This is the word of the Lord, Genesis chapter 33, starting at verse 18. And Jacob came safely to the city of Shechem, which is in the land of Canaan, on his way from Paddan Aram, and he camped before the city. And from the sons of Hamor, Shechem's father, he bought for a hundred pieces of money the piece of land on which he had pitched his tent. There he erected an altar and called it El Elohe Israel. Now Dinah, the daughter of Leah, whom she had born to Jacob, went out to see the women of the land. And when Shechem, the son of Hamor the Hivite, the prince of the land, saw her, he seized her and lay with her and humiliated her. And his soul was drawn to Dinah, the daughter of Jacob. He loved the young woman and spoke tenderly to her. So Shechem spoke to his father Hamor saying, get me this girl for my wife. Now Jacob heard that he had defiled his daughter Dinah, but his sons were with his livestock in the field, so Jacob held his peace until they came. And Hamor, the father of Shechem, went out to Jacob to speak with him. The sons of Jacob had come in from the field as soon as they heard of it, and the men were indignant and very angry because he had done an outrageous thing in Israel by lying with Jacob's daughter, for such a thing must not be done. But Hamor spoke with them saying, the soul of my son Shechem longs for your daughter. Please give her to him to be his wife. Make marriages with us. Give your daughters to us and take our daughters for yourselves. You shall dwell with us and the land shall be open to you. Dwell and trade in it and get property in it. Shechem also said to her father and to her brothers, let me find favor in your eyes, and whatever you say to me, I will give. Ask me for as great a bride price and gift as you will, and I will give whatever you say to me. Only give me the young woman to be my wife. The sons of Jacob answered Shechem and his father Hamor deceitfully because he had defiled their sister Dinah. They said to them, We cannot do this thing, to give our sister to one who is uncircumcised, for that would be a disgrace to us. Only on this condition will we agree with you, that you will become as we are by every male among you being circumcised. Then we will give our daughters to you, and we will take your daughters to ourselves, and we will dwell with you and become one people. But if you will not listen to us and be circumcised, then we will take our daughter, and we will be gone.' Their words pleased Hamor, and Hamor's son Shechem. And the young man did not delay to do the thing, because he delighted in Jacob's daughter. Now he was the most honored of all his father's house. So Hamor and his son Shechem came to the gate of their city and spoke to the men of the city, saying, These men are at peace with us. Let them dwell in the land and trade in it. For behold, the land is large enough for them. Let us take their daughters as wives, and let us give them our daughters. Only on this condition will the men agree to dwell with us to become one people, when every male among us is circumcised as they are circumcised. Will not their livestock, their property, and all their beasts be ours? Only let us agree with them, and they will dwell with us. And all who went out of the gate of his city listened to Hamor and his son Shechem, and every male was circumcised, all who went out of the gate of his city. On the third day, when they were sore, two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brothers, took their swords and came against the city while it felt secure and killed all the males. They killed Hamor and his son Shechem with the sword and took Dinah out of Shechem's house and went away. The sons of Jacob came upon the slain and plundered the city because they had defiled their sister. They took their flocks and their herds, their donkeys, and whatever was in the city and in the field. All their wealth, all their little ones and their wives, all that was in the houses, they captured and plundered. Then Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, You have brought trouble on me by making me stink to the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites and the Perizzites. My numbers are few, and if they gather themselves against me and attack me, I shall be destroyed, both I and my household. But they said, Should he treat our sister like a prostitute? Well, since many of you have heard me preach for several months now, if not longer, you know that I don't tend to preach in the manner of giving a running verse-by-verse commentary. There's some significant value in preaching that way, because using that method, you'll always cover every word of a passage, and it's more difficult to skip over difficult verses without it being obvious to the congregation. But there's some drawbacks with that method as well. One drawback is that you can easily miss out on the larger point of the passage. And when people write, no matter what the genre they're writing, the overall meaning of what's written is usually tied up in larger chunks than each individual word and sentence. Paragraphs and sections tend to be more helpful in ferreting out the most significant meaning. I also think that preaching is something more than, or at the very least, different from simply giving an oral commentary. Preaching involves explaining and interpreting, exhorting and encouraging, and even more. Furthermore, how you preach a passage should depend a lot on the genre of literature it is. Historical narratives like these may differ significantly from parables, which may differ from poetry, and which all may differ from an epistle, let's say. And so preaching each one of these genres may take on a different style or flavor because of the nature of the passages themselves. I say all that because today, this passage seems to require a bit more of a walk through the account. It still won't be verse by verse, but maybe more so than I usually do. But before I get going on explaining and interpreting the account, I do want to lead off with this one concept. When we see an account like this, we often want to ask the question, who was right and who was wrong? We want to have an entirely black and white sense of justice about accounts like this. And that's no surprise. This is a shocking narrative. And there are a lot of actions to condemn here, for sure, by almost everyone in the account. So I want to start by saying, let's realize that in this entire account, no one is the clear hero who acted absolutely righteously. Some were clearly better than others. Some were far worse than others. Some acted very badly, but in different ways. Now, the first two verses in this sorted account provide shock value right away. And if you're a woman or a girl, what I'm about to say may seem a little off-putting. What happened to Dinah here is not the main focus of this story. And here's what I mean by that. It's not the main focus of the story, but it is the event that provides the catalyst to tell the account. The focus of which is actually the negotiation and outcome that takes place in the aftermath. And right off the bat, I'm gonna say something else that will probably also seem controversial. I'm going to buck the societal trend here that would automatically assume that under no circumstances did Dinah do anything wrong. Our current society has become infatuated with the concept of castigating what they call victim shaming. Now, please hear me. There truly is a real concept victim shaming. And that has to do with no matter whatever happens to you, you always caused it to happen if only you had acted differently. You're the source of everything bad that ever happens to you. That's real victim shaming. And obviously it's not a biblically derived concept. It comes from a skewed view of mankind that automatically assumes individuals are naturally good. And so if someone mistreated you, well, you must have done something to deserve it. That's simply not a true statement and it's not biblical. But the problem in our current society is that they veered too far in the other direction. They've taken that real concept of victim shaming and broad-brushed it. They claim, on the other extreme, that if something bad happens to you, you can't possibly ever had any role of responsibility in what happened. Again, that's an unbiblical concept. The Bible does recognize, first and foremost, that we all have a sinful nature. And even after we become believers and are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, our sinful nature does not simply vanish away. We have to war against our sinful nature by actively walking in the Spirit. So in the same way that it's a bad assumption that everything bad that happens to you is entirely caused by you, it's also an untrue statement, a bad assumption, that you have exactly zero responsibility for anything bad that ever happens to you. Again, two extreme views and they're both flawed. And the reason I bring this up is that even though Dinah is probably the most honorable and best behaved character in this particular narrative, the way the language portrays her in this first verse is that her choice as she went out to see the women of the land is at the very least imprudent, That is to say, not particularly wise. These were the Canaanite people who their ancestors knew were despicable people. As we've mentioned before, 1 Corinthians 15.33 says, do not be deceived. Bad company ruins good morals. And at this time, she was probably about a teenager, which speaks to just how long Jacob and his family have avoided going back to either Bethel or to his father's house, which is where Jacob was supposed to return, according to his vow in chapter 28. Dinah was probably only about five years old or so when they arrived in this territory. So they've been there for several years. And so there is a small portion of this message that can be instructive for you younger women and girls. It is absolutely true that if someone attacks you and mistreats you, that they are in the wrong for doing so. However, at the same time, it is also true that part of what you need to learn, and as we all do in various ways, is generally how to avoid likely harmful settings and situations. Is it possible that different choices by Dinah could have avoided this situation? It's possible. I do believe the language used here and some of the implications suggest that much. I encourage you, if you've got questions about what I'm saying, let's talk about it. Let's talk about it together with your parents, if necessary. As I said, Dinah is likely the most honorable character in this entire account, but I will not say that she's completely devoid of any responsibility at all, because I don't believe the passage is portraying that. That said, the rest of the account here deals with far worse behavior on part of all the other players, although even the worst of them is not completely devoid of any sense of goodness or honor. Shechem was clearly one of the most prominent men in this area of Canaan. The region is described at least as the one he lived in if it's not actually named after him, which it may have been. And as a very prominent man, he appears to have been raised to take by force whatever he wants. That's not an uncommon thing among those who have always had whatever they wanted and have some or a lot of power over others around them. These are also the Hivite people of the Canaanites, the descendants of Noah's son Ham. These people were known in these times for being excessively wicked, especially when it came to areas of sexuality. But even in this most despicable act of defiling Dinah for his own pleasure, it says in verse 3 that afterward, Shechem's soul was drawn to her, and that he loved her and spoke tenderly to her. So even this most despicable character treated Dinah better than, for example, King David's son Amnon treated his half-sister Tamar. When Amnon forcibly slept with Tamar, he hated her afterward, sent her away even more humiliated than Dinah was in this instance. Now, because of the way Shechem reacted here, some commentators say that the way in which he humiliated Dinah was no more than that he slept with her consensually without there being any tempt ahead of time to come to her family and arrange a wedding, rather than taking her by force. But I don't believe that's the entirety of what the language here in verse two seems to indicate. I think verses 3 and 4 simply show what I said earlier, that even the worst people who commit the most heinous acts may not be entirely devoid of any sense of honor. It genuinely appears that Shechem truly wanted to marry Dinah, and that becomes the impetus for this negotiation tale, the rest of the account from verse 4 on. Honestly, the character in this particular narrative that is portrayed in the worst light is Jacob. He appears to have avoided returning to his father's house for years upon years after having escaped Laban and after having reconciled with Esau. And he appears in this account to have almost no regard for what Shechem has done to his daughter Dinah. Jacob's reaction, or lack thereof, indicates a couple of things. First, his reaction indicates he's still treating his two wives and their respective children with extreme favoritism. The very first words of this chapter help us to identify that favoritism because for them to say that Dinah was the daughter of Leah that she bore to Jacob, it was extremely unusual to discuss the genealogy of a woman. The narrator is reminding us that Dinah was born to Jacob through Leah, his less favored wife. as we had been told back in chapter 30 the first time, because that explains Jacob's lack of reaction. From the beginning, he loved Rachel, and it seems quite apparent that not only did he not ever really love Leah much at all, his attitude toward her also spilled over onto his attitude toward the children he had by her. The sons he had by Leah apparently realized they were not treated nearly as well as the sons of Rachel, Joseph, and eventually Benjamin, which of course we're going to read a lot more about as we get to chapter 37 and beyond. And we also saw hints of this in the way the family was presented to Esau, that Rachel and Joseph appeared to be Jacob's favorites. But this is the first clear, outright indication that Jacob was actively neglecting the children of Leah. Verse 5 says that Jacob didn't do anything about it until his sons came home. They were the ones who were indignant and very angry about how their sister Dinah had been treated. Not Jacob, for his daughter. Simeon and Levi were the two that handled the negotiations with Shechem and Hamor, not Jacob. Simeon and Levi were the ones who sought out justice for their sister, not Jacob. In fact, as we've mentioned before, the narrator here, who usually, in the Genesis account, refrains from making explicit value judgments, is very clear here in verse 7. Shechem had done an outrageous thing. Such a thing must not be done. Jacob's lack of response may even speak to why Dinah thought it was a good idea to go out to see the women of the land. How much had Jacob warned her against the idea? The implication is that he probably hadn't instructed her enough regarding the people who inhabited the land they were living in. Second indication here is that we also see Jacob is only thinking about himself. Look at verse 30. It shows us in his response to Simeon and Levi, he's most concerned about what will happen in the way the inhabitants of the surrounding land think about him. While that's a true statement, their actions will reflect on him and may come with some consequences. What about the way his own lack of reaction at Dinah's treatment has affected his sons, her brothers? Jacob's lack of reaction almost surely contributes to Simeon's and Levi's approach to this whole situation, which may objectively speaking be considered an overreaction eventually. Parents, this is something for us to consider deeply. How much of our reactions to our children betray that we're actually more concerned with how they make us look, rather than with training their hearts and minds and helping them grow in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and even helping them out of tough situations they may get themselves into. That's something for us to ponder. Now, before I talk about Simeon and Levi and how to assess their actions in this account, I want to step back for a bit and look at some of the features of the negotiation that takes place. After all, this truly is a negotiation tale, and examining the negotiation can help us to assess this account. I've spent a good portion of my adult life in positions in the business world that require a lot of consistent negotiation. And I'm not one of those people that was just born a shrewd negotiator. I've learned what I've learned through work and study and experience. So I think shedding some light on what's going on with this negotiation can actually help us interpret this passage. The first thing I think we should note about this negotiation is that Simeon and Levi seem to be acting from a position of serious weakness. They don't have much power in this situation. They dwell in someone else's territory. They're dealing with the most powerful family in that territory. And their own father doesn't seem to care much about what's happened to his daughter, their sister. If he had cared, he's the one who's carrying the promises of God. So he's the one who could and should be coming to the aid of his family and asking God to work on their behalf in this instance. Since he doesn't do that, Simeon and Levi believe they have to do this on their own. And what tools do they have if they've not been brought up to seek the face of God? Not to mention that we see down in verse 26, another aspect of this situation, which is that it appears that Shechem is actually holding Dinah in his house. That's another way in which Shechem has the upper hand here. Now, we don't know that Dinah is being held against her will. The passage doesn't tell us that one way or the other. But one way or the other, Simeon and Levi feel they're operating behind the eight ball here. They have little power in the negotiation. Their father is not helping them. And so the only way they believe they can mete out justice for their sister and for their family is by deception. Even that is an aspect of negotiation we have to consider. Anytime you're involved in a negotiation, one thing you have to determine as best you can is whether the other party's acting in good faith, is being truthful. And that's not always easy to tell. Shechem and Hamor don't figure this out, and even they may have been acting deceptively as well. Either they were deceiving Jacob and his sons in verse 10, in encouraging them to acquire property in their territory, since they told their own people in verse 23 that Jacob's livestock and property would become theirs, or they were in some way deceiving their own people because they hid the true reason behind Shechem wanting the whole town to agree to be circumcised, which was so that he could marry Dinah. That's a good deal of deception going on here by Simeon and Levi and also by Shechem and Hamor. And lastly, regarding the negotiation itself, one of the cardinal rules of negotiation is you need to find out what the other party actually wants, or at the very least, stop offering things that you think they want that they don't. Look at verse nine. Hamor and Shechem keep trying to encourage Simeon and Levi and Jacob to intermarry with them because that's what they themselves want. They assume Jacob and his family want the same thing they do. Well, this is a very common trait among us in the way we tend to work with other people. We simply assume that other people want the same things we want, and so that's what we offer them, that's what we give them, that's what we expect them to want and like, the very things we want and like. That's the reason, for example, that real estate agents always advise a house seller to leave their house before a buyer comes over for a showing. The things you love about your house are not necessarily going to be what your potential buyer might love about your house. And if you go on drawing about what you love about it, instead of allowing them to discover what they may like about it, You're most likely going to shoot yourself in the foot when it comes to that buyer. We have to allow people to discover, own, and communicate what they like and want. Well, the church is not immune to this kind of dysfunctional pattern either. It takes work to understand what other people want and desire, where they're coming from, and determine not only what they want, but what are the motivations behind what they want. When we work at figuring that out, that's when we begin to truly understand another person, and only then are we able to more effectively minister to them, when we understand their wants and their desires and their motivations. All in all, Shechem and Hamor simply couldn't conceive that Jacob's family wouldn't want these intermarriages. And so they were only making themselves more of a stench to Simeon and Levi the more they spoke about it. What Simeon and Levi wanted was justice for their sister. I think they probably thought that when they required the whole town to be circumcised, they'd say, well, no, thank you. You can take your sister and go. But that's not what happened. And so even from their position of negotiating with very little power, they come up with a way of obtaining justice. Unfortunately, what they got was far more than justice upon Shechem. They meted out revenge against all the able-bodied men of the entire town. And then they, and maybe even the rest of their brothers, not only retrieved their sister, they also plundered the entire city. Verse 28 says they took the flocks and herds, the donkeys, whatever was in the city and the field. Verse 29, all their wealth, all their little ones and their wives, all that was in the houses, they captured and plundered. So you can see why I say that the way they've acted in seeking justice for Dinah turned into far more than justice, but revenge upon the whole city, likely an overreaction. And knowing where they were coming from with dealing with the most powerful family in the land and not getting any help from their father, who could have and should have helped them, we can perhaps understand this. But it does seem to be an overreaction. And I keep saying that it only seems to be an overreaction, and here's why. We heard Jason read earlier from Numbers chapter 25. And in that passage, we actually see a mildly similar situation where some of the later people of Israel were caught intermarrying among the pagans of the land and yoking themselves to the pagan gods. Interestingly enough, the person that Phinehas murdered who brought the Midianite into the camp and into his tent and family was a Simeonite. which I think is an interesting, unfortunate occurrence. Someone who was a descendant of the one who was defending his honor against the pagans was the one who brought a pagan into his camp and family. And in that process, we see that the Lord not only commended Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, for putting to death the offending parties, but then the Lord commanded Moses to strike down all the Midianites because of their pagan practices and their pagan actions toward the people of Israel. It seems there's at least a little bit of a parallel here between what happened in Numbers 25 with Simeon and Levi slaying the entire city of Shekol, the able-bodied men, and plundering the rest. Excuse me, that's in Genesis 34 with what happened in Numbers 25 when the Lord commanded them to put to death all of the Midianites. The difference, I think, is that while Phinehas meted out clear justice on the clearly offending parties, And then the Israelites only acted further on the command of the Lord himself. Simeon and Levi were, for the most part, acting out of their own will. They were indeed truly seeking justice. Look how they respond to Jacob at the very end of the chapter, verse 31. Should he treat our sister like a prostitute? But they don't seek the Lord's will in this or the Lord's command, and they take it upon themselves to concoct a way to obtain that justice. And after having obtained it, proceed to take their own revenge on the whole city. And we must remember Paul's admonition in Romans 12, which we also heard earlier, verse 19. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God. For it is written, vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. And he appears to be quoting, Paul appears to be quoting Deuteronomy 32, 35 there. Paul's statement there does not mean we should not seek justice, rather that we should not seek vengeance. Justice is what occurred in Numbers 25, and then the Lord took his vengeance through his command to Moses. What happened with Simeon and Levi is in their efforts to obtain justice, what they ended up doing was taking vengeance. Now, as I've said throughout this message, there's really no perfectly honorable or perfectly evil people in this whole account. And I've given you my reasons for saying that. But one of the key results of this incident, the fallout or the aftermath, It doesn't depend on what I think about what occurred. It depends on what Jacob thought about what occurred. Because at the end of the book of Genesis, when Jacob is on his deathbed and blesses his sons, we read this in chapter 49, verses 5 through 7 of Genesis. Jacob says, Simeon and Levi are brothers. Weapons of violence are their swords. Let my soul come not into their counsel. Oh, my glory, be not joined to their company. For in their anger they killed men, and in their willfulness they hamstrung oxen. Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce, and their wrath, for it is cruel. I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel. Simeon and Levi's reaction or overreaction here, at least in Jacob's eyes, becomes the reason that when Jacob is blessing his sons, he passes over these two for receiving the promises of God inherited through Isaac and Abraham before him. Remember, we've been tracing this theme of the seed of the woman down through the line of Seth and through Noah and Shem and eventually to Abraham and Isaac, not Ishmael. and Jacob, not Esau. Now we see that when Jacob passes down the blessing, we see him skip over all three of his earliest born children, Reuben, because of what we'll read about in chapter 35, verse 22, and Simeon and Levi because of their actions toward the city of Shechem here in chapter 34. So the mantle will fall to Judah, the fourthborn. That's where the promised line continues, through whom the eventual seed of the woman, Jesus Christ, the lion of the tribe of Judah, will be born. What sort of things can we take away from this message? Well, first, I think this passage helps us to see that many situations we encounter in life are not black and white. They're not all black and white. That is to say, people's actions are not always all good or all evil. Many people act in ways that could be worse, but also could be improved upon. And I think realizing this can help us to see people and their actions with greater accuracy than we often allow for other people. Perhaps it can also help us to identify that even when we think we are acting justly, that we might actually be able to improve upon our responses. Secondly, the negotiation that takes place here can help us to identify when we are expecting people to want the same exact thing we want, rather than us working to find out what they actually want, even if that seems strange or unusual to us. And third, Even our well-intentioned decisions can have negative future consequences. In Simeon's and Levi's honorable quest to seek justice for their sister Dinah, they apparently went overboard, enough so that they forfeited any future right to carrying on the future line of God's promised Messiah. Our actions in the present, even, and I might say especially for the youngsters and youth here, our actions now can permanently affect and alter the trajectories of our future. Lastly, as always, even when we have made poor choices, even when we have sinned, sinned against God, sinned against our families and friends and other loved ones, we can trust in Paul's encouragement written in Romans 8, 38, and 39. I am sure that neither death nor life nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Let's pray. Father, what a blessed truth that is, that you have guaranteed and sealed with the Holy Spirit the people you have called to yourself, the people that have been adopted as your sons, men and women, boys and girls. been adopted as co-heirs with Jesus Christ, and that nothing can take us out of your grasp. Nothing can take us from that love. We thank you and give you praise, Lord, because we know, we know we still war against the sin in our sinful nature. We still war against that by your Spirit working in us and through us. We sin against this body of decay that's falling apart around us. We need your grace, we need your Holy Spirit. We need your Holy Spirit not only for our actions and thoughts and words, but we need your Holy Spirit in the way that we perceive others' actions and words. And so Father, please send us your Spirit, give us more so that fill us to the greatest degree that we might honor you in everything that we say and do. In Jesus' name I pray, amen. Well, let us honor the Lord by obeying his command to share this ordinance. The bread broken for us, the cup shed for us as a new covenant in his blood.