From Unloved to Loved

I believe that there are three things humans long for:

• Intimacy

• Affirmation

• Acceptance

These are expressions of love, core to meeting a deep need that God has placed in our hearts. And only He can fill that void, that longing for love.

In the book of Genesis, we read the account of Jacob and his four wives. ¹ Jacob's first wife was Leah. Leah had a sister Rachael whom Jacob also married. Unfortunately for Leah, Jacob's affections rested on her sister, Rachael. Leah was unloved. But what to do? These days we say, "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach". In Leah's time and culture, giving a man a son was the way to his heart. So the Lord, seeing Leah's misery, opened her womb to conceive and bring forth sons for her husband Jacob.

She gave him four sons — and I believe their names are significant.

Her first son Reuben means, "Look, a son." The Lord had looked upon Leah's affliction and had seen it and given her a son because of it. We all want to feel understood, to be known deeply and regarded with care. We all long for intimacy.

Her second son Simeon means, "The one who hears." The Lord had heard of Leah's rejection and looked on her with pity. All of us want to be heard, to be listened to, to know that how we feel and what we value is important — not to be dismissed or disregarded. We want our feelings (and thus us) to be understood and acknowledged. We all long for affirmation.

In what Leah was hoping would win her husband's heart, almost as a last-ditch effort, she gave birth to a third son, Levi, which sounds like the Hebrew word for "attached" or "joined". She wanted to know the embrace of her husband, to know his affection for her, to feel brought in, drawn near. All of us long for acceptance.

But for all of these children, Leah's desire for a deep and meaningful relationship with her husband still remained unreachable. Love, for Leah, had become ungraspable.

The woman at the well probably understood Rachael's predicament more than most. ² She was married five times. And the sixth man she was living with was not her husband. She had sought for true love in men and came up empty — empty until she met the seventh man, Jesus the Messiah. That day everything changed. She had sought to fill the deep thirst that each of us are born with through the love of another and came to find that the only thing that could satiate the deep of her soul was a relationship with the Author of Life.

This is true for every person, and this leads me to Leah's fourth son, Judah. In Genesis we read,

She conceived again, and when she gave birth to a son she said, “This time I will praise the Lord.” So she named him Judah. Then she stopped having children. ³

Judah sounds like and may be derived from the Hebrew word for "praise." The meaning is appropriate. It is my belief that at this point, Leah saw something she was missing before - and what she saw gave her reason to praise the Lord. Both Leah and the women at the well had reason to praise the Lord, for both had discovered that God's love is better than life itself. ⁴ Both had found the source of life, the Creator of Love, and had come to understand that only God is able to supply the thirst-quenching, never-ending, intimate, affirming, and accepting love that we all long for.

And finding that love will result in praise.

References

¹ Genesis 29

² John 4

³ Genesis 29:35

⁴ Psalm 63:3