The Headless Household

Genesis 30:1-16
Gregory Broderick | Sunday, October 16, 2022
Copyright © 2022, Gregory Broderick

The Bible presents a pleasant picture of family life.  Recall that marriage and family were instituted by God Himself in the garden (Gen. 1 and 2).  The picture it paints is clear and consistent: a husband and a wife united for life, except for extreme circumstances (Prov. 5:18; Mal. 2; Matt. 5:32); children born to them and raised up with care and instruction in the word of God, and with training and discipline to turn them from the wrong path to the right path (Deut. 11:19; 6:7; Eph. 6:4).  The Bible has a lot to say about family and marriage, but the defining feature of this family unit is love.  First of all, love for God (“We love because He first loved us”) but also love for each other.

The husband is to love the wife sacrificially, looking to her good rather than his own.  He is to love her just as Christ loved the church (Eph. 5:25).  That is the highest possible standard you could have.  And it is a joy and not a burden to live according to that rule.  Marriage itself if a joy and not a burden.  Proverbs 5:18: “May you rejoice in the wife of your youth.”  Proverbs 5:19: “May you be ever captivated by her love.”  The Bible describes a godly wife as a gift from God to the husband (Prov. 19:14).  Men, it is not good for you to be alone.  It is, rather, good for you to be with her, the one that God has for you.  God said so, and God provided.  God speaks of the Christian wife in superlative terms.  She is worth far more than rubies.  She brings him good, not harm, all the days of his life (Prov. 31:10–11).  The wife is to help her husband and to submit to his headship.  She is to be a great help to him as he blesses her by providing for her, by washing her with water through the word, by praying to God for her, and by protecting her, covering her by taking the heavy burden of headship and using it, not to indulge his own desires or his own lusts or to dominate her, but to bless her and to bless their mutual children by leading in love.

Marriage is a great blessing for the wife just as it is for the husband.  She respects him and does not have to give way to fear (1 Pet. 3:6; Eph. 5:33).  He feeds and cares for her, physically, emotionally, and spiritually (Eph. 5:29).  He is considerate of her and respects her even though in some ways she is a weaker partner (1 Pet. 3:7).  They are not two anymore; they are one (Eph. 5:31).  The Bible speaks of the godly Christian wife as clothed with strength and dignity (Prov. 31:25).  Having no fear for her household (Prov. 31:21).  Lacking nothing good (Prov. 31:11).

What about those sometimes pesky children?  They benefit greatly from Christian parents.  They are blessed to a thousand generations (Exod. 34:7).  They are provided for physically, developmentally, and spiritually.  They are taught as they sit at home and as they walk along the road (Deut. 7:6).  They have, at minimum, food and clothing to be provided for them by the heavenly Father through their earthly father (2 Tim. 5:8).  They learn from infancy the Holy Scriptures.  They learn from an early age the way that they should go (Prov. 22:6) and the way that they should not go (Prov. 2:1–5 and Proverbs 5, 6, and 7).  Being the child of Christian parents is a path to prosperity and eternal life (Prov. 3:1–2).  So it is great for the children.

Yet somehow these children are a blessing to us fathers and mothers as well.  It is a lot of work and it is a hard job.  These small, wrinkly, and demanding people come out screaming at you, eating, soiling themselves and then repeating the whole process.  It doesn’t look like much fun.  But somehow these little people manage to capture your very heart, and they bless their father and mother both (Prov. 31:28; 10:1).  So it is a two-way street.  It is not a one-way thing.

Children bring joy to the father and mother—joy, not resignation or perseverance.  They may bring those things at some times too, but they bring joy to the father and mother (Prov. 10:1).  Psalm 128 sets the scene of the godly household.  “You will eat of the fruit of your labor; blessing and prosperity will be yours.  Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your sons will be like olive shoots around your table.  Thus is the man blessed who fears the Lord” (Ps. 128:2–4).  That is the life that is being described right there.

I have not even mentioned grandparents.  Zechariah 8:4-5 says, “Men and women of ripe old age will sit in the streets . . . , each with cane in hand because of his age.  The city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing there.”  This is the picture of generational family life that the Bible presents.  It is the best life this side of glory.

I would like to sit down and leave it there.  Christian family life is great.  Go get married, be fruitful and multiply, and live the dream.  But there is only one problem with that, and it is called reality.  It is not because the Bible is wrong or too rosy in its view.  The problem is that we are all sinners.  We don’t do what we are supposed to do, what God commands us to do, to bring about the good and pleasant life we could have by following God’s commands.

Look at Jacob’s home.  It bears very little resemblance to the idyllic and joyful life of the Christian family that I just told you all about.  First off, Jacob has two wives, Leah and Rachel, and they are sisters on top of all of that.  It is not God’s pattern from Genesis 2.  Genesis 29:31 says, “Leah was not loved.”  That doesn’t sound like what I read.  Leah knows that she is not loved.  In Genesis 29:33 she says, “I am not loved.”  In Genesis 29:32 she says, “Surely my husband will love me now.”  She was wrong.  In Genesis 29:34 she says, “At last my husband will become attached to me.”  You can hear the longing in her statements.  It is kind of sad, and a little bit pathetic.  It is miserable.  It was probably five or so years that she lived in this way, or longer than that.  Where is all the love that I spoke about before?  She said, “I am not loved.”  Where is all the joy?  She didn’t have joy.  Where is the blessing and the praise that I said the godly Christian wife enjoys?

Look at Rachel in Genesis 30:1:  “She became jealous of her sister.”  Jealousy.  I don’t think I read anything about jealousy in the godly home that God prescribes.  Also in verse 1, Rachel commands her husband, “Give me children, or I’ll die!” And Jacob’s response: he was angry.  Verse 2: “Am I in the place of God?” Anger, fighting, conflict, frustration, helplessness.  It has nothing to do with the Bible’s picture of family life.

In verse 3 Rachel says, “Here is Bilhah, my maidservant.  Sleep with her so that she can bear children for me.”  This is adultery.  This is madness.  And as Jacob certainly knows, his grandfather already tried this in Genesis 16 and the result was a big mess in “The Hagar Solution.”  In Genesis 30:4, Jacob sleeps with Bilhah.  Disorder in the home, sin in the home.  Verse 8: Rachel said, “I have had a great struggle with my sister, and I have won.”  Struggle, fight, conflict, disregard.  Wrong priority, rivalry, children and servants in the household used as pawns in some kind of struggle or match.  It is no good.  Verse 9: “Leah took her maidservant Zilpah and gave her to Jacob as a wife.”  This has nothing to do with the biblical pattern.  This is mess.  This is adultery.  This is a dehumanizing of Bilhah and Zilpah, who are people too.  They are servants in your home.  They are reliant on you.  You should protect those people and look out for them.  But they exploited them instead.

Where is this happy home that I spoke about?  What is all this one-upsmanship and competition?  Why are we adding a third and fourth wife into the mix?  In verses 14–15, they barter Jacob for some mandrakes.  And we see the separation even in that interchange: “Give me some of your son’s mandrakes.”  That is Rachel’s nephew she is speaking about.  But she callously calls him “your son.”  That is her nephew Reuben.  He is not some foreigner, some stranger to her.  In verse 16 she goes to the husband: “You must sleep with me.  I have hired you with my son’s mandrakes.”  It is all very base and very transactional.  There is no love in this household.  There is no joy in this household.  There is no unity in this household.  There is no two-become-one in this household.  What we have instead is a five-way marital mess.

Yet they do not seem to get it.  Verse 18: “God has rewarded me for giving my maidservant to my husband.”  No, no, no, no, no.  You got the child you were looking for, but there is no reward here.  This is confusion.  This is spiritualizing your sin.  Verse 23: “God has taken away my disgrace.”  Verse 20: “This time my husband will treat me with honor.”  Ten or twenty years into it, we are still feeling unloved.  We are still feeling dishonored.  There is no one-anything in this household.  This bears no resemblance to the happy life that we explored.  Let us look at why that is.

1. The Problem: No Head

The reason we see such a difference biblical marriage and family life on the one hand, and the madhouse of strife, disorder, and sin in Jacob’s household on the other, is that there was no biblical order in the home.  Biblical blessing is a function of obeying the biblical structure.  Deuteronomy 28 lays it out: blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience.  This is for two reasons.  The first, and rather simplest thing, is that God’s ways work.  God picks the best means to achieve the best ends.  If you are using different means, you are going to get different ends, and they won’t be as good.  But the second reason is that God blesses your obedient efforts but He opposes and curses your disobedient efforts.  It’s the difference between running with the wind at your back and having the wind blowing in your face as you struggle forward.

This is true in the family, and it is true in all parts of life: in health, in financial matters, in church, in dating and marriage, in employment, in government, and so on.  But it is most present in the family.  God has a family order, a mandatory family order, that He imposed.  The husband is to function as the head (1 Cor. 11:3; Eph. 5:22; 1 Pet. 3, and Gen. 2).  It is mandatory.  God said.  It does not depend on your size, on your ability, or on your personality.  It is a role-based requirement.  You are the husband; you must be the head.  The man is not free to abdicate his role as the head and dump the responsibility onto his wife.  Nor is the wife free to seize command of the whole operation, or even to carve out spheres where she acts as the head not under the husband.

It is a biblical mandate.  It is not a cultural relic of so-called backwards patriarchal culture.  It is biblical.  God’s family order was established by God Himself in the garden before the Fall, before sin entered the world, and it persists to this day.  In other words, it is not a response to sin, but it was not wiped out by the existence of sin either.  If we as husbands lead in sacrificial love for the good of our wives and our children, we will be blessed and so will they.  But if we govern out of our own self-interests, our own lusts, our own laziness, we will have strife and trouble just like Nabal the fool and just like Jacob.

If wives submit as to the Lord in everything to their own husbands (Eph. 5:22), there will be blessing and peace in the home.  If not, there will be trouble and strife and misery and mess.  Proverbs 25:24 says, “It is better to live on the corner of a roof than to share a house with a quarrelsome wife,” because there is no peace.  Proverbs 27:15: “A quarrelsome wife is like a constant dripping.”  There is no rest, no peace.  Drip, drip, drip.  Proverbs 14:1: “With her own hands, the foolish woman tears down her house.”  It is no good.

Where children honor both parents, they will prosper and they will enjoy long life, both on this earth but especially eternally (Eph. 6:2–3).  Where they do not do so, where they oppose the biblical order, there is misery and mess for all, including those rebellious children (Prov. 15:5), like the prodigal son.  His life was a mess.  He thought he knew a better way.  It was not a better way.

We see all of this present in Jacob’s family in Haran.  There is so much disorder, so much anti-biblical life that the real question is not why things were as bad as they were, but why it was not worse than it appears in the Scripture.  Now, all that said, their situation was pretty bad off.

Wrong Family Structure: Two Wives

One problem was that the entire family structure was wrong from the beginning.  Why are there two wives here at all?  Laban is a liar (Gen. 29:17, 23).  He tricks Jacob.  Jacob is a fool (Gen. 29:23).  He does not seem to be aware that he married Leah and not Rachel.  Now, I don’t know what the marriage ceremony was like in the old days, but it seems like something you would want to check before you make your vows.  Jacob foolishly solves the problem of marrying the wrong girl by marrying another one in addition, and her sister on top of that.  This is a plan that is doomed from the outset.  There is no way that you can give two wives to one man and end up with anything other than jealousy, competition, hurt feelings, and strife.  And if that would be true with any two women, how much more when you put two sisters?

What happened here to Jacob is the only thing that could have happened.  The Bible does not endorse plural marriage.  Genesis 2:24 says, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh.”  The word “wife” is singular.  It doesn’t say, “A man will be united to his wives.”  This idea is echoed in Titus 1:6 and 1 Timothy 3:2.  It is speaking of elders, but it is the pattern for all: The husband of but one wife, of only one wife.

When God talks about being united to your wife, there is an idea of deep loyalty and fidelity.  They are one flesh.  They are united.  They are joined.  They are no longer two independent beings.  Not even like two people on the same team.  They are one unit, one being.  It says, “Two will become one.”  I didn’t read anywhere where it said, “The five will become one flesh.”  Adam had one wife.  Noah had one wife.  His sons had one wife each.  First Peter 3:20 says eight in all went into the ark.  Abraham had one wife, at least one wife at a time.  And if you want to try to argue that the Hagar dalliance proves otherwise, you missed the entire point of that story.  Isaac had one wife.

It may have been the custom in Haran as in other parts of the world, godless parts of the world, to have multiple wives.  Esau took multiple wives (Gen. 26).  Lamech took multiple wives (Gen. 4).  That may have been the way it was in the godless parts of the world.   That may have been the way it was in the “culture” around them.  But it was not the biblical order.  And as you read through your Bible, even where the Bible makes provision or allowance for plural marriage, it is never a recommended course nor is it presented as a positive good.  Just like the Bible deals with slavery.  Treat your slaves well or treat them up to a certain standard does not endorse the practice of slavery.  It makes provision for reality.  It says you shouldn’t do this, but if you are going to do it, here is how you do it.  And I would ask, where did plural marriage ever work out well?  Hagar mess.  David mess.  And the king of all plural-marriage messes, Solomon mess.  No, in the beginning, it was not so, and it will not be blessed.  What was Jacob to do?  Well, he should have stayed married to Leah only and loved her.  That would have been blessed.

Doubling Down on the Wrong Family Structure

The second problem is that they doubled down on the wrong structure.  By the end of Genesis 29, two wives is already a problem.  One is unloved, the other is jealous.  So the natural solution is to add two more wives to the mix.  That will straighten everything right out.  Two isn’t working, but four will fix the problem.  No, no, no.  More wives, more problems.

This is not to blame Bilhah or Zilpah.  They do not seem to have had much choice in the matter.  They seem to have been tools or, if anything, victims of Leah and Rachel, and of Jacob’s passivity.  And out of anyone involved in this mess, they seem to be the two best-behaved people in this entire circus.  No, the adding of these new second-class wives is all mixed up.  It is wrong action born of wrong motive and, of course, they reach the wrong conclusion: “God has blessed!” No, it is not blessed.  It is a mess of fighting and discord.  It is a cursed mess.  God said, “Be fruitful and multiply.”  I read some commentators who said, “Well, they were trying to be fruitful and multiply, so you have to give them a break.”  No, God said, “Be fruitful and multiply,” and God said, “Your seed will be like the sand on the seashore and the stars in the sky.”  That means there was no reason to engage in plural marriage in order to help God along with the “Be fruitful and multiply” project.  There was no need for unbiblical and self-motivated maneuvers.

As we preached recently, when you find yourself in a mess, such as sharing a husband with your sister and unable to conceive children, don’t double down on the mess.  Seek God, conform to the biblical pattern, and repent.

Adultery

The third problem is adultery.  Marrying multiple women does not cure the adultery problem.  These extra marriages were a form of adultery.  God made some rules to protect second wives and the children of plural marriages.  This is in Deuteronomy 21, beginning with verse 15.  But this is in no way endorsing the practice of polygamy any more than the laws that protect the slaves was an endorsement of the evil of slavery.  As Jesus explained in Matthew 19:18, God gave such laws because our hearts are hard.  But God has a better command and a better way for us: one wife.

The application for us is this: Don’t double down on your mess, but reverse course.  He who stole must steal no longer (Eph. 4:28).  You cannot steal your way out of the mess.  Instead, a 180-degree change is required.  Stop stealing, start working hard, support yourself and your family, and then give to others who are in need.  It is not a gradual or half-hearted way of doing.  There must be a clean break from sin, a clear commitment to do what is right, and then clear action.  And as you go, God will help you.  (GTB)  Don’t keep going on in your sin, thinking it will lead you out of the problem.  Rather, it will only draw you deeper into the maze of misery and mess.

Self-Centeredness

The fourth problem in this situation is self-centeredness.  In all the actions in this text, everyone is operating in a self-serving way.  Verse 1: “Give me children, or I’ll die!” Self-driven.  Verse 3: “Sleep with her so that she can bear children for me.”  For me.  “Through her, I can build a family.”  It is focused on “I.”  Verse 8: “I have had a great struggle with my sister, and I have won.”  Verse 13: “How happy I am!  The women will call me happy.”  Verse 20: “My husband will treat me with honor because I have borne him six sons.”  Verse 23: The focus is on “my disgrace.”

Where is the love for God?  Where is the love for your husband?  Where is the love for children, your children, and also the children of your sister, the children who live in your household?  Where is the basic regard for Bilhah and Zilpah, who were treated just a shade above farm animals?  No, there is none of it.  It is all self-centered—me, me, me, my, my, my, I, I, I.  This is not the Bible life.  We are called to love one another—certainly, in the larger household of God, but also in our family, in our small family unit.  Here, though, we see the opposite.  They do not even have the natural affinity, the natural care and love for their biological family.  Instead, we have unabashed self-love operating.

Don’t be fooled by all their God-talk and Christianese: “The Lord has blessed us,” and so on.  Don’t look at what they say but look at what they do.  It has nothing to do with God and His commands.

Out of Order Home

The fifth problem in this household: It is out of order.  Those wives are supposed to be a helpmeet for Jacob (Gen. 2:24).  They are supposed to be under him as the head (1 Cor. 11:3).  Yet what do we see?  They are over him.  They command him, and he gladly obeys.  He becomes a helper to help them have children.  If you look at it that way, he has become a wife, and a sort of shabbily-treated wife at that.  Listen to how they command him: “Give me children, or I will die!” Harsh.  “Sleep with my maidservant.”  Leah took her maidservant Zilpah and gave her to Jacob as a wife.  Who is the boss?  And then, most humiliating of all, verse 16: “I have hired you with my son’s mandrakes.”  This is contempt.  She should have left with mandrakes all over her.  They discuss it with one another in verses 14 through 16.  They inform him of the decision as though he is an inferior or a servant in verse 17.  She even says, “My son’s mandrakes.”  That’s his son too.  And he has a name.  But there is none of that.  “I have hired you with my son’s mandrakes.  Come!” Jacob has become a nothing, a zero, a loser, irrelevant, not even part of the household decision-making process, without a say even in this most personal and intimate matter.  This is all bad.  It has nothing to do with biblical order.  Thus, because they lived all out of biblical order, there is no righteousness, no peace, and no joy in the Holy Spirit in that home.

2. The Cause of the Problem

So the problem is that there is no head.  What is the cause of the problem?  This is a big unpleasant sounding mess.  How did it happen?  We could blame the culture around them.  Polygamy and idols were probably the thing to do in Haran.  Maybe it was even a kind of matriarchal culture.  I don’t know.  You could blame the culture.  You could blame Laban.  Laban was a big fraud and a liar.  He stuck Jacob with the wrong sister.  You could blame Rachel and Leah.  They have gone crazy and are out of control.  All these bear some piece of the blame for sure, but they are not the real problem.

Jacob is the real problem.  Jacob was supposed to be the head (1 Cor. 11:3).  He is supposed to manage his own family well (1 Tim. 3:4).  He must be active in government, not passively sitting around, watching what is happening or wondering what happened, but making things happen.

It all starts in the fraudulent marriage to Leah.  Jacob got burned because he was not paying attention.  He was not careful when he took his vows.  Jacob’s passivity is present again when he discovers that he has been defrauded.  He does not demand a divorce or an annulment.  He does not keep his oath to the one wife.  Instead, he gets buffaloed by Laban into the whole thing.  Laban says, “It is not our custom to give the younger daughter in marriage first” (Gen. 29:26).  Now, stop right there.  What do I care about your custom?  This has nothing to do with me.  I am a Christian.  I have a different way.  Fulfill your vows, Mr.  Laban (Gen. 29:18).  It was very clear: “I will work for you seven years in return for your younger daughter Rachel.”  You cannot have a clearer contract than that.  So he could have said, “No, you defrauded me.  Give me my proper wife.”  I don’t know what you would do with Leah at that point, but that was at least an option.  Or he could have said, “Well, I got defrauded but I made a vow and so I am going to keep that vow.  I am going to be married to Leah and I will do it God’s way.”  But Jacob doesn’t say anything.  Old passive Jacob just goes along.  Genesis 29:27: “Finish [Leah’s] bridal week and then I will give you [Rachel] in exchange for another seven years of work.”  And it says, “Jacob did so.”  Passive.  He is sitting around, wondering what happened.

With such a poor start and with such a wrong structure, it is no wonder that things went so bad: fighting and jealousy among the sister-wives; abuse of the maidservants; and wives commanding the declawed and compliant husband.  It is all because Jacob failed to govern.  He failed to act as the head.  He abdicated his biblically mandated role to teach, to train, to rebuke, and to correct by the word and to lead his household.  He did not love any of his four wives or his children just as Christ loved the church.  He did not love them enough to rise up and to rule for their good and in obedience to God’s command.

I don’t know why he did that.  Maybe he was simply lazy.  It is, after all, a lot of work to love your wife just as Christ loved the church.  It is easier, at least in the moment, to let them do what they want to do.  So maybe he was just lazy.  Or maybe it was lust—sleeping with multiple women with a veil of legitimacy and all of them competing for your attention and approbation.  What a flattering set up this must have been!  It must have fueled his pride.  Or maybe he did it out of fear—fear  of Laban.  After all, Jacob was over in a foreign land, somewhat under the thumb of Laban.  Maybe he had fear of Rachel, whom he loved.  Maybe he had fear of hassle or trouble, so he just decided to hide in the fields.  In our modern day, we may hide in the fields too or we may hide at the office or we may hide in our garage.  But he is hiding from them, not leading.  Or maybe it was fear of failure.  If I rise up and rule, I may not be able to actually achieve it.  I don’t know.  Maybe it was guilt.  Genesis 29:30 says, “He loved Rachel more than Leah.”  As we said, Leah was definitely aware of this fact, and I would imagine that everyone was aware that she was aware.  So perhaps he was feeling guilty.  She knew and she was downcast, so perhaps he could not bring himself to rebuke or correct her because he had treated her so poorly.  So maybe Jacob withdrew from the whole situation out of guilt or disgrace.

Whatever the reason, Jacob did not do his job: Love your wife just as Christ loved the church.  Lead her in righteousness.  Say “No” to sin and “Yes” to righteousness.  Active government, running the show.  He did not do any of it.

A lack of headship always makes a mess.  When no one is in charge, there is no way to have clear direction or finality.  It always leads to uncertainty, to fights, and to disputes.  If your head does not function properly—let’s say you have a stroke—your body goes into spasms or paralysis.  It either cannot do anything, or it does things it shouldn’t do.  It is a messy situation.  My grandmother used to tell a story.  She was raised in rural South Dakota, way out on the farm in the Depression.  Their city relatives would come out to the farm to visit.  Her brothers thought it was real funny to twist the head off of a chicken and put it on the ground.  Apparently the chicken will run around for a couple of minutes after you twist its head off.  It was spurting blood everywhere on the dresses of the city girls.  But that is a picture of what is going on here.  This headless chicken is running around spraying its mess everywhere.   Whenever there is no head, there is always a mess.

For those of you kids who are in school, you may have been subjected to the cursed “group project” where no one is in charge.  So some people don’t do their job at all, some people don’t do it well, or there is an argument about what we ought to do and there is no real way to solve that dispute.  There is not a person in charge who has the authority to say, “Here’s what we are going to do.”  So you end up running around in circles, like that chicken.

In business, those of you who are at work, if you don’t have a clear chain of command or if you have a boss who absents himself or herself from the situation, you will see that the company drifts, that subordinates squabble.  “You’re not in charge.”  “Well, I am not in charge either, but you are not in charge.”  So we argue and fight about what is the best way to go instead of having a boss who says, “Here is what we are going to do.”

In the absence of a clear and functioning head, there is a vacuum, and then in that vacuum, there is a power struggle.  It happened the same way here.  Jacob’s failure to act as head created the conditions for these girls to go wild.  He should have been aware who he married.  He should have been active in responding when he was defrauded.  He should have stomped on the jealousy and the infighting when it first arose, and insisted on a love household.  He should have ministered to those wives.  “Yes, we are in a tough situation, but you are sisters, and God will take care of us.  Everything will be all right.”  He should not have treated Leah as a shabby and unwanted wife, but he should have kept his obligation to love her just as God loved us.  Remember his father Isaac.  Rebekah got off the camel and became Isaac’s wife and he loved her (Gen. 24:67).  The impression is that he loved her right away, not out of some great emotional feeling, but because that is the vow that he took: Love her, and the feelings follow.  Jacob should have rejected the maidservant wives as unbiblical and unwise.  At least, he should have stopped them at the mandrake barter.  Have some dignity, man!  “I have hired you with my mandrakes.”  “No!  I am the head.  That’s enough.  You ladies can make whatever arrangements you think you can make when I am not here but do not presume to bind me or boss me.  I am God’s appointed head.  This stops now!”  Instead, he went right along.

They surely sinned, but Jacob’s abdication of his God-given role as the head created the conditions necessary for such chaos and for such disorder.  And his responses, his actions in response to their misbehavior, exacerbated the problem.

Maybe you are feeling sorry for old Jacob.  After all, he is far away from home and he is on his own, although ask yourself why that is.  But maybe you are feeling sorry for him.  Perhaps he simply was not up to the job.  Perhaps he was a lazy man, you think to yourself.  But that is not true.  He is not lazy in any other part of his life.  He worked very, very hard.  It is hard to scheme and to defraud so many people, but he did the job.  It’s hard work.  He worked very hard to enrich himself—all the goat shenanigans that went on.  Maybe you say that Jacob was naturally meek or afraid.  I don’t think that is the case, but even if it were so—so what?  God called you to be the head and to govern.  Rise up!  Rise up and do the job and God will equip you, just like he equipped little Gideon, whom he made a mighty warrior.

Maybe you say, “Give Jacob a break.  He was very busy at work.”  It is true.  In Genesis 30:16 he is coming in from the fields at evening time.  This is a long day of hard labor.  In Genesis 31 he will later say that the heat consumed him by day and the cold by night, and sleep fled from his eyes.  He is a hardworking man.  Or you could say that he had a lot of mouths to feed and a demanding boss.  Laban was a demanding and fraudulent boss.  But this is a trap that many men fall into: a general in the barracks, but a private at home; a CEO at the office, but a lowly mail clerk in the home.  This is all too often an excuse for our natural passivity or avarice.  God does not call every husband to be a CEO, but He does call every husband to be the head over his home, and to be an active governor in his own house (Eph. 5:24 and so on).  So it is a matter of priority.  It is better to be a general at home and a private in the workplace than the other way around.  So if your job interferes with your ability to fulfill your God-mandated role as the head of your house, then leave that job.  Your home is a higher priority.  Find something that fits around the higher priority of being the head of your home.  Don’t try to fit your being the head of your home over your higher priority of success at the office.  This may cost you.  It may mean a lower lifestyle or less prestige.  But no success in the workplace will ever make up for failure in the home.

Men, let us put aside all passivity and let us dismiss all excuses.  Let us rise up and be active in our God-mandated role as the heads of our homes, not wondering what happened, not watching what happened, not even merely reacting to what happened, but making things happen: looking ahead, planning ahead, acting ahead, and then following up to make sure our instructions and our leadership has been carried.  And if this sounds hard, it is hard.  But you can do it; God will help you.

I said to dismiss all excuses.  Maybe you think that headship is fine for some people, but my wife does not submit to me.  I say, give her something to submit to.  Give her a chance.  And persevere in it for her good and the good of your children, whether or not they like it in that moment.  They will like it later and they will like it a lot more in eternity.  It will always seem easier today to just go along with whatever mandrake plan they have cooked up while you were out in the field.  It will not only seem easier today, but it will actually be easier today to just let them do it.  But it will not be easier tomorrow or five years from now or fifteen years from now or fifty years from now.  Just look at Jacob: compromise today and disaster tomorrow.  It probably said that on his tombstone.

Everyone miserable.  Everyone unhappy.  This is always the way when we abandon God’s order, and it is all Jacob’s fault.  It is all due to his failure and his abdication.  Now, he is elect.  He is saved.  God said, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”  But he sure made one heck of a mess in his household along the way.

Conclusion

Just a few points of application in conclusion.

1. Men of God, let us rise up and govern our homes as God commands, not as self-indulging tyrants, not as lazy or absent sluggards, but in the model of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ: in love directing others to good, steering them away from the bad, teaching, training, rebuking, and correcting from the Holy Scriptures, providing and protecting them, encouraging and comforting them when that is what is necessary, with wisdom, with strength, and with perseverance, putting down all threats from without and all opposition from within. It is a big job, but as I said, God assigned it and He will help us.  God sends others to help us too.  We are not alone in this.  Pastors, brothers and sisters in the Lord, even godly wives to help us as our helpmeets.  And I can tell you: our families want it.  Our families need it.  And certainly our broken culture needs it.  Let us act as men, and act as men of faith, knowing that God who died for our sins and who was raised to life for our justification will make us able in this matter as well.
2. May we all live lives of love for God, for our godly wives and for our godly families, not doing what is easy in the moment, but what is right in the sight of God. Then we will not live lives of chaos, misery, jealousy, discord, longing for the corner of the roof to escape the quarrelsome household or the drip, drip, drip.  Rather, we will live the life that God intended for our families, the life of I spoke about: righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit; rejoicing in the wife of our youth; captivated by her love; secure and blessed in our godly homes; praised in the temple; praised at the city gates; praised by the Lord; enjoying our children and grandchildren (and if I can paraphrase) who run around while we sit around, with the smiling providence of God upon us.  That is the good life.  It is not fantasy.  It is not hyperbole.  It is utterly achievable.  It is achievable if we seek the Lord, if we trust in Him, and if we obey His commands.  May we all do so and be blessed.