All Natural Remedies for Spiritual Problems

​Photo by Hans Vivek on Unsplash
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What we have in front of us today is a painful story. We have an unloved woman yearning for the affections of her husband. We have a loved woman who has everything in her life except that which she most desires, a child. We have a passive husband, tossed around by every twist of emotion in the household. We have two other women seen only as objects and means to an end. 

The sad news is this is all done entirely to themselves. None of this was necessary. All of it was an attempt to control things that cannot be controlled. The glad news is that God is going to turn petty competition and profound longing into the nation of Israel that will one day bring the Messiah. 

Our two points today: Coveting kills joy through false promises, yet God blesses whether we see it or not.
Coveting Kills Joy Through False Promises

We hear the word “covet” thrown around pretty casually as just another way to say “want.” I hear people say, “I covet your prayers.” While that’s not a sin to say that, it just isn’t the proper understanding of that word. Coveting is wanting something to the point of being willing to sin to get it. That doesn’t mean that this sin is hard to commit. I can so want time to myself that I ignore prayer. That’s coveting. I can so want well-behaved children, that I’ll try to short-cut the process by being harsh. That’s coveting. I can so want acceptance by friends that I’ll compromise what I believe. Or so want good grades that I’ll cheat on a test. Or so want that toy that I’ll be mean to a sibling. It’s all coveting. At the end of the day it is what I want no matter how I get it. 
So how does this play out at first? This passage in front of us is neatly divided into four sections. The first and last sections start with an action of the Lord. The Lord sees in verse 31, and the Lord remembers in verse 22. The middle two are the sisters “seeing.” These middle sections display the craziness that results when we covet something and attempt to get it our own way. 
In this first paragraph, Leah is clearly in pain but isn’t as yet doing anything sinful to alleviate it. To be honest, she participated in the deception of Jacob. She decides to go along with her father’s plan to trick Jacob. Jacob already didn’t love her prior to marriage, and tricking him into marrying her certainly doesn’t help matters. 
Despite how she got into this position, and at this time in history she was in a rough spot (compassion where it is due), the Lord saw that Leah was hated. God was watching Leah, and acts for the hated one. God sees you, too. There are seasons of life where it feels like everyone is ignoring you, even the ones who shouldn’t be ignoring you. Parents, friends, even spouses can seem distant and distracted. That loneliness feels crushing. But God seems especially attuned to that. He has even experienced it in the person of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane when all His disciples fled from Him after one of them directly betrayed Him to death. God knows what it feels like to be alone, to be hated. And He has compassion. 
He shows this to Leah by causing her to have children, sons even! A son means that the family name will continue, and for this family, the blessing to pass on! You can see Leah’s state of mind in how she names her children. All of these names are puns, play on words. They sound like other Hebrew words for the emotions she feels. She names her first son Reuben which sounds like the Hebrew word for “see.” She feels that now that she has given Jacob a son, a future, a descendant to pass on the blessing, the guarantee of land for future descendants, that she will finally get the love from Jacob that she desires. 
However, even with one son born, and even with three more to come in these verses, her status doesn’t change from “unloved.” She names her second son Simeon which sounds like shema or “heard.” She understands that the Lord “heard” she was still hated and thus sent a second son. The first son wasn’t enough, but she will find that the second son doesn’t help either. Son number three’s name sounds like the word “join,” Levi. She hopes that her husband will be attached, but even this doesn’t help. Finally, the fourth son is named Judah, sounding like the word “praise.” She is stopping the pursuit of her husband’s love and decides to simply praise God for what He is doing. 
If she could only see what these sons will do, though. Each of these sons, and all the ones to follow in the rest of our passage, will form the nation of Israel, all twelve tribes. The tribe of Judah is ultimately going to be the kingly tribe, the tribe of David, the tribe of Jesus. Levi is going to produce the priestly tribe, the tribe that will offer sacrifices for the sins of the people, the tribe that will point most clearly to Jesus’ sacrifice. All from the unloved one! You never know what is hidden in your pain. Some of your deepest pains will be the greatest offerings you give to the world. Those pains form you into a person able to serve, understand, and pray for others. Here, Leah channels that pain into praise. She is an example of what to do in this situation. She recognized the the Lord sees, and she worships Him. 
However, we are about to see what happens when Rachel and Leah see in a different way. God saw Leah with the eyes of compassion, but Rachel sees her with the eyes of competition and envy. Here’s where the “all natural remedies” kick in. 
Rachel’s seeing causes her to envy her sister and covet her position. This begins by yelling at Jacob for something he can’t control, a fact he angrily reminds her of. AS one scholar notes, “Jacob does not handle the exasperation of Rachel very well. He does not pray to God for his wife nor does he give her any comfort…Neither Jacob nor Rachel are trusting in the LORD to give them children” (Belcher). Yelling comes natural, but it isn’t the solution. The other “all natural” solution is to give Jacob her maidservant to have children with, since that went so well with Sarah and Abraham. 
Having a concubine was a very normal part of the ancient world, but the Bible never approves of this practice. Here these real women are just being used as baby machines, a practice we moderns do as well with surrogacy. In this practice, the child born to the servant (in this case Bilhah) was fully the child of the mistress (in this case Rachel). 
This isn’t even fully about having children, as such, but it seems that this is all about competing with Leah. She names her first child “Dan” which sounds like “judged.” The implication here is that God has finally done right by her in giving her a son, sort of (Ross, 511). The second son of Bilhah is called “Naphtali” which sounds like the word for “wrestle.” She feels in this moment that she is winning! 
Not to get left behind, Leah “sees” the situation, and suddenly the woman of worship enters the wrestling match. She has her own all natural remedies to this spiritual problem of jealousy by deploying her own servant, Zilpah, bearing her two more sons whose names sound like “good fortune” and “happy.” 
You think we’d be done at this point, right? Everyone has, as far as society is concerned, children. Competition done, right? Can’t be jealous if everything is equal, right? All natural remedies have worked? 
Nope. 
Leah’s son finds some mandrakes and gives them to his mother. Mandrakes were a plant considered to enhance the bedroom experience and increase fertility (Matthews). However, ingesting too much of the plant would be poisonous resulting in hallucinations, blurry vision, and even death. The plant has the same compounds we use in anti-nausea pills and those eye drops they put in to dilate your eyes. 
The fight begins for the mandrakes and reveals that the sisters still are in the same painful spot. Rachel wants them because, really, she still hasn’t had a child. Leah doesn’t want to give them because she still feels unloved by Jacob. All the competition, all that scheming, all those “all natural” remedies resulted in nothing. But we will continue down this path as the wheeling and dealing begin. Rachel sells Jacob to Leah for the night in order to get mandrakes, which Leah takes. Even without the mandrakes, she gets pregnant again, and names her son after a word that sounds like “wages,” a sort of double pun on the sale of mandrakes and on the mistaken idea that God was rewarding her efforts with the servant. She then has another son, and finally a daughter. 
That just had to be crushing for Rachel. Despite having the mandrakes, yet another all natural remedy it is another two years of no children. 
Finally, only when the Lord moves, He causes Rachel to have a son. “Joseph” sounds like the Hebrew word for “taken away” meaning this birth has removed the stigma of childlessness, and it sounds like the word for “let there be another son.” 
What a mess! 
God blesses whether we see it or not.
Now, despite their sinful motives, the Lord blesses. No one ultimately needed concubine children or mandrakes. In fact, pursuing these things never gave them an appreciation for the sons they had. It was never enough. 
So what do we take away from this? 
God is blessing you whether you see it or not. Coveting things that God hasn’t given you yet isn’t going to help you see the blessings He has given you already. 
Modern science is actually waking up to the practice of gratitude. Apparently, scientists can actually see the change in people’s brains when they spend time being grateful for what they have. 
By all means do that, but as a Christian, you have something even more powerful than that. Again, by all means, be grateful for the things that He has given you. Write them down. But don’t forget to be grateful for the Giver of those gifts. You don’t just have gifts from God, you have the gift OF God. You have a good Father who knows and loves to give good gifts to His children far better than we can (Matthew 7:11; Psalm 84:11; James 1:17)! The climax of those gifts is spelled out in Romans 8:32 “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” You, as a sinner who offends God daily, has been given forgiveness through the death and resurrection of Jesus. And as it says in Luke 12:32 ““Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” 
This world is too hard for you to intentionally forget that you are going to heaven. There are too many things to want in this world for you to not start every day saying, “I’m going to heaven to be with God.” That is the only way to combat your coveting. It’s the only way to combat anxiety, which is just coveting the things that you currently have and are afraid of losing. Stare at the ultimate blessing that you do already have. This doesn’t mean that the shimmer of things in this world goes away completely. God made a good world. There are great things in it. But over time as you practice turning your eyes on Jesus, the things of this world fall into their appropriate place, underneath the glory of Christ.