Meeting Our Matches

This will have a double-meaning in summarizing Genesis 29. We can speak of a prospective spouse as a “match,” but we can also use the expression “meeting your match” in the sense of running into an opponent who is either your equal, or, because of that very element of surprise, turns the tables on you. Jacob the Deceiver would meet Laban the Even More Deceiving Deceiver! We don’t know the identity of that “thorn” in the flesh was for the Apostle Paul. For Jacob, it was his own uncle. But the key is that a gracious God was behind it all.

• Providence turns the tables on our sin.

• Providence makes us labor for love.

I bring up providence not only because the whole Scripture’s teaching demands that we think about it here, but also because it is clearly signaled in how Jacob runs directly into his kin in verses 1-8.

Doctrine. is that our gracious God sanctifies us by having us meet our matches in sin and in love.    

Providence turns the tables on us.

“But,” someone might say, “I thought God’s providence is for turning evil into our good” (cf. Rom. 8:28). Ultimately, yes. However, we don’t get to decide when the dark night of the soul is over, nor even how many more crosses we need to obtain a crown. As one commentator describes things, this is the “school of hard knocks,”1 by which Jacob must be sanctified. As long as there is still sin in us, there must be a mortification of sin. And one of the ways that God gets to work on killing our sin is to hold up a mirror to our sin in the form of a difficult person who just does that sin better than us, and does it to our disadvantage. He’s a real professional, and though he may immediately be sent by Satan (cf. 2 Cor. 12:7), such a messenger has ultimately been sent by God to make the point. And what is the message? It whispers to us: How does it feel on the other end? Is this particular sin really worth it in the end? Call it “poetic justice” inside of grace.

One thing God used to set Jacob up here, I can relate to. He used good old fashioned naiveté. “Hey, uncle! What a relief!” He had just left Esau’s fury and come upon Laban’s open arms.

“Then Jacob kissed Rachel and wept aloud. And Jacob told Rachel that he was her father’s kinsman, and that he was Rebekah’s son, and she ran and told her father. As soon as Laban heard the news about Jacob, his sister’s son, he ran to meet him and embraced him and kissed him and brought him to his house. Jacob told Laban all these things, and Laban said to him, ‘Surely you are my bone and my flesh!” (vv. 1-14)

And the happy music played, and the birdies chirped, and the credits rolled.

What a great guy, this Laban. “This guy isn’t like that guy back there. That’s legalism, back there. It has a frown and a twelve-step regimen. This guy is free. That’s abuse, back there. It gives black eyes and shouts people down. This guy is mild-mannered. That’s deception, back there. I put that behind me, and haven’t we all? We’re family. We all want the same thing. We can talk rationally about this.” Those are the things we say, when we’re under the delusion that kinds of sin come in only one coating, one form, one angle, and are easily controllable.

‘And he stayed with him a month’ (v. 14). That’s all it took. One month, and the metaphorical honeymoon before the literal honeymoon was over. We’re not told what changed, if anything, in that one month; but things turned from welcome party to scheme. He even put the ball in Jacob’s court.

“Then Laban said to Jacob, ‘Because you are my kinsman, should you therefore serve me for nothing? Tell me, what shall your wages be?” (v. 15)

That was an easy answer for Jacob, but Laban knew that. And Laban already had his scheme worked out. We see it play out in verses 22-25, culminating in Jacob’s ironic complaint: ‘Why then have you deceived me?’ (v. 25). We know that Laban premeditated because his reply to Jacob was, ‘It is not so done in our country, to give the younger before the firstborn’ (v. 26). If that is true and if that was so important, surely Laban could have included that information up front. Or perhaps at some point during those seven years! He chose not to. He either knew that Jacob at least had enough integrity to not cast Leah aside,2 or he knew that Jacob was in a weak position—not in the place to bargain, or having expended all his moral credibility back in Canaan. All this he could have discovered in that month and learned how to exploit, and it was confirmed, day after day, for seven years.

God brings us to people who function as mirrors of our sin, but in order to function, they must be “good at it,” or they must at least be in a position where they can get away with it, or where we can’t get away from them. We must deal with it. We must get a good look in that mirror.

At this point a qualification is needed. I am not saying that this mirror must represent the same exact sin as our sin. Not at all. Sometimes the “mirror” matches their sin to ours in a way that naturally draws out our sin.

For instance, a difficult boss with anger or ingratitude or dishonesty issues, may draw out my impatience or my idol of expecting too much from others. The “match” is a mirror in the sense of an exposing lens, but that does not require a one-to-one copy of the sin. For Jacob it was. He was a schemer. And so God set him up with a professional schemer. As Matthew Henry puts it, “Jacob was paid with his own coin.”3 The point is that the tables get turned on our sin by magnifying the sinfulness of sin, that we might call it a great evil in ourselves, to hate it in ourselves, as we are perfectly ready to hate it in others.

Providence makes us labor for love.

Jacob met another match, this one happier. Rachel. We will see next time a more clear way that she becomes a type of the church; though there may be something to her being a ‘shepherdess’ (v. 9), especially considering that her name in Hebrew is derived from “ewe” or “female sheep” (רָחֵל). But the shepherd who would be God’s shepherd is told: “Know well the condition of your flocks, and give attention to your herds” (Prov. 27:23) She at least was diligent, which is no small thing today. At the very least, it shows that the one being held out as an ideal of femininity includes the care of the family’s things. The heart of her husband would be able to trust in her (cf. Prov. 31:11). She was not a busybody or a sluggard. Young men today especially feel hopeless that young women are not as they used to be—that such are nowhere to be found. But they are looking on social media and other places that bear no resemblance to how they will fare in the domestic realm. In the Bible, when God makes His matches, He always brings us to a woman who is a picture of domestic femininity, regardless of the smaller details that may differ.

It says, ‘Then Jacob kissed Rachel and wept aloud’ (v. 11). It is certainly possible that he had heard her name before, given the family ties.4 But this is another case of love at first sight, as with Jacob’s parents. And it says, ‘Rachel was beautiful in form and appearance’ (v. 17) and about the seven years, that they ‘seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her’ (v. 20). However, as the narrative goes, we see that things did not go according to the visions they both had when they first met at that well. Fourteen years of long waiting, followed by barrenness (which we will get into next time).

“Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Prov. 13:12).

God sanctifies us through a long march in family life as well. Our loves ones do not bear quick and easy fruit for us, and we don’t for them either. God may even ordain that someone waits a lifetime in the most literal sense, but always for our greatest good.

What starts to look to Jacob like a possible death sentence, will become a story that he can point back to with gratitude and wonder. One day he would dread missing out on God’s grace more than missing out on his old plans. We all have “What ifs” in our rear view mirror. In other words, on the other side of the “What if” is something good in this life that we were hoping for, and sometimes something that was quite realistic—something just within reach. And then, “life happened.” No it didn’t. Providence did. God’s providence did that to life. And we learn to say that, but we slip back into the what ifs, especially as it drags on. Seven years, and then another seven years, for Jacob. As was true of Abraham’s servant in finding a bride for Isaac, so here for Jacob. All of God’s people are told:

“I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you” (Ps. 32:8).

Why instruct and teach “in the way” you should go, rather than simply to the way, giving us every immediate right turn like a heavenly GPS? Simple—God’s providence is sanctifying us for a lasting world.

Practical Use of the Doctrine

Use 1. Correction. That is, it corrects the first impressions and expectations of our Christian life. Very often, more dramatic experiences of God at the beginning of one’s walk are followed by years of difficult labor. Matthew Henry notes the transition from the end of Chapter 28 to Chapter 29, that Jacob “had no more such happy nights as he had at Bethel, no more such visions of the Almighty. That was intended for a feast; he must not expect it to be his daily bread.”5 Instead, expect a labor in the Lord’s field that bears a far greater fruit than the alternatives in this world outside of that field.

“God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints, as you still do” (Heb. 6:10).

This correction about expecting ongoing spiritual highs has its counterpart in the natural. Again, young men (and women) need to be counseled today. You don’t need the “American dream” to get things started. You need to get started. How many movies do we see, telling the story of some wanderer into town, with nothing but two hands to wash dishes. This was Jacob.

“Jacob fled to the land of Aram; there Israel served for a wife, and for a wife he guarded sheep” (Hos. 12:12).

You have seven years on you either way, young man; but you’ll regret not using them to get started on real building. Does she have anything worth guarding, like that flock? Even her very life? If she doesn’t value that, you don’t want her. Young lady, if he won’t gladly do that right away, you don’t want him!

Use 2. Admonition. In learning this lesson, Jacob would unfortunately regress on another. His parents practiced favoritism. That became a main aggravation to his conflict with Esau. Now Jacob would show favoritism—namely to Rachel over Leah. It began long before the battle of babies that would come. It began the morning after the first wedding night: ‘And in the morning, behold, it was Leah!’ (v. 25) You don’t think she caught that BEHOLD, and felt the sting of his disappointment? Take care that you do not make others “behold” your disappointments in life when they are standing in that space that you thought other things and people would. You may be reflective of past hopes and dreams. But be careful to say to loved ones in the present, as Paul said to his spiritual children,

“For what is our hope or joy or crown of boasting before our Lord Jesus at his coming? Is it not you?” (1 Thess. 2:19).

Yes, mom and dad had dreams back then, but you are our whole life now; and it turns out that those plans back then were all vanity. Life is far better with God as our “Matchmaker” in every sense of that word.

Use 3. Consolation. This is a picture of the gracious providence of God that Jacob would be able to look back on.

The more we reflect on this gracious providence, the more God turns all of our “What ifs” into “Thank you, Lord”(s).

“It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes” (Ps. 119:71).

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1. Boice, Genesis, II:779.

2. Revisiting polygamy, Henry comments: “The polygamy of the patriarchs was, in some measure, excusable in them, because, though there was a reason against it as ancient as Adam’s marriage (Mal. 2:15), yet there was no express command against it; it was in them a sin of ignorance. It was not the product of any sinful lust, but for the building up of the church, which was the good that Providence brought out of it; but it will by no means justify the practice now, when God’s will is plainly made known, that one man and one woman only must be joined together, 1 Co 7:2” (Commentary on the Whole Bible, 65). And R. L. Dabney remarked, “I now argue that the Old Testament never legalized polygamy. First, the sacred writer [...] paused to detail the criminal origin of the practice. He traces its beginning to the apostate family of Cain and to the murderer Lamech” (The Practical Philosophy).

3. Henry, A Commentary on the Whole Bible, 65.

4. Henry makes this point (Commentary on the Whole Bible, 65).

5. Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, 64-65