v. 15 The key term in this entire passage, the account of Jacob in Paddan Aram, is the Hebrew verb "to serve", even to serve as a slave (ayin, beth, daleth). It appears here and then also in vv. 18, 20, 25, 27, 30. The related noun means "servant" or "slave." Like the term in Greek it can refer to service or work in general or to something more servile and slave-like, as is the case here. We miss the connecting thread because the English translations render the word differently, sometimes "work" sometimes "serve." It is going to be a key word in this entire section, the narrative of Jacob in Paddan Aram, because it is, for Jacob, an exile in servitude. Also a key term is the word for "pay" or "wages" [sin, kaph, resh].

Laban's question may actually sound friendly, the concern of a relative. But why raise the issue of wages and pay at all? The dollar signs, we will discover, are already appearing in Laban's eyes, he sees an opportunity here.

v. 17 "weak" or "soft" is thought to mean that her eyes did not have that fire and sparkle that is so prized in the East. Whether that is the only feature that let her down is not clear, for Rachel's description as a girl with a beautiful figure and a lovely face suggests that she was altogether more attractive than Leah. The Bible is never embarrassed by the significance of physical appearance to attraction, especially the attraction of men to women.

v. 18 In old Babylon casual laborers received between one half and one shekel per month. That would be, at the most, twelve shekels per year. The OT law fixed the maximum bride price at fifty shekels (Deuteronomy 22:29). Seven years at twelve shekels suggests that Jacob was offering Laban a very handsome marriage gift in exchange for Rachel's hand. Perhaps already he realized that nothing short of a large amount would satisfy his grasping uncle. But, in any case, he was happy to pay the price because he loved Rachel.

v. 19 In light of Jacob's precise "I will work seven years for your younger daughter Rachel," it is perhaps significant that Laban does not expressly say that he will give Jacob Rachel for his work -- he just says "It is better than I give her to you than to someone else..." Is he already hatching his plot and preparing his defense? "I never said I would give you Rachel!"

v. 20 "a few days" Remember his mother, Rebekah, had told Jacob to stay with his uncle Laban "a few days" before returning home (27:44).

v. 21 Once again, commentators wonder if the narrator is not indicating that Laban was simply not interested in his nephew's happiness or well-being. Why should Jacob have to ask for Rachel again? Did Laban really need to be reminded that Jacob's seven years were up? Jacob seems to be demanding his rights because he knows that Laban would not consider them of his own initiative and is always going to be unwilling to give Jacob anything more than he absolutely has to.

v. 24 Ordinarily a wedding in those times involved processions to and from the bride's house, a reading of the marriage contract, a large feast attended by family and friends, which was ended by the groom wrapping his cloak around the bride, who had remained veiled throughout, and taking her to the wedding chamber. But, in Jacob's case, of course, his family was not present and that made it much easier for Laban to deceive him. Perhaps too much drink was involved as well. But the veil and the night kept Jacob from discerning what was going on, just as Isaac's blindness had prevented him from detecting the trick Jacob played on him!

Zilpah is part of the dowry for Leah. But, she will also figure in the story as it unfolds.

v. 25 The word "deceived" used with such an aggrieved tone by Jacob, is used by Esau, in the same tone, of Jacob's deceiving him (27:36)! Laban had exchanged daughters as Jacob had exchanged sons to deceive his father. Here is Jacob condemning himself.

v. 27 Both his financial necessity and his desire for Rachel left Jacob with no alternative but to accept Laban's harsh demands. The gloves are off. Laban had him over a barrel. No pretense remains that Laban has any true interest in his nephew. So much for Jacob's hopes of returning immediately with his new bride to Canaan. At least he gets to have Rachel right away and not at the end of the seven years of working for her. But imagine Jacob and Rachel's thoughts as they lasted out that first bridal week; and imagine Leah's thoughts knowing what was to come. Her father had sold her with no thought whatsoever of her affections or feelings or the happiness of her life. And similarly, he had been happy to place Rachel in a situation in which a romance that might well have bloomed into something remarkably lovely now is darkened. By his heavy-handed abuse of everyone involved he saw to it that the home that both of his daughters would occupy would be embittered and that the two girls themselves would be antagonists of one another. Terrible!

v. 30 The next seven years are not said to have passed like "a few days." The house was divided, everyone was embittered in one way or another. Jacob loved one wife and not another and we shall see in the next paragraph that that fact portended further troubles and sorrows ahead. These are not people that lived happily ever after. Jacob's bitter resentment of Laban is more hinted at than directly mentioned (unlike Esau's bitter resentment of his deceiver), but it will have its consequences as well in due time.

Now, coming so soon after Bethel, and the promises that God made to Jacob there, we naturally wonder how this disaster can be squared with those divine promises of blessing and protection. We appreciate that Jacob must be punished for what he did and surely this punishment perfectly fit his crime against his father and his brother. "The Lord disciplines him whom he loves and punishes every son whom he receives" (Hebrews 12:5-6). But, there is more than just Jacob's punishment here. We are going to find divine providence overruling Laban's deceit and bringing great things, important things from it. Eight of the twelve tribes of Israel would trace their descent back to the unloved Leah and her maid, Zilpah. Surely there is a great lesson in that. God blesses and uses the poor, the weak, the needy to accomplish his will and work in the world. What does Paul say? "Not many wise; not many influential; not many of noble birth. ... God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things and the things that are not -- to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him." (1 Corinthians 1:26-29).

Further, God promised Jacob many descendants, and God fulfilled that promise, though he did it by overruling both Jacob's and Laban's sin. To some degree, every single promise God makes to his children is kept by means of his overruling our sins.

Further, there is a picture of a still larger reality here as well. Jacob is deceived and spends fourteen years working effectively as a slave. His is a bitter servitude in some ways. He knows that he is a prince, but he lives as a slave. But, what will be the result of that long servitude. He will eventually leave Paddan Aram a wealthy and a powerful man. Just as Abraham left his exile in Egypt with great wealth; just as Israel will leave her long, bitter sojourn as slaves in Egypt with great wealth, so Jacob here, and all because God was with him as he had been with Abraham and would be with Israel.

In very many ways, as the Bible will teach, we -- the children of God -- are now in servitude in this world. We cannot spread our wings as we wish. We do not yet rule as we will. We encounter many things in this world -- our own sins chief among them -- as slaves experiencing servitude, but the day is coming when, like Jacob leaving Paddan Aram after his twenty years of servitude there, we will enter upon our inheritance, we will leave our servitude and step into the world to come and into a peace and prosperity, a power, an authority that will make the greatest wealth and prosperity ever seen here seem like abject poverty in comparison. And it will be -- for us as it was for Jacob -- because God will have been with us.

All of that is true and important, but these are themes we have considered already in the previous material.

But there is something else here worth our pondering.

The life of Jacob is the life of Christians in the world, the life of faith, the life of the church. The Bible mines this material over and over again for lessons that are valid for any and all times. And in this respect too: that the church encounters the culture of the unbelieving world as a culture that it must offend and that must be offended by it.

In verse 26 Laban defends himself to Jacob, after his cruel deceit, by saying, "It is not our custom here..." Literally, he says, "Such things are not done here..." You can hear the offended tone in what he says. "It just simply is not done!"

Now, to be sure, there is a gigantic hypocrisy here on Laban's part. If he really felt that he couldn't give the younger before the older (and that is not by any means certain), he certainly could have told Jacob that beforehand. The deceit is proof of Laban's evil intent. What is more, we have no hint that he tried to marry his elder daughter to someone else during the seven years that Jacob was working for Rachel. The implication of the text is that Laban saw this as a way of getting both his daughters married and making a killing in the bargain.

But it is a perfect picture of the offended virtue of the world in the face of the Christian message and the Christian church. The world says to us, in a thousand ways, "It simply is not done!" And is completely blind to the gigantic hypocrisies her so-called moralities require of her.

C.S. Lewis makes this point brilliantly in Books iv and v of Mere Christianity. Everyone's life has a moral cast to it; he cannot escape it, for he is made in the image of God. But the clarity of moral vision differs profoundly. Here is Lewis:

"...when a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his badness less and less. ... Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either."

"Those who are seriously attempting chastity are more conscious, and soon know a great deal more about their own sexuality than anyone else. They come to know their desires as Wellington knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes knew Moriarty; as a rat-catcher knows rats or a plumber knows about leaky pipes. Virtue -- even attempted virtue -- brings light; indulgence brings fog."

And what is true of individuals is also true of entire cultures. The more corrupt and sinful a culture becomes the less capable it becomes of moral judgment. But, it still poses as a defender of morality, as a moral judge of highest principles.

We saw that at Sodom when the evil men of that place condemned Lot as judgmental, "holier-than-thou", because he refused to go along with their evil sexual schemes.

And we have come to the same pass in our own day. A recent World magazine article reports the new arguments being made for pederasty, sex between adults and children, not in some murky underground publications, the type that pedophiles alone know about, but now in the mainstream press of professional psychology and psychiatry. The leading journal of the American Psychological Association recently published an article that purports to show that sex between adults and children -- what our culture has long understood and described and punished as a crime of child abuse -- can often be a positive experience for the child. Many of those numbers are, of course, heavily skewed toward homosexuality, as many more young men than young women viewed their childhood sexual encounters with adults as a positive thing -- though, interestingly, the vast majority of those surveyed still said it was a negative thing.

But, raise this as the moral issue that it is; call those who advocate pederasty the moral lepers that they are; point out the rather obvious fact, however unwelcome, that these results tend to confirm what researches have always known anyway, viz. that child molestation is an important factor in the emergence of homosexual desires in many young men, and the culture will tell you, in so many words, "Such things are simply not done!" "Such statements, such claims, such arguments are simply not acceptable here!" And it will speak in Laban's highly offended tone. "Who do you think you are, to judge those who get abortions, or who would trample on the freedom of young people to enjoy their sexuality without the constraints of ancient and irrational taboos, or who are unfaithful to their wives and leave their children." "You 'holier-than-thou' types make us sick.' And they will mean every word of moral outrage that they utter.

The 20th century has produced Labans aplenty. Evil men and women who successfully persuaded whole cultures to abominate and despise those who dared to criticize and condemn their wickedness. These are the true descendants of the Enlightenment and its intellectual and moral leader, Voltaire. Voltaire, you may remember, once wrote a book on the moral education of young people -- the kind of thing that really interests intellectuals today (teach them the validity of the gay lifestyle, the "neutrality" of abortion, the value of sexual expression, the evil of distinctions based on gender, and the other cardinal moralities of our day) -- but Voltaire himself, fathered five children by a woman he made virtually his sex-slave and then, because he couldn't be bothered, sent his offspring by her to virtually certain death in an institution.

It is easy to love mankind, for mankind is an abstraction. But to love real people is another matter altogether. Voltaire in his old age was so eaten up by bitterness and hatred that even his embarrassed friends referred to him as "the genius of hate." [In Thomas Reeves, The Empty Church, 75] Just like Laban, who could raise himself straight up to say with the deepest moral conviction that marrying the younger off before the older "is just not done!"; but who could treat his own daughters with absolutely no regard for their own feelings, affections, and future happiness. Laban was a true forerunner of 20th century man!

But Jacob, and in him all the believing church of Jesus Christ, is of a different cast. He has his warts, to be sure, and they are ugly. But he is not bound, he will not be bound, to the morality of that corrupt and evil culture -- corrupt for all of its easy moral posing.

Throughout Genesis we see the position of the culture being rejected and overthrown, just as it is here. It is, in fact, a major theme in Genesis, that God's kingdom and people move forward precisely in violations of the cultural norms, especially this norm of primogeniture. It is Isaac, not Ishmael who inherits the covenant promise. It is Jacob, not Esau. Jacob will bless Ephraim before Manasseh, the younger of Joseph's two sons. It will be Joseph, not Reuben, Jacob's firstborn, who receives the double portion in Jacob's blessing of his sons and Judah who gets the greatest of all the promises made by Jacob to his sons. In case after case God does or God sees to the doing of what in the eyes of the world "simply is not done!"

And here is the question and the challenge for us. Do we accommodate ourselves to our culture or do we resist it in hopes of transforming it, or, at least, in hopes of not being sucked into its ever so moral immorality.

I had thoughts of taking this text in other directions for this morning sermon. After all, a text this rich can be the basis of many sermons, as we said at the beginning, all of them faithful to the truth taught here. But I have so often of late, in so many different ways, been reminded of the contest that is underway, as we speak, for the heart, for the loyalty of the church, that it seemed to me that this was the point to make from our reading. Will we listen to the offended virtue in Laban's "It simply is not done..." and find ourselves nodding in understanding, sympathy, and agreement? Or, in loyalty to God and his Word, will we see the real evil in Laban, the galling hypocrisy, the utterly immoral morality, and refuse to take our cue from him in any way. "If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him."

I've heard of late of a man, a church elder, whose long-held and sturdy views on the Sabbath day and its sanctity as the Lord's Day, suddenly have begun to change now that his son's prowess on the basketball court have brought invitations to play in prestigious leagues which play and in tournaments which are held on Sunday. To withhold from a young man opportunities for athletic stardom over some old-fashioned religious rules? It simply is not done!

All over the evangelical world today people heretofore loyal to the straightforward sense of Holy Scripture are abandoning that sense in regard to the Bible's teaching about the distinction of genders precisely because the world is saying to them, in tones of such offended virtue, "such distinctions are simply not made here!"

And on all hands the clear, sharp, antithesis that Christianity demands -- between right and wrong, between God and the Devil, between salvation and damnation, between heaven and hell -- is being turned to mush because moral absolutes of that kind are simply not tolerated in our corrupt world. And Christians, actually, find themselves ashamed that somehow they have violated the moral code of the world in which they live. They hang their heads when Laban tells them that "Such things are just not done."

I tell you, brothers and sisters, these are Christian people today who when Christ was accused of being a drunk and a glutton, would not have agreed, perhaps, but would suggest, in tones suggesting that no one cared so much for the Lord's reputation as they, that perhaps next time the Messiah shouldn't eat quite so much or enjoy himself quite so obviously at the table. And when unbelieving men and women came to them to express their offense at the Savior's hard words, they would put their arms around the shoulders of the Prince of Life and encourage him to tone down the rhetoric -- just a bit -- for the sake of reaching those who needed most to hear. This is the class of people who betray the Lord with a kiss!

And everyone of us has done this himself or herself; every time we have taken the world seriously when, with all of its offended virtue, it has objected to the ethics and the theology we have been taught in the Word of God.

You are living in a day when the church is collapsing into the world all around you. The world is saying to the church: "make me feel good or be gone." And in many quarters the church cannot run fast enough to make the attempt to make the world feel good. And it makes the attempt by taking with utmost seriousness whatever the world says, when it says, "Such things are simply not done!"

What will the next twenty years bring? Well, I hope, that if the world continues to maintain its tortured morality over against that of the Bible and the faithful Christian church, I very much hope it will be twenty years of exile in servitude for the loyal sons and daughters of Almighty God. For then we can be sure that when our Paddan Aram comes to an end, the Promised Land, with its prosperity, its milk and honey, and its peace will beckon.

Laban for all his moral posing, knew nothing about good and evil. For all his offended virtue, he had no virtue. For all his abuse of his daughters and his nephew, he received in due time, the just deserts of his sins, as we shall see -- rejection by his daughters and the loss of all he hoped to gain from Jacob. So will be the fate of this culture of ours. We must take our cue from the Word of God -- bear the reproach of the world with confident and patient reflection, as we await the day of his appearing. Those who trust in him will never be put to shame!

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