Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, September 21, 2025
by Pr. Matthias Lorimor, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: God’s blessing is unfair and unjust. And thank God for it!
This is an unfair scripture. Jacob is a liar and a cheat who has betrayed the ones he was meant to love to steal a blessing he does not deserve. Then, while running away from the consequences he does deserve, God chooses to give this cowardly, back-stabbing, thief an even greater blessing. As Jacob prepares to enter a strange and hostile land alone, God promises to be his divine protector guarding him wherever he goes (v.15), to give him “the land on which you lie” (v.13), and to bless him with the same blessing given to none other than Abraham; “all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you” (v.14). To nearly any modern church audience, God choosing this unworthy trickster for such an indescribable blessing is bound to come off as horribly, even unbearably, unjust and unfair. However, instead of trying to use historical and textual details to try and explain away God’s actions, perhaps the best way to approach this unfair passage is head on. Yes, God’s blessing seems deeply unfair to us. But that is perhaps the greatest miracle in the story.
Throughout scripture, God’s blessing is typically unfair and usually comes to those who haven’t done anything to deserve it, from Moses the murderer to Paul the persecutor. Maybe the greatest example is the modern church audience itself, to whom “God proves his love in that while [they] were still sinners Christ died for [them]” (Rom. 5:8). That’s the miraculously unfair thing about grace. God doesn’t bless us, protect us, and promise to go with us because we are such perfect, wonderful people. In our own ways we are all broken and have all hurt someone somehow. But God still blesses us because, no, God isn’t fair. God is grace and redemption.
Jacob wasn’t worthy of God’s blessing, but the beautiful thing is, that the blessing came all the same and the blessing changes him. When Jacob meets Esau again years later, he meets him as a very different man then he once was. God’s unfair blessing changes him in unimaginable ways.
