Part of a series, The Man God Mastered:
A sermon preached at St Alban’s Highgate 13th August 2017
Australia is to have a postal plebiscite about same-sex marriage. The question that should be on everyone’s mind is the basis on which we decide such a thing. How do we decide what it right and wrong? Our generation is super-moralistic, but no one says on what basis moral judgements are made. The Christian basis has been abandoned. A titanic effort is underway to undo everything that has been put together on a Christian foundation, including marriage. But no one is telling us what is the basis on which this brave new world will stand.
We come to our fourth study of the life of Jacob and the question of marriage confronts us in a dramatic way: marriage, love and marriage, marrying more than one wife, marrying sisters, surrogate motherhood. We will need to give some thought to these things before we tackle what the story is really about. About the only thing this story doesn’t touch on is same-sex marriage.
Jacob reaches the well at the edge of Haran and meets his cousin, Rachel. It seems to have been love at first sight, and mutual. Once again Jacob proves he is no weakling. No one can move the stone covering the well until the main body of shepherds arrives, but for Rachel – Jacob moves it with ease!
His uncle Laban offers him a job and he agrees to work seven years for the hand of Rachel. It is still the rule in Africa that a man’s family pays for his wife. The going rate is eleven cows or the equivalent, which in South Africa is a big sum and takes a lot of earning and saving and collecting. But all my students had to do it, if they wanted to marry. Lobola is pretty well universal in Africa. It looks like it has come down to them, like a lot of things, from a time before the birth of Christianity; it is old!. The interesting thing is that somewhere along the way the Jewish custom swung over to the opposite: the bride’s family pays a dowry to secure a good marriage partner for their daughter, and secure her against being cast off. Which leads us to an interesting point.
I wonder if any of you saw Monday night’s SBS program on the Tower of Babel. It was odd so soon after last Sunday’s sermon on Jacob’s dream. Nebuchadnezzar built a 90 metre high ziggurat in Babylon; its foundations have been uncovered. “So the Tower of Babel was real,” said the professor. “The Israelite captives would have seen it.” Not everyone would have picked up the implication that the Bible’s story, including the story of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was a fiction written more than a thousand years after its time. Some people think that, but there is no basis for the idea. Christians and Jews have believed in these things as history for millennia. It is only in recent times that scholars have suggested they are only stories, invented at the time of Israel’s exile to Babylon. The ziggurat of Ur, which I showed last Sunday was built one thousand five hundred years before Nebuchadnezzar’s, just where Abraham came from, and I am not suggesting it was the original Tower of Babel. The attempt to build the Tower of Babel is hundreds of years older again. You need to be very careful with these seemingly scholarly programs, that oh so cleverly dismantle the Bible. We will see many more of them.
One of the things that strengthens my confidence in Genesis is that its world is so very different to the world of later times. It corresponds to much that archeology has uncovered about what things were like at the time of the patriarchs – like Jacob needing to pay for his wife, which was not the custom later. He even marries his wife’s sister, which is forbidden in the law of Moses, which came 400 years later. I noted how strange it is that the Israelite’s story of their ancestor hero portrays him as a lying cheat. It shows that the story is true. So with his marriage to a woman Jewish law forbade. Would any later writer make this up? And then this convoluted story of children born to Leah, then to Rachel’s servant Bilhah, then to Leah’s maidservant, Zilpah, then to Leah again and finally to Rachel. Is that a story that was made up to legitimize Israel’s twelve tribes taking ownership of Canaan? No, these stories have the ring of truth, however strange they seem.
What then are we to say about all this marrying and sleeping with servants? It is telling us what happened, and how the Israelite people came to be. It is a mistake to see it as a moral lesson, or as teaching polygamy, as Joseph Smith thought. The early Mormon movement taught that a man should have more than one wife. Joseph Smith had between thirty and forty. Mormons believed – perhaps they still do – that men will have multiple wives in heaven. The practice of polygamy was only abolished in the Mormon church in 1890.
In Jacob’s world it was common for a man to marry more than one wife. Jacob was conforming to his culture. Laban was concerned about marrying Rachel off before her elder sister. He was quite happy for Jacob to have them both in return for fourteen years of free labour from his son-in-law.
So should we conclude that God is uninterested in morality? That would not be true. God is intensely concerned about doing what is right, and with true goodness, but the human raw material he starts with is deeply flawed. It is the Book of Genesis itself which lays down for us God’s intention for marriage. Adam is lonely; God makes a woman suited to him. She is flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone. The two become one flesh. Jesus made it clear, if it wasn’t already, that this meant that life-long faithfulness between one man and one woman was God’s intention from the start. The person who wrote that story also recorded Genesis 3-11 where we see human cultures degenerating. Lamech is the first record of someone having two wives. Jacob enters into that history when culture had degenerated a long way from Eden. But God was at work, ultimately to do a new thing. He still is!
So let me say that the marriage of one man and one woman, the cultural norm for Christians and modern Jews, and for many other peoples of the world, is as God would have it. Joseph Smith was mistaken in his reading of Scripture. Does this mean that it is wrong for an African or a Muslim to have more than one wife? It is not the pattern God wills, but if he marries within his culture – well, it is a fact, and the important thing is that he cares properly for both his wives. The Bible does not teach that it is continuing sexual immorality to have a second partner; but legislates the rights of the second partner, so that she is properly cared for. And this is definitely a problem. I spent some time with a young Kenyan who had “two mummies”, as he put it. His father wanted an educated wife, so took a second woman, who had completed primary school. And then he completely neglected his first wife, so she would have starved, if the second wife hadn’t taken pity on her. This is totally forbidden in the law of Moses. My bus driver in Palestine was a Muslim. He told me he agreed with Christians on one thing, “You only allow one wife. I have four. It is terrible.” He had to provide for his four wives, and then there are the quarrels. You think it can be bad for a man with one wife – try it with four!
In the case of Rachel and Leah we see a very natural jealousy of two women competing for the love of the same man, both wanting more children than the other to win his favour. This is surely one reason Moses forbad marrying sisters.
Next comes the question of surrogacy. A woman bears a child on someone else’s behalf. There was nothing unlawful about it then, and it happens today. The problem was not sexual immorality. Mosaic law required that a man should sleep with the wife of his deceased brother to give her a child to inherit her dead husband’s estate, whether or not he was married himself. That was brotherly, not immoral. Mostly what we are dealing with in surrogacy is the exploitation usually of a poor woman to obtain her child for someone else. That was the case then and so it is now. It ignores the natural bond that is likely to develop between the biological mother and her child. It also ignores the child’s natural desire to know its true mother.
Women have always been vulnerable to exploitation. Their best hope was a caring family. The law is trying to take over, but it is having a hard time of it, judging by the amount of physical abuse, breached restraining orders, suicides, drug abuse, not to mention the sex-slavery which you would think would be a thing of the past. But the most prevalent form of abuse of women today is the sheer number who are drawn into living together by men who will not commit and marry them. Many of these men will leave when the relationship doesn’t please them. Their abandoned partners may well in desperation be drawn into another such relationship. Following the protection and care of a family, a properly considered marriage to one man is the best chance of happiness and safety most women will have, and remember, I am not just talking about ourselves in our well-ordered, thickly policed society. There is a world of women out there for whom there is no care, if family and marriage fails them.
Strange that we should be looking at this story just when we are being called to vote on changing an understanding of marriage that is thousands of years old, honoured by most major religions, and foundational to God’s pattern for human society. I will make no comment on same-sex marriage this morning, except to say that the Bible, properly understood, should be our guide.
And now let us turn to what the story is really about. God has made a world-changing promise to Abraham and repeated it to Jacob, and now he is beginning to work it out. The foundation of the twelve tribes of Israel is being laid: the family who will take over Canaan. They will also be there – in perfection – in the new world, which God has announced, but is yet to unveil. Remember Jesus’ words to his disciples at the Last Supper? “You are those who have continued with me in my trials, and I assign you a kingdom as my Father has assigned me, that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and you will sit on twelve thrones ruling the twelve tribes of Israel.” We see those thrones in the Book of Revelation.
But here, we are back at the beginning, and Jacob is feasting and making merry at the thought that his seven years of labour are over, and his beloved Rachel is about to be his. He drank too much, for he didn’t notice that the woman who was in his bed when he finally retired was not Rachel, and he woke in the morning to discover he was married to the elder sister. This is the man who once disguised himself as his hairy brother to deceive his blind father, and stole his blessing. Genesis makes it hard for us to overlook this. Also when Leah’s son gathers mandrakes from the field and Rachel asks for some we catch a glimpse of the sadness of this dysfunctional family. “Tonight I will let you sleep with my husband, if you give me some of those mandrakes.” Sounds like: “Give me some of that stew and you can have the stupid birthright.” As often as Jacob thought back to that night, and other painful incidents, he must have said to himself, “It is only what I did myself”. God was beginning to teach him. The new Jacob was under construction. That is why we read in Hebrews about the Lord’s discipline. God is our Father. He treats us as sons. Sometimes his discipline is painful, but it is ultimately for our salvation.
Laban is not altogether heartless. He gives Rachel to Jacob, and then begins what should have been the happy marriage to follow the great love affair. But it is a tale of jealousies and competition and frustration. Yet emerging from it all comes the blessing of many sons. In those days of little government, and much lawlessness, and no machines, twelve sons was undoubtedly a blessing.
And notice how God favours Leah: Leah the unlovely and the unloved. And notice how God finally answers Rachel’s prayers and gives her a son – just one: Joseph, who will become Jacob’s favourite, and later break his heart. This is a passionate real-life story. It makes me think of my own family’s story; I wonder if it does yours.
One thing we all have in common, the Christian and the non-Christian, the wealthy and the poor, the immigrant and the Australian-born, the hetero and the same-sex attracted – we all have a mother and a father, though we may not always know them. There is a family story for every one of us. And often there is great sadness. I think of myself as fortunate to have had a mother and father who loved me and made my childhood happy. But towards the end of her life my mother wrote her story, and it was harrowing at times: her parent’s unhappy marriage, a scandal, divorce, her own difficult marriage, losing her firstborn son in early childhood, and then me seeming like I wouldn’t make it. And yet through it all there were incredible blessings, most of all finding God in her mid-thirties. And I can testify she died a deeply contented person, very much in love with my father until the day of his death. This is real life. And when I look even at my close relatives, more of the same. My favourite cousin – passionate Christian – smashed to a pulp in a head-on accident. I don’t know how she is still alive. Beautiful woman! They pieced her head and face back together like a jigsaw puzzle. Yet she is still praising God and living for Christ. I could go on. How is it with you and your family? That is the question. How do you cope with the sadnesses and the blessings? Many turn away from their marriage, because it hasn’t yielded all they dreamed of. Many turn away from God: how can he allow such things? But this is normal – outside of Eden, and we can embrace it. My wife pointed out to me something wonderful, which I had missed: Jacob’s care of his two wives and his growing affection. You see it clearly at the end, when they die. No marriage is without its difficulties. A marriage carried through to old age yields rich blessings.
Yes, God is blessing Jacob, all who are with him, and everything he touches. Laban realizes that things have never been so good since Jacob came to stay. He offers him wages. Jacob accepts the dark-coloured sheep and the speckled goats. Laban cheats and removes these from his flock and sends them off with his sons. But God keeps enriching Jacob anyway. Again we mustn’t make the mistake of thinking the Bible is teaching us genetics or how to increase you flock. There is some primitive breeding and selection going on there, but mixed with God’s special action. The point is that God has promised blessing and is working it out. And it is stirring jealousy. So finally God tells Jacob it is time to leave and go home. He has been away for twenty years.
“I am the God of Bethel, where you anointed a pillar and made a vow to me. Now arise, go out from this land and return to the land of your kindred.” (Genesis 31.13)
Next time we will accompany Jacob on his amazing journey home, in the course of which he will encounter the great experience of his life and change his name to Israel.