The Wrong Woman: The Providence of God 3

God is in control. We say this to each other, and when the world is calm it’s easy to feel it’s true. When chaos strikes, it can be hard to imagine that God is in control. We might assume that catastrophes like fire and floods shake our confidence in God’s providence the most. Sometimes it’s not the forces of nature but the choices of people that seem beyond the realm of God’s providential guidance. 

Few people have found themselves at the centre of human chaos like Leah. Yet God proved that He was steering her life in a way that no one could have imagined. When we first meet Leah in scripture (Genesis 29:16-17), we only learn a few things about her: her father is a man named Laban; her younger sister is a beautiful woman named Rachel; Leah has weak eyes. The action and drama in Leah’s life are happening to the people around her. Her cousin Jacob has made a dramatic escape from his angry older brother. Then Jacob was met by God himself on his journey to Laban’s home. Rachel has won Jacob’s heart and he’s desperate to marry her. Laban hires Jacob as a shepherd for seven years to have her. Poor Leah- she has no suitors, she has no drama, she has bad eyes. Leah is not the heroine of this story, or even an important part of it- until Jacob’s wedding night!

Can God use bad people for a good purpose? Providence says yes. But the process can be a mess. It turns out that even though Laban acted like a loyal family member, declaring to Jacob that he was ‘surely his bone and his flesh’ (29:14), he was actually a scoundrel who is only loyal to himself. When the wedding feast day finally arrived after the seven year wait, Laban sprang a selfish trap. He didn’t want to lose a good shepherd, and he didn’t want to be stuck with a spinster daughter. So in the night when it was dark (and after Jacob had probably had too much wine to drink), Laban snuck Leah into the bridal chamber.

I have so many questions about this story. Where was Rachel when this was happening? Was she being kept locked up? What did her father tell her was happening that she was kept from going into the bridal chamber? Did she weep the whole night? What chaos! And Leah: did she go in willingly? Did she perhaps have some romantic feelings for Jacob? Had she been jealous for him before? Or was she completely unattracted to him, but afraid of her father and so compliant? Why didn’t she say anything? What did she think would happen to her sister? What did she think would happen in the morning? I can’t know any of the answers, but I do know that when Jacob woke up in the morning, Leah was the wrong woman. She had gone from being the wrong daughter that Laban was having trouble getting rid of, to the wrong wife Jacob could not get rid of.

What an absolute catastrophe! A wedding night was destroyed. A sisterhood was destroyed. An uncle-nephew relationship was revealed to be semi-slavery. There was more than enough anger and hatred to go around for decades to come. 

But God was in control, and His providence was in effect. God was seeing to it that something important happened, and we know this because of how God tells us the story of Jacob. Before Jacob came to Laban’s house, he was in trouble with his family. At his mother’s initiative, he had stolen into his blind father’s tent and pretended to be his brother in order to get the family blessing from him. When Jacob’s brother Esau learned he’d been robbed, he vowed to kill Jacob, thus Jacob had to flee to Laban’s. What we have in the life of Jacob is two stories about deceit in the dark. But in between these two stories is another lightless encounter. The God of the universe appeared to Jacob in the middle of the night in the middle of his sleep. The Lord gave Jacob a promise:

“I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” (Genesis 28:13-17)

In between these two stories of humans behaving badly is a story of God behaving providentially. He commits himself to be with Jacob and give him a huge family, and with this promise He brings Jacob’s family life under his sovereign care. The Lord was with Jacob in the night when he gave him this great promise by a vision in a dream, and He was with Jacob on the night He began to fulfill His promise when He gave him Leah by the hand of Laban.

God’s providence wasn’t only working for Jacob that complicated night. God was also showing concern for Leah. If you look back at when Jacob stole the blessing from his father, there were four people involved: Isaak, man in the tent looking to make a covenant of blessing; Rachel, the instigator who thought of the plan to deceive Isaak with the sheep skins; Esau, the person who lost an expected blessing, and Jacob, the person who got God’s blessing. In Leah’s case there are also four people involved: Jacob, the man in the tent looking to make a covenant of marriage; Laban, the instigator who thinks of the plan to deceive Jacob; Rachel, the person who lost out on an expected wedding night, and Leah, the person who ends up with the blessing of a marriage. If you hold side by side these two stories, Jacob and Leah stand in the place of the ones receiving the expected blessing. They are the black swan events no one saw coming. They are misfits thrust from the outskirts of family life into the center of God’s attention. In both cases it’s very messy and painful, and no one seems very innocent. But God was at work. Leah was the wrong woman in the sight of man, the wrong daughter and the wrong wife. But God had a plan to build a nation for the descendants of Abraham, and Leah was the right woman for that calling. So in His providence, he brought it about.