Loved and Wanted Leah
Genesis 28:1-29:35
Matthew 9:18-38
Psalm 11:1-7
Proverbs 3:11-12
Leah.
The girl with weak eyes, unwanted, not beautiful, not loved.
The sorrow, the depression, the pain, the desperation.
She who just wants to be wanted, she who just wants to be loved, she who just wants to be seen.
Leah.
This is not a story about how Laban tricked Jacob and "hah! Jacob you deserved that because you tricked your dad!" nor "Laban you terrible person! Didn't you promise Jacob he could marry Rachel?"
No. It's a story about Leah.
Jacob did not get the bad deal, Leah did. Leah's very existence became the "taste of Jacob's own medicine," how cruel. Leah was the girl Laban felt wouldn't have found a husband, and so he sent her to a man who didn't want her.
She had to have known he didn't want her when she walked into that dark room that night. How awful that she felt so forced to go? Maybe she was so convinced no one would ever truly want her...maybe she felt it was her only option too!
She had to wake up the next morning and watch as Jacob saw it was her and became confused and angry....how awful.
But for all the people who thought Leah was undesirable and unlovable...Jacob, Laban, maybe Leah herself...the joke was on them, because God loved her, God desired her. God honored her.
God loved her.
He enabled her to conceive, which is the most honorable thing God could do for a woman in this age. I'm sure God doesn't have to care about the things we value as a culture, but He reveals Himself in ways we will understand culturally. He enables her to have a son three times and each time Leah says, "God has given me this gift so that I can now have the thing I want the most: the love of my husband."
Of course that's what she wants! She wants her husband to want her and to love her! It's the thing that's missing, the thing she can't attain, the thing she deserves.
Can't you see her praying every day? "Lord, please, that my husband would love me! That my husband would want me!"
Every time he avoids eye contact with her, every time he laughs with her sister Rachel, every time he seems apathetic, every time she sees his tension with her father knowing he's thinking, "You tricked me."
This is her desire and she is reminded of it every. single. day.
"Surely my husband will love me now."
"Because the Lord heard that I am not loved, he gave me this son too."
"Now at last my husband will become attached to me, because I have borne him three sons."
She wants her husband to love her. It's the one thing she can't seem to have and it's the one thing she deserves. But when God enables her to have her fourth son He must have opened her weak eyes to see that for all the right she has to her husband's love, what she has is far more precious, far more necessary, and far more glorious. She has the love of God.
For every day she saw her husband keep on not loving her, for every day she cried out to God "please, I am not loved!" He answered her by LOVING her in ways her husband never ever could. He gave her something SO much better. He loved her from the beginning and never stopped loving her.
And so she named her son Judah which means "praise" for she praised God for loving her, wanting her, and seeing her.
And it was from Judah's line that the Lord Jesus Christ came to be born.
For all that Leah didn't have...beauty or love...God blessed her a million times over.
What an awesome God.
He lets no one go unseen, unwanted, unloved. Like the bleeding woman in Matthew...He sees you and me and no matter how broken, undesirable, or unloved we feel: God loves us infinitely.
Tomorrow:
Genesis 30:1-31:16
Matthew 10:1-23
Psalm 12:1-8
Proverbs 3:13-15