A bride for Isaac

Good morning. As we proceed into the passage this morning, I want to start in a particular way. Long, long ago in a geography far, far away. Well, that's where this chapter takes place. Genesis chapter 24 is one of those that is like the chapter we looked at last time, best understood by understanding some of the characteristics of the culture. Certainly reading the passage, but also understanding what was typical or expected in the culture is going to help us in understanding the passage here. One of the reasons we bring that out is because we will read of practices and assumptions, characteristic of the culture here, that were second nature to the people living then, that to us might seem, well, a little different. There's also something else that's helpful here in that there's quite a bit of written material from the time of Abraham and centuries both before and after that are helpful here.

I have jokingly a 4,000 year old PDA. They typically would write on clay tablets with a stylus and make these markings. From the time of Abraham and before and afterwards, about a half million clay tablets have been found. And so a great number of these tablets, the great majority of them have never been translated. So there's a great deal of information and yet even more that has not been translated with which to work. Now, we have the next part here.

It's high time that Abraham get a wife for Isaac. Isaac was born and Abraham was 100 years old. And so by this time, Sarah died when Abraham was 37 years old. So that makes, excuse me, 137 years old. That makes Isaac 37. And so by this time, Isaac is somewhere between 37 and 75 years old. I think there's some reasons to think it's probably on the younger end of that range.

One reason that finding a wife may have been difficult is simply just from the standpoint that Abraham, as it's very clear from the passage that Wayne read for us, Abraham did not want to have a wife from the Canaanite culture. After having a promise from God that said, your descendants, your descendants will have the land, he did not want to have that simply just kind of melt away by mixing in with the Canaanite culture and the Canaanite people. He wanted to have God's promise remain distinct to him and his descendants. Here's the chart that you have on your handout here.

And so Genesis 24 puts Isaac in this age range. I think there's As we look at it, multiple indications, and one of those being in Genesis 24-67, that favor an earlier time. I think there's also, as we begin the next chapter, here in a couple of weeks, as we begin the next chapter, one of the things that's also going to point to that is Abraham having another wife, more children, those kinds of things. Those tend to favor Isaac being younger at this time. All right.

Another question that came up, and matter of fact, I was asked about it just before the service is, is this servant Eleazar or somebody else? Quite often assumed to be Eleazar. From Genesis 15-2, that's the one place the Eleazar is mentioned by name.

Abraham, because he did not have any direct offspring at that point in time, was assuming maybe my heir is going to be my oldest household servant born here in my own tents. But by the time we get to this chapter, which is some decades later, what we'll see repeatedly as we step our way through it is that there's reference particularly to just this, the servant, the servant, the servant, but never the name given. So it may well be, excuse me, well be that Eleazar is the servant, but we don't know. So I'll just simply do as the chapter does and refer to him as the servant. Looking at this passage here, and typically I don't put a big chunk of passage on the screen here, but one of the things that stands out, as Wayne read for us, is Abraham gave his servants some very clear parameters.

One thing is, do not take a wife from these Canaanites. That's the shortcut. I know that's the easy answer. Take one of those, okay? I don't want to be mixing in my family with these Canaanites and end up losing the distinctiveness of God's promise. That's one.

The other thing, and this is amazing, alright, you've got to go back to where my family is from and find a wife. Don't take my son Isaac there and you must bring that girl that's to be his wife here. with all the miles in between, hundreds of miles in between. And so this is quite a set of parameters to give this servant. You can imagine this servant kind of scratching his head thinking, oh boy, how am I going to pull this off? I can't take Isaac there. I've got to bring the girl here. She's never been here. She's never met us. This is quite an undertaking. And imagine he thought that this is something he's got to think about very carefully, strategically almost.

The other thing I'll point out is just the two places here. Abraham says, one, you're going to place your hand under my thigh and you're going to swear an oath. And then what we see at the very last verse there, verse 9 that Wayne read for us, is that's exactly what he did. Now, I need to bring this up for a very important reason.

Some of you are at this point in time employed or hope to be so or will be so, okay? There are a great many things to learn from the Bible and from this Bible passage. One of the things, however, I suggest you do not do, do not place your hand under your boss's thigh. Don't do that. This is a very special circumstance.

Abraham entrusted, we'll use that word, his servant with finding a wife for his son Isaac. You can tell from this account that it was an exceedingly important assignment, a stewardship, if you will, that Abraham gave to this steward. He says, this has got to be done. You're the guy to do it. You're going to swear me an oath because this is extremely important.

I am entrusting to you, basically, the fulfillment of God's promise that I will have a descendant through Isaac. I'm entrusting finding a wife for him, not from the Canaanites, but from my distant relatives to you. So Abraham is looking upon this as something he took very seriously, and we see that his servant also took it seriously. So he had this highly critical stewardship to his servant, find a wife for Isaac. Mission code name F-A-W-F-I, Fafi. Code name Fafi, that means find a wife for Isaac. The wife must not be from the Canaanites.

Absolutely not. That is abundantly clear. The next thing, Isaac must not return to Nahor. He can't go back to Nahor, Haran, any of that neighborhood of cities. He can't go there. You've got to bring the wife here. She's never been here. Isaac can't go there. You've got to travel hundreds of miles. That's the way it's got to be.

Abraham made his servant swear an oath. The typical pattern for an oath was three things. One, swearing by a deity. He said very clearly, this is the God of heaven. A promise, that's the promise with the parameters that he gave. And a physical gesture of some kind, like I said, that's the hand under the thigh. Like I said, I don't recommend that as common practice now, but that's what he did. Why the hand under the thigh?

It was a very personal assignment. A very personal assignment. Abraham was entrusting by faith here to this fellow. He was quite convinced that God wanted him in that land. He says, I'm not going to leave this land. You've got this assignment. I'm going to stay here in this land. God wants me here. You're going to leave Isaac here. God wants him here. So you're going to be the one to do it.

And Abraham didn't want to cause any confusion with God's fulfillment of the promise to him that his own descendants would take this land, not the Canaanites, his own. So he wanted that to be very clear, crystal clear. Now, Abraham summarized God's promise to Eliezer in order to make it abundantly clear. So here comes the camel caravan. In the passage, the trip up to Nehor, where he was headed, is summarized quickly.

But imagine this, you're taking 10 camels, okay? You're going to load them up with goods. You're going to travel for days and days. The round trip is over a thousand miles. Okay, by camel. Now, we're thinking camel, and a lot of us would think, well, that's quite a trip.

Okay, in those days, that was a desert limousine. A camel was a desert limousine because they were fairly unusual and expensive animals. As a matter of fact, to take ten of them was rather extraordinary. So here's the servant with all the valuable goods, ten camels and probably some others to protect and accompany on the trip as well. And so they're all traveling on these desert limousines up to Nahor. That's the scenario here.

Ten camels themselves would have been a sign of wealth. Job chapter 1 indicates that they were a sign of wealth. We know from archaeological and cultural studies that they were used, but rather unusual during this period of time. It was only the more wealthy that had them. The camels were loaded with costly goods. As we move forward in the account, it'll become very clear that, He brought with him very costly goods including things of gold and silver and expensive garments and jewelry.

These were at a minimum to pay the bride price, what was typical in those days to pay the price for the bride. With 10 camels loaded with these costly goods, no doubt he'd have other with him to protect the caravan, because just as we find in the first chapter of Job, there were raiders out in that section of land. Matter of fact, the route that he possibly and maybe even likely took was similar to the area where Job was raided for his camels. Camels are going to be spoken of 17 times in this passage. So we're going to find that they're very critical to how things come down here. So now on this foffy mission, OK?

Abraham and his steward made this trip from probably Hebron in that area, maybe even a little farther to the south, all the way up to Nehor, which is a city just south of Haran, where Abraham's family had been previously. Nehor was the name of the city, which was also an ancestor of Abraham. And so by now this city had been established. There are records of it, by the way, in the tablets of the time, on into about the time of Isaiah.

And so he made this 1,000 mile plus round trip all the way up to Nihor, starting from around Hebron and heading up to Nihor. So now he gets to the city of Nihor with these 10 desert limousines, all fully loaded, And as he gets there, the servant had formed a particular strategy. You can imagine the servant thinking, boy, this is quite an undertaking.

I'm supposed to go to this place that he may never have been. I'm supposed to go to this place where I have likely never been. I'm supposed to go to this place and convince this girl to come with me who has never met me before or anybody that I know. and she is supposed to come with me and travel hundreds of miles to get married to some guy she's never met. That's quite an undertaking, and I can't take the guy that she's supposed to marry with me. Oh boy. And so he figures I'd better have a really good strategy in order to make this work, in order to make this come off. Here's what he does.

Here's this well outside the city. They had the wells outside the city because you didn't want to have the well with the animals coming in and drinking water and all that. So you could have the animals outside the city with the well outside and when they need to get water they would go outside and usually the morning or the evening to get the water. The women would typically come in groups for safety in the morning when it was cooler and in the evening when it was cooler. Frankly this picture is nice except for the fact that it looks like it's midday and so that wouldn't fit, but you'll have to forgive the artist.

They would come with jars that were about three gallons each capacity. So you got the clay jar, so it's not lightweight. No super injected foam nanotechnology or anything like that. This big heavy clay jar and about three gallon capacity. It meant drawing every time you pulled up out of the well, and the indication here using the word spring at one place means the well might not have been terribly deep, thankfully, because each jar of water would have been about 35 pounds.

So you can come and heft this if you like. What that tells us is these women were buff. Now, a stranger in the culture of the time could politely ask for a drink, demanding you're not going to get it, but politely they could ask for a drink and it would be expected that they would get some kind of a response. favorable response. That would fit the customs of the day. And in fact, that custom carried over even into New Testament times.

Here's John chapter 4. The woman at the well who comes out midday, not the usual, which indicates something about who she is, and Jesus asks her for a drink. That would have been an acceptable thing were it not for the fact that she was a Samaritan, he was a Jew, he was a male, and she was a female.

The stranger would not expect a woman to water the camels. Not even a camel, but here there are ten of them, we're told specifically. Ten camels. Now, why would that be extraordinary? Here's the why. The woman who would offer to draw out the water for all ten camels without being asked was really extraordinary. Offering a drink? Sure. For the people? Yeah, no problem.

Offering to water a camel, that would be kind of unusual. Offering to water 10 camels, really extraordinary. Each camel could drink up to 25 gallons of water. Quick arithmetic, 250 gallons of water, about 80 plus draws of water, okay, to water the camels. That's a lot of water, okay? So here's the servant's strategy. He says, I'm going to pick the extraordinary woman, and I will use that extraordinary generosity and hospitality along with prayer to determine who is the right woman. That's his strategy. Okay.

This passage here, Genesis 24, 12 through 14, that's the first prayer for God's guidance in the Bible. Isn't that interesting? I'm not so sure it's the first prayer I ever prayed for guidance, but it's the first one recorded. So this is a real interesting one.

The service condition for knowing God's selection of a wife for Isaac was that the woman who would offer without request to water the camels, all ten of them, up to 250 gallons of water, that would be the one. So here he is praying. And you can imagine as he's riding these desert limousines toward Nehor, that he's thinking about this and considering it very carefully. So that by the time he gets to Nehor, he's got to settle in his mind. That's what he's going to do. Now, we see this kind of guidance, Lord show this and this, show that versus that.

In the Old Testament, Gideon would be another example. Make the fleece all dry and the ground wet and vice versa. They use the Urim and Thummim. Even into the Book of Acts, you see the apostles early on doing the casting of lots. The New Testament epistles, however, don't seem to encourage that same pattern. God doesn't seem to have called us to be guided in that same way.

And what we find, and you have this on page two of your handout there, is something that we've been teaching and continue to teach, and we'll touch on it in big picture here and leave you to follow on the details. What Scripture lays out for us, we have God's Word spelled out in full for us here. is that there are three aspects of God's will.

God's sovereign will, fixed and irreversible, includes your position and possessions in Him. God's moral will, revealed in Scripture. It's intended to be lived out for believers by the life of Christ. And then thirdly, God's individual will for each individual believer, which is different. and to be carried out with godly wisdom.

Now, we can't take the time to go into it all, but I would point you to the Holly Hills website and click on messages and biblical counseling. We covered God's will for basically a month, two weeks on even career guidance. So anyway, I'd point you to that.

But the other thing that I would point you to that is kind of directing our attention this morning in this passage is there is still a prayer opportunity. A prayer, if you're a person who is looking for a spouse, to pray about that. We have the opportunity to pray for those that we love regarding a spouse or even to grow into that. Maybe even if you're married already. There's likewise an opportunity to pray. for oneself or another to know how God has gifted us. One of the points we made earlier in our study of Genesis is the New Testament reveals that there is both a giftedness for marriage and a giftedness for singleness.

Both those are things that the believer can use the Lord's wisdom in determining. And so we can pray for ourselves or one another in that regard. Okay. Something else that comes out, we see what this servant prayed for explicitly. There are some other things that the Lord revealed that may or may not have been explicitly mentioned, but at least it wasn't said. He prayed to be able to know the woman of God's choice by her demonstrating this hospitality and generosity way beyond what was typical. One draw of the jug? Sure. Eighty draws? Well, maybe.

Whether this servant knew or prayed about the rest of the things that would come out of this, we don't know. But one of the things that is clear is scripture also makes abundantly certain to us in Ephesians 3, verse 20. Now, to him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think. The Lord is certainly able to go beyond what we ask Him, isn't He?

Now, the next step after Rebecca waters the camels, like I say, about 80 times, maybe a few more, drawing water out of this well, The servant comes up and gives him bracelets weighing about four ounces and it says a gold ring. Knowing the customs at the time, that actually may have been a gold nose ring. So that's what he immediately does.

But then on asking, whose household are you from? On asking that question, And also if there was lodging, he found out that she was from his own master's brother's household and that there was lodging for all of them as well. There was a yes answer to each one.

You have on page three of your handout this family tree, which I'll admit is a little convoluted. We've tried to simplify it. You have this family tree here and it shows the relationship between Abraham and Isaac and this other set of relatives here. So, Rebecca would have been a relative of Isaac. And a couple of things we would just make note of. One, unnamed spouses aren't shown in order to simplify the family tree here, and Sarah was the daughter of Terah by a different mother. Genesis 20 verse 12 makes that clear. Now here in this passage at the end of that section we were looking at in Genesis 24, verses 26 and 27 spell this out.

Then the man bowed low and worshipped the Lord. He said, Blessed be the Lord, the God of my master Abraham. who has not forsaken his lovingkindness and his truth toward my Master. As for me, the Lord has guided me in the way to the house of my Master's brothers." A couple of things. It's clear from what this account records for us that the servant was a believer. He was a believer who trusted the Lord.

And here, he doesn't just say, well, boy, that was a nice answered prayer and run along. He takes the moment to worship the Lord and recognize the Lord. He worships and glorifies God in this. He, in that, expresses God's character. Did you notice that? In his prayer, he asked twice for the Lord to show loving kindness. What does he do? He acknowledges in this prayer of thanks and praise and worship the Lord's loving kindness. He acknowledges the Lord's character.

It's twice in his request and now spelled out as his own character in this prayer of thanks. The other one, his truth. And from what I can tell, this is the first instance of a statement of this kind in the book of Genesis. His truth. Acknowledging that God's character is not only one of loving kindness, but one of truth. And he spells it out clearly. He acknowledges that the Lord has provided the guidance that he asked for.

You start to think about it, we pointed out earlier, this is a real risky assignment. In one sense, it's this crazy impossible thing. You've got to go up to this place way far away, get a girl to come down here who is qualified to come down here sight unseen to anybody else and to marry the son that she's never met. This is quite a task and you can't take the son up there. So now, what's he done? He said, this is impossible. I better pray about it. Ever been in that situation? The Lord may well do that. He may well put us in impossible or unlikely situations. And just like this, I recommend prayer. I recommend prayer. Get in the impossible, it's the Lord's opportunity. There's also a puzzling personality in this account.

We see in this account that this fellow Bethuel, who's in the family tree that you have on page 3 of the handout, is Rebekah's father. He's named only once and in verse 50 he speaks alongside Laban. That's it. That's the one place where he comes into the action here. Rebecca's mother is more prominent. She is mentioned three times. Interesting. Something else. Laban, Rebecca's brother, is the one who ends up doing all the negotiating. And it's amazing.

His involvement just kind of jumps into place there. The mother's involvement. overwhelming the involvement of this fellow Bethuel, raises the question, is Bethuel sickly? Or is he just a wimpy guy who's dominated by his wife and a relative? Dunno. But puzzling. Interesting. Because he just kind of disappears from the scene here.

Verses 28 through 49 are basically a repetition And the reason it's a repetition is because everybody's kind of recounting, how did this happen? How did we get here? How did we come to this place? And so everybody's sort of telling the details of the story and in some cases restating what took place there.

That pattern of restatement is one that we found previously in Genesis. We saw it, for instance, in the account of Noah's flood. It's sort of a restatement pattern here. It's common in Jewish writings, and even in Paul's letters. We give a couple examples here in 2 Corinthians 4, 10, and 11, and Ephesians 2, 20, and 21 as a kind of a restatement pattern. There are other places as well, but I'll leave it to you to look those up. So this passage goes on for some number of verses, restating what's already taken place. But you could imagine, here's Rebecca.

And here is the servant and they're telling to the rest of the family now gathered around all of what took place and how spectacular it was and kind of amazing. And you can imagine they're all very excited about it. And there's another reason for making sure everything gets told clearly.

Imagine put yourself in the position of Rebecca and especially Rebecca's family and you're about to give your daughter permission to travel away in less than 24 hours, maybe more like 12, to travel away with people that she's never met before, to a place she's never been to before, to marry somebody she doesn't know. You get the idea? So you want to talk about this real carefully and make sure you've got all the details because you're about to make a critical, life-impacting, pivotal decision on the basis of a few hours at most of conversation. So this has got to happen very carefully.

Now, on the agreement after this, I'm sure, lengthy discussion of Laban and Bethuel together, verse 50, Rebekah was then offered as Isaac's bride. The servant gave the bride valuable gifts and paid a bride price to Laban. Here's an interesting, it was paid to Laban and to Rebecca's mother, not to Bethuel. So this fellow Bethuel, interestingly enough, is not substantially involved in this transaction. And so the bride price was paid out. They had loaded up the camels, I'm sure, with plenty of things to pay the bride price. After eating and lodging that night, the servant asked to take Rebekah back to Abraham and ultimately to Isaac right away. Wow! And they say, whoa, wow! How about ten days? That was their response. Her brother and her mother then, interesting, not her father, asked for 10 days but then consented to let her go.

And basically I think they were just doing what would normally be expected because they had some kind of follow-up checking in to do and making arrangements. So what we see here are two conditions that were set out in order to let Rebecca go with the servant right away. And one of those is Rebecca was consulted as to whether or not she consented to the arrangement. And this was typical. It was typical even on into New Testament times. The parents arranged the marriage, but the bride was not forced to comply with the marriage. She had to consent to it, even though she didn't make the arrangements. If she objected to it, they backed out of the arrangement, okay?

Secondly, Rebecca was to take her nurse and maids with her. That's when you read the total account. Initially, they bring up the nurse and then you find also the other maids that go with her. So those two conditions. Both of these were in accord with the culture and would have been typical.

I think it was kind of the relative scrambling to make sure they got the bases covered before she took off. Imagine she is at the well in the evening, they're wanting to take off the next morning, right away. This is quite a fast thing. You can imagine when Rebecca had gone out to the well, none of this was suspected. And all of a sudden she's taking off in basically less than 24 hours.

The other thing we'll find as we go through Genesis is this fellow Laban, was inclined to unveil surprises. So the fact that this was in keeping with the culture doesn't mean that he was going to stay with that. He was a guy of a few surprises, as we'll find out.

Here when we get into this last set of verses in the passage here, it says, Now Isaac had come from going to Be'er Lahairoi, for he was living in the Negev. Isaac went out to meditate in the field toward evening, and he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, camels were coming. Rebekah lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac, she dismounted from the camel.

That would have been a sign of respect in the culture. She said to the servant, who is that man walking in the field to meet us? And the servant said, he is my master, indicating Isaac. Then she took her veil and covered herself. The servant took Isaac all the things that he had done. Then Isaac brought her to his mother Sarah's tent and he took Rebecca and she became his wife and he loved her and thus Isaac was comforted after his mother's death. Now, I'll give you a map of where things are here. This is a place we haven't looked at specifically since back in Chapter 16.

But, so here's, and I, you see it looks like beer, lahairoi, okay? I particularly in the passage put an apostrophe in the middle because be'er, okay? So it's not like, you know, lahairoi root beer or something, okay? All right, so it's be'er lehiroi and be'er just is the Hebrew word for well. Okay, so it's not that. Putting on the veil would have meant that she recognized herself as the bride. It was not typical in the culture for the women to wear veils except in a wedding ceremony.

So basically she was saying, here's my husband, I'm the bride, down comes the veil. That was the reason for her response and the way she carried herself out the way she did. She immediately saw herself, this is the man that I've traveled on a desert limousine for for hundreds of miles to come marry. So Rebecca was presenting herself as the bride right then and there.

For Isaac to take Rebecca into his mother's tent meant not only that he was receiving her as his wife, but she was now the mistress of the, and I put it in here, tenthold. She was the mistress of the tenthold or of the household. She was now the one in charge.

We think of a tent as an informal place in our own culture, and we go camping in it and do all sorts of informal things. In the culture of the day, and even now in Bedouin peoples, a tent is a formal structure. And for example, the internal dividing wall that divides off the woman's area, taken very seriously, is don't violate that. Now, tent life would likely be an adjustment for Rebecca. She had likely grown up in a city environment, so that would be new, but something she would adjust to. Oh, and by the way, not only was carrying the water woman's work, but setting up the tent was woman's work, too.

Now, what does this chapter tell us? What are we getting out of reading this account, 67 verses that we've actually ran through? One thing is that God's faithfulness of His promise to the descendants of Abraham is made clear. The servant had an improbable assignment. Are you likely going to travel hundreds of miles and convince within hours this woman who needs to be qualified to come back with you to marry someone hundreds of miles away that she's never met? This is an improbable assignment. And you would understand why he would have some questions and why even in the oath, Abraham had some doors out of the oath.

If this doesn't work out, don't worry, I won't hold you to it. But nonetheless, it was taken very seriously. There was a faith in God's faithfulness in the midst of this. And that's one of the things that we can count upon. God is faithful for who He is. He is faithful for what He has done. He is faithful to what He has accomplished in us. He is faithful to everything that He said He's going to do. Everything. We can count on Him for all those things.

As we saw uniquely in this chapter, the first time we've seen it here, actually in the whole Bible, God does guide believers who are seeking and asking for his will. And that's one thing is you may have encountered Christians and maybe even have been through this yourself where you'd feel like, oh, I'm just struggling for what God's will is. And one of the things that this passage does give us assurance of is that God does intend to guide us. God does intend to lead us.

And we can look to him. to guide and lead us and respond. And that leads us to the next thing. Abraham's servant not only prayed to God expecting an answer, but he praised and worshipped God when God gave one. And that's something we can look to as well. As we pray to the Lord for various things, when the Lord answers our prayer, we then have the opportunity to say thank you. Praise you Lord for who you are. Praise you for your faithfulness. Thank you Lord for what you've done. So that the prayer is not simply requesting and then getting something, but it's part of a relationship. It's part of our relationship with the Lord. That's why the Lord has done all the things that He has done. He wants relationship with us.

And this servant understood that. It's really a neat thing if you look at it. We don't even know the servant's name for certain. Might be Eliezer, but maybe not. But we know for certain that he trusted and believed in the Lord. And that he did give the Lord credit where credit was due, even acknowledging God's character and God's guidance.

Something else that comes out of this, a pretty substantial bride price was paid for Rebecca. They brought there were these camels and the camels were not empty. They were loaded up. And a pretty substantial bride price was paid. Some of the items that we have here are itemized in terms of the ounces of gold and the amount of silver. Other things are generalized. But no doubt there was a substantial bride price.

And I think something else to keep in mind is the Lord has paid a bride price for us, the body of Christ, the church. We see in Ephesians 1, 3 through 4, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before him in love. We were chosen as the bride. The church was chosen as the bride of Christ, just as Rebecca was chosen, guided by the Lord as Isaac's bride.

What's amazing is we put that together with later on in the book of Ephesians chapter 5. Here's in the passage about marriage and one of the things that becomes clear is this very thing. Let me read it for you starting in verse 25. Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her so that he might sanctify her having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word that he might present to himself the church in all her glory. having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she would be holy and blameless.

As we look at this account in Genesis 24, it is an extraordinary account. It's a charming and heart-touching account as well. But all the more amazing to see that the Lord has chosen us, his bride. And that this selection is as charming and heartwarming as it is of Rebecca. And amazing even, how well it pictures the even more astounding choosing of us as the bride of Christ.

Not just for a time, but for eternity. What an amazing thing. Let's go to our Lord in prayer. Lord, we thank you in this account, the many lessons to be learned. Faithfulness, faith in your faithfulness, prayer, guidance, looking at how you miraculously intervene and provide. And yet, as we look at this too, Lord, also just to get a glimpse, a foreview of your having chosen us as the Bride of Christ and how special that is and beyond charming, how marvelous to get a foreview of the eternal romance of Christ in the Church. We thank you for the marvelous insights that we have because of your precious word. In Jesus' name, Amen.