Jacob, Leah & Rachel

Good morning people, I pray you are having a very glorious morning? By the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ it will be a very glorious day and a very glorious week for us all. I don’t know about you, I am trusting God for a last minute miracle in my life and because He is a faithful God I know that my expectations in Him shall not be cut short.

In my post yesterday I shared the story of a woman whose husband married a second wife while leaving his responsibility to his family unattended to, that post ignited a thought in my spirit and I feel compelled to share the story of Jacob, Leah and Rachel. I had once shared a post on this when we were looking at the marriages in Bible but still I believe the Lord wants me to discuss it again.

Genesis 29:15 through to the end of Genesis 35 gives us details about Jacobs family and work life, but what I want us to focus on is his marital life. The Bible tells us how Jacob labored for 7years in order to marry Rachel but was given Leah as his wife instead. First, what readily comes to mind is that Jacob was swindled or cheated off the deal, but have we considered the fact that Leah was probably God’s choice of wife for Jacob and not Rachel?

The Bible tells us tells us in Genesis 29:31 that when God saw that Leah was not loved, He opened her womb and she became fruitful. I am almost convinced that God was more interested in the marriage of Jacob and Leah far more than that of Rachel. The Lord who searches the secrets thought of the heart of men saw that Leah had a lot of good packaged in her, ideal for the support that Jacob needed in his life than what Rachel had stored up in her heart. No wonder Leah was the wife of Jacob’s youth.

Apart from the fact that Leah was not as beautiful as her sister Rachel as the Bible said she had weak eyes, she was of a better character than her younger sister. Nothing was said wrong of Leah’s personality other than the fact that she had weak eyes. So will you blame God for choosing Leah as His favored wife for Jacob over Rachel? Obviously the favor of God for Jacob resided more in Leah than in Rachel. Jacob was swept away by physical beauty, but God honored the inner beauty of Leah, the beauty of a beautiful spirit and character.

Before I begin to sound judgmental about Rachel, let’s take a look at her character. Genesis 30:1 tells us that “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!’” So from here we can conclude that Rachel has a jealous personality and she was a nagging wife. The Bible didn’t tell us that Rachel prayed to God about her predicament, but rather she nagged her husband. Yet she was beautiful, loved and the preferred of the two wives.

Genesis 30:7-8 reads, “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.” So we see that Rachel had developed an unhealthy rivalry with her sister. She has stopped seeing Leah as her sister but as a competitor and a rival; she was envious of her own flesh and blood, her sister. This is another negative trait of Rachel.

Genesis 31:32 says, “But if you find anyone who has your gods, he shall not live. In the presence of our relatives, see for yourself whether there is anything of yours here with me; and if so take it.’ Now Jacob did not know that Rachel had stolen the gods.” Again we see another negative character that Rachel possessed; she was a thief. You can imagine that the beautiful wife that Jacob adored with all his heart and worked fourteen years to marry being a thief who stole gods from her father’s house. No one would have been able to tell that Rachel had the capacity to steal but the Lord. Jacob was a man whom God loved and set apart right from when he was in his mother’s womb, he didn’t deserve to be married to a thief. No wonder God gave him Leah as wife instead. If only Jacob had prayed before falling in love.

Genesis 31:34-35

Now Rachel had taken the household gods and put them inside her camel’s saddle and was sitting on them. Laban searched through everything in the tent but found nothing.

Rachel said to her father, “Don’t be angry, my lord, that I cannot stand up in your presence; I am having my period.” So he searched but could not find the household gods.  

Rachel did not just steal the household gods, she lied about her period, she deceived her father and her husband. And this is the beautifully formed lady that blessed Jacob fell in love with. Now these are the negativity in the life of Rachel that made God prefer Leah to her as wife to His beloved Jacob. So we see the importance of prayers before marriage. In Jacob’s ignorance God had blessed him with a wife that would complement him and support him in the fulfillment of his destiny, yet he refused to accept and love that which the Lord has blessed him with because she was not attractive to his eyes. If only he had considered the inner beauty and grabbed it with gratitude while making effort to polish the outer beauty to his taste.

A lot of men are daily making the same mistake as Jacob. They despise God’s precious blessing for the them in the person of their wives and then run after beautifully bodied women with ugly characters and in so doing ruin completely their destiny. If the Lord did not prevent you from marrying that so-called ugly woman, it’s because He knows what she has inside of her and if only you can work with the Lord and seek his face, He will bring out the very best in your wife and she will become more than what you wish for. She will be beautiful inside out.

Do you need to speak to someone today, then visit www.thewordthatsuits.com someone is waiting to help you out.