Then he breathed his last and died and was gathered to his people, old and full of years. And his sons Esau and Jacob buried him.Genesis 35:29
Jacob gets rid of all his foreign gods (!) and builds an altar to the Lord. God reaffirms his promises to Jacob - a great people, in a land, under God's blessing, to bless the nations.
In a lot of ways the promises are coming together - God's people are growing and the fact that they are under his (undeserved) blessing is obvious from the stories throughout Genesis. But they don't have any land, they are in conflict with other nations more often than blessing them, and the shadow of death still looms large. Abraham died, Isaac died. Jacob and his sons will die.
These stories of the beginning of God's people should not cause me to pine for the good old days and try to be more like them. It should cause me to look with the same hope that they had - that God is the one who can do something about this.
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