It happened the day I poured myself out for Southern Baptists one last time.¹

I drove home afterward, feeling numb. Parking, I walked into my empty house. There, the realization hit me so hard I wailed aloud:

I AM LEAH!

I sat, feeling bereft, and hopelessly, helplessly stuck. And then I realized something else:

Leahs are legion in this church culture.
Rachels walk among us too.
And while Leah may envy her,
Rachel’s lot isn’t enviable.
Just a different type of misery.

The Triangle

Once upon a real time, a man named Jacob pretended to be his brother Esau, to get his father’s blessing.

Jacob succeeded, then fled. Soon, he arrived at Leah’s place and fell in love with Leah’s beautiful younger sister, Rachel. In order to marry Rachel, Jacob worked seven years for Laban, the sisters’ dad.

The morning after the wedding, Jacob awoke to find he wasn’t the only one who could successfully pretend to be a sibling. He had married Leah.

Leah spent one week as Jacob’s sole wife – while he counted the days until he could marry Rachel, as well. Jacob had to work for Laban seven more years to earn Bride #2. But the second wedding happened only seven days after the first. Genesis 29:30-31 says:

Jacob lay with Rachel also, and he loved Rachel more than Leah …
When the Lord saw that Leah was not loved, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren.

Thus, the triangle: One man – two wives. Each wife miserable for a different reason.

Leah

English Bible translators have softened the blow in Genesis 29:31. Most versions say Leah was “unloved.” Yet, the Hebrew says Leah was “hated.” Indeed, this word “expresses an emotional attitude toward persons and things which are opposed, detested, despised and with which one wishes to have no contact or relationship.”²

Perhaps Jacob hated facing what Leah had unwittingly exposed about him. Her success in tricking him ever reminded him: He too was a supplanter. He too had complied with a parent to deceive.

Ultimately, Jacob would seek to reconcile with the brother he had deeply wronged. He would approach Esau with much fear, many gifts – and no sign of repentance. Esau would welcome him and show mercy to him.

Ah, but Jacob would not extend any forgiveness to Leah. Relentlessly, he rejected her.

And yet, he repeatedly engaged in the most intimate of acts with her – because he wanted the sons she produced for him. Six sons in all Leah birthed.

Surely my husband will love me now

As she named each newborn, Leah expressed, and Scripture records, her heartcry:

Reuben: “It is because the Lord has seen my misery. Surely my husband will love me now.”

Simeon: “Because the Lord heard that I am not loved, he gave me this one too.”

Levi: “Now at last my husband will become attached to me, because I have borne him three sons.”

Didn’t happen. Giving birth to her fourth son, Leah made a different announcement:

Judah: “This time I will praise the Lord.” (Gen. 29:32-35)

With her new attitude, Leah and Jacob and Rachel lived happily ever after, right?

Wrong. Barren Rachel was as desperate to match Leah’s production record as Leah was to be loved. The battle turned uglier as both women used other women (their respective maidservants) to beget more sons for Jacob.

Then, as if things weren’t already bizarre enough, Leah bought a night with her own husband, by selling Rachel some “fertility drug” plants.

That did not go as Rachel had hoped. While she remained childless, Leah had a fifth son and later a sixth. What did Leah cry when these two were born?

Issachar: “God has rewarded me for giving my maidservant to my husband.”

Really, Leah? In this too didn’t you profoundly deceive yourself?

Zebulun: “This time my husband will treat me with honor, because I have borne him six sons.” (Gen. 30, 17, 20)

No, Leah. This hope will always disappoint. This husband will exploit you as much and as long as he can. He will never love you. He will never honor you.

The disparaged, and exploited, in the church

Reading Leah’s story in Genesis, we learn after the fact that she died. We’re not told how or when it happened, or whether Jacob even pretended to mourn for her.

Oh Leah!
Women in evangelical church cultures hate that your story had no happy ending.
We feel so sorry for you!
We do not want to identify with you.
Yet far too often, our situation has paralleled yours.

Like Leah, we’re flawed. And we may be counted ordinary. Serving in many ways, we may birth many good things. Yet, how many of us can testify:

The church culture,
to which we have given ourselves,
has used us and used us
to make someone else look good,
while profoundly rejecting
our personhood, our adulthood, our worth, us.

Time and again, we may tell ourselves: “Now they will notice how much I do for them; now they will love me.” When repeatedly they do not, we may act in ways we know to be deceptive and wrong – okay, yes, we use people too. And then, we may view any outcome that seems good for us, as evidence that God has rewarded the wrong we did to someone else.

How deeply we may long to identify with Rachel, the beautiful and beloved. How inferior we may feel when Rachel is around.

Rachel

The celebrated, and exploited, in the church

Like Jacob, the world in church clothing loves beautiful people. Often, this beauty is the literal, physical kind. It may also be related to charisma, or to an amazing life story. Or it may hinge on connections – birth into a well-known family, leadership of a large ministry, significant relationships with influencers.

In short, toxic church loves celebrity. And celebrity cultures value beauty for its marketability. So yes, they exploit beautiful people too.

But it can seem that the beautiful and beloved have it all. For whatever “privileges” the powers-that-be deny to most women in a given church culture, they lavish on the Rachels they have raised up.

Like Leah, Rachel is human, and flawed. Like Leah, Rachel is caught up in a contest that pits women against each other.

In such a church system, favor has a cost. Rachel must compromise herself and keep other women in their place, in order to maintain her status. Yet, she must not appear to be compromising or competing. Instead, she must seem a godly champion of women.

Not loved in truth

In the Bible, having favor did not bring Rachel happiness. Though “loved,” she never felt secure or complete. For Jacob was nothing, if not selfish. He wanted Rachel. But also, he wanted sons. So he relentlessly demeaned Rachel too.

And while the husband who said he loved her continued to sleep with her own sister, the fruitfulness that Rachel desperately sought continued to elude her. Thus, Rachel became jealous of Leah. And Rachel launched the “use others to get what I want” plan that Leah joined in too. Result: four extra sons for Jacob; two extra women sharing his bed.

Even when Rachel’s offspring finally arrived, she felt no delight in them as persons, no sense that she in herself was enough. Not having been loved in truth, she too looked at her own sons, and saw only her own struggle.

Rachel greeted Joseph, her firstborn, with these words: “May the Lord add to me another son” (Gen. 30:24).

When she did indeed become pregnant a second time, she died in childbirth. With her last breath, Rachel named her second child Ben-oni: “son of my sorrow” (Gen. 35:18).³

Jacob

The husband in this story is flawed too. And a master of misdirection.

Double-dealing

Long story short: Jacob has two wives he pits against each other. He works to each of their disadvantages behind their backs.

• He “loves” the one. That is, he loves that she makes him feel good and look good. So he gives her preferential treatment. But he makes her pay for not producing.
• He lures the other. Always dangling the hope of his favor and honor in front of her, he never bestows it on her.
• Using and confusing both, he cherishes and protects neither.

In the Bible, in the church, Jacob creates a contest that no one but Jacob wins.

The more Rachel and Leah compete, the less they notice that Jacob has set them up. They do not see how much he contributes to, and profits from, their pain:

He uses the two, and everything they do, to get what he wants.
He gives neither one the selfless love that both desperately seek.

And yet, his seeming noninvolvement in the family strife
misdirects his wives’ resentment onto each other and away from him.

Thus, Jacob emerges from the whole sordid mess unscathed by it,
and able to shake his head over the “cat fights these women get into.”

And so he keeps his women in their place, and maintains his control over them.

Supplanting

Oh dear ones, what do we do? Must the Rachels among us spend their lives frantically seeking fruitfulness, knowing Jacob will sleep with another wife if their beauty underperforms? Must the Leahs spend their lives doing the next thing and the next thing they just know will make them beloved?

Whichever sister we identify with, do we give up in despair, seeing that neither ever found contentment or joy?

Or do we recognize it, and turn from it, when we have given ourselves to a two-timing double-dealer?

In Genesis, Rachel and Leah could not opt out of polygamy. But we can. And if we would love God alone, we must.

For remember: Jacob also supplants. He uses deception to take someone else’s place.

The Beloved

The day I realized, “I am Leah,” I was desolate – like “a wife who married young, only to be rejected” (Isa. 54:6).

Then God asked me a question. I heard the words so clearly it was almost as if he said them aloud.

So whose wife are you?

Brides of Jacob, or Bride of Christ?

If I was Leah, it was in relation to my church culture. Yet early in my life, I had committed to love Jesus – not a church system – with all my heart and soul and strength. Somewhere along the way, I had deeply confused the two.

I sat in my den, trying to breathe, feeling the blood drain from my face, as God reminded me:

Jesus Christ has one bride. Only one.

In his marriage, there is no triangle. He is to us – to all of us – as Isaac to Rebekah.⁴ He says to each of us individually and all of us collectively:

“I have chosen you and have not rejected you.” (Isa. 41:9)

“You are precious and honored in my sight, and … I love you.” (Isa. 43:5)

“I have loved you with an everlasting love.” (Jer. 31:3)

He never counts anyone more valuable than another. He never pits one against another. For “in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others” (Rom. 12:5). He passionately, faithfully loves each of us. He himself makes us both beautiful and fruitful.

And yet, how very easy it is for women in the Bride of Christ to think and act like the brides of Jacob. How very tempting to make covenant with toxic systems, and to seek approval and significance from them.

How tempting, and how disastrous. For our systems, and the powerful within them, will always:

• love some more than others;
• use people, and view people solely in terms of their value to the system;
• provoke endless rivalry and misery.

Seduced by a supplanter, we ourselves become two-timers.

Angry and grieved, our true Bridegroom waits.

Accepted in the Beloved

The day I realized I was Leah – and the moment God pointedly asked, “So whose wife are you?” – I cried, “Yours, Lord! You are my Husband. You alone are my Lord.”

That day, I began to cooperate with him, as he began revealing and removing the hidden idols in my heart.

And that day, I began to taste as I had not before, his love, that offers every one of us deep satisfaction, high esteem, true fruitfulness, great joy.

“Accepted in the Beloved,” I am Leah no more.⁵

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About this post: July 15, 2006, I published an e-column titled, “Leah No More.” December 14, 2019, I revised that piece and published it as a blog post. For this 2024 repost, I did some significant editing, added subheadings and changed the title to make it more clear.

Image by Sajjad Saju from Pixabay

See also

• I will change your name
• This “good Christian girl” is a woman now
• Adulthood and the church that rejects it
• Checklists, idols and loving God
• Behind the scenes at Living Proof Live
• Behind the facade in the SBC

Footnotes

1. See the post, Behind the scenes at Living Proof Live. ↩︎
2. Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Moody Publishers, 1980), Hebrew sane (#2272), p. 880. ↩︎
3. After Rachel’s death, Jacob ignored her dying wish, and changed the child’s name to Benjamin, “son of my right hand.” See Genesis 35:13 NLT. Consider that. The moments of their newborn’s birth and Rachel’s death were marked by a power struggle, as Rachel and Jacob each gave their son a different name – and neither gave him his own identity. Instead, each chose a name that tied his identity to that parent. ↩︎
4. See Genesis 24. ↩︎
5. See Ephesians 1:6 NKJV. ↩︎