Rebekah A Marvelous Mate And Mother Series

Annie Taylor was the first person to ever go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and lived to

tell about it. That was in 1901. In 1932 Pearl S. Buck was the first woman to receive a

Nobel Prize in literature. In 1979 Susan B. Anthony became the first woman to ever

appear on a United States coin. There are whole books written about women who were

the first to do specific things. On this Mother's Day we are going to focus our attention

on the first woman in history that we have any record of who gave birth to twins.

Rebekah in giving birth to her two boys Jacob and Esau became one of the most

unique mothers ever, for her two boys changed the course of history. In fact, her boys

represent the two great forces of human history-good and evil. Jacob was the line to the

Messiah, and Esau was the line to Herod the Great, who tried to kill the Messiah as a

child. Her twins each took one of the two main roads in life. One took the way of doing

the will of God, and the other took the way of defying the will of God. Rebekah then

represents both sides of motherhood: the success and failure of motherhood.

We often only look at the positive side of motherhood, but the Bible gives us a

balanced picture. The same mother who bears a child who goes on to produce the

12tribes of Israel, and the very people of God, also bears a child who becomes a rebel who

marries pagan wives and produces a people who are great enemies of the people of God.

Here is a mother who can be praised for being a mother of the best, even though she bore

one who was the worst.

It is important that we see this, for I have a hunch there are millions of mothers who

are made to feel rotten and guilty on Mother's Day by sermons that exalt mothers to the

heights of sainthood. This can be disturbing to mothers who are like Rebekah. They can

point to their Jacobs and feel proud, but they also have their Esaus who have gone a

different route, and they feel hurt, bitter, and frustrated. They have done their best, but

all of their children are not what they wish, and what they have prayed for. They feel

guilty when good mothers are portrayed as always having all their children as wonderful

examples of good and godly people. It is a comfort that the Bible gives mothers a break,

and portrays one of the great mothers of Hebrew history as one who also had failure, and

a truly rotten kid. Mothers need to know they can still be good and even great mothers,

even though they have failed to guide all their children in the way they ought to go.

Now I must confess it has taken me years to choose Rebekah for a Mother's Day

message because I had some negative feelings about her as a mother and a wife. Our text

here in Gen. 27 portrays her as deceiving her husband Isaac, and of aiding her son Jacob

to lie and deceive his father too. Who needs TV to lead a child astray with a mother like

this around? This has been my feeling over the years. But then I began to study the facts

that the Bible reveals about Rebekah. I discovered I was judging her unfairly, and that I

had a prejudiced attitude toward this unique woman based on a narrow view of this one

event in her life. I did the same thing with Jobs wife because she told him to curse God

and die. Then I discovered that Job never rejected her, but she was his precious partner

for life. The same is true for Rebekah. Jacob never rejected her.

In almost every Mother's Day sermon I have ever preached one of the qualities that

most stands out in the great mothers of the Bible is that they were first of all loving and

loyal wives. A mother's first obligation is to help her children love God, and the second is

to love their father on earth, and they do this by being a good wife to the father. I always

thought that Rebekah got an F in this department because of this story of deception in

Gen. 27. But then I discovered the facts that make Rebekah stand out as one of the most

marvelous and precious wives in all of the Bible. Let me share the facts, for maybe you

have the same prejudiced attitude toward her as I have had.

Isaac was 40 years old when he married Rebekah. He stayed with her for 20 years,