It happened the day I poured myself out for the SBC one last time.¹

I drove home afterward, feeling numb. Parking, I walked into my empty house. There, the realization hit me so hard I wailed aloud:

I AM LEAH!

Then I sat, feeling bereft, and hopelessly, helplessly stuck. And then I realized something else:

Leahs are legion in this church culture.
Rachels walk among us too.
And while Leah may envy her,
Rachel’s lot isn’t enviable.
Just a different type misery.

The Triangle

Once upon a real time, a man named Jacob pretended to be his brother Esau, to get his father’s blessing.

Jacob succeeded, then fled. Soon, he arrived at Leah’s place and fell in love with Leah’s beautiful sister, Rachel. In order to marry Rachel, Jacob worked seven years for Laban, the sisters’ dad.

The morning after the wedding, Jacob awoke to find he wasn’t the only one who could successfully pretend to be a sibling. He had married Leah.

Leah spent one week as Jacob’s sole wife – while he counted the days until he could marry Rachel, as well. Jacob had to work for Laban seven more years to earn Bride #2. But the second wedding happened only seven days after the first. Genesis 29:30-31 says:

Jacob lay with Rachel also, and he loved Rachel more than Leah … When the Lord saw that Leah was not loved, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren.

Thus, the triangle: One man – two wives. Each wife miserable for a different reason.

Leah

English Bible translators have softened the blow in Genesis 29:31. Most versions say Leah was “unloved.” Yet, the Hebrew says Leah was “hated.” Indeed, this word “expresses an emotional attitude toward persons and things which are opposed, detested, despised and with which one wishes to have no contact or relationship,” according to the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament.

Perhaps Jacob felt such aversion to Leah because her success in tricking him ever reminded him: He himself was a supplanter. He too had complied with a parent in deception. Yet Jacob extended no mercy to Leah, no forgiveness, no love.

Oh, but he did repeatedly engage in the most intimate of acts with Leah – because he wanted the sons she produced for him. Six sons in all Leah birthed.

At each birth, Leah expressed her heartcry:

Reuben: “It is because the Lord has seen my misery. Surely my husband will love me now.”

Simeon: “Because the Lord heard that I am not loved, he gave me this one too.”

Levi: “Now at last my husband will become attached to me, because I have borne him three sons.”

Didn’t happen. Giving birth to her fourth son, Leah made a different announcement:

Judah: “This time I will praise the Lord.”

With her new attitude, Leah and Jacob and Rachel lived happily ever after, right?

Wrong. Barren Rachel was as desperate to match Leah’s production record as Leah was to be loved. The battle turned uglier as both women used other women (their respective maidservants) to beget more sons for Jacob.

Then (as if things weren’t already bizarre enough), Leah bought a night with her own husband, by selling Rachel some “fertility drug” plants.

That did not go as Rachel had hoped. While she remained childless, Leah had a fifth son and later a sixth. What did Leah cry when these two were born?

Issachar: “God has rewarded me for giving my maidservant to my husband.”

Really, Leah? In this too didn’t you profoundly deceive yourself?

Zebulun: “This time my husband will treat me with honor, because I have borne him six sons.”

No, Leah. This hope will always disappoint. This husband will exploit you as much and as long as he can. He will never love you. He will never honor you.

Reading Leah’s story in Genesis, we learn after the fact that she died. We’re not told how or when it happened, or whether Jacob mourned for her at all.

Oh Leah, we feel so sorry for you! We hate that your story had no happy ending! For that very reason, Christian women today do not want to identify with you. Yet far too often, our situation has paralleled yours.

Like Leah, most of us are ordinary. Serving in many ways, we birth many good things. And yet, how many of us can testify: The church culture, to which we have given ourselves, has used us and used us to make someone else look good, while profoundly rejecting our personhood, our adulthood, our worth, us.

Time and again, we may tell ourselves: “Now they will notice how much I do for them; now they will love me.” When repeatedly they do not, we may act in ways we know to be deceptive and wrong – okay, yes, we use people too. And then, we may view any outcome that seems good for us, as evidence that God has rewarded the wrong we did to someone else.

How deeply we may long to identify with Rachel, the beautiful and beloved. How inferior we may feel when Rachel is around.

Rachel

Like Jacob, our church culture loves beautiful people. Often, this beauty is the literal, physical kind. It may also be related to charisma, or to an amazing life story. Or it may hinge on connections – birth into a well-known family, leadership of a large ministry, significant relationships with influential people.

Unlike Jacob, our church culture loves celebrity. The one factor sure to mark the Rachels in this system is marketability.

Rachels draw a crowd. People fight to be near them. Publishers fight to publish their books. (Even if a Leah actually wrote it.) And whatever “privileges” the powers-that-be deny to most women in a given church system, they lavish on the Rachels they have raised up.

Does the fact that Jacob prefers Rachel mean Rachel is more spiritual than Leah? No. Does it mean Rachel is a villain? No.

Like Leah, Rachel is human. Like Leah, Rachel is trapped in a contest with no winners. Since today’s rules require more subtlety than when Rachel and Leah actually lived, today’s Rachel must do everything she can to try to maintain her favored status while giving the appearance that she’s not competing.

Ah, but in the Bible, having favor did not bring Rachel happiness. Though “loved,” she never felt secure or complete. For Jacob was nothing, if not selfish. To get what he wanted, he relentlessly demeaned Rachel too.

And while the husband who said he loved her continued to sleep with her own sister, the fruitfulness that Rachel desperately sought continued to elude her. Thus, Rachel became jealous of Leah. And Rachel launched the “use others to get what I want” plan that Leah participated in too. Result: four extra sons for Jacob; two extra women sharing his bed.

Even when Rachel’s offspring finally arrived, she felt no delight in them as persons, no sense that she in herself was enough. Not having been loved in truth, she too looked at her own sons, and saw only her own struggle.

Rachel greeted Joseph her firstborn with these words: “May the Lord add to me another son.” When she did indeed become pregnant a second time, she died in childbirth. With her last breath, Rachel named her second child Ben-oni: “son of my sorrow.²

Jacob

So, dear ones, what do we do? Must the Rachels among us spend their lives frantically seeking fruitfulness, knowing Jacob will sleep with another wife if their marketability wanes? Must the Leahs spend their lives doing the next thing and the next thing they just know will make them beloved? Whichever sister we identify with, do we give up in despair, seeing that neither ever found contentment or joy?

Or do we expose the two-timing Jacob as the non-husband that he is? Surely our Jacob, like the original, has lived up to the name that literally means “Supplanter” – he who displaces another.

Our Jacob, like the original, has two wives. He loves the one, giving her preferential treatment. He uses the other, always dangling the hope of his favor and honor in front of her, but never bestowing it. Love-bombing the one, despising the other, Jacob cherishes and protects neither.

In Genesis, Rachel and Leah could not opt out of polygamy. But we can. And if we would love God alone, we must.

The Beloved

The day I realized, “I am Leah,” I was desolate – like “a wife who married young, only to be rejected” (Isa. 54:6).

Then God asked me a question. I heard the words so clearly it was almost as if he said them aloud.

So whose wife are you?

If I was Leah, it was in relation to my church culture. Yet early in my life, I had committed to love Jesus – not a church system – with all my heart and soul and strength. Somewhere along the way, I had deeply confused the two.

I sat in my den, my breathing shallow, all the blood draining from my face, as God reminded me: Jesus Christ has one bride. Only one.

In his marriage, there is no triangle. He is to us – to all of us – as Isaac to Rebekah.³ He says to each of us individually and all of us collectively:

“I have chosen you and have not rejected you.” (Isa. 41:9)

“You are precious and honored in my sight, and … I love you.” (Isa. 43:5)

“I have loved you with an everlasting love.” (Jer. 31:3)

He never counts anyone more valuable than another. He never pits one against another. For “in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others” (Rom. 12:5). He passionately, faithfully loves each of us. He himself makes us both beautiful and fruitful.

And yet, how very easy it is for women in the Bride of Christ to think and act like the brides of Jacob. How very tempting to make covenant with toxic systems, and to seek approval and significance from them.

How tempting, and how disastrous. For our systems, and the powerful within them, will always:

• love some more than others;
• use people, and view people solely in terms of their value to the system;
• provoke endless rivalry and misery.

Seduced by a supplanter, we ourselves become two-timers.

Angry and grieved, our true Bridegroom waits.

The day I realized I was Leah – and the moment my Lord confronted me, with deep pain in his voice – I cried, “You, Lord! You are my Husband. You alone are my Lord.”

That day, I began to cooperate with him, as he began revealing and removing the hidden idols in my heart.

And that day, I began to taste as I had not before, his love, that offers every one of us deep satisfaction, high esteem, true fruitfulness, great joy.

“Accepted in the Beloved,” I am Leah no more.⁴

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The original version of “Leah No More” was published as an e-column July 15, 2006.

Image by Sajjad Saju from Pixabay

See also

• I will change your name
• This girl is a woman now
• Adulthood and the church
• Don’t be afraid to look
• Behind the scenes at Living Proof Live
• Behind the facade in the SBC

Footnotes

1. See the posts, Behind the scenes at Living Proof Live and Behind the façade in the SBC. ↩︎
2. After Rachel’s death, Jacob ignored her dying wish, and changed the child’s name to Benjamin, “son of my right hand.” See Genesis 35:13 NLT. Consider that. The moments of their newborn’s birth and Rachel’s death were marked by a power struggle, as Rachel and Jacob each gave their son a different name – and neither gave him his own identity. Instead, each chose a name that tied his identity to that parent. ↩︎
3. See Genesis 24. ↩︎
4. See Ephesians 1:6 NKJV. ↩︎