Today we look at Rebekah. She is a fascinating woman. In today's day and age she would probably be a successful business woman or academic. She is smart and creative and brave enough to take risks for what she believes. She was like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice, Like Jo in Little Women, Like Anne of Green Gables. She was the somewhat impestuous young woman who pushed the limits of her society. Back in her lifetime, in a patriarchal society she was limited in her options. She took the chance to travel - not often offered to unmarried women. She agreed to marry a man she had never met in order to have that chance. When she couldn't conceive, she prayed and trusted God to come through. When she did conceive and the pregnancy was difficult - She prayed.again - and ended up giving birth to healthy twins. If this was all we knew about her she would be held up as an example of what we should be like, as a paragon of faithful womanhood. But there is more.
There is the rest of the story. Rebekah favored her younger son. We don't know whether that was because she was remembering the prophecy that the younger would serve the older, or because her husband preferred her older son or if Esau was just too much a "man's man" with his enjoyment of hunting and his early marriages. She favored Jacob to the point of helping him cheat his older brother out of his birthright and then getting his father to send him out of range of his brother's murderous rage. This part of the story makes her seem manipulative, devious, and deceptive. Not exactly the ideal descriptors of a Christian.
So who was she? I guess we'll never know for sure. She was probably a regular woman - with strengths and weaknesses like us all. She seemed to do a lot of praying early in her marriage and even heard God speaking to her late in her pregnancy. She had a vision of Jacob succeeding and she did what she could to make sure it happened. It does seem, however, that she did not trust God to fulfill the prophecy of Jacob's success. She seemed to feel she had to make things happen. Maybe this is the lesson that we need to learn from Rebekah - that when we take things into our own hands we end up doing things that maybe we shouldn't do. We end up hurting other people, like Esau, and even ourselves. Rebekah ended up having to send Jacob away to save his life and so was stuck living with the son she had slighted and all his foreign wives. She also may have hurt Jacob, by making it so he had to leave on his own, make his own way and not return to the home of his childhood for a very long time. This does not seem to be an ideal situation.
It is a challenge knowing how to best serve God, how to help God's will be done. It does not seem right to sit back and do nothing. We are God's body on earth and, as Christians, want to help. But it also does not seem right to lie and steal and cheat to serve God, even if the end result promises to be good. Somehow we need to learn to pray and to listen. We need to allow God to guide us. To trust God to show us the right way to go, even if it doesn't feel right and to take care of things so they will turn out right. As the old cliche says - we need to let go and let God - let God lead us, let God take charge, let God make the decisions. God can handle the responsiblity.
No comments:
Post a Comment