Clough Genesis Lesson 63
The bride brought to Isaac – Genesis 24:27-67
In Leviticus 24 we’ve been studying the calling of the bride for Isaac; this is known in the Scriptures as one of the short stories, a short story that is often used to illustrate divine guidance. And as such it contains all the principles that one needs to define the outline of divine guidance. First of all, what is divine guidance? Well, first of all what it isn’t. Divine guidance is very often misunderstood in our day because people think that divine guidance is a direct voice of God, a sort of infallible guidance system that need not ever be questioned and that is always inerrant. That is not divine guidance. If that were taking place today we would have Scripture written and we would have the Bible added to; that can’t be the case, the Scripture is closed, the canon is shut; God has not spoken directly for 1900 years. So if that is not divine guidance what is divine guidance? Divine guidance is simply discovering truth and it is not infallible in the sense… not that the truth that we’re trying to look for is inerrant but rather our apprehension of it is colored with error.
Last time we dealt with some of the principles of divine guidance and showed, number one, the principle of dedication. Quite often God will simply not permit you to know His will until a certain transaction has taken place. And the magic transaction is the bet, or the point where you gamble your entire future on him. In other words, there has to be a transaction, it is spoken of in Romans 12:1-2 and other passages in the Scripture, which states that we must agree to do God’s will before we even know what God’s will for our future is. It is a gamble, it’s betting our life on the fact that He knows what He’s doing and that His will will always be better for us in the long run than our will. Another way of saying it is that until this takes place in the Christian life, that as a Christian grows and his eyes spiritually become more acute and he sees more of God’s truth, as this sphere expands and expands, suddenly he decides that there’s a lot out there for the future and at that point we have to come to a place where we bow before His implicit authority and until that bowing takes place, until that commitment to His will and to abandon our own details, until all that takes place there really isn’t any kind of dedication and therefore the Scriptures suggest that we’re going to have a problem with divine guidance. This, then, is one of the preliminary principles of ascertaining God’s will for our lives.
The Scriptures put it in several places by simply saying that if you don’t will to know His will then you won’t know it. It’s that simple; it has nothing to do with anything magical, nothing to do with anything extra, it’s just simply to do whether or not we will to bow before His will or not. This sometimes takes a long time. I can recount the time when I was in the Air Force, deciding whether to go into the ministry or not and I had two paths before me; one path was very well defined, I’d been offered a regular commission, had a future all scoped out. The other one was full of the unknown, and the question was whether or not I would trust God with this whole package of unknowns and bet that this was what He wanted me to do and that He was perfectly competent of taking care of me. And so I can remember going through many months of agonizing choice, going back and forth, thinking it through and so on. And this has to take place, not that everybody goes into fulltime Christian work, but it has to take place as far as committing yourselves to His will, such that if tomorrow He led you into a new path you’d be willing to go the new path. Now that takes spiritual fortitude to do but that is what is necessary. And this is often why when this is not done, people who study the Scriptures, and they study the Scriptures and they study the Scriptures and they study the Scriptures, and they still can’t figure out what God’s will is for them. The reason is simple; there’s never been this simply spiritual transaction take place.
Then we mentioned last week besides that principle of dedication is the principle that there are sources of guidance. There are at least three sources that we can isolate and in the course of our Christian lives we use all three sources. The first source we said last time was the direct commands and the deduced commands of God; obviously we’re talking here about the Scriptures and we’re talking about the clear commands and we’re talking about what can be inferred directly from those clear commands. An example would be seeing the people who are socially dating; one of the clear commands of Scripture is 2 Corinthians 6 which says you are not to be unequally yoked. Now that’s a clear command of Scripture; nothing could be clearer and nothing could be clearer as far as a simple deduction from that, and that is that you’re not to date non-Christians, as far as getting spiritually involved with them is concerned. And the point there is that there’s no need to pray about that kind of a decision; that kind of a decision is absolutely clear, no necessity to pray whatsoever. In fact, there is an example of where prayer could be sinful because there, in that situation, prayer becomes an excuse to cover up defiance of God with piety.
So one source of divine guidance is the
directive to deduce commands of God.
Then we said last time there was a second source and that was the
conscience. And we said the conscience
operates negatively; we qualified this; this is not as secure as the first
source, it’s not infallible like the first source, it’s Scripture. The conscience will not operate positively
and by this we mean that just because your conscience doesn’t give you a
problem does not mean what you’re doing is pleasing to God. The only way the conscience works is
negatively, that if it gives you trouble then you had best not do it. Romans
And the third source of information we
said, which is the one we use most of the time, is what we call the solution
grid, and it looks like the idea of the tic tac toe diagram; you can see it
operate in the story of Ruth and you can see it operate in Genesis 24, and the
idea is that you have a problem here, and you want to box that problem in with
Scriptural principles, even though those Scriptural principles don’t tell you
exactly what to do; they’ll come close to it.
Naomi, for example, got Ruth and she told Ruth look, I know certain
things about the welfare system of my nation,
So in order to pinpoint further that’s where we use what we call common sense creatively, common sense here not in the sense of just human viewpoint opinion but common sense in our awareness of general revelation. You may be a professional; you may have studied in your field very much in detail so you are confident in your field. You may be a teacher, you know certain techniques, you know your subjects and so therefore you know a certain area of general revelation like the back of your hand, and obviously you use that in seeking divine guidance; obviously because God created the field that you know; God created you, God created your mind and it all fits together. So you shouldn’t feel like because the Scriptures don’t give you an answer you have no information. You’ve got the entire reservoir of every fact in general revelation to give you an answer and this is where common sense comes into the picture. Common sense must be used because common sense is a supplement to all of special revelation.
So we have these three sources of divine guidance: we have the first one, special revelation, that is the Bible, Scripture, inerrant, infallible, absolutely authoritative. We have a second one that is not inerrant but nevertheless useful and that is our conscience when it gives us trouble. And then the third one is the solution grid to apply special revelation as tightly as you can, running out of that, going to the field of general revelation.
Finally we said last time there are perspectives on the application of Scripture; that is, there are certain approaches you can use; when you run out of gas in one approach you can come around and try a second approach and maybe after trying one or two approaches you come up with an answer whereas the first time you couldn’t come up with an answer. The first approach is the obvious and the straightforward approach, is when you think in terms of norms and standards; and that is you are looking for a principle in the Scriptures and you are looking for a principle, a piece of advice, or something else, you’re thinking in terms of a statement, a principle. That’s one approach to use and usually the one we use.
But I’m here to say also there are two other perspectives, not as useful but nevertheless sometimes you have to revert to them. And that is what I call the continuity approach, found in 1 Corinthians 7 as far as in principle, but the continuity states that God doesn’t lead you in a zigzag path; God leads you in smooth curves; God doesn’t lead you here, there and everywhere; God rather has continuity. And the principle is that God’s plan is coherent, it has structure to it. God is not an eccentric and He doesn’t lead people in an eccentric fashion. There’s got to be reasons; He may take a sharp bend in the path but you will find the sharp bend in the path necessitates or involves facts that are linked to that which went before you took that sharp turn in the path. So there’s got to be some principle of continuity.
By the way, this is one way you can define spiritual gifts. There are a lot of believers that have trouble devising where they might have spiritual gifts so that they can function in the body of Christ. One way of doing this is keeping a small personal spiritual diary of areas where God has led you; where you’ve been in the last ten years of your life. Try it some time, take a couple of pieces of paper and write down every significant thing that’s happened to you in the last 10-15 years. And do you notice any trends; do you see any areas where spiritually you’ve had a problem here, here, here, and here, and you keep on having the problem here, here, here; does that point to something? You bet it does, there’s the application of the principle of continuity.
And then there’s a third principle, even more subjective than that one and that is what we call the help or hinder approach and that is looking at the options, which one will help you and which one will hinder you spiritually, as far as the facts go that you know. Often this third approach or this third perspective will help you think okay, I don’t know other thing there is to know about this option so I’d better gather some data for it. So these are some perspectives on application, so this summarizes what we’ve learned so far by divine guidance.
Now one other thing about Genesis 14:1-27 is how Isaac and his bride come together. There are certain presuppositions here that offend the modern thinker and we’re glad it does because the modern thinker is by and large apostate. As a humanist he cannot understand why there’s a plan in history; for him it is sheer chance that that propels history. For us it is the sovereign Word of God that propels history and history includes a man looking for a wife and it goes back to this principle that the husband here, who was Isaac, has a plan for his life, or what we would call a calling. On the other hand, his wife is designed to be his helper according to Scripture and her role in life, therefore, is a function of his plan. It goes all the way back to the Garden. At the moment of creation God gave a plan to Adam; He did not give one to Eve. Instead, He defined Eve and He said to this woman, Isha, for her name was not Eve at that time, it was Isha, He said to Isha, you are an ezer to him, a helper to him. Well now how is Eve supposed to find out how she’s a helper to him? The only way she can help him is to find out what he’s supposed to do that she’s supposed to help. And so the very language of the creation accounts shows you that the woman is structured and defined in relationship to the man. This is repeated all the way down in the New Testament, in 1 Corinthians 11, this is why some of the new evangelicals want error in the New Testament; for example, one of the theologians behind the young life movement wants to have errors in the Scripture so he can throw out 1 Corinthians 11. He’s got to; 1 Corinthians 11 repeats Genesis and he can’t have Genesis, he’s got to have liberation, he’s got to go along with the idea that both sexes are role wise identical.
So we find that this point about women being the helper is part and parcel of all the Scripture, so it’s no accident that when we come to Genesis 24 we find, lo and behold, the same pattern. Here we find the calling is Isaac’s calling to function under the Abrahamic Covenant. Rebekah is called out to help Isaac; she is called to help him in conjunction with his functioning under the covenant. Let’s look at the text.
Genesis 24:1, this comes out first of all in the blessing, “[And Abraham was old, and well stricken in age:] and the LORD has blessed Abraham in all things.” And this is referring to God’s blessing under the terms of the Abrahamic Covenant. In verses 2-4 we find the oath the servant takes and the oath the servant takes is an order to provide a girl not from the daughters of the Canaanites and the reason is because the daughters of the Canaanites had bad culture; not crude, necessarily, but simply shot through and through with human viewpoint presuppositions and therefore culture does count and the Christian can’t be neutral with regard to culture. Never forget, the Christian can never add two and two and get four without committing a religious act. Two and two are four means two entirely different things; one to the Christian and one to the non-Christian. And so therefore no area of culture is neutral and you can’t have Canaanites girls marrying the Isaacs of this world; they bring too much anti-Christian, anti-Biblical baggage into the marriage.
In Genesis 24:12 we found the vocabulary once again, reminding us of the backdrop of the [can’t understand word] calling; “show kindness,” or literally “show chesed to my master, Abraham,” and the chesed is the Hebrew noun that means God’s covenant love. You see the same thing in verse 27, where we read, “Blessed be the LORD God of my master, Abraham,” notice again Abraham always, “[...his truth: I being in the way, the LORD led me” and the Lord “has not left destitute my master of his chesed,” once again, the Hebrew noun chesed refers to the Covenant. So I don’t think it can be debated that behind this entire story is not simple chance; it’s not any girl that’s going to meet this situation, it is one girl, a girl that has been groomed by God for the role that she will now play with her husband as that husband perceives God’s calling.
Now to end the application one must understand that the modern Christian husband doesn’t have the clear cut calling of Isaac. But if you look up in the Bible the word “calling” it is used and restricted to four meanings; there are only four callings that we can find vocabulary wise in the Bible. One calling is the Genesis 1 mandate and the Genesis 1 mandate is the calling upon every male and that calling says that every man is to produce; every man is to subdue his environment under the laws of God for God. He is not to lie on his back and be a spiritual cripple for the rest of his life. He is not to be an impotent dud; he is to be, if he is to follow the mandates of Scripture, a producing person. A second calling of Scripture is the universal call to salvation and the gospel; that applies to all men and that is a sovereign work of God. A third used of the word calling it to spiritual maturity or discipleship, and spiritual maturity is no question. So every Christian man has at least three callings he knows; he doesn’t have to pray about these, he knows these automatically. Where he needs to get specific guidance he applies it to his divine guidance; what field of general revelation, Lord, do you want me to subdue; in what field do you want me to work, what do you want me to build, where should I go? With my particular talents and my particular background and my particular interests, where can I max out? That’s the question that the man has to face and has to answer. And so there’s a fourth calling that has to do with a particular form of ministry. But these three every man shares and then he makes this specific and oriented to a point by the techniques of divine guidance.
So presumably, then, we have the Christian man in this position and he looks around for the woman. By the way, notice something else he just automatically does. Looking at the situation from this perspective it means that the man is automatically in a position of spiritual confidence at least, if not maturity, he is moving spiritually, and any girl who is looking at a particular fellow ought to think how far along is he. Now some Christian girls are so [can’t understand word] that they don’t even notice that the guy’s the party type and so on, a good fellow to be around, good time, but he has no idea what he’s going to do with his life, he hasn’t even got the first calling down, what he’s supposed to be as a human being. And they’ve never talked about spiritual things on their date, so they don’t know whether the guy is a Christian or not, so that’s out. So is there any wonder why we have problems sometimes, because we rush into things. Until the man has these things down he has no business getting married; it is that simple. And if we eliminated and enforced these things before we allowed marriages to take place you’d have a lot less divorce, as you can see.
Now back to Genesis 24:28; this is the completion of the story. Remember last week, the servant of Abraham traveled far north with a camel train; he prayed about it first and he found the girl with character, and the character test would be whether she’d come out to the well and she’d water all ten camels. We pointed out to you that watering ten camels is not the case of the girl coming along giving a teaspoon full of water to each one of these beasts. It was a case where the girl went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth between the trough and the well; she’d fill up the trough and they’d slurrrrp, wipe it up, she’d go back to the well, carry the water, dump it in the trough and they’d slurp it up, and of all the animals under creation, the one that took the most water, that operates at least today in this age, is the camel. And it was ten of these beasts that this woman, this girl who came down to the well, voluntarily, graciously volunteered to water. So as a result of this, in verse 28, remember the servant had given her the bracelets and so on and now she runs back to her mother’s house.
Genesis 24:28, “And the damsel ran, and told them of her mother’s house these things. [29] And Rebekah had a brother, and his name was Laban: And Laban ran out unto the man, unto the well. [30] And it came to pass, when he saw the ring, and bracelets upon his sister’s hands, and when he heard the words of Rebekah, his sister saying, Thus spoke the man unto me; that he came unto the man; and, behold he stood by the camels at the well. [31] And he said, Come in, thou blessed of the LORD; wherefore stand thou outside? For I have prepared the house, and room for the camels.”
Particular things to observe about the text at this point; it’s the girl’s father—where is he? In fact, this girl’s father seems interestingly absent from most of the transactions that occur in this chapter. He’s not only absent in verse 28, she runs to her mother’s house, it says, not to her father’s. In verse 53, “And the servant brought forth jewels… and he gave them to her brother and to her mother,” but where is the girl’s father. In verse 55, “And her brother and her mother said, Let the damsel stay with us a few days,” so immediately we’re faced with a peculiarity in the text. Where is Rebekah’s father; we know he’s alive, verse 50 says that, “Then Laban and Bethuel answered and said,” so it’s not that he’s dead; he’s an old man, presumably retired and presumably out of the act of the business of running the home. But commentators have suggested another reason for his lack of participation in this and this shows you something about the second divine institution, the institution of marriage.
Bethuel was a polygamist and in polygamist marriages where there are many wives, and of course each of these wives have their own sets of children, these children take any one, let’s say Rebekah, these children are going to have their closest relationship with whom, their father or their mother? Obviously their mother, and so it’s their mother and their brothers that the girls had their closest relationship to. Their father was more distant, he had to be, it was the price one paid for fracturing a monogamous marriage. I point this out because the same thing is true in divorced situations; it is the child that is [can’t understand words] that is going to be closest to you and it’s just the price you pay when we pay for the sinful operations that have fractured marriage after marriage after marriage. So observe this. The Scriptures, while condoning polygamy, and people will often turn back to these chapters to condone it, while condoning polygamy are [can’t understand words] to point out the prices that people paid for it. And here is one of them. Basically the father doesn’t care that much where his daughter was going to go because after all, he’s got daughters by other marriages, she’s just one of a number in the home. So the people who care most for the girl are going to naturally be her brother and her mother. Thus, in verse 28 she runs not to her father; she runs to her mother.
Rebekah had a brother and he becomes the negotiator because he’s the leading male closest to her. And Laban went out to see the servant of Abraham. We can only speculate about Laban’s motive; the author of Genesis in Genesis 24:30-31 doesn’t really directly tell us anything about Laban’s motive but knowing Laban and knowing what he did later on to Joseph, he’s the kind of man with whom you have hard bargaining, and after having a hard bargain with he would still turn around and feed you. Laban is simply that kind of an individual. He’s good, in some cases he’s reliable, but you’ve got to watch him. Don’t ever let this kind of a person get in back of you; Laban is that kind of a boy and we presume the text is being sort of sarcastic in verse 30 and the first part of 31, when Laban sees the earring, and the bracelets, ah, wealth. What were the earrings and the bracelets made of? Gold, and this speaks to Laban’s dear heart, far more than the state of his sister is the state of what his sister is wearing, and the possibility of great wealth. Notice, for example, his response in verse 31, “Come in, thou blessed of Jehovah,” now I said in this text the word “blessing” always ought to be identified in your mind with wealth. We’re not talking here about spiritual invisible blessings as in the New Testament. Here we’re talking about economic riches.
For example in Genesis 24:1, remember “the LORD had blessed Abraham in all kinds of things,” meaning his holdings. In verse 10 we read, “all the goods of” Abraham his servant had administrative control over. We find the wealth in verse 22, the golden ring, and it’s really a nose ring, “of a shekel weight, and two bracelets for her wrists of ten shekels weight,” this is heavy; this is expensive jewelry, and it’s solid gold. So this tells you the blessings of Abraham were literal. Imagine many, many thousands of dollars, if not close, in our terminology, to a million dollars. Abraham may very well at this point in his life been close to a millionaire. Abraham, blessed of the Lord. In verse 35 you see the very distinct marriage between God’s blessing and monetary wealth. In verse 35, “And the LORD has blessed my master greatly: and he is become great: and He has given him flocks, He’s given him herds, He’s given him silver and gold, and menservants and maidservants, and camels and asses.” The whole point there is his capital assets of his business [can’t understand words]. The point is that when God blesses there it is in a tangible physically visible way and this is why, in verse 31, “Come in, thou, blessed of the LORD,” that’s exactly what that means. Said another way: Come in wealthy man, you’re interested in my daughter, or my sister. Aw, so am I, I like that jewelry. This is Labin’s motive.
Now even though Labin’s motive is this way, God’s sovereignty operates over the motive. If you look at Genesis 24:31 it says, “Why are you standing outside?” This is a hospitality problem, and in verse 31 the hospitality, we would argue, ought to be suspect; it may be that the hospitality of verse 31 is simply used to obtain more wealth. I warn you about that in the light of what happens later. Verse 32, so “the man comes into the house: and he ungirded his camels, and they gave straw and fodder for the camels, [and water to wash his feet, and the men’s feet that were with him. [32] And there was set food before him to eat: but he said, I will not eat, until I have told my errand. And he said, Speak on. [33] And he said, I am Abraham’s servant,” and in verse 35, God’s blessing, verse 36, “And Sarah, my master’s wife, bore a son to my master when she was old: and unto him has he given all that he has,” and notice the last clause in verse 36, “he has given all,” “all that he has!” What are the “all” that he has? The blessings of verse 35.
Now let’s pull back and look at this a moment. Several things are going on; this story is deeply important for the categories it sets up. Here we have Abraham, we’re going to come back to this diagram later and I’ll add to it; right now I’ll just give you a simple key diagram here; I want you to look at it and see the relationship. Here we have Abraham, here we have Isaac, his son, and here we have a bride; we could draw the arrow this way, up from the bride to the son, and over arching all characters is the plan of God. Now that’s the diagram of the forces that are operating in this story. And as these forces begin to operate the plan of God has blessed Abraham; Abraham will convey his wealth, riches, upon Isaac, and the servant takes these riches and uses them to woo the bride to Isaac. That’s the dynamics of the story.
And as this story takes place, and as the incident gets into the negotiation stage, verse 33-34 represent a breach of etiquette. Now the authors of the Scripture don’t give us a lot of the biblical etiquette, but they always give us breaches in the etiquette of the day, and when you see a breach in the etiquette of the day it’s there to warn us that something important is taking place. Now what is the etiquette? The etiquette in the ancient Near East for negotiating business is a long, long, prolonged, and to us as Americans a very foolishly prolonged session, and this we know pretty well because the Bedouins today in Israel and in the Sinai operate the same way.
An example, when Israeli archeologists go out into the field and they want to negotiate a place to do what they call surface digging which happens to be in Bedouin territory, you don’t just go in there and drive your jeeps all around and all the students pop out with shovels and start digging. Not if you want good relationships with the Bedouins. The only frustrating part about this is the negotiating process that must take place through the Bedouins. The man who is the head of the negotiating team will have to find the chief, the man who’s the head of this particular clan of Bedouins; that’s not always easy to do, but finally he will locate him, he will be the oldest man, the great-grandfather perhaps of the clan, old, retired, but what he says goes for everybody in the clan; he is the chief and the chief of the plan. And so they go in and they have to sit down to three, four, five course meals before this negotiation process can even begin. You don’t talk business first; you talk simple social relationships first. And then we go through this dinner and maybe in the process between course two and course three the old man decides he wants some entertainment and so he brings in some people to entertain. And we go on for an hour and a half while they entertain, and he brings out course four, and then course five and we go on, no business transacted yet, until hours later, then perhaps, if he wants to, we talk business.
Now the question—why does this take so doggone long? And Americans traditionally have never done well in these negotiations because we are an impatient people; we like to get our business done with, over with and move on to something else, not sit around and waste a whole day asking for one privilege. I’ve often wondered why these etiquette principles of the ancient world were there, and why in some cultures they’re still there. I suggest this reason; I suggest that this particular piece of etiquette is based on a very interesting principle of human nature. What is a Bedouin doing before he is talking business with you, while he’s just passing the time of day he’s getting to know you and he refuses to have business dealings with people he does not know. For the Bedouin, in his “primitive,” we’d put it in quotes, in his “primitive” business like way knows something that many modern businessmen don’t realize and that is the power that controls your relationship with someone else is not a written contract because if the other guy has a sharp enough lawyer he can always fake you out. Ultimately the stability in your business relationships is a product of the kind of people you do business with. It is not a product of the contract or the language in the contract or the legal force behind the contract; it is in the personality of the people with whom you do business. So that’s what was going on.
And in Genesis 24:33-34 you discover that this etiquette is shattered, and we have to raise the question, why? Why was this servant so impudent to say that before he eats, I will do my business? We see this once again in the Scriptures; remember in that scene when David is about to be picked as the king of Israel, we have the scene of Jesse’s household and all the sons are gathered there and Samuel comes in and he has in his hand a little jar of oil and it’s the oil that he’s going to pour on the king to anoint him, or “Messiah him” literally, and what does the prophet Samuel do when he stands in the old man’s tent, in Jesse’s tent? I will not sit down until I have chosen the Lord’s anointed. So when we find a breach of etiquette it is a dramatic device to emphasize the importance of some work of God, some calling of God and that’s why verse 33-34 is there. I am Abraham’s servant and I don’t care what the etiquette is, you are going to trust me.
Now that’s interesting; in other words, in verse 34 he claims to be trustable because he’s Abraham’s servant. He claims to short-circuit the etiquette which was normally there for the business man to size up this other guy that he’s going to have a deal with. What the servant, in effect, says is you don’t have to size me up, you don’t have to spend five hours over a meal so you can get to know one another, you can implicitly trust me. Why? What’s the evidence? Because I’m Abraham’s servant, that’s why; that makes me automatically trustable.
And so it goes on with the negotiation
itself, Genesis 24:35-36 clearly flaunt wealth. There’s no other way around it,
we can’t spiritually allegorize the text; to be honest with the text we have to
say exactly what it says; it’s simply flaunting wealth. But why?
As evidence that God blesses him; as evidence that this girl that you’ve
just released your daughter to us she’ll be in good hands; that’s the point of
the wealth. And it goes on in verse 37,
“my master made me swear” and he goes on from verse 37 all the way down to
verse 48, from 37 to verse 48 is a complete narration of the principles of
divine guidance. Now we know those
principles of divine guidance so let’s just review. Verse 37, my master said don’t take a girl,
the daughters of
Notice in Genesis 24:40-41 the uncertainty in divine guidance. I point this out lest someone think divine guidance give you total certainty all the time; it doesn’t. Notice he had an escape clause in verse 41, that if the girl wouldn’t go with him, no dice. It was a built-in control. Then he narrates how he came to the water in verse 43-44, how Rebekah in verse 45 answered that template and so on. And verse 46 the description of how she watered the camels. Now at that point, you remember, in the text it was a case where, if you look back at verse 23, after Rebekah had come out to water the camels, remember he said in verse 23, whose daughter are you? Now why did he ask that? Clearly, if he acted like many Christians he would have said well I prayed, I put the fleece out, and God answered, there was a girl that came down here, do you want water, she gave me the water, she watered my camel and so on, she met all these criteria but yet because divine guidance doesn’t ever get all the facts he went to gather additional point of data, what lineage are you, because that had to be included in the solution. Then he goes on, obviously in verse 47, okay, she’s of the right thing, verse 48, “I bow down my head, I worshiped the LORD, and blessed the LORD God of my master, Abraham,” and so on.
Now Genesis 24:49, another incident where you have uncertainty implicit. After the taking of Rebekah, and let’s go back to the solution grid idea, here’s the potential bride, he doesn’t know who she is but he knows certain things about here. Number one, she’s not going to be a Canaanite girl; that’s principle number one, minus C, she can’t be of the Canaanites. Number two, she’s got to be of the family of Abraham, so that’s the second principle he’s used to try to pin her down. Another thing, he’s used the well setup to test her character because even though this girl is going to come into what we would classify as upper upper class life, she is going to be essentially a queen economically, no problem about it. But nevertheless, even though she’s going to be showered with wealth upon her marriage, she still must have the character of the producing woman to be mother of the promised seed. So therefore he wants to test to see in a non-wealthy environment what kind of a girl is she and that will tell me more about what she’s going to be after she gains her wealth.
So he tried all this and he’s pinned down that it’s got to be a girl that fits in this category. Rebekah is it but maybe there’s another girl over here; or a third girl over here that qualifies; right now we don’t know. So this is why he says in verse 49, he says, “if you will deal kindly and truly with my master, tell me; and if not, tell me; that I may turn to the right, or to the left.” In other words, if you don’t grant release of your daughter okay, I’ll go back to the well and try again; that’s his point. In other words, he never takes certainty for an answer until he’s got all the facts that he possibly can amass. You’ll notice later on in verse 58, a further piece of information. They don’t twist the girl’s volition themselves; they ask Rebekah, do you want to go, and she says yes. So keep in mind there’s a constant searching for facts that can be brought to bear on the situation.
So they ask permission in verse 49, and verse 50, both the old man and the brother must agree at this point, they say “the things proceeds from Jehovah;” which shows you, incidentally, their spiritual heritage, in northern Mesopotamia they knew very well the name of God; “we cannot speak unto thee bad or good,” an idiom for the fact that we can’t add to anything that you’ve said, they accept that this is of the Lord. [51] “Behold, Rebekah is before thee, take her, and go, and let her be thy master’s son, as the LORD has spoken.” Now that’s interesting because it’s a combination of divine guidance and God’s revelation that is meant by “the LORD has spoken,” in verse 51.
Genesis 24:52, “And it came to pass that, when Abraham’s servant heard their words, he worshiped the LROD, he bowed himself to the ground,” and he pulls out all the wealth. But notice in verse 53 he gives them to…not Rebekah, “to her brother and to her mother the precious things,” it was part of the deal. We can’t go into all the deals that were made at marriage but marriage was a very businesslike thing in their world. There was a contract that was made up, there was a stipulation about what wealth when to who, when, how, which parent got what and so on. It was quite a long negotiation process; the reason, incidentally, being that property, private property is critical to define social life. Socialism and communism are anti-God because they are hostile to private property. The Bible assumes all the divine institutions and particularly this one, marriage, is a function of property. This is why we have the word in the English language called “bastard;” why is the word “bastard” come to be a kind of off-color word; it didn’t use to be. The word “bastard” was a word that simply meant a child who could not inherit family wealth; today, thanks to the liberals bastards are protected but it didn’t used to be that way; a bastard had no right of inheritance and that was the circumstance money wise that led to our term bastard and the way we use it but originally it simply meant to exclude this. Why? To protect the legitimate children. Why should you elevate a bastard when the legitimate children have first claim on wealth. See, the Scriptures discriminate and they do not treat everyone the same way, that’s American, a little bit of our human viewpoint in our American character, the word for it is egalitarianism, the idea that everybody is equal; that’s not true in the Scripture. All men are not created equal and equal men are not free.
So we have in verse 50 the thing proceed from the Lord, the deal is made. Verse 54 they rose up, and now the second breach of etiquette. The negotiations have gone on, the deal is agreed to, and he wants to get going right away. Now in verses 54-56 you have a little hunk of wisdom about those trying times that can come into a Christian’s life when a significant decision is made about following the Lord. Let’s watch verses 54-56 and see if we can figure it out. Genesis 24:54, “And they did eat and drink, he and the men that were with him, and they stayed all night; and they rose up in the morning, and he said, Send me away to my master. [55] And her brother and her mother said, Let the damsel stay with us a few days, at least then; after that she shall go. [56] And he said unto them, stop hindering me, seeing the LORD has prospered my way; send me away that I may go to my master.”
Now here’s what’s happening and you’ve got
to put yourself in the parent’s position, so mentally right now do a little
imagination. Here’s the map of the area,
the eastern
Now there’s a piece of wisdom in verses 54-56 and it’s kind of hard of harsh. It sounds so hard at the first, when it says “release here, now,” it’s like Jesus says “if you love your father and your mother more than Me” then forget Me, you’re not worthy of Me. This isn’t meant to hurt people; in fact, it’s meant to help them. I would suggest the reason why the ten day hypothesis of verse 55 is not followed is simply because it would be harder for parents, for ten days, to go through this thing, every morning the girl gets up, every morning she looks in her brother’s eyes, every morning there’s that oh, nine more days and I’m going to be leaving forever; eight more days, I’m leaving forever, seven more days, I’m leaving forever. And the break, it’s like picking a sore, you break the scab every time you do it and it hurts and it smarts. Why not just get it over with and that’s what the Scripture is saying. It’s the same thing that happens when God asks Abraham kill your son for My sake; no puttering around, no procrastination, get over the things that hurt so that they’re on the other side, they’re in the task and you go on living your life. There are these kinds of hurts when God’s sovereignty invades and demands something, when if you procrastinate two things will happen: (1) you will wind up, if you finally do obey, hurting more than if you’d instantly obeyed in the first place. And (2) it may very well be that in your hesitation to obey, thinking you’ve got to take care of this detail, this detail, this detail and this detail, in your hesitation to obey you’re finally going to be encompassed by the lust of your flesh not to obey ever; conceivably they could have thrown so many parties that by the end of ten days the servant and Rebekah would forever stay on and never go back to Abraham. So there’s wisdom in this, even though I know if we read it as Americans in the 20th century it seems like a very harsh thing.
Well, Genesis 24:57-58, what can they do? They do the only thing they can do in the situation, ask her. And they asked her and she answers in verse 58, “I will go.” The Bible never tells us how Rebekah decides to go; maybe she’s been praying about it a long time, we don’t know, but for some reason it doesn’t her as much as it appears to bother her parents. Verse 59, “And they sent away Rebekah, their sister, and her nurse,” her nurse’s name was Deborah, her name is given in Genesis 35:8, and they wish her well and in the wishing her well in verse 60 they make two statements; two statements that are very significant as to how and why God picked Rebekah, because the wishing of well shows you the heart of the family from which the girl came. Obviously at the point when they wished their sister well they are betraying what they really want most for that girl; at that moment, that poignant moment of separation, it’s almost like a deathbed experience, truth comes out and the truth that comes out is that they want her to be a mother of thousands of millions, the idea that she has regality to her; they want a majestic destiny for their sister. Now if that’s what the family wanted all these years, secretly in their dreams when they looked at Rebekah, they wanted her to be a queen, what have they got? She’s going to be a queen. And notice what they say at the last part, “and let thy seed possess the gate of those who hate them.” It’s an idiom for dwelling in peace.
Turn back to Genesis
So they wish her the blessing, chapter 24, and the closing scene of the chapter has her meeting her groom. She goes south in the caravan and in Genesis 24:62 Isaac is located; he’s located not where we left Abraham in the land of the Philistines, he’s changed locations. In verse 62 we pick up Isaac at Lahai-roi, and we said this was the well, remember I spent about ten minutes one Sunday morning giving you the translation, and what the translation means, it’s the well of the living one; it can be the one who sees me, I prefer, for reasons I told you then, to read it as passive, a well of the living one, a vision, or a word, or that which is visible. So it’s a picture of Isaac going back to the place where life is, where the living one, the vision, is God and His plan for his life, and Isaac is found not in the land of the Philistines, he’s found right smack dab in the center of the plan of God, the well that is named for the plan of God.
Genesis 24:63, “And Isaac went out to meditate,” and again, the author of Genesis loves to do this, you’ll see him do this several times with Joseph, he loves to juxtapose and relate how things happen at just the right moment. So verse 63 has Isaac, it’s at evening and he’s going out into the field to pray, the word “meditate” there means to go out, think as well as pray and I think we’re going to be able to tell what he’s praying about in a few verses. Right now we’ll just say he’s going out in the field to pray. “…and he lifted up his eyes, and saw, and, behold, the camels were coming.” Verse 64, “And Rebekah lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac,” so immediately they recognize each other. In the Hebrew it’s kind of funny; at the end of verse 64 instead of “she alighted off the camel” it says she fell off the camel. Well, it doesn’t mean that she saw Isaac and thomp, like this, and fell off the camel. It means that she just got off fast; in the Hebrew verb used this way this means boom, she hit the dirt.
Now why did she do this? Because intuitively she knew this is my husband. And then she says to the servant, she identifies… [“For she had said unto the servant, What man is this that walks in the field to meet us? And the servant had said, It is my master:] therefore she took a veil, and covered herself. [66] And the servant told Isaac all things that he had done,” bringing all the data into the case, and now a very revealing verse to close off the story. And this verse tells us lots about a man and about a man’s nature.
Genesis 24:67, “And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her: and Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.” See, Sarah’s died, remember she died a chapter or two ago and the word “comfort” is the one we want to look at first. The word “comfort” means a merciful comfort and the idea here is that a man spends 98% of his life in the company of two women; his mother and his wife. Both of those names are in verse 67 and they’re connected by a common denominator; the man is comforted, comforted after his mother’s death. Now why? Was he momma’s boy? No, that’s not the point. It was the fact that the woman supplies the man with something that’s missing in the man’s soul; men alone have a certain masculine characteristic that is simply unfulfilled; it can show up as harshness, it can show up as insensitivity, it can show up in many, many different ways. This is why God said to Adam alone, “It is not good for a man to be alone,” a man needs the woman and this is why Isaac was comforted, because now he had, so to speak, his rib, his helper was there and this provides him fullness.
I suggest verse 67 is the clue as to what he’s praying about in verse 63, that as he walks out in that field to pray he’s praying for a helper and while he’s praying, if my conjecture is true, he’s lifting up his eyes in verse 53 and he sees the answer to his prayer: “before they call I will answer, and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.”
I said that this story is important for
many reasons; let’s go back to that fundamental diagram. Abraham, Isaac, the servant and the
bride. We’ve already determined that the
story behind Abraham and Isaac, the sacrifice and so on, is a picture of the
Father/Son used in the New Testament; who do you suppose the servant of Abraham
is? It’s the Holy Spirit, it’s a picture
of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit picks up what? The bride, who is the
Another interesting thing, the servant goes into a far land and woos a bride to the guy that’s a thousand miles away, and what is the Holy Spirit doing today but wooing you and me to Christ or we’d never see Him. Rebekah has to bet her life that a boy that she’s never seen is going to be her husband, and you, when you become a Christian have to bet your life that Jesus Christ, who none of us have ever seen, is actually who He claimed to be and we have and we have to commit our lives to Him and His future destiny. But even more amazing, what was the theme of this chapter? The blessings God had given to Abraham; to whom were the blessings that God had given to Abraham now given to? The son, Isaac; remember the negotiations in the tent? God has blessed Abraham, Laban, and then lately he’s borne a son and he’s going to give all that he has to his son; I want you to supply the daughter for his son. And when Jesus Christ is presented in the Gospels He is presented as the One who is heir to His Father’s blessings, and we are wooed to Jesus Christ because of the Father’s blessings, which become Christ’s which become shared for us; we share the Father’s blessings through Jesus Christ.
This is like in the Song of Songs, a basic theme of the Gospels, it’s one that a lot of… particularly in the strong, extreme forms of the Reformed theology this is not well appreciated but in Genesis 24 and the Song of Songs you see a peculiar thing. Christ, when He is presented by the Holy Spirit in history does not come as the King of Kings; He is the King of Kings but He’s not presented as the King of Kings, in both the Song of Songs and the Genesis 24 motif He comes as the seeking groom who sets aside His glory and tries to woo His bride on a human level. Remember the Song of Songs; Solomon doesn’t come up to the bride, hey, I’m king, bow! That’s not the way the gospel is presented; it’s Christ wanting us to know who He is and we respond to all of His character, not just His sovereignty, all of His character, and he woos us to Himself, not in weakness but in deferred majesty. And so similarly Isaac doesn’t come and demand Rebekah’s allegiance. Isaac comes and he offers, do you respond, because Rebekah must surrender; she must surrender the whole future destiny of her soul to a man she’s never seen.
And that’s the point that we have to do. As non-Christians, and the point of the gospel hearing, we surrender everything that we have to Christ. And as we grow as Christians more and more we become aware of this need, as I said in the first part of divine guidance, to make that transaction of dedicating or surrendering or whatever label you want, for the future of your life, to a Lord that you’ve never seen.
We’ll conclude by singing…..