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Counterfeit Gods Week 2: Love is Not All You Need

The human longing for true love has always been celebrated in song and story, but in our
contemporary culture it has been magnified to an astonishing degree. So much so, that it is one
of the most common idols today.

Making an idol out of love may mean allowing the lover to exploit and abuse you, or it might
cause terrible blindness to the pathologies in the relationship aka red flags. An idolatrous
attachment can you lead you to break any promise, rationalize any indiscretion, or betray any
other allegiance, in order to hold on to it. It may drive you to violate all good and proper
boundaries. To practice idolatry is to be a slave.

There is a story in the Bible that illustrates how the quest for love can become a form of slavery.
It is the story of Jacob and Leah in Genesis 29. It has always been possible to make romantic
love and marriage into a counterfeit god, but we live in a culture that makes it even easier to
mistake love for God, to be swept up by it, and to rest all our hopes for happiness upon it.

II. Jacobs Longing

Jacob escaped to his mothers family, and they took him in. His uncle Laban hired him as a
shepherd of some of his flocks. Once Laban realized that Jacob had real ability as a manager, he
offered him a management job. What can I pay you to be in charge of my flocks? he asked.
Jacobs answer was one word: Rachel.

Genesis 29: 16-20.

The Hebrew text says, literally, that Rachel had a great figure, and on top of that was beautiful.
Jacob was more than smitten with her. Robert Alter, the great Hebrew literature scholar at
Berkeley, points out the many signals in the text showing how lovesick and overwhelmed Jacob
was with Rachel. Jacob offered seven years wages for her, which was, in the currency of the
time, an enormous price for a bride. But they seemed like only a few days to him because of
his love for her. (verse 20) Then Jacob said to Laban, Give me my wife. My time is
completed, and I want to lie with her. (verse 21) Alter says that the Hebrew phrase is
unusually bald, graphic, and sexual for ordinarily reserved ancient discourse. Imagine saying to
a father even today, I cant wait to have sex with your daughter. Give her to me now! The
narrator is showing us a man overwhelmed with emotional and sexual longing for one woman.

Why? Jacobs life was empty. He never had his fathers love, he had lost his beloved mothers
love, and he certainly had no sense of Gods love and care. Then he beheld the most beautiful
woman he had ever seen, and he must have said to himself, If I had her, finally, something
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would be right in my miserable life. If I had her, it would fix things. All the longings of his heart
for meaning and affirmation were fixed on Rachel.

Jacob was unusual for his time. Cultural historians tell us that in ancient times people didnt
generally marry for love, they married for status. Nevertheless Jacob would not be rare today.

Romantic love is an object of enormous power for the human heart and imagination, and
therefore can excessively dominate our lives. Even people who completely avoid romantic love
out of bitterness or fear are actually being controlled by its power.

III. The Sting

Jacobs inner emptiness had made him vulnerable to the idolatry of romantic love. When he
offered to work seven years for Rachel, nearly four times more than the ordinary price for a
bride, Laban saw how lovesick he was. He decided to take advantage of his condition.

Genesis 29: 21-30.

IV. The Devastation of Idolatry

Rachel was not only Jacobs wife, but his savior. He wanted and needed Rachel so profoundly
that he heard and saw only the things he wanted to hear and see. That is why he became
vulnerable to Labans deception. Later, Jacobs idolatry of Rachel created decades of misery in
his family. He adored and favored Rachels sons over Leahs, spoiling and embittering the hearts
of all his children, and poisoning the family system.

We see how idolatry ravaged Jacobs life, but perhaps the greatest casualty of all is Leah. Leah
is the older daughter, and the narrator gives us but one important detail about her. The text
says that she had weak or poor eyes. (verse 17) Some have assumed it meant she had bad
eyesight. But the passage does not say, Leah had weak eyes, but Rachel could see very well. It
says Leah had weak eyes, but Rachel was beautiful. So weak eyes probably meant that she
was cross-eyed or literally unsightly in some way. The point is clear. Leah was particularly
unattractive, and she had to live all of her life in the shadow of her sister, who was absolutely
stunning.

Leah, then, had a hollow in her heart every bit as big as the hollow in Jacobs heart. And now
she began to respond to it the same way Jacob had.

Genesis 29: 31-35.

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V. Leahs Breakthrough

Leah is the one person in this sad story to make some spiritual progress, though this happens
only at its very end. Look first at what God does in her. One of the things Hebrew scholars
notice is that in all of Leahs statements, she was calling on the LORD. She used the name
Yahweh. The Lord [Yahweh] has seen my misery, she says in verse 32. How did she know
about Yahweh?

Elohim was the generic Hebrew word for God, but Yahweh was the name of the God who
revealed himself to Abraham and Moses. The only way Leah could have known about Yahweh
was if Jacob had told her about the promise to his grandfather. So even though she was
struggling and confused, she was nonetheless reaching out to a personal God of grace.

After years of childbearing, however, theres a breakthrough. When Leah gave birth to her
fourth son , Judah, she said, This time, I will praise the LORD. There was a defiance in her
claim. It was a different declaration from the ones she had made after the other births. There
was no mention of husband or child. It appears that finally, she had taken her hearts deepest
hopes off her husband and her children, and had put them on the Lord. Jacob and Laban had
stolen Leahs life, but when she gave her heart fully to the Lord, she got her life back.