(This is an alternative to the Lifeway “Explore the Bible” lesson for Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024, for teachers wishing to continue the Genesis study for Easter.)

A video overview of this lesson is available on YouTube at:

INTRO:  Ask your group: ??? Does anyone have a favorite LOVE STORY from history or literature — or someone you know???

(Some of the most famous are:  many think of “Romeo & Juliet” right off (of course that is fiction); there is Mark Antony & Cleopatra; I just read a biography of Napoleon, so I would NOT include Napoleon & Josephine!   

(Perhaps not very well-known, but one of my favorites is John & Abigail Adams. He was our 2nd President, and they were often separated as he went overseas as a U.S. Ambassador, but they kept up a great correspondence via letters, in which they always called each other “My Dearest Friend” — and they did seem to be.)

Then = today we are going to look at one of the great love stories of the Bible, that of Jacob and Rachel from Genesis 29.

CONTEXT

We just left Jacob as he was on the way “back east” in Genesis 28, where he stops and has the dream of the angels on the staircase. He makes a personal commitment to God, and says He will be HIS own personal God and that he will make a place of worship for Him at Bethel, and will give Him a tenth of all He gives him. That brings us to Genesis 29, and our passage for today:

OUTLINE

I. Love At First Sight (29:1-20)

II. Love Experiences Difficulties (29:21+)

III. (God’s) Love Works All Things Together 

TEXT

I. Love At First Sight?  (29:1-20)

Chapter 29 opens with Jacob going “east” (really N/NE to Haran, following the servant’s footsteps where he went to get Rebekah — you might use that MAP again to show where he went to Haran!)

:1-8 which tells how Jacob came to a well, where 3 flocks were gathered to water. He asks the men if they know Laban (his uncle, Rebekah’s brother) and they said they did — and that Rachel, his daughter was coming with the sheep.

Verse 9 says “While he was still speaking with them, Rachel came with her father’s sheep, for she was a shepherdess.”

:10 a key verse:  “When Jacob saw Rachel the daughter of Laban his mother’s brother … Jacob went up and rolled the stone from the mouth of the well and watered the flock of Laban his mother’s brother.”

So Jacob was impelled to a strong act of service on Rachel’s behalf, as soon as he saw her. 

Verse 11 says “Then Jacob kissed Rachel” — not TOO unusual, as they were “long lost cousins” — but as we will see, that did not keep them from marrying!  But it seems like they made an instant connection, “love at first sight,” one might say!

In “As You Like It,” Shakespeare said:  “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”

??? Did anyone here experience “love at first sight”???
(Not everyone does. In fact the first time I ever laid eyes on my wife Cheryl, she was in 8th grade, and was getting hauled out into the hallway to get swats for acting up in art class! So you might say we were an “acquired taste for each other!)

But some do have love at first sight —  and evidently Jacob here did as well.

*Interestingly enough, that phrase “Laban his mother’s brother” is repeated THREE TIMES in :10!

— “When Jacob saw Rachel the daughter of Laban his mother’s brother …”

— “and the sheep of Laban his mother’s brother”

— “and watered the flock of Laban his mother’s brother”

So it is REALLY EMPHASIZING: this is the house of “his mother’s brother” — Laban is Jacob’s UNCLE, and Rachel is his COUSIN.

Now, usually when the Bible repeats something three times like that, it is doing it on purpose, to emphasize something important. 

In :13 Laban hears the news about Jacob coming, and he ran and embraced him. And :14 says he stayed with him a month. 

Then in :15 he came up with a plan. He said, “Because you are my relative, should you therefore serve me for nothing? Tell me, what shall your wages be?”

And in :18 Jacob says “I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel.”

Laban agrees to that

And then :20 is one of the greatest “romantic love” verses in the whole Bible: “So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her.”

??? Who can share an occasion when time seemed to just FLY BY for you???

(Our time with our grandkids at Disney in April, 2022. It went by in a flash! It was one of the best weeks ever. We still watch pictures of it on Cheryl’s Frameo digital picture frame.)

This is how it was for Jacob here: he loved Rachel so much, even the 7 years just FLEW BY.

You’d like to think this was the end of the story, and you could just write, “And they all lived happily ever after …” after this — but you couldn’t — because they didn’t! There was actually a lot of trouble after this, as we shall see next: 

II. Love Experiences Difficulties  (29:21+)

In :21 “Then Jacob said to Laban, ‘Give me my wife, for my time is completed …”

So :22 “Laban gathered all the men of the place and made a feast.”

But :23 “Now in the evening he took his daughter Leah, and brought her to him …”

And :25 “So it came about in the morning that, behold, it was Leah!” 

So the “love story” now has some complications — and it does get VERY complicated!  

— :23 Laban brought his OLDEST daughter Leah to Jacob instead, deceiving him.

— Jacob gets angry in :25, and asks why he has been deceived.  (Any irony here? Jacob, who deceived his father Isaac, was now himself deceived by Laban!)

— So :28 says after he gave Leah her bridal week, Laban now gives Rachel to Jacob as a wife — for another seven years of service, so he has “bound” him for another 7 years!

— Then :31 says Rachel was barren. More troubles.

— :32 says When Leah had a son, Reuben, she said “Surely now my husband will love me” — what a sad statement! She wanted to be loved — we all do — but she didn’t sense that he did.

— Then in 30:1 now Rachel is jealous of Leah and she and Jacob get angry with each other. She gives him her maid to have children with (like Sarah did with Abraham) and he did; and then Leah gave HER maid to Jacob, and he had more children through her

The whole thing was just a sad, troubled, complicated MESS!

In every “love story” there is trouble. You never watch or read a love story, that doesn’t have some kind of trouble in it. It’s never: “They met, fell in love at first sight, and all lived happily ever after.” It is NEVER like that. There always comes some difficulty.

People make fun of the typical “Hallmark movie plot”:

A woman and a man meet, and like each other at first, but SOME misunderstanding happens, that alienates or separates them, that they have to work through by the end of the movie. There’s always some trouble to be overcome.

For one, I guess you have to have that to make it interesting. There’s no interesting story if you don’t have some conflict to overcome.

But for two, THAT’S REAL LIFE, right? How many relationships just “live happily ever after” without any problems? Almost NONE!

We just finished studying Dr. Gary Chapman’s “5 Love Languages” in our church Discipleship. It was very good book, and I would highly recommend it for anyone needing some good input for your marriage — or a good book to recommend to a couple who is struggling with their marriage. There are SO many good insights in it. 

— One very insightful study Chapman quotes in this book, is that the average time that a couple will “feel in love” is about two years. After that, the “feeling” of being “in love” wears off — and then, the couple has a decision: they can either put in the effort to keep working on their marriage and make it better — or they can just give up and walk away.

So it’s a very good book, and has a lot of helpful insights. But one important lesson it teaches is that there is no “easy, happily ever after” marriages that you don’t have to work on. Marriage takes work; and if you want a good marriage, you do have to work on it.

So here in Genesis, there is no “easy, happy ever after” either.  Some complications came into Jacob’s family that are going to take more than a lifetime to work through … jealousies, conflict, hurts, the ramifications of which are still going to be felt by the end of this book! 

But that’s real life. God’s word addresses real life. Both in Genesis, and today. 

— There is no “easy, happily ever after” marriage.

— There is no “easy, happily ever after” Christian walk either. It’s not that you get saved, and then “merrily, merrily, merrily” coast through the rest of your life to heaven. The Christian life is a battle, against “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” and it takes work: getting up every day to walk with God in His word & prayer; fighting temptations; losing some battles and confessing your sin, and dusting yourself off and keeping on going!  But it’s not easy; it’s a battle. Some of us need to hear that.

— And the same thing is true with churches. Some of think the church should just be “easy, happily ever after” — after all, we’re all Christians, everything should be great. But it’s not, because we are all flawed people in the church, every one, and we have an enemy, the devil, who wants to use any little opening he can, to divide us and keep us from our main task. So we need to understand it takes work.

— it’s so in just about any relationship. You can’t take it for granted. You have to work at it. There’s no “easy, happily ever-after.” And we definitely see that here in Jacob & Rachel’s story in Genesis 29 and following.  

As we will see, God works in real life situations, and He causes even the difficult things in our lives to work together for good, as we see in our last point:

III. (God’s) Love Works All Things Together

The story of Jacob with Rachel, and Leah, and Zilpah, and Bilhah, is a “messy” one. As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, not everything in the Bible is “prescriptive” — in other words, something God “prescribes” for us to do; rather many things in the Bible are just “descriptive” — it just describes WHAT THEY DID! Just because it is what they DID, doesn’t mean that it was GOOD!

??? Can you think of some other things in the Bible that are just “descriptive” and not “prescriptive”???

(Some examples could be:

— Jacob deceiving his father Isaac a couple of weeks ago in Genesis 27.

— The disciples casting lots for a new apostle in Acts 1. Many believe this was “descriptive,” not “prescriptive.” I don’t know many (any) churches that practice this — because most of us don’t believe this was prescriptively telling us that this was God’s will for making decisions. 

There are all kinds of examples of this in the Bible that you/your group can share. 

And so it is here in Genesis 29 & 30 too. This passage shows what Laban did (deceiving Jacob) and what Rachel did, and what Leah did (giving him their maid to have children with) etc. It doesn’t mean that all this was “good;” it’s just what they did. It’s not “prescriptive;” it’s just “descriptive.” It’s what they did. Much of it was wrong.

BUT YET God used even all these children, born of all these different mothers, in His plan, to bring about the 12 Tribes of Israel, who would be central in His plans in the Old Testament, to bring about a people through whom He would give us the scriptures, and the Messiah, and save the world! 

( I think it is interesting, by the way, that the only son He “had” to have here was was Judah, from whom the Messiah would come — and Judah was born of Leah, whom Jacob did not want to be married to in the first place! So he was tricked into marrying her — and yet, it brought about God’s plan to bring about Judah, who the Messiah would eventually come from!)

This story is one of those “messy” places where we see that God really does “cause all things to work together” for His purposes.

But remember, these things are not just “history lessons;” they apply to US too! One of the lessons we need to learn from this is that God does the same thing in our lives today too: He uses even difficult, “messy,” even “bad” things — to somehow fit together in His plan.  

??? Can you share something difficult in your life/the life of someone you know, that was bad/hard/difficult — maybe you were deceived like Jacob was by Laban — yet in retrospect, you can see how God used it for His long-range good purposes???

One illustration you can use is from the life of C.S. Lewis. In Harry Poe’s great new biography of Lewis he writes:

“As a self-aware Christian, however, he knew his own story well enough to tell it, however obliquely, in The Pilgrim’s Regress, then to objectify this same story in his broadcast talks, and then to pick out episodes of his own experice and the experiences of others he knew to present as mirrors for the readers of The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. Lewis’s atheism prepared him to be an apologist. Though he lived a relatively dull and ordinary life, his spiritual journey has managed to speak to millions of other people, perhaps because most of us also live rather dull and ordinary lives.” (The Making of C.S. Lewis, p. 342)

Was Lewis’ atheism bad? Absolutely. And many of the things he went through in his life were difficult. But God used them: as Poe says, his atheism prepared him to be a great apologist for the faith — one of the best the world has ever known. 

You and your group can share instances from your lives too: 

(For example, I shared before about how I got sick in 2012 and had to step out of ministry for two years. It was very hard, but much good came out of it. I am a better pastor, more empathetic, more humble, more dependent upon God, and more, because of what we went through. In fact, after it was over, I made a whole list: it was good for our marriage; it was good for our family; it was good for my ministry; it was good for our church — and I could say with Psalm 119:71 “it was good for me that I was afflicted”!  

God causes all things to work together for good — even the “hard” things — even the “bad” things. Undoubtedly some of us have even been cheated or mistreated by someone in the past — and yet God even worked something good out of that, in His plan.  He did it in the life of Jacob here, and Rachel and Leah and their children — and He will in our lives too.  

So this “love story” has a lot of interesting elements:

— “love at first sight”

— complications!

— but God making everything work together for His good plan.

ALL LOVE STORIES SHOULD REMIND US OF THE GREATEST LOVE STORY: GOD’S GREAT LOVE FOR US:

(Share the GOSPEL with your group here, for example:)

God loved us, and created us to know and love Him, in His presence in glory forever. God wasn’t “lonely,” as some have postulated, and create us so that He could have “someone to love.” No, He has always experienced perfect love in the Trinity, among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But He created us to share in that love with them. 

And in this great story, “complications” came too: we foolishly chose to sin and run away from God, loving the world or ourselves more than we loved Him, which would have brought eternal separation from God upon us.

But amazingly, in the GREATEST love story, “God so loved the world” that He sent Jesus to die for us — “greater love has no man than this, to lay down his life” — and that is what Jesus did for us, dying on the cross to pay for our sins. But as we celebrate today, He did not stay dead, but rose again on the 3rd day, to prove what He had done.

So God used the greatest tragedy — the death of Jesus on the cross — work for our good, to save us (which is why we call the day He died “Good Friday”, because it led to the forgiveness of our sins.

God caused it all to work together for good, for His plan, for eternity. God always does that. And THAT is the greatest love story of all — hopefully each of our class members have a share in it! You might encourage them to receive it today if they never have before.

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— Remember if you’d like to read/print a text version of this overview, to print out the lesson, or use one of the quotes or stories, that is available on my blog at http://www.shawnethomas.com (I’ll post that address in the comments section below).

— If you’ll hit “Subscribe” to this video, YouTube will automatically send you next week’s video and you won’t have to search for it.

— And if you write something in the Comments below, I’ll be sure to pray for your and your group by name this week.

Lord willing we’ll see you next time, as we get back to our Lifeway “Explore the Bible” study in Genesis 30, and Jacob continues to wrangle with Laban!