Genesis Chapter 32: Verses 4-8 (NIV-UK)
And Shechem said to his father Hamor, ‘Get me this girl as my wife.’
When Jacob heard that his daughter Dinah had been defiled, his sons were in the fields with his livestock; so he did nothing about it until they came home.
Then Shechem’s father Hamor went out to talk with Jacob. Meanwhile, Jacob’s sons had come in from the fields as soon as they heard what had happened. They were shocked and furious, because Shechem had done an outrageous thing in Israel by sleeping with Jacob’s daughter – a thing that should not be done.
But Hamor said to them, ‘My son Shechem has his heart set on your daughter. Please give her to him as his wife.
Colossians Chapter 3: Verse 2 (NIV-UK)
Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.
Shechem had become obsessed with Dinah, Jacob’s daughter. After he had raped her, he was determined to keep her as his wife, and in the culture of the time, demanded that his father negotiate with Jacob so that he could have her as his wife. His father gave in to those demands.
We need to be careful what we set our hearts on, and how we go about getting the things that we want. Shechem had given in to his desires and had done a terrible thing. Perhaps his father thought that by marrying Dinah, his son would be putting things right. Sadly, we read later in the chapter, it only led to revenge and murder, when Dinah’s brothers took matters into their own hands.
Sometimes we are determined to do our own thing, even if we haven’t sought God’s mind on the matter, and then after we have done so, we ask God to bless it. And its maybe not a bad thing that we do, its just not what God wants for us. But we should never act first and pray later, it should always be the other way around. What do we focus our desires on? We need to be careful that those desires drive us, be it for success, approval, recognition, wealth or relationships. Allowing our desires to drive our actions can lead to all sorts of problems, even if the consequences are not as dire as those we read of here. I once heard a manager I worked with say that forgiveness is easier to get than permission. She’d said that to justify the action she had taken for something that she had done without approval. As followers of Jesus, and also His ambassadors, that is not the way that Christians should behave, and we cannot expect God to intervene in something if we know it is something He doesn’t want us to do.
The only sure success we will have is if we set our hearts and minds on the things of God, as Paul told the Colossians to do. Doing that will keep our priorities right, our life on the right path, and we may even get all the other things too, in the right measure and in the right way, if that is God’s will for us.
Dear Lord,
Help me keep my focus on the right things, and not get consumed with my own plans and ideas, even if they seem like good ones. I ask in Jesus’ Name. Amen.