Poor Leah.  Her very name meant weariness or languor, and her only real description is as one who had “weak eyes”.  This wasn’t a comment on her eyesight but rather on their appearance.  The eyes were the center of beauty in the Eastern world and so having “dull or bleary eyes” as is here described was a sign of weakness.  Ellicott says in his commentary that she may very well have had an eye problem or disease as so many did in a dry, gritty, sandy land.  She is also the oldest daughter and therefore traditionally must be the first to marry, yet she remains unwed.  And compared to Rachel, described as having “a lovely figure and beautiful”, it would have been no surprise if Leah had been bitter at her fate.

Leah is rejected once when Jacob chooses Rachel over her, again when she is used as Laban’s pawn to squeeze 14 years of work out of Jacob, and again when Jacob wakes up next to her on their wedding night and rejected again.  Weary, unloved, weak eyed… such is Leah’s fate.  And we read her emotions clearly in the names her children bear.  First comes Reuben, and she says, “surely my husband will love me now.”  Ouch.  Next is Simeon, saying, “because the Lord heard that I am not loved…”  And then Levi, saying, “Now at last my husband will become attached to me.”  Her fourth is Judah, and in him we see a change for Leah.  Rather than the pleading for love from Jacob, she seems to recognize her love from God and says, “This time, I will praise the Lord.”

All of us have felt like Leah at times.  We’ve compared ourselves to others and found ourselves lacking.  We’ve been rejected by someone we had hoped might love us.  We have been used and found ourselves unloved.  But every one of us is loved by God.  Our comparisons are nothing when compared to the infinite love God has for us.  And so each of us can proclaim with Leah, “This time, I will praise the Lord.”

Often in scripture we find people using the phrase, “the Lord your God”, usually when speaking to their parents.  This is a common and necessary transition in our own faith development, the transition from living out our parent’s faith to claiming it as our own.  For some, this happens in adolescence as we become adults and make our own decisions.  For others, this process doesn’t really happen until much later in life, when we begin to recognize our faith as a foreign thing and have to either discard it or claim it.  For still others, we never really ponder this question and continue to live out our parent’s faith throughout our lives.

For Jacob, God had to do a lot to draw his attention to this question.  As a sneaky, manipulative man, stealing his brother’s birthright and then blessing, he seems to live without God for much of his early years.  This is confirmed in his conversation with his father Isaac in v.20: “The LORD your God gave me success.”  But then God intervenes, yet another mark of His grace in this story.  Jacob sleeps and God speaks to him in a dream, confirming His Covenant with Jacob as He had with Abraham and Isaac.  And so Jacob is confronted with the reality of God, perhaps for the first time.

Yet even after seeing God in a vision, even after receiving the promise of God’s blessing, Jacob still seems to be trying to wrestle more out of God.  Like so many, his early faith is transactional – you give me something and in return I give you something.  “IF God will be with me, watch over me, give me food, give me clothes, and keep me safe, THEN God will be my God and I’ll tithe.”  It won’t be until much later that Jacob’s faith moves from transactional to relational – I follow You because I love you, not for what I get out of it.

It’s an important point to ponder today: Is your faith your own or are you still living someone else’s faith, a parent’s or a mentor’s?  Is your faith in God transactional (I give something, I get something) or relational (I love God so I follow)?  To sum it up, in the words of the Covenant Church since it’s very founding, “How is your walk with God?”