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 studied her that I might learn from her. I learned what we sow, we reap.
Rebekah had two sons, Jacob and Esau. According to Genesis 27, Rebekah manipulated Jacob, and he deceived his father, Isaac, and stole the blessing from his brother, Esau. When this was discovered, Esau threatened to kill Jacob. Rebekah sent Jacob away to live with her brother, Laban.
Laban also carried the deception gene. He manipulated Jacob into serving him with the promise that Jacob would marry his beautiful daughter, Rachel. But at the wedding, 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 woke the next morning . . . Whoa! There was Leah, clinging to him. Yikes!
The plot continued, and Jacob married Rachel. When Jacob left Laban’s house and took his family, Laban pursued him. Someone had stolen Laban’s 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 came Jacob’s sons. Two of his twelve 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 fighting form, Simeon and Levi swept in and killed them all.
We saw again the generational cord of deception when the sons of Jacob sold their brother, Joseph, into slavery in Egypt and told their father that a wild animal had killed his favorite son. Their father, Jacob, the man who had manipulated his own brother out of his birthright and stolen his brother’s blessing through deception, had become the victim of the most heart wrenching scheme his sons could have perpetrated on their father.
Rebekah could not have known the hardship and heartache along the path she set her son on, or the tragic effect Jacob’s actions would have on his brother. I wonder if his father’s blessing and his brother’s birthright were worth the price he, and the generations that followed, paid.
When we interact with our children and grandchildren in the day-by-day of things, we rarely pause to 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 children’s and grandchildren’s future for good.
If you looked farther back in the record, you would 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).