Genesis 30:37 Meaning Jacob Took to Himself Rods of Fresh

Jacob is the inner self that supplants the facts by imagining, and the peeled rods he sets before the flocks are the images he deliberately holds. By stripping the bark and making the white show, he fixes a picture in view, and what is steadily beheld is what the flocks bring forth. This is the whole law. A person becomes, and produces, what he persistently looks at in his mind's eye.

The striped young are not a trick of livestock but the outer proof that an inner image hardens into fact. Jacob does not wrestle the animals or argue with the herd. He changes what is beheld, and the world changes to match. What a person keeps before his imagination shapes what appears around him, whatever the plain odds seem to promise.

A man set vivid marked images before living creatures at the exact moment they were most open, trusting that what is looked upon steadily shapes what comes forth. The mind runs on that oldest law: the imagination presents a picture, and the creative mechanism reproduces it in flesh and fact.

Stripping the rods to make the white appear is careful, deliberate rehearsal. He left nothing to chance. He built the image he wanted seen. A self-image works the same quiet way inside a person, and the pattern he holds before his own mind begins, over time, to appear in the life he lives.