Bach never wrote an opera, but the closest thing to it was
his Coffee Cantata. He became quit an expert on coffee
because in his day coffee drinking was the popular vice
much like drugs have become in our day. There were laws
against it and spies roamed the city sniffing the air to catch
people in the act of roasting coffee beans. Frederick the
Great was disgusted with the increase of coffee drinking
among his subjects. He was brought up on beer, and many
of the great battles had been won by soldiers nourished on
beer. The king felt that coffee drinking soldiers would not be
strong in their warfare against his enemies. \
The cantata of Bach is about a father who was greatly
disturbed about his daughter was hook on coffee. If she does
not get it three times a day she says, "I'm no better than a
piece of dried up goat meat." Papa tries everything-he
argues, he threatens, but nothing works until he promises to
find her a husband if she will kick the habit. She agrees, but
in the closing trio she confides that she will only marry a
man who will let her drink all the coffee she wants. This is
Bach's idea of a prodigal daughter. It is a rather mild
rebellion in comparison to the Prodigal Son. We know that
daughters can be equally rebellious and as foolish as sons,
but the Bible seldom reveals a bad daughter. There are sons
galore who bring grief to their parents, but very few
daughters.
The Bible is much more son oriented than daughter
oriented. But there is more about daughters then we realize.
Believe it or not, there are about 500 references to daughters
in the Bible, and about 90 of them are in Genesis, which
makes it the most daughter oriented book in the Bible. Most
of Genesis is about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his 12 sons.
But here in Genesis 24 we see entire long chapter of this
male dominated book revolving around the young daughter
Rebekah who would become the grandmother of the 12 sons
of Jacob.
Rebekah got in on God's plan for history because
Abraham did not like the girls he saw in Canaan. They were
idolaters and corrupted by their culture. He did not want
his son Isaac to marry one of these girls, and so he sent his
servant Eliezer back to his native Mesopotamia to find a
daughter among his brother's family. This was probably the
longest journey in the Bible to find a wife. It was a 6 weeks
trip across the desert. In our culture we don't send servants
out to shop for a wife. We prefer to see the merchandise for
ourselves and make our own choice. Isaac is 40 years old,
and yet he does not go along to have some input. He just
took the one the servant selected, and they had a long and
fruitful marriage. They had their fights, but they overcame
them and became the grandparents of the 12 tribes of Israel.
For some reason the Patriarchs had a hard time having
daughters. Abraham had just 2 sons-Ishmael and Isaac.
Then Isaac had his 2 boys-Jacob and Esau. Then Jacob had
the 12 sons from his 4 wives, but then Leah finally came
through with one daughter named Dinah. She is the only
daughter we know of for 3 generations in that family tree.
Because of this lack of daughters the line of Abraham had to
go back to the family of Nahor his brother to find their
wives, for girls were abundant in his line. It gave us
Rebekah, Rachel and Leah. It is a strange reality, but it is
still true today that some families tend to have all boys and
others have all girls, But the majority get a mixture of the
two. Such was the case with the family of Rebekah. She
had a brother named Laban.
The thing that surprised me in studying the families of
Genesis is that many of them just had 2 children. I guess I
assumed that most families were large in the Bible, but if you
read with the intent to count, you discover that families with
from 1 to 5 are the majority, and 2 or 3 are very common.
Part of the problem in counting is that daughters are often
not listed, for the family tree followed the sons. That is why
it is rare to have a passage like the one we are looking at
where a daughter plays the leading role on the stage of
history. She was not forced to play it either, but chose to
play it by her own will. It was a male dominated world, but
we see that the males who dominated Rebekah's life
respected her right to determine her own destiny. We read
in verse 57-8, "Then they said, let's call the girl and ask her
about it. So they called Rebekah and asked her, "will you
go with this man?" "I will go," she said."
She did not hesitate to make the choice of leaving her
family to go to a far land to be married to a total stranger. It
was an awesome decision, but she choose to go. She was the
female equivalent of Abraham leaving his family to go to
Canaan. Good parenting and good relationships of all kinds
demand that we respect the rights of people to have a say in
the direction they go. They should be consulted and given
the right, and not have their destiny determined by someone
else.
It is one of the hard parts of parenting to give guidance
with trying to impose your will on your child. A mother was
listening to her little daughter say her prayers one night.
She was really into blessing with God bless daddy and
mommy, grandma and grandpa, uncle Bill and aunt
Dorothy, and the mailman and Mickey mouse and, the
mother seeing no end to the list said "Amen." But the little
girl said, "Don't listen to her God. She doesn't know when I
am done."
It is hard to let children be children and have their own
feelings because they often do not fit our adult agenda. One
of the major problems in our culture is the refusal of parents
to let their children be children. The parents are captives of
the culture, and they feel the pressure to impose an adult life
style on their kids. Childhood is a non-productive period of
life, and so the goal is to get over it as quickly as possible.
Such is the thinking of many. It is a waste of time to be
children in their minds, but this is in direct contradiction to
the Bible.
John Drescher in What Parents Should Expect writes,
"Because we do not see childhood as a legitimate phase of
life itself, and because we as parents feel the need to find our
success in our children, we do many ridiculous things. At 3
months we buy toys parents like to play with. And electric
train is purchased and set by parents whose child still wants
to stack blocks. A tricycle stands riderless with the driver
still in diapers. We dress 5-year-olds in caps and gowns for
kindergarten graduation. A little fellow recently said, 'I
think it is bad I graduated because I can't even read.'" He
goes on giving numerous illustrations of how parents refuse
to let their children be children.
We live in a childhood denying culture. Animals do not
have much a childhood. There born and very quickly are on
their own. God made people different from the animal
kingdom. He made them to need a long period of childhood
before becoming adults. We don't like God's plan. The
animal kingdom is what we want, and so we deny that man
is different and go along with the evolution philosophy that
man is just another animal. And so we reject childhood as a
waste and want our children to become adults as quickly as
possible. This has led to children having breakdowns
increasing numbers, and at younger ages. The drive to be
grown up leads to inferiority feelings. This has become the
number one emotional problem of teens. Almost all of them
feel inferior because they cannot be mature adults, and so
they turn to alcohol, drugs, and suicide to escape a world
where they don't fit in.
Jesus said adults are to become like children, and we
have reversed that to say that children must become adults.
The result is a culture where families are breaking down at
record pace. You cannot contradict God's plan for life and
not pay a price. There needs to be more of verse 57 in family
life. It says, "Let's all the girl and ask her about it." Let
your children share their feelings and dreams. Let them
have choices about their destiny. Don't impose your dreams,
or those of your culture on them. Let them be who they are
as God has designed them.
Florence Nightingale changed the history of nursing in
hospitals, but few realized how her choice to do so was
fought by her family. She and her sisters were educated at
home by their father. As a teen she fell in love with the idea
of studying nursing. Her mother had other dreams for her.
She was pretty and witty, and she smart and talented. Her
mother did everything she could to frustrate her dream of
becoming a nurse. It was not a respectable profession in
those days. Her mother and sister actually felt it was
immoral to be a nurse, and her sister refused to talk about
the degrading topic.
Florence felt called of God to be a nurse, but her family's
resistance led her to depression so deep that she wanted to
take her own life. At age 30 she finally escaped the clutches
of her family and got some training with the deaconesses in
Munich, Germany. But when she came back home she was
sentenced to be her sister's slave for 6 months, and she was
forbidden to mention nursing. She was deeply depressed
again and realized she had to follow her own will regardless
of her family's wishes. She left home and went back to
Munich. She wrote to her mother pleading for her support,
but her mother would not respond. Her family resented her
and felt she had disgraced the family name. She was treated
like a criminal for becoming a nurse.
You can understand why Florence wrote in July of 1851,
"The family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what
they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for-its
own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them
but as the something which it has arranged that they shall
be." Her family interfered and got her fired from her first
job at age 32, but she fought back and got reinstated. It was
not until she became famous that the family stopped fighting
her. It was too late then, however, and even though Florence
nursed her own mother the last 7 years of her life, they were
never close because she was a parent who never had the
wisdom to say, "Let's call the girl and ask her about it."
Let your daughters and your sons tell you how they feel.
Let them express their own dreams, for God could have put
in them, as he did in Florence, the ambition and ability that
you have no understanding of and not interest in, but which
are a part of His plan for their lives. The Bible is mainly
about men who leave their land and people to go into an
unfamiliar world to do the will of God, but here in Gen. 24
we have a daughter doing so. As history developed more
and more daughters have become called of God to make
such commitments. Today there are more women on the
mission field fulfilling the great commission than there are
men.
Rebekah's life reveals that commitment like hers can
change all of history, but it is not necessarily glamorous. We
take famous people like Florence Nightingale and pick out
the honors she received and the great events of parties with
the Queen, and we think such a life would be so glamorous.
But the fact is, she had a hard life, and it was full of
loneliness and sorrow with very little glamour. She saved
many thousands of lives by her influence and commitment,
but it was mostly just blood, sweat, and tears, and not a lot
of enjoying ambrosia-the nectar of the gods.
As we follow Rebekah back to Canaan to be the wife of
Isaac we see it was a commitment that changed history, but
there was not a lot of glamour. Isaac was a rather generic
sort of husband. He was not a very exciting personality. He
like to hunt and so he favored Esau the hunter. But she
favored Jacob, and so there was conflict in the family. She
sent Jacob back to her brother and never saw him again,
and Esau was a great disappointment to her, for he married
pagan girls. The point is, she played a major role in God's
plan, but her life was not full of the spectacular. There was
disappointment, boredom, loss, and just the typical life of
most wives and mothers. But she remained committed, and
that is why she was God's choice for this role.
She was given a choice and she remained committed to
that choice, and that is what God is looking for in daughters
and sons. Rebekah was pretty we are told, but she never
became famous for anything. She just had a family of two
boys and did her best to raise them. Nobody is clamoring to
get the movie rights to her life story. It was a rather
commonplace life she lived, but she had the key ingredient
that makes any daughter and asset to the kingdom of God,
for she had commitment. If you teach your child to be a
committed person, you will prepare them to be used of God.
Lack of commitment has always been a major weakness
in people. Adam and Eve were not committed to obey God's
will whatever the cost, and they lost paradise. Lack of
commitment has been the major problem of man ever since.
The bottom line cause of every problem every church faces is
the lack of commitment. If all believers were committed
people, there would be no problem in getting people to do
the work of the church, or to fund missions, or to achieve
any of the realistic goals that are aimed for.
A missionary society wrote to the famous David
Livingstone in Africa, "Have you found a good road to
where you are? If so, we want to send other men to join
you." Livingstone replied, "If you have men who will come
only if they know there is a good road, I don't want them. I
want men who will come if there is no road at all." We are a
soft people. We have so many options of enjoyment that it is
painful to do anything that is hard and costly. Commitment
involves pain, and we just do not like the idea. There was
pain involved for Rebekah to leave her family and travel for
weeks over the desert to marry a stranger. It was hard, and
called for commitment.
An old Swedish hymn has this line, "There is nothing
that is not won by the love which suffers." This is so true of
God's love which gave His Son to die on the cross to achieve
the reconciliation of God and man. But it is true in every
realm of life. Commitment is love for anyone or any goal that
will be pursued, even if it means suffering. John Audubon
became the famous naturalist and the name to be ever
associated with bird lovers because he was committed to
learn about birds. He would go out at midnight and crouch
in the swamps just to learn more about the nighthawk. He
would stand in water that was stagnant up to his neck while
poisonous water moccasins swam past his face in order to get
a picture of a New Orleans water bird. He risked his life for
what seemed so trivial because he was committed to his goal.
Shun Fujimoto of Japan, in the 1976 summer Olympics,
broke his right knee in a floor exercise. He refused to give
up, and he competed in his strongest event, which was the
rings. His routine was excellent, and when he dismounted
with a triple summersault twist the pain shot through his
whole system like a knife. Tears ran down his cheeks, but
the tears were soon gone, for by his commitment he won the
gold medal.
The stories are endless of people who are so committed to
a goal that they will suffer greatly to achieve it. We need to
have goals that we know are God's will that we are pursuing
with diligence no matter what suffering may be involved. It
does not have to be a commitment to be great or famous.
God does not put that kind of pressure on us like parents
often do. He just wants us to be like Rebekah, and be
committed to what He has called us to be. She was called to
be a wife and mother, and that is a worthy calling. Today
daughters are called to be just about everything that sons
are called to be. We need to encourage them to follow their
dreams and be committed to do all that they do for the glory
of God.
The thing that impresses me about God's call to people in
the Bible is that all He really asks for is commitment. He
does not ask them to be great. He does not ask them to do
spectacular things. He just asks them to go where He wants
them to go and be committed to the goal. Abraham was not
told he had to go to Canaan and be a hero of any kind, or
become famous in the land. He was just called to go there,
and that is what he did. Rebekah was just asked to go to
Canaan and be a wife, and she went and was committed to
it. She did not have to become great or famous. All she had
to do is be what she was called to be-a wife and mother. God
does not put pressure on His children to be something they
are not called to be, or gifted to be. He just wants us to be
the best of what we are called to be, and that is what
Rebekah was as a dedicated daughter.
