[We have to read verses 50-57, or we miss the force of Rebekah’s answer in verse 58.]
Rebekah says, “I will.” I will, I want to. Her bold answer is the key to her story. She decides to go right away, to leave home right away, and that’s a leap of faith.
She had the right to stay home ten days. Those ten days would have been lucrative for her, days for collecting many gifts from all the neighbors, in her new status as the fiancé of a sheik. She gives that up when she says, “I will.” That’s the choice she makes, and it’s the only choice she’s given here.
Consider how little she had to say. Her marriage was arranged by her father and brother with the servant of Abraham. Nobody asked her for her opinion. It was not done. She was not part of the negotiations. Nobody asked her, “Do you, Rebekah, take Isaac, to be your wedded husband?” She never gets to say, “I do.” But then, against the odds, she says, “I will.”
She goes against her family. They assumed she would say, “Of course not.” That’s the little game they played against the servant of Abraham. They expected her to want to stay ten days, in order to honor them. The ten days were for the honor of the family, and for the family getting many gifts as well. But her choice denies them their fair share of the customary loot, and what will be their compensation for never seeing her again? What was she thinking, that she said, “I will”? This is to live by faith, to be a stranger to your family, to be an alien in the world.
Rebekah goes against the social laws of her day, and St. Paul writes, But I see in myself another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells within me. And yet Rebekah chose not to be captive to the social laws of her day, she chose for freedom, but at what great risk, for what did she really know was ahead for her?
Think of Rebekah in the midst of her family when Jesus says, But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, “We played the flute for you and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.” She did not dance and she did not mourn, she set her eyes forward and looked to the promise she could hardly see. This is to live by your faith. You live in the future, you live for the promise, with its freedom and its loss.
In all these Abraham stories, Rebekah is the character most like him. Like him she left her home behind to go to an unknown land. Yet her choice cost her more than Abraham’s did, for she risked her family’s loyalty. She did it anyway. Which is what Jesus did. Jesus is like Rebekah.
Take Rebekah as your mother. I invite you to say, against the odds, “I will”. Choose for the future, choose for the promise, accept that you may be a stranger and a pilgrim in the world, that you go against the conventions and assumptions and expectations, that you be charged with disloyalty, and disappoint your loved ones. It might mean neither eating nor drinking, and being criticized for that, or eating and drinking, and being called a glutton and drunkard and friend of sinners.
Yes, you do want to live your life like this, you do want Rebekah as your mother, you do want, every day, to say, against the odds, “I will.” You do want to keep stepping out into God’s promise.
Your experience will be more like Rebekah’s than like Abraham’s. Her experience is closer to your own. The call of Abraham came directly from God. What Abraham heard was the voice of God and no one else. And God kept talking to him throughout his pilgrimage. But God never talked to Rebekah. Her call to faith came through the invitation of another human being, in the voice of the servant of Abraham. Her call was not direct but indirect, like your own.
So her response was riskier than Abraham’s. How could she say this was God’s will? Isn’t it much easier to be able to say, “I’m doing this because God told me too,” than to have to say, “I’m doing this because I wanted to, and I’m risking that it’s right.” You meet some pious people who explain their decisions by saying that they’re doing what God told them to do. They’re afraid to say, “I want.” You might think you have to say the same. It would sound more pious. Well, you can be too pious for the Bible. You don’t have to speak like that. You don’t have to say, “God told me so.” You can say, “I want to.” I will go. I choose what I choose, and I trust God.
God wants us to say, “I will,” God wants us to say, “I want.” Only not in terms of the flesh, but rather in terms of God’s promises. Typically we say “I want” in terms of our flesh, as an expression of desire, or lust, or greed, or for our fair share, or to satisfy an appetite, or in conformity with the laws of society and with the rules and conventions of the world.
That’s what Paul means by his term, the flesh in Romans 7. He doesn’t narrowly mean your physical body, but all of your life as you stand apart from God, both body and soul as you resist God’s Spirit, human culture in resistance to God’s Word. Your flesh commands your wanting and your willing. Like Rebekah’s family, who lived conventionally, but apart from the promises to Abraham, and independent of the providence of God, and all the risks involved. The point is to convert your willing and wanting from resistance to trust, from gratification into faith, from satisfaction into hope, and from possession into love. I know you do want this.
How often you find yourself discouraged in your wanting and willing by the resistance and confusion inside you. How often you find yourself choosing the very opposite of what you really want. You choose poorly, and you see it only afterwards. “Why did I choose this, what was I thinking?”
St. Paul describes your condition with compassion. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. . . . I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. It’s easier for non-believers, because if you stay within the flesh at least you are unified, but as a Christian you always feel like there are two of you: your life in God’s Spirit and your life in the flesh. Should you turn the other cheek or should you fight for justice? Should you accept your suffering or work for change? Should you tithe or pay down your mortgage? It never ends. You get frustrated and discouraged. How do you know that what you want is from God? How do you know that the Holy Spirit is in you? You know it precisely from the struggle in you, from the doubleness of you, from your unsettling duplicity. That you want the God thing, that you want to say “I will,” and that is what God hears.
The whole family of Rebekah is inside you, Bethuel her father, Milcah her mother, Laban her brother. They are always with you, and you will always be drawn to their interests, and to the social laws they represent, and the laws of the flesh, and your appetites. You will be giving in. And you will keep returning to God in confession and humility and grief and deeper longing.
But at the same time more deeply in you is Rebekah, your mother, the distant matriarch of Jesus, she is real in you, she is the deepest part of you, and that’s the you that God keeps looking on. Midst the clamor of the voices of the family system inside you, God can hear your voice, God knows what you really want, God knows what is your deepest will, even in those many times that you can’t see it through, God knows it, and recognizes it, and reckons it to you as perfection. God believes you when you say, “I want to,” even when you have a very hard time believing it yourself. God believes in you more than you believe in yourself, because God love you even more than you love yourself.
Copyright © 2014 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
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