THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

Genesis 29:14-30
Bob Bonner
December 17, 2006

Recently, I celebrated another birthday. Typically, birthdays are times that I stop to take a closer look at my life and what has transpired over that past year. In particular, I look back at the workings of God in my life, the major events that have impacted my life that year, both good and bad; I think through the people God has used to shape my thinking, my character and those other instruments He has used to do radical surgery on the glaring weaknesses in my life.

For me, this past year has felt like I have been in the classroom of humility, flunking one exam after another. Yet through it all, there has been one great blessing that has stood out in my life. That blessing has been my wife of thirty-three years. However, I would not be completely honest with you if I said that there have not been times that I have wondered about this “blessing.” Sometimes, she hasn’t felt like a blessing to me, just as I know there have been times that I have broken her heart, been insensitive and plainly, made her life miserable. So are some of the highs and lows we experience in marriage, even good marriages. But marriage, when viewed from God’s perspective, is the “gift that keeps on giving.” It is something that God purposes to use to mold and shape our characters, making us into the persons we and He truly wants us to be when life is over.

This morning we are going to begin looking at how God providentially uses romantic love and marriage as one of His tools to get our attention, to draw us closer to Him, and yes, to humble us. We will see that through marriage, God causes us to depend upon Him if we want our lives to develop meaning. We will also see in this chapter and the next, that sometimes, marriage is a rough road, from beginning to end. For some, marriage doesn’t come close to the expectation or dreams one hoped for from the beginning. However, if we stay the course, God deliberately uses marriage as a way to force us to grow up or to mature spiritually.

In our study of Genesis, we recently have been focusing on Jacob’s life. In Genesis 29 Jacob is single and probably in his late 80's. He has just experienced, in Genesis 28, the first of many great experiences with his personal and living God, Yahweh. In New Testament terms, we would say that there in Genesis 28 at Bethel, Jacob was born again. He became a new creation. That doesn’t mean he is a totally changed man, but rather, the new and great transformation of Jacob’s life and character has just begun. Out of love for Jacob, God will not allow him to remain the self-centered, deceptive, personally ambitious and greedy man he was. When God loves a person, He is going to raise him up, discipline him and train him to be the man (or woman) of God He wants him to be. And so it is with Jacob.

In Genesis 29, we will see that God’s great transformation of Jacob now begins, two weeks after his conversion. There are two instruments that God chooses to use in Jacob’s maturing process: first, it is the instrument of his romantic love for a woman, named Rachel; and second, God uses the instrument of a relative’s deception of Jacob. Through God’s school of hard knocks, He is educating Jacob. He is taking these next 20 years of Jacob’s life, lived out in the northern territory of Aram and using them to transform Jacob into the leader this family needs as a patriarch. By the time this portion of his education process is over, Jacob will be a humbled man who has begun to learn the importance and wisdom of making the priority of one’s life to seek and trust the Lord. Only when Jacob comes to this point of dependence upon the Lord is he fit to rule over his brother Esau, in accordance with God’s model of servant leadership.

Last week we were introduced to Jacob’s future father-in-law, Laban. We have learned a little bit about Laban in the past from our study of Genesis 24. This morning, we will more clearly see that Laban was, at the beginning of his story and at the end of his story, a very cunning, deceptive, greedy and selfishly ambitious man. But by the time we get to the end of Chapter 31, providentially, Laban will stand humbled before his family, humiliated by his actions and will recognize that God is for Jacob and against Laban.

As one studies these two individuals, Jacob and Laban, we notice that before his conversion at Bethel, Jacob possessed Laban’s same qualities of being cunning, deceptive, greedy and ambitious. As we move through these next chapters, we will see little or none of those qualities showing up in Jacob’s life. Instead, we will see a man who’s faith is developing, a man who is capable of romantic love, a man who is a hard worker and a man of integrity, even when wronged. He shows amazing long-suffering with his wife, Leah, who was part of the deception that broke her husband’s heart. This great deception would later prove to be the divisive factor that would bring tremendous heartache to Jacob’s family for generations to come. Yet, with all the hurt that Leah’s deception brought to Jacob and his family, Jacob never turns on Leah.

Through it all, we witness Jacob getting a taste of his own medicine, a sense for what it must have been like to be Esau, the brother whom Jacob had manipulated and deceptively stolen both his birthright and blessing. In these next chapters we see a man who submits to God’s providential moves in his life and God’s discipline which results in Jacob becoming a better man.

As I mentioned just moments ago, God’s providential first instrument to bring about the major transformation of Jacob’s life was Jacob’s marriages. As God does for so many of us, the process of preparing for a marriage and a wedding, and the end product of being married for several years tends to shape an individual’s character. When married, we are forced to see and learn things about ourselves that we never would have seen otherwise, like how really self-centered rather than servant-hearted we are. A man and woman committed to marriage for the long haul discover each other’s rough edges and when they submit themselves to God, they also discover how over time, God uses the other person to polish off those rough edges. God can use marriage to make us into the men and women He has desired us to be. In addition, God uses the friction of marriage to draw individuals closer to Himself, and through marriage He teaches the importance of depending upon Him. All of these things we will witness in our study today, beginning with Genesis 29:14.

In verses 14-17, Moses establishes the setting for Jacob’s marriages. Last time, we closed the curtain on the scene in verse 14, which reads “Laban said to him, [Jacob] ‘Surely you are my bone and my flesh.’ And he stayed with him a month.”

According to Dr. Charles Ryrie, “my bone and my flesh” may indicate that Laban’s vocal intent at this point was to adopt Jacob as his son, for this phrase is found elsewhere in ancient adoption rituals. Why would Laban want to do this? Because a son, in that culture, must work for free. I’m not suggesting that Laban actually adopted Jacob, but that he was testing and treating Jacob as a son for a month to see if he really wanted to use his services. But after a month, as it turns out, Laban does want to use Jacob’s abilities, but not as a son. He wanted to pay Jacob for his work. Maybe out of fear that Jacob would somehow become more powerful over his family, Laban turns this familial relationship into a labor contract. For we read in verse 15, “Then Laban said to Jacob, ‘Because you are my relative, should you therefore serve me for nothing? Tell me, what shall your wages be?’”

Whereas before, Laban welcomed Jacob as a relative, now he degrades their relationship as nothing more than an economic arrangement. Jacob should have worked for free as a relative, maybe not as a son, but at least as a close relative.

What Laban should have done as a loving relative is to help Jacob get a start on building his own home, as Jacob will later ask for in 30:25-34. Instead, Laban keeps Jacob as nothing more than a laborer under contract, which Jacob later bitterly complains about in 31:38-42. So, after this first month and for the next twenty years, Laban and Jacob’s relationship is one of an oppressive lord over an indentured servant paying off a bride price, not the relationship of an uncle or blood relative.

With the next verse, we quickly learn what the wages for Jacob’s labor will be. We read, “Now Laban had two daughters; the name of the older was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel.”

The names of these two sisters mean “cow” and “ewe” respectively, which we may think to be a joke or at least rather peculiar. Today, I’m not sure too many of you ladies would like to be called “cow.” But in that culture, these were appropriate non-inflammatory names for those of a shepherding family. Unfortunately, Laban actually treats his daughters as shepherds, animals, or commodities for bargaining.

We are told, in verse 17, that Leah’s eyes were weak, but Rachel was beautiful of form and face. “Weak” literally means “soft.” This description of one’s eyes implies that Leah’s eyes lacked the fire or sparkle that orientals prize as beauty. Leah’s eyes were dull, maybe even cloudy or had cataracts. What we do know is that Rachel was a stunningly beautiful woman, and probably explains why the three shepherds who were mentioned sitting by the well for so long, waiting for Rachel to show up, had not gone to work. They wanted to feast their eyes upon her beauty. Leah, on the other hand, was older and just plain unattractive.

The story of Leah and Rachel points to the perplexing inequalities of life. Here we have two sisters, enjoying the same heredity and environment, yet one is plain and unattractive, while the other is beaming and pretty. Therein lay the tragedy of Leah, the elder sister. She had what could be considered in the eyes of men, a physical disability, which would probably have destined her to lifelong spinsterhood had it not been for the treacherous ruse that she and her father Laban played on Jacob. Yet, despite her stratagem, Leah does not become the loved or cherished wife that all wives hope to be.

In verses 18-20, we read of the arrangement or contract for Jacob’s marriage. “Now Jacob loved Rachel, so he said, ‘I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel.’ Laban said, ‘It is better that I give her to you than to give her to another man; stay with me.’ So Jacob served seven years for Rachel and they seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her.”

Notice how Laban’s answer is shrewdly ambiguous. He never states that he will give Rachel to Jacob. He never mentions her by name. Laban only refers to her as in one of his daughters. He deliberately does not name Rachel.

Notice also that Moses gives us this classic line, that to Jacob these seven years seemed “but a few days” setting us up for the depth of agony Jacob will be feeling in the complex and extremely disappointing outcome, seven years later.

From Jacob’s perspective, in verses 21-26 we read of what he believes to be a broken marriage contract. “Then Jacob said to Laban, ‘Give me my wife, for my time is completed, that I may go in to her.’ Laban gathered all the men of the place and made a feast. Now in the evening he took his daughter Leah, and brought her to him; and Jacob went in to her. Laban also gave his maid Zilpah to his daughter Leah as a maid. So it came about in the morning that, behold, it was Leah! And he said to Laban, ‘What is this you have done to me? Was it not for Rachel that I served with you? Why then have you deceived me?’ But Laban said, ‘It is not the practice in our place to marry off the younger before the firstborn.’”

When Moses records for us that Laban threw a feast, he includes two important details. First, different than most Eastern wedding celebrations of this time, only men were invited to this wedding feast. Second, Moses uses a term for “feast” that implies that this wedding festival was a drinking fest.

Hence, as a result of having stayed out too late and drunk too much, Jacob is not in control of all of his faculties on his wedding night. By befuddling Jacob with wine and using the blindness of the bridal veil and the darkness of night, Laban pulls off his deception, the “switch” of the two daughters, the older and less comely one for the younger, chosen and more pleasing-to-the-eye one.

This deception on Laban’s part is similar to the deception Jacob pulled off, with his mother’s help, deceiving his father, Isaac into thinking that because Jacob smelled and felt like his brother, Esau, he must have been Esau. I sense that Moses wants us to understand that the modern-day saying of “what goes around comes around” is in operation here. I say that because Moses uses the same word here in Jacob’s mouth for being “deceived” that came out of Esau’s lips once he realized that Jacob had deceived him and stolen his father’s blessing. Therefore, it should be clear to the reader of this account that God is fully intending to teach Jacob a lesson as to what being on the other end of deception feels like.

Laban’s response to Jacob’s question is worth noting also. In Laban’s neighborhood or social circles, the firstborn were always honored, (had the first choice or right of refusal to the available spouses and thus married off first) not like what he had heard took place in Jacob’s home, where the younger got the birthright. However, Laban had had seven years to explain this practice, but never did so. This reveals that Laban was doing what he did, not so much out of wanting to protect Leah, but to better himself by scheming as to how he could take advantage of Jacob’s services for fourteen years.

Furthermore, according to one scholar, the expression “It is not the practice in our place” is of a linguistic formula that indicates a highly objectionable action, morally speaking has taken place. In other words, Laban is feigning outrage and takes a moral stance as though Jacob had done something wrong by insisting on marrying the younger daughter. However, an honest man, which Laban was not, would have made this custom clear in the original contract or sometime during the seven year period. Laban is merely diverting the blame from himself to Jacob. Laban is presenting himself here as the poster child for the hypocritical self-righteousness father.

In the next verse, Laban offers Jacob a solution to their “misunderstanding.” He says in verse 27, “Complete the week of this one, [complete the week of wedding festivities for Leah] and we will give you the other [daughter] also for the service which you shall serve with me for another seven years.”

Typically, in the East at this time, a wedding feast lasted a week and involved all of the friends of the family. It was not typically a men only event. In my research, it appears that not all of the scholars agree as to what the exact order of events are during the week. That might be because there were no iron-clad rules. Some say that after the week’s celebration, then the bride was brought to the groom to consummate the marriage. Others explain that sometime during the early festivities the bride and groom are brought together and then return to the celebration.

In this case, the “completing of the week” with Leah really meant finish out the last days of this feast, then he could immediately take possession of Rachel as his second wife. That could mean that Jacob spent anywhere from one more night with Leah and then would take Rachel, or he would spend several more nights with Leah before marrying Rachel. It’s hard to tell for sure.

So, what is Jacob to do with Laban’s solution? He is now married to someone he never intended to marry and he can’t throw her back. There is no “catch and release” clause in marriage. If he really loved Rachel, which he did, he had to agree to Laban’s terms. Laban had Jacob, and they both knew it. So we read, “Jacob did so and completed her week, and he gave him his daughter Rachel as his wife. Laban also gave his maid Bilhah to his daughter Rachel as her maid. So Jacob went in to Rachel also, and indeed he loved Rachel more than Leah, and he served with Laban for another seven years.”

Notice something else that is obviously absent in these verses. There is nothing mentioned about Rachel having her own wedding celebration. Her’s was an add- on to her sister’s celebration. This must have been very hurtful to Rachel, but she so loved Jacob that she would gladly concede to anything to just have him for her husband, as he would have done for her to be his wife.

By the way, there are some hard questions that still need some answers considering the events of those days. For instance: “What was Rachel doing the night that Leah was presented to Jacob? Where was she?” We are not told, but we can imagine that this was a long night for her. She certainly wasn’t an agreeable party to such things. She must have been locked up or diverted to something else so that she wouldn’t know. But knowing that her beloved and betrothed had been tricked into marrying her sister, and that, together with not having her own wedding, must have been mental agony for her.

Here’s another question: “What about Leah? Did she have a part to play in this ruse?” Leah, even though being obedient to her father’s wishes, knew what she was doing and that it was wrong, every bit as much as Jacob knew that following his mother’s suggestion to deceive his father in order to get his father’s blessing was wrong. She didn’t have to participate in this deception, but she chose to do so. Why? We can only assume that she wanted Jacob for herself knowing that few men of Jacob’s caliber moved through their land of Aram. Hence, she willingly went along with the hope that she could make him love her after they were married. Later, we learn that she never wins Jacob totally over. She may have been loved by Jacob, but the text clearly states that Jacob loved Rachel “more than Leah.”

Another question: Why didn’t Jacob demand Rachel to be his without having to serve Laban for another seven years? I believe Jacob could have, right then and there, demanded Rachel without any further services, but he didn’t. And I believe he didn’t demand to have Rachel on the spot, and agreed to serve Laban another seven years out of respect for Rachel. In other words, since he had already worked seven years for Leah, giving her monetary value, Jacob, in light of all the disgrace Rachel had suffered, consented to her father’s request out of wanting to honor Rachel by showing her that she was of equal value.

One other closing thought considering this wedding. Whereas the wedding week’s festivities were normally focused on celebrating the joining together of two people getting married, this week of festivities, following the deception of Laban was nothing more than a man’s toast to himself among his buddies as to how he outwitted and humiliated Jacob.

Interestingly, Laban knew that Jacob was a man of integrity, a man of his word, and would not go back on it even though he might be angered. Hence, he entrusted Rachel to Jacob right after Leah’s wedding week was finished, knowing that Jacob would work the required seven years before leaving Laban. The fact that Jacob received Rachel first, and then worked the seven years is attested to in veres 30.

One last comment: This giving of a maid to a bride on her wedding day was a custom of the day. But by mentioning this custom twice in such a short period of time, Moses is setting the stage for what is coming later—the conflict between Jacob’s wives and handmaids over having his children.

I sense that this is a good place to stop and apply some principles we can gather from these verses we have looked at already. I would like to begin with one I mentioned from the outset of our study and one we will look at more in depth when we continue our study of Genesis after Christmas. And that is that marriage is one of God’s key instruments used to bring about spiritual maturity in the believer’s life. I won’t go into much detail at this point, but we can tell from this passage that even a marriage that begins under horrible circumstances and remains what some would call “a bad marriage” is still a positive instrument that God uses for good in our lives. Furthermore, we will see next time that “being happy” in marriage is not your God given inalienable right. Faithfulness to your God within marriage, even a challenging marriage, is what God demands from each of us. Getting a divorce on the basis of “I’m just not happy” has no biblical support and dishonors God. We will see more of the biblical evidence when we return next time to this study.

A second point to take away from Laban’s deception of Jacob comes from an obvious absence of the mentioning of the Lord in this entire chapter. Interestingly, Genesis 28 closes down with Jacob worshiping God as an outward evidence of his being born again. But two weeks later, we see that Jacob has not once prayed or sought out God concerning his decision to marry Rachel. As a result, he has not had God’s gift of discernment to uncover Laban’s motives or God’s protection from such an evil man. Furthermore, this failure will not only affect his life, but the lives of all of his children to come. In the days ahead, Jacob’s household will experience jealousy, bitterness and strife all the days of his life, all of which can be traced back to his decision to seek a wife, without God’s direction. Hence, the second lesson we can take from this study is: When we fail to seek the Lord in any decision, [marriage, business, school, college selection, etc.] we increase the risk of failure in our lives.

There is a third principle we saw in action back in Genesis 27, here in Genesis 29, and we will see once more in Genesis 31. That principle is: We seldom gain by guile what we fail to win honorably. In Genesis 27, it was by guile that Jacob tried to gain his father’s blessing. It was to be his anyway, and he could have received his father’s blessing honorably, but failing to trust God and taking matters into his own hands, Jacob did get his father’s blessing, but it came with quite a cost as a result of trusting in deception rather than the Lord.

In this chapter, we see Leah strategizing to take Jacob, by deception and dishonest means, as her husband. In the end, she never really gets what she wants, to be cherished and loved by him. She failed to win his heart because she tried to take it dishonorably.

Once again, in chapter 31, we will see that Laban’s attempt to deceive and take advantage of Jacob for Laban’s personal gain nets Laban nothing. In the end, Laban loses the love and respect of his two daughters and ends up with no more than he would have if Jacob had never come into his home. On the other hand, Laban enabled Jacob to be empowered with wealth and family, all of which will leave his land and move elsewhere.

Whether you are talking about love, business or cheating in school, trying to advance one’s self by means of guile, in the end, it will never leave you a winner.

This morning, if you are facing a decision, financial, school, health or relational, I challenge you to seek God, ask Him for wisdom from His Word or to show you someone who may be able to show you something from God’s Word that will lead you in the right direction concerning your decision. Commit in your heart ahead of time to do whatever He will show you He wants you to do,.

Keep in mind as we close, that Jacob is only beginning to learn, as a new believer, that God desires for all of us to include Him in every facet of our lives. He wants us to learn to depend upon His leading in our lives. And the proof of His good intention and good pleasure to do only what is best for us, is this very season we are celebrating right now. It is because of His desire to do good toward us, that we might know Him and be rightly reconciled to Him, that Jesus came into this world.

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