Just One More

 Read Genesis 30

By the time we get to the middle of this chapter, Jacob will have 11 sons by two wives and two concubines. Son number 12 will come along shortly. We will get there in a few weeks. His mother, Rachel, died giving birth to him, or at least from complications in childbirth.  This child was, of course, Benjamin.

So we have Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, and Benjamin.

You might think, OK, so those are the heads of the 12 tribes.  You would be 83% correct.  Only 10 of the 12 would result in the tribes that would go into and come out of Egypt and be counted as the 12 Tribes of Israel.  

Reuben lost his inheritance when his dad found out that he had slept with Bilhah, one of Jacob’s concubines.

Joseph’s two sons would become tribes.  Looking ahead, we know that Joseph would save not only his own family but much of the known world. His sons were Manasseh and Ephraim, and the younger would be considered senior to the older.  That had to be strangely familiar to Jacob, but we are not there yet.

I noted last week that the family tree was about to branch.  There would be one father but 4 separate mothers.  Two of them were sisters and they were surely in competition with each other, so much so that when they were not on their game, they went to the bullpen to have another child—mostly men—to their credit.

Those kids counted as their own RBIs. It’s baseball season—what can I say?

Here’s the scorecard. 

·       Leah (obviously the MVP) had 6 boys.

·       Rachel had 2 boys.

·       Leah’s servant had 2 boys.

·       Rachel’s servant had 2 boys.

But Leah and Rachel were surely in daily competition with each other. I’m not going to recount the whole list but here is an interesting extract from the chapter.

During wheat harvest, Reuben went out into the fields and found some mandrake plants, which he brought to his mother Leah. Rachel said to Leah, “Please give me some of your son’s mandrakes.”

But she said to her, “Wasn’t it enough that you took away my husband? Will you take my son’s mandrakes too?”

“Very well,” Rachel said, “he can sleep with you tonight in return for your son’s mandrakes.”

So when Jacob came in from the fields that evening, Leah went out to meet him. “You must sleep with me,” she said. “I have hired you with my son’s mandrakes.” So he slept with her that night.

God listened to Leah, and she became pregnant and bore Jacob a fifth son.

Do you think that Jacob had any clue what was in store for him when he agreed to work 7 more years so he could have both Leah and Rachel as wives?  Do you think that he had any idea at all what he had gotten himself into?

Imagine coming home from a day in the fields and wife number 1 meets you and tells you that you are hers for the night.  “I hired you for the night.  Paid off wife number 2 with some mandrake plants.”

You are bought and paid for and you had better deliver.

You had better be packing good seed!

What are Mandrake plants?  Supposedly, they promote fertility. They are Mandragora Officinarum if you want to do the research yourself.  They are $20 with free shipping if you have Amazon Prime.

This whole chapter is about breeding—human in the first half and livestock in the second.

That reminds me that a local farmer, I won’t mention the name as some of you might know him, asked me to pray that his bull would get to work.  It had become sluggish and not interested in performing the service for which it was purchased.

I told him that I could pray for his bull, but that the vet could give him something.  It’s not that prayer wouldn’t be appropriate, but Paul told Timothy that he didn’t have to give the problems that already had solutions provided to the Lord. If you have some GI problems, take a little wine for your stomach.

The farmer said that he didn’t have time to go to the vet, so I went for him.  The vet said that one of these tablets should do the trick but he gave me a 30-day supply anyway.

After the first pill, the bull took care of half the herd one day and the other half the next.  On the third day, the bull jumped the fence and serviced the neighbor’s cows.

The farmer was obviously pleased.  He asked me, what’s in those pills?

I said, I don’t know but they taste like peppermint.

I hope that by now, you know that this story may not be entirely accurate.  It’s 2023 so I am required by law to give you a fact check.  You can get a larger dosage of this supplement and it tastes like raspberry, not peppermint.

I might have to get a farm tax number to get a refill.

That should set the record straight. Yes, it was all tongue-in-cheek.

What a crazy story, not Tom’s bull medicine story but the story of 2 sisters competing to have children by their shared husband.  They even went so far as to contract out some of the work. One sister paid for a night with her husband with a fertility supplement given to her competing sister-wife.

But God told Abram, who he renamed Abraham, that he would be the Father of Many Nations.  Up until this point, there hadn’t been a whole lot of activity on that front, but now the stage was set for the family line of Abraham to grow much faster than it would have with a single wife having children in successive years.

What a crazy time to live.  Monogamy wasn’t really on the top of God’s list at this time.  Wives praying in competition with other child-bearing candidates just seems crazy.

C’mon God, just give me one more son.  Just give me one more.

Did you ever watch the movie, Hacksaw Ridge?  It’s about the U. S. Army fighting in Okinawa.  Yes, the Marine Corps had plenty of battles on this island.  I’ve spent my time on that island.

The movie was about a young man who wanted to serve his country but didn’t want to kill anyone.  He put himself at risk time and again as an army medic to save other soldiers.

The movie is about one battle with lots of American casualties that needed to be evacuated over impossible terrain, but his one medic kept going back.  He just wanted to save one more, just one more.

Just one more.

Leah wanted just one more son. Rachel wanted just one more son.  Leah wanted just one more son Rachel wanted just one more son. Leah wanted just one more son.

They counted the sons of their servants as fruit to their credit, but they wanted one more, just one more.

I was thinking about retiring this month and just writing soap operas using the stories in Genesis as the basis for 10 or 12 years’ worth of work.

I have probably told you that Sharman likes Barry Manilow.  That means that I have to like him too, or at least pretend that I do.  It also meant that I had to take her to Barry Manilow concerts when we could.

I was counting my blessings that we lived in Oklahoma and would probably not have to contend with any Barry Manilow concerts, but then, he announced his last concert.  It would be in Las Vegas.  It was probably 15 years ago, perhaps longer.

What could I do?  I had to take her.  Then I would be out of danger or so I thought.

A couple years later, Barry Manilow was doing his very last concert in Oklahoma City.  I had been to his very last concert, but there he was again, this time just an hour and a half away.

Every time that I thought I was out of the woods, here came Barry with another very last concert.  It was like he was saying, just one more.

Just one more.

It’s sort of like one of those stores that has a going-out-of-business sale for 8 or 9 years.

God used these 4 women to fulfill his will, his plan.  The family tree that started with the Father of Many Nations was branching and branching fast.  This many nations business had been supercharged because these 2 sisters were in competition with each other and weren’t afraid to use all of their tricks and even contract out some of the work.

God used their nature to fulfill his will.

What about us?  Sometimes our human nature gets us in trouble.  Sometimes we find talents and abilities built into our nature.  Sometimes we wrestle with our nature.  Sometimes we embrace it.

We want to be more like God.  We want his nature to consume our sinful nature.  We want to be more Christlike, but we are who we are.

Don’t you think that God knows that?

Does that mean that we should sin and sin profusely?  No, but when we do, and God redeems us once again from our own nature, we should have something called a testimony.

We should be able to share not only our glorious days when we were in perfect step with the Lord, but also those days when we were on the wrong path, knew it, and went down that road anyway, but God brought us home.

The shepherd left the 99 in the wilderness and went after you, me, us…

And we should testify to that.  We should have testimonies that affirm other believers in their race of faith, that strengthen them in times of weakness, and that help us to fulfill God’s will in these perilous times.

We matter to God and he comes after us time and time again.

God also trusts us with important work.  Ladies, I am not talking about a baby-making race. That race has been run.

God trusts us to take the message of salvation to the world.  As we go into the world with this good news, we should be like Jacob’s 2 wives.  We should be like the army medic on Okinawa.  And as much as it pains me to say it, we should be like Barry Manilow. We should want one more.

In context with our situation, we should want to save one more.  Yes, God does the saving, but our part is to reach the lost with good news—with news of life in Christ Jesus.

We should never be satisfied with the work we have been commissioned to do.  We should always be thinking and living these words:  Just one more.

Lord, help me to reach just one more.

Yes, there was some interesting stuff in this chapter, but God used the competitive and sometimes selfish nature of these two sisters to accomplish this part of his plan.

Let us allow him to use us in all of our brokenness to affirm other believers that God is at work in us in this time and helps us to reach the lost with words of life.

We want to affirm one more believer.  We want to reach one more person who is lost.

Lord, help me to reach just one more.

Amen.