July 25, 2006

• Here is a list we were instructed to make in the Beth Moore Study of The Patriarchs. This will impact on our Genesis study, I should make you do this yourself,   but figure you can still be blessed with reading what I wrote. This is taken from Genesis 29:31-30:24. What is sad to me is poor Dinah has nothing said over her, she is a girl and in those days girls were not considered the blessing boys were perceived to be.

  
  

  I don’t know if we can do columns in Xanga so here is going to be the order – the children will be put in order of their birth.

  
  

  CHILD’S NAME IN CAPS/meaning of name/Mother
  The statement made about the child/who made the statement

  
  

  REUBEN/See, a son/Leah
  “It is because the Lord has seen my misery. Surely my husband will love me now.”/Leah.

  
  

  SIMEON/Heard/Leah
  “Because the Lord has heard that I am unloved he has therefore given me this son also.”/Leah

  
  

  LEVI/Attached/Leah
  “Now this time my husband will become attached to me. Because I have born him three sons.”/Leah

  
  

  JUDAH/Praise/Leah
  “Now I will praise the Lord.” Leah

  
  

  DAN/Judge/Bilhah (Rachel’s maidservant)
  “God has judged my case: and he has also heard my voice and given me a son.”/ Rachel

  
  

  NAPHTALI/My Wrestling/Bilhah
  “With great wrestlings I have wrestled with my sister, and indeed I have prevailed.”/ Rachel

  
  

  GAD/troop, fortune/Zilpah (Leah’s maidservant)
  “A troop comes.”/Leah

  
  

  ASHER/Happy/Zilpah
  “I am happy, for the daughters will call me blessed.”/Leah

  
  

  ISSACHAR/Hire, Wages/Leah
  “God has given me my wages, because I have given my maid to my husband.”/Leah

  
  

  ZEBULUN/Dwelling/Leah
  “God has endowed me with a good endowment; now my husband will dwell with me, because I have born him six sons.”/Leah

  
  

  DINAH/Leah

  
  

  JOSEPH/He will add/Rachel
  “God has take away my reproach, the Lord shall add to me another son.”/Rachel

  
  

  Later one more son will be born, but we will deal with that in the future.

  
  

  Can you imagine sharing your husband with another wife and two maidservants, sigh. I know this is not God’s heart for marriage. By the way, the quotes always come from the wives, not the maidservants.

  
  

  Genesis 29:31 we see that God opened up Leah’s womb when He saw that she was unloved, and Rachel was barren. So for the remaining part of the chapter of Genesis 29, Leah has many children, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah.

  
  

  Before we move on to Rachel’s offspring, I thought you might be blessed by looking at the descriptions of the first four children – Leah’s children.

  
  

  Here is Leah’s mindset when she was bearing these children:

  
  

  Reuben – Surely my husband will love me now.
  Simeon – I am unloved.
  Levi – I will be loved because of what I did.
  Judah – He doesn’t love me, so I will praise the Lord.

  
  

  Would that Leah would have stopped there – she came to a point we all seem to have to come to in our walk with Christ. Beth Moore on page 140 puts it succinctly, “The human psyche requires love for wholeness. That’s a fact of life. Self-love won’t cut it. Unfortunately, we are born into a world with no guarantee we’ll be loved. We’re all desperate for love, but in some seasons of our lives we become convinced we must have a certain person’s love to be complete. That person doesn’t have to be a spouse or a romantic interest. He or she may be a parent, a relative, a neighbor, a church member, a mentor, or a peer.”……”Leah was desperate for Jacob’s love, so she became obsessed with having his children. If untreated by the love of God, desperation gives birth to obsession. Invariably we learn what Leah discovered. Obsession neither heals desperation or fills its lack. The statements Leah made are like mirrors reflecting her heart.” and then on page 145 “Leah finally—-if temporarily—- progressed to a place where God became the only sense in a senseless spiral, and she gave Him praise. If only Leah could have remained in the mindset of praise for all she had instead of returning to misery for all she lacked, how different her life would be.”……”Haven’t we had similar experiences? Has God ever brought you through a very painful process where you were finally able to think victoriously? Then over time did something happen to catapult you back into the old cycle of defeated thinking? Have we lost ground we worked so hard to gain? Let’s regain the freedom we lost! Our Liberator has not changed. Beloved, let’s allow God to show us our deepest desperation is for Him. The troubled child of desperation is obsession, but the healthy child of desperation is devotion. Our desperation will birth something. What will it be?”

  
  

  Ouch! this one hit home for me. I have so often grabbed on to someone or something to fill the need, to find out that they could not meet my incredible void of needs. For many years I think I drove my therapists crazy with the needs I had, with the demands for attention and care, far exceeding what was “normal”. Abuse leaves big voids, and no human on earth can fill them, only God can. God is the one that started the healing in me, He is the only one who can fulfill the emptiness.

  
  

  Genesis 30:1-2 “Now when Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister, and said to Jacob, “Give me children or I will die!” And Jacob’s anger was aroused against Rachel, and he said, “Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?”

  
  

  We have to be sooooo careful what we say. Rachel will end up having one more child not covered in this chapter, Benjamin, and she will die in childbirth. When we pray, we should not demand that something happen, God sees things so much more clearly than us. In a way she is in the same situation as Abram and Sara, waiting, and waiting for her children. She decides to do what Abram and Sara did, the use of her maid, Bilhah.

  
  

  BILHAH – means troubled
  ZILPAH – means to trickle as myrrh

  
  

  We will now see a frenzied competition between the two wives to bear the most sons. This competition is sort of bizarre to our standards because of the maids being used for bearing children. At one point there will be a competition for mandrake root – mandrakes were believed to provide fertility, guess that is a remnant from their past idolatry. And when Reuben finds mandrakes for his mother, the two women barter for the chance to sleep with Jacob.  Leah will tell Jacob, verse 16 “You must come into me, for I have surely hired you with my mandrakes.”

  
  

  I guess the one person who probably enjoyed this frenzy was Jacob, but imagine having a household full of women competing on all levels, and hoping to bear offspring. I am certain that God did not have this kind of activity in mind when he made his covenant with Abraham. God has a different sense of timing, and frenzied activity can sometimes delay God’s best plans for us.

  
  

  Please refer to the above list to see the comments made. It is important to know that Dinah will play a role in the future of this family.

  
  

  I think we will stop here and deal with Jacob and Laban’s business dealings tomorrow.

  
  

  Hoping you have a blessed day.

  
  

  Heather

  • 12:20 am
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