Now, as I said last week, our approach is two-week, so this is a bi-week type of lesson. The first week, we will send you home with questions, and you'll spend some time at home doing those, right? right okay everybody said yes and so you spend some time in the word doing that on your own and then you come back here and we'll have one night and we'll just flesh the questions out but then the second sunday night that for of the lesson will be just more of my comments over the top of the text so i'm going to preach over this text tonight if you will but That doesn't mean that you can't step in with a question if you have one at some point along the way. This isn't a preaching type thing like a Sunday morning would be. But keep your questions relevant and specific to wherever we're at at the moment. So if you would turn then in your Bible to Genesis 24. And I've entitled this chapter, The Search for Isaac's Wife, because that's precisely what's going on in the chapter. A chapter begins with these words, now, Abraham was old, well advanced in years. That is an understatement. Given that Isaac was, given that Isaac was born about the time Abraham was around a hundred years old, and he is now some 30 years old, give or take, Abraham is well advanced in years. But he mustn't be that advanced in years. Because if you look at the first words of chapter 25, it says, now Abraham took another wife. So he must have still had a little bit of energy left in them old bones. In fact, if you read through the first part of chapter 25, and I'm giving away some for next week, he has a bunch of kids, even. So don't read too much into chapter 24, verse one, that this is a decrepit old man who is wanting something done. This is a man who's still very prime of his life in a sense, but he has a concern, a specific concern for his only natural son. And of course we're talking about Isaac, Ishmael not being his natural son and Ishmael, you know, has already left. So here we have Abraham deciding, hmm, It's time for Isaac now to move into adulthood, and the first thing that a man of his day would think of is for Isaac to have a wife. But there's another reason for that, of course. The obvious one is that this is the child through whom the promise that God gave to him that he would be the father of many nations is going to come through, since it's his only son. By definition, he needs to have a wife. Because if he doesn't have a wife, the line ends here. Okay, so this is his concern. He knows that Isaac needs now to move into adulthood and for him to move into adulthood he needs to have a wife in order for the promises of God to be fulfilled. Now, let me just pause for a moment here and say, I don't think that Abraham is trying in some way to extend the promise of God on his own power. He has attempted to do that in the past. Ishmael was the result of that. He attempted, Sarah I should say, attempted to produce the child that would give the promise. That's not what this really is. I know it kind of looks like that in the sense that here's Abraham fixing his son in some way, but in reality this would just be logical. This would just be real for anybody living in that day and age. So when Abraham says Isaac needs a wife, he's just thinking like any man of his day would. However, he has some concerns, some very specific concerns that comes out in the first few verses of this chapter, in fact, the first nine. First of all, if Isaac is going to have a wife, he wants Isaac to have a proper wife in order to continue the bloodline and the promises of God, okay? So he doesn't want just any woman. He wants a woman who will be involved in what God is going to do through Isaac to bring forth the line that will come. So that's the first concern he had. He does not want Isaac, therefore, to have a wife from among the Canaanites, from among the people of the land. And we've already been introduced to a number of them, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the various ites that are living in the land. He has said he doesn't want to have one from among them because he knows that it will produce syncretism between the worship practices of those nations and his son. I mean he knows, any logical father would figure out, that if my son marries that girl from amongst the Amorites and the Amorites are into child sacrifice, Guess what's going to happen? My son is likely to be tempted into that kind of religion. So I need to have him have a wife that is protected from that. Thirdly, he does not want Isaac to leave the land of Canaan. Stay here. Now, the reason he says, of course, is because this is the land that God gave to us, and I don't want you leaving this land. Tell you what, I'll send somebody else out to get you away from these people here. You stay put. This is Abraham speaking to Isaac here. So these are the three things he doesn't want. He doesn't want Isaac to marry a Canaanite. He doesn't want Isaac to leave the land. He doesn't want Isaac to wind up being unmarried or having to figure it out for himself. He wants to cause this to happen for himself. He wants to have some say in what's going on. By the way, arranged marriages in this day are not uncommon. In fact, they're quite common. In fact, they're quite ordinary. I mean, the idea of marrying for love would be, in fact, quite absurd in a second millennium BC world. So this is not unusual. This is, this is, he is a man of his time. And so he's, he's figured that out. Now he asks his servant, verse two, the oldest of his household, who had charge of all that he had. So he goes to one of his servants. And I am convinced, I don't have any biblical text to support this, but I'm convinced that this is the man Eleazar of Damascus who was introduced in chapter 15. There's a number of things that lead me to that conclusion. I think that First, Abraham is looking for someone extremely trustworthy, and this Eleazar has proven himself to be that for a very long time. Secondly, this Eleazar, if he is in fact this man, has been in the household for a long time. So he's been a part of the family, he knows Isaac, he knows Abraham, he knows what Abraham would want, and most importantly, given that he's lived in Abraham's household, he knows the God of Abraham. He's familiar with the God of Abraham. Notice in chapter 15, he's called Eliezer of Damascus, which means he's a Syrian, which means he was picked up by the household of Abraham, Abraham's father, during the time that they were there when they made their journey from Ur. Remember, when they made their original journey up the Fertile Crescent, they wound up stopping in Damascus and staying in Syria for quite some time. In fact, Abraham's father died there. Terah died in the city of Terah in that place. And so it's highly likely that this man has come from Syria. Again, no knowledge of the living God in that place at that time, just like there was none in the Mesopotamian Valley either. So this man living with Abraham would know Abraham and his wishes, would know Isaac and his temperament, and would know the God of Abraham. And I think the chapters speak clearly to the fact that he knows this God because he prays to him and he relies upon him and so forth. So Eleazar would understand these things. One additional fact that I don't want you to forget, and that is that God specifically passed over Eleazar as the heir of Abraham's house. You remember when Abraham first arrived, he said to God, I don't have any heir, I don't have anyone that can take over my property and my family life, again, Think agrarian society, right? You pass on the family, you pass on the land. All of these things are extremely important. Abraham's got none of that because he doesn't have an heir. And so he says, I'll make my servant my heir and I'll groom him to be my son. But God says, no, no, no, no. A child will be the heir. And so I think this could be Abraham's way of saying to this servant, you've been a faithful servant all these years. You've served me. I can't give you any honor from my estate. So what I'll do is I'll give you this honor. I'll let you go and find the wife of my only son. that's a tremendous honor. And Eleazar obviously feels it is. You read this text, you get that sense that he really feels the import of what's taking place. Thus, by implication, he would also get the honor of it in being involved in it. So this Eleazar comes to Abraham and they make an oath together. He says, Abraham says, put your hand under my thigh. That was really weird language for us, right? Not the sort of thing we do in our day, but it was in theirs. Put your hand under my thigh that I may make you swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and God of the earth, that you will not take a wife from my son, et cetera, okay? So he makes him take an oath here. Promise me. that you will seek out a wife under my conditions. Promise me that you won't settle, but you'll go and seek out the one that the Lord has set aside for you. Swear by this. Now, I had you look at 2 Corinthians 6.14 about this idea of oaths and taking oaths. It's not that close of a connection, to be honest with you, because the kind of oath being taken here is between two men who know each other well and Abraham already trusts him. But in 2 Corinthians 6, Paul speaks about the fact that taking an oath is something you need to strongly consider as a man. making a promise to someone else, making a promise, for example, to tell the truth or to be involved in a business relationship or whatever kind of other oath that you take. This is an important matter. It's a matter of being honest and truthful in the way that you speak, biblically speaking, that is. And it is dangerous, according to Paul, to become entangled with promises to unbelievers. It's unwise to become entangled with someone who does not believe as you do. And part of the reason for my connection here, again it's not direct, but I think part of the connection is Abraham is expecting Eleazar to go out and do what he wants him to do. but he's trusting him to do that because they have a relationship with one another. So there's something very significant going on here, and he does not want someone to go and do this that he doesn't trust. So the oath is really more a matter of two men agreeing on a plan, on a vision. Abraham has the vision, but I can't believe Eliezer doesn't have it too. Right? It seems reasonable that if this man's been in the house all these years, he would want the exact same thing for Isaac that Abraham does. How do I find a woman for this man who rightly fits it? Now, what is one of the greatest oaths that we take as men? And the answer is when we stand in front of a minister and we say, I do, we're making an oath. We're taking the most significant one we'll ever take, frankly, to become one flesh with someone else. So in essence, Paul is arguing, don't take that oath lightly. If you're going to take that oath, remember what it is. It is an oath until death do us part. Now, I know the old joke that most men who take such an oath are really setting a goal, but until death do us part, that's a goal. That was what you call a Led Zeppelin. We take this oath, but what are we doing? We're promising to Almighty God that this woman is going to be the one that we're going to cherish as Christ cherishes the church, especially if we make that oath as believers. But anyone who makes such an oath is making the oath of saying, I'm committing myself. Therefore, for me, someone comes to me and says, I want to marry her. What's the first question I'm going to ask? Is she in the same spiritual condition that you are? If she's not a believer and you're not a believer, fine. I probably won't marry you, but at least it's, you know, it's an equally yoked scenario. But it's very important to consider that because here's what's gonna happen. And this happened, I've seen it happen countless number of times. I think I said this last week. A man will marry someone outside of his faith and he will find himself in her faith in no time. or in her lack of faith in no time. How relevant that is to this particular text because Abraham wants Isaac to have a wife that will be yoked to him equally in the sense of a woman who will come and will carry on what it is that God has purposed to do through this kid, through this young man. Question though, I mean, when he goes there, she's a pagan, right? She is, I think. We'll get to that question. Hold that thought. Can you hold that thought? We'll get there. We'll get there. Yep. Now, go to verse 10. The servant takes a bunch of stuff from his master, some camels, 10 of them, and a bunch of other stuff, and he travels to Mesopotamia, to the city of Nahor. So he goes back. I know most of your translations, well, the ESV says Mesopotamia, but most other English translations translate the word there correctly, which is not Mesopotamia. It would have been known as that in those days. But in this particular case, it's lower Mesopotamia. So he makes a reverse track back around the direction that Abraham originally came. And if you're familiar with the geography of that part of the world, he would have traveled north up through the spine of Palestine into Syria, in which he would then have turned east and traveled east for a distance and then began to turn south along the Euphrates River. We call that the Fertile Crescent. That was the original seat of civilization where there's a crescent of fertile land that extends from the lower Mesopotamia up and through into Syria and down into Palestine and theoretically even down into Egypt along the Nile. So there's this big arc in that space. So he's traveling back across this and he takes the necessary provisions and he goes on his way. In verse 12 he says this, he comes to the city outside, he comes to this city at the time that the women come out to water and he says this, Oh Lord, God of my master Abraham. Please grant me success today and show steadfast love to my master Abraham. Interesting, it doesn't say granted to me. It says granted to my master, which means granted to his purposes, not to mine. Behold, I am standing by the spring of water and the daughters of the men of the city are coming out to draw water. Let the young woman, to whom I shall say, please let down your jar that I may drink, and who shall say back to me, drink and I will water your camels, let her be the one whom you've appointed for your servant Isaac. By this I shall know," or some translations, by her, I shall know that you have shown steadfast love to my master. This man prays a prayer that we really ought to all see, understand, And I would dare even say memorize in a skeleton sense. He prays to the God of Abraham first. So he knows who the God of Abraham is, and so he focuses his prayer to the God of Abraham. So he starts with a proper focus where prayer needs to be. It's to the living God. Because prayer to anything else is a waste of breath. Because everything else is a fiction. Everything else is a fiction made in the minds of men. So you might as well pray to the wall. It's going to have about as much effect. This is a man who prays to the living God. Secondly, he prays that this God would grant him success. Or more specifically, as I said before, that he would grant Abraham success in this quest. So he prays, use me, in the sense that Abraham gets what he wants. So he turns to God in this situation and he says, give me success. Thirdly, he prays specifically, specifically for a sure sign from God as to whom God has chosen from Isaac. That's the part I really like about this prayer. Yes, as I said last week, it looks somewhat audacious for him to say to God, well, just, you know, these are the conditions. but it's that specificity that allows God to answer the prayer. How often in our prayers are we really specific? Do we really ask God, this is what I want? Now, I know you're probably saying to yourself, well, you know, I don't want to pray outside of God's will, you know, I want to be careful because, you know, we're supposed to always pray for God's will to be done, so I'm going to kind of hedge my bets a little bit here and be kind of, you know, nebulous in what I ask for, so I'm careful as to not offend God in asking. Ha! I would tell you, forget it. First of all, God's bigger than that. Secondly, there are times when God says, you have not because you ask not. So what do you want? Somebody once asked me, do you ever get angry with God? And my answer is, sure, why not? He's a person like anyone else. I get angry with other people. Why can't I get angry with God? Now, I'm not going to sin in my anger, right? But our God is big enough to handle what's really going on in your head. If you've got a question, if you've got a problem, if you've got a bit of anger towards God, do you think God's gonna want you to hide that and pretend that that's not the case, even though he already knows it's true? Why aren't we just honest with God? And I would argue it goes to the specificity of prayer. When was the last time we actually went to God and said, this is what I would like you to do? Now, I agree it's your will, not mine, but I'm going to ask. I'm going to have the audacity to ask. There is an element of motive involved in this, too, because your heart is not tuned into what you just got done saying. And this is a fleece. Correct. This is a matter of- I'm going to lay down a fleece and we'll see what God will do. Yeah. It's a form of mysticism. And it's also a form of- I want you to answer the prayer the way I want you to answer it. Correct. And so he's laying this out for God, but at the same time he's saying, okay, God, you do what you will. But there's nothing wrong, I don't think, with us going to God and being specific. God, I just, I just, I just asked that you would just, you know, you know, do this or that. I saw Babylon Bee the other day in which they discovered now that 80% of the words used in prayer are the word just. I find that absolutely hilarious because it's true. Why can't we just go to God and say, you know, God, I'd really like it if you do this. No, I know you're going to do what you want to do, but be specific. I mean, one of the things that just grinds my ax wheels is when people write on prayer request lists, unspoken. How am I supposed to pray for that? You want me to pray for something? Write it down. Tell me what it is you want me to pray about. And I'll be happy to go to God and ask for it. I mean, if you put down unspoken and you're thinking, I'd like to have a million dollars by winning the lottery, I'm not going to pray for that. Now, you could. Don't ask me to. If you wanna pray for that, go ahead. But you know, God has three ways of answering prayer. One is yes, one is no, and one is wait. So God might be saying, I'm gonna wait on that one. I'm gonna let you wait, too, until you change your mind. Let's be specific. He's specific, he prays to God, and then, and this is the important part that goes with it, and I think this is where Perry was going, he waited for God to assure him that his choice was the correct one. He waited upon the Lord. He said, I'm going to put down this condition, but I'm going to wait to see if God will do this. Now, by the way, is it possible that God may have put it in his heart to pray this way? Sure. Okay. So if we assume that from the beginning, it's okay for him to be specific. Fourthly, or fifthly I should say, he worshipped God for providing him an answer to his prayer. So he recognized that what was required of him when he prayed, and the prayer was successful, was worship. genuine, fall down in your face before God, and admit that this is from God. Sixthly, he gave the credit to God in front of the family for what had happened. So when the family has a conversation with him about what happened, he tells them the truth. This was God who did this, who answered my prayer in this very specific way, and I think that's what convinces the family to let this Rebecca go, or at least Rebecca herself. And of course, once again, he bows before God again when the family allows Rebecca to go and Rebecca decides to go. So he's a man of faith in the sense that he's trusting God in this matter. You see it. You see a picture of this man. Just to travel that distance and to wind up in this place and then to meet this woman is a matter of faith. And so his prayer seems to me, and the way he acts, in relation to his prayer shows that he is a man of faith. He steps up in prayer. Now, I think there's a number of things that you learn about prayer from this prayer. I've given you some of them already. Since he recognizes who God is, genuine prayer, real prayer, always starts with an acknowledgement of the true nature of God. One of the things that we do on Wednesday nights now is we pray with a form in which we start by offering praise to God and then we offer thanks to God because I think it's key in prayer to start with praise and thanksgiving before you ever get to the supplications. You know why? Because it sets the tone in your heart as to what you're going to say to the Lord then when it comes time to actually ask for something. When we just rush in right away and start asking God to do stuff for us, we often forget about the fact that we're coming before the creator of the universe, the almighty God, and asking him to do things. It's better for us to start with a sense of praise, adoration, and thanksgiving, so we're recognizing who this God is first. There have been a lot of times when I've come and I've said, I want to go pray about something, and I start praying, praying, praising God for who He is, and speaking of various things about God, and then giving thanks to Him. And then I get to the point where I'm about to ask Him, and I go, I don't even remember what I was going to ask Him for. And now it seems kind of sillier than I would. starts with an acknowledgement of the true nature of God. Second, as I said, he was specific in his request. Genuine prayer seeks specific things from God and not just generalizations that are immeasurable. Pray for measurable things. Let God show you that he's answering your prayer. Maybe the reason why many of us have never actually had God answer a prayer in a definitive manner is that we never asked for something measurable that we can say, yes, God did this, or no, he did not. Thirdly, he comes humbly before God knowing that only God would be able to answer his request. He's traveled all this distance He has no idea which one of those women to choose. None. I don't know how many women came out, but it's obviously more than one. And so these women come out. They're all carrying pots on their head. They're all going down to get water. The question is, which one? Which one will fit Isaac the best? Which one will fulfill the plans of God in the future? Which one will Isaac like even? I mean, you know, just to get simple. I don't know. I haven't got a clue. So I'm going to have to humble myself before God and wait for him to give an answer to this particular prayer. And genuine prayer always starts with the recognition that anything we ask of God must be asked in a spirit of submission. In James chapter 5, I think there's a principle. The principle is this. Prayer is powerful. It's a powerful tool that God has given to us, and he's given it to those of us that he knows personally. to be able to walk into his presence as those adopted by him as sons and daughters, and to be able to actually have the audacity to stand in front of the creator of the universe and ask him to do something. In essence, to ask God to bend his will to ours. Right? Now, we of course know, if we look at it from his side, he's not bending his will, for he knows all things. Right? So he knows all things that we're having. But from our perspective, it looks as though God is bending his will towards us. Prayer is powerful. Therefore, it must be done with these kinds of stipulation. A believer who genuinely seeks the will of God and believes that God will answer his prayer, putting himself under the sovereign hand of God, in accordance with his purposes has tapped into a great source of power. I wonder how many of us as believers really believe that anymore. I wonder how many of us really believe that prayer is actually a powerful tool that God has given to us to exercise. I wonder sometimes. You know, I've been in a lot of Baptist churches in my life. I've seen very few people who I could really look to and say, that person really believes in the power of prayer. Because I've seen it permeate his or her life. Very few. The source, of course, of that power is the hand of Almighty God, who uses prayer to accomplish what he has already ordained. But nonetheless, it is imperative. And let me also add one more thing to this equation that you must never forget of. God in his sovereignty has ordained both the ends and the means by which his will is done. Therefore, it is the prayer of this servant that was ordained by God to be the means by which he would accomplish his own will. You see that? It is God's intention for a certain outcome to be, but it's also God's intention for how that outcome will come to play. God isn't just in the business of saying, well, Rebecca's going to come and she's going to be the one. That's true, but that's not the only thing that God is doing. God is also saying, I am going to bring Rebecca to the well at this particular time and I'm going to use the prayer of the servant as a part of the process, even. Dare I say, if the servant hadn't actually prayed, Rebecca might not have come. Now, I realize, I know, from God's perspective, all things are handled. But God doesn't reveal all those details to us, does he? He leaves us without those details. when he was praying that prayer about this world, which one, to have a line, I just imagine a line, and you're gonna go pick the one out that's gonna... Yeah, go pick the one. Yeah, I just can't imagine that. No, I can't either. But God put it, I believe that God put it in the man's heart to pray as a part of the means to accomplish the ends, right? So in other words, our evangelism To use an example, our evangelism isn't just preach the gospel to get people saved. Our evangelism also includes the prayer that God may use to open the heart of the man to receive the gospel and believe it in the first place. Which is why you see these great heroes of the faith who prayed as they did. knowing that their prayer was a part of what God was going to do to accomplish the end goal. This is an excellent example of it, of a man who is, of a text who's showing us that it's not just the man going there and picking a girl out of a lineup. This is a man going there and God using the prayer of the man to accomplish the task. You have not because you ask not. Could very well be your friend's not saved. Because you've never actually asked God to save him. Because you never actually asked that. Something to consider. Something for us to keep in mind. Interestingly, this man arrives at the city of the very family of Abraham. Now that's an interesting coincidence, isn't it? We don't have coincidence in our lexicon, do we? No, we have the providence of God. Verse 15, before he finished speaking, before the words came out of his mouth, before the words finished coming out of his mouth, which by the way, I think is Moses' little tongue-in-cheek way of saying this prayer was important, so important that it actually caused the effect, right? Before the words are even out of his mouth, behold, Rebekah, who was born to Bethuel, the son of Melchor, the wife of Nahor, Abraham's brother, came out with her water jar on her shoulder. So this, he's there in this place. It's Abraham's grandniece, born to Bethuel, his nephew, through Nahor and Milcah. So it's a grandniece. And this one is let out specifically. It's also interesting that she happens to be, according to the next verse, a maiden, which is another way of saying a woman of mariable age. It also happens to say that she's attractive. That helps. What would happen if he, you know, if God didn't make this woman beautiful and he didn't pick her. Suppose he'd come back with a 240 pound woman that's bald-headed. Now a 240 pound woman that day might have been a good thing. I don't know. I'm just saying, I don't know. But a bigger miracle. She's very attractive. Now it doesn't say what attractive means because I don't know what a second millennial BC attractiveness is. I mean, You know, if you go back to Victorian times, our view of is, you know, so attractive is in the eye of the beholder, right? In the culture of the time. That's right. But nonetheless, she had all the characteristics that was needed, right? Except for one. And that is that she has not yet fulfilled what it is that the servant prayed for. Okay. But she does. The servant says, verse 17, please give me a little water to drink from your jar. She says, drink, and she quickly let down her jar. When she had finished giving him a drink, she said, I will draw water for your camels also until they have finished drinking. Have you ever considered that phrase? What does that tell you about Rebekah? A worker, yeah, but a generous woman. She has a certain spirit in her. She has an attractiveness on the outside, but she also has an attractiveness on the inside. So God didn't just providentially bring an attractive woman on the outside. He had also prepared one on the inside for what Isaac would be looking for. Okay, so that's important. I suppose it took a little while for the camels to drink. Probably, and a little bit of work. They've been walking a while. Right, and a little work. My father says a camel can hold up to 25 gallons, and he might have had 10 of them. Right, he did have 10 of them according to one verse back here. That's 250 gallons of water. That's a lot of water. Eight and a half pounds a gallon. I wonder if he helped her. Now, I added a question to this lesson from when I did it back at Calvary several years ago, because there was something stuck out to me in verse 29. Rebecca had a brother whose name was Laban. Laban ran out toward the man to the spring. Now, verse 30 is a, is an explanation of verse 29. Okay. As soon as he saw the ring and the bracelets on his sister's arms and heard the words of Rebecca, his sister, thus the man spoke to me, He went to the man. Okay, so in other words, at some point in this, Rebecca goes back home, verse 28, right? She goes back home, she tells her mother, and by extension the rest of her family, this guy gave me this ring, and these rings, and these bracelets, and he wants me to come with him. He wants me to go back with him. So Laban sees all of this, and he runs out to meet the man. Now, I find that behavior perfectly normal. In fact, I would have expected that out of the brother of this girl, because what does he want to discover? The motives of the man that gave the rings and all this stuff to the girl. This is only up and up. What's going on here? How dare you come to my sister? Again, if we understand the second millennium BC mindset, who would have been responsible for getting Rebecca a wife? Her father and her brother as part of the male structure of the family, if he's an older brother, which appears he is, maybe even a firstborn, he would have been in a position of having a say as to what was gonna happen in Rebecca's life. And here he has this woman who he assumed up until now was going to go someplace else where he wanted her to go. And remember, there's usually some economics involved. in these kinds of relationships, right? You marry your sister off in order to connect her to another family, in order that the two families are connected together economically, so their land becomes your land, and survival is based on these realities in those days. So here's Laban going, what? You're gonna run off to another land, and you're not gonna be here, and I'm not getting to make this decision? It makes sense that he would go out and he would confront this man and see what it was, and that is why the servant then gives this long explanation to the family as to what happens. He recounts the whole story, starting in verse 34 and going all the way down to, in fact, all the way down to 49. He tells the whole story, Abraham sent me, I traveled to this place, I came to the well, I prayed to God, this is what I prayed specifically. Then this girl comes out and she answers the prayer specifically, and she does all these things, and she seems to have all the characteristics. So here I am, I'm telling you this, okay? So I think that Laban feels a responsibility for this as her older brother, and he wants to make sure that this man isn't, you know, have some nefarious goals in mind here. I mean, after all, it's highly presumptuous for this man to come and select his sister to be the bride of someone unknown. Very presumptuous. You're a stranger around here. What do you think you're doing? It caught my eye this time when I was reading this text. Here's a man, the older brother. And it reminded me, I didn't write this in my answer, but it reminded me of the prodigal son parable. The older brother, back at home. And who did the older brother represent in the story? The Jews, the Israelites, who thought that they were the ones who were going to get all the favor, etc. And the parable says, no, it's this prodigal who's going to get the favor. It's not going to be the natural born children. You're going to get your reward, but it's not going to be what you think it is. Same thing here. Laban has all these plans, all these ideas of what is going to happen. And then this stranger shows up to take him away. It's important when you read narratives in the Bible to try to put yourself in the story and imagine how the story unfolds. We have a tendency to read so many of the stories in the Bible from that very thin perspective that we have, that very myopic sense that we have about the Bible. You know, we read a story, it's very familiar to us, and we don't put ourselves in the story and think about what's happening to the people and the various customs and practices that are going on. And I think we lose some of the richness of it in that. There's some richness here. This is a brother who's concerned for his sister. I'm not just sending you off. Oh, God just willed it. It's not that simple. It never is that simple. Now, go to verse 52. Which is beyond, you know, the storytelling of the servant. He gives the whole story out. I think it's interesting that Moses, by the way, if I might just make an aside here, that Moses includes the entirety of the story again. See it? It's twice. Once from the narrative and then once from the person in it, accounting it. So it's almost as though Moses says, I really want you to get the point here. I really want you to see that this was God actively working through the life of this man coming to this place and through Rebekah as she comes out and so forth. Now, what evidence can you find from these verses that Rebekah is in fact a woman of faith? And I think the answer, the best answer that we came up with last week is there are none. There are none. Let's not forget something. Again, put yourself in the story. How much knowledge of Yahweh Does Rebecca and her family have? Answer? None. With maybe one exception. And the exception might be this. That God has, in this sense, revealed himself into the situation to this woman. So that she can act by faith, although she has little or no knowledge of the living God. I mean, for example, in my own life, and I bet many of you could agree with me on this, when I first came to faith in Christ, coming out of a Catholic background, I knew zip about the gospel. Nothing. Really. I had never read a Bible in my life. I had only the Catholic understanding of God, which, as I've often argued, is mostly agnostic. I had little or no connection to spirituality whatsoever. When I confessed Christ that night on that hillside, when my roommate led me to faith, I had no understanding of the gospel. I bought a Bible the next morning. That was the first time I actually held one in my hands and read it. I had no knowledge of the living God, but I had enough. by the Spirit of God working in my heart, in my soul, to take out that heart of stone and put in a heart of flesh that I might be called to Him. Now, that required then 35 years of training to get to where I am now, 35 years of learning to get to where I am now, a lot of time spent in this book to get to where I am today, and a lot farther yet to go. The fact is, is that I think that's what's going on here. When we talk about Rebecca as a woman of faith, we're not talking about her being a woman who has a grand faith like Abraham because she has no knowledge of Yahweh. She has minimal understanding. In fact, a couple of places where the word Lord is used in this text, even when it's used in uppercase, does not have to imply that this is a woman who knows who this Yahweh is. She simply knows the terms. And it's very possible that Moses inserted the words Lord in this text, probably Adonai in the Hebrew here, to emphasize that God is at work here, but not necessarily that this woman was a woman of faith. She had an enticement here. One of the enticements was the stuff the servant gave her, right? She goes home, she runs home to mom, right? She gives him all this stuff and then she runs home to mom. Because Laban says, the text says in verse 30, as soon as Laban saw the ring and the bracelets on his sister's arms, what is she parading in the household? Hey, look at all this stuff I got. She had an enticement, number one. Okay, that's first. Secondly, she goes, I think, because God puts it into her heart for her to go. What she knows of where she's going is nothing. Now, we would say that's faith. Well, it is. I don't know where I'm going. But, I mean, how many of us, now we look back and say the Holy Spirit was working on us well before. There were some things arranged, things that came together way before we were on the cross. There were some things going on. Well, yeah. I mean, if you want to be technical about it, he wrote your name in the Lamb's Book of Life before the foundation of the world. So yeah, there was a whole lot of things going on before he ever got there. Directly that I've seen. Correct. Directly that I've seen. Right. But even then, in the heat of the moment, you wouldn't have noticed that. No, we didn't. And it isn't until many years later that you look back and go, ah, I see the hand of God moving. That's the same thing here. You know, you think about it, too, though, on her perspective, most of the other women in that line weren't fixing to get this kind of deal. You bet. You know what I'm saying? Ten camels, he traveled 500 miles, he got a bunch of gold on him. There's an enticement there, isn't there? Yeah, a big enticement. Sure. And why do you think Laban runs out? Because he's concerned about the fact that she's bought into the enticement of the servant rather than whatever he might have had planned or her father might have had planned down the road. What's in it for me? What's in it for me? Now, I'm not minimizing Rebecca as a woman. In fact, what I'm arguing is that Rebecca will show herself to be a woman led by God as this text unfolds through time. But let's not impose upon Rebecca at the beginning of this discussion that she was at that point some great follower of God who was just immediately ready to go as soon as the servant showed up. There's no hint of that in this text, none. What we have is a woman who is enticed to go. She finds the idea appealing. I mean, there's at least a reward involved. And God does work in her to motivate her to go. But let's not, let's not put the cart before the horse here. Rebecca will come to learn who the God of Abraham is when she gets back to Canaan. Right now, she has little or no understanding of that. In verse 60, the family agrees. Well, it doesn't actually go exactly like this. There's some things going on here, okay? In verse 54, the servant says, he and the men who were with him ate and drank and they spent the night there. When they arose in the morning, the servant said, send me away to my master. Okay, it's time for me to go, send me on my way. Middle Eastern custom, give leave to go, okay? I wanna go. But he said to them, do not delay me. I'm sorry, verse 55. Her brother and her mother said, let the young woman remain with us a while, at least 10 days. After that, she may go. What do you think they want her to stay there for 10 days for? Convention not to go. No. Get to know. What's that? Get to know. No. Get a better deal. See if they can get a better deal. Give me 10 days. Her mother and her brother Put that up, okay? Again, it's one of my evidences in this text that Laban has actually already got plans for the woman. And so give me 10 days, give me 10 days. I want to have like a 10-day contract that I can get out of this thing and we'll marry her off to the local chieftain here so she doesn't have to leave and we can get our land connected to them, right? But this verse 56, the servant says to them, do not delay me since the Lord has prospered my way. Send me away that I may go to my master. So now what do they do? Well, now let's ask the girl if she really wants to go. Now, notice that they're not just saying, yes, go, this would be wonderful. God is obviously giving you authority. No, no, no, they're delaying this. So this is the second stall tactic. Let's ask the girl. Now, what do you think Laban thinks his sister's going to say? I don't want to go all the way there. I don't know this guy. I mean, yeah, yeah, the trinkets are nice, but I'm not really sure about leaving my family, which by the way, would have been an extraordinary thing, if you think about it, because in our day, you can just get up and go, right? Your kids get to high school age, right? And then they leave the house. And some of you parents are happy about that, and some are not. But the fact is, is that in our day, you can just get up and go. You just leave. And we don't think a thing about it. But not in that day. And that day, leaving home was an extraordinarily unusual thing. You stayed on the family plot, and you lived there your whole life, and your parents lived there, and your grandparents lived there, and your great-grandparents lived there. I came out of Kansas, you know, before I came here. And there was a family in the church, many of the families in the church, but one of the specific families in the church, everybody in their clan had lived on the same plot of land their entire life. They'd never lived anywhere else. This is a man, a woman, and their six children lived on the same spot, on the same plot of land for their entire life. I can't imagine it. But that's all they knew. And that's all this knows. So this girl is not inclined to go. Laban's hoping that maybe she'll want to stay here instead of going away. All right, so let's ask her. So she comes in and says, I will go. Now again, as we've said, I think that's God nudging her to go. If you look at this text the way that I've just expressed it, it's highly likely that Rebecca would have been inclined not to go, because that would have been the natural thing for her to do in living here at this particular time. But she agrees to go, and I think that's God nudging her out the door, giving to her what is necessary for her to go, which is precisely what all of us need when we come to faith in Christ, because none of us None of us just say, yeah, today I want to be saved. No. The Bible teaches something other than that, doesn't it? I will go. So, verse 59, they sent Rebekah, their sister, and her nurse, and Abraham's servant, and his men. They sent them away. And they blessed Rebekah. So out the door, they give her this blessing. Now, don't read too much into this. I know the natural tendency is to read this text and go, oh look, they're giving praise to God for this girl going out the door. It's not what it says. It says, our sister, may you become thousands of ten thousands and may your offspring possess the gait of those who hate you. Or it could be translated, those who hate them. This is just a standard blessing being given over a woman. Go be fruitful. Go be prosperous. Remember I said, I've said a couple of Sundays now from the pulpit, how central the idea of marriage and procreation or multiplication is to the human condition when God created this world? We don't think of it that way anymore. But in these days, that was critical. You had children and your children had children in order to pass on the family line. Survival was based on your ability to procreate and reproduce, which is why Abraham not being able to have kids is so significant. He doesn't have anybody that he can give his own land to. His line dies with him. Which doesn't now. That's what his concern was. So they're simply saying to Rebecca, be prosperous as you go. We wish you the best. In our pagan way in southern Mesopotamia with no knowledge of the living God, here's what we say to you. Go be prosperous. Godspeed and go. And so she leaves. Verse 61, she goes. Now this particular prophecy, as it turns out, is fulfilled. Because it is through Rebekah that her sons, Jacob and Esau, are born, through which one of them becomes the father of 12 men who become the tribes of Israel. So this prophecy becomes literally true. And I bet that's why Moses includes it. Who's he writing to? He's writing to the very people who are the progeny of this blessing. He's writing to the Israelites. You Israelites need to understand your own history. Who are you from? You are descended from a woman who had no knowledge of the living God and yet stepped out in faith to go and marry your ancestor, your patriarch, Isaac. You come from them. And I think part of it is also this. Moses saying to these Israelites, listen, you want to know why you're here? You want to know why you even exist? Do you want to know why you're even a nation? because God has purposed it every step of the way. Everything that's happened to you, everything you've encountered, including the 400 years that you just spent in Egypt, were specifically designed by this God to accomplish where you are at at this very moment. Is that not true in our own lives? But how many of us really stop to think about that? How many of us really stop to consider that the circumstances going on in your life right now, as bad as they might be, are designed specifically by Almighty God to accomplish a purpose in your life? We spend so much of our time praying for God to take away our pain, instead of asking God, show me what you're going to do with this pain. Instead of asking for God to take it away, maybe what we should be asking for is for greater strength to get through it so that our faith is built up in it, so we grow up in it. Instead of being so quick to look for the quick answer or the quick solution. Now, I realize I just contradicted myself, because a moment ago I told you to pray specifically. But why can't your specific, your specificity be, Lord, would you take this disease away? And if you won't, will you show me what this disease is all about? Now that's specific. And yet it honors what is going on here. We spend way too much of our time trying to get God to make our lives easier when we really should be asking God to strengthen our faith. Now, there's an old rule, by the way, that says don't pray for what you don't want, because you might get it. In Alabama, we'd say, be careful what you pray for, because you might get it. Well, that's another way of saying it. Be careful what you pray for, because you might get it. If we're going to be specific, don't ask for what you don't want, because you might get it. Lord, make me a better believer. Make me a better follower of Christ. How do you think he's going to answer that prayer? Trials and tribulations. Trial and persecution. Very possible. But shouldn't that be our prayer? Lord, make me a better follower of this Christ. Make me love him more. Help me to spend more time in this word. Let me put aside, help me to put aside other things that I can spend more time in this word, that I can know this Christ better, so that I can love him more and follow him in obedience more. And guess what God just might do? Lay you up. He might get you unemployed. It's okay, I'll give you all the time you need. Don't pray for what you don't want, because you might get it. No, I'm not saying God is vindictive and going to do that. All right, I know what you're thinking. People are going to go home and go, that preacher really thinks God's a vindictive person. I'm not suggesting that at all. God has a whole arsenal of ways by which he can grow your faith. And many of them, you haven't even got a clue. He's doing things you don't even know about. But if we're serious about what it means to be a follower of Christ, then our prayer should be, Lord, what would you have me to do that I might be a better follower of Christ? How does Isaac respond to this girl when she appears? Isaac had returned from Bir Laha Roye, which was dwelling in, and was dwelling in the Negev. He's down in southern Palestine in the desert. And Isaac went out to meditate in the field towards evening. What do you think he's doing? What is he doing? He's praying. The servant's gone. He's off finding my wife. This is probably not the first time that he's been meditating. I bet this is a common occurrence, right? He's meditating. Lord, if you're going to bring me a wife, I'm going to pray for her. So there's two guys praying for this, not just one. And Isaac went out to meditate in the field and he lifted up his eyes and he saw and behold, there were camels coming. And Rebekah lifted up her eyes and when she saw Isaac, she dismounted from the camel and said to the servant, who is that man walking in the field to meet us? How did she know he was the guy? She doesn't. Not until she asks, who's that guy coming to meet us? Is it possible the Lord might have nudged her into saying that's the one? Don't know, doesn't say. The servant said, it is my master. So she took her veil and covered herself. hides herself. She covers it. That would have been a custom in that day. Okay. An unmarried woman was not found visible and out in public. All right. So she covers her face and the servant told Isaac all the things he had done. That must have been an interesting conversation. Here's what's happened. I don't know how long this takes, but based on the travel time from Canaan to Mesopotamia and the time they were there and back, it could have been several months. They're taking multiple animals with them. They've got multiple men that are going with them. It's a large caravan that's traveling. They're going a very long distance. I don't remember how far it is, but if I remember right from my geography, it's probably 800 to 1,000 miles. On foot? My Bible says 450. It doesn't say 450? Really? My Bible says 500. Okay. But 500 miles is still a long ways. Even if you travel 20 miles. Well, remember you're going up this way and then back down this way. You're not walking five miles an hour consistently. It's going to take a while. So it could be a couple of months even to go that 500 miles. So Isaac's been back at home waiting for the servant to come back. Abraham's been waiting for the servant to come back. I got to believe Abraham's praying about this dude. The servant now comes back and tells him the story and you can almost see the glee in the servant's face when he tells the story. You're not gonna believe what happened when I got there. Yeah, I do believe it. Isaac brought her into her tent, brought her into the tent of his mother and took Rebekah and she became his wife and he loved her. How did Isaac respond to her? He loved her. He took her to be his wife. He didn't know her, but he took her to be his wife. But the significance is that he loved her. That text is not necessary here. In an arranged marriage kind of situation, it's not necessary, but Moses includes it in order to show that something's really took place here. And Isaac was comforted after his mother's death. I noted last week that this, to me, is a picture an Old Testament picture of the gospel in this way, in the book of Genesis. It's one of the easier chapters, by the way, to find the gospel in because it's a picture of God seeking a bride for his son. I had you look at Revelation chapter 19 and the number of times we've talked about it from the pulpit over the last few weeks of God going and saying, I have a people that I'm going to bring to my son, and I'm going to go find them. I'm going to send my servant out into the world, and I'm going to find this bride. And of course, the bride, metaphorically, is all of us who belong to this Christ. And we're brought to this Christ, and we're brought by this Christ, and he loves us. He loves us. He loves us as a husband, loves a wife, in that self-sacrificial sense that Ephesians 5 talks about. He loves this bride. He has made this day a day of joy and celebration, a great wedding feast. In Revelation 19 it speaks of the marriage supper. It's a marriage supper. It's the day when the saints are universally and finally all brought together to Christ who loves them perfectly. He presents them to his father. presents them to his father, this is my bride, this is the one I'm marrying, the one I'm having a self-sacrificial love relationship with, this is the one, this is mine. The servant bringing Rebecca to Isaac is a perfect parallel. Just as the servant brought a perfect bride to Isaac for him to love, so God the Spirit brings a perfect bride to Christ for him to love. The will of God is to bring a perfect match to Isaac, And he does the same thing in bringing a perfect match to Jesus as his bride. We are Rebecca. We are Rebecca. We know nothing of this God until he makes himself known to us. We live in a foreign land, but no idea who this Jesus is. We're not connected to him in any way. But the spirit of God goes throughout the earth, and he finds those who are chosen by God. And he draws them out of the world and he brings them to this Christ. And on that day, that great day of celebration, there's going to be a feast like none of us have ever experienced. No wedding reception you've ever been to is going to match this one when this perfect bride is presented to Christ. And he brings us. And the word that's often used by theologians to talk about what happens when Christ's kingdom is finally established on the earth is the word consummation. We think of that word in human sense, we know what it means in relation to marriage. But when it's used for Christ, it's the consummation of a connection, a one flesh union created between Christ and his people in perfect harmony forever and forever. So here we have another example of the gospel of Jesus Christ, very visible in the book of Genesis. And it's a reminder to us that we belong to this Christ. He is our groom. And he loves us perfectly.