Women

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 Based on Gen. 24:42-66

      Bach never wrote an opera, but the closest thing to it was his Coffee Cantata.  He became quit an expert on coffee because in his day coffee drinking was the popular vice much like drugs have become in our day.  There were laws against it and spies roamed the city sniffing the air to catch people in the act of roasting  coffee beans.  Frederick the Great was disgusted with the increase of coffee drinking among his subjects.  He was brought up on beer, and many of the great battles had been won by soldiers nourished on beer.  The king felt that coffee drinking soldiers would not be strong in their warfare against his enemies. 

       The cantata of Bach is about a father who was greatly disturbed about his daughter was hook on coffee.  If she does not get it three times a day she says, "I'm no better than a piece of dried up goat meat."  Papa tries everything-he argues, he threatens, but nothing works until he promises to find her a husband if she will kick the habit.  She agrees, but in the closing trio she confides that she will only marry a man who will let her drink all the coffee she wants.  This is Bach's idea of a prodigal daughter.  It is a rather mild rebellion in comparison to the Prodigal Son.  We know that daughters can be equally rebellious and as foolish as sons, but the Bible seldom reveals a bad daughter.  There are sons galore who bring grief to their parents, but very few daughters. 

      The Bible is much more son oriented than daughter oriented.  But there is more about daughters then we realize. Believe it or not, there are about 500 references to daughters in the Bible, and about 90 of them are in Genesis, which makes it the most daughter oriented book in the Bible.  Most of Genesis is about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his 12 sons. But here in Genesis 24 we see entire long chapter of this male dominated book revolving around the young daughter Rebekah who would become the grandmother of the 12 sons of Jacob. 

      Rebekah got in on God's plan for history because Abraham did not like the girls he saw in Canaan.  They were idolaters and corrupted by their culture.  He did not want his son Isaac to marry one of these girls, and so he sent his servant Eliezer back to his native Mesopotamia to find a daughter among his brother's family.  This was probably the longest journey in the Bible to find a wife.  It was a 6 weeks trip across the desert.  In our culture we don't send servants out to shop for a wife.  We prefer to see the merchandise for ourselves and make our own choice.  Isaac is 40 years old, and yet he does not go along to have some input.  He just took the one the servant selected, and they had a long and fruitful marriage.  They had their fights, but they overcame them and became the grandparents of the 12 tribes of Israel.

       For some reason the Patriarchs had a hard time having daughters.  Abraham had just 2 sons-Ishmael and Isaac. Then Isaac had his 2 boys-Jacob and Esau.  Then Jacob had the 12 sons from his 4 wives, but then Leah finally came through with one daughter named Dinah.  She is the only daughter we know of for 3 generations in that family tree. Because of this lack of daughters the line of Abraham had to go back to the family of Nahor his brother to find their wives, for girls were abundant in his line.  It gave us Rebekah, Rachel and Leah.  It is a strange reality, but it is still true today that some families tend to have all boys and others have all girls, But the majority get a mixture of the two.    Such was the case with the family of Rebekah.  She had a brother named Laban. 

      The thing that surprised me in studying the families of Genesis is that many of them just had 2 children.  I guess I assumed that most families were large in the Bible, but if you read with the intent to count, you discover that families with from 1 to 5 are the majority, and 2 or 3 are very common. Part of the problem in counting is that daughters are often not listed, for the family tree followed the sons.  That is why it is rare to have a passage like the one we are looking at where a daughter plays the leading role on the stage of history.  She was not forced to play it either, but chose to play it by her own will.  It was a male dominated world, but we see that the males who dominated Rebekah's life respected her right to determine her own destiny.  We read in verse 57-8, "Then they said, let's call the girl and ask her about it.   So they called Rebekah and asked her,  "will you
go with this man?"  "I will go," she said."  

     She did not hesitate to make the choice of leaving her family to go to a far land to be married to a total stranger.  It was an awesome decision, but she choose to go.  She was the female equivalent of Abraham leaving his family to go to Canaan.  Good parenting and good relationships of all kinds demand that we respect the rights of people to have a say in the direction they go.  They should be consulted and given the right, and not have their destiny determined by someone else.

      It is one of the hard parts of parenting to give guidance with trying to impose your will on your child.  A mother was listening to her little daughter say her prayers one night. She was really into blessing with God bless daddy and mommy, grandma and grandpa, uncle Bill and aunt Dorothy, and the mailman and Mickey mouse and, the mother seeing no end to the list said "Amen."  But the little girl said, "Don't listen to her God.  She doesn't know when I am done."

      It is hard to let children be children and have their own feelings because they often do not fit our adult agenda.  One of the major problems in our culture is the refusal of parents to let their children be children.  The parents are captives of the culture, and they feel the pressure to impose an adult life style on their kids.   Childhood is a non-productive period of life, and so the goal is to get over it as quickly as possible. Such is the thinking of many.  It is a waste of time to be children in their minds, but this is in direct contradiction to the Bible. 

       John Drescher in What Parents Should Expect writes, "Because we do not see childhood as a legitimate phase of life itself, and because we as parents feel the need to find our success in our children, we do many ridiculous things.  At 3 months we buy toys parents like to play with.  And electric train is purchased and set by parents whose child still wants to stack blocks.  A tricycle stands riderless with the driver still in diapers.  We dress 5-year-olds in caps and gowns for kindergarten graduation.  A little fellow recently said, 'I think it is bad I graduated because I can't even read.'"  He goes on giving numerous illustrations of how parents refuse to let their children be children.

       We live in a childhood denying culture.  Animals do not have much a childhood.  There born and very quickly are on their own.  God made people different from the animal kingdom.  He made them to need a long period of childhood before becoming adults.  We don't like God's plan.  The animal kingdom is what we want, and so we deny that man is different and go along with the evolution philosophy that man is just another animal.  And so we reject childhood as a waste and want our children to become adults as quickly as possible.  This has led to children having breakdowns increasing numbers, and at younger ages.  The drive to be grown up leads to inferiority feelings.  This has become the number one emotional problem of teens.  Almost all of them feel inferior because they cannot be mature adults, and so they turn to alcohol, drugs, and suicide to escape a world where they don't fit in.

      Jesus said adults are to become like children, and we have reversed that to say that children must become adults. The result is a culture where families are breaking down at record pace.  You cannot contradict God's plan for life and not pay a price.  There needs to be more of verse 57 in family life.  It says, "Let's all the girl and ask her about it."  Let your children share their feelings and dreams.  Let them have choices about their destiny.  Don't impose your dreams, or those of your culture on them.  Let them be who they are as God has designed them. 

      Florence Nightingale changed the history of nursing in hospitals, but few realized how her choice to do so was fought by her family.  She and her sisters were educated at home by their father.  As a teen she fell in love with the idea of studying nursing.  Her mother had other dreams for her. She was pretty and witty, and she smart and talented.  Her mother did everything she could to frustrate her dream of becoming a nurse.  It was not a respectable profession in those days.  Her mother and sister actually felt it was immoral to be a nurse, and her sister refused to talk about the degrading topic. 

       Florence felt called of God to be a nurse, but her family's resistance led her to depression so deep that she wanted to take her own life.  At age 30 she finally escaped the clutches of her family and got some training with the deaconesses in Munich, Germany.  But when she came back home she was sentenced to be her sister's slave for 6 months, and she was forbidden to mention nursing.  She was deeply depressed again and realized she had to follow her own will regardless of her family's wishes.  She left home and went back to Munich.  She wrote to her mother pleading for her support, but her mother would not respond.  Her family resented her and felt she had disgraced the family name.  She was treated like a criminal for becoming a nurse.

      You can understand why Florence wrote in July of 1851, "The family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for-its own uses.  It thinks of them not as what God has made them but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be."  Her family interfered and got her fired from her first job at age 32, but she fought back and got reinstated.  It was not until she became famous that the family stopped fighting her.  It was too late then, however, and even though Florence nursed her own mother the last 7 years of her life, they were never close because she was a parent who never had the wisdom to say, "Let's call the girl and ask her about it." 

      Let your daughters and your sons tell you how they feel. Let them express their own dreams, for God could have put in them, as he did in Florence, the ambition and ability that you have no understanding of and not interest in, but which are a part of His plan for their lives.  The Bible is mainly about men who leave their land and people to go into an unfamiliar world to do the will of God, but here in Gen. 24 we have a daughter doing so.  As history developed more and more daughters have become called of God to make such commitments.  Today there are more women on the mission field fulfilling the great commission than there are men.

      Rebekah's life reveals that commitment like hers can change all of history, but it is not necessarily glamorous.  We take famous people like Florence Nightingale and pick out the honors she received and the great events of parties with the Queen, and we think such a life would be so glamorous. But the fact is, she had a hard life, and it was full of loneliness and sorrow with very little glamour.  She saved many thousands of lives by her influence and commitment, but it was mostly just blood, sweat, and tears, and not a lot of enjoying ambrosia-the nectar of the gods. 

     As we follow Rebekah back to Canaan to be the wife of Isaac we see it was a commitment that changed history, but there was not a lot of glamour.  Isaac was a rather generic sort of husband.  He was not a very exciting personality.  He like to hunt and so he favored Esau the hunter.  But she favored Jacob, and so there was conflict in the family.  She sent Jacob back to her brother and never saw him again, and Esau was a great disappointment to her, for he married pagan girls.  The point is, she played a major role in God's plan, but her life was not full of the spectacular.  There was disappointment, boredom, loss, and just the typical life of most wives and mothers.  But she remained committed, and that is why she was God's choice for this role.

       She was given a choice and she remained committed to that choice, and that is what God is looking for in daughters and sons.  Rebekah was pretty we are told, but she never became famous for anything.  She just had a family of two boys and did her best to raise them.  Nobody is clamoring to get the movie rights to her life story.  It was a rather commonplace life she lived, but she had the key ingredient that makes any daughter and asset to the kingdom of God, for she had commitment.  If you teach your child to be a committed person, you will prepare them to be used of God. 

      Lack of commitment has always been a major weakness in people.  Adam and Eve were not committed to obey God's will whatever the cost, and they lost paradise.  Lack of commitment has been the major problem of man ever since. The bottom line cause of every problem every church faces is the lack of commitment.  If all believers were committed people, there would be no problem in getting people to do the work of the church, or to fund missions, or to achieve any of the realistic goals that are aimed for. 

      A missionary society wrote to the famous David Livingstone in Africa, "Have you found a good road to where you are? If so, we want to send other men to join you." Livingstone replied, "If you have men who will come only if they know there is a good road, I don't want them. I want men who will come if there is no road at all." We are a soft people. We have so many options of enjoyment that it is painful to do anything that is hard and costly. Commitment involves pain, and we just do not like the idea. There was
pain involved for Rebekah to leave her family and travel for weeks over the desert to marry a stranger. It was hard, and called for commitment.

     An old Swedish hymn has this line, "There is nothing that is not won by the love which suffers." This is so true of God's love which gave His Son to die on the cross to achieve the reconciliation of God and man. But it is true in every realm of life. Commitment is love for anyone or any goal that will be pursued, even if it means suffering. John Audubon became the famous naturalist and the name to be ever associated with bird lovers because he was committed to learn about birds. He would go out at midnight and crouch in the swamps just to learn more about the nighthawk. He would stand in water that was stagnant up to his neck while poisonous water moccasins swam past his face in order to get a picture of a New Orleans water bird.  He risked his life for what seemed so trivial because he was committed to his goal.

      Shun Fujimoto of Japan, in the 1976 summer Olympics, broke his right knee in a floor exercise.  He refused to give up, and he competed in his strongest event, which was the rings.  His routine was excellent, and when he dismounted with a triple summersault twist the pain shot through his whole system like a knife.  Tears ran down his cheeks, but the tears were soon gone, for by his commitment he won the gold medal. 

      The stories are endless of people who are so committed to a goal that they will suffer greatly to achieve it.  We need to have goals that we know are God's will that we are pursuing with diligence no matter what suffering may be involved.  It does not have to be a commitment to be great or famous. God does not put that kind of pressure on us like parents often do. He just wants us to be like Rebekah, and be committed to what He has called us to be. She was called to be a wife and mother, and that is a worthy calling. Today daughters are called to be just about everything that sons are called to be. We need to encourage them to follow their dreams and be committed to do all that they do for the glory of God.

     The thing that impresses me about God's call to people in the Bible is that all He really asks for is commitment. He does not ask them to be great. He does not ask them to do spectacular things. He just asks them to go where He wants them to go and be committed to the goal. Abraham was not told he had to go to Canaan and be a hero of any kind, or become famous in the land. He was just called to go there, and that is what he did.  Rebekah was just asked to go to Canaan and be a wife, and she went and was committed to it. She did not have to become great or famous. All she had to do is be what she was called to be-a wife and mother. God does not put pressure on His children to be something they are not called to be, or gifted to be. He just wants us to be the best of what we are called to be, and that is what Rebekah was as a dedicated daughter

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