Gospel in Life

Guest (Female): Welcome to the Gospel in Life podcast. We're excited to share a special episode with you today. It's one of Tim Keller's most shared sermons, "The Girl Nobody Wanted." In the book of Genesis, Leah's life is shaped by disappointment and unmet longing, yet her story mirrors our own search for meaning. Why are we always so sure that the next thing, whether it be success, love, or recognition, will finally make us feel whole, only to find that the satisfaction never lasts? Today, Dr. Keller shows how the gospel rescues us from the weight of unfulfilled expectations, ultimately inviting us to find our true identity in Christ and his redeeming work on the cross.

Tim Keller: We just finished a series in the Old Testament of sermons and messages on how we can search for God, how we do spiritual searching. We're about to start a series of messages out of the teaching of Jesus himself on how to do spiritual finding, and we're going to look at all the places where Jesus talks about finding. I'm going to do something that I hardly ever do today. Almost always, virtually always, maybe only twice in my life, I'm not going to preach on the text that's been announced.

There's been a particular passage, a particular text, that has just been doing a real number on my heart. It's a very fascinating place that clarifies what the gospel message is. It doesn't fit from what I can tell into any series that I can conceive of in the indefinite future. It is appropriate because we just witnessed a wedding. I'm going to read you a passage out of the Old Testament, Genesis 29, and one of the things that we learn right away and were struck with immediately is that the Bible is the most unsentimental of all books when it comes to the subject of marriage and family. It is utterly realistic about this: that it is always hard and often devastating to not be married, and it is always hard and sometimes devastating to be married.

In order to keep this biblical understanding, this biblical balance, it's very difficult because there's almost no support for it institutionally or structurally. Outside this church, for example, or outside Christian circles in the secular world at large, there's a tremendous amount of fear and a tremendous amount of cynicism about marriage, with good reason because of one of the things I just said that the Bible talks about. On the other hand, inside Christian circles, there is a tendency to say marriage, that's what life is about: marriage, family, kids, white picket fence. Both, the Bible says, both of those attitudes are utterly wrong.

Jesus Christ does not point to marriage, saying this is what you need. Rather, the Bible shows us marriage, both in its strengths and even in its tremendous difficulties, pointing to Jesus Christ as the thing we need. That's never been more obvious than when I read you this account. I'm going to read Genesis 29, verses 15 through 35.

After Jacob had been with Laban for a month, Laban said to him, "Just because you are a relative of mine, should you work for me for nothing? Tell me what your wages should be." Laban had two daughters. The name of the older was Leah; the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah had weak eyes, but Rachel was lovely in form and beauty. Jacob was in love with Rachel and said, "I'll work for you seven years in return for your younger daughter Rachel."

Laban said, "It's better that I should give her to you than some other man. Stay here with me." Jacob served seven years to get Rachel, but they seemed like only a few days to him because of his love for her. Then Jacob said to Laban, "Give me my wife, my time is completed, I want to lie with her." Laban brought together all the people of the place and gave a feast. When evening came, he took his daughter Leah and gave her to Jacob, and Jacob lay with her. Laban gave his servant girl Zilpah to his daughter Leah as her maidservant.

When morning came, behold, it was Leah. Jacob said to Laban, "What is this you have done to me? I served you for Rachel, didn't I? Why have you deceived me?" Laban replied, "It is not our custom here to give the younger daughter in marriage before the older one. Finish this daughter's bridal week, and then we will give you the younger one also in return for another seven years of work." Jacob did so. He finished the week with Leah, and then Laban gave him his daughter Rachel to be his wife. Laban gave his servant girl Bilhah to his daughter Rachel as her maidservant. Jacob lay with Rachel also, and he loved Rachel more than Leah. He worked for Laban another seven years.

When the Lord saw that Leah was not loved, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren. Leah became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She named him Reuben, for she said, "It is because the Lord has seen my misery. Surely my husband will love me now." She conceived again, and when she gave birth to a son she said, "Because the Lord heard that I am not loved, he gave me this one too." She named him Simeon. Again she conceived, and when she gave birth to a son she said, "Now at last my husband will become attached to me because I have borne him three sons." He was named Levi. She conceived yet again, and when she gave birth to a son she said, "This time I will praise the Lord." She named him Judah, and then she stopped having children.

This is God's word. You need to know two things as background to the story, and then we'll look at two features of the story and see some remarkably rich stuff in here for all of us. First, there's two things you have to know as background. You have to know that Jacob came from a family chosen by grace and a family filled with suffering. Jacob had a grandfather named Abraham, and one day God comes to Abraham and he says, "Abraham, look at the world. Do you see the misery? Do you see the cruelty? Do you see the injustice? Do you see the disease? Do you see the tragedy? Do you see death itself? I'm going to do something about it. I'm going to heal it, I'm going to redeem it all, and I'm going to do it through your family. One of your descendants will be the Messiah."

He says to Abraham, "Therefore, this is what has to happen. You need to know that in every generation of your family, there'll be children, but one of the children will be the seed. One child will be the Messianic seed, the bearer of the Messianic strain. That child should be head of the family, and that child must walk before me, and that child must pass the true faith along to all of the family because of all those children, one of them will be the true seed. On and on until someday one seed will be the seed, and one prophet will be the prophet, and one priest will be the priest, and one king will be the King of Kings and Lord of Lords."

That was why this is a very special family Jacob was part of. But also, in spite of that, and this is a lesson all by itself, this is a family filled with suffering because Abraham had one son, Isaac. But when Isaac's wife Rebecca was pregnant and she had two twin sons in her womb, God sent a prophecy to Isaac and said, "The elder will serve the younger." That meant God was saying to Isaac, "The second one out is the seed. Not the first one, not the elder, but the younger. That's the seed, that's the one I've chosen."

Out they come, Jacob and Esau, and what Isaac does is ignores what God said. He puts his heart on Esau. He favors Esau, clearly favors, loves him more than Jacob. As a result, devastation is reaped on both the boys as they grow up. Their characters are ravaged by this because not only does Esau grow up to be willful and proud and with no self-control at all because of the way in which Isaac dotes on him and clearly makes him the favorite, Jacob turns into a liar. Jacob turns into a deceiver. Jacob turns into a manipulator.

Many of you know the story. What happens is when they come of age, Jacob one day deceives his father. His father is old and he's blind, and Jacob dresses up as Esau, goes in and gets Isaac to give Jacob the blessing, the birthright, the head of the clan. But when Esau realizes what he has done, how he's deceived, Esau vows to kill him. Jacob has got to run, and he flees far, far away across the desert, the other side of the Fertile Crescent where his mother's relatives take him in. His uncle Laban takes him in.

Now, you see, Jacob's life is over. Jacob isn't sure if it's God that screwed up, if he is the one who screwed up, if his father, his family screwed up, but he'll never fulfill his destiny now. He's got no faith, it's all ruined. He's got no money, he's got no place, he's not in his homeland anymore. It's all over. The background point is that Jacob's family was chosen by grace but filled with suffering. The story has two parts to it: Laban's plot and Leah's lot.

Laban's plot: Laban is the uncle and Laban brings Jacob in sort of as a charity case. Jacob's working for him for a month as a shepherd and Laban suddenly realizes something. He looks and he says, "This guy's a great shepherd. This guy's got management capabilities." He realized that if Jacob becomes a foreman for him, he could tremendously expand his operation and he could make a tremendous amount of money as long as he doesn't have to pay Jacob too much.

He comes to Jacob and he says, "I'd like to give you a contract. What do you want in order to work for me?" Jacob says, "Rachel." Now Jacob really screwed up here because when you're talking to a shyster, when you're talking to a con artist, you never let them know your area of weakness. As soon as Laban sees this, as soon as he realizes this guy will do anything for Rachel, Laban's got him. Laban, Jacob has met his match because Jacob's a liar, Jacob's a con artist, and so is Laban. But Laban's been at it 25 more years. As a result, you see, he's much more experienced at this.

Laban says, "I got a way that I can deal with two problems at once. I will use this man, I will exploit this man's weakness to deal with two problems at once." What are the two problems? The first problem, of course, is how do I make lots and lots and lots of money? How do I get out of this guy a tremendous amount of valuable skill with very little to pay for it so I can become a wealthy man? But a second problem is Leah. This man had two daughters and the verse, of course, you might remember, I tried to read it slowly but I probably didn't.

It says, "Now Laban had two daughters, the older was Leah and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah had weak eyes, but Rachel was lovely in form and beauty." If you go to the various translations, you'll find that every single one of the translations will describe Leah's eyes differently. Some will say she had tender eyes, some will say she had delicate eyes, some will say she had broken eyes because that's what the word really means, is a breakable, fragile thing.

Nobody really quite knows exactly what the word means, but it's not that hard when you look at the context. Does it say when it uses the word weak, does it mean that Leah's vision was weak? Well, if it says Leah's vision was weak, it should say Leah had weak vision but Rachel could see a long, long way. But that's not what it says. It's not talking about how they looked, it's talking about how they looked. It's talking about what they looked like.

What it's really saying is this: these were two girls, these were not women yet, almost for sure. You have two girls here and one of them had either crossed eyes or protruding eyes or some kind of eye disorder, but whatever it was, she was ugly and Rachel was gorgeous. One was an ugly duckling who would never become a swan, and one was absolutely gorgeous. These two girls had had to grow up together with each other.

Laban had a problem. Now listen, here's where the Bible is brutally frank. If you say, "Thank goodness we're beyond all this," oh, are we? Laban said, "I'll never marry this poor woman off. I'll never marry this daughter off. I have a way to get rich and get rid of the daughter that would be around my neck for the rest of my life." That's the kind of man he was. What does he do? Jacob says, "I'll work for Rachel for seven years." Laban says, "It's better that I give her to you than to some other man. Stay here with me." He didn't say yes. In other words, he said something that led Jacob to believe he was saying yes, but he would always be able to come back later and say, "Jacob, read the fine print."

He says, "It's better for you that she should go to you than some stranger," but he didn't say yes. Jacob goes for seven years and then finally Jacob says, "Now I've done my seven years, send me my wife." Laban says, "Fine." At the time of a wedding feast, which was a week long, Jacob of course was just more happy than most people at wedding feasts because now I have Rachel. Finally something's going right in my life. Finally something will console me for all the problems I've always had.

Everybody begins to feast and everybody begins to get drunk, and right in the middle of the very first night, in comes the wife, in comes the bride, all veiled, and they embrace and they are married and they go into the tent and they lie together and they go to bed together. The Hebrew literally says, and it's a great narrative ploy, the Hebrew literally says: "But when morning came, behold, it was Leah."

Jacob goes and says, "Why have you done this to me?" Laban says, "Wait, it's the custom. You can't marry the younger daughter off before the older. It's illegal here. This is the custom, this is the way we do things. You have to have the older daughter has to be married before the younger." Lovesick Jacob says, "Well, what do I do?" Laban says, "I'll tell you what. You can marry Rachel too, but you have to work another seven years for her." Jacob says yes.

Now, because of all this greed and now because of all this manipulation and these deceiving men, Leah is thrown into hell. Leah, who probably could have hardened her heart had she stayed single for a long time, she could have dealt with the fact that she was unwanted, dealt with the fact that in a world like this she was not marketable. Is our society that different? She might have been able to harden her heart, but because of these men, she is now put into a situation where she is married to a man who not only doesn't love her, but the person that he does love is also a wife right there, it's her sister.

She's put into hell and the last verses of this passage are the most plaintive I know of hardly anywhere in the Bible. Every time she names a child, when she begins to have children, she says, "Now, maybe my husband will love me. Now, maybe I'll have some meaning in life." Every time she names Reuben, Reuben because it's Reuben means "I'm seen." Simeon means "I'm heard." Levi means "I'm attached." Every time a child comes along she says, "Now maybe finally I'll be visible. Now maybe finally I'll be heard. Now maybe finally he'll cleave to me." Every time: "Surely now my husband will love me now," and it never happens.

In the last verse, this is what we read: "And finally 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 and she stopped having children." That's the gospel. Let me draw out the lessons and let's do it the way the gospel does. Six lessons: three bad news, three good news. That's how the gospel goes. Lots of bad news at the beginning, but then the good news is so much better than the bad news was bad.

Let's take the first three, the bad news. Number one: you never do sin, sin does you. You never commit sin, sin commits you. Look carefully. People think that when you do a sin, when you break God's law, when you lie, when you use somebody, when you trample on somebody, when you sin, you feel like that's just an event, that's just an action. No, it's not. The Bible says that when you sin, you don't just do an event and you pass on. You create and you release a devastating power that careens around your life indefinitely.

Look at what Isaac does to Jacob. Look at how he favors Esau, look at what he does to Jacob. Now look at what's going on, the reverb. Jacob is doing the very same thing to Leah that his father did to him. Not only that, because of what Isaac did to Jacob, Jacob does it back to Isaac. Eventually, of course, as you if you keep on going down, the fact that he does this to Leah means that Leah's children hate Rachel's children when they finally show up, Joseph. Because Leah's children hate Rachel's children because of the way in which Jacob sinned and deceived, they eventually sell Joseph into slavery, and then they deceive Jacob and say he's dead, and Jacob goes through utter hell. Hell begets hell, lie begets lie, sin begets sin. You never sin, you don't do it, it does you. You never sin and pass away. Sin is like a boulder not onto the stone, sin is like dropping a boulder into water. Shockwaves go out forever.

Friends, listen, you never get away with it. Anything that's a violation of God's will for how people should live here and how people should live together, you never get away with it. You don't do sin, sin does you. That's the first bit of bad news. Second bit of bad news: all life here is marked by cosmic disappointment. Having read this thing and thought about this passage, I want you to know that I love Leah and I am protective of her in this story. For a minute I've got to tell you that she represents something very bad.

One of the most fascinating things in the narrative is the way it turns on you because here is Jacob saying, "Finally, finally I'm going to have happiness in this life. Finally, finally I've got Rachel." But behold, in the morning it was Leah. There's a very interesting little commentary written by one of my favorite writers, Derek Kidner, and he puts it this way: "But in the morning behold it was Leah. This is a miniature of our disillusionment experience from Eden onwards."

What he is saying is this is a miniature of a fact that everybody in this room needs to know. You critically need to know it. No matter what your hopes for a project, no matter what your hopes for a marriage, no matter what your hopes for love, no matter what your hopes for a career, no matter what your hopes in, in the morning it will always be Leah. No matter what you think is Rachel, it will always be Leah.

Nobody ever put it any better than C.S. Lewis in his chapter on hope. He says most people, if they really learn to look into their own hearts, and that's what I'm urging you to do right now, most people if they really learn to look into their own hearts would know that they do want and want acutely something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love or first think of some foreign country or first take up some subject that excites us are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning can ever really satisfy. I am not speaking of what would ordinarily be called unsuccessful marriages or failures of holidays and so on; I'm speaking of the very best possible ones. There's always something we've grasped at, there's always something in that first moment of longing but fades away in the reality. The spouse may be a good spouse, the scenery has been excellent, it turned out to be a good job, but it's evaded us. In the morning it's always Leah.

The reason you have to understand that is because it's painful to overhear people's lives. I didn't say overhear people's words because people don't say these things out loud, but you hear it in their life. I overhear it when I see people's choices, I overhear it when I see people's attitudes, when I see what they're doing. You overhear people saying essentially, "I'm going to have such a career, I'm going to get myself a hunk, I'm going to get myself a babe, and I'm going to live in this place and I'm going to have a life."

In the morning it's always Leah. This is a miniature of the disillusionment which is our lot from Eden onwards. Your life eventually is definitely going to come through, eventually you're going to see it. When you do, there's only four possible ways of responding to that. There's only four ways to go and you're going to have to choose one of them and it will totally shape the rest of your life. You'll either blame the things you have and say I've got to get better ones—better woman, better man, better job. Or secondly, you'll blame yourself and just hate yourself. Or thirdly, you'll blame life and you'll harden yourself so you'll never hope for anything at all.

Or fourthly, you can blame your theory of reality and you can say if there's nothing in this world that ever is Rachel, then Rachel must be beyond this world. If there's nothing in this world that ever satisfies me, then that means I am made for something beyond this world. There's only four possible responses. Which one is it going to be? One makes you a fool, one makes you a self-hater, one makes you an utterly hard cynic, and one makes you a Christian.

Now thirdly, and it's very linked: first of all, the first bit of bad news is sin—you never do sin, sin does you. Secondly, all life is marked by cosmic disappointment. In the morning it's always Leah, always. Thirdly, as bad as life is, you make it much worse through idolatry and especially the idolatry of a family. I know this may sound very strange, but what we have here is a form of idolatry where you put your hope in something to give you a sense of being loved, being valuable, giving your life meaning. These are not idols of the liberal world; these are idols of the conservative world.

Jacob says, "If I get this gorgeous wife on my arm, if I marry, then I finally will have happiness," and it didn't work. Poor Leah, she turns and says, "If I have a child, if I have children, if I have sons, if I have this wonderful family, then I'll be worth something, then I'll be loved," and it never works. Don't you know that when you build your life on a white picket fence, when you build your life on either before or after it happens, on being married and having a perfect family and all of your children growing to be so happy, the Bible comes against that.

Doesn't the Bible come against immorality and adultery and orgy and living together? Well, yeah, some other place. That's not the text we have here. We've got a text coming against conservative idols here. We have a text coming against traditional values. We have a text that's saying if you build your life on a spouse, at the very best you'll be emotionally dependent or you'll be controlling, you'll be judgmental. If anything goes wrong with that spouse, if that spouse has any problems, you will go to pieces and you'll be of no help to that spouse or anybody else.

If you build your life on your children, at the very least you'll try to live your life out through your children till they either hate you or they don't have any identity of their own. At worst, you'll end up abusing them because they have got to be good, they have got to be right, they have got to love you or you don't have a life. Again and again, you see Leah saying, "A son! Now!" She just fit right in with traditional values, especially at the time. You're nobody unless you have children. You're a woman, so you must have children. She does and it doesn't work. If she'd had a nicer husband, she might have been able to live in the delusion for a longer time, but fortunately for her she didn't and she came to see that idols always make the disappointment of this world far, far, far worse.

Guest (Female): Jonah is one of the most widely known stories in the Bible, but it's so much more than a simple account of a prophet who runs from God and gets swallowed by a great fish. In his book "Rediscovering Jonah," Tim Keller uncovers the deeper message of this familiar story, revealing how Jonah's resistance to God exposes our own reluctance to trust and obey him, and how Jonah's experience ultimately points us to Jesus and his saving work on the cross. During the month of May, we'll send you a copy of "Rediscovering Jonah" as our thank you for your gift to help Gospel in Life share the transforming love of Christ with more people. Request your copy today at gospelinlife.com/give. That's gospelinlife.com/give. Now here's Dr. Keller with the rest of today's teaching.

Tim Keller: That's the bad news, but what's the good news? The good news is better than the bad news was bad. Three things. First of all, the good news is that God works with very weak people. Somebody here surely, this is New York, somebody out there is saying, "This is the stuff I hate in the Bible. Why did you bring something out like this? Here you've got Jacob, and look how he's oppressing these women. Look how he's acting: polygamy, bigamy. Look at women being moved around and abused and sold. Look at this, this is what I hate about the Bible."

Dear friends, we could spend a little bit of time on that. In the whole Bible, every place, the Bible condemns bigamy, polygamy, every part of God's law. If you think that this text showing us the absolute misery and hell that comes when women are treated like this, if you think that this text in any way condones that, this text is a screed against that. But that's not your real problem. The reason when people read these kinds of stories they get so bummed out and they get confused is this: you have got a spiritual paradigm I want to shatter right now.

When you read the Bible and you see all this stupidity and all this stabbing in the back and all this foolishness on the part of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and David and everybody, you say what's going on here. You know why you're so upset? Because you think the Bible should be a book of virtues. You think the Bible should be a series of inspirational stories with role models. You think the Bible should be a series of stories of heroes, and that proves that you don't understand the gospel.

The Bible is not about role models, it's not about emulating these great people. The Bible gives you again and again and again men and women who God continues to work with even though they resist his grace, they don't deserve his grace, they don't seek his grace, and then they don't even appreciate it after they've been saved by his grace. It's story after story after story. Now why would God give us stories like that? Why would God continue to work with this guy?

Unless you're incredibly proud, you don't realize what incredibly good news this is. How can you be offended at this unless you have a tremendously unrealistically high view of yourself? My dear friends, listen. If you think the Bible should be a book of virtues, inspirational stories of role models we should be emulating, that means you think that the Bible should be like all the other scriptures and all the other religions. But they're not, because every other religion says God is at the top of a ladder. He's put a ladder down between you and heaven and earth and he's standing at the top of the ladder and he's saying, "Perform, do good, live right, emulate the heroes. If you try real hard, you can come up the ladder to heaven."

But Jesus Christ said, "You will see angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man," because Jesus Christ said, "You'll never come up the ladder, you'll never emulate. Look at all these guys, look at all they have revelation from God, they have miracles in their lives, they have all kinds of incredible things happen to them and they screw up again and again and again." Our Bible, our God, the Christian God, is not a God who stands at the top of the ladder but who sent his son down to be the ladder. He's not a God who says perform, but he says, "My son Jesus Christ will come down and live the life you should have lived and die the death you should have died."

That's the reason why these Bible stories are a series not of stories of role models emulated but weak people like you and me whom a weak God had to come down and become weak and die on the cross to save us. God works with weak people. That's the first good news. Second good news: God works through weak people. Laban really hurt Leah, didn't he? Laban really hurt Jacob, didn't he? Yet, if you understand how God used Laban in their lives, you'll see that it was only because of Laban and all of his shysterness and all of his meanness that Jacob finally began to get humbled.

You know the reason a lot of commentators say, "Oh my goodness, why is it that Jacob didn't put up more of a fuss when he realized what Laban was doing? He could have insisted, he could have said no way seven more years for Rachel." Why didn't he? Because he realized what was happening to him was exactly what he had been doing. He saw himself in Laban and he hated it. He finally began to come around, he finally began to get some perspective, he finally began to realize who he really was and what he'd really done.

See, God works in your life through weak people. Right now there's a Laban in your life. Instead of just screaming why in the world Lord have you put this Laban in my life, you have to realize that God works not just with weak people but he works in your life through weak people. But lastly, God is attracted to the weakest. See, he doesn't just work with and work through, but he works in the weakest and the most broken of all. This is what is so astounding. Leah, now one thing you can't realize as you're watching her cry out to God and talk about how I want my husband to love me, maybe now, is that she uses a vocabulary that commentators over the years have been struck by.

There's two words that are used for God in the Old Testament in your English translation. The one word is the word translated "God" and it's the Hebrew word Elohim. It's a generic name for God, it just means "God," and everybody used the word God. All religions, all people, everybody used the word God, it meant "the great one." But when God came down to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, he gave them a new name. He gave them a personal name, the name Yahweh. This word Yahweh was a name he only gave to people to whom he was also giving the story of salvation.

He only said Yahweh to people to whom he said, "I want you to believe my promise that through a descendant I will save the world." Every place the word Yahweh shows up in the English Old Testament, you don't see the word God translated, what do you see? "The Lord." Leah, floundering around like a madwoman, doing anything she can to deal with the hell she's in, anything she can to start to feel like how do I get out of this? I always knew I was homely, I always knew that in the world's eyes I was nothing and now every day it's just pushed into my face. How am I going to survive this?

She says, "A child, a child," but every time she has a child, she cries out and she faces her husband: "Now my husband will save me, now my husband will love me." She looks at the child but she also says every time "The Lord." She begins to call the name Yahweh. What happened? Where did she hear about it? Leah must have heard the promise, the promise of the seed, the promise of salvation. She began not just to believe in a general God at the top of the ladder to whom she must submit, which is what everybody else in the world believed, but she began to grab hold of, at first only partially, of the idea of the Lord, Yahweh, the God who will save by grace.

What's so fascinating is look carefully and you will see if you go back and read this passage that she's turning to her husband, to her husband until the very end. At the very, very end, something changes, something radically changes. Every time she says, "Now my husband will love me, now my husband will love me, now my husband will love me." Then it says she conceived again, and then she gave birth to a son and she said, "This time I will praise the Lord."

What did she do? Finally, no talk about her husband. What had happened? Through this suffering, she stopped turning to her husband. She stopped looking to her children. She stopped looking to anything else and she said, "I'm going to praise the Lord," and at that moment she got her life back. At that moment Laban, Jacob, all the people who had used her and abused her, as long as she had stayed in the idolatry she would have been a slave, but at that point she stood up and she got her life back.

More than that, look, who was the child? When she finally stopped turning from her husband and she stopped looking to her husband for those things that only God can give, and when she finally turned to God, she said, "This time I will praise the Lord." The child was Judah. Who's Judah? Get this: God comes to Leah and says, "You'll be the mother of Jesus," because Judah was the seed.

But more than that, Leah became the seed: Leah the outsider, Leah the ugly, Leah the rejected. Because she grabbed hold with faith, she got her life back from all the people that had ruined it for her, she got it back. God comes down and makes her into the seed. She goes ahead of her husband. She understands the gospel better than her husband and at the very end she stands up. God says now through your suffering because you have come to understand the gospel of grace, you are the seed and your son Judah's the seed, and you've become the mother of Jesus.

How could this be? Why would God choose Leah to do that? The answer is right here. When the Lord saw that Leah was not loved, he came to her. Now we know. The Old Testament shows us what the New Testament really tells us: God loves those who others don't love. God is attracted because of his gracious nature and he wants the ones that no one else wants. But more than that, when he sees a wife who's not loved, he shows that there's a heavenly bridegroom, he shows that there's a heavenly husband.

Jesus Christ, the Bible tells us, is the bridegroom. He's not just a king and we're the servants, he's not just a shepherd and we're the sheep. He's the bridegroom and we're the bride. What happened is Jesus Christ came to earth and died. He lost his true beauty, the beauty of a noble soul, the beauty of holiness. He lost his true beauty, lived the life we should have lived, died the death we should have died so that when we believe in him, what? We become his bride. So that though we may look like Leah, to Jesus Christ we look like Rachel.

That's the gospel. We might look like Leah in ourselves, but to Jesus Christ we look gorgeous. That is exactly what God does here. We see here in the Old Testament a foretaste and a hint of the fact that God is the heavenly bridegroom. He sees the wife who's unwanted. That's the reason why God chooses the foolish to shame the wise, God chooses the weak to shame the strong, God chooses the things that are despised, even the things that are not to bring to nothing the things that are, so that we might understand God's grace.

In conclusion, if you're a person here who's still searching for God, you need to understand this: God is not at the top of the ladder; he sent his son to be the ladder. Secondly, if you're a person who is very upset whenever you get near a wedding because you're so angry that you're not married, or if you're still just incredibly desperate to be married, you've missed the point. In the morning it's never what you thought. You cannot look to anything but Jesus.

Jesus is the only husband in heaven. We have a father that'll deal with all of our imperfect fathers here. In heaven we have a brother that will deal with all our imperfect families. In heaven we have a spouse that will deal with all our imperfect spouses. Until we make him the one, until we say, "This time I will praise the Lord," we'll never be able to deal with all the imperfection around us, never.

If there's anybody in this building right now that feels like somebody else has ruined my life, look at Leah. What a picture. Leah gets her life back. She doesn't have to be bitter, she doesn't have to hate, she doesn't have to deceive back. She doesn't. She says, "This time I will praise the Lord." I won't look to anything else to give me what only Jesus Christ can be for me. I will not add anything to Jesus Christ as a requirement for being happy. Do that and you'll get your life back. Is there anybody here who feels ugly? The only eyes that count are radiant with you. The only eyes that count are ravished by you. That's the only comfort that can't be quenched.

Let's pray. Our Father, we pray that you'd help us to get that balance that is so difficult. Forgive us for the liberal idols and the conservative idols. Forgive us for all the ways in which we try to blame ourselves or our society or other people for what's wrong in our hearts. We pray that you would help us hear the good news that we can, like Leah, praise you and have your grace come into our life and be used for great things. We thank you that you made her into a great heart. We thank you that you brought her to greatness through her suffering because she came to understand the difference between salvation by grace and by works. We pray that you'd help everybody in this room to understand the same. In Jesus' name we ask it, Amen.

Guest (Female): Thanks for joining us here on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you were encouraged by today's teaching, you can help others discover this podcast by rating and reviewing it. To find more great gospel-centered content by Tim Keller anytime, visit gospelinlife.com. Today's sermon was recorded in 1998. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017 while Dr. Keller was Senior Pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.