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"Light and Shadow" Text Comment v.17 Rebekah had prayed for another son, as we learn in 30:24. v.18 "Ben-Oni" means "son of my trouble" but "Benjamin" means "son of my right hand." The right was the favored side -- the Lord puts his sheep on his right hand, the goats on his left, in Matthew 25, for example. The Lord Christ sits at the right hand of the Majesty in Heaven. And so on. Rachel was his favored wife; Benjamin her son; and hence the name. v.22 The Bible never glosses over sin. It is as candid about the squalor of human behavior as any Hollywood producer who hopes to make money off that squalor by selling its titillating effect. But the Bible never panders to prurient desire by going into detail. You get the crime, but it is not described in detail. You get the lesson but are not harmed by it, but helped by it. There is a method Hollywood should learn.
v.26 A generalization. It obviously doesn't apply to Benjamin, whose birth in the Promised Land was just recorded. v.29 The reconciliation of the two brothers is reaffirmed in this joint act of filial piety. I can often wish that the Bible were not so candid, not so realistic in its description of human life and Christian life in this world. But, then, when I wish that, I am somehow reminded how necessary, even how consoling the truth always is at the last. We have three scenes in this material which contribute to a conclusion to the story of Jacob that is decidedly muted. Jacob's story ends not with a bang, but with a thud. To be sure, we are not finished with Jacob, we will hear more of him, but, really, from now on as an accessory to the personal history of his sons, especially Joseph and Judah. We read in that immortal text that brings to an end the triumphant 40th chapter of Isaiah: "...those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint." [40:31] Well Jacob did not soar back to his father's house; nor did he run. At most he walked back, and even then at a faltering pace. And, because we know by the Bible's own testimony and the teaching of this history we have been studying that Jacob was a man of true faith, the completion of his pilgrimage with a sigh, with a moan, is a study and a lesson and a caution for all true Christian believers. Indeed, what is so powerfully striking and impressive about the discouraging and demoralizing aspects of this final scene of Jacob's personal history, of the toledot of Isaac -- you will notice that a new division of the book of Genesis, a new "toledot" begins with 36:1 -- is their mixture in this narrative with its account of Jacob's obedience in purifying himself and his family, after the sins of chapter 34, the Lord's reward of that prompt obedience by causing a great fear of Jacob to fall upon the peoples of that area, the Lord's response to Jacob's worship at Bethel, reaffirming in the most impressive way the promises of the covenant God had made with him, and, finally, the chapter ending with a reminder of the reconciliation between Jacob and Esau which the Lord had brought to pass. All the elements of triumph and victory and God's blessing and faithfulness are here: Jacob's faith and obedience, his return to Bethel and worship there, and God's appearance to him to reaffirm Jacob's honored place in the history of salvation. But, in the midst of all that, there is also that which leaves us shaking our heads; that tarnishes the victory terribly. It comes in three scenes especially. The first of these scenes is the death of Rebekah's nurse, Deborah. What is noteworthy about v. 8 of chapter 35 is the way it draws attention to what is not there. The only other mention of Rebekah's nurse is found in 24:59. There we learn that many years before, when Rebekah left Paddan Aram to return with Abraham's servant to Canaan to become Isaac's wife, her nurse accompanied her. That is all. Her name is not mentioned. She is never again mentioned in the history until this notice of her death where we learn that her name had been Deborah. Now what makes this notice so striking is that Rebekah's own death is never mentioned. Her nurse's death is mentioned, but nothing is said anywhere of Rebekah's death or her burial. Now, I suppose that one cannot say this for a certainty, but having been living these past months in these chapters of Genesis, and seeing week after week the narrator's art on display, seeing how so much is conveyed with so little, it seems virtually impossible to believe that the narrator is not sending us a message in this short note concerning the death of Rebekah's nurse. Rebekah is being "gapped" as the scholars say. Attention is drawn to Rebekah in this mention of her nurse's death, a woman otherwise unnamed and unnoticed in the history, but drawn to Rebekah precisely in such a way as to emphasize her being ignored. The notice of her nurse's death immediately sets us to wondering what we have heard of Rebekah herself, and the answer is, of course, we have heard nothing. Not a word, since her conspiracy with her favorite twin son, Jacob, to steal the blessing from Esau by deceiving her husband, Isaac. We don't know when Rebekah died. We learn, in an incidental reference to her in 49:31, that she was buried in the same tomb where Abraham and Sarah and her husband Jacob were buried, but we are not told when, no mention of her death is given, or of anyone mourning for her, as Abraham mourned for Sarah, or of anyone doing acts of loving piety for her, as Jacob here did for Rachel. Even when we learn here that Isaac was still living, Rebekah is not even mentioned. In other words, here, at the end of Jacob's journey, we are forced to remember once more his and his mother's deceit and we are left to worry about what God thought about Rebekah's participation in that evil deed more than twenty years before. We have not escaped, even after all of these years, the reach of the wicked things that were done long before. Then, in a second scene, Rachel, Jacob's favorite wife, died giving birth to her second son, and, alas, showed little faith in dying. You remember (30:1) that Rebekah had once cried out to Jacob, "Give me children or I'll die!" She had not turned to the Lord, she had turned in anger to her husband and her solution to the problem was not prayer and humble submission to the will of God, but the way of the world around her, a surrogate pregnancy, with Bilhah, her maidservant doing the honors. After God later gave her a son of her own, Joseph, she said, "May the Lord add to me another son," but when she conceived again and when the child was to be born, dying as she was, she wanted to call him "the Son of my troubles" -- thinking of herself to the end. Rachel is no Hannah. She never did anything really that demonstrated her to be a woman of real faith. We wonder about her: from her bitter contest with Leah, to her reliance on magic in the matter of the mandrakes, to her stealing her father's household gods and then lying about it afterward. And then she died and still she gave no glory to God. Jacob at least knew better and with the perspective of faith changed his infant son's name. But here Jacob's marriage to his favorite wife ends with a moan, a sigh; nothing really to demonstrate Rachel's faith, though, of course, the reader knows that Benjamin makes twelve and the nation of Israel is now complete in its original form. But, the third scene, the worst of all, is Reuben's evil effort to displace his father in the leadership of the family. It is clear that Reuben's act of sleeping with Bilhah, Rachel's servant and, for a time, Jacob's concubine, was not merely an act of lust. Reuben wanted to ensure that he, Jacob's eldest son, would get the leadership of the family upon the death of Rachel. He knew that his father preferred Rachel to Leah, his mother. He did not want Bilhah, Rachel's servant and Jacob's sometime concubine, to succeed Rachel as his father's favorite wife. But, his act, also, virtually amounts to a claim to replace his own father in the leadership of the family. Reuben was making his play for inheritance and authority now, while his father was still alive, just as Absolom would later do by sleeping with David's concubines. It was, without question, a deeply evil act: an outrage against filial piety, against sexual purity, against the law and the will of God. In the Law of Moses it would be an act only the death penalty could avenge. In Reuben's case it was also an act of defiant hypocrisy. You remember that Reuben was among the leaders of the sons of Jacob who protested that the rape of Dinah by Shechem was "a disgrace in Israel." Shechem and Hamor had disgraced Israel and revenge must be sought. But, here, Jacob's eldest son does a still more disgraceful thing against Israel, his own father, and the self-righteous Reuben is exposed as nothing but a hypocrite. Whatever his motive in avenging Dinah, it wasn't any pure interest in the honor of his father, as he had claimed. But do you see what all of this says about Jacob's family and the disfunction of it. How profoundly unfaithful to God's gracious covenant this family still is! Jacob had bred into his sons a rivalry between one another and particularly, by his favoritism for Rachel and Rachel's children, a rivalry between the sons of Leah and the sons of Rachel. This act of Reuben, for someone who knows how the history proceeds from this point, is an ominous portent of troubles, grave troubles to come. The sons were eaten up with jealousy, a jealousy created by Jacob's ineffectual government of his home. Jacob had lost control of his family, and, clearly, had failed to instill covenantal character into his sons, even at this late date. What is more, as a further illustration of Jacob's impotence and ineptitude as a father, he seems to have done nothing in response to Reuben's direct assault on his parental authority, the sanctity of Jacob's home, and what must have been, for all intents and purposes, the rape of one of his wives by his own son! Jacob seems simply incapable of effective action when it came to his own family. This the Jacob who had wrestled the Lord himself to a standstill all through the night at Peniel! Here is the patriarch, the heir of the covenant of grace, back in the Promised Land, and what happens: his eldest son commits an outrage against everything pure and right. And, what is perfectly obvious, Jacob has no one to blame for all of this but himself, a man who had his moments of sterling faith -- a faith such as that he showed at Peniel, that we rightly envy --, but who, at the same time, was a miserable father. C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter to a friend, "It is terrible to find how little progress one's philosophy and charity have made when they are brought to the test of domestic life." [Letters to Arthur Greeves, 362-363] Well, Jacob would have been the first to admit that he knew the truth of that! So, what have we here? We have Jacob returned to the Promised Land, much more the man of faith than he was when he left it twenty years before. But the sins of the past are not forgotten, they still cast their shadow over his life and the life of his family, the years of fatherly indifference and neglect have taken their toll, his sons are in no shape whatsoever to take over custody of God's sacred covenant from their father, and now, back in the Land, he presides over a home racked by jealousy, resentment, and competition. And this is the family that will bring to the world its Savior, this is the family through which all the nations of the world will be blessed, this is the family that is to become a nation greater than any other, more numerous than the sands of the sea or the stars of the sky, and that will bring the salvation of God to all the earth. All through this material in Genesis we have been taught the complexity of life, the mystery of human affairs, even in the world of divine grace. There is here in this material exactly what one finds in the world and in the church of God, viz. a tragic sense of life. There is that in the lives, even of the truest saints, which is deeply disappointing. And it doesn't end with the patriarchs. Think of Eli and Samuel and David and Solomon and Hezekiah and Manasseh and Peter and, even Paul. For what, after all, did Paul mean when he said of himself, as an apostle thirty years into his apostleship, that he was a "bond-slave of sin?" And think of the church in Corinth and the church in Laodicea among many others. And then cast your eye over the long course of Christian history, and, when you have finished with all of that so often discouraging recollection, think of the Christians you yourself know or know about, and then, at last, think about yourself. I was reading, the other day, in the biography of John Charles Ryle, the famous Bishop Ryle of the 19th century Anglican church, the man Spurgeon said was the English church's best man. He wrote a number of books and a large number of little pamphlets he called "papers" by which he brought to the masses of English Christians biblical doctrine and its application to the heart and life in plain and graceful English. Many of his books have been reprinted in the 20th century and the reprinting, in 1952, of one of them, Holiness, at the insistence of Martin Lloyd-Jones, can be fairly said to be the event that began the renewal of interest in the Puritans and puritan theology in English speaking Christianity after World War II. Ryle was a man at odds with his time. He was an outspoken evangelical and defender of the Bible in a day of theological drift and widespread unbelief within the church. He was a puritan when puritanism was generally held in contempt even among the evangelicals in his own church. He was a Calvinist in a largely Arminian Christian world. And he was a firm Protestant during the days of Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic reawakening in the English church. At special services in the great cathedrals of England, Westminster and Canterbury, when numerous bishops would be present and he among them, at that moment in the service, he would lean forward in his stall so that people could see that he was not turning to the East during the recital of the Creed. But for his biblical fortitude his earnest interest in the salvation of souls, his faithful work as a pastor and later a bishop, for his helpful writings, most all of which were addressed to ordinary folk, he was much beloved of the earnest followers of the Lord Christ both inside and outside the Church of England. But, you know, Bishop Ryle was also a man of his time and his class. Though J.C. Ryle's father was a man of deep Christian conviction and faithfulness of life, he was also, as a prosperous merchant and landowner, very much a member of the English middle class. Some of his values, alas, were very much more the values of the English Middle Class than of the Kingdom of God. One of John Ryle Sr.'s other sons made the mistake of marrying a woman "of inferior rank" and he was ostracized from the family for his sin against their "class." [Toon and Smout, John Charles Ryle: Evangelical Bishop, 11] And, alas, J.C. Ryle grew up not only a faithful Christian, but too much a faithful Englishman of his class. Prosperous families in those days sent their sons to the established boarding schools of storied name: Eton, Harrow, and the like. Ryle sent his sons to Eton, to be educated in a school that had nothing but contempt for the doctrine and for the staunch evangelical faith of J.C. Ryle. His sons never recovered. The one dark shadow that lay across the life of this good and faithful man and churchman, and his greatest personal sadness, was that not one of his three sons once in adulthood continued to share his gospel convictions, his confidence in the authority of the Bible, or his plainspoken loyalty to the faith once delivered to the saints. Indeed, his eldest and favorite son, Herbert, became a professor of divinity at Cambridge and later a bishop himself in the Church of England. Not to put too fine a point on it, Herbert, an advocate of German skepticism about the Bible and all the new ideas then surfacing in liberal Christianity, pretty much undid what his father had done. Do you recognize the terrible irony here? Many of you have read with profit J.C. Ryle's paper entitled "The Duties of Parents." We have distributed it for years here. It is very good and very helpful as a simple statement of how children ought to be raised in a Christian home. It bears all the marks of Ryle's spiritual writing: clarity, forcefulness, tenderness, and Scripturalness. And here we give folk a pamphlet on the raising of Christian children written by a man whose three sons did not follow him in his Christian faith. How much like Jacob. A man who will be saved himself, but so much of his work burned up as so much wood, hay, and stubble. Don't think it can't happen to you! And we can multiply such stories by the hundreds, all of which, in one way or another illustrate the mystery and the deeply disappointing character of life in this world, even for the sons and daughters of the Kingdom of God, even for the church's patriarchs. We began this "toledot" of Isaac, which is, you remember, the history of Isaac's sons, not of Isaac himself, the history of Jacob and Esau, but, of course, primarily of Jacob; I say, we began this toledot of Isaac by observing Isaac's failures. Like Rebekah, he was "gapped" because his life, though the life of a faithful man at bottom, was in too many respects a disgrace to the covenant and unworthy to record. And we drew from that the basic point what would be reinforced countless times in the chapters that followed, that the covenant of God and the promise of salvation and the hope of mankind depended absolutely not on the faithfulness of men, not even the faithfulness of those men with whom God made his covenant, those men upon whom God lavished the favor of fellowship with Himself. The covenant and salvation -- not only the world's, but yours and mine -- depended wholly on God's own faithfulness to his promise, to his Word, and to the relationship he himself established with his chosen people. We end this toledot on the same theme, emphasizing the same great lesson of this history.
Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness. (Psalm 115:1) |
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