October 29, 2026

GOD’S WORD FOR TODAY:

“Then the servant told Isaac all he had done. Isaac brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he married Rebekah. So she became his wife, and he loved her; and Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.” (Genesis 24.66-67)

REFLECTION ON GOD’S WORD:

We may forget in the midst of this story, that Isaac suffered the loss of his only mother. The love of a good woman is indispensable. I understand the depth of such loss myself. In recently going through my library and boxes of files, I came across a diary in which I had chronicled the month leading up to my mother’s passing in September of 1983. I had just accepted a position as pastor of a congregation on the Mississippi River 1400 miles away from where I had grown up and where my mother was dying from a long bout of cancer. Though she told me to go ahead and pursue my career, which I did, it was the longest month of my life. To quote the line of an old song, I literally and figuratively “cried me a river.” We had found solace in each other’s company. Her health struggles had shadowed a great number of years of my brother’s and my lifetime. She passed when I was twenty-six and my brother was twenty-four. She and I talked many times during that time when we was so sick that all she could do was sit in the den in her rocking chair and look out the large window into the backyard. I would wash the dishes, even though we had a dishwasher, so I could talk and sing to her. I brushed her hair when her hand were too sore to hold a brush and fixed a number of meals for our family when she grew too tired. We laughed, cried and prayed. When the word came that she would not live but a few more days, I took my family back to Texas. It would be the last time I would see her alive except in my memories. We laughed (she greeted me with “You are late, now say Psalm 23”) and we cried (“I am so tired that I can barely breathe”) and we prayed (“Lord, not my will but yours be done.”) It is hard to face such situations even when you have faith in God and knowing that where the next step of the journey leads is into the Master’s presence. I remember returning to that same picnic table on the Mississippi River, Lock and Dam Number 21, and crying another river. Her passing, as did her living, made a lasting impression and an empty space which only her memory could fill. Sometimes we look at such memories as keeping the empty space as a hole or a bottomless pit. It is easy to see things that way. But that would be more the truth, I suppose, if it were not for faith. Memories such as those cannot be seen, at least for me, as a bottomless pit that can never be filled but cry out to be filled endlessly to no avail. Instead, such memories are more like a chalice filled to overflowing that pour out and anoint both the living and the dead who by faith have not passed but pressed on into the future. It is easy for me to hear the untold story of Isaac at this point in the time between his mother’s passing and meeting Rebekah for the very first time.

When that meeting happened, Isaac had been living in the Negev. If you remember, the Negev had been seen at first by his father Abraham as a place of desolation. It was the furthest reach of the land promised to Abraham by God. It was not land’s end. As one of those inevitable droughts came to pass, Abraham sought to provide for his own family and property by moving on to Egypt which was flourishing on the banks of the Nile. It was there that Abraham took matters into his own hands fearing the loss of everything he had. He convinced Sarah to speak half the truth of who she was and say to Pharaoh, “I am my brother Abraham’s sister.” It would not be the last time that Sarah would bind herself to that half-truth in order to protect her husband’s legacy. She was a part of that legacy. She was an invaluable part as Isaac could not be born to Abraham save through her as the Lord God had promised. Yes, she, too, would tell a half-truth in her own way by pleading with Abraham to be intimate with her handmaiden Hagar so that a child might be conceived. She bound herself to the law of the land of those not her ancestors in order to give Abraham what she believed was promised by God. She did not consult with God on the matter but took matters into her own hands as Abraham had done for himself. She did this for herself believing more in her inability to bear a child than in the promise of God to bring one into the world from her own womb. When they left Egypt shortly after arriving due to the intervention of God on their behalf, they returned to the Negev with a different vision of the land. They saw the natural resources in the land were far greater than what the soil could provide as a desert place. The desert place would represent an absence of God’s blessing. It was into the desert place that the “scapegoat” would be driven to survive on its own for as long as it could. The practice became a tradition of confession leading to a hope for redemption as the scapegoat would be covered with the blood of the sacrificed lamb bearing the sins of the nation into a place of desolation away from the people. Hagar had been driven into the wilderness on two occasions. Both times Hagar was found by God and blessed as “One who sees.” The second time, it would be at a well which Abraham himself had gone to dig so that there would be water conveniently provided for anyone who passed by.

It was in this “desert” place that Isaac had gone. There he dwelt in his mother’s tent in the midst of grief, sorrow and lament. His life had been spared at Moriah, the blessing of God conferred upon him but how could he go forward without his mother’s love now that she had died. He went into the Negev as far away as possible to live out his days. How could the promise be manifested if he dwelt there alone? I have no doubt his father told him the same thing he told his servant, “Isaac could not marry anyone who was not of the people of Abraham’s kin.” This would be a reminder of what Abraham had said when he took Isaac up Moriah without a lamb, “God will provide.” Indeed, God provided at Moriah and now at Negev. The story of Rebekah is that reminder of God’s commitment to fulfill the promise made to Abraham. It is also a reminder that Abraham had finally come to trust the Word of God to bring about the testimony of the consequence of faith. So, when we read that Isaac took Rebekah into his mother’s tent and made her his own in marriage, we can easily hear the healing that God brought to Isaac so that his faith would not be a bottomless pit into which he would pour himself into endless to no avail. Instead, it was a cup of blessing that would bring new life and a bright future. It was what God had promised and what his mother had lived for even in her old age.

TODAYS’ PRAYER OF THANKSGIVING:

Father, in these days we are finding the need to believe even more than ever before. We all have known trouble, some in greater ways than others, but You are offering us the assurance that we will not be consumed by it forever. Regardless of the “time” we are in and the “time” we have been given, we ask for Your Holy Spirit which Jesus asked You to share with us, to lead and guide and direct us in the paths we should go. Teach us what we still need to learn. Empower us to put that learning into action. Bless our actions not as a works righteousness endeavor, but as righteous works of faith, hope and love in Jesus’ name. AMEN.