Ge 28:20-22
And Jacob went on to vow a vow, saying: "If God will continue with me and will certainly keep me on this way on which I am going and will certainly give me bread to eat and garments to wear and I shall certainly return in peace to the house of my father, then Jehovah will have proved to be my God. And this stone that I have set up as a pillar will become a house of God, and as for everything that you will give me I shall without fail give the tenth of it to you."
Hmmm, ambitious!
Up until this 6th comprehensive coverage of the Genesis account I could never relate to the Jacob character! I had seen Jacob only as self-invested, covetous, scheming. Calculating. I often wondered why his scheming altogether resulted positive, why God blessed him at all, why he was so favored, why a whole nation resulted from him, why God chose him to be in the line of the ancestry that produced the seed that is God's, if it took some undue bias.
But, I do not know God to be partial! No, not. No, not so.
From these verses I conclude there was something God saw, saw in Jacob. It was what God wanted to see after all. It was the reason God had made one man to make many men a people, people for Him. It was what God wanted after all. To propagate His purpose--to have out of one man a people, people for God's name.
Desire begets ambition.
It starts first with discerning what God may want from man. And ambitioning such achievement. Jacob so did.
Jacob was in touch with his family history and fully aware of God's promises to Abraham and desired to fulfill it. Jacob thought he could and wanted to build a people for God, a house of God.
This was the desire--earnest as was--that led to his ambition that led to his vow. This vow.
Perhaps he went about it the wrong way--coveted his brother's right as firstborn, bought the birthright, and connived with his mother to obtain the blessing that follow it--he, man as he was, understood that he needed the place of firstborn to achieve his ambition. Besides, Esau was not up to it.
I might conclude that whatever Jacob did, he did to achieve his ambitious desire. Right or wrong, he used the means at his disposal. God could only tolerate him, even as He tolerates us today, but so impressed with the desire that matched God's purpose, God blessed Jacob.
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