FBC Daily Devotional – January 27, 2021

Faith Baptist Church

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Well, a good Wednesday to you. Here we are in the middle of the last week of January already.

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I hope your week has been going well and that you're getting over the hump of the week.

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Tonight, by the way, in Wednesday evening, seven o 'clock, we have our midweek service. We have some

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Bible study time and prayer time and kids clubs meet and so forth. I try to do that in a very responsible way, but nevertheless be meeting tonight at seven if you can make it to that in -person gathering.

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But are you reading the scriptures, following along in our Bible reading? Today we read in Genesis 30 and 31, and as we read this passage, we have to be struck, don't we, with the foreignness to our ears, and really the bizarre nature of it all.

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We talked a couple days ago about how Jacob got hoodwinked by his father -in -law, and when he thought he was marrying

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Rachel, he wakes up the next morning and finds he's been given Leah. By the way, how in the world could he mistake the two?

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He thought Rachel was such a beautiful woman, and it was wedding night, and he doesn't realize who it is.

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Well, you've got to understand the cultural thing that the woman would be brought with a veil covering her face, and the veil would remain, and it was dark, and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

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But anyway, the point is that Jacob got stuck with Leah.

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Well, then he negotiated a deal to work seven more years for the other sister.

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He didn't have to wait seven years to get her, but he had to work seven years. So he's got these two wives, and each of them, by the way, the father has given to each one a maidservant.

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This would be probably a slave. Her job was to take care of the needs of the daughter, and each one had one.

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So first of all, Leah gets pregnant multiple times. She has multiple children.

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Rachel's ticked because she can't have any children, and she complains to her husband about it, and of course, it's like, what's he going to do?

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He only is one half of the component of the arrangement, so he can't do anything about it.

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He says, am I in the place of God? And so Rachel says, all right, well, if I can't have children, then have children by my handmaid, by my servant girl.

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So she gives the servant girl to Jacob, and she ends up, the servant girl gets pregnant, has children.

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Well, then Leah has, she's quit bearing children, so she's upset.

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She comes and says, well, you take my maidservant, and have children by my maidservant, and so he does.

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And then finally, Rachel's able to have children. So 11 sons later is where the story takes us.

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After 11 sons, all of this takes place through, over a period of time, 11 different sons through four different mothers married, or all from the same father.

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Now, that's really bizarre to our hearing and understanding, and it's certainly outside the scope and the framework of God's intention for marriage, there's no question about that.

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But a few observations that I've come to from this. Number one, doesn't it just absolutely amaze you how

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God uses even some of the most sordid and bizarre stuff that you read in the scriptures?

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Doesn't it just amaze you how God in his grace uses those things and the outcome of them?

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I mean, these 11 sons, and eventually there's going to be a 12th, they become the 12 tribes of the nation of Israel.

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And it is through these sons that the nation is populated. It is through these sons that the promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is going to be fulfilled.

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It's through these sons that all the nations of the earth are going to be blessed, and that God is going to multiply the descendants of Abraham as the stars in the heavens.

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Through these sons, through these four different women, it just amazes me the grace of God and what he can take and use for his glory.

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But what also strikes me here is the profound desire for children on the part of these women, and particularly sons.

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There's such a high value and an importance placed upon children, and I contrast that with the attitude of so many in our day.

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Children are to be tolerated. Some, they don't want them, so they just dispose of them through abortion and so forth.

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And that whole attitude is absolutely foreign to this passage of scripture.

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But then this passage also shows us the relational tragedy of multiple wives.

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Competition, there's jealousy, even between these two sisters, Leah and Rachel.

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And what a sad life for Leah, isn't it? Knowing that she's not the wanted and the favored wife, having to buy love with mandrakes and earn or merit it with children, trying to earn her husband's love with children.

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So when we read of this thousands of years ago, we realize that the dysfunctional family of the 21st century isn't really new.

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It is really just a byproduct of our fallen world.

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Oh, how we need the grace of God to overcome our fallenness. Oh, how we need a

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Redeemer who can save us from it. I trust you have found that Redeemer.

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Our Father and our God, our hearts are, well, we rejoice at your grace and how you can take something so dysfunctional and from it bring blessing.

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Father, we realize this is no justification for the dysfunction. We can learn from the dysfunction and we can learn from the sin and the grief that it causes others and avoided ourselves.

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Oh, by your grace and by your instruction, teach us that we may avoid such heartache.

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Father, we thank you and praise you for all that you do for us in Christ Jesus. And we pray that as we wrap up this day and go through the rest of this week, we would endeavor not to be presumptuous of your grace, but to be grateful for it and respond to your grace with a greater passion and desire to live for Christ.

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This we pray in Jesus' name, amen. All right, well, have a good rest of your midweek day.