The 30th chapter beginning at verse 14. Now Ruben went in the days of Weed Harvest and found mandrakes in the field and brought them to his mother Leia. Then Rachel said to Leia, please give me some of your son's mandrakes. But she said to her, is it a small matter that you have taken away my husband? Would you take away my son's mandrakes also? And Rachel said, therefore he will lie with you tonight for your son's mandrakes. When Jacob came out of the field in the evening Leia went out to meet him and said, you must come into me for I have surely hired you with my son's mandrakes and he lay with her that night. And God listened to Leia and she conceived and bore Jacob the fifth son. And Leia said, God has given me my wages because I have given my maid to my husband. So she called his name Issacar and then Leia conceived again and bore Jacob the sixth son. And Leia said, God has endowed me with a good endowment. Now my husband will dwell with me because I have borne him six sons. So she called his name Zebulin. And afterwards she bore a daughter and called her name Dina. Then God remembered Rachel and God listened to her and opened her womb. And she conceived and bore a son and said, God has taken away my reproach. So she called his name Joseph and said, the Lord shall add to me another son. The word of the Lord, let's pray together. Father, this is strange stuff to our ears. And yet the things that we resort to would seem strange to these about whom these things seem strange. Because whether it's Leia or Rachel or Jacob or us, we're strange people filled with strangeness. And we need very much to be reminded of our security and our safety in you. We need very much to be reminded that our contentment, our fulfillment, our joy. We'll be in you and you alone and not the strange things that we resort to. So please help us as we consider your word. Helps to receive it, helps us to believe it, helps us to act upon it. You know how hard it is for us, O Lord. But we ask that you would help us, that you would come to us and assist us. Not only to you here and not only to receive but to do the things that are here for us in your word. We pray in Jesus name. Amen. You may be seated. This stuff really is strange. Barb said to me this morning, she was reading this Genesis passage and she said, you know this really is bizarre. And these wives and these maids and all these pregnancies and babies and everything else. And then you throw this mandrake business into the mix and you wonder, what is going on here? Well in the midst of it all, all of the strange stuff, what you have to love about the Scriptures is that they are utterly realistic. They are utterly realistic. You have to read them closely, you have to be careful as you read them. But if you do, you find that while the details differ, your struggles, your discouragements are not different from the struggles and the discouragements of a Jacob or a Leah or a Rachel. In this narrative you have got these three main characters. And last week I described them in this way. There is Jacob who is uninvolved and unconcerned. And there is Leah who is unlovely and unloved. And then there is Rachel who is unfulfilled and so unhappy. In all of us, in all probability, I would say absolutely but I can't know for absolute sure but I suspect that all of us are present in one way or another in these three characters. Jacob and Leah and Rachel, it's not a gender specific thing. It's not about being men, it's not about being women. It's a human thing. It's a human thing to have these struggles. Some of us are like Jacob. Unconcerned, uninvolved. Let me read to you again what one commentator says as he reflects upon Jacob and sort of summarizes where Jacob is in his life until his name has changed Jacob is ever trying to secure God's blessing through his own efforts. That's not a gender specific thing. Tragically, in this important phase of his life he continues prayerless. He has potent in physical strength both to work hard and sire a family but spiritually he is impotent. As his wives struggle for God's blessing in children to validate their marriages, Jacob is reduced to a stud. The narrator reflects Jacob's impoverished state in the minimal dialogue assigned to him. He has addressed once by Rachel, give me children and once by Leah, I have hired you. Both statements reveal a dysfunctional home without a spiritual leader. So that's Jacob. But then there are these other characters. Leah and Rachel and it's not as though Leah and Rachel are without their spiritual defects, their spiritual problems, their spiritual dysfunctions. Jacob is guilty of seeking his own by seeking by his own efforts to secure God's blessing. Then Rachel and Leah by their own efforts, by their own whipped, by their own cunning are seeking to secure their own happiness and contentment. What is God doing here with these people? With Jacob, with Leah, with Rachel? What's happening in these people's lives? Here's what's going on. Here's the goal. Here's the objective. In their respective ways with Jacob but now with Leah and with Rachel, God is working, driving each of these people to find their contentment. Their security, their happiness in him. God is driving each of these people to find his or her contentment in himself. Whether it's Jacob or Leah or Rachel, the objective is the same. That God himself be their joy. That God himself be their contentment. That God himself be their peace. With Jacob, the resolution of this attention, this conflict takes a bit longer. You're really well into the thirties of Genesis. Before you begin to see the resolution with Jacob, but with Leah and Rachel, in this passage, there are strong, strong hints that that resolution has begun to take place. Here's the struggle. Here's the frustration. Here's the disappointment first. For Leah, it is the longing to be loved. You look again at verses 31 to 35 of chapter 29 and verse 31, most of the translations render this word unloved. The Leah was unloved. The word is stronger than the renderings. It really means to be hated. Jacob had contempt for Leah. Jacob found himself in a marriage that was from his vantage point, a mistake, and he felt contempt for Leah. Not just that she wasn't loved, but she was hated. She was held in contempt. That sense of being hated, that sense that deep and abiding sense of being unloved was only reinforced by her inferior social position. Rachel was the wife that he wanted. Jacob did. Rachel was the superior. She was the beautiful one. Leah was the unlovely one. She had an inferior social position from the very beginning. But you see an indication that that inferior social position lived with her by the fact that when this whole mandrake episode comes up, it is Rachel, the chief wife, who seems to have the authority, the responsibility, the discretion to allow Leah the other wife to sleep with her husband. She seems to have been sort of the head of the harem, and all of that only reinforces for Leah that she is inferior in the family. And from the very beginning, Jacob has had an evident affection for Rachel. And Leah lives for, and this is important for years and years and years, unlovely and unloved. You look at the names that she gives to her first three sons, back in verses 31 and following. Verse 32, when Ruben is born, she says, the Lord has surely looked upon my affliction. Verse 33, when she bears the next son, she comments, the Lord has heard that she is unloved and so is given this son. And then when Simian is born, she says, this time my husband will become attached to me, all three of those names reflect the distress of her soul, the anguish that she feels in her soul. And again, you can read verses 31 through 35 in 15 seconds. You can read over that in 15 seconds, but you understand that she lived with this for years, for years and years. This longing to be loved, unfulfilled in Leah's life. For Rachel, the lack of fulfillment was a bit different. Leah sought contentment in a husband, the husband who loved her. Rachel sought contentment in the very thing that Leah possessed. They each were jealous of the other's possession. Leah had the children Rachel wanted. Rachel had the loving relationship with Jacob that Leah wanted. And so there is this emerging jealousy. And it is this emerging jealousy that drives Rachel. And it continues for years and years and years. And then you have this this very strange business that goes on beginning in verse three, where Rachel, because she is incapable of having children herself, gives her maid to Jacob so that she might have a family by her maid. And so she has two sons by her maid, Billha, but she is still not content. She has the children that she wanted, but she is still not content. And in that lack of contentment, feeling that her contentment is going to be found in having children, she resorts to a superstitious practice. That is what these mandrakes are all about. Mandrakes were believed to be an aphrodisiac. They were believed to confer fertility upon those who were not fertile in the Greek world. Aphrodite was called the Lady of the Mandrake. And so there is all of this superstition and all of this aberrant practice that has worked its way into Rachel's life. At the beginning I said there is some strange stuff here, strange things going on, strange practices. People will do strange things in an attempt to fill the void. In an attempt to satisfy the lack of contentment. And that is what Rachel seems to be doing here. She seems to have believed that acquiring these mandrakes from Ruben, from Leia. She seems to believe that these would be a cure for her infertility, and by them she would conceive, but there is no benefit in them. There is no benefit. The mandrakes aren't mentioned again in the narrative. You don't know how long Rachel persisted in believing that this aberrant practice, this superstitious practice, would fill the void? We don't know. But at least at this moment Rachel is resorting to a strange and superstitious practice in a desperate attempt to satisfy this longing in her soul.
Adding insult to injury only further intensifying the animosity, the jealousy, the hostility that exists between Rachel and Leia. It isn't Rachel who becomes pregnant in the following verses, but it is Leia. She is able to conceive again and has more sons. And so with each of these women, you need to understand there is deep, deep disappointment. And it's a year's long disappointment. It doesn't go away. Now try to remind us of this. And I hope I don't remind us of it ad nauseam. I don't want to do that. I don't want to beat a dead horse. But I try to remind us that disappointment is real. Leia and Rachel's disappointments are real disappointments. Their anguish is acute anguish. Now I say that to us because as I know this church and I know this crowd of people, the vast majority of us, the overwhelming number of us are Christians. And because we are Christians, there is a safety that we know and the freedom that we know that allows us to acknowledge the fact of the disappointment. This is the place where people don't have to pretend anymore. This is the place where people having come to terms with their sin, with their weakness, with their frailty, and having turned to Jesus Christ, have found in Jesus Christ forgiveness. But have found even more than forgiveness. They have found adoption. They have been translated from the status of being orphans abandoned and left alone in the world. They've been translated from that status into this great status and standing of being sons and daughters of the God of heaven and earth. And that's who we are, as Christians. If you're not a Christian, may I plead with you, may I beg you that you contemplate what it means to be a Christian. That there is this staggering thing at the center of it. What it means to be a Christian is that I am a son of God, a daughter of God, a child of God. He is my protector, he is my defender, and there is a safety that I have because I am a Christian. And in the midst of that safety, I can look at these disappointments and I can say that they are real. I can acknowledge that the anguish is acute and it's all around us. I've met Leah. I've met Rachel. You know Leah. You know Rachel. I was a seminary student. I led a Bible study. It was part of my field education requirement for some singles in this church where I was worshiping. I remember Barbara McCauley. Barbara was 23 years old. She suffered from muscular dystrophy. She knew she would never be married. She knew she would never have children. We sat in the pastor's study on one Sunday afternoon as she trembled and wept acknowledging that she would never have the desires of her heart. How do you respond to that? I read to you last week this email that a member of our congregation received and which she gave to me. You say that women should not assume that marrying having children and being grandmothers are part of God's plan for their lives. I challenge you on that because we're wired to marry and have kids. It's the deepest part of our being to reproduce. It was not in the deepest part of my being to have a career. There's an honest woman. I cannot accept that God wired me one way than plan to frustrate me. That's beyond cruel. That's the agony, the anguish of Leah and Rachel. A couple of weeks ago, I met, and for breakfast, actually not a young man, a little younger than me, but that's not obviously so young anymore. Young man, I don't know if he's a Christian, he may be, but he rehearsed his story. He talked about his life, the fact that his earliest memories as a child are memories of being abused by his father. And it went on and on for years and years until he was 15 years old and then he left home. And he acknowledged all of his anger and all of his resentment and all of his bitterness and the reason that he went into the army and the reason that he became a special forces officer is because he wanted to kill. And the desire to kill was born out of the soul sufferings that he experienced. The grief is real. The anguish is acute. What do you say in the midst of all of that? How do we respond? How do I respond to Barbara McCauley? How does this email person begin to get some hope? How does this young man begin to get some hope? Well, they don't get hope by us pretending that things are other than what they really are. These disappointments have to be acknowledged as real and these desires that people have, these longings for marriage and for love and to be valued and to have children and to be regarded as worthwhile, to be prized and cherished. Whether wives by husbands or husbands by wives or children by parents or friends by friends, these things are a real measure of who we are as human beings. We are the image bearers of God. God exists, father, son and holy spirit in perfect interpersonal communion and fellowship. That is how God exists and that is what God created us for. And so the desires are God implanted desires. The longings are God implanted longings in fact reflecting the longings that exist in God himself. Who does the father love, the father loves the son? Who does the son love, the son loves the father? And they delight in one another and the prospect of the cross was in part a prospect that this fellowship and union between the father and the son would be ripped and torn asunder. The disappointments are real because the desires are a real measure of who we are as human beings but we recognize also that we do live in a fallen world. And in the midst of that fallen world, in the midst of this brokenness we ask, is there any resolution, can there be the beginnings of the resolution of this grief and this agony and these disappointments and the answer is yes. We don't resolve the tension, we don't resolve the anguish by pretending that it doesn't exist or by pretending that we're some sort of superhuman people. You know, like Mr. Spock from the Starship Enterprise, we pull heart in his chest, no soul in his being. No, the hope begins to come by recognizing that these longings, these aspirations are a true measure of who we are as human beings and that even in the midst of a fallen world, the possibility exists that there can be the beginnings of the resolution of these longings and the satisfaction of these longings. You look back at Leah, let me observe for you again that the first three names given by Leah to her first three sons all have reference to her pain, to her disappointment, to her longing to be loved. But with the fourth son, let me suggest to you that a corner has begun to be turned. For the fourth son named Judah means I will praise Yah, I will praise Yah. And as she begins to turn that corner and I understand that it is a corner that can be difficult to turn, but you see as she begins to turn that corner, Leah is beginning to find her contentment, her satisfaction, her security no longer in a husband, but in God himself. And by the time her sixth son is born, many more years later, it seems that she is content now simply to be honored, simply to be recognized. She frankly has given up the hope of finding satisfaction in an earthly husband and Rachel, Rachel after years of resentment, after years of jealousy, after years of employing superstition, when all of her Jacob-like methods were shown to be fruitless, when all of her Jacob-like methods to acquire or secure proved empty, then, verse 22, God remembered Rachel. God listened to Rachel. God responded to Rachel. It seems that God allowed Rachel to exhaust every other avenue by which she thought she might be satisfied. And when all of those avenues were exhausted, then God remembers Rachel, listens to Rachel, and she acknowledges him. You see it. Verse 23, she conceived and bore a son and said, God has taken away my reproach, what Jacob could never do, what she could never do, God has done. What Jacob could never do for Leah, God has done with both Leah and Rachel. It is God who listened. It is God who heard. Jacob never heard. He never heard the cries of Leah for his affection. He never heard the pleas of Rachel, the anguish of her soul, for children. He never interceded for Rachel in the way that Isaac interceded for Rebecca. He never prayed for her. He never prayed with her. But what Jacob never did, God did for both of them. God remembered, God listened, and God heard, and somehow they knew it. I will praise Yah. God has taken away my reproach. What do you see in all of this? What are the things that you can conclude, that you can take with you and sort of wrestle with before God about these things? Here are two profoundly disappointed people, and God responds to them. Here's the first thing it seems to me that goes on with Rachel and Leah. I don't pretend for a moment that this is an easy thing to hear, and it is certainly not an easy thing to learn. But here's the first thing. It seems that is going on with Rachel and Leah, and I will say also with Jacob, this is not a gender-specific thing. It's not about men and women. It's about people. Here's the first thing. It seems that God will deny us, desire, in order to drive us to Himself. It seems that God will deny us what we desire, in order to drive us to Himself. That's what He does with Rachel and with Leah, and He's doing it with Jacob as well. Jacob's just not quite so quick on the uptake as our Leah and Rachel. He doesn't get it quite as quickly as Leah and Rachel do. And you see this sort of thing suggested, really found out the scriptures. But here's just one example, Psalm 119, verses 65 through 72. This is David. Somebody just like us. This is David in the midst of his growth as a spiritual person. You have dealt well with your servant. It's how this portion of this Psalm begins. You have dealt well with your servant, O Lord, according to your Word. Be good judgment and knowledge, for I believe your commandments. Teach me good judgment and knowledge. I believe your commandments. Before I was afflicted, I went astray, but now I keep your Word. You are good and you do good. So teach me your statutes. The proudest forge to lie against me, but I will keep your presets with my whole heart. Their heart is as fat as grease, but I delight in your law. It is good for me that I have been afflicted that I may learn your statutes. The law of your mouth is better than me than thousands of coins of gold and silver. What the Psalmist said that God has actually done a good thing in his life. We don't know what the affliction was, we don't know what the struggle was, what the disappointment was, what the point of denial was, we don't know. But the Psalmist, David says, you've done a good thing in my life by afflicting me, because in afflicting me, you have kept me from going farther and farther astray. You have pulled me back to your Word, and it is there in your Word, which is an expression of who you are, your being, your character, your goodness, your beauty, your loveliness, your delightfulness, it is there. That I find my own delightfulness. What was God doing? He was denying him what he desired in order to drive him back to himself. The second thing I've already suggested this, God is what no person can be. God is what no person can be. The illustrations of this are all over the Scriptures. I've been reading Isaiah. I'm a little behind in my Berean readings, but I'm catching up. I read this last week, this last week, Isaiah 26. In that day, this song will be sung in the land of Judah. Listen to this. We have a strong city. God will appoint salvation for walls and bulwarks. Open the gates that the righteous nation, which keeps the truth, may enter in. You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stateable, because he trusts in you, trust in the Lord forever, for in Yah, the Lord is everlasting strength. Listen to Isaiah 54, verses one through four. These are promises that God makes. Sing O Baron, you who have not born, break forth into singing and cry aloud, you who have not labored with children. For more are the children of the desolate, than the children of the married woman says the Lord, enlarge the place of your tent, and let them stretch out the curtains of your dwellings. Do not spare lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes. For you shall expand to the right and to the left, and your descendants will inherit the nations, and make the desolate cities inhabited. Do not fear for you will not be ashamed, neither be disgraced for you will not be put to shame. For you will forget the shame of your youth, and not remember the reproach of your widowhood anymore, for your maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts, his name, and your redeemer is the holy one of Israel. And he is called the God of the holer. He is what no person can be, and understand this, you men, you are the wife to this groom, to this husband. You are the ones whom this one has wed to himself, and he now is your Lord protector, and he alone can be for you what no person can be. God will deny us what desire to drive us to himself because God is what no person can be, and so the scriptures are replete with these images and these promises and these invitations to us, and that we use our energies that we expend ourselves so that we might find our contentment and our security. Our sense of well-being in God himself. You all have seen the movie, I suspect, chariots of fire, you know that storyline, you know that Eric Little is a missionary, a missionary who can run, who can run like the wind, and you know that when he went to the Olympics he was to run the hundred meters, and you know that the qualifying heat for the hundred meters was on a Sunday, and because of his convictions, convictions born out of his relationship to God he refused to run on Sunday, and there's this marvelous scene of Eric Little sitting in the crowds with a close friend on the day that the finals were run in the hundred meters, and his friend asks him, are you disappointed? And he said, disappointed? Yes, regrets, you see that it can be, as there was for Leah, as there was over Rachel, as there was for David, as there was for Jesus in the midst of his excruciating griefs and disappointments, there can be a sense of well-being and contentment, and that is to be found in God. Let's pray together. Lord Jesus, we need your help in this, we need your help because it's so hard for us to know how to relate to a God we can't see, so much easier for us to relate to things we can't see, things we can touch, things we can taste, things we can feel, and you're not like that. You give us emblems, you give us signs, you give us some tangible reminders of things you've done and who you are, but you yourself, we can't touch, we can't handle, we can't embrace, and so we need for you to do for us and in us by your spirit, in our hearts, in our souls, but no person, no possession, no hope, no dream, could possibly do. We need for you, O Lord, to be our contentment, our security, our joy, that you, O Lord, must break through to us as you did with Leah, as you did with Rachel, as you did with David. O Lord, please do it with us, and I do pray as we come to this table, that this table might be a taste, a real taste for us of those things. We pray in Jesus' name and we act.