Laban – Moment to Moment (Bible blog)

How to wreck your relationships

Several months ago, I watched an old “Alfred Hitchcock Hour” show called “How to Get Rid of Your Wife.” It was a black comedy about the lengths one man went through to get rid of his wife.

Essentially, he convinced her that he was trying to kill her, and in so doing, got her to try to kill him. She was then arrested and thrown into prison, and he went scot free. Kind of. You have to see the episode to find the twist at the end.

Anyway, it was basically a story of nasty people dealing with nasty people. The wife in the story wasn’t exactly a wonderful person either.

The episode came to mind as I read the last part of the story concerning Jacob and Laban. Moses could’ve titled this story, “How to Get Rid of Your Son-in-Law (and Your Daughters Too).”

Laban may not have been trying consciously to get rid of Jacob, but it sure is hard to believe he couldn’t see the potential consequences of what he was doing.

I’m just amazed at all the things Laban did to Jacob. First he deceives Jacob into marrying Leah. Then he makes Jacob work another 7 years to get Rachel.

Then he makes an agreement where Jacob would take care of all of Laban’s sheep and goats, with all the spotted and striped ones becoming Jacob’s.

But no sooner do they make the agreement than Laban takes all the spotted and striped animals from the flock and puts those animals in the care of his other sons, leaving only the white ones with Jacob.

He of course thought that by doing so, there was little chance that there would be many striped or spotted animals being born for Jacob’s flock.

When that didn’t work, Laban unilaterally changed the terms of the agreement 10 times.

What in the world was Laban thinking?

When Jacob confronts him with all this, Laban doesn’t even apologize. He just says, “Well, they were all my daughters and flocks to begin with.”

One wonders if Laban really couldn’t see how his attitude had not only wrecked his relationship with Jacob, but with his own daughters as well.

Leah and Rachel saw how Laban had treated them, and they felt like they had just been sold off like slaves or farm animals simply for the money.

(Although Rachel at least had the comfort of knowing that Jacob loved her. Leah didn’t even have that much.)

So how can we wreck our relationships? I’ll put this in the context of marriage, but you can apply this in just about any relationship.

1. Dishonesty.
Trust is essential to any relationship, and when you are dishonest in your dealings with people, it’s a good way to destroy your relationships.

In the Hitchcock film, it started with the husband complaining that his wife had deceived him into thinking she was a completely different kind of person while they were dating.

It was only when they got married that his wife showed her true colors.

How often do people do that when they’re dating others? They pretend to be someone they’re not, and in so doing, lay a foundation for their relationship that cannot stand the test of time.

2. Having no respect for others’ feelings.
Or at the very least, being completely oblivious to them.

When your husband or wife says you’re doing something that upsets them, do you just say, “You’re too sensitive”?

Or do you really consider their feelings and try to place them above your own?

It’s all well and good to tell someone, “I want you to be honest with me.”

But when they are honest about how your actions or words make them feel, do you make the effort to change, or do you just think they’re being too petty?

3. Selfishness and pride.
I have no idea whether Laban was merely so selfish that he couldn’t see his actions were wrong, or whether he was too proud to apologize.

Either way, he was wrong. And whether you struggle with pride or selfishness, either can effectively destroy a relationship.

When we become so selfish that we can’t even realize it, we start to demean people, and it allows us to justify just about any action that we do, no matter how wrong it is.

And when we become so proud that we can’t admit when we’re wrong, it puts a wall in our relationships that will only grow with time. How many marriages have you known that were torn apart by selfishness and pride?

How are your relationships? Would someone be able to write a script about your life called, “How to Get Rid of Your Wife/Husband/Best Friend”?

If you truly care about the people in your life, take a look at yourself, and start rooting out anything that would tear those relationships apart.

Using people? Loving people?

This is by far one of the more bizarre stories in the Bible. And sad. Jacob falls in love with Rachel, and her father Laban says, “If you work for me for 7 years, I’ll let you have her.”

That’s not really the bizarre part. Jacob had nothing, and it was a custom in those days to pay a dowry to a bride’s father.

But then the bizarreness begins. Jacob works the 7 years, and he takes his newly wed, but veiled, wife into his darkened tent, and when he wakes up the next morning, he finds out that it isn’t Rachel; it’s Rachel’s sister Leah.

Laban tells Jacob, “Well, it’s our custom to let the older sister get married first, but if you work 7 more years, I’ll let you have Rachel too.” Jacob agrees and then marries Rachel.

But for obvious reasons, Jacob didn’t really love Leah, and the Lord saw that. And so he allowed her to get pregnant, and she had three sons. Leah’s words at their births are very poignant.

She named her first son Reuben, which meant, “He’s seen my misery.” And she said, “The Lord has seen my misery. Surely my husband will love me now.”

She named her next son Simeon, which meant, “Heard.” And she said, “The Lord has heard I’m not loved, and so he gave me another son.”

The third son she named Levi, which meant “Attached.” And she said, “Now at last my husband will become attached to me because I’ve given him three sons.”

Rachel then got really upset because she had no children, so she gave her maidservant to Jacob to be another wife and to have children for her.

Then Leah got jealous when she was no longer having children, so she gave her maidservant to Jacob to be yet another wife and have children for her. And this situation went on and on and on.

Why did all this happen? Because Laban forgot one key thing: people are to be loved, not used.

He used Jacob in order to both marry off his older daughter and to gain a profit from Jacob’s work. He didn’t care that Jacob was a man with feelings. And he didn’t care about the consequences to his own daughters.

You can see throughout these passages that he passed this way of thinking on to both his daughters, who started seeing both Jacob and their own maidservants as tools in their own battle with one another.

Jacob wasn’t a whole lot better. As the Bible says in Proverbs,

Under [this] the earth trembles… [and] cannot bear up… an unloved woman who is married. (Proverbs 30:21, 23)

How do we see the people in our lives? Do we see them as people that God loves and we should love? Or do we simply see them as tools to get what we want?

So much pain comes into the world when people become tools instead of someone to love.

You see this in relationships sometimes with men claiming to love a woman simply in order to sleep with her.

You see this in marriage sometimes with people getting married simply because their partner happens to be rich.

You see this in the workplace sometimes with people using others as something to step on in order to advance in their career.

But when we see people that way, we not only degrade them, we degrade ourselves.

We were made to love and to be loved. And by using people instead of loving them, we make ourselves something less than what God intended.

And that leads to misery, not only for the people we used, but for ourselves as well.

There’s an old song I love. It says:

Using things and loving people
That’s the way it’s got to be

Using things and loving people
Look around and you can see
That loving things and using people
Only leads to misery

Using things and loving people
That’s the way it’s got to be

Using things and loving people
Brings you happiness I’ve found

Using things and loving people
Not the other way around

’Cause loving things and using people
Only leads to misery

Using things and loving people
That’s the way it’s got to be
For you and me