Read with Me
Genesis 30:22-24 (HCSB)
Then God remembered Rachel. He listened to her and opened her womb. She conceived and bore a son, and said, “God has taken away my shame.” She named him Joseph: “May the LORD add another son to me.”
Listen with Me
After many years of barrenness, Rachel suddenly found herself pregnant. Moses writes that this was no chance event, nor was it the result of the mandrakes she had earlier consumed. Instead, he makes it very clear that God had heard the persistent prayers of Rachel and had opened her womb, enabling her to conceive.
Even before she gave birth, Rachel recognized the significance of this. It was no longer about the competition with her sister. It was about the shame she had long felt about being unable to conceive being suddenly lifted from her shoulders.
When she gave birth to her son, she named him Joseph. The name had a double meaning. The word itself means “may he add”, reflecting her prayer that God would add to her another son to prove that this was no fluke, but was instead a sign of God’s favor on her. But the word Joseph also sounds like the Hebrew root word meaning “taken away”, an acknowledgement that, through this pregnancy, God had taken away Rachel’s long-standing shame at being unable to conceive.
To those watching from the outside, although this pregnancy and birth were remarkable from the standpoint of Rachel’s barrenness, there was nothing notable about the son who was born that marked him out for greatness.
But Moses wrote in the context of the whole history of God’s people. And in that history, both looking back to people like Isaac and forward to people like Samson, Samuel, and John the Baptist, God used those born through a miraculous overcoming of barrenness to do remarkable things in advancing His plans. This was a boy who had a God-given destiny that no one else at that point could see.
Pray with Me
Father, it is truly easy for us to only see the circumstances, the barrenness and the conception that overcame it, and to lose track of the fact that You are always working to move forward Your plan of saving and restoring the world. Even today, we tend to believe that, now that Jesus has come and gone, we are on our own until He returns. But You are just as present and just as active in the pursuit of Your goal for humanity as ever. Lord, help me not to just work FOR You each day but to work WITH You in bringing Your plan to fruition. Amen.