“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”
Matthew 7:7 (KJV)
In the last article we looked at the scheming that comes out of fear, a man trying to keep what he has. There is a second kind. This one does not start with a threat. It starts with a want: a blessing, a position, a place, a result. And the man will not wait for God to give it, so he takes it.
It looks different from fear, and it ends in the same place. Fear says God cannot protect me. Taking says God cannot be trusted to give me this, or not in time. Both come from not believing that God can.
Eve: grasping what she already had
The first scheme to take was in the garden. God had given the man and the woman every tree but one: “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden” (Genesis 2:16), except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And they had already been made like him. “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26).
Then the serpent came with the offer: “you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). Look at what he was selling. He was offering to make her like God, and she already was, in his image. She did not need to take what she had already been given. But the serpent’s whole pitch was that God was holding something back, and that if he was holding back, she would have to take it herself.
“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.”
Genesis 3:6
She saw, and she took. The Hebrew verb is laqach, “to take,” and it runs through the rest of this story. Every scheme in this article is Eve’s again: God is withholding, so I will take.
Abraham: scheming to help God keep his promise
Abraham had been promised a son. “This man shall not be your heir; your very own son shall be your heir” (Genesis 15:4), and then the stars, as many as he could count. But the years went by, and Sarah was still childless. Ten years after they had come to Canaan, she made a suggestion:
“Behold now, the LORD has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.”
Genesis 16:2
And then the text gives us the line that should stop us: “And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.” It is the same phrase God used to Adam, “you have listened to the voice of your wife” (Genesis 3:17). Sarai “took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram her husband as a wife” (Genesis 16:3). The verb is laqach again. And Abram “went in to Hagar, and she conceived” (Genesis 16:4).
It was a scheme to get what God had already promised, and it seemed reasonable. God had said “a son,” and not how, and they had waited ten years. So they helped. And the help split the family. Hagar “looked with contempt on her mistress” (16:4), Sarai dealt harshly with her, and Hagar ran into the wilderness (16:6). Years later Hagar and her son were sent away for good (21:14), and the two sons became two peoples at odds.
God did not make Ishmael the promise. Thirteen years after Ishmael was born, he appeared to Abram, now ninety-nine, and said again that Sarah would have a son (Genesis 17:1, 19). Sarah laughed, and the Lord asked her the question that all of this article rests on:
“Is anything too hard for the LORD?”
Genesis 18:14
The man we met last time on Moriah, who surrendered his son, is also the man who took Hagar. It took Abraham most of his life to learn that God does not need our help to keep his word.
Jacob: scheming for what was already promised
Jacob did not scheme out of fear. He schemed out of wanting. Before the twins were born, God had told Rebekah, “the older shall serve the younger” (Genesis 25:23). The blessing was never in doubt, and still she and Jacob dressed him in goatskins to take it. Isaac says to Esau afterward, “Your brother came deceitfully, and he has taken away your blessing” (Genesis 27:35). “Taken away” is laqach again. Esau answers, “Is he not rightly named Jacob? For he has cheated me these two times” (27:36).
They took what God had already said would come. That is the heart of it: the scheme added nothing to the promise, and it cost Jacob twenty years away from home. And the one who grabbed became the one who was afraid. Years later, hearing that Esau was coming: “Then Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed” (Genesis 32:7). Taking schemes, and the scheme produces the fear that schemes again.
Joseph: the man who waited
Joseph was seventeen when God gave him a promise. It came as a dream: “we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright. And behold, your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf” (Genesis 37:7). And then another: “the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me” (Genesis 37:9). The promise was that his family would one day bow to him.
Nothing in the promise said how, or when, and what followed looked like the opposite of it. His brothers threw him in a pit and sold him as a slave. In Potiphar’s house he was faithful, and he was falsely accused and put in prison (Genesis 39:20). Of all the men in this family, Joseph had the best reason to take matters into his own hands. He had a promise, and the world was telling him it would never happen.
He did not scheme his way up, and he did not scheme his way out. He never seized his own dream.
In prison he explained the dream of Pharaoh’s cupbearer, and he asked for one thing in return: “please do me the kindness to mention me to Pharaoh, and so get me out of this house” (Genesis 40:14). That was a request, not a scheme. And then the door that seemed to open closed again: “Yet the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph, but forgot him” (Genesis 40:23). Two more years went by. “After two whole years, Pharaoh dreamed” (Genesis 41:1).
Two years of waiting, after the one hope he had was forgotten. He could have tried every other way out, and the text records none. The psalm says what those years were:
“Until what he had said came to pass, the word of the LORD tested him.”
Psalm 105:19
When Pharaoh finally sent for him, “they quickly brought him out of the pit” (Genesis 41:14), and the first thing Joseph said was, “It is not in me; God will give Pharaoh a favorable answer” (Genesis 41:16). It came from the hand of God, not his own.
It had taken thirteen years from the dream to the day he stood before Pharaoh, seventeen to thirty (Genesis 37:2; 41:46). And then the promise came true, in a way he could never have arranged. His brothers came to Egypt for grain, and “Joseph’s brothers came and bowed themselves before him with their faces to the ground” (Genesis 42:6). The text says: “And Joseph remembered the dreams that he had dreamed of them” (Genesis 42:9). He had not forgotten the promise, and he had never tried to build it.
David: who would not take, and then took
David was anointed king (1 Samuel 16:13), and then spent years running from the man who still wore the crown. One night he and Abishai came into Saul’s camp and found everyone asleep, the king included. Abishai saw what looked like God’s answer: “God has given your enemy into your hand this day. Now please let me pin him to the earth with one stroke of the spear” (1 Samuel 26:8). It was a scheme dressed as God’s will. David refused, and then he did something remarkable. He told Abishai how it would end:
“As the LORD lives, the LORD will strike him, or his day will come to die, or he will go down into battle and perish. The LORD forbid that I should put out my hand against the LORD’s anointed.”
1 Samuel 26:10–11
He named three ways it could happen, and none of them included his own hand. And it was the third. Saul died in battle on Mount Gilboa (1 Samuel 31), and David took the throne in God’s time (2 Samuel 5:3).
Then the same man did the opposite. He was king now, with everything God had promised him, and one afternoon “he saw from the roof a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful” (2 Samuel 11:2). He saw, and “David sent messengers and took her” (2 Samuel 11:4). It is the same verb as Eve’s, laqach, and the same two steps: he saw, and he took. When she was pregnant, he schemed to cover it, and the scheme ended with an order that Uriah be left exposed in the hardest part of the battle (2 Samuel 11:15).
Then Nathan told him what God had said:
“I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives into your arms and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah. And if this were too little, I would add to you as much more.”
2 Samuel 12:8
That sentence is the whole lesson. God had already given him everything, and if he had wanted more, he would have given more. David did not need to take, and what he took was the one thing God had not given. The man who would not stretch out his hand for a crown stretched it out for a neighbor’s wife. That is worth noticing: a man can pass one test of taking and fail another, and the second test often comes when he has the most.
What the fear of the Lord does to taking
Put Eve beside Solomon, as we put Abraham beside Jeroboam. Solomon was the son of David and Bathsheba, and God gave him the chance he never gave Eve: “Ask what I shall give you” (1 Kings 3:5). Solomon asked for exactly what Eve had reached for:
“Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, that I may discern between good and evil.”
1 Kings 3:9
Eve took knowledge of good and evil, “to make one wise,” and found shame and exile. Solomon asked for the discernment of good and evil, and God answered, “I give you also what you have not asked, both riches and honor” (1 Kings 3:13). One took what she was not given and lost what she had. The other asked and was given more than he asked for. It is Matthew 7:7 in a story: ask, and it shall be given.
And look where Solomon’s search ended. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). And at the end of Ecclesiastes, after everything else had been tried: “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man” (Ecclesiastes 12:13). Solomon did not always live by it, but he had found out where wisdom ends. It is not a coincidence that the story leads back here. The knowledge Eve reached for could only be had the way Solomon received it, by asking God, and that is the fear of the Lord.
If the promise belongs to God and he gives it, there is nothing to grab, and no one can take it from the person he chose. “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5).
It also changes what we think God is like. Hebrews 11:6 says that God “rewards those who seek him.” The man who schemes for a result has decided that God is either unable or unwilling to give it. The man who fears the Lord believes that God can, and that his timing is part of the gift.
Replacing, not just removing
You cannot simply tell yourself to stop wanting. You can ask what the wanting is doing. These are the same questions as before, turned to this kind of scheming:
- What do I want that I do not yet have? Name it. A blessing, a position, a person, a result, a place that someone else has?
- What am I doing to get it? Pressing, flattering, manipulating, hurrying, or taking? Is it something I would be willing to do in the open?
- Do I believe God can give it, in his time? If he is good, able and just, I do not need to take what he has not yet handed me.
The one who would not grasp
Eve took what she already had. Jesus did not grasp what he truly was.
“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
Philippians 2:5–8
The word translated “grasped” is not Hebrew but Greek: harpagmos. It comes from harpazō, which means to snatch or seize, the verb used of a wolf that “snatches” the sheep (John 10:12). So the word describes something to be seized and held onto. Bible scholars discuss whether it means something not yet possessed that he refused to snatch, or something he already had that he refused to clutch and use for his own advantage. Either way the point is the same. Equality with God was his by right, and he did not treat it as a prize to hold on to. Eve reached for what she was offered, and Jesus let go of what he had.
The devil offered him the same shortcut. In the wilderness he showed him all the kingdoms of the world without the cross, a way to the very thing the Father had promised him, and he answered, “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve” (Matthew 4:8–10). So he went the long way, down to a servant’s form and a cross, and trusted the Father to give what he would not take.
And the Father gave it. “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name” (Philippians 2:9). The one who would not grasp is the one who was given everything.
