Welcome to Doctrine for Life with Dr. Joel Beeky. In today's broadcast, we hear the second part of Dr. Beeky's message on Genesis 29, verses 1-30, where Jacob met and married Rachel and Leah. In the previous broadcast, we heard how God's providence led Jacob to the exact place and people where he needed to be. Yet, we also heard that unlike Abraham's servant in Genesis 24, Jacob demonstrated a sad lack of prayer and praise in his life, failing to live consciously in dependence on God and for God's glory. In this broadcast, we see how God taught Jacob some hard lessons to train him in godliness. May the Lord bless you through it. Well, as we enter the second half of the portion read to you tonight, it seems that God has only slapped Jacob on the ends of his fingers, and that Jacob has really gotten away, for the most part, with his underhanded ways. And now he's going forward in his own strength, and all is going well. But as we enter the second half, we meet a very troubling word. Notice the word serve, or served, seven times. from verses 15 to 30, actually the major theme of this portion of Scripture. Jacob served Laban. The word is the word of a slave, of a hired man, not of an adopted son. of the hired man. It's actually a step lower for Jacob. He worked. He slaved. He worked hard for Laban. Jacob is entering a long, dark tunnel of suffering, which he richly deserves. In one word, it's payback time. Payback time for Jacob. Well, how so? Well, let me give you three ways. The first is this. Deception. Deception. Jacob is deceived by his uncle Laban. First, it doesn't appear that it will go that way. The beginning of the passage looks very promising. Laban comes to Jacob, verse 15. He says, "...because thou art my brother," notice the word brother, "...shouldst thou therefore serve me for naught?" Tell me! What shall thy wages be? Name your price, Jacob." That seems generous. He's saying to his nephew, you're working for me, I don't want to take advantage of you, name your salary. Wow, what could be better than that? Laban is a very devious man. He's actually changing Jacob's status in the process from an honored relative to a hired servant. He's humiliating him. He's tying him into a long-term contract so he can't go back home to the promised land soon. He knows, of course, that Jacob's been looking at Rachel, but he's fascinated with her, enamored with her. It's obvious there's a chemistry, a rapport of sorts between them. even though they, according to the customs of the day, can converse very little. It's no secret on that farm, Jacob is after Rachel. Now Laban, of course, has two daughters. We're told that the older one, Leah, has weak eyes. That seems like a strange way of describing a young woman today, I suppose, but we need to remember that In the East, the Eastern women wore a veil and a headdress. And about the only part of their body that you could really get a clear view of was their eyes. So eyes became very, very important in terms of judging a woman's beauty. And Eastern women were known for their dark and beautiful eyes. And they'd often wear different kinds of makeup to make their eyes look larger and more vibrant. And this was a big deal for women and a big deal for men as they judged women. They would look at their eyes. And Leah apparently had pale-colored eyes, eyes that lacked the fire and the sparkle and the glow and the warmth that was so prized in the ancient East. She had eyes that made her seem unattractive. But Rachel, well, for Jacob, Rachel was a knockout in his eyes. She was a striking beauty. The Bible says, too, she was beautiful and well favored. Jacob found himself infatuated with her and then falling in love with her. And so he promises Laban he'll work seven years for her, which is three times the price of that age for a dowry. But he wanted to show his eagerness to have Rachel. He wanted to make a generous offer. And he had no money to pay, so he offered himself. He offered his seven years of service. Well, Laban is astonished. He's grateful. He's glad, and he gladly accepts. He says, well, it's better I give her to you than I should give her to another man. But what we don't notice until we know the rest of the story is do you notice when Laban makes the promise, he never mentions Rachel's name. And he doesn't really promise anything. He just says, it's better that I give her to you than I should give her to another man. Doesn't make a contract. I will give you Rachel. Laban's devious, you see. So Jacob served seven years. And in one of the Bible's most dramatic statements we're told, they seem to him but a few days for the love he had to Rachel. So, this infatuation certainly grows into love now, and he's passionately in love with this beautiful woman, and he serves seven long, hard years for her. He's looking forward to his wedding night, and when the seven years comes to an end, he says to Laban, give me my wife. Laban makes wedding preparations, And in those days, the whole town would be invited, and the party, the wedding party would go on for seven days and seven nights. And the custom was that at the end of the first night, the father of the bride would bring the bride to the bridegroom in the bridegroom's tent. And it would already be dark. They would consummate the marriage. in that first evening, and then for six more days of eating and drinking, and the Hebrew word especially here emphasizes drinking, which sounds rather ominous. So what happens is, after the first day, Jacob no doubt has a good time socializing, he's eating and drinking, perhaps maybe a little too much he drank, or whatever it may be, but that night he's excited, he's looking forward to receiving Rachel, He's sitting in the dark in his tent, and Laban brings his daughter, and he consummates the marriage. And then the Bible says, "...so crisply, with such shocking brevity, in the morning, behold, it was Leah." In the morning, behold, It was Leah. Oh, when you read it, it sends shockwaves up and down your spine, doesn't it? Leah, after seven years of working for Rachel, and he wakes up in the morning and he sees a woman on his pillow he's not even in love with. Jacob has been taken. He's been deceived. The deceiver has been deceived. What a lesson for us today! What a lesson about how this big bad world is really like. The world is full of clever deceivers today. We hear about it in the newspapers all the time. Some man, weaseling, what was it, 50 million or 50 billion, I'm not sure, recently from a whole group of people in the paper, deceiving, people willing to lie and cheat and take advantage of us. You know, we don't live in a cozy, dream, Christian world. Jesus said, Behold, I send you forth among wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves. Jacob is deceived. It's payback time. But the second thing we see here is duplication. Not only deception, but duplication. This whole scene paints for us Laban's manipulation and guilt. Now what Laban did to restrain Rachel that first night, I don't know. And how he managed to get Leah to play the part, I don't know. Fathers at that time did have a lot of control over their daughters, and we don't even know if Leah at that time had a secret crush on Jacob. Later we read that she really did love him. But what Moses, the author of Genesis, wants to do is not deal with these things, but suddenly what he wants us to catch here is that in this story we hear echoes from the past. We hear duplication. There's a tremendous sense of what we call déjà vu. We get this feeling, this is a replay. We've been here before. Let me outline what I mean. What do we see Jacob doing in his life? Well, we see him preferring the younger over the older. In his affections and in his love, he pushes the older aside in favor of the younger. This is what he's always done. He did it in his mother's womb. He struggled to overtake Esau. He tried to jostle the older aside in favor of the younger. He did it with a birthright. He tossed the older aside in favor of the younger. He did it with a blessing. He jostled the older Esau aside in favor of himself as the younger. And now he's eagerly doing it again, pushing the older aside in favor of the younger. But Laban exploits Jacob's eagerness. He knows Jacob is hungry for Rachel. And Laban takes advantage of this to make a very hard bargain. Seven more years, four more dowry prices, or three more dowry prices, and you can have Rachel. Does that remind you of somebody? Remember Esau coming in from hunting boys and girls. He was hungry. He wanted the red potage or the stew. And he said, what good is my blessing? I'm going to die. Jacob takes advantage, strikes a hard bargain. Give me your birthright. Esau's trapped. Esau gives in. It's payback time for Jacob. What do we see here in this passage? We see a blind man being deceived, don't we? His blindness is not due to old age or to cataracts, but it's due to alcohol, and to darkness, and to veils. This is the irony of this story. Jacob is just as blind when he's in the tent on the first night of his marriage with Leah, when he thought he was with Rachel. as his father was blind when his father thought Jacob was Esau. A blind man who deceived a blind father is facing payback time. In Jacob's past, the younger pretended to be the older. Now it is reversed. Leah pretends to be her younger sister. Another echo. of this is in verse 25, "'Wherefore then hast thou beguiled me, Laban?' Esau used exactly the same word in Hebrew of Jacob when he said, Genesis 27, 36, "'Is he not rightly named Jacob? For he hath supplanted me, beguiled me these two times.'" The deceiver. is complaining that he's deceived. There's duplication everywhere. And then notice the cruel irony of Laban's reply in verse 26. It must not be so done in our country to give the younger before the firstborn. Well, that may be true, but it's a complete excuse, of course. The time to explain that to Jacob was seven years ago when he struck the bargain in the first place. But you see, the irony It's not our custom here, says Laban, to allow the younger to take precedence over the older. As if he said, I know, Jacob, that's the way you behaved when you were at your home. You kept taking precedence over Esau. You kept grabbing everything for yourself. But that's not our custom here, Jacob. The older gets the first blessing. Oh, what a low blow to Jacob. What a brand for his conscience. It's payback time. Jacob has brought all this upon himself, you see. It's all deserved. The grasper is now grasped by someone else. He's getting his own medicine. He's being treated as he treated others. He's gotten away with his sins, but God doesn't close his eyes to his wrongdoing. We reap what we sow, congregation. The deceiver is deceived. Now, we all know a little bit of this, don't we? That our old sins come back to haunt us. But you know, that's the law of life. If you deceive someone or slander someone, you let someone down or take advantage of him or her, God will find a way, if not in this life, then in the life to come, that you reap what you sow. If you neglect God, you will suffer the consequences. You see, this is the problem. Jacob goes through all of this in Genesis 29, and you still don't read of one prayer or one cry to God. Human passion, human calculation, and he receives now human duplication. What a lesson for us. If we set a bad example for our children, we ought not to be surprised one day when they set a bad example for us. If we neglect our marriage, we ought not to be surprised one day when our marital partner will neglect us. If we are prone to be sunk in self-pity, the day will come when we can't get out of it. But most of all, if we neglect God, Don't be surprised one day when God neglects you. The list is endless, you see. God is not to be mocked. We reap what we sow. It's payback time. Payback time involves, however, not only deception and duplication, but thirdly and finally, it involves discipline. Laban has a proposal ready for angry Jacob. It's too late now to back out of his marriage to Leah. It's been consummated. He can't escape. Laban says, fulfill her week. That is to say, play games for six more days, Jacob, and go through this whole wedding feast. Don't say anything to anybody. At the end of the seven days, I'll give you Rachel for a wife, and then you work for me another seven years. You have to be amazed at Laban's nerve, don't you? Not only is Jacob stuck with a wife he doesn't want, but he has to pay another seven years for Rachel. So Laban traps him. Fourteen years amounts to six full dowries of servitude for the wife he loved. Jacob is beaten into silence. What can he say? He wants Rachel. So at the end of that first week, he gets Rachel. Laban gives her to him. And we read, he went in also unto Rachel and served with him yet seven other years. And then Laban finds a way, imagine that, to keep Jacob another six years as a slave. Twenty years in all. What a clever man. And Jacob has hard lessons to learn the whole time. All his life, Jacob has been a deceiver. But for 20 years, God says, every day, Jacob, I'm going to teach you from your own bitter experience what it means to be cheated and deceived. Of course it was unfair for Jacob. Every moment of every day would say to him, this is what cheating is like. Now you can sympathize with Esau. You see, Jacob was now in the hands of a deceiver who was more deceiving than Jacob himself. He's in the hands of a master crook. Jacob was just an amateur compared to Laban. It would be later he said, Laban, you changed my wages ten times. Alexander White put it this way. Jacob is cheated out of his wages, and then cheated out of his wife, and cheated and cheated and cheated again, ten times cheated, and that too by his own mother's brother, until cheating came out of Jacob's nostrils and stank in Jacob's eyes, and cheating became hateful as hell to Jacob's heart." Well, don't you think after twenty years of this, that Jacob walked away from Laban and said, I don't ever want to cheat anyone again. I've learned my lesson. That's why White goes on to say it was Jacob's salvation, his soul's salvation, but salvation that he fell into the hands of his uncle Laban. Because God used Laban to change Jacob, to deal with Jacob, to rub the rust off of Jacob, to refine and mature his faith. Finally, Jacob understands Esau's pain. You see, God has his ways to teach us the ugliness of sin. Sometimes those ways involve discipline, to discipline us. Psalm 119 puts it this way, verse 67, before I was afflicted, I went astray, but now I have kept thy word. This is the amazing thing. God is afflicting Jacob in his kindness, in his chastening love, in his compassion. You see, Jacob never would have gotten rid of that character, that deceitful character, if God hadn't dealt with him this way. God is the potter. Jacob is the clay. God is forming him and molding him to be what he wants him to be. And the amazing thing is that God works through all these ways to fulfill His own plan. Despite the deceitfulness of Jacob, and despite the deceitfulness of Laban, despite the fact that Jacob's polygamy ends up with four women, really, in a couple weeks' time, because he gets a handmaid from both of the wives, and God actually oversees all these things and works through them So that Jacob becomes the father of all the tribes of Israel, and the promised stars begin to shine, and the sand on the seashore begins to multiply. What an amazing God. Works even through deception, and duplication, and discipline. And of course, he did that for Leah, too, really. Poor Leah. We don't know if she was pushed into the marriage or not, but we do know she was an unloved wife. And we'll see next time how her husband loved Rachel more than her, and what a terrible position it was for her to be in. What a dysfunctional marriage for her to be an unhappy, unloved, neglected woman. And yet God molds her through her trials. And he makes her the mother of all the priests of Israel, because she bears Levi. He makes her the mother of Judah, the mother of all the kings of Israel. And he makes her the ancestor of Moses, the author of Genesis, who's writing the story. And of David, the greatest king of Israel. And yes, of Jesus, the Messiah, the Savior of the world. Leah, the lonely, abused, neglected wife in a dysfunctional marriage, is greatly affirmed by God. And God's way is wonderful. Well, let me close tonight with applications. The first is this. God works through our mistakes. God works through our mistakes. Jacob made a host of them. Here he suddenly finds himself with four women, abandoning the God-honoring one-woman mentality of his father Isaac. And yet God does not remove the angel-freighted ladder of his covenant, his promises, and his providences. And so though there will be, as we hope to see in the coming weeks, draining, emotionally draining birth wars between Leah and Rachel, God is still the God of Jacob. And Jacob will become the father of Israel, and the stars will indeed shine, and God will not remove the ladder. As Ken Hughes says, the angel afraid of ladder disciplines and exalts. God had brought the arch-deceiver Laban into the life of the great patriarch deceiver so that Jacob's sin might be displayed before his eyes and might be cut to the heart. Yes, Jacob will change. It will take a long time. It will take him 20 years to graduate from the school of hard knocks under the hand of Laban, but he will become Israel, a prince with God and with men through God's disciplinary grace, even though he will have to go on halting on his thigh. And you know God is still the same today. He overrules our sins and our failures and our confused, struggling, imperfect Christian lives. He goes on working, bringing blessing, bringing glory to Himself, never derailing His own plan for us, His purposes being fulfilled, His covenant becoming true. that will go in different ways than we expect, maybe ways that hurt, maybe ways that cost tears, but the divine ladder will not be taken away. And the Son of God who's at the right hand of the Father, who oversees the ladder, who overrules everything for good and looks down upon this earth and upon His people and upon the traffic of that ladder of heaven descending to earth, that God will never cease caring for us until we are brought up the ladder to be with Him forever in glory. God works despite our mistakes. His grace is greater than our sin. Secondly, God shows us real love. God's relationship with believers is built on real love. Verse 18 we read, Jacob loved Rachel and said, I will serve thee seven years for Rachel, thy younger daughter. Well, he loved her with a human love. But there was a lot of faultiness in Jacob's love. It is a wonderful thing to see human love even, isn't it? But the word love is often the most misunderstood word in the English language. Jesus models for us what it means. Love means to seek the good of the other for whom you yearn, no matter what it costs, no matter how much pain is to be endured, without any thought of getting anything in return. That's the supreme love of God in His only begotten Son, sending His dear Son into the world to bleed for enemies. Jacob loved Rachel. with a human love, but Jesus Christ loves His people with a perfect, divine love. He's the Divine Bridegroom, and His self-giving love for His church is like no other love in all the world. Christ so loved the church that He gave Himself for her. And today, He still makes that love available to the greatest of sinners, to the most deceitful of Jacobs, to the most bankrupt of people, to the most unexpected choices, He offers this love. The Spirit and the Bride say, Come. And let the one who hears say, Come. And let the one who is thirsty come. Let the one who desires to take the water of life without price. Come to the Bridegroom, Jesus Christ. Believe in Him and drink of His love forever. Thank you for listening to Doctrine for Life with Dr. Joel Beegee. William Ames said, Theology is the doctrine of living to God. May God write the doctrines of the Bible upon your heart, so that you may truly live.