Such a one I judge Jacob to have been in the house of Laban. As to Laban, he was a thorough man of the world when Jacob entered his house, and so he was when Jacob left it. In all his dealings, from first to last, he eyes his own advantage. He is constrained to own that the hand of God was with Jacob; but he would make that hand, through Jacob, minister to himself, and turn Jacob’s interest in God to his own account. For twenty years he had the witness of the hand of the Lord, and the operation of His grace and power, under his eye and in his house, and that daily; but he continued a man of the world still. God came near to him, as afterwards to Bethsaida and Chorazin in the doing of His mighty works; but there was no repentance. And Jacob’s departure from his house at the last, was like an escape out of the enemy’s hand, or from the snare of the fowler. It was a kind of exodus. In a family way it was what was afterwards known by Israel in a national way. Laban was as Pharaoh, and Padan-aram as Egypt to our patriarch. He would fain have kept Jacob a drudge still, or at best have sent him away as a beggar; but the Lord pleaded for Jacob with Laban, as He afterwards pleaded for Israel with Pharaoh. Laban and Pharaoh had each in his day _witnessed_ the operation of God, but neither of them became the _subject_ of it. A thorough lover of the world he surely was, and never anything better; a crafty one, and a hypocritical one too--common companions. At the end, when all his devices are broken to pieces, and no enchantment is allowed to prosper, as against Israel, he does what he can, according to the miserable, disgusting style of a crafty heart, to cover the purpose which had now failed, and to give himself a fair character. He pretends that Jacob’s leaving him was mere fondness for home, while his conscience must have told him many a very different reason. He affects grief and indignation at not having an opportunity of kissing his daughters and grandchildren, and of sending them away honourably, while his conscience must have reminded him how he had sold them again and again. He seems to be concerned for them, now about to be in Jacob’s hand, as if his own hand had been that of a father to them. He pretends to spare Jacob through religious fear of God’s words, while he must have felt himself to be completely restrained by God, willing or unwilling, religious or profane; as Balaam afterwards. And he gives a serious air to the last bargain between him and Jacob, introducing the name of the God of Abraham, though he had just been searching for his idols, and was preparing to return to that land out of which God had called Abraham, and to continue there a thorough, heartless man of the world still, a worshipper of his own god. Miserable man! pointing a holy, serious lesson for us.