It’s Just a Little White Lie
According to the biblical record, Isaac’s wife, Rebekah, was a deceiver. She came from a family of deceivers and gave birth to deceivers who gave birth to deceivers. Because she was a grandmother, I wanted to learn from her. I learned what goes around comes around, and deception breeds deception.
Rebekah gave birth to two sons, Jacob and Esau. Genesis 27 records Rebekah manipulating Jacob to deceive his father, Isaac, and steal the blessing from his brother, Esau. When this is discovered, and Rebekah has successfully dysfunctionalized—this isn’t a real word but it should be—her family, she sends Jacob away to live with her brother, Laban.
Laban also carried the deception gene. He manipulated Jacob with a promise—he would allow Jacob to marry his daughter, Rachel. There’s a wedding, but Laban pulled a switcheroo. He veiled his oldest daughter, Leah, the daughter least likely to win the Miss Haran beauty pageant, and passed her off as Rachel. When Jacob awoke the next morning … Whoa! There’s Leah, clinging to him. Yikes!
The plot goes on and Jacob finally gets Rachel. When Jacob leaves Laban’s house and takes his family away, Laban pursues him. Someone had stolen his god, and he wanted his idol back. In the account, we learn Rachel had taken it and deceived her father. Did the man think his seeds of deception would reap integrity?
Then we come to Jacob’s sons. Two of his sons made a treaty with the men of Shechem. They would all live peaceably together in the land if the men of Shechem would agree to be circumcised according to Jewish custom. When the circumcised men were not in their best form, Simeon and Levi swept in and killed them.
We see vividly the generational cord of deception when the sons of Jacob sell their brother, Joseph, into slavery in Egypt and tell their father that his favorite son is dead. Their father, Jacob, the man who stole his own brother’s birthright through manipulation and stole his brother’s blessing through deception, becomes the victim of the most devastating scheme ever perpetrated on a father.
Rebekah could not have known the heartache and tragedy that lay ahead of her son, Jacob—not to mention the tragedy of Esau’s life—when she “practiced to deceive”. Jacob suffered far beyond the worth of his father’s blessing and his brother’s birthright.
When we interact with our children and grandchildren in the day-by-day of things, we rarely consider how our actions and attitudes will spill over into the next generation. But I pray God will give us grandmothers a “sanctified imagination”—the ability to see beyond the veil, to see with spiritual eyes so that we can, if we need to, alter our behavior and the course of our grandchildren’s future for good.
If you look farther back in the record, you will see the pattern of deception did not start with Rebekah, but neither did it end with her. Devastating generational traits may not have started with us, yet I pray by God’s grace they will end with us.
The wise woman builds her house, but the foolish pulls it down with her hands (Proverbs 14:1, NKJV).
