Joseph series. Introduction Duncan Leake
Meet the Family Gen 29:15-28. Oct 2nd 2005
1. For a few days last week, Pam and I went to visit “Babyworld”. In Babyworld days are different.
Daytime and nightime don’t mean very much in babyworld. Babies eat and sleep and stay awake, according to their own routine, nothing to do with whether it is day or night.
Babyworld is where our daughter lives at the moment. And it was good to spend a few days with her there.
2. Now I suppose that three thousand years ago… the tent of a nomadic sheep farmer living in the pasturelands of Paddan Aram (on the eastern border of Turkey?) might not have been full of special baby baths and cots and baby mobiles. And parents three thousand years ago wouldn’t have had a Moses basket for the baby (‘cos Moses hadn’t been born yet) and neither would they have had the support of skilled doctors and nurses during the birth or calls from the local health visitor afterwards. But despite the huge differences in lifestyle, I think that new parents then would be able to understand the feelings of new parents now. The joy and happiness, the anxiety and concern; the sleepless nights; the wondering - how you will be able to cope; the sense of responsibility for the care of this child who is totally dependent upon you.
So Jacob’s life must have changed on the day Reuben was born. For a while at least Jacob must have known a little of what it is like to live in “Babyworld.” He would have been woken up at night by the sound of a baby crying. And he must have had to respond to the needs and feelings of his wife, Leah.
However, Jacob’s situation was a little more complicated than usual. Because at the time his first child was born to Leah, Jacob was also married to Rachel, Leah’ s younger sister. It sounds like a good storyline for EastEnders!
3. Who were these people? Over the next few weeks we are looking at what we can learn from that part of the book of Genesis that tells the story of Joseph. There is a little booklet for this sermon series available in church today, if you have not had one already. The booklet contains some questions to think about and it also has the Bible passages that we will be looking at each week. In the coming weeks as we read his story, we will discover how God helped him to learn lessons that he needed to learn, and maybe that we need to learn too.
Today’s title is “Meet the Family”
The family we belong to is important to us and can have a great influence on us. Our parents, our brothers and sisters if we have any, the environment that we grow up can all help to shape us. We all have different experiences or memories of family… some of them good, some not so good, some experiences of family can be really bad. But maybe as we look at the story of Joseph we might decide that family experience does not determine our character, our family does not decide the sort person that we become.
So today what I want to do is to understand just a little about the family background of Joseph.
4. JACOB… Joseph’s father had been known to live up to his name. His name means “deceiver” and he had been taught by his mother to lie and to cheat. With her encouragement he had cheated his older brother of his inheritance, and gained the blessing of his father under false pretences. His older brother had been so angry that he was looking for an opportunity to kill him, so Jacob’s mother had told him to leave Canaan and run away to the east… to the place where we found him at the start of this morning’ bible reading - Paddan Aram.
On his journey to the east Jacob had a real encounter with God… the first of several. It took a whole lifetime for Jacob to understand the implications of living in relationship with God… and it was many years later that he was given the name ISRAEL… which means “WRESTLER with God”. There were times in his life when Jacob acted in accordance with God’s will and purpose for his life… and times when he didn’t. Maybe that’s something we can identify with.
When Jacob arrived in Paddan Aram he found two wives to marry. Because as we heard in this morning’s reading Jacob the deceiver was himself deceived. He fell in love with the daughter of his uncle Laban, a girl called Rachel, who had an older sister called, Leah. Jacob promised to work for seven years for his uncle and then at the end of that time he would be allowed to marry Rachel. But on the wedding night, Jacob must have been celebrating just a little too much, because he was so far gone that he never even noticed that the girl who his uncle brought to him late at night was not Rachel… but her sister Leah.
Jacob had been taught how to deceive by his mother, it seems that Leah was being taught the same lesson by her father. So Jacob married the wrong girl.
But Laban had a plan. He said “If you’ll promise to work for me for another seven years you can marry Rachel next week.” Jacob must have thought well I wanted to marry Rachel so I suppose I have no other option but to marry both of them - he said “yes” - and that’s what happened.
5. Does this mean that God approves of bigamy?!
Well, the people whose lives we read about in the Bible did all sorts of things that God knew was not the best thing for them. What Jacob did was plainly not God’s intention…but God loves us as his own children... he doesn’t CONTROL us like puppets on a string. I think that probably God could see that this family would be heading for all sorts of heartbreak, all sorts of problems and difficulties.
The amazing thing is that he refused to give up on them. God has always been like that.
In every family there are tensions. In every family there are relationships that go wrong and need to be put right. But sometimes things can go very wrong.
There were probably strengths as well as weakness in Joseph’ family background, but I think that a modern day social worker might come to the conclusion that Joseph was born into what was a dysfunctional family in many respects.
6. It was not a poor family that Joseph belonged to. Jacob was a good shepherd and farmer and during his time in Paddan Aram his flocks increased. He had food and clothing and servants… and by the time Joseph was born, JACOB would have been counted as a wealthy man.
Lack of MONEY was never this family’s problem… lack of LOVE could have been.
Leah knew that Jacob had never loved her.
Every time she gave birth to a child she hoped that this would make him love her – but it didn’t.
Rachel did love Jacob, and Jacob did love Rachel but she couldn’t give him children and she was naturally very jealous of her sister. Their relationship became very distorted. They competed with one another for Jacob’s affection. Four times Leah gave Jacob a son… Rachel could bear it no longer and so she chose a surrogate as her way forward. She asked her servant to have a son by Jacob… twice this happened. Later, not to be outdone, Leah did the same and used her servant as a surrogate mother… twice. Over the next few years… Leah had two more children.. and finally Rachel gave birth to her first son.. Joseph. But perhaps even the name that she gave to him shows how discontented and unhappy Rachel was. She could have given him a name that meant “thankful” or “at Last God has heard me”. She didn’t she called him Joseph which simply means “give me another.”
Well a few years later Jacob did father another child by Rachel - and she died giving birth to her second son… Benjamin.
Let’s just look at the family line up…
(Show on Screen…)
Because of the tensions between the two mothers, rivalry and competitiveness must have been in the air that these children breathed as they grew up.
It’s no wonder that as they got older the sons of Leah seemed to have little respect for Jacob.
Two of them, Simeon and Levi once started a war with a neighbouring tribe - and never said a word to Jacob about it. And Rueben .. the oldest of Leah sons, slept with Rachel’s servant who was his father’s concubine and the surrogate mother to his two half brothers. (Back to Eastenders again!)
And as we shall see over the next couple of weeks… the rivalries in this divided family were to have serious consequences for Joseph.
8. It was a far from perfect family upbringing for Joseph. But God was present in the life of that family.
Not because they were good.
Not because they deserved it.
But because he had promised that he would prosper them and make the descendants of Jacob into a great nation.
Meet the family… Amazing as it may seem, the God of Love was at work in Joseph’s family to bring good things to them… and through them eventually bring blessing to the whole world. For the family of Joseph were the ancestors of Jesus.
Maybe your family was or is far from perfect. Stay with us over the next few weeks and find out how God can be at work to bring good things into situations that are very very far from perfect. In fact if you stay with us you may discover as Joseph was to discover, that when things seemed to be at their very worst, that was when God was most near.