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SERMON
The Girl Nobody Wanted
Succumbing to the world's definition of success brings devastation and disappointment, but God works with, through, and in weak people to give satisfaction.
Timothy J. Keller |  Printer view |
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Now Jacob really screwed up here, because when you're talking to a con artist, you never let them know your area of weakness. As soon as Laban sees this, as soon as he realizes this guy will do anything for Rachel, Laban's got him. Why? Because in Laban Jacob has met his match; because Jacob's a liar, Jacob's a con artist, and so is Laban, but Laban's been at it twenty-five more years. And as a result, you see, he's much more experienced at this.
And so Laban thinks, I got a way that I can deal with two problems at once. I will use this; I will exploit this man's weakness to deal with two problems at once. Well, what are the two problems? The first problem is, of course, How do I make lots and lots and lots of money? How do I get out of this guy a tremendous amount of valuable skill with very little to pay for it so I can become a wealthy man?
But his second problem is Leah. This man had two daughters, and the verse of course you might remember. I tried to read it slowly, but I probably didn't. It says, "Now Laban had two daughters. The older was Leah and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah had weak eyes, but Rachel was lovely in form and beautiful."
Now if you go to diverse translations you'll find that every single one of the translations will describe Leah's eyes differently. Some will say she had tender eyes. Some will say she had delicate eyes. Some will say she had broken eyes, because what the word really means is, "a breakable, fragile thing." And nobody really quite knows exactly what the word means. But it's not that hard when you look at the context. When the text uses the word "weak," does it mean that Leah's vision was weak? Well, if it says Leah's vision was weak, it should say, "Leah had weak vision, but Rachel could see a long, long way." But that's not what it says. It's not talking about how they looked; it's talking about how they looked. It's not talking about how they looked with their eyes; it's talking about what they looked like.
What it's really saying is this. These were two girls. These were not women yet, almost for sure. And Laban had two girls here, and one of them had either crossed eyes or protruding eyes, or some kind of eye disorder, but whatever it was she was ugly. And Rachel was gorgeous. One was an ugly duckling who would never become a swan, and one was absolutely gorgeous; and these two girls had to grow up with each other. And Laban had a problem.
Here's where the Bible is brutally frank. And you say, ah, thank goodness we're beyond all this. But are we? Are we? Laban thinks I'll never marry this poor woman off. I'll never marry this daughter off. I have a way to get rich and get rid of the daughter that would be around my neck for the rest of my life. That's the kind of man he was.
And so what does he do? Well, it's pretty interesting. Jacob says, "I'll work for Rachel for seven years." What does Laban say in verse 19? "It's better that I give her to you than to some other man. So stay here with me." He didn't say yes. In other words, he said something that led Jacob to believe he was saying yes, but he would always be able to come back later and say, "Jacob, read the fine print." He says, "It's better for me that she should go to you than some stranger," but he didn't say yes.
So Jacob works for seven years and says, "Now I've done my seven years. Send me my wife." Laban says fine. And of course, at the time, a wedding feast was a week long. Jacob was happier than most people at wedding feasts because, Now I have Rachel. Now finally something is going right in my life. Finally, something will console me for all the problems I've always had. And so everybody begins to feast and everybody begins to get drunk. And right in the middle of the very first night in comes the wife, in comes the bride all veiled. And they embrace and they are married, and they go into the tent and they go to bed together. And the Hebrew literally says (and it's a great narrative ploy), "But when morning came, behold it was Leah."
Jacob goes to Laban and says, "Why have you done this to me." And Laban says, "Wait. It's a custom. You can't marry the younger daughter off before the older. It's illegal here. It's the custom. This is the way we do things. The older daughter has to be married before the younger." And lovesick Jacob says, "Well, what do I do?" He says, "I'll tell you what. You can marry Rachel too, but you'll have to work another seven years for her." And Jacob says yes.
And because of all this greed and manipulation in these deceiving men, Leah is thrown into hell. Leah, who probably could have hardened her heart—had she stayed single for a long time, she could have dealt with the fact that she was unwanted, dealt with the fact that in a world like this she was not marketable. You say, aw, we're beyond all that. Are we beyond all that? Is our society that different? She might have been able to harden her heart, but because of these men she is now put into a situation where she is married to a man who not only doesn't love her—and many, many people have that—but the person that he does love is also the wife right there. And it's her sister. And Leah is put into hell.
The last verses of this passage are the most plaintive I know of anywhere in the Bible or any place, because every time she names a child when she begins to have children she says: Now … now maybe my husband will love me. Now maybe I'll have some meaning in life.
And she names Rueben because Rueben means, "I'm seen." And Simeon means, "I'm heard." And Levi means, "I'm attached." And every time a child comes along she says: Now maybe, finally, I'll be visible. Now maybe, finally, I'll be heard. Now maybe, finally, he'll cleave to me. See? Surely now my husband will love me now. And it never happens.
But in the last verse, this is what we read. In the last verse we read, "And finally she conceived again, and when she gave birth to a son she said, 'This time I will praise the Lord.' So she named him Judah, and she stopped having children."
Let's draw out the lessons and let's do the way the gospel does. Six lessons—three are bad news, three are good news. That's how the gospel goes—lots of bad news at the beginning, but then the good news is much "gooder" than the bad news was bad. Now let's take the first three. There are three things here. Let's do the bad news. There's a lot of bad news in this story.
Bad News: Sin does you.
Number one: you never do sin; sin does you. You never commit sin. Sin commits you. Look carefully. People think that when you do a sin, when you break God's law, when you lie, when you use somebody, when you trample on somebody, when you sin, you feel like that's just an event, just an action. No, it's not. The Bible says that when you sin you don't just do an event and then pass on. You create and you release a devastating power that careens around your life indefinitely. Look at what's going on here. There are so many examples of this in here.
I don't have time to trace them all out. Look at what Isaac does to Jacob. Look at how he favors Esau. Look at what he does to Jacob, and now look what's going on, reverb. Jacob is doing the very same thing to Leah that his father did to him. And not only that, because Jacob does back to Isaac what Isaac did to him. And eventually, if you keep on going down, the fact that Jacob does this to Leah means that Leah's children hate Rachel's children when they finally show up. And because Leah's children hate Rachel's children, because of the way in which Jacob sinned and deceived, they eventually sell Joseph into slavery and then they deceive Jacob and say he's dead. And Jacob goes through utter hell.
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