Your past matters, but you're not a slave to it

I believe this might be a word for somebody specific out there today (I don't know who), but really it is truth for all of us. Sometimes, I encounter a troubling trend with some folks to deny the power of one's upbringing, one's past, old mistakes or bad decisions, past abuse, past trauma, or generally one's experiences. Rarely do we ever get to "wipe the slate clean" in our minds and proceed forward unaffected by our past experiences. Once in a while, I'll hear someone dismiss an attempt to ask about one's past as psychological mumbo-jumbo. This stuff matters, and your past is a huge part of understanding who you are today. But I want to declare today that while your past matters, and understanding your past is critical, you are not destined to repeat it. You are not a slave to it or to the decisions and actions of your ancestors. You are not doomed by it, and you are not a product of only the bad things in your past. God has something else to say.

I want to take a look at a character in the Bible that I have discussed a couple of times already on this blog. If you study the life of Jacob, and take a look back at his father Isaac, and his famous grandfather Abraham, you see trends. They were all rich because of their skills with livestock. They all inherited the covenant promise from God, and the promise was given to Isaac and then to Jacob almost verbatim as it was given to Abraham. The problem is that there was also a heritage of trickery and deceit in the family; they all tended to be liars when they faced pressure situations.

The early parts of Jacob's story are interesting. He's a scoundrel! Jacob manipulated situations to get both his older brother Esau's birthright and Esau's final blessing from his father. Jacob's trickster ways were evidently learned by his family, and it produced plenty of family drama. It really seems as if he learned deception in full measure from his forefathers, but we don't read very much about Jacob's interaction with God until God starts invading Jacob's dreams in Genesis 28. Even after this, I think Jacob's spirituality is still awkward, and he certainly was not immediately breaking the cycle of evil and deceit in his family tree.

But God kept pursuing Jacob. God didn't give up, and God wasn't going to let His promise to Jacob and his offspring be broken. He continued speaking to Jacob, sending angels to Jacob, and invading Jacob's dreams (seen in Genesis 31). He prospered Jacob and blessed Jacob's family. And in one of the strangest scenes of the Bible, God appeared to Jacob as a man and engaged in an epic wrestling match, which left Jacob with a limp from an injury to his hip.

I believe this wrestling match was God's loudest shout to Jacob. If you remember, Jacob was fleeing from Laban, for whom Jacob had been working for years at that point, but was heading home and about to face his old angry brother Esau. Was Jacob going to resort to old tactics? Was he going to continue this cycle? I believe one of the reasons God chose to encounter Jacob in this way was to say, "This trend ends now! You don't have to repeat the failures of you and your ancestors." And God would go on to prove it to Jacob by granting him favor with Esau, changing Jacob's name to Israel, and blessed him to be the father of a great nation.

There are many facets to Jacob's story, but I want to focus on how God continually pursued Jacob, with the intention of ending the power of deceit over Jacob. It is as if God's message was this: "Your father did this, your grandfather did this, you used to do this more than either of them, but NO MORE! You have a new direction and new identity."

This is not just about sinful behaviors like lying. Any tendency your parents might have had affects you and had some role in shaping you. But it does not have to control you. Any abuse, trauma, or bullying you may have suffered in the past will affect you. We don't pretend that experiences never happened. But we aren't doomed to responding to those experiences forever. God's pursuit of us gives us a whole new way of interacting with and interpreting our experiences. Maybe you have become cynical or bitter about something that happened in the church, and you have quit on fellowship with people. God wants to redeem that. If you have made terrible mistakes in the past, and continue to make them, you are not a finished product. God will pursue you to the point of wrestling with you in order to break that cycle and change the direction for your life. You may have made mistakes in relationships, and you might be thinking that you are doomed to act like that in all relationships forever. God has something else to say about that. This isn't mysterious psychoanalysis, this is part of the Good News of Jesus Christ!

I am not a fan of pictures or images that burn up or erase the past. We don't eliminate the past and pretend it never happened! It is precisely this that does damage and allows the cycle to continue, because something affecting us in our past manages to sneak by our awareness. Erasing the past only means hiding from it, or covering it up. We don't erase the past. But we can have victory over its harmful affects. God redeems our past when God pursues us, wrestles with us, and we finally submit to the work the Holy Spirit wants to do in our hearts. It rarely, very rarely, happens overnight. In some cases, it may be an ongoing process for life, continually being on guard that something major in our past does not regain the power it once had over us.

But whatever it may be in your history, the message is the same for you. God knows your past and how it is affecting you. God is pursuing you in order to tell you good news about your past.