God Has Taken Away My Reproach (Genesis 30:9-24)

God Has Taken Away My Reproach

Introduction

I’ve been learning that the way I respond to pain is one of the most crucial things about me. One thing I read lately is that every time we enter discomfort, we are experiencing a test. The test is how we will respond to our distress. How will we seek to manage it and heal ourselves?

Tests always give an opportunity to make a choice. Our choice is our decision of how we respond to a test. What our choices do is reveal our identities- who we really are. No one finds out who they really are until they go through some kind of test and have to respond. And our identity is what determines our destiny in this life and the next.[1] So, you can see that responding to pain holds a lot of significance for us as it does for the characters in our story today.

I want us to ask, How can we grow at taking our pain to God for healing rather than trying to heal ourselves in ways that are destructive to yourselves and others?

Before we get into it, let’s give a reminder of where we are at because it’s been a bit since we have been in Genesis.

Context

Daniel preached last month on the beginning of this birth story of the twelve tribal heads of Israel. It was a painful story last week and continues to be this week. The geography of where we are at should not be lost on us as it helps us locate where we are in this story.

Jacob is far from home, far from the land God commanded him and his ancestors to go to and only ever commanded them to stay (and never to leave, 26:3). So, Jacob has disobediently returned to the land of his ancestors, running for his life from his brother, married two women (sisters) in a twisted chain of events, and now begins having children with them.

In next week’s passage, he begins his journey home (Gen 30:25) and we will witness the beginning of the restoration of this wayward man. Yet for now, chaos and tragedy reign in his household as he dwells far from his homeland.

With these sad and hard details in mind, let’s get into our passage,

Revelation

9 When Leah saw that she had ceased bearing children, she took her servant Zilpah and gave her to Jacob as a wife. 10 Then Leah’s servant Zilpah bore Jacob a son. 11 And Leah said, “Good fortune has come!” so she called his name Gad. 12 Leah’s servant Zilpah bore Jacob a second son. 13 And Leah said, “Happy am I! For women have called me happy.” So she called his name Asher.

As Jacob and Esau before, these two sisters are in a great conflict with one another.[2] In their struggle, they have resorted to unholy ways of achieving victory and obtaining honor for themselves. In this old culture from the ancient world, the bearing of children was the chief path to honor for a woman.

So, when Leah ceases to bear children, it comes as a threat to her own sense of dignity. She was rejected from the beginning of her marriage, since Jacob preferred her sister Rachel (29:31). So, the status she obtained through childbearing was significant for Leah, and the end of it was distressing.

Yet, Leah refuses to take her destress to God- there is no mention of prayer or dependence on her part. Her marriage to Jacob started with her deceiving Jacob into thinking she was her sister, and she has not stopped with her scheming and self-dependance.

Her solution is that she will abuse her maidservant Zilpah just like Rachel abused hers (v. 3). She will give her to Jacob as another wife with the sole purpose of producing more offspring on her account. This corruption runs in this family’s line- just as Sarah gave her maidservant Hagar to Abraham out of desperation, Leah does the same.

What a reminder that if we don’t tend to our hearts (Prov 4:23) and deal with our needs in holy ways, our needs will find a way to be met. Chip Dodd has said that undealt with needs deal with us.

In Leah’s case, she has a need for honor. We see later in this passage that a yearning for honor motivates Leah’s actions (v. 20). God created all of us to live with dignity and have a sense of value as a person under his rule (Gen 1:26).  Shame is the sensation of not experiencing the dignity and honor our hearts were made to have, when through mistreatment from others or our own failure, we feel inadequate.

Here is a lesson from this passage: humans will do crazy things to remove their sense of shame and obtain a sense of honor if they don’t get a sense of honor from God. Our desires and needs are strong- stronger than we know- and if we don’t tend to them, they will have their way with us and we will find ourselves doing things we never imagined doing to try to satisfy them.

So, Leah sacrifices this servant girl’s dignity and worth for her own, trying to obtain offspring for her at the cost of her sexual purity and dignity. Leah probably never imagined that she would end up here when she was a little girl, and yet, because she can’t process her pain in this situation with God, she ends up treading on someone else and further corrupting her own marriage. How tragic a place her unmet longings and untended to needs bring her!

Leah seems unaware of the tragedy she is living through as she naively names these kids “Good fortune” and “Happy.” I imagine she is anything but these things. Leah does not know how to heal by voicing her pain to God and to others. So, she remains a danger to her and to others around her. There’s an inward volatility that tends towards destructive choices as a way of trying to heal her pain.

Let’s see how things progress and how this family continues to interact with one another and with God,

14 In the days of wheat harvest Reuben went 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.” 15 But she said to her, “Is it a small matter that you have taken away my husband? Would you take away my son’s mandrakes also?” Rachel said, “Then he may lie with you tonight in exchange for your son’s mandrakes.” 16 When Jacob came from the field in the evening, Leah went out to meet him and said, “You must come in to me, for I have hired you with my son’s mandrakes.” So he lay with her that night.

The conflict of these sisters keeps raging, now over a root the Reuben discovers in a field. Does it seem strange that this root becomes such an object of contention between these sisters? It turns out that mandrakes are a fertility root.[3] In this bitter conflict, any edge becomes valuable, so Rachel tries to obtain them from Leah. She’s just as desperate and unstable as her sister, and has made and continues to make destructive decisions.

This exchange shows how contentious the relationship between these sisters has become. Leah responds cooly to her, as her resentment spontaneously comes out of her.

Here is another lesson: when you have not brought your inadequacies to God and rather you are seeking to overcome them yourself, you find yourself in competitive relationships with others instead of loving ones, since your sense of dignity comes from you excelling beyond and beating others.

If your sense of dignity comes from your beauty or your physique, you must be prettier or stronger than others.

If your sense of dignity comes from your popularity, you must be invited to more things than others and have closer friendships with people close to you than others do.

If you fail to obtain these things, you feel a sense of fear or insecurity settle into your heart, an emptiness from not obtaining your source of meaning. And others who threaten your sense of meaning become competition rather than people to love. Both sisters feel that way towards one another as they rage in competition- they have become rivals and competitors rather than loving sisters.

Rachel acts in this mindset as she sells a night with Jacob to obtain the coveted fertility root. Rachel will do crazy things as well to reverse her own shame of not bearing children, adding to the corruption of her own marriage as well.

Now, Jacob comes in from the field. You hope that he has the courage and the decency to put an end to this conflict and bring some kind of order or reconciliation to his household. Yet, in this story, he’s as passive as Adam in the garden, allowing his wives to quarrel and himself to go along with what they negotiate. Jacob sowed seeds of chaos into his household by disrespecting God’s design for marriage in Eden and marrying two women- and now he is reaping what he sowed. Then, this happens,

17 And God listened to Leah, and she conceived and bore Jacob a fifth son. 18 Leah said, “God has given me my wages because I gave my servant to my husband.” So she called his name Issachar.

In this story, everyone is wrong- Jacob, Leah, and Rachel. There is no hero (except God). And at this moment, God does something generous (when no one else is being generous)- he gives Leah another baby. God loves taking care of desperate people in hard situations. Sometimes, he does it when the person is too far in their sin to even know what happened (as is the case here). Leah thinks God is rewarding her for giving her servant to her husband and names her son “wages”! She is not attached to God as a father, she believes she’s negotiating with him just as she’s negotiating with her sister over this plant. She’s deceived and far from God, and yet, God is opening her womb and bestowing on her favor and honor.

He does not open the womb of the sister using the fertility hack or the mandrake. He chooses the other sister instead. You cannot manipulate God into giving gifts- he does what he pleases.

Does this sound like any of your stories- God being good to you before you even had enough spiritual understanding to comprehend what happened? I love the contrast in this story between how stingy this family is with one another contrasted with how generous God is, because it brings into focus for us that this is how he treats us.

One more note about this situation, whenever a family or society rejects God’s good design for marriage, moral chaos follows. The Eden pattern is one man and one woman for life. Here we see that pattern broken with one man with 2 wives + 2 concubines and the pain and harm that follows, and gets passed down through the generations.

The more our city rejects God’s Eden pattern of one man and one woman for life, the most chaos and pain it will continue to feel. The pain of the city started in broken households. Now, unloved and unparented people wander our streets or transition their sex or enter same sex relationships in response to their pain. Each step we continue to take further from God’s design in Eden will introduce more pain and tragedy in our city.

We can receive criticism for believing in a sexual ethic that’s “old fashioned.” And the criticism is true- it is old fashioned. Only, it’s not the “old-fashioned” culture of the 50’s we are holding onto, it’s much older than that- it’s God’s ancient plan from Eden for all of humanity. And that’s precisely why what we believe in has power, because it’s from the creator given to us as a good plan for humanity for all of time.

And I want to remind myself and all of you this morning, don’t be ashamed of God’s good design for marriage no matter how much this culture despises you for it. You hold in your hands from God the two most important keys for human survival and healing- first the gospel above everything else, and then the restoral and renewal of godly families that flows from it.

Now, let’s step back into our story and see what happens next in this conflict between two envious sisters,

19 And Leah conceived again, and she bore Jacob a sixth son. 20 Then Leah said, “God has endowed me with a good endowment; now my husband will honor me, because I have borne him six sons.” So she called his name Zebulun. 21 Afterward she bore a daughter and called her name Dinah.

God’s opening of Leah’s womb continues undeserved. She has another son, and then a daughter. And at this point, God decides to step into undeserving Rachel’s life,

22 Then God remembered Rachel, and God listened to her and opened her womb. 23 She conceived and bore a son and said, “God has taken away my reproach.” 24 And she called his name Joseph, saying, “May the Lord add to me another son!”

While these sisters have a bitter struggle, and Jacob passively steps aside, God steps up with generosity. He gives Rachel a son, Joseph, who has a great destiny, and expresses her hope for still another.

Look at Rachel’s words in verse twenty-three. What does she say after she conceived? “God has taken away my reproach.” Another way to translate that word is with, “shame.”

Now look at what Leah says in verse twenty after she bears a sixth son, “now my husband will honor me.”

As I’ve mentioned before, an inward struggle with shame is driving these women and the behavior they exhibit outside themselves. On the surface, their struggle is with one another, yet on a deeper level, they have a conflict within themselves. The most obvious struggles you have may be with others around you, yet it is not your most significant struggle. Out external struggles are often manifestations of inward struggles we have with pain or with God. Here we see both women struggling with their shame and sense of inadequacy they both feel from their marriage and difficulty bearing children.

Christ/Church

How can this story apply to us? Both of these women show us something about ourselves, We have a God-given need for someone else to validate our sense of honor in a community. First and foremost, we need it from God vertically, yet we also need it from others horizontally. There’s nothing wrong with wanting/needing that- it’s how God made us. We need to recognize that God is most worthy of all honor, praise, and glory, and that he shares it with us secondarily as the most significant part of his creation (Ps 8).

If you don’t have a sense of validation from God and others in a community, you will do crazy things to obtain it or give into crazy addictions to numb the pain of not having it. No one can survive in a constant state of shame and rejection; we need a way out.

Are you carrying around a sense of inadequacy this morning? If so, over what? What aspect of live makes you feel envious of others or insecure around them?

Would you believe me if I told you the way out is first and foremost a person- Jesus? He died naked and alone, the apodeme of shame and rejection, to cloth us with righteousness and acceptance. Because Jesus died as if he were inadequate, we cease being inadequate before God- he embraces us as fully acceptable and crowns us with glory and honor.

Then, he gives us a church community to encourage one another so that our sense of shame can become a sense of honor. Paul even writes in Romans, “outdo one another in showing honor” (12:10). People who walk into this room and have no standing in the world should feel they have standing here. If you know what it’s like to have your shame covered by God, then you love to treat others in the same way.

Now, another point, if our definitions of honor and success don’t change, we will be just as lost and helpless as Jacob’s family.

For these women, having kids at any cost was what brought honor and removed shame. And they were wrong- they ironically end up doing a lot of shameful things in this story.

Instead, the path toward honor was waiting on God to take a tragic situation and provide and give them a godly path forward. For the people of God, living with godliness in this tragic world is the honorable thing.

What false definition of honor do you have to leave behind to pursue the true one? Does honor look like a certain career goal, body type, popularity in social circles- online or real life? You’ll know it by the sense of insecurity you feel around others who surpass you and your desire to compete with them rather than love them.

When you rightly define what brings honor, you are free to love people rather than compete with them.

When I was in college, there was a collective honor given to the funniest person, so instead of being a real person with other people, I competed to be the most humorous.

In seminary, there was honor for being the most intelligent, so I would feel insecurity when a smarter person was in the room.

In pastoring, there’s a sense of honor in being the person most people turn to, so I can feel insecurity when that’s not me.

Since college, the person who was funnier and more honored than me has since made shipwreck of his marriage, faith, and life. It makes me think, What if I had loved him more and competed with him less? Could I help him more now?

You see, God doesn’t want us to hide our relational, honest selves behind a wall of performance aiming at getting glory over others. He wants us to find honor by being connected to Jesus and doing deeds of love that are worthy of honor from him and others.

One thing I love about God is that he does not accept and adopt us because of our works, but he loves to honor us for the works that we do for him. The words he will even speak over us one day are “well done good and faithful servant” (Matt 25:23).

And may our church be a place of showing honor to one another- especially the people the world does not honor (1 Cor 12:23). Are you listening to me this morning, not yet in a relationship with Jesus, and sensing your need to be freed from a drive toward achieving that doesn’t actually meet the needs of your heart? If so, please repent and believe and Jesus and begin following him with us.

Let’s pray.

[1] Leeland Ryken, https://dpz73qkr83w0p.cloudfront.net/en_US/whitepaper/Reading-the-Bible-as-Literature.pdf

[2] Calvin, J. Calvin’s Commentaries on Genesis; Beveridge, H., Translator; BakerBooks, 2009, 144.

[3] Derek Kidner, Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 1, Tyndale Old  Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1967), 173.