God accommodates his called ones. Yes, their sins have consequences and their actions produce long term effects that make the path to God’s plan unnecessarily painful. Yet God’s permissive will seems to allow for blessing to come through their flawed choices. “All things work together for good to those who are the called according to his purpose.” For instance, Israel foolishly asked for a king, and suffered the consequences for that choice, yet from God granting what they asked for comes kings like David, Hezekiah and Jesus. Newton was right: We serve a gracious Master who knows how to overrule even our mistakes to His glory and our own advantage.”
The Journey // Focus: Genesis 30:22
If I were to arrive at a bottom line for this strange story of the “baby race” between Rachel and Leah, it would be this:
God will fulfill his plan, even through imperfect people!
God over-ruled the competition, jealousy, meanness, devaluing and cheating of these two sisters and their husband to accomplish his purpose of fulfilling his covenant with their forefathers to build a nation through them. As the great hymn writer John Newton observed, “We serve a gracious Master who knows how to overrule even our mistakes to His glory and our own advantage.”
Why God does that, I don’t know, but thank God for his grace. If he didn’t, there would be no fulfillment of the Divine plan through human beings.
And thank God that his sovereign plan is unstoppable. In spite of our imperfections, when he has called us, he will perfect everything that concerns us. (Psalm 138:8) That doesn’t mean he will give us everything we want. Again, thank God for that. Because of our sin nature and our shortsightedness, often what we want would be destructive to our lives and would be damaging to God’s plan for us. No, when God perfects that which concerns us, he is not necessarily giving us what we want, he is giving us what he wants, which is what we really need.
On the surface, this Leah/Rachel narrative of sibling rivalry, manipulation of the divine will and of crediting God for human conniving seems to have the Lord’s stamp of approval. There is no divine rebuke recorded in this story. This is no consequence for sinful actions. It seems that God has winked at their sin in order to keep his long-range plan on track to bless the world through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But keep in mind that when you read the narrative sections of the Bible and you run into these kinds of stories of flawed human beings making questionable choices, their inclusion in Scripture is not an excuse of bad behavior; it is an explanation for how things came to be and how God will ultimately fix the human race through his Son.
That leads to another interesting facet to the saga of Jacob, the deceiver. Always attempting to work out God’s will on his own terms, he plans on carrying the family line on through the beautiful Rachel. God’s plan, however, was to fulfill his ultimate plan of a Messiah for the world through the less desirable Leah. God overrode Jacob’s plan by blessing Leah with many children, including the birth of Judah, from whose tribe would come the Lion of Judah, Jesus the Messiah, Lord and King, Savior of the World. God will fulfill his plan, not ours.
Yet God accommodates his called ones. Yes, their sins have consequences and their actions produce long term effects that make the path to God’s plan unnecessarily painful. Yet God’s permissive will seems to allow for blessing to come through their flawed choices. “All things work together for good to those who are the called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28) For instance, Israel foolishly asked for a king, and suffered the consequences for that choice, yet from God granting what they asked for comes kings like David, Hezekiah and Jesus. Newton was right: God overrules our mistakes.
With that in mind, we come to the text that tells us God remembered Rachel. Throughout Scripture, we see that God remembers his people, flawed as they are. God remembered Noah…God remembered Abraham…God remembered Hannah…God remembered Ephraim…God remembered his people. Is God remembering because he forget? Not at all. Is God simply remembering that person? In part, yes, but there is something more, something far greater that is going on when he remembers a person. The blessed truth is, God is calling to mind his plan, couched in his unbreakable covenant, and bringing back on track the conditions to bring about the results he has eternally declared.
God remember Rachel, and through her blessed with world with a son, Joseph, a type of savior whom God used to preserve his people in Egypt and to serve as an eternal example of ruthless trust in the sovereign plan of God.
The good news from this story is that God remembers you, too. As flawed and shorted sighted as you might be, if you have surrendered your life to him by grace through faith in his Son, Jesus Christ, God will remember his plan for you. And he will fulfill his purposes for you. Even though you may sin, manipulate to get what you want, mess things up a bit, or a lot, God has a way of getting you to the finish of that which he has envisioned for your life as it fits into his eternal plan. At the end of the day,
“All glory to God, who is able to keep you from falling away and will bring you with great joy into his glorious presence without a single fault.” (Jude 1:24)
God remembers you, and he will fulfill his plans for you. You should remember that: it will go a lot better for you if you do.
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