The Girl Nobody Wanted - Genesis 29:15-35
by Timothy Keller
[15] Then
Laban said to Jacob, “Because you are my kinsman [relative], should you
therefore serve me for nothing? Tell me, what shall your wages be?”
[16] Now Laban had two daughters. The name of the older was Leah, and
the name of the younger was Rachel. [17] Leah’s eyes were weak, but
Rachel was beautiful in form and appearance. [18] Jacob loved Rachel.
And he said, “I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter
Rachel.” [19] Laban said, “It is better that I give her to you than that
I should give her to any other man; stay with me.” [20] So Jacob served
seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.
[21] Then
Jacob said to Laban, “Give me my wife that I may go in to her, for my
time is completed.” [22] So Laban gathered together all the people of
the place and made a feast. [23] But in the evening he took his daughter
Leah and brought her to Jacob, and he went in to her. [24] (Laban gave
his female servant Zilpah to his daughter Leah to be her servant.)
[25] And in the morning, behold, it was Leah! And Jacob said to Laban,
“What is this you have done to me? Did I not serve with you for Rachel?
Why then have you deceived me?” [26] Laban said, “It is not so done in
our country, to give the younger before the firstborn. [27] Complete the
week of this one, and we will give you the other also in return for
serving me another seven years.” [28] Jacob did so, and completed her
week. Then Laban gave him his daughter Rachel to be his wife.
[29] (Laban gave his female servant Bilhah to his daughter Rachel to be
her servant.) [30] So Jacob went in to Rachel also, and he loved Rachel
more than Leah, and served Laban for another seven years. [31] When the
LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren.
[32] And Leah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Reuben,
for she said, “Because the LORD has looked upon my affliction; for now
my husband will love me.” [33] She conceived again and bore a son, and
said, “Because the LORD has heard that I am hated, he has given me this
son also.” And she called his name Simeon. [34] Again she conceived and
bore a son, and said, “Now this time my husband will be attached to me,
because I have borne him three sons.” Therefore his name was called
Levi. [35] And she conceived again and bore a son, and said, “This time I
will praise the LORD.” Therefore she called his name Judah. Then she
ceased bearing. Gen. 29:15-35
There is no book, I believe, less sentimental about marriage and the family then the Bible.
It is utterly realistic about how hard it is not to be married; and it is utterly realistic about how hard it is to be married.
Out in the world, especially in the culture outside the church, there
are a lot of people who are cynical about marriage. They don’t trust
marriage, so they avoid it altogether or give themselves an easy escape
by living together. Then there are people inside the church who are very
much the opposite. They think, “Marriage, family, white picket
fences—that is what family values are all about. That’s how you find
fulfillment. That is what human life is all about.”
The
Bible shows us marriage and the family, with all of its joys and all of
its difficulties, and points us to Jesus and says, “This is who you
need, this is what you need, to have a fulfilled life.” What
the Bible says is so nuanced, so different, so off the spectrum. One of
the places you see this is in this fascinating story—the account of
Jacob’s search for his one true love. I would like you to notice three
things in the story:
First, this overpowering human drive to find one true love [Key Theme – a hope];
Secondly, the devastation and disillusionment that ordinarily accompanies the search for true love;
[Third], and finally, what we can do about this longing – what will fulfill it.
1) THE HUMAN DRIVE TO FIND ONE TRUE LOVE
At the beginning of the passage,
Laban says to Jacob, “Just because you are a kinsmen [relative] of mine, should you work for me for nothing? Tell me what your wages should be” (v. 15). Before continuing, let me give you the back-story.
Two
generations earlier, God had come to Abraham, Jacob’s grandfather, and
said, “Abraham, look at the misery, the death, and the brokenness. I am
going to do something about it. I am going to redeem this world, and I
am going to do it through your family, through one of your descendents.
And therefore, in every generation of your descendents, one child will
bear the Messianic line. That child will walk before me and be the head
of the clan and pass the true faith on to the next generation. Then
there will be another child that bears the Messianic line [seed] and
another, until one day, one of your descendents will be the Messiah
himself, the King of kings.”
Abraham fathered Isaac, the
first in the line Messianic forebears, and when Isaac’s wife, Rebekah,
became pregnant with twins, God spoke to Rebekah through and said, “The
elder will serve the younger.” That was God’s way of saying that the
second twin born would be the chosen one, to carry on the Messianic
hope. Esau is born first and then Jacob, but in spite of the prophecy,
Isaac set his heart on the oldest son. He set his heart on Esau and
favored him all through his life. As a result, he distorted his entire
family. Esau grew up proud, spoiled, willful, and impulsive; Jacob grew
up rejected and resentful and turned into a schemer; Rebekah favored her
younger son and became alienated from her husband Isaac.
Finally,
the time came for the aged Isaac to give the blessing to the head of
the clan, which was to be Esau; but Jacob dressed up as Esau, went in,
and got the blessing. When Esau found out about it, he became determined
to kill Jacob, and Jacob had to flee into the wilderness. Now
everything was ruined. Jacob’s life was ruined. Not only did he no
longer have a family to be the head of; he no longer had a family or an
inheritance at all, and he had to flee for his life. Jacob did not know
whether Esau messed up or he messed up or Isaac or maybe even God, but
now his life was in ruins and he would never fulfill his destiny. Just
to survive, he was forced to flee to the other side of the Fertile
Crescent.
Jacob escaped to his mother’s family, and they took him
in as a kind of charity case. Laban, his uncle, allowed him to be a
shepherd. Laban realized that Jacob had tremendous ability as a shepherd
and a manager. He figured out that he could make a lot of money if
Jacob were in charge of his flocks. That is how we get to this question:
“How much can I pay you to be in charge of my flocks?”
Jacob’s answer [vv. 16-18] is basically one word:
Rachel.
He wanted Rachel as his bride, and was willing to work seven years for
her. What do we know about Rachel? The text comes right out and says
that
Rachel was lovely in form and beautiful.
The Hebrew word translated “form” is quite literal it means exactly what
you think. It is talking about her figure. Rachel had a great figure.
She had a beautiful face and was absolutely gorgeous. I want to give
credit where credit is due and say that Robert Alter, the great Hebrew
literature scholar at Berkeley, has helped me understand this text a
lot. Alter says there are all sorts of signals in the text about how
over-the-top,
intensely lovesick and overwhelmed Jacob is with Rachel. There is the poignant but telling statement where the text says, “
Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her (v.20).”
More
interesting is the next verse: “Then Jacob said to Laban, “Give me my
wife that I may go in to her, for my time is completed.” Of course that
means he wants to have sex with her.
Alter says that this
statement is so blunt, so graphic, so sexual, so over-the-top and
inappropriate and non-customary that, over the centuries, Jewish
commentators have had to do all kinds of backpedaling to explain it. But
he says it is not that hard to explain the meaning. He says that the
narrator is showing us a man driven by and overwhelmed with emotional
and sexual longing for one woman.
What is going on here?
Jacob’s life was empty.
He never had his father’s love. Now he didn’t even have his mother’s
love, and he certainly had no sense of God’s love. He had lost
everything—no family, no inheritance, no nothing. And then he saw
Rachel, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, the most beautiful
woman for miles around, and he said to himself, “If I had her, finally,
something would be right in my lousy life. If I had her, life would have
meaning. If I had her, it would fix things.” If he found his one true
love, life would finally be okay.
All the longings of the
human heart for significance, for security, and for meaning—he had no
other object for them—they were all fixed on Rachel.
Jacob
was somewhat unusual for his time. Cultural historians will tell you
that in ancient times people didn’t generally marry for love (that is
actually a relatively recent phenomenon). They married for status.
Nevertheless, he is not rare today.
Ernest Becker was a secular man, an atheist, who won the Pulitzer Prize in the 1970’s for his book The Denial of Death.
In the book, he talks about how secular people deal with the fact that
they don’t believe in God. He says that one of the main ways secular
culture has dealt with the God vacuum is through apocalyptic sex and
romance. Our secular culture has loaded its desire for transcendence
into romance and love. Talking about the modern secular person, he says:
He
still needed to feel heroic, to know that his life mattered in the
scheme of things…He still had to merge himself with some higher,
self-absorbing meaning, in trust and gratitude…If he no longer had God,
how was he to do this? One of the first ways that occurred to him, as
[Otto] Rank saw, was the “romantic solution.” …The self-glorification
that he needed in the innermost nature he now looked for in the love
partner. The love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to
fulfill one’s life…
After all, what is it that we
want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want
redemption—nothing less. We want to be rid of our faults, of our
feelings of nothingness. We want to be justified, to know that our
creation has not been in vain. … That is exactly what Jacob did.
And that is what people are doing all over the place. That is what our
culture is begging us to do—to load all of the deepest needs of our
hearts for significance, security, and transcendence into romance and
love, into finding that one true love. That will fix my lousy life!
Let
me tell you something you notice when you live in New York City. It is a
tough town; everybody looks so cool and pulled together. But the amount
of money people spend on their appearance shows they are desperate.
They cannot imagine living without apocalyptic romance and love.
The
human longing for one true love has always been around, but in our
culture now, it has been magnified to an astounding degree. But where
does it lead?
2) The Disillusionment That Comes
Secondly, let’s look at the disillusionment and devastation that almost always accompanies a search for that one true love. We begin with Laban’s plot. Laban knew that Jacob offered to serve seven years for Rachel. He knew what that meant.
At
that time, when you wanted to marry someone, you paid the father a
bride price, and it was somewhere around thirty to forty-five shekels.
Robert Alter says that a month’s wages was equal to one and a half
shekels, and therefore, you can see that Jacob, right out of the box is
absolutely lovesick. He is a horrible bargainer; he is immediately
offered three to four times the normal bride price. Laban knew he had
him. He knew this man was vulnerable.
Commentators say
there are indicators in the text that Laban immediately came up with a
plan, realizing he could get even more out of this deal. Notice the
conversation between Jacob and Laban.
The text says, “Jacob
loved Rachel. And he said, “I will serve you seven years for your
younger daughter Rachel.” (v.18). Look at how Laban responds. He never
says, “Yes”! He does not say, “Yes, seven years. It is a deal.” No!
Laban said, “It is better that I give her to you than that I should give
her to any other man; stay with me” (v.19).
Jacob wants
it to be a yes, so he hears a yes. But it is not a yes. Laban is just
saying, “Yea, okay, if you want to marry Rachel, it is a good idea.”
Seven
years pass; now Jacob says, “Give me my wife.” As customary, there is a
great feast. In the middle of the feast, the bride is brought heavily
veiled to the groom. She was given to him, and he took her into the
tent. He was inebriated, as was also the custom; and in that dark tent,
Jacob lay with her. The text tells us, “When morning came, there was
Leah!” (v. 25). Jacob looked and discovered that he had married Leah,
and had had sex with Leah, and he had consummated the marriage with
Leah. Jacob, rightfully angry, goes to Laban and says, “What is this you
have done to me? I served you for Rachel, didn’t I? Why have you
deceived me? (v. 25). Laban replies that it is customary for the older
girl to be married before the younger girl.
I must say I
have read this text for thirty years or more and I have never understood
why Jacob basically says, “Oh, okay.” I have never figured it out. He
is obviously angry and the situation is absolutely ridiculous. Why
doesn’t Jacob kill him? Why doesn’t he throttle him? Again,
Robert Alter is very helpful here. He suggests something that I think is rather profound.
First of all, what Laban literally says is: “It is not the custom here to put the younger before the older.”
Second,
Alter points out that when Jacob said, “Why have you deceived me?” the
word translated “deceived” is the same Hebrew word that was used in
chapter 27 to describe what Jacob did to Isaac. [What goes around comes
around; sowing…and reaping]
Alter says (this is
surmise, but what surmise!) that it must have occurred to Jacob that
Laban had only done to him what he had done to his father. In the dark,
he thought he was touching Rachel, as his father in the dark of his
blindness had thought he was touching Esau. Alter then quotes an ancient
rabbinical commentator who imagines the conversation the next day
between Jacob and Leah. Jacob says to Leah: “I called out ‘Rachel’ in
the dark and you answered. Why did you do that to me?” And Leah says to
him, “Your father called out ‘Esau’ in the dark and you answered. Why
did you do that to him?” Fury dies on his lips. Cut to the quick.
Suddenly the evil he has done has come to Jacob. And he sees what it is
like to be manipulated and deceived, and meekly he picks up and works
another seven years.
We leave Jacob in his devastation (I
don’t have a better word for it), and then we see what it has done to
Leah. Now, who is Leah?
We are told that Leah is the older
daughter, but the only detail we are given about her is that she has
weak eyes. Nobody quite knows what “weak eyes” means; some commentators
have assumed it means she has bad eyesight. But the text does not say
that Leah had weak eyes, but Rachel could see a long way.
Weakness probably means cross-eyed; it could mean something unsightly.
But here is the point: Leah was particularly unattractive, and she had
to live all of her life in the shadow of her sister who was absolutely
stunning.
As a result, Laban knew no one was ever going to marry her or offer any money for her.
He wondered how he was going to get rid of her, how was he going to unload her.
And then he saw his chance, he saw an opening and he did it. And now
the girl that Laban, her father, did not want has been given to a
husband who doesn’t want her either.
She is the girl nobody wants. Leah
has a hollow in her heart every bit as the hollow in Jacob’s heart. Now
she begins to do to Jacob what Jacob had done to Rachel and what Isaac
had done to Esau. She set her heart on Jacob. You see the evil and the
pathology in these families just ricocheting around again and again from
generation to generation.
The last verses here are some of the
most plaintive [sad] I have ever read in the Bible (most English
translations tell you a little about what the words actually mean).
[she uses Hebrew words that express her longing for Jacob] Leah
gave birth to her first child, a boy and she named him Reuben. Reuben
means, “to see” and she thought, “Now maybe my husband will see me;
maybe I won’t be invisible anymore.” But she had a second son, and she
named him Simeon, which has to do with hearing: “Now maybe my husband
will finally listen to me.” But he didn’t. She had a third son and named
him Levi, which means “to be attached,” and she said, “Maybe finally my
husband’s heart will be attached to me.”
What was she doing? She was trying to get an identity through traditional family values.
Having sons, especially in those days, was the best way to do that; but
it was not working. She had set her heart, all of her hopes and dreams,
on her husband. She thought, “If I have babies and if I have sons and
my husband loves me, then finally something will be fixed in my lousy
life.” Instead, she was just going down into hell. And the text says—it
is sort of like the summary statement—Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah.
That meant she was condemned every single day. This is what I mean by
hell—
every single day she was condemned to see the man she most
longed for in the arms of the one in whose shadow she had lived all her
life. Every day was like another knife in the heart.
All
we see here is devastation, right? No, that is actually not the way the
text ends. But before we look at how the text ends, let me field
two objections and draw two lessons.
The first objection has to do with all these ancient practices.
Some people who read the text or listen to a sermon on it are thinking,
Why are you telling me this story—men buying and selling women,
primogeniture [pry-mo-gen-i-turr], sexual slavery—what is this about? I
am offended by this kind of old primitive culture. I know they existed,
but thank goodness we don’t live in a culture like that anymore. Why do
we have to know about it?
First, it is important to see
(and this comes from what Robert Alter says), if you read the book of
Genesis, and you think it is condoning primogeniture [the right of
succession belonging to the firstborn child], polygamy, and bride
purchase—if you think it is condoning these things, you have not yet
learned how to read. Because in absolutely every single place where you
see polygamy or primogeniture, it always wreaks devastation. It never
works out. All you ever see is the misery these patriarchal
institutions cause in families. Alter says if you think the book of
Genesis is promoting those things, you have no idea what is being said.
He says these stories are
subversive [seeking or intended to subvert an established system or institution] to all those ancient patriarchal institutions. Just read!
You might also be thinking,
Thank
goodness we don’t live in a culture in which a woman’s value is based
on her looks. Thank goodness we don’t live in a culture where a woman
looks in a mirror and says, “Look at me I am a size 4, I can get a rich
husband.” Hundreds of years ago, people used to do that but nobody does
that anymore. Really?
I am sorry, I shouldn’t be sarcastic,
but what in the world makes you think that we are in a less brutal
culture? We are and we aren’t. Besides that, what the Bible says about
the human heart is always true, it is always abiding. If anything, what
we are saying is truer today than it was before.
The second objection
people have has to do with the moral of the story. They ask, “Where are
all the spiritual heroes in this text? Who am I supposed to be
emulating? Who is the good guy? What is the moral of the story? I don’t
see any! What is going on here?
The answer is: That is
absolutely correct. You are starting to get it. You are starting to get
the point of the Bible. What do I mean?
The Bible doesn’t give
us a god at the top of a moral ladder saying, “Look at the people who
have found God through their great performance and their moral record.
Be like them!” Of course not! Instead, over and over again, the Bible
gives us absolutely weak people who don’t seek the grace they need and
who don’t deserve the grace they get.
They don’t
appreciate it after they get it, and continue to screw up and abuse it
even after they have it. And yet, the grace keeps coming!
The Bible is not about a god who gives us accounts or moral heroes. It is about grace, and that is what this story is about.
So what do we learn from this story? Is there any moral? I wouldn’t put
it that way, but here are two things I would want you to see?
First, we learn that through all of life there runs a ground note of cosmic disappointment.
You are never going to lead a wise life, no matter who you are, unless
you understand that. Here is Jacob, and he says, “If I can just get
Rachel, everything will be okay.” And he goes to bed with someone whom
he thinks is Rachel, and then, literally, the Hebrew says, “But in the
morning, behold, it was Leah.” What does this show us? Listen, I love
Leah; I really do. I have been thinking about this text for a long time,
and I love her and I want to protect her, so I hope you don’t think I
am being mean to her in what I am trying to say. But I want you to know
that— when you get married, no matter how great you think that marriage
is going to be; when you get a career, no matter how great you think
your career is going to be; when you go off to seminary, no matter how
much you think it is going to make you into a man or a woman of God—
in the morning, it is always Leah!You think you are going to bed with Rachel, and it in the morning, it is always Leah. Nobody has ever said this better than
C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity:
Most
people, if they have really learned to look into their own hearts,
would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be
had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that
offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The
longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of
some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us,
are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really
satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called
unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking
of the best possible ones. There was something we have grasped at, in
that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I
think everyone knows what I mean. The souse may be a good spouse, and
the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a
very interesting job: but something has evaded us.
You
have got to understand that it is always Leah! Why? Because if you get
married, if you have families, if you go into the ministry, and say that
“finally this is going to fix my life” (you don’t really think you are
doing it until you do it)—those things will never do what you think they
will do.
In the morning, it is always Leah.
If
you get married, and in any way do as Jacob does and put that kind of
weight on the person you are marrying, you are going to crush him or
her. You are going to kill each other.
You are going to think you have gone to bed with Rachel, but you get up and it is Leah. As
time goes on, eventually you are going to know that this is the case;
that everything disappoints, that there is a note of cosmic
disappointment and disillusionment in everything, in all things into
which we most put our hopes. When you finally find that out, there
are four things you can do.
One, you can blame the things and drop them and go try new ones, better ones. That is the fool’s way.
The
second thing you can do is blame yourself and beat yourself up and say,
“I have been a failure. I see everybody else happy. I don’t know why
I’m not happy. There is something wrong with me.” So you blame yourself
and you become a self-hater.
Third, you can blame
the world and get cynical and hard. You say, “Curses on the entire
opposite sex” or whatever, in which case you dehumanize yourself.
Lastly,
you can, as C. S. Lewis says at the end of his great chapter on hope,
change the entire focus of your life. He concludes, “If I find in
myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most
probable explanation is that I was made for another world [something
supernatural and eternal].
We see that both the liberal mindset and the conservative mindset are wrong when it comes to romance, sex, and love.
Neither
serves us well. In fact, you can almost see it in Jacob and Leah.
Jacob, with a liberal mindset, is after an apocalyptic hookup. He says,
“Give me my wife! I want sex!” he actually says that. On the other hand,
here is Leah, and what is she doing? She is the conservative. She is
having babies. She is not out having a career. She is trying to find her
identity in being a wife—“Now my husband will love me.”
Guess what? They are both wrong. They are not going anywhere. Their lives are a mess. That is the reason why
Ernest
Becker says so beautifully, “No human relationship can bear the burden
of godhood… However much we idolize him [the love partner], he
inevitably reflects earthly decay and imperfection. And as he is our
ideal measure of value, this imperfection falls back upon us. If your
partner is you “All’ then any shortcoming in him becomes a major threat
to you.” – Becker,
Denial of Death, 166.
As
Becker said, what we want when we elevate the love partner to the
position of God is to be rid of our faults, to be justified to know our
existence has not been in vain. We are after redemption. He then adds,
“Needless to say, human partners can’t do this.” You might think that is
pretty obvious; but we done believe it. We thought the Bible was a
source of family values. Well, it is, in a sense, but how realistic it
is! So what are we going to do? We are all creatures of our culture. We
have this drive in us for one true love. What are we going to do with
it? Here is the answer.
3) What We Can Do about This Longing
I
want you to see what God does in Leah and for Leah. Leah is the first
person to get it; she does begin to see what you are supposed to do.
Look first at what God does in her.
As we have said, every time she has a child, she puts all of her hopes
in her husband now loving her. And yet, one of the things scholars
notice that is very curious is that even though she is clearly making a
functional idol out of her husband and her family, she is calling on the
Lord.
She doesn’t talk about God in some general way or invoke
the name of Elohim. She uses the name Yahweh. In verse 32, it says,
“And Leah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Reuben, for
she said, “Because the LORD [Yahweh] has looked upon my affliction.” How
does she know about Yahweh?
Elohim was the generic word
for God back then. All creatures at that time had some general idea of
God or gods; they were gods at the top of a ladder, and you had to get
up to the top through rituals or through transformations of
consciousness or moral performance. Everyone understood God in that
sense, but Yahweh was different.
Yahweh was the God who came down the ladder, the one who entered into a personal covenantal relationship and intervened to save.
Certainly they didn’t know all he was going to do, but Abraham and
Isaac knew something about it, and Jacob would have known about it as
well. It is interesting that Leah must have learned about Yahweh from
Jacob. Even though she is still in the grip of her functional idolatry,
somehow she is trying, she is calling out, she is reaching out to
a God of grace. She has grasped the concept.
You
might say that she has got a theology of sorts, as advanced as it was
at the time, but she is having trouble connecting it. She is calling him
the Lord, and yet she is treating him like a “god.” Do you follow me?
She
is saying, “God can help me save myself through childbearing. God can
help me save myself by getting my husband’s love. So she is using God,
and yet she not call him God [Elohim]; she calls him Lord [Yahweh]. She
is beginning to get it, and what is intriguing is that, at the very end,
something happens. The first time she gives birth she says, ‘Now maybe
my husband will see me. Now maybe my husband will love me.” And when she
gives birth to her third son, she says, “Now maybe my husband will be
attached to me.”
Finally, it says that she conceived for
the fourth time, and when she gave birth to Judah, she said, “This
time!” Isn’t that defiant? It is totally different; no mention of
husband, no mention of child. There is some kind of breakthrough. She
says, “This time I will praise the LORD.”
At
that point, she has finally taken her heart’s deepest hopes off of the
old way, off of her husband and her children, and she has put them in
the Lord.
Here is what I believe is going on. Jacob and Laban had
stolen Leah’s life, but when she stopped giving her heart to a good
thing that she had turned into an ultimate thing and gave it to the
Lord, she got her life back.
May I respectfully ask you:
What good thing in your life are you treating as an ultimate thing?
What do you need to stop giving your heart to if you are going to get your life back?
There are a lot of things I am certain about, but I am absolutely certain that everybody in this room has got something.
Do you know what it is?
If
you have no idea, you need to think about it. Something happened to
Leah; God did something in her. There was a breakthrough. She began to
understand what you are supposed to do with your desire for one true
love. She turned her heart toward the only real beauty, the only real
lover who can satisfy those cosmic needs.
But we shouldn’t just look at what God did in her.
We have to also look for what God has done for her—because God has done something for her.
I believe that she had some consciousness, although it might have been
semi-consciousness or just intuition, that there was something special
about this last child. It would probably be reading too much into the
text to say she understood, but I believe she sensed that God had done
something for her. And he had.
The writer of Genesis knows
what God has done. This child is Judah, and who is Judah? The writer of
Genesis tells us in chapter 49 that it is through Judah that Shiloh
will come, and it is through Shiloh that the King will come. This is the
line! This is the Messianic line! God has come to the girl that nobody
wanted, the unloved, and made her the mother of Jesus—not beautiful
Rachel, but the homely one, the unwanted one, the unloved one.
Why did God do that? Does he just like the underdog? He did it because of his person and because of his work.
First, because of his person. It says that when the Lord saw Leah was not loved, he loved her. God is saying, “I am the real bridegroom. I am the husband of the husbandless. I am the father of the fatherless.” What does that mean?
He
is attracted to the people that the world is not attracted to. He loves
the unwanted. He loves the unattractive. He loves the weak, the ones
the world doesn’t want to be like. God says, “If nobody else is going to
be the spouse of Leah, I will be her spouse.”
Guess what? It is
not just those of you without spouses who need to see God as your
ultimate spouse, but those of us with spouses have got to see God as our
ultimate spouse as well. You have to demote the person you are married
to out of first place in your heart to second place behind God or you
will end up killing each other. You will put all of your freight, all
the weight of all your hopes, on that person. And of course, they are
human beings, they are sinners, just like you are. God says you must see
him as what he is: the great bridegroom, the spouse for the spouseless.
He is not just a king and we are the subjects; he is not just a
shepherd and we are the sheep. He is a husband and we are his lovers. He
loves us! He is ravished with us—even those of us whom no one else is
ravished with; especially those of us whom no one else is ravished with.
That is his person. But that is not all.
The second
reason why he goes after Leah and not Rachel, why he makes the girl who
nobody wanted into the mother of Jesus, the bearer of the Messianic
line, the bearer of salvation to the world, is not just that he likes
the underdog, but because that it the gospel.
When God came to earth in Jesus Christ, he was the son of Leah. Oh yes, he was!
He
became the man nobody wanted. He was born in a manger. He had no beauty
that we should desire him. He came to his own and his own received him
not. And at the end, nobody wanted him. Everybody abandoned him. Even
his Father in heaven didn’t want him. Jesus cried out on the cross: “My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Why did
he become Leah’s son? Why did he become the man nobody wanted? For you
and for me! Here is the gospel: God did not save us in spite of the weakness that he experienced as a human being but through it. And you don’t actually get that salvation into your life through strength; it is only for those who admit they are weak.
And if you cannot admit that you are a hopeless moral failure and a
sinner and that you are absolutely lost and have no hope apart from the
sheer grace of God, then you are not weak enough for Leah and her son
and the great salvation that God has brought into the world.
God
chose Leah because he is saying, “This is how salvation works. This is
the upside-down way that my people will live, at least in relationship
to the world, when they receive my salvation.”
Now the way up is
down. The way to become rich is to give your money away. The way to
become rich is to give your money away. The way to power is to serve
God, when he came to earth, as the son of Leah. God made Leah, the girl
nobody wanted into the mother of Jesus. Why?
Because he
chooses the foolish things to shame the wise; he chooses the weak things
to shame the strong; he chooses even the things that are not to bring
to nothing the things that are, so that no one will boast in his
presence (1 Cor. 1:27-29).
In conclusion, let me give you a few practical applications.
First, if there is anyone with a Laban in their life right now, don’t be bitter and don’t beat them up.
Don’t let them take advantage of you either if you can; but remember,
God can use that person in your life to make you a better person in your
life if you don’t become bitter.
Second, are you
somebody who has been rejected, betrayed, maybe recently divorced, and
you didn’t want to be? Are you a Leah? Remember, God knows what it is
like to be rejected. He didn’t just love Leah, but he actually became
Leah. He became the son of Leah. He came to his own and his own received
him not.
He understands rejection, and if anything, he
is, from what we can tell in the Scripture, attracted to people in your
condition. It is his nature, so don’t worry. He knows and he cares.
Third,
please don’t let marriage throw you. I have been saying this all along:
in the morning, it will always be Leah. And if you understand that, it
will make some of you less desperate in your marriage-seeking, and it
will make some of you less angry at your spouse for his imperfections.
Last,
you may believe you have messed up your life; that your life is on plan
B. You should have done this or that, and now it is too late. Think
about it:
Should Jacob have deceived Isaac and Esau? No.
Should Isaac have shown the favoritism that turned Jacob into a liar? No.
Everybody
sinned. There are no excuses. They shouldn’t have done what they did.
They blew up their lives. But if those things hadn’t happened, would
Jacob have met the love of his life, Rachel?
Jesus Christ,
who is a result of Jacob’s having to flee to the other side of the
Fertile Crescent, isn’t plan B! You can’t mess up your life. You can’t
mess up God’s plan for you. You will find that no matter how much you do
to mess it up, all you are doing is fulfilling his destiny for you.
That
does not mean what they did was okay. The devastation and the
unhappiness and the misery that happens in your life because of your
sins are your fault. You are responsible, you shouldn’t do them; and
yet, God is going to work through you. Those two things are together. It
is an antinomy, a paradox.
Remember, it is never too late
for God to work in your life! Never! You can’t put yourself on plan B.
Go to him. Start over now. Say it: “This time, no matter what else I have done, I will praise the Lord!”
*[Delight yourself in the LORD, and He will give you the desires of your heart – Psalm 37:4]
The
sermon manuscript by Dr. Timothy Keller above is excerpted in parts
from the original sermon and from the printed manuscript that can be
found in the excellent book of sermons edited by Dr. Dennis E. Johnson
entitled:
Heralds of the King: Christ-Centered Sermons in the Tradition of Edmund P. Clowney. Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2009
