and ways of the culture we live in are often unjust and cruel.People are right to desire something more than what their society offers them. Yet, the way out of the brokenness that we live in is not by cheating and conniving those who have been given more honor than the rest. You see, no one really is made greater by tripping someone up so that they are made less. Such actions only led Jacobs brother to hate him and want him dead. While God understands the desire for there to be equality for everyone, he alone is able to accomplish this without causing harm to the relationships we find ourselves in. You see, when we wake every morning, and we hear God call us to come and love on the world with him, asking us to have hearts attuned to love, souls willing to judge all we meet worthy of life and strength or resources always ready to be offered to those in need of life, we are to know that we do this work not as a servant of God but rather as a child of God. More to the point, as a first-born child as God, as strange as that might be. You see, in the fourth chapter of Exodus, when God calls Moses to rescue his people from Egypt, Moses is instructed to tell Pharaoh that he was to release God’s first-born son from slavery. So, even though the nation of Exodus considered these people nothing more than property which they could use and abuse, God knew them all as being his first-born child. Their struggle after God released them from slavery was for them to trust more in God’s definition of who they were instead of continuing to believe that all they were was second class goods.

You see, the curse of the world is the conventions every culture puts in place to create a sense of order, and more than that, a sense of honor to enforce that order. It is a curse to always be concerned about doing something that brings a sense of shame into your life, to always be wondering just where do we stand in the eyes of, you know, “those people”. It’s a curse to never be satisfied, to be continually striving to be more because the world you were born into has never acknowledged your true worth. This is a curse that Jacob felt in his heart just as it is the curse so many people still feel in their hearts as well. This is the curse which causes a heart to never consider to be guided by love for the only desire found in a heart infected by this curse is a desire to connive, and manipulate and deceive in order to even the score.

The good news is that God understands. God’s answer to those living under this curse of believing we are somehow second-rate is to let us be born into his world, to be born as God’s first-born child. It seems so outrageous to our ears to even say such a claim out loud, yet this is what God first proclaimed over Jacob, and then four-hundred years later to the descendants of Jacob. When we now state that we are in Jesus, his desire as found at the end of the seventeenth chapter of John, is that the glory the Father gives to Jesus will be given to all the Father welcomes home. As Jesus was loved by our Heavenly Father, before the foundation of the world, rest assured, so were we. This is what we are to know when we are people in the know about God. We are to know that our God knows us as his first-born child. Yet, as Jeremiah reminds us in this seventeenth chapter, the blessing of this declaration of God is ours only if we are willing to trust that what God states about us is the truth.. Like those ancient slaves down in Egypt, it is difficult to know ourselves as being anything than what the world has always considered us to be. What keeps us in the know about who we are in the eyes of God is for us to remember that the reason why God blesses us by calling us his first-born child, is so that we ultimately bear fruit. You see, when we trust in God and believe that in the eyes of God we are indeed to be first-born children, then we will know that such an honor comes not only with privileges but also responsibilities. As Jesus, the very Son of God, tells us in the fifth chapter of John tells us, “Whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. The Father loves the Son and shows his Son all that he himself is doing.” You see, every morning when God calls us to hear his voice, we should know that our Father is inviting us, his first-born child to come with him as he goes out to work. As we are led by love we are learning how are Father loves on everybody as difficult as that might seem. As we are called to judge everyone as being worthy of life, we can know ourselves as working along side of our Father as he brings life to the world.  As we use our resources to offer life to those who need life, we rejoice with our Father as life proves once again victorious over death. Thus we find that the heart once so devious, so like Jacob, has now become a heart that knows that it is the heart of an honored child in the eyes of God. Praise God for the healing which comes through knowing him and knowing just who we are to the God who has always loved us. Amen!