Good morning. It's really good to be with you again. I was telling Tom and Tim before this, you know, that I'm grateful that you allow young preachers such as myself to keep coming here and getting practice. which we really need, but you know, more than that, I'm just, I'm really grateful that God has worked out this connection, this relationship between my church, Christ the King, which is a few blocks away in Central Square, and your church, and between me and you. I'm just, I'm grateful that I get to be here with you this morning to bring God's word. The passage that I'm preaching from this morning is Genesis chapter 29 verse 31. to 30 verse 24, which is a pretty lengthy passage. I'm going to read it. It's one of these narratives, these stories that are in Genesis that are just good stories. And it's just good to sit back and just listen to the story. I do want to give you some background. We're picking up in the middle of a story here. And so I don't want to assume that you all know what's going on. This is from the story of Jacob. Jacob is in the third generation of this family that God called. So it was Abraham, and then Isaac, and now there's Jacob. And Jacob is the younger of two sons, twin sons, Esau and Jacob. Ordinarily, the older son, Esau, would be the one to inherit all of the land, to carry on the family name, all of that. But Jacob manages to cheat and connive and trick both his father and his brother so that he ends up with the inheritance. And as you can imagine, no one's very happy about this, particularly his father and his brother, who have been cheated and tricked. Esau, in fact, promises that he's going to kill his brother. And so Jacob has to go on the run. He ends up with his uncle. a man named Laban, in whom he finds a man whose character matches his own. They're both tricksters. So what happens at Laban's house, Jacob falls in love with Laban's daughter, his younger daughter. Laban's got two daughters, Leah and Rachel. It specifically says that Rachel was the better looking of the two. She's the one that attracts Jacob's attention. And so he asked Laban if he can marry her, and Laban says, great. Great idea. Just work for me for seven years, and you can have my daughter. Jacob is sufficiently in love with Rachel that he agrees to this. He works for seven years. There's a wedding feast. He's married to Laban's daughter. In the morning, he discovers it's the wrong daughter that Laban has tricked him, that Laban has realized, you know, I might have a hard time finding someone to marry Leah, and he's taken the opportunity um, uh, to, uh, to, to, to trick Jacob into marrying Leah instead of Rachel. Um, Jacob is not happy. Uh, he demands, uh, the daughter that he thought that he was marrying and Laban says, fine, you can marry Rachel too. Um, just seven more years of labor. Um, And Jacob agrees to that as well. He's actually married to Rachel right away and then stays and works another seven years. So this is how Jacob ends up married to two women, to Leah and to Rachel. Leah, the one that was not attractive, that no one was going to want. Rachel, the one who was attractive, who caught his eye right away. And the passage I want to read to you now is sort of what happens next. It's the story of the children that are born to Leah and to Rachel in this family. So Genesis 29 at verse 31. When the Lord saw that Leah was unloved, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren. So Leah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Reuben. For she said, the Lord has surely looked on my affliction. Now, therefore, 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. And she called his name 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, his name was called Levi. And she conceived again and bore a son and said, now I will praise the Lord. Therefore, she called his name Judah. Then she stopped bearing. Now, when Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister and said to Jacob, give me children or I die. And Jacob's anger was aroused against Rachel. And he said, am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb? So she said, here is my maid, Bilhah. Go into her. and she will bear a child on my knees, and I also may have children by her. Then she gave him Bilhah, her maid, as a wife, and Jacob went into her. And Bilhah conceived and bore Jacob a son. Then Rachel said, God has judged my case, and he has also heard my voice and given me a son. Therefore she called his name Dan. And Rachel's maid Bilhah conceived again and bore Jacob a second son. Then Rachel said, with great wrestlings I have wrestled with my sister, and indeed I have prevailed. So she called his name Naphtali. When Leah saw that she had stopped bearing, she took Zilpah, her mate, and gave her to Jacob, his wife. And Leah's maid bore Jacob a son. Then Leah said, a troop comes. So she called his name Gad. And Leah's maid Zilpah bore Jacob a second son. Then Leah said, I'm happy, for the daughters will call me blessed. So she called his name Asher. Now Reuben went in the days of wheat harvest and found mandrakes in the field and brought them to his mother Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah, please give me some of your son's mandrakes. But she said to her, is it a small matter that you've 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, Leah went out to meet him and said, you must come in to me. for I have surely hired you with my son's mandrakes. And he lay with her that night. And God listened to Leah, and she conceived and bore Jacob a fifth son. Leah said, God has given me my wages because I have given my maid to my husband. So she called his name Issachar. Then Leah conceived again and bore Jacob a sixth son. And Leah said, God has endowed me with a good endowment. Now my husband will dwell with me because I've born him six sons. So she called his name Zebulun. Afterward, she bore a daughter and called her name Dinah. 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. Thus far the reading of God's word. Would you please pray with me one more time? Father in heaven, whenever we open your word, we want not to take for granted what an astounding thing it is that the God of the universe has spoken and has given us this word. We want to stand under it and be formed by it. And so my prayer and our prayer is simply that you would grant that the meditation of our hearts, the words of my mouth would be acceptable in your sight. Amen. Okay. So, um, so I hope, I hope you got some sense of just, just the power of this story as I read that. And just the, the emotional dynamics that are taking place there. There's a lot, there's a lot there that is foreign to us that is outside of our culture. And I'm not going to be able to unpack every bit of that. Um, really what I want to do this morning is actually try to even give a sense of how this story fits into the big story. how it fits into the story being told by Genesis and really by the Bible as a whole. And the main point that I want us to get from this is that this story is telling us that God is faithful to his promise to save a fruitless humanity that can't save itself. So let me back up even a little bit further. Let me back up all the way to the garden just briefly here. In the beginning, God makes a world. He makes a world that is good. But in Genesis 3, the serpent convinces Eve that he is her friend and that God is the enemy. And part of God's response to that, if you remember, is that he says that he's not going to leave things that way. He's not going to leave things with him as the enemy and the serpent as the friend. He specifically says that he would put enmity between the accuser, the serpent, the one who was accusing man and God. He would put enmity between the serpent and humanity and would restore friendship between humanity and himself. And that theme is everywhere in the Bible. It is constantly said that God is a God who is with his people, a God who dwells with his people. He comes down to them. He identifies himself as being their God. He is their people. This is expressed in the most intimate terms possible. He's our friend. He is our father. He is our husband. We are his. He is ours. And that's why the Bible takes such an incredibly high view of marriage, such an incredibly high view of sex, which are right at the center of the story that we told this morning. It's because of what they signify. It's what those things are pointing to, this deep longing to be united to our creator in the most intimate way possible. So immediately after the fall in Genesis 3, God promises that he's going to accomplish this restoration, that he's going to restore this friendship through one of Eve's descendants. He says, the seed of the woman is going to crush the head of the serpent. And from that point on, one way to read the book of Genesis, one way to read its plot, is that it's driven by God's faithfulness to that promise. that he's going to keep providing seed. He's going to keep providing another generation, another son. You know, if you think about it, that's why those genealogies are there in the book of Genesis. If you ever tried to read your way straight to the Bible, you know how this goes, right? You read Genesis 1 and 2 and its creation, and that's all very interesting. And Genesis 3 is the fall. Genesis 4, you have a story about Cain and Abel. And then you get to Genesis 5, and it's a list of names. And your eyes kind of glaze over and you just kind of skip over that part and get to the flood, back to the story part. And that's understandable. But that list of names is there for a reason. One of the reasons that it's there is because God has promised seed. He's promised children. He's promised another generation. And so what you're meant to be reading as you read that list of names is, look, God was faithful again. God was faithful again. God was faithful again. The line didn't break. It kept going. And then when you come to these stories of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and you see how children are born in ways that are miraculous, born to barren women, born to parents way beyond childbearing age, what you're supposed to be getting is God is being faithful to that promise again and again. And being faithful in a way that emphasizes that salvation is not coming from humanity. you know, that we're not going to fix ourselves, that God has to act in ways that we can't. You know, this notion that God has to act from outside, that his providence, as we call it, is necessary. That's a hard doctrine. That's a hard thing for us to get a hold of and to grasp. There was a newspaper article this past week or the week before It was in the New York Times, and it was written by a professor who teaches philosophy of religion, or comparative religion, somewhere in Southern California. I think it might have been Caltech, actually. And he was saying, like, the one thing that offends his students the most is when he gets to John Calvin and the doctrine of divine sovereignty. He says even the students that identify as Christians just really get offended by this. It really rubs them the wrong way, that God is completely in control, that his providence cannot be thwarted. But the reason that this is hard for us is because we start from this basic view that, you know, basically humanity is OK. You know, humanity can get its act together. We can fix our problems. And the Bible just doesn't have any time for that. It just will not take that idea seriously. In the view of the Bible, humanity is a mess. And it's not a simple matter of being able to identify the bad people and put them over here, right? Because in the view of the Bible, we're all bad people. The line between the wicked and the victims of wickedness runs through every human being. We are all both wicked and victims of sin all the time. I mean, if you look at Leah, for instance, the character of Leah, how do you think about her? Is she a victim? You know, she's been treated as a commodity by her father. You know, she was married off in exchange for seven years of labor. She's being ignored by her husband. So is she a victim or is she manipulative? Is she being vindictive in this story? The Bible doesn't want you to have to assign her to one category or the other. She's a human being, and so she's both. Sin is more complex than we want to give it than we want to say. Because at the same time, we are both morally responsible for our sin and victimized by it. Sin has burrowed its way deep into every aspect of our lives. And we're not going to solve it by something as simple as human progress. We need salvation from outside. We need God to act. And that's what we're seeing going on in this story. Apart from God, humanity falls apart. We turn violent. We turn oppressive and fruitless. But God is faithful. So now let's look a little bit more specifically at this story, this story of these two women and their children, and see how God is faithful in this particular instance. So let's start by looking at Leah. So I said in my introduction, that Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah. In fact, right before the passage I read, it says that specifically. Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah. Rachel was the attractive one. Rachel was the one that he thought he was getting after those seven years, but he was tricked into marrying Leah first. And so that means that Leah is in, a precarious situation in a lot of ways. It's economically precarious. It's socially precarious. And frankly, it's just lonely. It's just emotionally lonely for her. She is the unloved wife in a polygamous marriage. And the text is just masterful in showing us her pain. I mean, if you look at the end of chapter 29, every time she has children, she says, the Lord has seen my affliction. The Lord has heard that I'm hated. Now at last, this time, my husband will be attached to me because I've given him three sons." I don't see how you can read this and not be moved by the pain that she's feeling, as her husband apparently takes no notice of her whatsoever. That's a pain that a lot of us know. That's a pain that some of you may be struggling with right now. That pain of feeling lonely and feeling unknown and unseen and unnoticed. And wondering if life is really worth loving. Living, excuse me. Wondering if life is really worth living apart from someone's affection, someone's love. There's this brief moment in the text where Leah seems to recognize that her husband's affections can't bear the weight that she's trying to put on them, that it's God and not Jacob that has to care for her. She names her fourth son Judah. And like one of the Psalms that turns from lament to praise, this time she says nothing at all about her pain or her husband. She just says, this time I'll praise the Lord. But she doesn't stay there for very long, does she? you know, as we keep reading. She returns to her pain, reminding us that even for those of us who have believed, those of us who have faith, we continue to struggle not to turn good things into ultimate things. She's drawn right back into this rivalry with her sister, and by the end, I don't know if you noticed this phrasing, she's reduced to hiring her husband, for a night of intimacy with these mandrakes that were thought to promote fertility. And the name she gives her next son is a play on the word for hiring, on the word for wages. So she had said, this time I will praise the Lord, but now she's saying, I earned this, I paid for this. And you can't help notice that her father, Laban, had manipulated Jacob into accepting her as a wage for his labor. And now she's the one manipulating the situation and trying to deal with her heavenly father on those same terms, terms of exchange. And with her last son, she's right back where she started. She says, now my husband will honor me. And one sad thing about this story. And just to emphasize maybe a big point about these Bible stories, one big point about them, that these are not stories about good people. These are not stories about people that we ought to emulate and pattern our lives after in every way. These are stories about broken people that God works with. To the end of their lives, there's no sign that Jacob ever really honors his wife. There's no sign that Jacob's affection towards her ever really changes. But there is great sign that God honors Leah. One of her children is Levi. And Moses is descended from Levi. The priests are descended from Levi. David is descended from Judah, that fourth son. And if David is descended from Judah, then that means Jesus is also. And so even though Jacob never honors his wife, the whole story of the Bible leading up to the person of Jesus gives Leah a place of great honor. It gives her a name that's gonna last forever. Now what about Rachel? What about this other daughter, the one that Jacob did want, the one that Jacob was attracted to? So in that sense, Rachel has what Leah wants. But she also wants what Leah has, right? Because initially, she can't have children. Again, that's a pain that a lot of us know. Many of us have known the pain of not being able to have children. It's a great pain. And so it's understandable to many of us why Rachel cries out to her husband, give me children or I die. I'm going to come back to the way that Jacob responds to that cry. Suffice it to say that it gives her absolutely no hope for bearing children. So instead, she gives Jacob Bilha, her servant, in the hopes that she'll have children, which would legally be hers. This is, of course, something that recalls Sarah's scheming to produce a son for her and Abraham through her servant, Hagar, when she was barren. But that isn't the way that God kept his promise to Abraham and Sarah, that he would give them a son. That's not how Isaac came into the world. Again, we're seeing in these stories that humanity's scheming, humanity's plans, don't deliver fruitfulness any more than the mandrakes would, a magical plant. When Rachel finally does have children, both she and the narrator give the credit to God, not to these mandrakes. So we're seeing that God remembers the Baron. He remembered Sarah. He remembered Rebecca. And now he remembers Rachel. And he also remembers Hagar. And he remembers Bilha. And he remembers Zilpha. What do I mean by that? It's shocking that these two names are showing up. Well, let me put it this way. It's shocking that these two names are showing up in this morning's sermon here on Antrim Street in the 21st century. Let me put it this way. Think of any famous person that you know. It could be anybody. It could be celebrity, actor, athlete, politician, any famous person. Now ask yourself, how likely is it that 100 years from now anyone will know their name? Well, it's possible. Right? We know people who lived 100 years ago. That's possible. What about 200 years from now? Still possible. What about 500 years from now? What about 1,000 years from now? What about 5,000 years from now? Right? Or think about it in reverse. How many names do you know of people who lived 5,000 years ago? You don't know very many. But you know these two. You know the names of Bilhah and Zilpah, these two slaves, these two women who are at the absolute bottom of their society, and yet God records their names in his word. And later on in Genesis 35, there's a list of all of Jacob's children, and the children of Bilhah and Zilpah are listed as their children, not as Leah's, not as Rachel's, whatever the culture said. In their world, they were nobodies. But God brought their names permanently into the story of the salvation, because he is the God of the unloved. He is the God of the barren. He is the God of the slave. Now, lastly, let's take a look at Jacob. Let's take a look at Jacob's part in this whole story. He's got a pretty small part. At least, he's got a pretty small speaking part. He's almost completely silent for this whole thing. He's got one line. So Rachel comes to him, the wife that he loves, aching with envy of her sister, despondent that she has no children. She says, give me children or I die. And what does he do? He gets angry and he shifts the blame from himself to God. Now I said at the beginning that I wanted to talk about how this story fits into the big story being told by the Bible. And so that's why I went back all the way to the beginning of Genesis. I went back to the garden. You know, I said, you know, think about how this fits in. And so when you hear that Jacob shifts the blame from himself to someone else, you know, you might think, that's just like Adam and Eve. That's just like, you know, Adam shifting blame from himself to his wife. Eve shifting blame from herself to the servant. And that would be a valid comparison. I mean, that's just, that's just humanity. That's what we do. We shift blame. But there's actually another comparison that I want to make. between what Jacob is doing here and what happened in the garden. There's another comparison, and it's actually much worse. Because look at exactly what Jacob says. He says, am I in the place of God who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb? Now, do you see what he's doing there? Do you see who he's being like as he shifts blame? Do you see what character from that story in the garden? Who was it? in the garden that accused God and that accused God of withholding fruit. That wasn't Adam. That was the snake. Now, let me be clear about what I'm not saying here. I am not saying that Satan is making an appearance in this story. I'm not saying that Jacob is playing the role of the serpent or of Satan. That would be a bit of a stretch. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is Jacob's got one line in this entire story. And with that one line, he is saying words which are quite literally diabolical. Because with his one statement to his wife, who's coming to him in grief, what he's doing is he is confirming for her the very lie that Satan wants her to believe. The same lie that he told to Eve in the garden. It's the same lie that he wants to whisper into your heart every day. It's the lie that God doesn't love you. The lie that God will not see to the desires of your hearts. That he doesn't know you, he doesn't see you, he might as well not be there. And so you're on your own to save yourself. It's no wonder that the first thing that she does after this is get to scheming and bring in her maid. And you know, some of the commentaries on this passage, they point out that technically what Jacob is saying is true. And it is true. In fact, It is not in Jacob's power to give Rachel children. In fact, children are a gift from God. And so, in fact, God is responsible for the fact that Rachel hasn't had children yet. The statement there is accurate, is theologically orthodox. But that means that this text is also showing us the power that we have to say things to each other that are factually accurate, to say things to each other that are theologically orthodox, and which can just destroy each other. We can just tear each other apart. And I would say that it's here in the face of suffering that we're most liable to do that. As I listened to the announcement this morning, as I listened to the prayer requests, I know that this is a congregation that is well acquainted with suffering, that you are sitting in the midst of suffering right now. Are we able? to simply sit with each other in that suffering, to resist the temptation to try to explain it away with things that may be theologically true. But can we simply sit with each other and say, we don't understand, it doesn't make sense, but we trust in God and we cry out to him together. Can we lament instead of explaining? Because when Jesus came, he reserved some of his harshest judgment for those who were theologically orthodox, religious people who know the Bible really well. There's a place where Jesus even calls them sons of the devil, because they're rejecting him and heaping guilt on others. And so they're doing the work of the accuser for him. And that's exactly what Jacob is doing here, right here within this family that God has chosen. Jacob's wife comes to him in her grief, and he gets angry, and he gets defensive, and with his words, he's acting like the son of the serpent, instead of being one of the sons of the woman. All of this action, everything that we're seeing in this chapter is telling us that on its own, humanity, even this very family that God has chosen, is fruitless. On its own, it's without hope. It's not going to save itself. It's all situated between these two bookends that began and ended our passage. The Lord saw that Leah was hated. God remembered Rachel. Again, he is the God of the unloved. He is the God of the barren and the God of the slave. This story was first told by Moses to people as they wandered in the wilderness. This story is part of the prologue to a covenant that God will make with the people that he's brought out of slavery. And he tells them, directly. He didn't choose them because they were great or powerful or numerous. He chose them because they were powerful. He chose them because they were powerless, and he brought them out of slavery. He calls himself the God of Abraham and Isaac and of Jacob. He identifies himself with this story and with these people, people full of fear and deceit and idolatry, because that's the gospel, that humanity is not going to save itself. But God is faithful, and God loves to save sinners. And this story is pointing us straight at that salvation. At the very end, when God remembers Rachel, he gives the barren woman children. And you look what she says. She says, may the Lord add to me another son. And that's what this whole story is about. It's about God adding another son. Rachel will literally have another son in tragic fashion. She gives birth to Benjamin and she dies giving birth to Benjamin. But even there, God's not finished because God is going to add another son. The God of the unloved and barren woman is going to send an even more miraculous sign when a virgin gives birth to a son who will be called Emmanuel. And that's where this story is pointing. That's where all of Genesis is pointing. It's where the whole Bible is pointing to Jesus, the one who is finally going to be that true son of the woman and will defeat the serpent. And just like us, he's going to be tempted to believe the lies of the devil. He's going to be tempted with the accusations that his father doesn't love him and won't take care of him. But he rejected those lies. He rejected them with scripture, and he turned away. And he lived the life that we should have lived, always trusting in his father, so that when he was in the garden himself, he said, not my will, but yours. And he went to the cross to die the death that we should have died, bearing our sin and its penalty in our place. And on the cross, the God of the barren loses his beloved child in order to put things back the way they were meant to be. in order to reconcile himself to the world. This is how he restores friendship between himself and humanity. This is how it works. Jesus becomes unloved so that you can be loved. He becomes the ugly one so that you can be beautiful. And what that means is that those of us who are longing for a husband or for a wife or for children or for sanity with the children that we have, any of those things, you know, God may give you those good things. But what he has given you, what you can bank on, what you can put your confidence today and know that he has given you and is giving you now is nothing less than himself. He gives you the giver. So you're not alone. You have a friend. You have a husband. You have a father. He made you and he loves you. And so you don't have to live in a world where sex or children or money or status or whatever it else it might be are trying to bear this weight that they can never bear or be used as tools to manipulate your circumstances. This God who remembers the slaves has come as a slave so that we can be free. So let's give thanks and pray. Father, there are many here this morning who know some aspect of the pain that's on display here in this chapter. We know what it means to be in Rachel's shoes, to say, give me children or I die, or maybe it's something else besides children. But we know how it feels to feel that there is something that life is not worth living if we don't have it. Father, we pray that you would tune our hearts to look past those things, to see what those things are really pointing at, to see the giver behind the gifts. Father, we pray that in Jesus and in his death on the cross, we would see what you have done. We would see how you have withheld nothing. Father, may the accusations of the devil fall flat. The devil wants us to believe that you don't love us and that you are withholding the fruit, the good things, the goodness that you would withhold yourself. Father, as we see Jesus on the cross, May we see that those accusations just don't hold water because you have withheld absolutely nothing. You have not even withheld your own son. And if you haven't withheld your own son, then what will you withhold from the people that you love? Father, we pray that these things would work their ways into our hearts and be expressed in our lives, lives of love to you and to our neighbor and to those in need. We pray all this in your name. Amen.