Genesis 29:19-25: a reflection

19Laban said, “It is better that I give her to you, than that I should give her to another man. Stay with me.” 20Jacob served seven years for Rachel. They seemed to him but a few days, for the love he had for her. 21Jacob said to Laban, “Give me my wife, for my days are fulfilled, that I may go in to her.” 22Laban gathered together all the men of the place, and made a feast. 23In the evening, he took Leah his daughter, and brought her to Jacob. He went in to her. 24Laban gave Zilpah his servant to his daughter Leah for a servant. 25In the morning, behold, it was Leah! He said to Laban, “What is this you have done to me? Didn’t I serve with you for Rachel? Why then have you deceived me?”

Jacob loves Rachel and agrees to work seven years for her, and the years pass like a few days because of his love. But on the wedding night, Laban deceives him, giving him Leah instead of Rachel, and Jacob discovers the switch only in the morning. His outraged protest, what is this you have done to me? why have you deceived me? carries an irony he may not have felt: Jacob, who had once deceived his own father and brother to steal a blessing, is now on the receiving end of a deception.

The scene quietly illustrates a hard truth. Jacob had built his early life on cunning and deceit, and now he tastes the bitterness of being deceived himself. What he had sown, he was beginning to reap. God was not absent from this; he was allowing Jacob to feel, from the other side, the very wrong he had once inflicted, part of a long, patient work of shaping a deceiver into a man who would finally learn to depend on God rather than his own scheming.

There is a sober lesson here about how the wrongs we do have a way of returning to us, and about God's patient use of even our being wronged to shape us. If you have been on the giving end of deceit or manipulation, this scene invites honest reflection. And if you are on the receiving end of another's deception, take heart that God is not absent; he sees, and he is able to weave even this into his good purposes, as he did with Jacob, whose tangled family would nonetheless become the people of God. Trust God in the tangle, and let him make you honest.

Lord, Jacob the deceiver was himself deceived, and began to reap what he had sown, yet you were patiently at work even in it. Where I have dealt in deceit or manipulation, show me honestly and make me a person of integrity. And where I have been wronged by another's deception, help me trust that you see, and that you can weave even this into your good purposes. Make me honest, and hold me in the tangle. Amen.