GOD IS IN CONTROL

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

When Rachel saw that she was not bearing Jacob any children, she became jealous of her sister. So she said to Jacob, "Give me children, or I'll die!"

Jacob became angry with her and said, "Am I in the place of God, who has kept you from having children?"

Then she said, "Here is Bilhah, my maidservant. Sleep with her so that she can bear children for me and that through her I too can build a family."

So she gave him her servant Bilhah as a wife. Jacob slept with her, and she became pregnant and bore him a son.

Then Rachel said, "God has vindicated me; he has listened to my plea and given me a son."

Because of this she named him Dan.

Rachel's servant Bilhah conceived again and bore Jacob a second son.

Then Rachel said, "I have had a great struggle with my sister, and I have won."

So she named him Naphtali.

When Leah saw that she had stopped having children, she took her maidservant Zilpah and gave her to Jacob as a wife. Leah's servant Zilpah bore Jacob a son.

Then Leah said, "What good fortune!" So she named him Gad.

Leah's servant Zilpah bore Jacob a second son.

Then Leah said, "How happy I am! The women will call me happy." So she named him Asher.

During wheat harvest, Reuben went out into the fields and found some mandrake plants, which he brought to his mother Leah.

Rachel said to Leah, "Please give me some of your son's mandrakes."

But she said to her, "Wasn't it enough that you took away my husband? Will you take my son's mandrakes too?"

"Very well," Rachel said, "he can sleep with you tonight in return for your son's mandrakes."

So when Jacob came in from the fields that evening, Leah went out to meet him. "You must sleep with me," she said. "I have hired you with my son's mandrakes."

So he slept with her that night. God listened to Leah, and she became pregnant and bore Jacob a fifth son.

Then Leah said, "God has rewarded me for giving my maidservant to my husband." So she named him Issachar.

Leah conceived again and bore Jacob a sixth son.

Then Leah said, "God has presented me with a precious gift. This time my husband will treat me with honor, because I have borne him six sons." So she named him Zebulun.

Some time later she gave birth to a daughter and named her Dinah.

Then God remembered Rachel; he listened to her and opened her womb. She became pregnant and gave birth to a son and said, "God has taken away my disgrace."

She named him Joseph, and said, "May the Lord add to me another son."

Genesis 30:1-24

This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

Question: Have you ever longed for something only to find another person get what you cherished the most?

How did you handle the situation?

Were you simply happy for the other person’s good fortune or were you envious to the point of resentfulness because they received what you wished you had?

Maybe this may have come in the work place where you were passed over for promotion in favor of a co-worker.

Or maybe it came in the way of a person being blessed with financial success that allowed them to afford the things you only dreamed of having.

Or maybe still, you might be like Rachel in today’s scripture, so obsessed with having a child that she was unable to be happy for her sister Leah when God blessed her to bear children with Jacob.

As we turn to our scripture passage for today, we pick up the story of Jacob, Rachel, and Leah. You’ll recall that the Lord allowed Leah, Jacob’s first wife, to conceive and deliver first, even though she was less favored less by her husband. You’ll remember how we learned that God watches over the unloved and will show His special grace and mercy to them in their time of need so to let them know He is with them and they are not alone. And so within the Leah story, it’s hard not to be happy for her but as we see in the scriptures, there was someone who was definitely not feeling that way and that was her sister, Rachel.

As we start Chapter 30, we see her (Rachel) in a rage over what has happened and in a fit of jealousy, she vents on Jacob saying, "Give me children, or I'll die!" as if Jacob was the problem in the matter. In response, we find Jacob speaking wise words that we should all keep in mind for the central point of the life lesson God is teaching us through this passage is found in these words. Jacob says:

"Am I in the place of God, who has kept you from having children?"

We need to grasp the essence of what Jacob said here. For he is essentially saying that God is the One who is in ultimately in control and telling Rachel that she is directing her frustration at the wrong person. If she wanted to learn why Leah was having children and she couldn’t, all she needed to do is seek the Lord’s guidance.

Unfortunately, Rachel wasn’t doing that and we get a sense that she had yet to learn how to simply trust God in the midst of challenging circumstances, to acknowledge His absolute authority, to know that things only happen when it is His will for them to happen.

And so I think we need to ask ourselves again:

How much are we like Rachel, expecting everything to happen just the way we want it to? And when we don’t get what we want in the time frame we want it, how often do we blame others or worse yet, God Himself?

If we’re honest, I think we all might see that we all have made the same mistake as Rachel, adopting her sinful attitudes ourselves.

Well, as we continue looking at what transpires, we see that Rachel doesn’t stop at just blaming Jacob for her misfortunes. For she becomes so tormented by seeing her sister prosper that she sends her maidservant, Bilhah, to have sex with Jacob so she could get pregnant and then claimed those children as her own like they had emerged from her own womb instead.

Go back to the scriptures and you will find Rachel say this after Bilhah had given birth to her second child by Jacob:

“I have had a great struggle with my sister, and I have won."

To Rachel, the childbirth matter had become a mere competition as she treated the precious children sent by God as mere statistics so she could keep score. The sad part of all this is that if she only had just turned to the Lord, she would have realized that all the children being born, no matter the mother, would later become the heads of the very 12 tribes of Israel. And so these babies weren’t just a number. They were holy blessings from God the Father sent to carry out the future of Israel.

Looking again within ourselves, I believe the Lord is asking us to step back and see that He is always working within the framework of our lives and there’s often more going on in His grand scheme of things than we can see. Emotions like jealousy, covetousness, and envy are all selfish feelings that serve to cry out from our hearts, "It’s all about me." In response, God would say, “Wrong! It’s all about Me…and Me alone.”

We would be well served to remember this.

Well, if Rachel’s antics hadn’t already gone far enough, we see her making still a third mistake. For we read where she goes to her sister Leah, the very sister she despised, and asked her for some of the mandrakes that her son, Reuben, had picked from the field.

You see, there was a superstition about mandrakes as people in biblical times thought that they would stimulate fertility when eaten. With this, Rachel would do anything to get her hands on a few, even if it meant allowing Leah to even have more children with Jacob. We can almost hear Rachel thinking to herself:

"Surely…surely the mandrakes will allow ME to get pregnant, "

Well, it didn’t happen as she expected and in the time she waited for those mandrakes to work, Leah had two more sons and a daughter!

Again, Rachel didn’t understand that nothing besides God Himself would allow her to bear children.

This leads us to another question to ponder:

Have we ever placed our trust in things other than God to try and help us get what we want?

Maybe we might have played the lottery, hoping we might instantly win the big jackpot and gain the solution to all our financial woes.

Maybe we believed that if we took some substance or stimulant, we would find just what we needed to help us achieve what we desires, whether it was athletically, dietetically, sexually, etc.

Or maybe, just maybe, we were even willing to follow any superstition, hunch, horoscope, ritual, or anything else with the hope that we might get our own way when we really should have just been trusting God and God alone.

Well, as we go back to our scripture passage, we do see where things end on a good note. Rachel does finally get to bear a child and she does so because it was God’s will for her to do so. In fact, Rachel proclaims:

"God has taken away my disgrace."

Note here that Rachel has grown spiritually through her journey. For she didn’t say that Jacob took away her disgrace. Ditto for the mandrakes she ate. No, she acknowledged that it was God who allowed her to conceive and give birth to Joseph and little did she know what his future would hold as he would become a prince of Egypt and save his father and eleven brothers in the process.

And so in closing, we come to the end of this valuable passage of scripture with the Lord teaching Rachel (and us) some important life lessons, lessons we can use as believers.

I don’t know about you but I find myself being able to relate to Rachel and I know I have acted like she did in my life. And like her, God has intervened to show me that He is in complete control of my life and all I need to do is just trust Him. The bottom line is that He has a plan for all of us and through our belief in His Son Jesus, it has the best ending ever.

If you’re struggling in the midst of life’s circumstances today, I encourage you to keep faith in your Lord and what He has in store for you. Embrace and accept His plan and never cease to pray for His will to be done.

When you see others being blessed, rejoice with them and be glad for them. This will keep you from falling into the sinful envy trap.

And above all things, never stop counting the blessings God has given you. Count them once, then count them again, and keep counting them until you fully realize His goodness in your own life. Anyone can sit around and wish things were better but when we obsess with this mindset, we lose sight of the gratitude we should show God for what He has provided.

In the end translation, I believe that when we look at our lives alone without comparing with someone else’s, we can realize how God has given us an abundance of blessings in our own right and move toward a spirit of thanksgiving and praise for what He has done, all the while looking forward to the blessings yet to come, blessings none better than the eternal life we’re promised through our belief in Jesus, His only Son.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it. Send any prayer requests to TheChristianWalkPrayers@gmail.com.