Genesis 29

And the Psalms express all human

emotions.

And desiring justice,

Against the injust is human

emotion, and

we can often feel that emotion nowadays.

We can definitely relate with that psalm.

If you open your Bibles with me to the book of Genesis, we're

in chapter number 29.

Genesis chapter number 29.

We're going to look at the whole book today, but we're just going to read the

first 20 verses to start out with.

God's word says, then Jacob went on his journey

and came to the land of the sons of the east.

He looked, and saw a well in the field, and,

behold, three flocks of sheep were lying there beside it.

For from that well, they watered the flocks.

Now, the stone on the mouth of the well was large.

When all the flocks were gathered there, they would then roll the

stone from the mouth of the well and water the sheep,

and put the stone back in its place on the mouth of the well.

Jacob said to them, My brothers, where are you from?

And they said, we are from Haran.

He said to them, Do you know Laban, the son of Nahor?

And they said, We know him.

And he said to them, Is it well with him?

And they said, It is well, and here is Rachel.

His daughter coming with the sheep.

He said, Behold, it is still high day, it

is not time for the livestock to be gathered, water

the sheep, and go pasture them.

But they said, we cannot.

until all the flocks are gathered, and they roll the stone

for the mouth of the well, then we water the sheep.

While he was still speaking with them, Rachel came with her father's

sheep, for she was a shepherdess.

When Jacob saw Rachel, the daughter of Laban, his mother's

brother, and the sheep of Laban, his mother's brother, Jacob

went up and rolled the stone from the mouth of the well,

and watered the flock of Laban, his mother's brother.

Then Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted his voice, and wept.

Jacob told Rachel that he was a relative of her father, and

that he was Rebekah's son, and she ran and told her father.

So when Laban heard the news of Jacob, his sister's son, he

ran to meet him, and embraced him, and kissed him, and brought him to his house,

then he related to Laban all these things.

Laban said to him, Surely, you are my bone in my flesh,

and he stayed with him a month.

Then LeBon said to Jacob, Because you are my relative,

should you therefore serve me for nothing, tell me, what shall your wages be?

Now, Laban had two daughters.

The name of the older was Leo, and the name of the younger

was Rachel.

And Leia's eyes were weak, but Rachel was beautiful of form and face.

Now, Jacob loved Rachel, so he said, I will serve

you seven years for your younger daughter, Rachel.

LeBon 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.

Let's pray.

May, Father, we love you this morning, and thank you for the opportunity to come together

and worship you.

I pray that you bless your word, to our minds, to our hearts, and

our lives, and your message, in spite of the messenger,

in Christ's name, amen.

Amen.

One of the things that make good stories.

And what makes them great is that you can experience

and see the characters in that story as

they grow and mature, as they face more and more things.

And that's certainly the case here with

Jacob, that the story that Moses

tells about Jacob is a good illustration

of that, that Jacob grows,

and we get to see him as we read on in

his story, him grow and mature.

We have looked, from the beginning of his life, when he was born,

to the time where he was kind of a teenager,

and learned about his deceit and

his scheming and his shysterliness.

And now, in this fourth sermon, we're

going to learn that now he's growing up and coming into his manhood,

and out there trying to find a

wife to start his own family.

In the past, when he was under his father's roof,

it seemed like every decision and every

action he took was at his mother's direction.

His mother is the one that made the plan to steal the blessing

from his brother, Esau.

And his mother was the one who gave

him this idea and planned for him to be sent away

from his home to her land, original land,

to find a wife.

And generally, listening to your mother is

a good idea.

But as we have seen, Jacob's family is

full of dysfunction, maybe like our families, and

listening to your mother may not always be the

best idea when she is telling you to sin.

But now, Jacob's no longer under Isaac's roof.

Jacob's on his own, and he's making his own position.

He was sent to find a wife in his

mother's home country.

That's where her family and his family was, and

not to find a wife from the people of Canaan,

the ones that weren't his relatives, the pagans that were

worshipping the false gods of Canaan.

And I wanted to bring something out here about Genesis,

and in fact, a lot of scripture, Genesis was

written a very long time ago.

It's not the oldest book that was written.

That was by Job, but Genesis was written by Moses,

and it was written in Hebrew under Hebrew

literary guidelines and methods.

We write things a certain way now, or chat GPT

does, and different than what they did back then.

And one of the things that they used as

a tool, a literary device, is the

repetition of themes of phrases of

words, and they would repeat words.

They would repeat phrases, and they would repeat stories,

even narratives, for a purpose,

to emphasize those stories.

Now, there have been some scholars that try to

make this out, like it's evidence that these repeated narratives

are evidence that the Bible was written,

especially Genesis, was written by many different people, and

that a group of editors came together and

compiled all these different haphazard stories

together and messed with them and massaged them to

make one different story, and that's why there's repetition.

But that actually doesn't look like the case.

If you look at the Hebrew literature.

This repetition is something that they use all the time, and

you can find several examples

of it, one of them, and just the word, we

have a good, better, best, right?

A superlative, a way of showing that something is the greatest.

And we use those suffixes, err, and s to do that.

But what the Hebrew would do would just repeat the word.

The more they would repeat the word, the higher, the greater it was.

But, for example, when Isaiah was talking about how

holy God was, he said, the angels called God, holy, holy, holy.

God isn't just holy, he's not even just holy, holy,

he is holy, holy, and

that is the most holy, that someone can be.

And this was used in stories as well when the

author would want to really get you to understand a point.

They would repeat stories, and then

you could look at the stories and see the similarities, and

you could look at the differences, and see what the author wanted you

to understand about those stories.

We'll be learning more about that in Sunday school as we learn on how to interpret scripture.

I recommend it to you.

So, Abraham, the grandfather

of Jacob, was traveling,

he was told by God to move from where he grew up, and

moved to a new land, and then he was no manic even after that.

One time he went to Egypt, and his wife, Sarah, was very beautiful.

And so it was in the time where if your

wife was beautiful, and the king, or some great man,

wanted your wife, you would just get killed, and

then he would take your wife, right?

So he told Sarah, he said, Don't tell the king of Egypt that

you're my wife.

Tell him that you're my sister.

And he actually did this twice, with two different kings.

Well, Isaac, Abraham's son, did

the exact same thing.

And so these scholars would say, look, this is just several

different stories, they're just put together, repeating themselves.

Well, no, it kind of makes sense that if you saw

your father do something, that you would probably do the

same thing as well, and you can look at the differences

in between the two accounts of Abraham and

the account of Isaac, and try to see what

the author was intending for you to understand about them, because they are different.

And this is the same thing.

Isaac had the same experience of

going back east to his family's original

nation and original family, his extended family, to

find a bride.

Well, actually Abraham's servant did for him.

And now Jacob is doing the same thing, and it makes sense that

the son would do the same thing as the father,

but there's big differences between those stories,

and I want to commend, but you go back and read the story

of how Isaac got his wife and compare it

to the story about how Jacob gets his wives,

as we shall see.

It's not uncommon for the same thing to

happen to different people.

It happens to us all the times.

So here, if you remember, Jacob isn't just being

sent to get a wife, the main reason

why Jacob has made this trip at all is

because he had tricked his brother out

of his blessing, and his brother was breathing

threats about taking his life because of it,

and it came to Rebecca, Jacob's mother's

ears that Esau wanted to kill Jacob.

So she sent him away.

He was running for his life to the east,

and finding a wife was the excuse.

Genesis 2743, Rebecca says, Now, therefore,

my son, obey my voice, and arise, flee

to Haran, to my brother Laban.

So he sets off this journey on this journey, and

there's hundreds of miles that he has to go from

where they were, and to her family's land,

and we really don't get too much about the journey,

except last time the story, where God's

grace, through a dream that he had, about

a ladder, came to Jacob, and really

became the pivotal change point in his life.

Jacob started to follow Yahweh.

And because Jacob started following Yahweh,

all the bad stuff was behind him, right?

And there was no more drama, and no more pain in his

life, because he was following Christ now.

He would walk the straight and narrow until God called him

up Jacob's ladder forever, and he would go to heaven.

That's not how it goes, even for Christians, right?

You don't just go and get no more drama,

and no more pain, and all kinds of prosperity because you become a Christian.

In fact, some things may become even harder, and

they usually do.

But we see that the road that Jacob was

on wasn't necessarily made straight and

smooth for him, but that's the beauty

of how these narratives are told.

We are to look at Jacob's life, and see

that not only is this the ultimate

narrative, that God is riding from creation,

to consummation and glory forever and eternity,

but it's also the stories that we can look at to see reflections

and mirrors of our own lives,

even as people who live a couple thousand years

after these

things actually happened.

So it's important for us to see both things in this story,

the big point, the big picture, pointing

to Christ, our savior, and then also pointing

through Christ to eternity with him, but

also the little things that it's trying to teach

us about who we are, and how we're

to live our lives, and how we're to trust in God, as Jacob would

end up learning to trust in God.

Jacob, even though he lived in a completely different time,

and in a completely different culture, as we've seen, and as we'll see today,

there's things that they did differently, way differently than we do, but

even in those cases, we can look at Jacob's

life and compare it to our life and the things that happen to us

and learn from him.

And that is what we're getting at today as the rogue.

God's rogue finds two wives.

So just like us, Jacob is directed by Providence.

That's the first thing I want to show from this passage, versus 1 through 14,

We'll just read verses 4 through 11.

Jacob said to them, My brothers, where are you from?

And they said, We are from Haran.

He's talking to the shepherds that he happened to walk up on.

He said to them, Do you know Laban, the son of Nahor?

And they said, We know him.

And he said to them, Is it well with him?

And they said, it is well, and here is Rachel,

his daughter, coming with the sheep.

He said, Behold, it is still high day.

It is not time for the livestock to be gathered.

Water the sheep and go pasture them.

But they said, we cannot, until all the flocks are gathered,

and they roll the stone for the mouth of the will, then we water the sheep.

While he was still speaking with him, Rachel came with her

father's sheep, for she was a shepherdess.

When Jacob saw Rachel, the daughter of Laban, his mother's brother,

and the sheep of Laban, his mother's brother, Jacob went up

and rolled the stone from the mouth of the well, and watered

the flock of Laban, his mother's brother.

Then Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted his voice and wept.

And as we read through this passage, I

want you to notice something that wasn't mentioned.

Something is missing from normal biblical narratives.

There is not one mention of God's name,

either Adonai as Lord or Yahweh,

as his name, until you get to the end of the chapter,

when it's talking about Leia herself, and Jacob is not mentioned.

So all the time, that we're going through the

story of Jacob here,

There's no burning bush, there's no cloud on

a mountain telling him where to go and what to do.

And there's no dream of a ladder again

for him in this passage.

God has not mentioned whatsoever.

And this is similar to the book of Esther.

If anybody read the book of Esther, you'll notice the same thing.

God's name is never mentioned once in the book of Esther.

But, just like in this passage, the book of Esther,

you can see God's hand, working

through the entire story.

And that is the same with this account.

And we start this part of our account, with

Jacob coming on some kind of civilization at the end of the journey.

He's been traveling through the wilderness, and he comes

upon this place with a well and trees, and he

finds these shepherds there.

And then he says, in verse 2, I'm reading this again on purpose.

He looked and saw a well in the field,

and behold, three flocks of sheep were lying there beside it.

For from that well, they watered the flocks.

Now the stone on the mouth of the well was large.

When all the flocks were gathered there, they would then roll

the stone from the mouth of the well, and water the

sheep, and put the stone back in its place on the

mouth of the well.

Moses here, the author of Genesis, is telling

us their customs.

And it seems like it's kind of a random thing

to kind of insert here, how they took care of the sheep, that that well

had a large stone on it, and what they would do, gather all

the sheep together, roll it away once, let

all the sheep water, and then roll it back.

So Jacob then comes to these shepherds,

and he strikes up a conversation.

So remember, he is traveling east.

He doesn't have longitude and latitude, or

GPS directions, to his uncle LeBon's house, right?

And ETA and all that stuff.

He doesn't even have a Rand McNally atlas to follow.

He is going through the wilderness, and he happens to

come upon these shepherds.

And so he asked them, of course, you have to ask for directions,

and if you're in the right spot, in verse four, he says, Jacob said

to them, my brothers, where are you from?

And they said, We are from Haran, which is where he's going.

And he said to them, Do you know Laban, the son of Nahor?

And they said, We know him.

It's a small world, isn't it?

At that time.

So here, we see God's hand of providence and

directing him to the exact right place.

Even though God's name isn't mentioned, we

can see just the complete minuscule

chance that he would happen to walk up to these shepherds

who know who are from where he's going and know exactly

who he's going to see.

He needs to find his uncle.

And he finds shepherds that know his uncle from

the place where his uncle is, and on top of that,

as he was speaking with his shepherds, his

future wife happens to walk

Just by coincidence, walks up.

It's like the Psalms say in Psalm 37,23,

the steps of a man are established by

the Lord, and he delights in his way.

Now, many times, a woman's heart has been wooed

by sweet words from her

wooer, beautiful poetry,

gifts of flowers, and jewelry, right?

But Jacob has none of those things.

He is probably just ragged from the trip.

He probably smells worse than the sheep smell.

But what Jacob does have is machismo,

and bravado.

As she is walking up with the sheep because she was a shepherdess,

as the text tells us, he puffs out his chest

to those shepherds, and he's trying to show his

leadership skills, and how much he knows about

the shepherding business.

Verse 7 says he said, Behold, it is still high day.

It is not time for the livestock to be gathered.

Water the sheep and go pasture them.

OK?

He begins to bark orders to them to show

Rachel that he was the man.

In Jacob's eyes, these shepherds were

doing the wrong thing.

That's why Moses told us, their custom

beforehand, to show how out of place Jacob would have sounded.

He's kind of tripping over his own words here.

But he wanted to show Rachel that he wasn't a lazy bum,

like these other shepherds are waiting for her to get there, to water all the sheep.

And they responded and tell him, look, you

don't know how things are done around.

That's not the way things happen around here.

We do it all together here.

One of the reasons why this interaction, I think,

is shown, is because later, as we see

him interact with Laban, there's another cultural mistake

that he makes that ends up being a much bigger deal,

but we'll get there.

Just remember that when we do.

So Rachel walks up.

And so he's like, what else can I do to impress her?

I need to show her a feat of my strength.

So he goes over there, and single handedly, moves

the large stone from the well, and waters her sheep,

verse 10, when Jacob saw Rachel, the daughter of Oban,

his mother's brother, and the sheep of Aban, his mother's brother, we just say,

uncle, Jacob went up, and rolled the

stone from the mouth of the well, and watered the flock of Oban, his mother's brother.

What a man.

Right?

And you think Rachel was impressed with his strength?

He waters the sheep for her.

And then, after he does that, he goes up to her, and

he greeted her, this is what it says, he kissed her.

It wasn't a passionate kiss, it was a kiss of greedy,

like he'll kiss his uncle soon.

And then he lifts up his voice and weeps, right?

He lifts up his voice and wept.

Why does he cry?

Just imagine how exhausted he must be.

And as he's walking up to these shepherds, in

his mind, oh, I got here, but now I'm going to

have to search, and I'm going to have to find this journey is not over.

And he not only finds the place that he's going, he

not only finds people that know the person he's going to see, he

now sees his cousin, who

he will end up bearing, and who he

is falling in love for.

He just happened to come to the right place at the right time.

And he met the right person.

What else?

in his life, to this point, has

gone right for him, right?

But now everything seems to be going right.

Not much has.

He's actually, at this moment, running for his

very life.

God used a broken road to bring

him straight to her, to borrow a phrase.

And that isn't just a cheap, throwaway, lovey

dovey, feel good, cliche, not in this instance,

the song is kind of that way, but it is the truth.

Every step he took on this journey was

directed by the hands of God on

purpose, even though his name wasn't mentioned yet.

Everything was directed by the providence

and sovereignty of God for his purposes, and his glory.

And you realize how often we take

that fact in our lives for granted, every

single day, we don't even think about it.

A quick run to the grocery store, and you have

tons of steel, heading directly at

you at speed, but

only protected by a couple feet.

The hand of God and his providence is protecting

us every day.

How quickly a simple illness can turn

very serious.

James tells a story about

exactly how we should feel about God's providence

and what we should say and think and do about it.

James 4:13, Come now, you say, Today or

tomorrow, we will go to such and such a city, and spend a

year there, and engage in business, and make a profit.

Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow.

You are just a vapor that appears for a little while,

and then vanishes away.

Instead, you ought to say, If the Lord wills,

we will live, and also do this, or that.

God directs every step.

But that doesn't mean that every step in Jacob's life was easy.

This part became easy.

God gave him a break.

He could rest.

But the next part, not so very much.

The next part shows Jacob and

his discipline, versus 13 of 20.

So when LeBon heard the news of Jacob, his sister's son,

he ran to meet him, and embraced him, and kissed him,

and brought him to his house.

Then he related to Laban all these things.

The bond said to him, Surely you are my bone and my flesh, and

he stayed with him a month.

Then the bond said to Jacob, Because you are my relative,

should you therefore serve me for nothing?

Tell me, what shall your wages be?

Now, Laban had two daughters.

The name of the older was Leah, and the name of the

younger was Rachel.

And Lea's eyes were weak, but Rachel was

beautiful of form and face.

Now, Jacob loved Rachel, so he said, I will serve

you seven years for your younger daughter, Rachel.

But Bon 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.

Jacob meets his uncle Laban, his mother's

brother, and is welcomed into his

home with open arms.

Laban lets him stay there for a month

and eat from his table and takes care of him, provides shelter.

And then at the end of the month, Laban offers him employment,

he offers him work, and so they're negotiating his

wages for his job.

And at this point, the author introduces both

of the daughters, Rachel and Leia.

We've already met Rachel.

But now we get to meet her older sister, Leia.

And the Bible says that she had weak

eyes, and there's been controversy

over what this means by weak

eyes, the word can also mean tender,

or soft, and people don't quite understand

what they're going after.

Some people think that weak or soft or tenderized

means that she had poor eyesight.

Some people think that it was about the

color of her eyes.

But I think it has to do with Jacob's attraction

to Rachel, and not to Leia.

Jacob said, Rachel was beautiful of

form and face, but he wasn't attracted

to Leia, so there was no spark when

he looked into her eyes.

The spark was when he looked into Rachel's eyes.

And the Bible is setting up his love for Rachel,

and his not love for Leia

to make the story even hit harder when we get to it.

Either way, whatever it means, again,

Jacob was clearly, and it was clear

to everyone, who he was attracted to, which sister

that he wanted.

And so here, we're given a completely fresh start with LeBon.

If you've read the story or heard the story already, you know

the end of it and you've got a preconceived notion about this man.

But now, as I just read the passage to

you, that you have the same eyes as Jacob.

Labon as let Jacob stay.

He's fed him and taken care of him.

He's offered him a job, and he's about to agree

to his proposal for one

of his daughters, his younger daughter, for seven years.

And so we think everything's good.

This is a great guy, right?

But those are the eyes that we have now.

But we'll see later that they may change.

That's called foreshadowing, right?

LeBont acts.

Like, he will take on Jacob as one of his workers

and pay wages for his service.

So, the negotiation here, Jacob makes, is, look,

I work for you seven years for,

and he specifically said, Rachel, your younger

daughter, for her hand in marriage,

because there was a bribe price to

pay, and Jacob had nothing to offer for

Rachel, except for his service.

So, we're not used to bride prices

anymore, although they could be very expensive in the long run.

They had to pay for them up front, because the daughter

in the household had a lot of responsibilities, and

it offered a lot of production for the household.

So that production had to be replaced with the

bride price.

And so it was customary for there to be an exchange for

a daughter to be married, not super romantic

by our standards today.

But you got to remember, we are the anomaly.

For most of history, before our time period, life

was grueling, and all about suffering, and

hardship, and nature was out to kill you,

and if the whole household didn't produce, then

the whole household suffered.

This was a long time ago, but that

was the way of things until very recent in our history.

Jacob, by himself for the first time in

his life, no mother there to guide him, he

puts his nose to the grindstone for seven

years for Rachel.

And this seems like a long time to us.

But verse 20 says, Jacob served seven

years for Rachel, and they seem to him but

a few days because of his love for her.

So, to get what the Bible's doing.

They're really setting up how much.

He loves Rachel.

and how big his disappointment is about to be.

Jacob, as we'll find out in the next part of our

passage, isn't the only trickster in

the family.

LeBond turned out to be a pretty big heel

grabber as well.

And so Jacob will get a little comeuppance in

the next part of our passage.

Jacob is deceived from

verse 21 to the end of the chapter.

We'll just read verses 21 to 30 right now.

Then Jacob said to Laban, Give me my wife, for my

time is completed that I may go into her.

Laban gathered all the men of the place, and made a feast.

Now, in the evening, he took his daughter, Leia,

and brought her to him, and Jacob went in to her.

Laban also gave his maid, Zilpah, to his daughter, Leia as a maid.

So it came about in the morning that, behold, it was Leia.

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 Leban said, It is not the practice.

It's not our culture in our place to marry off the younger

before the firstborn.

I thought you would have knew that.

Complete this week of this one, and we will give you the other

also for the service which you shall serve with me for

another seven years.

Jacob did so and completed her week, and he gave him

his daughter, Rachel, as his wife.

LeBon 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 Leia, and

he served with Laban for another seven years.

Jacob does what he says he was going to do.

He didn't try to deceive anybody this time.

He was straight up, I'm going to work seven years and I'm

going to get your younger daughter, Rachel, as a wife.

And LeBon shook hands on it.

He agreed to that proposal.

He knew exactly what he was doing from the start.

But to Jacob, the seven years lasted,

it seemed, like a couple days.

So he gets to the big night,

and everything seemed to be going, great.

Laban is throwing this huge wedding feast.

Now, if you've been married before, you remember that engagement

period, it wasn't seven years long, I hope, but especially

when you get close to that big day, and maybe even in the

night before, how excited you were, and just remember

the excitement of it, and in Jacob's mind, that excitement is there.

He's met this woman.

He fell in love with her at first sight.

He's worked hard for her for seven years, and it's

finally going to be the time where he's going to get married to her.

But he had

a big surprise coming.

Verse 23, now, in the evening,

he took his daughter, Leia, and brought her to him, and

Jacob went in to her.

So, Labon turned out to be a shyster, too.

But this was much more than just stealing a blessing.

Say, Jacob, he switched a blessing with the brother.

Labon switched his sister, herself,

on Jacob.

Listen to verse 25.

So it came about in the morning that, behold, it was Leia.

And he said to Laban, What does this you have done to me?

Was it not for Rachel that I served with you?

Why, then, have you deceived me?

Can you imagine waking up on your honeymoon night,

and yawning and stretching and opening your eyes, getting to

sleep out of them, and it's the wrong sister?

How could this even have happened?

How could Jacob have been so confused?

Well, you have to know a little bit about their culture.

The veil comes from this culture, and Leo

would have been veiled the entire time, until it was very dark,

they didn't have LED lighting.

And also, Laban threw a great feast,

and it was a big celebration.

So everybody at the feast would have been completely

inebriated.

So it's not really a surprise that Jacob

didn't realize what was going on.

He trusted Le Bon to keep his word.

So he goes and complains about Laban's

deception to Luban.

But this, really, is rich, coming

from Jacob, the supplanter, the deceiver,

the heel grabber himself.

There was a man named Sir Robert

Watson Watt.

He was the man who invented radar, and

radar was extremely useful

in war, right?

You could see the planes coming, even land

things, as it got better.

But that wasn't the only place where his invention was used.

It's used in detecting the speed of a baseball, right?

But it's also used by officers to make sure that

you are obeying the speed laws of the land.

So one day in Canada, Sir Robert

Watson Watt was speeding, and he got

arrested for speeding, and the officer was

using a radar gun to check his speed.

He was using his own invention against him, and he wrote this poem.

He says, pity, Sir Robert Watson Watt, strange

target of his radar plot.

And this, with others, I could mention a victim

of his own invention.

LeBon deceived Jacob for

14 years of labor.

And in the Bible, the

first seven, he said, the Bible says they went by quickly,

like it were a couple days, but it doesn't say, how

slow the last seven went, but

he also learned not to trust his uncle.

And that'll come in handy in the chapters to follow.

And in fact, even his daughters knew that they couldn't

trust their own father.

In Genesis 31, 15, it says, Are we not reckoned by him?

This is the daughter speaking about Laban, for he

has sold us, and has also entirely

consumed our purchase price.

It isn't this how all of us can

be, sometimes, not to this degree, necessarily,

but we're all can

be a little crooked, because of our sin nature, but

the bigger deal is, look at how Jacob responded.

He was just aghast that he was deceived.

He just couldn't believe that LeBon would deceive him.

But he was also a deceiver.

We're completely clueless about our own sins sometimes, aren't we?

We're quick to stand up for our rights, though, and

for those who do the same thing that we do against us.

But aren't you glad that Jacob found, or

grace, found Jacob at his ladder,

and aren't you glad that grace found us at

a cross and an empty tomb?

And we're all, this is us,

to a T, if you can be honest enough to hold

this mirror up to yourself and your life.

Both the mess, and

God's work with the mess, or ordained,

for our good, and his glory, for our growth in Christ.

Now, as we get to the end

of the chapter, the last four verses is

kind of the rest of the story, the beginning of

the rest of the story, and to this point,

as I said, God's name hasn't been mentioned, no

Yahweh, no Adonai, but now God's

name will be mentioned, dealing with Leia.

So verse 31 35.

God's word says, now the Lord saw that Leia was unloved.

And he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren.

Leia conceived, and bore a son, and named him Reuben,

for she said, Because the Lord has seen my affliction, surely

now my husband will love me.

Then she conceived again, and bore a son, and

said, Because the Lord has heard that I am unloved, he has therefore

given me this son also.

So she named him Simeon.

She conceived again, and bore a son, and said,

Now this time, my husband will become attached to me, because

I have borne him three sons.

Therefore, he was named Levi.

And she conceived again, and bore a son, and said, This

time I will praise the Lord.

Therefore, she named him Judah, then she stopped bearing.

Oh, the hidden hand of God's providence.

And sometimes the direct hand of his sovereignty

in our life.

even though we may not even know it.

Jacob didn't treat Leia like

a husband to treat a wife.

He didn't love her.

And it showed, she knew that he didn't love her,

that he preferred Rachel, that he loved Rachel.

So God blessed her with children.

And maybe you recognize some of her the

names of her four sons here.

They are the first of Jacob's sons that would

go on to be the fathers of the tribes of Israel.

I'm not trying to just keep sounding like a broken record about

and repeating myself, but the Bible is repeating itself.

And so as we get

this through our thick skulls, that God is in control, that

God is working, his plan out in all of our lives.

A deceiver here gets deceived into

marrying the wrong sister.

The hated bride, bears the first children that

we become the heads of the great nation of

Israel, everything, although it's

hard for them to go through it at the time.

Everything that's happening in their lives, whether it seemed good or

seemed bad, was working out in exactly the

way that God was intending for the end

that God wanted to happen.

It started out as a getaway from a brother who

would murder him if he had the chance, but

ended up with a family that would be remembered for

thousands of years, and would be the four

fathers to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

So don't get discouraged by your suffering,

or that the sin that is done against you, because it

most certainly will.

We're all dealing with sinners all around us.

But look at the hand of God's grace in the

story of Jacob's life, in the life of Leia,

the unloved wife, and use that

as a mirror to look at your life, and the things that

you're going through, and the things that God is teaching you

through the process of sanctification, and

look to Christ, as Jacob should look to Christ.

Don't take one day of your life for granted.

But remember that he cares for you as

he cares for the swallow.

And he blesses you in ways.

Leia had no idea that the reason her womb was

opened four times for four sons was because

God sovereignly intervened into her lie.

And remember, God does that with all of us all the time.

and give him the praise and the glory that

he deserves for.

Let's pray.

Say, Father, we love you.

We thank you, Lord, for this wonderful story of Jacob's life.

I pray that it blesses us.

pray that you'd keep us and always remind us

that you are in control, that you love us, that you sent

your son for us, when we don't deserve him, Lord.

We need to praise you for that.

Bless us as we leave for your glory in Christ's name.

Amen.